Jason in Cairo

This is a story that should go into a collection entitled something like “Rustbelt Blues” or some bullshit metaphor like “As The Sprawl Bled” where I would recount like some budget bargain basement Bukowski the vagaries of north east Ohio through the lens of something or other. This book sounds like a good idea but it is not. So instead you have this thing and maybe a couple of others. Leave me alone to come up some less bullshit metaphors.

Cleveland is a place where stories of the ordinary and extraordinary mix like peanut butter and jelly on the machine fabricated, angry and disappointed white bread surface. It’s a place that produces people that look regular on the outside and are a luscious battle of sweet and salty on the inside that will pull you in with enough time and patience.

He was that one guy you would see at parties. He was the guy who grew up next to someone you were friends with, who in this case this dude we called The Wizard. You can already see how good of a story this is going to be.

So this dude Jason. I was at a party or something and get to chatting with him. Whatsup, hey this, you know whatever, all the air exchanged in pleasantries in a dance of harmless bullshit we all do to get off the couch every once in a while. Standing. Some lounge or living room somewhere. Bad lighting. Decent music. Beer. Lo and behold though dude comes with, “Well actually I was just in Egypt for a month and a half.”

Here is where I need to explain memory a bit. I was likely in the cups as they say, he was for sure. There may have been other things, and this was over two decades ago, so who knows because memory slips either way. It drifts and skids from the second it happens to today whoever you are and none of it is anything more than your brain creating its own little film anyhow. Note, the misremembering and inaccuracies here are all mine and there is no LLM to blame for hallucinating. Yet, these two concept are fairly intertwined but that’s a different story.

I am quite happy to admit that I’m a jealous person. In fact, I would admit that I am consumed by it as if tied to a bed on the fourth floor of a burning house made out of fireworks, cardboard and lighter fluid. There is no end to it. But if there is one person I’m jealous of the most, it’s the ones that stumble partying into interesting things way more than they should.

His uncle worked for an airline. This was in the days where airlines were semi-reputable and amounted to smidgens more than the buses of the skies they are now. There was some thing where he got a ticket around the world. Because Cleveland is the only thing I can think of. Everything is random there. For this same reason, one of his prime destinations was Egypt. Because the pyramids which he saw on TV once. Was it because of the aliens that obviously built them, which having seen them in real life myself I was asked, I don’t remember. It doesn’t matter though because if even half the story is true, dude pulls the rug on the world’s ideas of how things should work in a way that only a guy named Dale who loved meteors or someone selling dreamcatchers with every inch of their soul could. That.

Sure enough he lands in Cairo. Gets a cab. Any cab, because what does he know. No reservation. Nada. Where will you be staying sir? No idea, thought I would go downtown and find a hotel. That may not be a good idea sir. If you want, for a good price you can stay with me and my family. Sure. Oh right, yeah hash is nice, love it, thanks man. Into it.

Then riding shotgun with this taxi driver, who’s family he was boarding with for over a month, spending days on heroic tokes and smokes with this landlord/dealer/driving companion, all the while seeing the urban mess of Cairo slump, spill and flop across the Nile into the desert without end or quiet. And likely not having a clue. No, because he was a winner he didn’t do what I would do which is read stories about how the city evolved and its people shifted and morphed into 18 or 20 millions, who knows, of different streams of life and thousands of years. He just stumbled graciously without any pull by some grand narrative in his head. I’m sure my valorisation of the experience is less than half accurate, but it’s necessary, because it happened. In reality however, he wanted to see the pyramids and that was enough.