Post by Erick Ganz on Oct 22, 2013 12:26:44 GMT -8
I could bore you with the granular details of my youthful years, but it would just be a litany of events and escapades, each following the same steps as the last; the names and locales might differ, but they can all be summarized thusly:
Excess. Debauchery. Self-medication. Waste.
Of course, this is said with the adapted eye of time and perspective. In the immediacy of those years, well, I was just having all the fun in the world! Young and rich, bound neither by family oversight or any sense of propriety; spurred headlong into every experience available by the acute knowledge of life’s fleeting and pointless nature, as embodied by my mother’s corpse. It was heaven!
And that encapsulates the fifteen years following the financial infusion of my 18th birthday: a haze of directionless depravity, without fear of want or consequences.
That is until 1st January of 1976. It would have been memorable alone for my having been in Morocco to take advantage of its casinos, nightlife…and all that entails. Memorable still for celebrating the New Year in the exotic lavishness of the place. But of course, all of that pales in comparison to what happened next.
I woke as I usually did, encased in fine sheets in an overpriced hotel. I was trudging the line between consciousness and a particularly pedestrian hangover from what or whomever I had been doing the night before. Surprising, really, given the previous night’s festivities I know I had to have been enjoying; I would have expected to be in far more pain. Indeed, I would have expected to have awakened in jail!
Regardless, it was the incessant ringing of the phone which finally irritated me into moving from my position. I had to climb over a naked whore or two to get there. It was the hotel’s front desk. They said a routine charge to my account had come back denied. I mumbled for them to try again. But it was again declined. I called my accountant in Vienna.
Everything was gone. Everything.
Something about an annual audit, only just completed; outstanding debts that had needed to be paid at the risk of litigation; et cetera, et cetera. All gone.
The man was sobbing; grieving for his assured income from managing my wealth, no doubt.
I was suddenly very sober. I climbed over the unconscious girls crowding in the bed with me, and went into the shower. I stayed there a very long time, sitting under the steam and flow. I told myself it had to be some sort of mistake, but the accountant had been openly weeping. I knew it was real, though I was thoroughly in denial.
My world had coated itself in ice; I had no idea what to do, or where to go. I emerged from the shower some time later, perhaps hours. The girls had disappeared by then, and the room had been made-up. In a stupor I dressed myself, then attempting contacting my accountant, just to be sure I had not dreamed it, but there was no answer.
I checked my wallet: empty. The whores, most likely. Perhaps the cleaning staff. I as well could not find my passport and other papers. I tore the place apart in the ensuing few minutes, rapidly losing my mind to fear and stress and rage. But, to no avail. The noise of my search brought hotel security, and soon thereafter I was arrested.
I spent the next five days or so in a Moroccan prison with no funds, no papers, and no one locally to vouch for me. I think I was allowed all of two phone calls during that time: another failed attempt to speak with my accountant, and…I think I tried a dealer ‘friend’ of mine in Linz. Nothing.
Eventually, and without explanation, I was released onto the street. I had literally the clothes on my back, and nothing else. My first night of true poverty was spent in the alcove of a putrid alley, eyes wide in fear for what the next day might bring. And the one after that.
I did everything I could, under the circumstances, to leave that country. But it seemed no matter what I did, all avenues of escape were denied me. It did not matter what I said my name was; it did not matter how often I tried to explain myself. I was trapped.
It was quite a revelation to discover, after so many years of flippancy, how many who were friends of yours were truly only friends of your money. I should not have been surprised, but the fact that I was only proves the delusion I had constructed for myself.
Ah, but I digress into the introspective. So, what does one do when they are stranded in a foreign land with no money, no identity, a language barrier and no other assistance?
I begged at first, sitting on the edge of the streets with open hands and a plaintive look of desperation that could be nothing else than genuine. I would be routinely chased off by police or competing beggars; often I would as well be beaten and left bleeding.
It took me longer than you might imagine to begin scavenging for food amidst the garbage and waste; my pride and refined palette could hardly entertain such things. At first. Starvation and delirium will do wonders to one’s sense of propriety. But even this meager and pathetic source of sustenance was a point of contention and physical violence, when I was caught in someone else’s claimed ‘territory’.
Without my money, without the insulation of wealth-as-superiority…my lack of survival skills and, well, spine when it came to having to defend myself engendered such shame in me…‘meek’ is probably the best word to describe where I went. I hid as much as I could; shied away from raised hands or loud voices. Fear, depression, and hopelessness replaced whomever I once had been.
One night, well into my second year of homelessness, a man I would come to know as Faruz came across me as I slept under a bridge. Beneath the rags and grime, he apparently recognized that I was not an Arab, and this intrigued him. He lured me from my stupor with promises of shelter and food, even a bath. I was soon provided all of these things, and it was as if a door had opened onto some landscape of heaven I had never known before. And these luxuries could be frequent, Faruz promised. As long as I did as he said.
I was an exotic option for Faruz’s clients. The things each one of them required of me caused a small piece of myself to shrivel, and hide itself away. The narcotics that were perpetually on hand helped to turn each encounter into something like a dream; something I could try and convince myself had not actually happened. But the bruises were still there the next day. And the scars. And the pain. And the shame.
I was in Faruz’s stable for 9 months when I finally decided to kill myself.
The opium that had been smoked in the previous hour had caused my muscles to relax a bit too much, and my teeth had offended the nascent rigidity of the client. Literally kicked out of a moving limousine, I rolled painfully into the gutter of a filthy street on the outskirts of the city, where total darkness abounds.
Laying there in my cheap, pretty-boy clothes, the coppery taste of blood on my lips and awash in a narcotic mist, all my downfalls bubbled to the surface in chokes and sobs. What little of my rational mind remained in that moment looked to the future, and saw nothing. Nothing at all.
I stumbled into an old shed just off the road, more out of reflex than anything else, falling into a heap amidst rotting trash and puddles of oil and grime. I laid my head on the dirt, staring absently through hot tears. And in a shaft of moonlight that had slithered its way through a crack in the roof, there shined on the ground a jagged shard of metal.
Grasping it, I sat up and brought its tip up to my throat, pressing the point into my flesh until pain registered. I paused, looking upward to nothing, closed my eyes, and steadied myself.
A sound caused me an instant’s hesitation. I opened my eyes to see its source: a dripping of fluid from some old canister on a shelf into a puddle on the ground next to me. But in this puddle of dark ooze, I caught my reflection; thin, haggard, a blade at my own throat. But I also saw something else there, in my eyes: determination. Determination to free myself from my plight. And it was an epiphany for me that, despite it all, I still possessed the will to act. But if so, why act in this way?
I made my way back to Faruz’s on foot, my mind squarely focused, all my despairs shoved aside by disgust, rage, and resolve. I found him sitting in his easy chair, flanked by two other of his stable boys who were drugged to the gills. When he saw me, dirty and disheveled, he knew I was not coming home with the expected money. He stood with a growl and advanced on me.
I cut a deep red line across his chest with the scrap of metal, the sound of it a hiss of sliced flesh and a ripping of shirt fabric. Faruz staggered back a step, and in the moment of shock I plunged the metal into the fullness of his fat neck. Blood geysered out of him in a thin stream and choking burble as he fell to his knees. I strode past him towards the bedroom; the stable boys looking on in sleepy bewilderment.
I knew where Faruz kept his emergency stash of money and drugs, and I scooped all of this up, filling my pockets. I left the place as casually as I had entered; the boys only began screaming after I was halfway down the hall.
* * *
In my work of the previous 9 months, I had learned who the players were in the local sex trade, including and most importantly those that specialized in moving people from place to place. With the proper applications of cash, drugs and threats, within 24 hours I had secured passage for myself on a steamer to Italy; from there I would find a way north back to my home. My only real concern at that point was that I departed the country before Faruz’s friends determined who had killed him. But that turned out not to be an issue.
Sitting in a storehouse near the docks, awaiting the arrival of my ship, exhaustion began to finally claim me around sunset. Sleep enveloped me so suddenly, I did not realize it until I was brought back to consciousness with the iron grip of Faruz’s hand lifting me off the ground by my throat.
I will never forget his sneer of satisfaction, nor the lack of a wound on his neck. I was not afraid, so much as confused; I had already accepted death as an end, but this new mystery frustrated me. As my ability to breathe faded, I closed my eyes once more in acceptance.
“Release him,” a voice said in Arabic, just out of my sight. And Faruz did so, automatically; mechanically. I fell to the floor in a heap, and looked up to see the figure of a woman step out of the darkness. She was small, and dressed plainly; an Arab, perhaps in her forties. But even in the dim light, there was something inexplicably wondrous about her. What she said then will always be with me.
“You have lost everything,” she said to me, in German, “and have been reduced to less than nothing. You walked to the threshold of Anubis’ judgment, but you have chosen to purge your heart of sorrow. You have conquered your master, and used your wisdom to survive and begin anew. These tests I laid upon you, and these tests you have overcome. You have proven yourself worthy of new discoveries, but such requires the deepest sacrifice, and the ultimate commitment.”
She paused, then, making a final assessment of me with eyes that seemed to glimmer in the dim light of the room.
“I make you this offer only once: become my disciple, and know the meaning of both life and death eternal, and the mysteries and rewards that await within both. Refuse, and you may be on your way to whatever fate you make for yourself. You have earned at least that much. Choose now.”
I did not understand, but I wanted to. I stood, and nodded, and the woman’s eyes became spheres of purest gold, from which I could not look away.
Needle-like fangs slid into me then, and my soul departed in an explosion of rapt ecstasy. When it returned, I found myself feasting upon Faruz; my Priestess’ gift to me upon my becoming. His blood was and will forever remain the sweetest of them all.
My Priestess returned to me then my long lost passport and other papers; records of my still existing wealth, carefully hidden from me during the time of my downfall. My identity and money were restored, but these things did not matter; I had learned that they meant nothing at all next to the struggle of self.
Bahiti, as I would come to know her, wished to experience new lands and opportunities, and thus I was to be her guide into Europe. We set out on a long and eventful journey to what was then West Berlin, to learn anew together.
But that is another story. I must keep you wanting. It’s a habit of mine.
