The mishaps Of Jack Who?

This city is in a teenage relapse. Men like teens sizing up cocks in a summer camp. Except its not cocks but cars, and they are shiny and white and black and champagne gold and red and vein blue and just like some cocks some of them with their tops off. You could tick any box of the demographic part of a survey - any age, whatever sex, and everybody would fit right into this adolescent scheme except the kids yet not into their teens but dressed in their baby Armanis and miniature Ralph Laurens who have not yet self consciously decided the path they are on, so we will just call it a prelapse. They will get there, will get there soon enough, they have drivers with a fever switching on the air conditioners on full blast that will almost kill him, but he will bear, he will swallow the thick chlorophyll green mucous back in and be ridiculed about his bad breath in a language even if he knows will never understand because of the accents that has been imported from Yorkshire and New York lands, and then he will slide the sticky in because he has three kids born as the result of the lust a month he is allowed a year with his strangely naked wife, kids who he can't put a face anymore to but still want to send to school and whose voice seems different every time he talks to them, and he doesn't want them to walk to school because the one that teaches Newton’s three laws in English is 5 miles away but be one of those piled like books in an overfilled bag in a charcoal black polluting rickshaw.

Every night here is a prom night. Guys in uniforms of cool, huddled, working their ways via cocktail drinks into getting head. Girls, in pretty dresses, but the lower parts burnt by the forest fire that blew itself across the Atlantic wave and that almost dead flare now settled happily into their cunts. Music, oh that music, about head, and cracks, and teenage sexual fantasies blaring with bass and beats into the air and ash tipped by people smoking because fifty years ago a mythical man stuck it in between his lips and rode horses in a place you wouldn't choose over hell that we are all in.

It's odd, but I'm odd, and I remember this place, when what you drove was never a part of the conversation, and we stuck thumbs out, and stopped a Pathan in his pickup with dangling chains that made anklet like noises every time he pressed on the pedal, and we all jumped on to the cargo carrying floor enjoying the freedom of the non-conformity of no seats and the free rein to roll and poke and lose our balance, and it was safe then, and this man with his beard maroonish red after years of use of henna, this man who no matter what his name we called Khan baba, this man who brought in the smell of the summer sweat months before it, this man who is the butt of all jokes that deals with butts and kids, but who even before he took a sip of water always uttered God's name. He would drop us, and wish us God's grace, but if he only knew that this little trip was so that we were going to have a game of football with kids of cops, and we would have two legs broken between two pairs, and that fates are sometimes written before the story even begins, then he would have just left without a word because we all still want to believe.

One of those friends, that friend that broke his foot, then went on pretending like the swelling didn't exist and bearing the pain, because he would get beaten by his man for skipping school even if he was weighed down by the cast. He couldn't keep it up till day three because the swelling had become as big as his head. Those were the days when the times fast tracked teenagers into men, and not the other way around. Fuck, this age when everything's twisted, the son is the father, and the teacher is shitting chalk, this age when we don't need to think but to just talk, not about finesse but just the fuck. This is the age when they have more friends than the steps they walk, more cheese than cake in their talk.

JW?: Where do we go?

S: We need to follow that crowd (pointing).

JW?: (looking & visibly confused) What crowd?

S: The young ones.

JW?: What about the young ones?

Oh, today I feel like a million dollars. Not freshly minted. But a million dollars that have gone around the world. That has been exchanged to a street hawker for a roll of film. That has been exchanged for a ride to some jazz bar. A million dollars that has gone on its pilgrimage and found it’s way back so that it could be a million stories of a dollar that can fill a million volumes.

Today where I am, right now is no different from yesterday. Except the windows are open. And the workers are digging up a sandstorm outside. And my dilapidated building shudders, like a violent lullaby trying to put me to sleep. And I resist it as the jets in clear warm skies do their textbook manoeuvres as people on the streets cover their eyes with their palms to keep out the sun. The pilot, a roller coaster architect, creating his own twists and turns and rolls, probably oblivious to the eyes below, enjoying the G-forces, feeling the stick, kissing the clouds in his tinted helmet.

I love this. I love this. I love this. This craziness of the world. The lack of reason for people to act in such a way and say such a thing, beyond the seemingly ordinary, that makes every coming second unexpected. The world that makes even a poor man’s life seem like a movie script. Ups and downs. Lows and highs. The hint of a madness that blows up a mediocre moment to be etched into our lives forever.

Please don't take it the wrong way when I tell you this. We, the most of us, almost the all of us, are followers. Cheap imitators. Crowdsourced stooges. Networked minions. Earphone clad lambs. When was the last time you looked upon someplace no one had been before and said to yourself I am going to walk into this with my eyes wide open. Never? Why am I not surprised? It takes the balls of the size of Etisalat tower tops to willingly waltz into something new and uncomfortable and trying and testing and probably fatal. If it butters your ego I can stand on any town square you wish and shout through a megaphone that I belong to this same herd. Not everyone can be special.

But you have to give a round of applause to a bunch of folks that came not-so-gently down the stream and seas, forced by the King on the recommendation of Captain Fremantle on the western tip of Australia to a place where the natives called 'the land of the crying' and indeed for some perfectly justifiable weeping reason. I can imagine a shipload of people throwing up the last drops of hidden bile, the permeating smell of sickness, the uncertain flavor of a future life that could bite the dust before they picked up the saw.

So we are in Fremantle. The weather is as perfect as the belly button of a stripper I once saw gyrating in Athens. The clouds have been passed through a paper shredder and the troublesome kid next door has flung it high into the sky.

My decision to wear a thick shirt could backfire horribly wrong if it gets any warmer. After walking through the buildings, a hundred years old, among

people with a bounce and a spirit that will seep into a hundred years more we enter the old market. Fish and leather belts and long dresses and stationary and food stalls and fresh fruit and vegetables have in a hundred years transformed into vintage clothes with Eastern prints and Native American headgears and natural coconut soap and food stalls and fresh fruit and vegetables.

Maja is quieter than usual. I have to let her be. I love this Serbian I'm-wearing-my-attitude-with-a-dress-and-a-bow girl. She's as real and gritty as a volcanic stone glinting in the darkness when you look away. But no amount of love will stop her from telling, Don't push it, later on. While we were in a restaurant, and I scrambled out to get to the loo, I caught her through the glass in an introspective gaze, the mystery attached to the face making her look all the more beautiful. I wanted to ask her what was in her mind. But I told myself I have to let her be. That I couldn't push it with this free speaking Goddess. 

In the middle of the market we come across this coffee shop I want to call a caffeine island. A brewing machine in one corner, a grinder in another, a big pot brewing some masala tea, and a couple of patrons or owners flanked by long tables on all sides on its periphery bang in the middle of all activity. Maja ordered a black coffee while I ordered a cappuccino. The barista, an Asian man, in his late twenties, looked at the camera in my hand and quipped, "That's a nice lens. I like the 50mm", to which I had replied something of the order, "Yeah, I like keeping things simple," completely aware that was far from the truth. The coffees were served in limited edition paper cups with currently in vogue images of beautiful outback Australia neatly fitted into outlines of interesting faces on the outside. Maja left me temporarily. Making her way to the fruit and vegetable stall she had sworn like some nature's fortune teller that she knew it was heavenly.

The coffee cups were placed with their lids open. A good barista always wants his work appreciated. A cappuccino is not only about the coffee brew but also the size of the bubbles of the foam. When rightly done the warm-but-not boiling hot cuppa tends to stay in that magic glow until you sip the last drop. And this liquid tarnished gold was good. I opened up my Umberto Eco collection of essays and read his view of how 1984 was not an insight into the future but an insight into human tendencies that had existed at that time. Humans. Strange little unpredictable creatures. But predictable in their absurdities. Maja returned with a big plastic bag of raw goodness and we got into a decision-making process of whether I had to purchase that Native Indian headgear. Would feathers on another Indian's head open up his world to a mystical world of strange possibilities. We both concurred that I was as strange as I could be and a piece of accessory was only validation but not a tool for it.

Tha barista was refilling the masala chai pot when I noticed the tattoo on his right arm. It ran the length from his wrist to his elbow and was a waveform of some audio. Music was the only thing that wouldn't leave you at the altar. Music was the magic of some deeper realm in this universe. Don't you get it? Every single entity owes its existence to music. Science calls it the big bang theory. What it really was was some incredible source spinning a vinyl track and some unexpected feedback backfiring into space. Yes, we are the result of unexpected feedback. It makes complete sense when we think the mess we are. Churning out noise at unprecedented levels to create perfect imbalance in a perfectly good composition.

"What's that tattoo?" I asked.

"Oh, that's my father's voice," he said.

And I began to wonder if I heard it right and if he meant that Eric Clapton song My Father's Eyes.

"Well, I recorded my father's voice, converted it into a waveform and got it tattooed."

In between my breathlessness of the sheer beauty of the idea I managed to utter "That's really neat."

What a fucking brilliant idea. A tattoo of something deep and close and that meant something that would never change with shrinking skin or the onset of Alzheimers. A tattoo that intertwined two souls despite the distance, real or abstract. I sat there thinking if his father was alive or not. And what were those words. Was it him expressing his love for his son? Was it him, like all fathers, mad at his son for some irrational decision?

I sat there thinking if it were me what would I have gotten tattooed. What would I have gotten etched. What was the one thing he told me he never told anybody else?

You are a complete mess.

Yes. That's what I was. And he knew it like the cool of the color blue.

You are a complete mess.

And as we got to leave I asked him where he was from and he said South Korea. And I asked him what his name was.

"Wael."

"Wael?"

"Yeah, it's a name I decided for myself". An Arabic name a South Korean man with a tattoo of his father calling him something brewing a magic blend decided for himself.

Humans are predictably absurd. And I was a complete mess.