Host of Cafe Muscato Interviews Me

I have accepted the invitation of the dear host of our "heimish" Cafe Muscato to be interviewed. His questions are thought provoking...and revealing. But, one of the strings attached to responding in the affirmative to Muscato's RSVP is that I must offer to put one of my gentle readers through the wringer... No, really, I will be gentle...


You have to link back to the original post and also to your interviewer's post and include the following:

Want to be part of it? Follow these instructions:


1. Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me."

2. I will respond by emailing you five questions. I get to pick the questions.

3. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions.


4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.


5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.



Now, without further ado, the INTERVIEW:


1. As someone living in the Mystic East for almost a decade, you can be forgiven for venting about the undeniable frustrations to be found in these parts. What, though, brought you here in the first place and sustains you as an expat hereabouts?


In retrospect, the reason for coming here was not as dramatic as I might have considered it at the time. I had been working for a company for four years, and had incurred the wrath of two technical superiors who felt that I did not work hard enough (probably true given my aversion to overtime and working weekends), was not smart enough (untrue, as I was definitely smarter than them), and simply was too unorthodox in my metholodology to remain part of their organization (definitely true). They gave me no severance pay, but they did let me take three months at full salary to look for a job. Therefore, I started showing up when I wanted, reading the newspaper, and did nothing really to jump into the search for a new job until the last few weeks of my tenure. Then, quite suddenly, I started taking stock of the skills I possessed that might set me apart. One of them was the fact that I had studied Arabic at university, and although I had not had much occasion to use it, I still was able to read and write fairly simple, straightforward sentences. I called a friend from university, who was Saudi, who had married a former colleague of mine, and she suggested that I try to find a job in the Middle East. She dropped some names, I took notes, and in those fledgling days of the internet, I started sending inquiries, adding that I spoke, read and wrote Arabic. One of the companies to whom I offered my services bit, and 15 days thereafter, after a telephone interview, I sat down to play roulette at the Flamingo Hilton in Las Vegas and my lucky number came up. I thought for sure this was a good omen. So, shoveling the chips into my fists, I decided to go for the plunge and try living in the Gulf for a year. One year became four, then I left for some time, went back, and so on. In the process, I learned that I had been conned into accepting a salary far lower than my less qualified colleagues were getting, got cheated out of part of my low salary, never got the promised car, never got health insurance, and was swindled out of my end of service benefits. In spite of this wake-up call, it's now going on 10 years that I've been tied, for lack of a better word, to the region.


As for what sustains me, especially towards the end of my first post in the Gulf, I found myself often wondering what the hell I was doing here. However, there is obviously something I like. The culture fascinates me, even though certain aspects of the Arab personality really disturb me. The rat race here doesn't compare with that found in a big city in the States; thus, I find the pace of life easier to take in a general sense. But, that's really an excuse. I wanted to escape from an unsatisfying life in the States...because I had started moving around at the age of 16.... first to university, then to successive graduate schools...I lost my attachment to my hometown, and never seemed to replace it with another. In addition, wherever I did move in the States, acquiring a meaningful, satisfying social life proved difficult for me. After all, I had "come out" to myself and my immediate family in my late 30s, far later than most people nowaday, so plugging into a network of friends became incredibly difficult. Same-sex socializing in the Gulf has been much easier, even if much of it is superficial.


2. What is your earliest memory, and what light does it cast on your life since?


There are two, not simultaneous, but sufficiently close for both to be considered my earliest memory. In one, I was about 3 or 4, visiting my father's family in the southernmost part of Virginia. I was running barefoot in the meadow and suddenly tumbled into a hole filled with nasty, gooky crude oil. Or so I thought, for there being no oil rigs in the impoverished part of the state in which my father's ancestral property sat, I assume it must have been a cesspool, though I don't recall any noxious odors. My father stood in the background, laughing, howling actually, drinking beer out of a can. My mother ran over to me, along with my father's eldest sister (who was about as old as my maternal grandmother), and picked me up to clean me off. My mother started shouting at my father and he kept drinking and laughing.


In the second, I was about the same age, and my mother was taking me on a bus to a big white house on the corner of Utica and Albany in the borough of Brooklyn. This was an old-time doctor's house...a doctor in a white coat with a surgeon's circle strapped to his head. He was the kindest man I remembered, with a soft voice and the most avuncular manner. He lay me on a table, my mother was standing at my side rubbing my blond bangs back over the top of my head, and he doused some liquid onto a cotton rag and placed it over my face. When I awoke, I remember the doctor telling me that I could have as much ice cream as I wanted when I got home, but I couldn't talk.


The first memory must have impacted my life heavily because after my parents' divorce, I never had any desire whatsoever to see my father again...I did see him occasionally, but he was usually drunk or otherwise lamenting his fate. The second memory encapsulates the relationship I have with my mother (overly caring, controlling, boundary-less) and with ice cream!

3. As an American overseas, what is the most ridiculous misapprehension about the U.S. that you have encountered?

This is easy: That America and the Jews are at the fulcrum of every world event; that their sole objective is to destroy the Arabs; and, hence, that every world event is a conspiracy directed by America and the Jews against the Arab world. As a corollary, the greatest misapprehension I have had to counter since living in the Middle East is that any Westerner who knows Arabic and studies Islam must, as a matter of logical necessity, be a CIA operative.

4. What is your ideal vacation (where, when, why, with whom, how long)?




The grand tour of South American ports taken by Charlotte and Jerry inthe classic film Now, Voyager, albeit with certain essential changes: (1) my personal secretary throughout the trip would be John Abraham (coiffed just as he was in Dostana) and my valet would be Upen Patel dressed exactly as in the photo to the left (the two hunks would be in adjoining cabins, one to the left, one to the right,of my suite, and never the twain would meet); (2) all food catered by Taillevent in Paris; (3) a month's supply of Chateau Margaux 1982 and Chateau d'Yquem, divided equally between 1906 and 1947, is on hand in the ship's climate-controlled wine cellar for my and my guests' sole consumption; (4) a master tailor is on call at all times so I don't have to buy the clothes before I leave home; and (5) the Arabic singers Iwan and Rami Ayash, the Egyptian football deity Emad Miteb, and Arab film star Hani Salamah would serve as my errand boys. Ideally, it would last 3 months, stopping at Recife and Salvador before reaching Rio, and at Florianopolis, Porto Alegre, Montevideo and Buenos Aires after Rio. On the trip, I would of course meet the man of my dreams. However, I would want several of my friends to come along at my expense...it being understood that only the straight ones could meet my secretary or valet!




5. And one I'm stealing from Shirley, 'cause it really made me think: Everyone has guilty pleasures. What is one of your guilty pleasures?

I'll give you three: Rare books and manuscripts (I am a collector), mechanical wristwatches, and as you have probably guessed, vintage Bordeaux and Sauternes.