Story #4
The Incendiary Client
“Every wife is a mirror of her own husband's failures, and every husband a victim
of his wife's success.”
The Incendiary Client
Beirut’s winding alleys led me to the Antiochian Orthodox quarter to make a documentary video with client #9
on teenage rebellion faced by grandparents raising grandchildren in war-torn Lebanon.
My client’s issue focused on being a rebellious only grandson. We agreed not to use any names—only client numbers to communicate with one another.
As a traveling documentarian, finding creative solutions to problems of war focused now on incendiary star-crossed
soul mates from past lives that married again in this life. I'm a videographer acting as a catalyst, bringing people together
with the goal of obtaining measurable results for couples and families in distress.
My first documentary production experience in Beirut dealt with Client #9. "Do you want to know how violent groups
infiltrated the international UFO scene?" Client #9 complained in her loudest Aramaic accent as she pushed a publication under
my nose. I noticed she didn’t speak to me in the vernacular Arabic but resorted to Syriac/Aramaic dialects to see whether
I neatly fitted into her private circle of friends that had migrated to a place in Michigan that probably has more first to
fourth generation Lebanese immigrants than urban Beirut.
Client #9 slowly opened the door. I peaked inside. She beckoned me to follow.
"I'm not deaf," I laughed in her rare dialect of Christian Syriac/Aramaic as I blocked her flying spittle with my business
card. "If you hired the hate squad, habeeby (dearest), this time you’re looking
at the love squad, and the camera is rolling."
“No,” she said emphatically as she handed me a mignonette of
jasmine. “I wanted you to document on video my son’s connections.”
The men who came to strangle Client #9 were shrinking her world like the most delicately tinted of bubbles, shrinking
in ever narrowing circles from the upward gush of her own infancy. Her room was
empty. Client #9 sat on the unmade bed, a wreckage of blankets.
"You've got to be crazy to see a psychiatrist," I told Client #9. Why on Earth did you call a 70-year old recluse with
an expensive video camera and zero connections when you could have called my son, the psychiatrist? Well, you probably asked
for me because you’re a retired chef. So you must have good taste. But don't call me if you're gnawing on a bad day
or caught fava bean fever, and all you want to do is have a discussion over a bowl of
fatoush. I'll call you."
"Girgis's room..." she puffed on a cigarette. "Like I told you on the
phone, curiosity skilled the cat but turned the rat into kibbee nea (chopped meat).
Client #9 yanked a pair of electrical outlets from the wall. "Anyone can buy these from surveillance stores in your
country’s shopping malls. But here in Beirut, we need contacts in the American media, like you, Missus American Greek
lady. Your doctor friends ought to use the media wisely to prevent malpractice suits or accusations." She plugged an appliance
into the socket to show me how her own “spy camera” camera is built to operate from the tiny hole in the middle,
even when the socket is plugged.
"I know." I laughed nervously. "I'll show you my night goggles if you show me yours." Client #9 showed me how her own
tiny camera was built at the back of the electrical socket so it could video record or photograph anyone in the room from
any angle, like a third eye. It fit inconspicuously into the wall in the center of an aquatic mural, hidden by an angel fish.
"Only in black and white for now," she said. "My husband, Client # 10 has spy cameras imbedded in the electrical outlet
sockets of every room in our house. He's keeping an eye on my grandson, Girgis."
On top of Girgis's bed were European 'girlie' magazines with nearly nude centerfolds. She picked up her grandson's
magazines and peered. Client #9 shook her head, annoyed. Then she tossed the magazines neatly into one of her twenty-two-year-old
grandson’s dresser drawers.
Client #9 asked me to follow her downstairs, where she grabbed an electric drill from the utility room. She ran back
upstairs to her own bedroom. Client #9 tossed an old family portrait from her bedroom wall. Her room adjoined her grandson's.
She drilled a hole and then stuck a darkly painted camouflage band-aid over it. Client #9 peered through the hole, blowing
away the powdered plaster and drywall.
"What'd you do that for?"
"You want to observe Girgis, don't you?"
"No, not that way. You’re the one who wants to spy on your grandson. How come his mother and father are in America
and he’s living with you and your husband, here in Beirut?"
“His parents are trying to establish their medical practice—to save money and bring him over. They can’t
have any more children. It’s difficult for immigrant doctors to pass those state exams in a new land.
Was the woman a victim of elder abuse? I wondered. At that moment, Girgis did walk through the front door downstairs.
We heard him come in alone.
Client #9 rushed downstairs, frantic. "Where the hell were you last night? You weren't in your room this morning."
"Why do you always want to get your own way?" Girgis yelled back.
"What sacrifices a grandmother has to make for her grandson's education," she whined. “He’s twenty-two
and should be finished with college by now.”
I asked Client #9, widowed only two years prior, why she recently married Client # 10, her second husband. Before she could reply, Client # 10 walked in. "My wife marries men for their shock value," he answered
for her.
“All my children immigrated to Michigan,” she said timorously. “In Beirut, an invisible woman can
get desperately lonely for conversation at my age.”
"Client # 10, you're my dad reincarnated," Client #9 shot back. "You're not my Client # 10. Some shaytani, some devil's got into you. No, you're not the Teddy Bear I married."
"Maybe you two are just incompatible personality types," I interjected as I watched Girgis run up the stairs to his
room and bang the door shut.
Client #9 shuddered at the noise. "If the neighbors hear you howling, bitch, I'm going to give it to you upstairs,"
Client # 10 said.
"In front of the documentarian?"
"How does she know what I'm going to give you?"
Client #9 blushed. "You are my father reincarnated. When I was born, the doctor phoned my dad at two in the morning
to tell him my mom had a girl. He told the doctor to look twice. 'Are you sure it's not a boy?' he asked."
"Shaddup, shaddup, you slut, you sharmutter. The neighbors will hear you."
Client # 10 barked. "You're going to make me kill you."
Client #9 ignored him and looked me straight in the eye for sympathy. The more sympathy she could get from me, the
more she manipulated him with pity.
Client #9 tried to force even more pity on each family member so I'd give her a ride someplace or offer a job referral.
She said she wanted financial independence so she could leave, but did nothing to create it saying she was alone and nobody
wanted to hire her.
"Why do you speak to me only in commands," Client #9 sobbed.
"How else can I get work out of you?" Client # 10 usually answered a question by asking one.
"Isn't it funny how our marriages always turn out to be like our parent's no matter how far we travel in space or time
and try to be different?" I said.
Client # 10 went upstairs to the bedroom he shared with his son. It takes quite a man to give up the marriage bed to
his son, and quite a woman to give it up to her absent niece’s daughter.
The home was strictly sex segregated. Client # 10 and Girgis shared twin beds placed at opposite walls in one room
that adjoined the room Client #9 shared with her widowed niece’s nine-year old daughter. Her niece had left the country
hoping to bring her daughter to America when that niece’s older brother in Michigan could find steady work, save up,
and afford it. No matter how bad client #9’s new marriage went, those two types—her and her new husband, Client
# 10, would be hardest to separate. In their mood swings, they could kill each other.
My reclusive clients as a couple were so star-crossed in personality preferences that they behaved like photographic
plates, stamping each other with a compelling tattoo of put downs to pick themselves up, fault-findings, and criticisms.
“Timid men make the most violent wife beaters,” Client #9 whispered in my ear, away from both of our rolling
video cameras. Every member of this family had a video camera, and each recorded every word and movement of every other family
member when they could. Not only had the phone been tapped, but the walls had holes with spy cameras in every room, even the
room with the Turkish toilet—two painted footprints on the floor with a hole in the center of the floor.
They observed everything and turned it inwards, putting themselves down,
calling the partner a loser, and finally, bursting with violence when they cycled into a depression.
When bored, the royal game of Ur circa 3,000 BCE came into play, a chip
off the ancient Egyptian game of Senet. Girgis marched down and joined us in the
largest room. "How come tonight is backgammon? Why can't we go bowling anymore?"
Girgis asked.
"Because my next door neighbor says she too old to bowl," Client #9 said sarcastically.
"If it isn't backgammon with the elderly widows from your do-good club, it smells like fried onions for dinner with
your old lady friends," Girgis added.
"They make me feel so young sitting next to them."
"Why can't we go to America? Why can't I play computer games?"
"You're needed to help us carry the heavy packages."
It was obvious Client #9 controlled Client # 10 with an iron hand inside of a velvet glove. When he was free of her
a few hours a day, he went way over the limit.
"I like you Girgis," I said meekly.
He exploded. "I hate this big, book lined room where you play. I hate the big, cold fireplace, and your stupid potted
plant. I hate everything in this room. I want to go to America so I can become a television newsman."
"Girgis. Don't do this," I said with conviction. "You're coming to live with me and my documentary production staff
to see how it works out. After all, I’m paying for your film school training so you can learn travel video production
from my team. What else can I do to help people after I’ve reached this decade?"
"I hate everything in this room, from the copper cauldron that holds the kindling you never use to the dumb statue
of a cat that has a history I've heard a thousand times."
Girgis ran to the mantelpiece and tossed everything to the carpet. He took a vase with a candle in it and threw it
in Client #9's head.
Client #9 ducked, but the vase flew through the window.
"He's being ugly," she whined to me.
Girgis ranted on in his own dialect. "Last time it was the two deaf ladies from the senior club with whom I had to
play cards. I'm so lonely; I could die if anything comes between me and my goal of being a highly-paid television journalist—an
international correspondent working around the world." Suddenly he was ashamed of what he'd blurted out.
Girgis looked at me shocked that I'd see inside him. Client #9 poured some orange juice into several glasses and handed
me and him a glass. "Please, let's all cool it,” I sighed.
The juice stood on the table untouched. "I hate the two, long, watery juice drinks that have to last through the night,"
Girgis teased, twisting his mouth. "I hate the phony smiles in this room. You're all laughing at me. I'm sick of the fake
formality you go through after every backgammon game."
"You've done pretty well tonight helping him to talk, to open up like a woman," Client #9 complained. Everyone’s
camera stilled rolled and recorded every nuance of foresight, insight, or hindsight. “Here are some pitfalls to avoid,”
I began. But Girgis cut me off in mid-sentence.
"All I see are phony, stapled smiles, like costumed belly dancing dolls," Girgis continued. "Two red dots on each cheek."
Client #9 couldn't show anger. "Maybe if you had to go out and work for a living instead of living for the moment,"
she admonished her grandson.
"What about you--smoking five packs a day?" He shot back sarcastically.
"You worry me so, I have to smoke," Client #9 cried. "It's a stimulus barrier to the pain you cause me."
Girgis took up his orange juice glass. "Shove your guilt trip. I want something of my own."
That was the first faint surge of triumph he'd felt all evening. "Nothing makes a grandmother angrier than to have
her teenage grandson argue like an old hen," Client #9 said.
"Tonight I'm ready for a fight," he said.
"You control every facet of his life. Why doesn't he date girls his own age?" I asked Client #9.
“That’s your American way. Here in Beirut, we don’t date the same way as you folks do in America,”
she replied.
"The little bastard's ruined my whole evening," Client #9 said. "Why won't he allow me a life?"
"Allow?" I hesitated.
Client #9 broke out in tears. "Does he expect me to say 'My dear little baby, don't grow up?'"
"Client #9," I said. "Girgis is asking what abused children always ask."
"What's that?"
Girgis walked toward his grandmother. She put her arms around him.
"If I die, then will you love me, mommy?" He whispered to her, and then repeated himself facing the rolling video camera,
my camera, not hers.
Girgis broke down in tears. "Tell her, Client #9. Tell her."
Client #9 blew a long sigh through the serrations of her lower teeth. "We just found out today. Girgis has been diagnosed
with multiple sclerosis--M.S."
His face wrinkled, squeezing his eyes shut as he crumbled, sobbing at my feet. "I don’t want to hop off the railroad
at this stop,” he sobbed. “I'll never be a man."
Client #9 poured the glass of juice over the back of his neck. "You wimp, you mamhoul,
get up. Thousands of people run businesses with M.S. You must be a man."
"I'm going to end up in a wheelchair."
“How would you like to make me a list of international Presidents who ruled from wheelchairs?”
"My brother has been in a wheelchair since birth, and he's working on his life-long learning and career just fine,"
client #10 interrupted.
"It must take a lot of doing to win all that strength over into your own corner and then go on eating at the same table,
living normally day to day," Client #9 told me.
Girgis rose and looked at me. "You're too damned good at everything, like my grandma is--hitting a tennis ball or running
a documentary production company or cooking dinner for twelve."
"You should be proud of everything like that. Tell me about your mom in America, Girgis. When I was your age, talking
wasn't an option," I said.
Like a thorough bred horse, Girgis couldn't resist the challenge. Before Girgis could open up to me in front of Client
#9, she interrupted and cut him off in the middle again just as Client # 10 did the same to her.
"You're emotionally absent just like your old man, the sonofobitch."
Girgis shut down. "Where's daddy, where's the sonofobitch?"
"The sonofobitch is gone." Client #9 laughed.
"What are you thinking, Client #9?" I asked.
"About my father who always chased me yelling, if I catch you, I'll cripple you. Now I got a crippled grandson."
I tucked my business card into her top pocket. She twisted her mouth into the same grin Girgis used. The cameras kept
rolling.
"You notice that crooked smile on your new husband?" I pointed it out to Client #9. She giggled. "Oh, that. Girgis
taught him that. He saw it on Tony Perkins in ‘Psycho’ in the dubbed rerun over here at the theater. It's so weird,
that it's funny. You don’t get those foreign movies here in Beirut very often."
Client #9 motioned with her head to leave the room. She followed me downstairs
to Girgis, who had fallen asleep on the sofa. "I got another bomb to lay on you, besides finding out about Girgis's M.S.,"
she announced in the tiny, threadbare kitchen. “You have to save your own life.”
How could I tell her that she had to really love herself and respect herself to deal with all the stress? How could
I treat this war on a family level when a bigger war was going on outside the door, a war of hatred between the haves and
the have-nots, the culturally different, and even the planets? As much as war stank, it was responsible for the evolution
of technology. That bothered me a lot.
The last time Client #9 and I did lunch at a posh hotel at my expense, with the camera rolling of course, an old lady
got ahead of her in line as we waited in the hot sun for a seat. It was in one of those fancy business lunch places in Beirut
where men in black suits closing deals are given preference over two mature ladies in wide-brimmed hats made of wheat stalks.
Client #9 grabbed the lady who cut in front of her and screeched, "Get out of my way before I push in your face." All
that inner rage exploded. At home, Client #9 was incapable of showing anger. Instead, she'd make you feel guilty by prying
your sympathy at how sick she was. With a total stranger whom she was sure of never seeing again, Client #9 pinched, shoved
and stepped hard on toes.
All the anger she banked for years was suddenly spent on a stranger.
Client #9 lighted a cigarette, and I pulled it out of her mouth.
"Quit now."
She changed the subject. "We're placing power in sick hands. Half the men I know who earn a lot of money have slapped
their wives around or worse. The poor half does the same sometimes, but the wives don’t speak up. The wives of the powerful
men speak up to me.”
“Architects create domestic violence by creating cages too small for a couple to hide in. Everybody knows two
monkeys in a cage bite each other. So do two people in a 600-square foot residence,” I said sheepishly.
Client #9 was a little doll face with blood-red lips. "Do I have to drive a stake through his heart to stop him from
bothering me?" She always asked me this kind of a question. Then she answered it herself with a 'but.'
"Would you want to have your daughter marry a man exactly like the man you married?" I added. "Just walk out with your
own kids and don't turn back. Girgis wants to come live with me and learn the television journalism and documentary production
ropes."
Client #9 choked on her ice water laughing so loud, so strained, and so fake. She pleaded with me to spend the night.
"I'm afraid of Girgis," she sobbed. "He's cruel--like my first husband, and just as penny-pinching. No matter how far I travel
to find a nourishing, slow-to anger man who’s different, I end up marrying a disgruntled cheap skate just like my own
wife-beating step father.”
The guest wing provided me with Client # 10’s movie studio affects. There was that gaping hole in the wall covered
by a portrait or mural between Client #9's bedroom and Girgis's. And in my room, the same hole had been filled by the lens
of an industrial-quality video camera. Whoever inserted the camera had mass duplication on his or her mind. They wanted me
to see, and probably, the public, most likely the international news networks.
Late that night, all was quiet. I awoke around 3:00 in the morning from too much sugary pomegranate juice and curiosity
on the brain, and peered through the lens into Client #9's room.
That cat woman of a 75-year old invisible grandma undressed slowly in front of the camera, knowing I could be watching,
perhaps hoping. I wasn't quite sure yet of her motive. I could only assume she wanted me to watch and video record how Girgis
treated a lady, his grandmother.
Client #9 was made up to look like a cheap, aging whore. Her black satin pushup bra and lace bikini panties dug deeply
into her flabby, cottage cheese textured thighs. She looked like a comic caricature of her grandson’s foreign girlie
magazine centerfold.
The makeup she slapped on her mature face looked like a clown, like the character, Sweet
Charlotte in a 1964 American Betty Davis film about a child star grown mature. Her brassy pink and orange-hennaed white
hair flopped under the mirror lights. Black eyeliner ran down her lower eyelids into the creases in the bags under her eyes.
I pressed my finger on the red 'record' button, and the camera rolled feverishly under the blaring light bulbs capturing the
eye liner melting into the creviced bags under her eyes.
Across the wall was a second camera. I ran to peer through that camera, and started it, also, when Client #9 left her
room and began banging loudly on Girgis's bedroom door. The second camera's wide, fish-eye lens peered through a hole in the
wall in Girgis's bedroom. Most certainly Girgis knew I was here, and the cameras were here, and I would edit the video. Client
#10 tapped every wall, every room, every place in the tiny, decrepit flat; cameras rolled everywhere, except inside the toilet.
I wondered why the hell each adult family member wanted me to tape him or her in each person’s room for an obvious
network news broadcast? There was no sign of Client # 10, who shared the twin bed on the opposite wall with Girgis. The niece
had been sent to spend the night with other relative and their same-age children.
I noticed none of the bedrooms or the bathrooms had locks. The video tape rolled as Client #9 pushed open Girgis's
unlocked door. He growled. "What the hell do you want?"
Client #9 touched him on his bare shoulder. He looked up and ran to close his night stand drawer. As I peered through
the lens, taping his grandmother’s communication attempt (we had discussed in therapy), something went chaotic. Nothing
can be planned to go a certain way. There are always the laws of chance, the unforeseen, or the unstable. There's always something
going awry on the fractal curve of life's number game.
Girgis had a packed suitcase on the bed. Girlie magazines lay sprawled and open across his comforter. Client #9 looked
down at the centerfolds. The camera picked up one magazine whose cover depicted a bruised, nude, beaten-down girl chained
eagle spread to four bedposts wearing a Swastika armband and a nipple ring. The image of torture sent chills of revulsion
up my spine. What's so sexy about pain? I thought. Love isn't supposed to hurt, but this wasn't love.
Client #9 grabbed the girlie magazines from Girgis's hands. She quickly thumbed through the photo layouts. "Girgis,
this is sick. Why don't you get yourself a real girlfriend, a best friend?"
He moved backwards, tearing the magazine from her grip, and flinging the pulps into his dresser drawer. He slammed
the draw shut with vengeance.
"Do you honestly think these pictures will give you back your manhood?" Client #9 laughed at him.
"Only my disability stands between me and my manhood."
He reached out to touch her, but she jumped away. Girgis took her in his arms and shoved her against the wall, forcing
her bony, frail body back as if she were a crumpled, rag doll. She had some feistiness in her yet and pushed him away.
"It's wrong. So terribly wrong," she said sarcastically.
Hopelessly, raised his fist to belt her in the kisser, but decided to
push her away. She bounced on the bed and backed out his door. "You're a bitter, old bag,” he ranted.
The words "old bag" ticked her off. Client #9 exploded in anger.
"What have you been doing with those hate groups? And now you buy that foreign garbage that puts women in chains and
gets off on their pain. The price of that magazine could have been spent on your college education during these past four
years.”
“I’m without any money of my own,” he yelled, turning to leave the room, but she blocked his path
and grabbed his shoulders. "Why can't you look me in the eye? Why can't we talk anymore? You're not my husband. You’re
my little baby grandson. We can talk. We can be friends," she demanded and manipulated with a dominant tone in her voice.
He began to wash his hands in his bathroom sink. “You forgot to use soap,” she snapped.
That mothering command pushed his fury icon. He flung her into the wall, and her head knocked a portrait to the carpet.
He looked up in surprise to see the hole she had drilled in his wall leading to hers. Girgis ran over and poked his finger
through.
"You old bitch," he ranted. "You spied on me all this time. You were always watching me."
"Since my new husband and I were married, I drilled holes to watch you--and him. I watched you howl with pleasure over
those magazines, and when you were away, I watched my new husband and you together, looking at the girlie pictures. My husband
wouldn't look at me if I stood naked in front of him, of course. He told me my fat stomach squeezed into lace corsets made
him want to puke.” She sobbed loudly.
"Shut up. Shut up you filthy sharmutter."
"You wasted yourself on those paper dolls just like my new husband throws himself at his sickening whores and flicks.
He only wanted the little money my first husband left me. And to think I went under the knife for him. I had two facelifts
to look twenty-eight forever, and none of them worked. I look worse at seventy-five than before I spent my old age savings
to look young for my husband. Don't you ever marry for money.”
She put her arms around him, but Girgis wrenched her wrist, twisting it so she dropped one of his girlie magazines.
She grabbed another from his drawer and backed further away from him, laughing, teasing, and poking fun.
Sobs convulsed Girgis's shivering body. "Your irritability,” he whined. “It’s the first sign of dementia.”
“My husband calls me a loser. Look at you, both of you.”
