Fitness for Foreigners

SLATE.COM - 19 JANUARY 2010

Here in Istanbul, where I swim laps at a university health club, time in the pool looks a little different than in New York: A pear-shaped boy prefers the deep end, where he sinks to the bottom, twirling slowly, floating gaily back to the surface to bob and splash. Then there are the two bronzed women who emerge from the locker room in flowery towels. Wearing the briefest of black bikinis, they slip long limbs into the far lane, dog-paddling daintily to and fro, painted toes barely pushing the water. In the center lane, a thick man in his 40s dives in, sending tremendous waves skating around. He swims furiously, nearly drowning us, his hairy arms thrashing. But two laps later, he's standing in the shallow end, soaking, massaging his vast upper body, smiling. I smile back, then continue swimming, getting nowhere fast on another day far away from home.

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Christmas in Exile

THE DAILY BEAST - 25 DECEMBER 2010

ERBIL, Iraq – It's Christmas morning in northern Iraq, and the parishioners of St. Joseph's Church are emerging from their homes into the bright desert sunlight. With two Iraqi friends, I drive along narrow avenues decorated with twinkling lights and the occasional inflatable Santa. We pass a clutch of men wearing bright sweaters, pressed slacks, and loafers. A trio of women breaks into tight smiles; one is wearing a red skirt with a band of white snowflakes.

We round the corner, and we’re surprised to see that a shimmering tanker truck is blocking the road to the church. Frowning men in uniform wave their arms.

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Holiday in Baghdad

SLATE.COM - 29 NOVEMBER 2010

Rising to stretch my legs, I surveyed my fellow travelers, who had just endured a 3 a.m. flight to Baghdad. Among the Iraqis, there was a preponderance of plastic and/or leopard-print overnight bags. The men had big mustaches and weary eyes. The women were generally in their 30s, wearing colored headscarves, some of them no doubt coming back to Iraq for the first time in years. The plane smelled of sweat and perfume.

I felt weak in the knees. An Iraqi girl sized me up with a hardened glare. What did you expect? her eyes seemed to inquire, and I let my head fall.

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A tale of two Arabian cities

THE REVIEW - 9 APRIL 2010

The clang of metal rings out down a dusty street in Sana’a, the capital of Yemen. Soldiers in blue camouflage hold oiled assault rifles, standing among a gathering crowd. One of the city’s dispensaries for cooking gas has just received a shipment. There’s a shortage of fuel all around the city, which is groaning under the twin strains of governmental dysfunction and an influx of refugees from the north. A jet streaks high above us, presumably en route to the border with Saudi Arabia, where the Yemeni military is targeting anti-government Houthi rebels and alleged cells of al Qa’eda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Some in the West have begun to call Yemen a failed state, but at least they’re calling it something.

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Embedded at the Mayo Clinic

TRUE/SLANT - 7 APRIL 2010

Your correspondent is no longer based in the Middle East. I am instead reporting from the ICU floor at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, where my dad is battling cancer.

This is my sixth day here and it's been a constant state of siege. Basically, we're battling to keep my dad stable enough in order to undergo the daily radiation that could prolong his life. Every hour, it seems, we confront a new and significant hurdle to that plan.

In our tiny room, my mom, sister, and I take shifts staying up all night, holding his hand, skipping meals, trying to cater to his every need. He can't talk anymore, so we talk for him, charming the nurses into giving him his pain meds on time and to treat him like man, not meat. We listen carefully and take notes and ask tough questions, and when a doctor appears to discuss some new terror, we remain calm.

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Did I see a man die this morning?

TRUE/SLANT - 6 MARCH 2010

Traffic in Saudi Arabia: After every white-knuckled trip here, I was such a raging, quaking mess that I finally gave up renting a car and took to using a driver.

This morning, heading east into Riyadh, I saw a bronze-colored Camry swerve on the west-bound service road. Trying to overtake slower traffic, he veered onto the soft shoulder but lost control. There was no guardrail, and I saw the vehicle slice into yellow sand and jackknife into the air. Kicking up a dense cloud of dust, the car flipped over once, the dark underbelly exposed, then flipped again. In a concussion of glass and metal, the Camry slammed to the asphalt, rocking on its roof in the middle of a four-lane freeway. Mecca Road.

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Who was Barry Hannah writing for?

TRUE/SLANT - 3 MARCH 2010

The conventional wisdom is that Barry Hannah, who died this week at the age of 67, is the kind of writer who had two kinds of readers. One: Those who just haven't read him yet. Two: As the estimable Wells Tower wrote in a profile before Hannah's death, those who get a "feverish, ecstatic look before they seize you by the lapels and start reeling off cherished passages of his work."

Sheepishly, I think I fall into a third category. I admire the taut, spring-loaded fury in Hannah's hearty, American stories. But even as I learned to agree with the idea that he's among the most important fiction writers of the last decades, I always brushed up against his mechanics, and sensed in his disciplined prose a kind of wrestling match with the words that didn't work for me. (I gravitate more toward another tortured, muscular southerner: Padgett Powell, who in my opinion wrote the best book of 2009.)

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Living in Riyadh's ghost town

THE REVIEW - 18 FEBRUARY 2010

It was September 2008; after a few days in Riyadh, my wife and I left our spartan hotel room, with its bouquet of sweat and sewage, to rendezvous with two American bankers we’d met at the Sharjah airport. “Poor you,” they’d said, learning we were just moving to Saudi. “Let’s meet for dinner.”

Outside, the dust was thick. The bankers -- one a buff guy with a buzz cut who looked like a parody of a CIA agent, the other a wry Korean-American -- picked us up, and off we barreled through snarls of sun-baked cars. Battle-scarred Crown Victorias gunned their engines past late-model Toyotas. A Hummer ploughed over rumble strips, cutting off a brand-new 700-series BMW. The low-slung immensity of central Riyadh -- economy booming on oil, population growing exponentially, housing at a premium -- shimmered in the late summer heat. This was home, if we could find a place to live.

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I dream of war

TRUE/SLANT - 12 FEBRUARY 2010

Woke up early this morning with John McCain slapping me on the back. I was in fatigues, standing among fellow soldiers for some sort of honor guard ceremony. I leaned uninjured against crutches, trying to fake my way out of fighting. McCain, his big scarred face a plastic mask of fellowship, slapped me on my back again and nearly knocked me over. Then a towering, super-buff Latino General -- of higher rank somehow than McCain -- came over and laid his crushing, buff arm over my head. This Latino General regarded the field of soldiers, the gleaming guns, the spectators in the stands. How was I lucky/unlucky enough to have the two important guys on either side of me? Then I realized the Latino General thought McCain was a bullshit pussy, and I -- with my glasses and touch-typing fingers -- was someone just as bad.

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Reading Stephen King in Riyadh

TRUE/SLANT - 9 FEBRUARY 2010

Before I read The Dome in three manic days this week, I hadn't read a book by Stephen King since I was 12. Needful Things, which came out in 1991, was the last gasp of what you'd probably call a childhood obsession. Over about 16 months, helped by an aunt who ran a used book store in rural Montana, I devoured them all -- The Stand, Misery, even his pseudonymous Bachman Books. I was hooked on the horror and drama, of course. But there was an inkling in the breakneck reading that I was being driven by desires more important than mere titillation.

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Last night, at the checkpoint

TRUE/SLANT - 6 FEBRUARY 2010

The blogger stood beside his compact green sedan, the police lights washing over his polo shirt, jeans, and sneakers. I coasted over, surprised at how slight he seemed in person. The gears of my Chinese-made bike clicked, and I felt in my breast-pocket for the comforting heft of my U.S. passport.

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In which my friend tells me he's leaving forever

TRUE/SLANT - 2 FEBRUARY 2010

I'm riding in the back of a taxi driven by Sabic, a six-foot Keralite with piercing yellow-green eyes. Dust from the Empty Quarter bathes the morning in an ill, yellow haze. Usually I read, but today I'm sizing up the central city buildings, reading signs, taking note of the way people drive.

"When are you going home?" I ask Sabic.

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Not dead, I was nonetheless hit by a car today

TRUE/SLANT - 25 JANUARY 2010

The sun glinted off oil-smeared asphalt. Winter's already over, and the heat was building in the last morning minutes before the call to prayer would ring out across this city of several million.

I stood at one of Riyadh's busiest intersections, half-way across Olaya Street. With cars blasting by to my rear, I checked the light ruling the traffic I'd need to cross. Sweat began to bead. I felt like a bug: All flesh and limbs and fluid, ready to pop against the unforgiving weight of a metal cleat.

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Down in the floods, something in Saudi Arabia may have changed

THE REVIEW - 22 JANUARY 2010

On the first day of Hajj, rain blanketed Saudi Arabia’s vast western coast. As my wife assembled her radio gear in preparation for the next day’s news brief about the storm’s effect on the pilgrimage, I quickly scanned the news online: it was already the heaviest rain Jeddah had seen in a quarter-century, and the city of four million was flooding; four were already reported dead. By the time we woke up the next morning, the death toll had risen to 77.

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When teenaged Saudi girls attack!

TRUE/SLANT - 18 JANUARY 2010

I knew it would happen eventually. I've jogged just about every night the year-and-a-half we've lived in Riyadh. First was in town, when we rented a hotel room for the first month. Back then, I dodged Crown Victorias and made my way round and round the parking lot behind Kindgom Tower, one of two skyscrapers here. It wasn't pretty; choking on exhaust, I was always on the lookout for religious police, who had every reason to bust a geeky white dude pounding pavement in shorts.

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My favorite American painter

TRUE/SLANT - 16 DECEMBER 2009

Jeremy Willis's paintings are a meditation on longing. And much of his work -- a collection of oil-on-canvas paintings -- actually depicts figures who reach out, who provoke the viewer. As a result, his subjects feel as if they long to be more than the sum of their parts -- quite actually more than the body they inhabit. And like each of us, the figures Willis paints seem to be locked in a dim but growing awareness that having such hope is as foolish and endless an endeavor as it must and always will be.

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David Rees is unstoppable

TRUE/SLANT - 9 DECEMBER 2009

After 9/11, when we were all flailing and searching for direction, I drank too much. We all did. We hand-rolled cigarettes, listened obsessively to NPR, and got really familiar with all the -Stans.

In the midst of all the epic Sy Hersh stories and On Point broadcasts from Boston, there began circulating these insane cartoons. Illustrated only with clip art, the strips were searingly critical, explosively funny -- digs at us, at you, and at them. No cow was sacred.

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Checkpoint Qatif: Shoulder-to-shoulder with Saudi's Shiite minority

THE REVIEW - 4 DECEMBER 2009

My blood went cold at the sight of the checkpoint to enter Qatif, the coastal municipality that is home to almost all of Saudi Arabia’s Shiite minority. Qatif -- my wife quickly explained, seeing my discomfort as we approached the two officers in brown uniform -- erupted in violent protests in 1980, just a year after Shiites launched a revolution in Iran and, closer to home, Islamists opposed to the Saudi royal family seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca.

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In Defense of Verlyn Klinkenborg

TRUE/SLANT - 23 NOVEMBER 2009

For several years now, I have kept in my wallet a few paragraphs by my favorite New York Times writer, Rural Life columnist Verlyn Klinkenborg.

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Night of the gun

ST. PETERSBURG REVIEW - ISSUE 4/5, 2011

After living for six months in Mohammad’s apartment – a 1980s unit in central Riyadh with tall ceilings, dark windows, roaches and fluorescent lights – I could no longer dodge his repeated invitations to visit his farm. And so, on a recent Thursday afternoon, my wife Kelly and I loaded up our rented Toyota and headed north.

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