The Biggest Lie Ever Told

Overture

In my childhood there was a disgustingly lurid comic book in America entitled Crime Does Not Pay.

Some of this "comic's" covers would turn your stomach. Like the one I saw around the time I turned 13, showing a guy blowing another guy's head off. The drawing depicted the very moment the murderer's bullet struck the victim's head. Brains and eyeballs flying every which way.

A churchgoer of my acquaintance complained about the sample cover of Crime Does Not Pay which I originally put in the space below to illustrate what a sickie rag it was.

She claimed that my sample, which featured a scene of sexual torture, (the October, 1970 cover if you want to go and look for it on Google Images) was a bit too sickie-porno. She found it offensive. Well, yeah, but that was the idea. The whole stupid magazine was offensive.

So I've replaced the cover I originally used with one that removes nasty old sex and illustrates only good, clean American fun: a hail of bullets followed by a guy roasting in the electric chair. No churchgoer could ever object to that.

This magazine was pure crap. It did glorify violence and sadistic sex, and it was being sold to kids.

If the original rationale was to scare youngsters away from lives of crime by showing criminals getting their supposed comeuppance, (Yeah, right!)  It didn't work.

In fact, many people feared that the magazine was having the opposite effect: making crime glamorous to kids. Under pressure from parents and clergy, not to mention a congressional subcommittee on what was then called juvenile delinquency, Crime Does Not Pay was forced to cease publication in 1955 after once having had a national readership of about six million. Later someone brought it back. You can't keep a lucrative business down.

But never mind that. Big circulation or no, this rag was, not to put too fine a point on it, a pack of damned lies and balderdash. After the story I'm about to tell, if there remains any notion in your mind that crime does not pay, and that the mounties always get their man, well, let my tale be a dose of what's known these days as "reality check."

For I have a good story on this subject that needs to be told.

Part One

My poor father.

He always boasted of being so tough and savvy. He swaggered around like his hero John Wayne, boring everyone who could not escape from listening with one story after another about how once upon a time he had intimidated somebody with his fists. Big Man. Little fists. (He was five feet eight.)

In short, (no pun intended) my father was in some ways a sad character. And once or twice he was also the biggest chump you could imagine.

I say that not in mockery, but in sorrow.

At the end of the 1960s, the port of entry into the United States between San Ysidro, California and Tijuana, Mexico, run by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, was as rotten as an unrefrigerated, week-old persimmon. American immigration and customs officials were taking bribes from narcotics smugglers, what we now would have to call "undocumented-worker" smugglers and smugglers of who knows what all else, (today it might be fissionable material) like kids grabbing chocolate chickies on Easter morning. Or used to. (Do we still have Easter anymore, or has the ACLU gotten it abolished?)

Anyway, as that awful decade was petering out, enter my father, the INS' favorite patsy.

He had been a patsy once before, and it set his career back more than a decade.

In 1954 (so my father told me years later), my father, a Border Patrolman in those days, was stabbed in the back in an affair involving his former INS boss, Harlan Carter, who many years later became president of the National Rifle Association.

(By the way, in 1981 two Associated Press reporters broke the story that then-NRA president Harlan Carter had shot and killed a Mexican in his Texas youth, and had gotten off scot-free. In 1930s Texas, killing a Mexican was no big deal. But the irony was delicious to gun-hating liberals: the president of the NRA had once shot and killed a Mexican! And gotten away with it! Laugh, snicker, guffaw.

When this story broke in the press, I had already heard it. Long before.

I'd heard it from my father.

As a young journalist, I thought I had the biggest scoop of all time. But Dad asked me to hold off publishing the story until he gave me the green light. He was my dad. I agreed.

And then those two AP reporters broke the story before I had a chance to.

Typical of my life: always in the right place at the wrong time.)

But back to '54. Harlan Carter was my father's boss when Dad was in and out of Washington, D.C. as a Border Patrolman in the fifties. (Dad's later D.C. boss, Rex Kelley, was also a good friend -- I'm named after him.)

But according to the story Dad told me, in 1954, when they were both in Miami for some governmental reason, Harlan Carter pitched to my dad the idea that if they got a certain individual drunk, he would spill his guts about someone running an "undocumented worker" ring somewhere in south Florida. (Or as they were called then, "illegal aliens.")

Dad thought the whole thing smelled bad, but Carter was his boss, so he went along with it.

Anyway, when this supposedly blabbermouth-drunk turned blabbermouth to the wrong people, my father skeedaddled back to Washington, only to hear through channels that Carter was claiming at the top of his lungs that the whole thing was my dad's idea, not his. Who was going to take my father's word against that of his boss? Such things do not happen in the ass-kissing halls of government, believe me. Joe Dupuis, Fall Guy, Part I.

On Rex Kelley's advice, Dad decided to make himself scarce in Washington. He put in for a tour of duty in the northeastern sector headquarters in St. Albans, Vermont, where I was born in the fall of 1955.

My late dad claimed that this perfidy on the part of the late Harlan Carter was the reason my dad remained a GS-11 for the next dozen years. He just couldn't get promoted. He had too many enemies. He was blackballed by the bureaucracy.

In 1967 Dad finally got a little break. He put in for the position of Chief Patrol Inspector (the title has since been changed) of the northwestern sector, in Spokane, Washington. He got the job.

In 1968 our family moved to Spokane. But my mother, a native of Chula Vista, California, and by then no big fan of my father's, (another story for another time) hated Spokane. Nothing against Spokane; it's a wonderful city. But the truth is that my mother would have hated any place my father took her that wasn't Chula Vista. She kept the pressure on my father constantly to get himself transferred back to her home turf. It was Mom's mulishness that kept Dad in Spokane by himself for one full year -- she refused to leave southern California. So for a year the family had two homes. But finally Dad put his foot down, bought a house in Spokane and we all moved there. The Chula Vista house was rented out to a young couple.

Thanks to the unending tension between my parents, (Mom wanted to go back to southern California where her "friends" were, and that's ALL she wanted), our tenure in Spokane was fated to be short.

In the fall of 1969 my dad went on a temporary-duty assignment back "down south" to San Ysidro.

While he was there, Satan whispered in his ear, in the form of his friend and former boss Al Gearhart, who by the way had a ranch in Fredericksburg, Texas.

Harlan Carter, Al Gearhart. Texas. Texas keeps popping up in this narrative. Did my father have some karma to burn involving Texas? Who knows? Perhaps in a previous life Dad had been a soldier in General Santa Anna's army -- Santa Anna was the "bad guy" in the Texas version of the Alamo story.

I had known Al Gearhart since I was a baby. He had been my father's boss in the northeastern sector in Vermont when I was born. Later, around the time I was in kindergarten, Al Gearhart was my father's boss again, in San Pedro, California. A year or three later, Al Gearhart was my father's boss yet again, at the Border Patrol sector office in San Ysidro.

In short, my father spent a good many years looking at Al Gearhart's butt on the Border Patrol career ladder. And Dad told me years later that he knew the reason why: once those in INS circles discovered that Al's wife, Rhoda, was the niece of John Nance ("Cactus Jack") Garner,who had been Vice-President of the United States under Franklin D. Roosevelt, Gearhart couldn't get promoted quickly enough. Again and again.

Garner was from Texas. (Yeah, Texas again.)

Now, around the time of my 14th birthday, Al Gearhart reportedly took my dad aside and told him that the job of Officer in Charge at the San Ysidro port of entry was being vacated, and Al recommended that my dad put in for it.

In fact he not only recommended it, but having known my parents for years, and taking advantage of what he knew about their relationship, Gearhart gave my dad a little "incentive:"

"If Sheila (my mother) finds out that this job became vacant," Gearhart reportedly told my dad,  "and you didn't put in for it, she'll make your life even more miserable than she's making it now."

Dad put in for the job. And he got it. And it meant a promotion to GS-13. Hurray. My mother was exultant. She was getting what she wanted, the return to southern California from Spokane. I was less thrilled; I'd been very happy in Spokane and did not want to return to Chula Vista, where I had been very unhappy in junior high school two years earlier.

Every day thousands and thousands of cars pass between

California and Mexico at the port of entry at San Ysidro. When

the FBI launched an investigation of corruption at this facility

in 1971, my father was running it.

What my father didn't know in 1969 was that Gearhart, and certain other people in the INS as well, wanted Dad to get that job.

Why? Because they knew that very soon that job was going to become the focus of a federal investigation. And they wanted my dad to be holding the bag when that investigation broke.

Dad came to this realization 18 months or so later, when, as they say, the fecal matter hit the rotating oscillator.

Joe Dupuis, Fall Guy, Part II was about to begin.  



As Dad was being set up, I was growing up. My family returned to Chula Vista in the summer of 1970, just in time for me to become a sophomore at Chula Vista High School that fall, and for my older sister Carla to become a senior at the same school.

So now we were back in southern California. My father settled into his new job running the port in San Ysidro.

Shortly after that, weird things began happening.

For example, one of my dad's officers sent a pot of stew over to our house that his wife had supposedly made. My whole family (except for me) ate it and got sick.

Then Dad came home one night from a drinking bout with his American and Mexican cronies in Tijuana (Dad spoke fluent Spanish and had friends on both sides of the border) wincing with pain from what was apparently a cracked rib.

The story he told us at the time was that he and his friends had been lounging by a pool somewhere, and Dad had run, slipped on the wet cement and fallen down.

One of Dad's Mexican pals, Rudy Valladolid, (whom I knew well from hunting trips in Mexico with Dad in my childhood) even joked about it: "Joe was drinkin' 'Butterfly Tequila!'" Rudy jibed. "You drink too much of it and you think you're a butterfly!"

That's not what had happened. Dad told me years later that what actually happened was that a longtime Border Patrol crony of my father's named Leonard Gilman, against whom my father had unsuccessfully campaigned a few months earlier for the job of INS regional commissioner in San Pedro, had intentionally gotten my father drunk and then viciously punched him in the ribs.

Dad had known Gilman for many years, and told me much later that Gilman had always been a powerful bar-fighter, with a deadly punch. It was not hard to believe the scenario: Dad had challenged Gilman for the regional commissioner's job, Gilman had beat him out for it, having better political connections, and then one drunken night in Tijuana, resenting my father for having challenged him, Gilman delivered a drunken body-blow to the ribs of my equally-drunken dad.

Not hard to believe at all.

One of my Dad's most trusted and liked officers was Frank Castro. My parents became friendly with Castro and his wife, socialized with them.

I remember only two things about Frank Castro. First, as my father pointed out, Castro bore an uncanny facial resemblance to the famous Mexican bandit Pancho Villa. Second, Castro got my dad and me tickets to accompany him to a closed-circuit television screening at the San Diego International Sports Arena of a boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Jerry Quarry in the fall of 1970.

Ah, yes but there's also a third thing I remember: it was Castro who had sent over that pot of stew that made everyone in my family sick, and months later, both of my parents noticed a "cooling" in their relations with the Castros which neither could really explain.

What was going on? I must confess that I didn't think about it much in those days. I was 15 and busy with my own concerns, which were, basically, school and unrequited love, the only kind of love I ever experienced before I was out of my teens. Work was just a place my father went every day while I went to school. I didn't give it much thought.

Then, the following year, about the time I turned 16, Dad arranged a weekend job for me, pumping gas (something teenagers did for you in those days) in a Shell station at the corner of Broadway Avenue and L Street in Chula Vista. (A 7-Eleven and an Auto Zone occupy that corner now.)  The station's owner, Joe Byrne, was one of my father's immigration inspectors. He ran a Shell station on the side.

"On the side?" The 16 year-old that I was when I was hired (40 years ago this month) wouldn't have noticed this, but there were a few distinctly fishy things about Joe Byrne. In retrospect, I don't know why my father didn't pick up on them right away.

In 2001, a former FBI agent living in Virginia, Robert Hanssen, was caught spying for the Russians and went to prison, where he still is. It was all over the news. Hanssen spied for about 20 years before he got caught. He might have spied for the Russians for another 20 years, but for one thing: the dumb son-of-a-bitch gave himself away.

How? By living far beyond his means.

An FBI agent suddenly moves into a super-expensive house in tony Vienna, VA, and starts spending like a sailor?

They got him.

Lesson: if you're going to do something illegal, at least keep a low profile. Ostentatious spending will get you into trouble every time.  Al Capone flaunted his bootlegging fortune and wound up getting nailed for income-tax invasion. He died in prison.

Joe Byrne, my father's subordinate and  my boss in 1972, was an immigration inspector.

He also ran a Shell gas station.

He also had two Peterbilt trucks and ran his own trucking company.

He also had his own airplane.

How do you manage all of that on an immigration inspector's salary?

Well, uh...

Part Two

I worked at Joe Byrne's Shell station all through my junior year of high school, through the following summer and into the beginning of my senior year.


But more strange things were happening, and finally it all blew up. The government, which usually prefers a more subtle approach than door-bashing, despite what you might have seen in Bruce Willis movies, began moving slowly in. The FBI didn't want to make anybody panic and run -- they went about their investigation of the port of entry, as the French say, peu a peu. Little by little. My dad began getting phone calls and visits at work from the Junior J. Edgars.

What were those strange things that were happening?

Well, at the gas station, especially late on a Saturday night, I started getting weird phone calls. People "looking for Joe." Also odd visits. Guys would come poking around, again usually late in the evening, and they wouldn't buy anything. They were just "looking for Joe." One night a couple of guys wearing suits and ties came in while I was running the place alone (I was "night man" during the summer of '72, running the station by myself from six p.m. to midnight.) Once again they were just "looking for Joe." These two guys sat in the showroom for a while perusing magazines, and when Joe didn't show up, they  quietly said "good night" to me and left.

"Those guys were runners," my dad told me later. "They were looking for Joe, either to pick up or drop off some cash."

A small cast of regulars seemed always to be popping up "looking for Joe." One was a truck driver named Leroy Riddlesburger. He drove one of Joe's trucks I think, so I assumed he had a legitimate reason for his visits. Another was a Mexican named Willie Reyes, a smartass who drove a muscle car ('72 Camaro?), played loud rock music on his car stereo system and enjoyed giving me a good-natured bad time when I came out to pump his gas. A jerk, to the eyeballs.

Both of these guys were in the shit up to their ears, as we would learn later.

And this was not just about "undocumented workers," but also about narcotics. And LOTS of money.

Things were coming out more and more out into the open. By now the investigation was an acknowledged fact.

Everyone sat tight; no one broke and ran for the Bahamas, but everyone knew the feds were sniffing around.

Naturally the Mexicans became interested in all of this; it affected them too. There was a TV talk show on XEWT Channel 12 in Tijuana in those days, Juan Luis Presents. Because my dad was running the show at the border and because his Spanish was very good, Juan Luis interviewed Dad a couple of times. I watched one of these TV interviews. Of course I couldn't understand a word they were saying, but it was a rather eerie experience, seeing my father on television talking in a foreign language. I had heard my father speak Spanish often enough of course, but TV is...well, you know, TV. It creates its own reality.

Not once but twice, my dad was summoned to Washington, D.C. to testify before a federal grand jury.

I'm proud to say that my father, professionally, was as clean as a whistle (if he had possibly been a bit naive in the beginning.) After the second of his two appearances in D.C., the district attorney told the grand jury, "Unless one of you has something you want to accuse Mr. Dupuis of, I don't want to see him again."

And for the rest of his life, my father never again set foot in Washington. In fact, I don't think for the rest of his life he ever left California.

One afternoon in the early fall of 1972, when I was just about to turn 17, I got a strange phone call of my own. From my father.

"Listen," he said, "if you were planning to go down to the station this afternoon, don't go. I'll explain it when I get home."

By the time he got home, Dad had cooked up his story. "You know that Union 76 station across the street from the one you work at? The Border Patrol moved in this afternoon and busted a couple of illegal aliens who were working there. I didn't want them to see you across the street, point their fingers and say 'That's the guy who told on us.'"

Not a very good story. Not plausible at all. But I was on the eve of my 17th birthday, and this was my father talking. I didn't question him for a minute. If that's what he said, that's what he said.

As usual, I went about my business.

But about a week later, Dad walked in with another announcement.

"The FBI closed down the station and Byrne's in jail. You don't have a job anymore."

For some reason that came as a shock to me. After all, I had been working at this gas station for the better part of a year, and was accustomed to the pocket-money it gave me.

My father was ready for that. "Look," he said. "You're in your senior year of high school now. I know you relied on the station for money. But your studies are more important. So, for now, just concentrate on school and I'll give you a few bucks a week, okay? Take a break."

Nice birthday present. Nice Dad, when he wasn't threatening to beat me up.

So, we had all been "cashiered," we Byrne employees. I had to go down to the station that night to pick up my last paycheck.

It was strange, seeing the station locked up at 6 p.m. It was also strange seeing both of Joe's Peterbilt trucks locked in the service bay. The FBI had impounded them.

"Al," Joe's indescribably crotchety father-in-law (he was always screaming about something) was there to cut those final checks.

"I don't understand it," he said when he handed me mine. "I can't believe he's guilty. Joe always talked down drugs. He always said he'd brain any of his kids if he caught them using drugs."

Self-interest trumps rhetoric, one more time. I took my check and went home.

Joe Byrne was sentenced to six years in prison. Frank Castro also went to jail, as did a number of others. As for the higher-ups involved in all of this, including Al Gearhart, they didn't go to prison but some of them, including Gearhart, were forced to retire as an alternative to being prosecuted.

Eventually my father, too, was forced to retire. Not because he was implicated or guilty in any way, but because, as whistle-blowers in the government invariably do, he had once again made powerful enemies. By the fall of 1973, when I was starting college and "Operation Clean Sweep," as it had been called, was over and done with, my father was being threatened by the powers that be with the worst retaliation bureaucracy can inflict on any of its minions: transfer to a job they don't want or some place they don't want to go.

My dad was 59 by then, and had spent most of his career in southern California. He had seen what happened five years earlier when he transplanted the family from Chula Vista to Spokane: my mother declared Cold War. Now he had two kids (my older sister Carla and me) in college. Between Carla's and my college careers, and my mother's demonstrated antipathy for any place but Chula Vista, there was no way my dad was going to accept a transfer to St. Paul, Minnesota.

And his enemies knew it.

Dad retired from the Immigration Service on January 1, 1974, three-and-a-half months shy of his 60th birthday. Over the next three decades he would delight in watching his government enemies drop dead, one by one. Dad lived to be 91, and in his old age one of his proudest boasts was that he had outlived every enemy he ever had.

In fact I remember one in particular. I was living in Washington, D.C. in the spring of 1995, working for the U.S. Department of State. I saw an obituary in the Washington Post for a guy named James Greene. The obit said that Greene had had a long career in the Immigration Service.

I made a phone call to my dad. "Hey, Dad, during your Border Patrol and INS days, did you know a guy named James Greene?"

"Jim Greene? Sure, I knew him," Dad said.

"Was he a friend or an enemy?"

"ENEMY," Dad said without hesitation.

"Well, he's dead. I saw his obituary in the newspaper this morning."

I swear, my father almost chortled.

Al Gearhart, my dad's perpetual boss the whole time I was growing up, also dropped dead in the years following Operation Clean Sweep. Heart attack.

My father expressed no sorrow or regret when Al Gearhart suddenly died, never mind the fact that they had been "friends" for decades, had even played golf together. Gearhart had become an "enemy" during the Clean Sweep debacle. As close as our families had been when I was a child, after Clean Sweep my father never spoke to Gearhart again, and when Gearhart died, Dad responded only with a shrug.

When we left off the saga of Joe Byrne, he had just been sentenced to six years in federal prison for taking bribes from narcotics smugglers.

Fast-forward six years.

It is now 1978. I, down on my luck as usual, am working as a cashier in a little, independent beer-and-wine store in Bonita, California, right over the hill from Chula Vista. (Actually, one could argue that this store was in Sunnyside, a less-"chi-chi' place than Bonita, further out Bonita Road on the way to Spring Valley. But the store's short-lived owner, an overconfident, overloud and overweight insurance salesman and general jerk-off named Ty Williams, insisted on calling the place The Bonita Wine Cellar.)

It was nothing of the sort. It was a 7-Eleven without the goods, and doomed to fail. The place had been a liquor store prior to Ty's " buying" it, but he was too cheap to pay for a liquor license. So he tossed some beer, wine, soft drinks and bread in there, installed me behind the cash register, and then sat back on his big fat, wine-drunken ass and waited for the place to make him rich. But that same summer, a Von's supermarket opened just around the corner and down the street. Their beer and wine was much cheaper than ours, so people bought from them instead of us. And we didn't have much to offer anyone besides overpriced beer, Coke and a few loaves of bread. Von's and its neighbor Big Bear killed us. In those days the big grocery chains in California were not yet allowed to sell hard liquor. That changed later. But even if we had had a liquor license, Von's would eventually have killed us.

And even in 1978, when the big grocery chains did not yet have liquor licenses, the Bonita Wine Cellar was doomed to fail, given the half-hearted, half-ass, penny-pinching way Ty Williams chose to run it.

Still, when the business did fail, he blamed me. I quit.

Six months later he was out of business. Since 1979 that place has been a dry cleaning shop.

One Saturday afternoon I was standing behind the cash register at the "Bonita Wine Cellar," reading a book as usual because as usual there was no business and nothing else to do.

 Joe Byrne walked in.

And I don't mean that in the sense that Thomas Mann meant it in Tonio Kroeger: "Hans Hansen and Ingeborg Holm walked into the room." Mann's italics implied metaphor.


No metaphor for bourgeois normalcy here. It was Joe Byrne, the real article. In the flesh. Out of jail. And happy.

Yes, just as I remembered from my teen years, Joe was grinning, as my father used to say, "like a jackass eating shit in a briar patch."

Joe had always borne that jackass grin. And, after having been sentenced to six years in prison and serving four, he still had it.

He also still had his dirty money.

Yes, here we reach our ultimate point: "Crime Does Not Pay?" Baloney. Crime is the world's most lucrative racket if you don't get caught.

And sometimes even if you do.

Joe was in a fine mood that day, for an ex-con or anyone else. As he explained to me, his trucking company had just landed a lucrative federal contract. They were building Interstate 805, which runs from the Mexican border at Otay Mesa up to a spot near Del Mar, where it merges with Interstate 5. Byrne Trucking was in on the project, to the tune of god-knows how many taxpayer dollars.

Byrne Trucking? Didn't that all end when Joe went to prison? Didn't the FBI impound his two trucks?

Yes, but what the FBI didn't impound, because they never found it, was the money. Joe had stashed it all over his property before he went to jail. In fact I think he admitted at some point that even he had forgotten where he put some of it.

Didn't matter; there was plenty left, and when Joe got out of prison, his ill-gotten gains awaited him with open arms. He went right back into the trucking business, and by 1978 was prospering as never before.

I never saw Joe Byrne again.

But let's fast-forward another 18 years anyway. In the spring of 1996, at a time when my father and I were not speaking to each other, by the way, Dad nevertheless sent me a newspaper clipping.

It was Joe Byrne's obituary. And quite an obituary it was. Joe had been out flying his private plane one night (yes, he got another plane as well) with his younger son Pat, and they crashed into a mountain. End of Joe, end of Pat, end of story. Okay. Well, one might argue until one is blue in the face about the mills of the gods grinding slowly, but if you ask me, that is not justice by anyone's definition. Byrne got to enjoy himself, living high off the proverbial hog, for a full 20 years after giving four years to jail. Crashed plane or no -- and it is too bad he took his son Pat with him --  I think he struck a pretty good bargain with the gods, all in all.

If that's your idea of a bargain.

I guess to some people it is. I guess to Joe it was, because he was smiling from ear to ear when I saw him two years after he got out of jail.

Still, my father outlived Joe Byrne. He had that, and so do I.

The Price You Pay For Fame

I don't like to complain. (Well, that's a damned lie. Yes, I do. But I try not to be gratuitous about it.)

This is Varketili, the suburb of Tbilisi, Georgia where I teach

school. I couldn't find a picture of my school, but take my

word for it: most of Varketili looks just like this. I lived there

for a couple of months, then moved uptown. I commute now.



Ever since I started teaching here in Tbilisi earlier this fall, I've been going on and on about how wonderful my pupils are (I began referring to them as "my kids" when I had been teaching them for less than a week) and how much I enjoy teaching.

One of my recent blog postings was in fact entitled I Never Had A Child In My Life; Now I have 300.

True, very true.

I love my kids. So would someone explain to me why I am currently the loneliest guy on Planet Earth?

Because it is true that the children at Public School #117 in Varketili do make me feel like a cross between Santa Claus and Justin Timberlake. They hug me in the hallways. They mob me in the street. They come up to me just to say "Hello" (the only English many of them know) or to introduce themselves, ask my name and ask me questions about myself and about America. And to tell me things about their country, of which they are, justifiably, proud.

"Do you like our country?" I have been asked.

"Yes, I like Georgia very much," I reply. Which is true, and also, usually, gets a smile from my little interlocutor.

The next question is invariably "Do you like our food?"

That one's tougher to answer. I like their food, but I can't pronounce it.

Would that someone, anyone in this country over the age of 14 would treat me that way.

But they don't.

Among the kids of Tbilisi, I'm the greatest thing since Coca-Cola.

Among my so-called "colleagues," I'm the Invisible Man.

Oh, it's not a rule without exceptions. I do have one co-teacher, a woman named Medea, who has been very nice to me. She's about my age, widowed for 20 years, struggling to get by on a teacher's salary, like the rest of us. I can't say we're good friends; we never socialize off-campus, but at least she does talk to me.

And there's another, "Natia," half my age or so, who is very busy with little children at home, but tries to be civil to me when she can spare the time.

Almost all of the rest of my fellow teachers here fall into two categories: (1) The ones who will only talk to me if I learn Russian first, and (2) The ones who won't talk to me at all.

The "teacher room" at PS #117 has become a place I tend to avoid. If I go in there between classes, I had better have my copy of In Search of Lost Time with me, because for me, the choices are either read a book or look out the window.

And believe me, Varketili doesn't have that much to look at. Crumbling old Soviet apartment buildings with laundry hanging outside of their windows isn't exactly a soul-uplifting vista. Especially in November.

Okay, I understand that we have a language barrier, most of my colleagues and me.

That includes, I'm sorry to say, a couple of them who teach English. Their English is good enough to teach fifth graders, but it's not good enough for conversation in the sense that I understand it. Generally the best we manage is Q&A: they ask me for clarification on the meanings of English words, and I ask them for such useful Georgian phrases as "Did you do your homework?" "Why didn't you do your homework?" and "Quiet!"

The Georgian phrase for "Be Quiet" is pronounced Sijoumay -- "See-joo-may" -- and believe me, does it come in handy! Yesterday I momentarily stunned my noisy fifth-graders by barking out "Sijoumay!" They lapsed into silence, stared...and then started tittering.

"You surprised them by saying something in Georgian," my colleague explained.

"So why don't you learn Georgian?" I hear you cry. Because I'm only going to be here seven more months, and that's not enough time to learn a language, particularly a language as difficult as Georgian.

"How difficult can Georgian be?" I hear you cry.

Okay, Mr. or Ms. Smarty-Pants, here are two short sentences in Georgian:

"დილა მშვიდობისა. როგორ ხართ?"

Uh...you were saying?

This language is lovely to hear, beautiful to look at, and difficult to learn. And it's only spoken by four million people on the entire earth. Ninety-eight percent of those people are right here. If I busted my butt for the next 20 weeks trying to learn Georgian, what would I get for it?

Memories of having once studied Georgian; that's about it. I know what I'm talking about, by the way. More than 20 years ago I lived in Brazil, and I studied Portugese very hard. Two years. I had a great teacher. His name was Miguel. He was a grammarian, and a fabulous tutor. I got up to the "intermediate" level in Portuguese with Miguel, the best I've ever done with any language.

I don't speak ten words of Portuguese now. If you don't use a language, you lose it. Where besides Brazil was I going to use Portuguese? Portuguese is not spoken anywhere except Portugal, Brazil and a few small places nobody ever heard of.

But never mind that. What's getting to me is the fact that most of my fellow teachers here won't even make a gesture in my general direction. Not even a smile or a "hello," which is the least I get out of the kids. They come sashaying into the teacher room with a cheerful "Gamarjoba," (the Georgian word for hello) for their colleagues, but not so much as a glance at me. They walk past me like I was a table and plunge right into a spirited session of gossip and professional bitching in Georgian with their fellow old biddies. And young biddies -- which brings up another subject: some of the young teachers here are hot -- unfortunately there are no single women of my age in this country except widows with rotten teeth. The USSR did NOT provide dental care.

Aside from toothless, or nearly toothless, widows of the late communist regime, women in this country fall into ... well, I'm going to have to resort to the "categories" thing again. Three this time: (1) Married. (2) Young enough to be my daughters. (3) Both. And even if that situation did not apply, there's a Georgian "cultural" thing: you can't just walk up to a woman and start talking to her, even if she speaks English as well as Katherine Hepburn. In Georgia, you have to be "introduced" by a "family." Well, that lets me off; I live alone. I don't know any Georgian "families," and am not likely to.

Yes, it might be a cultural thing, this cold shoulder I'm getting, but there's no claiming that Georgians don't like Americans. It's Russians who are unpopular here, and given the way Russia has been invading Georgia for the past 150 years, that can hardly surprise anyone. (Having said that, there are some older Georgians who do admit to a certain nostalgia for Russian language and culture).  But Georgians do like Americans. Would the kids here make me a celebrity if they were hearing a lot of anti-American rhetoric at home? I don't think so. In fact, this will make some of my "leftie" friends back home just gag, (the hope for which is among the reasons I bring it up) but Tbilisi has a "George W. Bush Avenue." I'm not kidding. It's near Varketili, on the way to the airport. There's even a big picture of old GWB waving and smiling.

This is course led me to wonder aloud just what the heck Dubya ever did to get so popular here.

"He came to visit," an American colleague said.

"I didn't know that," I replied. (I never read the news anymore. Ever.)

"And?" I went on.  "Did he promise them anything?"

"Well, no, he just gave 'em the old 'Think of me as your Padron' speech," my friend said. "Naturally that led to some Georgians thinking, 'Oh, good. We'll start a war with Russia and the Americans will come help us."

I'm not holding my breath on that one.

So, whatever the cultural problem might be, anti-Americanism isn't it.

It just might the fact that I'm male. This has occurred to me. Few if any of the kids in my school have seen a male teacher at any time in recent memory. Virtually all of their teachers are women. While this might make me an exotic figure of fascination among the kids, it might "put off" the old biddies for some reason, and maybe the young biddies too. Maybe there's some arcane cultural fillip buried in heart of every Georgian woman that says she isn't supposed to talk to strange men, especially foreigners.

Whatever it is, I certainly would appreciate an adult conversation with another adult, even if it has to be through an interpreter. Or even a smile. I don't get either. If I want to hear English spoken, I have to walk down Rustaveli Avenue (Tbilisi's main drag) to Prospero's Books, a bookstore/cafe where Americans and Brits hang out, I assume for the overpriced English-language books and the (wildly) overpriced cappucino. People from Teach and Learn With Georgia, the government agency that brought us foreign teachers of English over here, often hang out at Prospero's Books, using the Wi-Fi and sucking up the high-end coffee, and now and then I'll see somebody I know there.

Or ... I might bump into somebody I know on the street. It's happened. A couple of weekends ago I was wandering around in the mud over near Station Square (the main train station) where there is a huge shopping bazaar. Suddenly I heard a voice. "Hi, Kelley!"

It was my friend and co-TLG'er, "Hannah," who hails from St. Louis and was walking in the opposite direction.

We went shopping together. Some other TLG friends joined us later. Eventually there were five of us, shopping in lousy weather. I had to break this party up at last. My ex-wife, who is working temporarily at the American embassy here in Tbilisi, had invited me and one other TLG colleague to dinner, so I had to peel off.

But what a refreshing and relieving Saturday! To be among English-speaking adults for a few hours who actually wanted to include me in their conversations! After it was over, I was back to living the way I customarily do here, which is to say I commute to my teaching job, get love from the children and cold shoulders from my Georgian "colleagues," and then return to my one-room studio apartment to spend the evening, the night and usually the weekend alone, reading, listening to classical music on iTunes radio, and wishing that someone, anyone I work with would talk  to me.

Or at least smile.

Or at least say "Gamarjoba." I don't speak Georgian, but I know what that word means. I just never hear it here, (the only place you're ever likely to hear it) unless it's addressed to someone else within my hearing.

Joe Frazier: 1944-2011



Smokin' Joe in his glory days, the 1970s


Joe Frazier, one-half of the last sporting event in history to galvanize and divide America, hasn't been in his grave for 72 hours yet, but the keepers of the 1960s flame are already busy trashing his memory.

The poor bastard. He was a great fighter, but he just wasn't politically correct. Darn.


Joe Frazier died on Monday at age 67, of cancer.


Slate magazine commemorated Frazier's passing with a veritable sneer-fest. Slate's obituary starts off with the statement that Frazier wasn't fit to tie Muhammad Ali's shoe.


From there it turns unpleasant.




Joe Frazier makes life difficult for Muhammad Ali,
knocking him on his butt in the 15th round.
March 8,1971

Maybe Frazier wasn't fit to tie Ali's shoe, but once upon a time he was fit to mess up Ali's face, nearly bust his jaw and and knock him flat on his can. How many men could do that? Probably not Michael Kinsley.

But Ali, after all, was a hero to the anti-Vietnam War crowd back in the late 1960s and early '70s, that crowd which is all sclerotic now, but in its dotage is still nostalgic for Woodstock, tie-dyed T shirts, bong pipes and Fillmore East posters, and still eager to sneer away anyone who didn't follow the orthodoxy of Woodstock Nation, a group which never existed in the first place and is dying off now.

Ah, stuff it, Slate. And by the way, you can also kiss my ass, all of you aging hippies, all of you who still have November 22 marked in red on your Rolling Stone calendars. Stuff your nostalgia for rebel days that never were. Stick your Moby Grape albums in your ears.

Grow up, for chrissakes, my fellow aging Baby Boomers! Peter, Paul and Mary broke up a long time ago. In fact Mary's dead, as are a lot of you. And soon, me.

Yes, I'm a trailing-edge member of that narcissistic "Woodstock" generation. By which I mean I'm too young to have been at Woodstock, but do remember it. (It's been said that if everyone who claims to actually have been at the original Woodstock festival were actually there, Max Yasgur's upstate New York farm, where the big party took place in August, 1969, would have to have been the size of Connecticut.)

And I do remember that epic night when Frazier squared off for the first time against Ali. The day that preceded it as well. Everyone my age does.

Nothing would be seen to resemble this spectacle until the O.J. Simpson trial nearly 25 years later. America chose up sides on Ali-Frazier. And America followed this fight by any means it could.

Earlier in the same fight. Ali was showboating,
as he often did in those days, but you can see that
despite the legerdemain of his footwork, he was
scared of Frazier's deadly left hook.

As mentioned above, the catalyst that made this prizefight such an epic event was the war in Vietnam. In 1967, Muhammad Ali, whose name had once been Cassius Clay and who had won the olympic gold medal in boxing at the Rome Olympics of 1960, refused to be drafted into the armed forces. He refused to fight in Vietnam. His famous quip "I got nothin' against them Congs," echoed from one end of the nation to the other.

Immediately Ali became an icon to opponents of the war, and a villain to that still-large portion of America, which, in 1967, (a mere two years after President Lyndon Baines Johnson had escalated the U.S. war effort in southeast Asia) believed that the war was justified, a necessary and unavoidable part of America's global crusade against Communism.

When Ali was stripped of his heavyweight title for refusing to be inducted into the Army, many Americans thought the action was right and justified.

In fact, the generation that had fought World War II, still only in its forties and early fifties at that time, was aghast at Ali's recusancy. By refusing to serve his country, many felt that Ali had showed himself to be unpatriotic, anti-American and undeserving.

Many who felt this way would change their minds later, after the war had dragged on in stalemate mode for a few more years and it began to appear that the United States either couldn't win or didn't especially want to.  By 1973, even my father, as loud a jingoist as you could ask for, was beginning to question why the U.S. continued to pour so many lives and so much money into what looked more and more like a black hole.

But that came later. In '71 the country was still pretty much split in two over Vietnam. And as the media would have it, on the evening of Monday, March 8, 1971, Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali became single-combat warriors.

Ali was fighting for the left, Frazier for the right, whether they knew it or not.

And everyone cared. At Chula Vista High School, where I was a 15 year-old sophomore that day, the fight was talked about all day long. I asked my teachers what they thought. "Frazier doesn't have a chance," I told Mr. Gary Chapman, my home room teacher and an avid sports fan. "I don't know," Mr. Chapman replied, "Ol, 'Smokin' Joe...'"

That same afternoon my English teacher, Mrs. Rochelle Terry, asked the class after her regular lecture if there were any questions. "Yeah," I said. "Who do you pick in the fight tonight?"

"Muhammad Ali," she smiled. Mrs. Terry was a confirmed sixties gal, leftie to the bone. I even remember the laced-up boots she was wearing that day, kind of a counterculture fashion statement of that era.

Media coverage of what Norman Mailer would call "The Fight" in a book he wrote about this event entitled The Fight (Mailer was rich enough to have a ringside seat -- oh, yes, the celebrities and "beautiful people" were out in force at Madison Square Garden that night, including Mailer, Frank Sinatra, and a phalanx of flamboyantly-dressed black men who called themselves "Ali's Army") was kept very tight. This was YEARS before pay-per-view, and the forces of greed were not giving away anything for free. There was no television coverage, except perhaps closed-circuit, the ancestor of pay-per-view.

Since I brought up closed-circuit and called it "the ancestor of pay-per-view," I'll fill in those of you who were born after the advent of HBO and are too young to remember closed-circuit, how it worked.

In fact I'll tell you, as we dreary old people tend to, from personal experience. 

And that experience, coincidentally, involves Muhammad Ali.

On October 26, 1970, a few months prior to "The Fight," Ali staged his first "comeback" bout after having been stripped of the heavyweight title three years earlier.

He fought Jerry Quarry that night, and dispatched him quickly. I saw this fight, even though television was not allowed. How? Via "closed-circuit:" The Ali-Quarry fight was shown on a big closed-circuit screen at the San Diego International Sports Arena. You had to buy a ticket to come and watch this bout on the big TV. Someone gave my father two tickets, and he took me along to see Quarry vs. Ali, which if you blinked you might have missed it. The bout was stopped after three rounds when a cut over Quarry's eye could not be closed. (You could still smoke in public in those days, and I will never forget the sight of my father, along with his Immigration Service buddies, standing there with a cigar in his mouth, shouting encouragement to the video image of doomed Jerry Quarry.)

Muhammad Ali on the "comeback
trail," 1970. He dispatched Jerry
Quarry in three rounds.

The fight lasted all of nine minutes. And I still had to go home and do my homework. Damn.

Still, seeing Ali-Quarry in October of '70 was a treat, despite the shortness of the fight.

The Ali-Quarry match raised some eyebrows, by the way, over how suddenly it was stopped. I overheard my dad remarking to his INS pals, "The question is, who's in the tank?"

I was writing juvenile poetry by then, and duly wrote a poem entitled The Question Is, Who's In The Tank?: Reflections On The Ali-Quarry Fight. Mercifully, it is long lost.

My dad and I did not get to see "Ali-Frazier I,"  as the fight later came to be called (see "World War I" for marketing references) on closed-circuit TV. Evidently nobody gave my father tickets to this one, although I'm sure The Fight was shown on closed-circuit TV in some venues, for those who could pay. And I'm sure that those who could pay had to pay a lot. My family was poor in those days. We had to make do.

We did. The best we could do, Dad and me, was to follow the 50-word summaries of each round which were allowed to be broadcast on the radio after each round ended. We sat in the kitchen together that night, as I'm sure millions of others all over America did, our ears glued to the radio.

I doubt that a boxing match had attracted this much attention since Billy Conn fought Joe Louis in 1941.

My father and I rooted passionately for "Smokin' Joe." It was 1971, Muhammad Ali was an America-hating traitor, (and probably hated white people as well; after all, he was a Black Muslim, a follower of Elijah Muhammad, the successor of the assassinated Malcolm X, and we had all heard the anti-white rhetoric of Malcolm X), and we wanted Frazier to pound him into dust.

Personally, as I had told Mr. Chapman that morning, I did not think it was going to happen. In fact I didn't think Frazier had a prayer. During the 1960's, on ABC's Wide World of Sports and elsewhere, I had watched Ali destroy one opponent after another.

Ali seemed invincible.

Of course I was just a kid then, and didn't know that Ali, for TV's benefit, had been fighting a series of opponents during the mid-1960s who really didn't deserve to be in the same ring with him.

To cement his reputation as "The Greatest," having won the Olympic gold medal and then beaten such real champs as Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson earlier in the decade, Ali "defended" his title against a list of nobodies which included George Chuvalo, Brian London, Karl Mildenburger, and a fellow named Cleveland "Big Cat" Williams, who, a few months before climbing into the ring with Ali, had been shot by a Texas policeman. Williams was missing one kidney plus ten feet of his small intestine, and had nerve damage in one leg to boot. Ali beat Williams in three rounds. No big surprise there.

In view of  "matchups" such as these, by the time Ali was stripped of his title in 1967, more than one sportswriter was accusing him and his manager, Angelo Dundee, of running a "Bum-of-The-Month" club.

But as a child I was taken in by all the hype. The media wanted us to think Ali was unbeatable, and I believed them.

Goliath. And worse yet, a Goliath who openly hated America, had a big, loud mouth (and probably hated white people.)

We needed a patriotic David to take him down.  But I didn't think such a figure existed.

I had no faith that Frazier, or anyone else, could do the job. I'd seen Ali plow under too many opponents, not realizing that so many of them were handpicked straw men. Jerry Quarry was a fighter of some reputation (good grief, he even made an appearance on I Dream of Jeannie!) but he wasn't in Ali's league.

Surprise: Frazier not only beat Ali that night, but knocked him flat on his ass in the 15th round.

And if Frazier didn't quite break Ali's jaw, (that honor would go to my fellow San Diegan Ken Norton two years later, when Norton defeated Ali for the North American Boxing Federation title), Frazier did give Ali a swollen jaw, which I saw a few nights later on The Dick Cavett Show.

Oh-kay, for you GenX'ers, GenY'ers and GenZero'ers who don't remember The Dick Cavett Show or Dick Cavett, his was a late-night talk show on ABC television in those days.

Cavett often had controversial and/or political figures on his show as guests. The '70s media called him "The Thinking Man's Johnny Carson."

Of course, that last sentence would require that I explain to you under-35's who Johnny Carson was.

Heck with it. Google him.

Anyway, March 8, 1971 was a "moment" which would not be repeated. Ali eventually won the title back from Frazier, and defended it successfully a number of times as the nineteen-seventies went on. 

Not to take anything from Ali; maybe we can blame his manager, but again, it was "Bum-of-the-Month Club" time for while. 

In 1975, for example, Ali fought Chuck Wepner, a Bayonne, Wisconsin liquor store owner who may have been as tough as nails, (he was) but as a fighter he was a journeyman rather than the master Ali was. Wepner was known as "The Bayonne Bleeder" for the ease with which a rival fighter could cut him. Ali-Wepner was a joke.

I actually watched this fight on TV. The late Howard Cosell, a sportscaster who had a somewhat-prickly relationship with Ali, (and also with the rest of the nation) commented that this bout between Wepner and Ali would at best give Wepner a good story he could tell in his Bayonne liquor store years later.

That's all Cosell would give Wepner. But Wepner did earn it. He had no business fighting Muhammad Ali. But he probably did plenty of liquor store business later, based on the fact that he had fought Muhammad Ali, boxing's equivalent of "I once pitched batting practice to Albert Pujols."

Ali, aging by now, lost his title to Leon Spinks in 1978. He won it back from Spinks, as he had won it back from everyone else who ever took it away from him. But after losing a 10-round decision to Trevor Berbick in 1981, Ali retired from the ring.

(I was a 26 year-old reporter in Vacaville, CA when Ali fought Berbick, and although not a member of the sports staff, I wrote a feature story about Ali's career for my newspaper.)

Jumping back to 10 years earlier, I also remember watching Ali's 1971 interview with Dick Cavett, a few nights after his loss to Frazier.

I was impressed that Ali was man enough to admit that Frazier had bested him. Speaking through that swollen jaw, Ali told Cavett, "All that talk you've heard about his left hook? That ain't just talk. When you see me on my backside, you know that punch had something behind it."

Good sport, Ali, despite his earlier reputation as a screechy, self-promoting loudmouth.

March 8, 1971: Round 15. After knocking

Muhammad Ali on his ass, Joe Frazier walks

back to his corner.

The end of the Vietnam War cooled a lot of passions, and by the time Ali's career entered its twilight half-a-dozen years later, many people who had cheered for Frazier to pound the daylights out of him for refusing to serve in the Army had changed their tunes.

One of them was my own father. By 1972, angry (along with a lot of other people) at Richard Nixon, and getting fed up with the way the Vietnam thing just seemed to keep going on and on and on in the nightly news, with no end in sight, my father remarked, "You know, goddammit, I'm starting to understand how the young people in this country feel! This Vietnam bullshit has gone on long enough!"

It should therefore come as no surprise that when Ali fought Earnie Shavers on the night of September 29, 1977, and the pre-fight warm-up included a short clip of Ali, relaxed in his jogging suit, saying softly that he was through with fame and glory and now just wanted to "help people," Dad remarked, "He's a great guy!"

He was a great guy, Ali. And is. I don't know how much of this was PR-driven, but I do recall that when 52 Americans were being held hostage by murderous fanatics at the American Embassy in Tehran in 1980, Ali spoke up. (One of those murderous fanatics, by the way, is now the president of Iran, but that's a discussion for another day.) Ali offered to exchange himself for the 52. "I'm a Muslim," he told the press, "I don't think they'd hurt me."

If true, it's a great story and a tribute to a man with a big heart.

Unfortunately, it seems that Frazier spent his post-ring years shadow-boxing. He maintained over and over that he despised Ali and wanted to fight him one more time. It almost became his trademark. 

And then, more disappointment: Frazier's own son did show some promise as a fighter, but not much. As a colleague of mine who was knowledgeable about boxing said, "He's not Dad." Well, who was?

The terribly sad thing was, what could Frazier do in the shadow of a man with such an aura as Ali had?

Not much. I feel sorry not just for Frazier, but for all fighters who had to fight in Muhammad Ali's charismatic  "aura."

In fact I don't think I feel sorrier for anyone than poor old Larry Holmes, who had the misfortune to inherit the heavyweight title after Ali had retired. Kind of like being Louis XV: who was going to notice the king of France who followed Le roi soleil, Louis XIV? Holmes was a great fighter, but after the flamboyant Muhammad Ali, who was going to remember him?

Me.  And I will also remember Joe Frazier. 

A Rainy Night in Georgia

As mentioned in my last blog posting, I was sick for most of the month of October.

I caught a cold around the first of the month, which turned to pleurisy, which then tried to become pneumonia. I was coughing; my head and chest were filled with discolored crud, I was running high fevers...I was a sick boy. Went through two courses of antibiotics.

But I'm still coughing, and I think I have figured who the culprit is:

Tbilisi.

Tbilisi is not the dirtiest place I've ever lived. That title would go to Abidjan, the capital of Cote d'Ivoire, where I lived more than 20 years ago. Second, third and fourth runners-up would be downtown Baltimore, Moscow ... and then Tbilisi.

But there were extenuating circumstances when I lived in Abidjan, or even, for that matter when I lived in Moscow.

For one thing, I was a younger man. I was in my mid-to-late thirties when I lived in Abidjan and Moscow, stronger and healthier than I am now. All my life I have had what you might call a "weak chest." Since I was a kid I've been subject to upper-respiratory infections.

Tbilisi's familiar telephone tower,
in the rain.

But in my long-gone foreign service days not only was I younger, but also spoiled rotten in terms of my surroundings. I was an employee of the American Embassy, and don't you believe anything those people tell you about their supposed "hardships:" they live on a satin pillow provided by the U.S. government. I know, I was one of them. Hardships? Listen to some of their "hardships:"  luxurious quarters, expensive furniture, chauffeur rides to and from work, General Services Support for anything you need from a broken window to a leaky toilet, medical services on-site, 24-hour security guards where deemed needed, commissaries well-stocked with American consumer goods, satellite TV...Oh, yeah, and top of it all, every American living overseas on "official business" has a full-time maid who costs him or her maybe $100 a month. Official Americans have it SO tough. My heart bleeds for the poor babies.

Trying living with none of those things, as I do now.

Anyway, yes, Abidjan and Moscow were dirty, dusty, sometimes dangerous places. Malarial, in the case of Abidjan. But in Abidjan I spent my entire working day inside the embassy, a completely air-conditioned and therefore air-filtered environment. In addition, I worked in the communications center, which didn't even have any windows. It was air conditioning all the way. Not that they cared so much about us, but the equipment had to be kept cool.

After working all day in the air-conditioned Cote d'Ivoire embassy environment, I would go home to my beautiful four-bedroom house in Deax Plateau (yes, we had a full-time servant who did all the cleaning and laundry, and cost a pittance) which was also air conditioned 24/7. So I was only breathing "the crap" when I was either out jogging or on my way from point A to point B. in my car or a taxi.

Goodbye to all that. I am not in Tbilisi as an overpaid government employee. I'm here as a woefully underpaid teacher. Benefits? Don't make me laugh. I live in a tiny studio for which I'm paying $300 a month. We are not permitted to drive here; our contract forbids it. So everywhere I go I either walk, take a cab or ride the smelly Metro.

I teach English to Georgian children in what could be charitably called a "sick building." (My Georgian teaching colleagues tell me that this filthy barn, Public School #117 in the suburb of Varketili, is actually one of the better buildings.) What can I tell you? It was built by the Soviets, and they couldn't build anything well except missiles and tanks. The building not only has no air conditioning, it also has no heat (until they get around to turning it on, which as of November 8 they have not yet, and we had snow yesterday), and as often as not, no electricity. The classrooms are illuminated, when illuminated at all, by naked light bulbs hanging from the ceiling, usually no more than 40 watts and usually at least half of them not working. When it's a gray day outside it's almost like teaching in a movie theater where the movie is just about to start.

"How do these children learn anything?" I demanded of a colleague yesterday? "I can hardly even see in here!"

Oh, yes, and then there's the dust.

In the streets it's bad enough. Decaying infrastructure combined with street-sweeping technology out of the 16th century (old ladies with straw brooms) have combined to create truly choking streets. And the traffic here, to make matters worse, is unbelievable. Everybody here drives like they're in training to become a suicide bomber, and their standard response to a traffic jam, which we have here oh, maybe every fourteen seconds, is to sit in the middle of it and blow their horns. Georgians think the most important part of a car is the horn. Oh, yes, and pedestrians most decidedly do NOT have the right-of-way here. There's one standing rule: "Get outta my way or die." When a Georgian taxi driver passes you at 70 mph, missing you by three-quarters of an inch, he honks his horn at you and then leaves behind a cloud of dust that looks like something out of the stampede scene in Silverado.

Georgia's capital isn't the safest place to drive in, even when
the weather's dry. When it rains, you'd better stay in the cafes.

And then there's my school itself. Five stories of crumbling plaster and wood. Dust an inch thick, everywhere. When the children are creating their own stampede, which they do every forty minutes between classes, the corridors look like fog has moved in through the windows. That's how much dust there is here, everywhere.

And I'm breathing it. Maybe the locals get used to it, but I don't. There's a reason why every afternoon I start coughing and can't stop.

I've even thought that I might have to be medevaced out of here, but you see, I have no place else to go.

The only thing that helps at all is when the weather turns. A good, persistent drizzle will keep the dust down.

When I left for school yesterday, that's exactly what we had, and it had been going on all night. Well, I was OK with that -- I'll tolerate a dismal, chilly November day in Tbilisi if it means dispensing, albeit temporarily, with the dust. I put on my suit and tie (no overcoat) and headed for the metro, enjoying the for-now clean, rain-washed air. And for once, breathing fairly easily.

My sartorial choice turned out to be a bad move, however. Not only did the drizzle not stop, but during the course of the day, the mercury fell.

About 2:15 p.m. my third-graders looked out the window (there wasn't much to look at in that dark room) and got excited. It was snowing.

Sort of. Like I said, the weather had turned a mix of drizzle and snow.

And after class I had to walk back to the Metro in that mess, plus walk from the Metro station back to my tiny studio at the other end, all without a coat on.

Well, I'm coughing again, and applying the Vicks. But what can I say? I came to Georgia to teach; nobody said it was going to be comfortable or fun. Or safe. But if I'm still alive and breathing this time next year, I'm sure I'll have some stories to tell. You just have to put your hand out here and it fills up with them, like the cold, wet drizzle of a November night in the Caucasus.

Update From Expat Boot Camp

I love living overseas. Especially in countries where I can neither understand nor read the local lingo.

And believe me, that's Georgia.


This is Georgia, where I live now. It's sandwiched between
Russia, Turkey, Armenia and Azerbaijan. I love its children.

You see, I don't want to know what's going on back at "home." I just don't want to hear about it.

My ex-wife Chris is doing a temporary stint of duty at the American Embassy here in Tbilisi. Last weekend she invited me and my friend Jason over for dinner. Because she's an American embassy employee (of sorts -- she's retired, but works on contract) she gets all the perks, including AFN. So we sat there before dinner and watched CNN and Fox News.

Talk about depressing! CNN and Fox are precisely two of the things I packed up and left the United States to get away from. Left-wing CNN, right-wing Fox. I pulled the plug on both of them right after the 2008 general election, and I intend for it to stay pulled.

And while we're at it, I've also pulled the plug on CSI, Dancing With The Stars, House, the NFL, rap "music," HGTV, The Simpsons, Lady Gaga, televised poker, professional wrestling, NASCAR, Barack Obama, Sarah Palin and e-mail pitches for cheap mortgages, Christian dating services and erectile dysfunction products.

I don't need, or want, what America is selling.

If there's another 9/11, don't tell me about it. I don't want to know. I couldn't do anything about it, just as I couldn't anything about the first one. I offered to donate blood back then, but everybody was dead. If it happens again, give me a point for having offered to donate blood the first time, and then go away.

Just leave me to my watercolors, my notebooks, my set of Proust and my loneliness. At this stage of the game that's all I ask of anyone.


That's where being in Georgia is such an advantage. If I were say, in Peru for example, and if there were another 9/11, the local newspapers would be shrieking something along the lines of "Ay, Caramba! Un Otro 9/11!"

I would understand that. I know at least that much Spanish.

But the same headline in Georgian would look something like this:

"ოჰ, არა! კიდევ ერთი ცხრა-თერთმეტი!"

Georgian looks to me like something a kid did with a can of Cheez-Wiz. I can't make head nor tail of it.

And as the old song goes, "I like it like that."

I'm not planning to learn Georgian either, not out of any contempt for this country and its wonderful people, but simply because I'm only going to be in this country until next June, which isn't enough time to learn a language, especially one that's only spoken by only four million people in the entire world (and 98 percent of them live here, in a country the size of South Carolina.)

I was sick as a dog through much of October. I have an ex-girlfriend whose son, Mason, is especially vulnerable to upper-respiratory infections. I share that with him. And I think Tbilisi aggravates them, in my case. It's a dirty city, although it's certainly not the dirtiest place I ever lived. It's just that there's a lot of dust here, especially out in the suburbs. I swear, when a taxicab passes me out in Varketili, where I teach school, I can almost see the cloud of dust behind it. And I'm BREATHING that crap. Maybe the locals get used to it, but I haven't. Every moment I'm outdoors in Tbilisi, I'm blowing my nose. There has to be an explanation for that, and I think I found it.

They do have street-sweepers here, not the kind you see in the U.S. with those big metal sweeping discs scouring the sidewalk, but rather, bent little former Soviet babushkas whom you see early in the morning, sweeping the streets with their handmade straw brooms. But it's like fighting a house fire with a squirt gun.

Anyway I think all of the dust here really does aggravate my upper-respiratory problems. At the beginning of October I caught a cold, which became pleurisy, which then flirted with pneumonia. I went to two doctors and ran through two courses of antibiotics. I spent my 56th birthday on October 12 in bed, running a fever, taking antibiotics and coughing up crud. Two of my fellow English teachers came to visit me that night in my horrible old ex-Soviet Kruschchoba, a one-room apartment in a crumbling building whose electricity would not stay on. (I have since moved uptown.) They brought a large jug of cheap Georgian wine. Georgia produces wonderful wines, but that wasn't one of them. I wouldn't wash my feet in that stuff. It was nice of these two guys, Cass and Jason, to come see me on my birthday, even thought I couldn't get out of bed. But when they left I told them, "Don't leave that slop here. Take it out and leave it on the sidewalk for some needy wino."

That's exactly what they did.

I'm feeling somewhat better now, but I'm not 100 percent back yet.

So where will I be after next June?

I have no clue. I have no plan except to look around, come late winter/early spring, for another English-teaching gig in another overseas venue. 

I can tell you one place where I will definitely not be, and that is Chula Vista, California, where I come from. At this point I can't see myself ever wanting to go back there.

"Why?" people ask me. "You grew up there. You went to school there. Your family has been there for generations."

Broadway Avenue, Chula Vista, California, which I hope

never to see again.

All of that is true. But it's also true that nearly all of my family, and the old family homestead in Chula Vista, the house my grandfather bought in 1941, are gone. I have one surviving sister there. My other sister is dead and so are my parents. There is nothing left there for me go "home" to. And you can't be homesick if you don't have a home. And indeed I haven't felt a twinge of homesickness since leaving the states. Loneliness, yes. Tremendous loneliness. But homesickness? No.

I'm about as rootless as a person can be. No wife, no children, no family left except my sister Carla. And since I'm never going to have any money either, I had better get used to living in poor countries.

The only thing that even possibly might get me to return to the United States is expedience: I have a buddy in North Carolina who has said that, provided he isn't sharing his place with a live-in girlfriend when my gig here in Georgia ends next summer, I might move in with him in Pinehurst, NC -- get some kind of a job there and we could be the Felix Unger and Oscar Madison of the Old South.

But that is the only set of circumstances under which I could see myself returning to the U.S.

Korea or Ecuador or some such place is more likely. I hear there are English-teaching jobs in the United Arab Emirates that pay pretty well. Why not? The UAE has more money than God. This job I have in Georgia pays next to nothing, but I took it because I wanted to get some teaching experience, and also because I couldn't stand Chula Vista for one more day.

And here's the kicker: I have found that I love teaching. Wouldn't you know it, when I finally find the thing I love to do (aside from writing, which has always been my first love), it would have to be something that pays next to nothing.

But I love teaching and I love my kids. My third and fourth-graders especially. But for the past two days I've been bribing them with Snickers bars to give me good responses in alphabet drills. Obviously I can't keep that up. My co-teacher, Medea, easily my best Georgian friend, suggested I switch to lollipops because they're cheaper. I might do that. (I know, I should probably stop bribing them altogether. )

The problem is ... well, as Ragueneau the pastry-cook says in the play Cyrano de Bergerac when the title character asks him why he's allowing a ragtag band of bums posing as "poets" to eat everything in his bakery for listening to him recite his verses, "I love a friendly audience."

Actually, I had a friendly audience before I started throwing Snickers around. The kids here in Tbilisi, especially the older ones, make me feel like Justin Timberlake. All I have to do is stand in the hallway wearing my California-Mexico straw "cowboy" hat and they come up to me, all smiles and curiosity, wanting to introduce themselves, learn my name, ask where I come from...and give me updates on soccer and rugby. My fourth-graders get visibly excited when I come into the room. They mob me in the street near the school: "Mr. Kelley! Mr. Kelley! Hello!" (I have trouble getting these kids to pronounce the word, "carrot." There's no way they're going to handle "Dupuis," so I'm "Mr. Kelley." But from the way they act, you'd think Mr. Kelley was Santa Claus. It's the damndest thing I ever saw.)

I think part of it is my playing the "good cop" to their Georgian teachers' "bad cop." Since I don't speak Georgian, I mostly leave discipline to my local colleagues. The kids get yelled at by their Georgian teacher for being noisy, but usually not by me. Oh, I have been exasperated enough to shout "QUIET!" a few times, but it's only the level of my voice that makes them settle down. They don't understand the word "quiet." If I said it without shouting, they'd ignore me. They do. And these kids are so used to being yelled at that it generally just slides right off their backs anyway.

But they're good kids. They're kids. Kids are noisy, boisterous and can't sit still. Hey, it hasn't been THAT long since I was ten. I remember. I was a serious ADD case at that age. School was torture to me because I hated sitting still. So I know how some of these kids feel. (I couldn't keep quiet, either. In junior high school I was always getting thrown out of classrooms for shooting off my mouth, which is why I have a blog now.)

We do have one or two children who are obviously borderline-autistic, and I don't know what to do or suggest. My colleagues don't either. Referring to one especially uncommunicative student who doesn't do his homework, a colleague told me today, "I had his mother as a student years ago, and she was the same way." It was agreed that this boy should be under a doctor's treatment, but "the parents never agree that there is a problem."

"Then the parents should be in jail," I replied.

Where would I go from Georgia if I had a choice? That's a tough one. Do I go for a good-paying job, or one that's in a location where I might want to die?

The UAE sounds like a good money proposition. On the other hand, I'm thinking about dying in Ecuador. Why not just cut to the chase and go there, since I'm 56 anyway?

I told an ex-girlfriend more than three years ago, when she was still infatuated with me and not disillusioned, (as they always become sooner or later) that my final "persona" was going to be "aging surfer dude."

She laughed. We were still at that wonderful, mutual-discovery stage, when she was amused by me rather than enraged by me, which she would become later, as they always do.

My dream-final persona: just picture this guy bald.

But seriously, this is why I'm thinking about Ecuador. My grandfather, who was in the British merchant marine, lived either there or in Peru for a while. He actually met my grandmother on a freighter bound for South America. (Although he died in Chula Vista, in the same house in which both his second wife and his daughter, ((my mother)) had fatal strokes, the same house in which my father died. The same property on which my younger sister died of an overdose of Methadone and booze in 2004.

A good 40 percent of my family died in Chula Vista, most of them croaking at 235 Madrona Street.

Dying in Chula Vista is a fate I will avoid if it's the last thing I do (no irony intended.) Call me contrary; call me a nonconformist. I want to die somewhere else.

Anyway, I figure it would be a familial closing-of-the-circle gesture were I to die in Ecuador. My seafaring grandfather, Bert Winrow, was a habitue of the Pacific coast of South America during the years around World War I. I have some pictures of him walking on the beach there, taken around 1912, when people still wore neckties to the beach. God, did he have big feet!

Ecuador is a poor country, relatively cheap to live in, and by the way has excellent surf.

Am I surfer? No. I took a few surfing lessons back in 2004, but I can't claim to be a surfer. I am, however, determined to become one before I die. I want to be an old surfer. An old poet, an old painter. The stereotype of Americans in the world at large is that we all want to be as rich as Bill Gates. I never gave that a thought in my entire life. I think I wrote it off as impossible at a very early age, considering that my father was poor and I had too much of his DNA ever to be rich. So, now that I'm not so very far from being an old man myself, I ask only to be an old poet, an old painter, an old surfer.

With a reliable supply of food and medicine, of course. We have to be practical.

What more could anyone ask?

I could ask for more, and did. Oh, no, not money. To hell with that. But everything else I ever asked for, basically recognition, love and companionship, was denied. So my last remaining hopes are to be the three things mentioned above, and, at the moment that that Ecuadorian undertow knocks me off my surfboard sucks me under the ocean to my death ... to be at peace.