October 26, 2017 First Person On Basquiat, the Black Body, and a Strange Sensation in My Neck By Aisha Sabatini Sloan Jean-Michel Basquiat, Back of the Neck, 1983, silkscreen with hand painting. While visiting Los Angeles a couple of years ago, I strained my back. My mother gave me the name of her former chiropractor. As I stood before him, I listed my symptoms, and in one quick gesture he ripped my pants down, without warning, just below the cheek. He hadn’t really looked at me while I spoke, so I wasn’t sure how to make sense of the way he’d stripped me. It was like he was going to spank or fuck me. He used a TENS machine to electrostimulate my muscles and I left with almost no back pain. A bit ambitious, I walked the several miles back to my hotel. It’s only now that I wonder what else might have prompted that need to wander so far by myself. I went to see another chiropractor in Tucson when my back froze up again. I waited for what seemed like hours, watching other walk-ins pass quickly through to the other side. I think we were ushered in based on seniority, and I was new to the place, but I kept a close eye on those who came and went, what they looked like. The chiropractor listened to my troubles. He moved my head quickly and I heard a click in my neck. After a few more adjustments, he told me to come back the following day and had the receptionist sell me a multi-visit package. The next day, I was still in pain, but my body refused to obey when I tried to drive back to claim the appointment I’d already paid for. I turned down a side street and pulled over. I will likely never see a chiropractor again. Because they know how to break my neck, I’m afraid they might. Read More
October 2, 2017 First Person Love and Badness in America and the Arab World By Diya Abdo Diya Abdo and her grandmother, on the porch of their farm in al-Libban, ca. 2002. Firstborn children are good. Saturated, no doubt, with the anxiety of first-time parenthood, firstborns are rule followers, pleasers. When I tell my firstborn, five-year-old daughter, Aidana Sabha, that she has to drink the juice covertly because the bouncy house does not allow outside food or beverages, she crouches, doubled over under the table, hiding the silver pouch underneath her arched body. Unable to go against the place’s regulations, she asks to leave; she is thirsty but would rather give up playing to go home and drink than break the rules. In Jordan, to be a firstborn female child came with added pressure—to be m‘addaleh, sitt el-banāt, btiswi thuglik dhahab, worth your own weight in gold. Whenever my grandmother uses this phrase to describe some woman or other, I keep a tally of the qualities she admires. When she uses it to describe my mother, though always in the past tense, it means that my mother had listened, obeyed, self-abnegated—the butter would not melt in her mouth. When she uses it to describe my uncle’s wife, her daughter-in-law, it means that daughter-in-law is content with her lot, her dirty laundry unaired—her secrets in a well. When she uses it to describe her neighbor, it means that the neighbor is chaste, never flirting, never yielding to men’s plying compliments and denuding gazes—as pure as yogurt. But most importantly, to be worth your weight in gold means that your seira, your narrative, your story, is not on every tongue. A woman like this is given the highest compliment—she is, ironically, a man (zalameh) or the closest approximation, the sister of men (ukht zlām). My grandmother was definitely worth her weight in gold—zalameh. An illiterate Palestinian villager, she was married at nine and divorced by sixteen. After al-Nakseh, she crossed the River Jordan with two kids in tow, knit loofahs to make ends meet, made sure her children got an education, and rejected all suitors and offers of marriage. She prided herself on never once being a piece of gum, to be chewed up by gossiping mouths and spat out. Sumʿitha dhahab—her reputation was golden. Read More
September 8, 2017 First Person Death’s Plus-One By Brian Cullman Early that fall, Amy’s cousin JJ was leaving Bertie’s Hair Salon in Fox Point and decided to try the restroom at Schuyler’s Funeral Home next door. Bertie’s facility was cramped, there was a cat box under the sink, and the loo paper was rough pink squares of construction paper. Well, it felt like construction paper, and it lent a depressingly cheap air to the place. Schuyler’s restrooms were spacious and cheerful, there were clean serviettes on a low ceramic table, and despite the scent of candles and the hushed voices outside, it felt more like a country house than a chapel. Out in the foyer, there was a pot of fresh coffee and a tray of small, star-shaped cookies. Men in dark suits and women in summer dresses looked at the floor and nodded to themselves. JJ signed the guest book and wrote, “My thoughts are with you,” then drew a small heart next to her name and address. The coffee wasn’t bad, though the cookies were too chewy and left a gummy taste in her mouth that lasted all the way to lunch downtown. She was unprepared for the check that came in the mail a few days later. The deceased was a Portuguese merchant with three ex-wives and an alarming number of children, none of whom had lived up to his expectations. More to the point, none had been very attentive during his long decline and illness. And so, he had amended his will so that anyone who showed up at his funeral would get a check for ten thousand dollars. And anyone who didn’t could go to hell. Read More
August 25, 2017 First Person At Eisenberg’s Sandwich Shop, Twenty-Second and Fifth Ave By Brian Cullman Photo by David Puthenry, 1985. At Eisenberg’s Sandwich Shop, Twenty-Second and Fifth Ave: Pale man in a coat and tie. Ham sandwich. Rye bread. Diet Coke. iPhone. Cracker. That’s all he says. Cracker. Sometimes he says it as a question: Cracker? Sometimes like he’s answering a question: Cracker! Sometimes it’s like the punch line of a joke: Craaaacker! But that’s all he says. Cracker. Cracker. Cracker. My wife says he talks to her. Talks to her about tv shows or about her friends or about the color of the curtains. About the news. But I walk in the door, and all he says is cracker. …… Fuckin’ bird! Brian Cullman is a writer and musician living in New York City.
August 23, 2017 First Person Fish Story: Dispatch from Coney Island By Joe Kloc Édouard Manet, Fishing, ca. 1862–63. I don’t fish, but I enjoy being around those who do. They’re easy to find in New York, leaning against the railing of a Brooklyn pier or resting on the rocky banks of the city’s rivers. In Sheepshead Bay, the fishermen are often jolly and sun-beaten, as if they’ve just returned from a long voyage. By early afternoon, they fill the local bars, swearing off red meat and bragging about not taking their medications. The Battery Park esplanade is more relaxed. Sometimes the only sign of a fisherman is an unmanned rod cast out to sea; a passerby might assume that fish in the Hudson catch themselves. One August morning a few years ago, I went out to Coney Island to clear my head on Steeplechase Pier, where fishermen gather in the summer months to fill their buckets with flukes, stripers, and porgies, much as they did a century ago. Coney Island is slow to change. Its busier blocks still have working pay phones on both sides of the street, and until recently, broken signs dangled off the facades of abandoned buildings, unmoored from their bracings by Hurricane Sandy. On hot days, the main stretch of Coney Island’s two-and-a-half mile boardwalk is crowded with visitors from the nearby amusement park. They eat mango on a stick as they navigate the performers dancing with snakes and rainbow-colored poodles. Down by the fishermen’s pier, the boardwalk quiets down. Elderly residents of the nearby towers read paperback novels and check the time on their digital wristwatches, and kids gather in the shade beneath the arches of an old terra-cotta building with a flaking portrait of Poseidon on the front. In the painting, the sea king is sitting alone in a rowboat, paddling toward the Atlantic. Read More
August 23, 2017 First Person Putting on the Veil: Boys Invade an All-Girls School By Rafia Zakaria From the cover of Veil. I wore the full-face veil for the first time on my wedding day. I was eighteen years old and I had never worn it before. In Pakistani Muslim tradition, this was the day of the ceremonial giving away of the bride, the day I was to say goodbye to my family (theatrically, and before an audience of a few hundred) and go off to be with my husband and his family. The fabric I had chosen over a year before for my wedding dress had been selected for hue and sheen—a fiery red-orange—and it was utterly opaque. I could see nothing. For navigation, I had the assistance of two younger cousins, unveiled and full of giggles. It was September in Karachi, I was pouring sweat and also blind. The story of how I ended up fully veiled and a bride did not begin that day. The skein connecting it to incidents past could be reeled back to an event a few years earlier, one that had led me to begin wearing the half-veil or the head scarf. Fifteen then, I was a student at an all-girls school that prided itself in being almost entirely free of the contaminating male presence, whose very existence made veils necessary in the first place. The hundreds of girls that were students there were instructed almost entirely by women. From the time we were six years old and began first grade to the time we were seventeen and graduated eleventh, it was women, women and all women. At five past eight every morning, the gates of the school would be locked and the man-free day would begin. The only men left inside were the very poor ones that the school employed, who mopped the halls, set up the nets for games of volleyball behind our high walls, or guarded the gates. The fact that they were poor seemed to cancel out their masculinity. Read More