Asheville

 

Flying into Binghamton’s Johnson City airport and the trees are bare and gray and the green pines sprinkled with snow. It’s still winter here in the northeast, early spring. 

Stanley’s leaning against the wall - one knee up - leaning back with his hand on grandson Nathaniel’s shoulder and he points and Nathaniel breaks out in a toothy smile like Sponge Bob.  He’s chirping like a happy bird as we slip past the sliding door outside into the cold. 

The car smelt bad from cigarette smoke. I’d forgotten. I’ve been away in Asheville, North Carolina for a week. They hardly smoke at all down there. I saw one woman - the same woman twice - huddling in a corner outside the Kress Emporium on Patton Avenue, smoking. The building is full of individual stalls of high quality craft and art. It costs $400 a month to rent a hundred square feet of floor and wall space. There was a waiting list.The owners of the space take a percentage. It was crowded and the tourist season had not yet begun. 

We were looking for breakfast that first morning in Asheville. But the Cowgirl Cafe was packed and people were gathered around the door and the girl taking names said come back in ninety minutes. We found a place around the corner but Asheville was already gaining momentum. Asheville is said to have similarities with other outlaw outposts like Austin, Texas;  Gainesville in Florida, Greenville South Carolina; Taos, New Mexico, Berkeley. There are a lot of raggedy homeless tribal types on the streets often playing pretty good music, rubbing shoulders with artists and hipsters, tourists and people like us. Asheville has the feel of a miniaturized San Francisco, famous for its buskers and music.  The geography is hilly in parts, the streets narrow and spacious restaurants, bars where they know how to mix a strong drink.

I heard a banjo and the wailing sound of the mountains in her voice and the thud of the bass. Yasser pointed at the guitar player, a young man in tattered jeans and a wool cap pulled down low around his scruffy face, sitting on a suitcase and the foot peddle hammer beating on the side of the case - BOOM - BOOM. But it was the older women in a long light blue floral dress with a gray cardigan over her skinny shoulders, sitting on a low stool beating out intricate rattling rhythms on sets of beaten, dented spoons that caught my attention. 

She was toothless and the tryptic she created with the guitar player and the young tattooed woman on the banjo was pure Walker Evans, James Agee and “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”, the assignment the writer and photographer took for Fortune Magazine on conditions in the rural south during the Dust Bowl of 1936.

Yasser  invited me to come spend a week with him in the South. He’s is a force of nature, alive and ambitious to leave his fingerprints on the world. His vision is massive and his Palestinian heart burns with righteous intent to help humanity. Out of the ashes of Gaza, Hassan came to New York. I was his sponsor. Don’t ask me how but I signed papers and wrote letters and that’s how we met in Brooklyn. 

He hardly spoke English. Yaser's family were successful rug merchants in Gaza until shut down by the Israeli’s. Palestine property was confiscated by the invading Israel authorities and many lost their livelihood.  During the Intifada when Palestinians in an act of desperation, hurled rocks and stones at the soldiers, Yaser was caught up in the turmoil. He was shot in the head by riot police as he pulled wounded from the front lines to safety. But he survived. “Here Andrew”, and he pushes my finger into a circular indentation in his skull that feels like a plumbing fitting. 

As we drive from the Roanoke Airport I marvel at his transformation. He owned a clothing business and the building on the edge of town - a kind of hip-hop clientele - expensive name-brand jeans and sneakers and it supported his lifestyle. When I knew him in Brooklyn he was quite, almost taciturn, with a gentle smile - a musician trained in Jordan  who played the violin, oud and darbouka drum and sought work in the back waters of the illegal immigrant Arab community. Life was rough but he shared an apartment with Mahmoud who was the other leg of the stool that joined we three in Brooklyn back in the Underhill Avenue days. Though separated by a generation and great geographic distance, we bonded as friends and brothers. 

One day Yaser came to me with a deep sense of sadness about him and said he had to leave New York City. It was the homelessness and poverty that he saw everyday in such a rich city. He could’t stand it any longer. And life was tough and relentless in the back streets. He’d heard of other Palestinians striking south to smaller towns where living was cheaper and their merchant skills might find more fertile ground. And in Yaser's case it turned out to be true. 

Now years later Yasser had an eight-year-old son with my name - Andrew - he’d left the woman he’d married, a girl from Virginia - there seemed no vindictiveness and he supported her and their son. And now he was a citizen in this land of dreams. But married life was not for him. Over years on the road, touring flea markets in the south selling clothing and merchandise from a van, he’d grown restless with married life. And then later in Roanoke, now with a house and lots of grass to mow, a finished basement that looked like a night club lounge with flashing lights and a flat screen, shelves filled with good booze; his music studio with three keyboards and drum sets and violin, guitar and oud and the computer work stations, Yaser enjoyed the single life. But on his reading table rested Khalil Gibran and Rumi and his life seemed dedicated to enjoying this life but never forgetting his roots or his goal of building a better world.  

We spent a couple of days riding around Roanoke. It’s a dead town. The highlight was on its outskirts on a strip. A Palestinian Middle Eastern grocery and restaurant called Jerusalem. It opened the night before.  Yaser parks off to the side away from the other cars. He drives a Mercedes he picked up at auction for $6,000 and it looks almost new. It’s a nice ride. You don’t see many Mercedes in these parts but: “back home”, Hassan says, sitting back behind the wheel and navigating like a taxi driver, “most taxis are Mercedes - strong car - look good - good for business and girls too”.

There are a couple of cabs parked outside and we swing in opposite.Three Middle Eastern men stand around talking and smoking lit up by the bright fluorescents around the windows of Jerusalem. Yaser, his right hand over his heart and head slightly bowed for a moment greets them politely - Inch-Allah -  and we walk up the steps into the brightly lit interior. 

She was leaning over the crimson formica counter beside the cash register and the freezer cabinet. Her long forearms were crossed in front of her and when I looked up into her face her eyes gripped me in their green desert gaze.

“From Iraq”, she said in perfect English, “I came to be with my family here. My mother and family are here now.” Images of Shock and Awe exploding and she’s is at the counter in Jerusalem and now she’s standing and stretching like Cleopatra’s cat.

Laser and I sit in a booth facing one another near the front where the action is. She serves the food. A bowl of fresh humus glistening with yellow olive oil and paprika and sprinkled with parsley and warm flat bread burned at the edges. And taboui - cracked bulgur wheat with crushed garlic and mint leaves and lemon juice and baba ghanoush, smokey aubergine - egg plant - roasted with lemon juice and garlic. She is dressed in black that clings to her supine curves and yet she moves naturally with no provocation as she makes more room for the plates that keep arriving.

Falafel is truly Palestinian Yaser explains. “The best is from Jerusalem and Ramallah - Andrew you would not believe how good when you taste it my brother.”  A pile of steaming grilled chicken livers in a spicy gravy with a sprinkle of parsley, and a kind of mealy sausage and chicken kebab and grilled lamb chops still sizzling cooked to perfection over the grill - pink inside and slightly burned outside: “From New Zealand”, he says. “Halal”, Taser says. “Delicious”. I say.

When we left I looked back through the window of Jerusalem  and she turned and took my gaze and smiled and the desert and her green eyes blew through me once again. 

We found the hotel just outside downtown Asheville. The drive up to 8,000 feet into the Appalachians between Roanoke in Virginia and Asheville in western North Carolina was spectacular. The peaks were laced with frost glinting on the edges of the fir trees and  craggy monoliths loomed on either side of the interstate. 

  

But down here in Asheville it felt protected and the pink cherry trees and white pear blossoms were flowering and yellow daffodils were in full bloom. It was a ranch style hotel, two-story, laid-up stone and wooden beams, spacious and a nice room with two queen size beds. 

Yaser told me he met Julie about four years ago at a Walmart. She was working the register. Blond, blue eyes with a pretty smile, she had the body of an Olympic gymnast but a sadness about her too. She’d had a rough time at home on the wrong side of the tracks in Memphis, Tennessee. Laser adopted her and paid her way through college while she continued working her day job. “She has a good heart Andrew - she wants to succeed - she is serious and I trust her - you wait - five years - you see my brother.” She lived in her own apartment, shared with a friend. She had her own life in Roanoke. But Yaser was her protector - and sometimes her lover. He was grooming her for the long term in a most practical manner, which seemed to work for both.

That Friday night we three stepped out together in downtown Asheville to hit a few bars. It was windy and cold and there were not many people but passing the windows of dimly lit bars one could see many were full and the crowd laid-back, young and hip.  She took my arm and strode out with me, swaying her hips and throwing out her strong legs and her heels clicked on the sidewalk in the cold night. 

We came down a steep hill and turned a corner and found a bar called The Social Lounge. It was long and narrow but one side had glass overlooking the town and the street. Sometimes people pushed up on you as they passed but  polite and nice and the barmen were good - whisking and shaking the cocktails, concoctions squirted from plastic bottles and cracking and breaking the seal between container and glass and the crack and rattle of ice and the squeeze of lemon and twist of lime on the rim. The nutmeg scrapped from the nut - those cocktails were good. Outside we could see a flurry of light snow falling. 

I don’t know exactly how long we were at The Social Lounge. We met people and we talked. I didn’t see that many on their phones. We met this ebullient Spanish guy who turned out to be Guatemalan - but we only learned that later. He was full-blood Mayan who’d lived in a hut with candles and had moved to the U.S. with his family to Los Angeles when he was nine. “I speak Mayan - and write it too - not many do but I do” and he beamed with pride. He’d never seen electric light until he woke up that night in a car driving through the Hollywood Hills. Suddenly Los Angeles was a blaze of light to the horizon. This was America. 

So he grew up in LA and he sounded like it - quick and friendly. He worked in a Mexican restaurant in the mountains up in the Appalachian town of Boone near the Tennessee border. The town is futuristic nestled in a valley between steep high Appalachian peaks - like a Star Trek set. It’s a college town - University of Appalachia - with bridges and walkways traversing the highway connecting hive-like uniformly designed structures. Amid all this geometry, our GPS lands us outside a nondescript line of utilitarian store fronts and there’s a lime-green blinking sign, Cilantro Mexican Restaurant, where the margarita’s are four dollars a pop and the food is good - at least that’s what our new friend Fernando told us and he was right. Fernando punched his mobile number into my iPhone and soon we were Facebook friends.  

After we left the Social Lounge that night in Asheville we walked a while and heard music across the street. It was past midnight and the crowd was thinning. The night was cold. I took another Jonny Walker Black on ice and we were dancing to old rock-n-roll and the blues on a wooden floor in this capacious bar. How did it look - the tall, gangly old man dropped from a Monty Python skit jerking in rhythm of the music and Hassan moves like the desert and smiles as he drapes his arm around her and she slides and shimmies and throws her head back laughing holding her cocktail glass.

And then I was in bed. I saw a mirage of a woman brushing her hair in the shadows. She glided over to me, comes closer as I lay only partially conscious and then her face comes closer - like an eclipse - and she bent and kissed me softly on my mouth and I fell into deep slumber. In Asheville. 

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