  |
|
 |
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||
down on the farm: part 1 by Todd Brendan Fahey (toddbrendanfahey@yahoo.com) - June. 10, 2002 |
||||
| I strained to follow his rare logic which proved exceedingly difficult, between the noisy suckling on the Myer's jug and a frequent weeping and the lighting of the pipe, which he continued to share with me until we reached the town of Jackson but it went something like this: Hamza Al-Assad, the eldest son of a high-level military strategist for the late Shah Reza Pahlavi, enjoyed a life of playful opulence in his
native Iran until 1979. His private chauffeur had introduced him to hashish and opium by the wizened age of eleven; at age fourteen, he lost his virginity to one of the Shah's own nubians on a deck chair at the Presidential baths in full view of a score of profoundly disinterested sunbathers; as the eldest scion, he had been groomed in the art of counterintelligence and was slated to inherit somewhere in the neighborhood of sixteen million dollars at the age of twenty-five. It was The Portrait of a Young Man Lacking Nothing . . . until the glass cracked. He could recall everything on the night his father, like so many among the Shah's army, stole an F-14 and took his family screeching down a burning airstrip, carrying off millions in gold bullion looted from the Iranian treasury and what he prayed openly was enough fuel to deliver them to the sanctuary that he just knew would be the United States of America. "He was right, of course," Hamza shrugged. "For him, it was Paradise. After only six days, he met a young woman who admired him for his power. But she was a shrew. She convinced him to leave us in poverty. If I should ever see either of them again, I will take pleasure in killing them both." The tale grew blacker. At sixteen, while living in a roach-infested two-room hovel in a New York housing project with his mother and four younger siblings, Hamza found he had a taste for smack. He quit school and became an accomplished burglar, which kept him from a jones until the end of 1982 that was the year he had graduated to robbing liquor stores. As he told it, one night his connection hadn't shown and his nose was running and he had a fever and he just wasn't paying the kind of attention required for such a level of criminality, and a certain Harlem shop-owner saw it as a prime opportunity to test out the butt of his shotgun on the bridge of Hamza's regal schnozz. SOCKO!! The New Year played rat-a-tat-tat on his rheumatic bones, enjoying, as he did, cold turkey inside a cell at Rikers Island. Fortunately, the cure took and he was released to a halfway house with a methadone program in Salt Lake City, where he had been driving a taxicab ever since. "I should be in good college, studying medicine or economics," he complained, "but I am drug felon. And because of your Mr. Reagan, I can no longer get a student loan. Besides," he waved lamely, "I am wrong kind of minority." Hamza guzzled the dregs of the Myer's, then rolled down the rear window to its mid-way limit and stared out at the rough-hewn storefronts of Jackson's historic Main Street. "Here, every car is pickup truck," he noticed. "They called your President 'Cowboy.' You are a nation of bigots!" I was circling the town square for a second time, wondering what to do with Hamza, when he solved the dilemma for me. In rapid succession, I heard a rustling of paper low in the back seat, followed by what sounded like a hollow tinkling inside an empty Myer's bottle, then a deafening howl, the whole Bottle Rocket Family screaming just past my earlobe and exploding against the front door of the Cadillac Bar and Grill. (to be continued . . .) The views expressed above represent the writer and not necessarily those of The Disinformation Company Ltd. |
||||
|
||||
|
|
