Import Export

I met her at a media party where she was meant to be the surprise big-time journalist who shows up and makes the party the one ‘not to have missed’. I was there because the host wanted to populate the crowd with local poets; for “intellectual ambiance” is how he put it.

Free drinks, pigs in a blanket, homemade sushi and a famous journalist. Not a bad payoff for years of loneliness, bad debts and the occasional book signing.

I suggested we meet for dinner at a Greek joint where I knew the owners, had done several favors, but mostly a place where I could run a tab. From the first sentence, which had something to do with Lebanese freedom fighters, her last unfaithful journalist boyfriend from a good Arab family here in town, the correlation of UN Food Programs with an integrated approach to human rights for Muslim women in the Sudan, it became clear that dinner was likely to take a long time and end at the check.

I was surprised when she told me that she would love to meet again.

When we meet again a couple of nights later she tells me that she is happy to be here in town, happy to be among her kind again: I think she means writers. I tell her that I read a piece of hers, in the New York Times, the one on women playing soccer in the war zone inside Kabul. I don’t tell her that I can’t figure out, sitting here in a  high-end Greek joint, on what, under other circumstances, would be a romantic misty spring night, why the piece read so well and why she seems so distracted by her own words?

She tells me that her true love, other than the endless string of bad relationships and war zone liaisons, is writing and reading poetry. Would I like to hear/read some of her work? Sure, says I, thinking that the chances of lasting through another dinner, on my dwindling tab, are about as good as flowers growing in February on Mount McKinley.

At one point I ask her if, when she says war zones, she means her love affairs or her news assignments. “Either way,” I say, “they seem to leave you broken hearted.” Her response takes up all of the grilled rack of lamb and the better part of two bottles of cheap red.

She certainly is engaged tonight, although in what I am not at all sure. Is she really interested in writing as she says or is it the adrenaline rush? Maybe it is in always being the best looking woman in every room she goes into. She says the assignments she hates most are the fashion week pieces she has to do in Milan and Paris. Maybe she is the most totally self-involved, insecure person I have ever talked to. But damn, she can really  write.

“Let’s read together,” she says suddenly. “We can go to Bukowski’s open mike. That’s what you said, right?” I guess I had mentioned that I read there from time to time though I don’t remember saying it.

I really don’t want to read with her, or any one else, to tell the truth, but she seems to want to so badly. What the hell, I think, maybe it’s just another war zone liaison for her.

“Let’s read together,” she says again. “You know, Ditmars and LeBeau, here, one night only. It’ll be fun.”

“Ditmars and LeBeau. Hmmm.  Sounds like an import export company to me,” I say, maybe hoping that she will ask me what I mean or decide that I’m right and poets deserve better than to be marketed as commodities. She raises an eyebrow and smiles.

Sounds like import and export I think again. Something foreign, exotic, alluring. Something made there and shipped here, sold there and brought here. You know, trade routes, The Silk Road, Marco Polo, Venice. Like something offered, something taken. Clipper ships are opium bound, running for home in front of the Pacific trades. Messages from lost sailors are cast overboard in hand-blown blue glass bottles rolling up years later on the western beaches. The glass becomes fireplace decoration. Ink clouds drifting on the sand are castles in my imagination.

“Yeah,” I say finally. “Let’s read tonight. It feels like rain.”

Photo Credit

“chair street #3” goldsardine @ flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.

“FF Trixie HD-Not the Best Typewriter Font” Font Font @ flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.

Previously published on May 1, 2010, www.blog.longrunpictures.com