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Table of Contents
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
AUTHOR’S NOTE
PROLOGUE
EPIGRAPH
THE FIRST STRAW: LOST IN THE BASEMENT
1. A Sheik Grows in Brooklyn
2. My Kingdom for a Freckle
3. Who Shakespeare?
4. Into Your Tent I’ll What…?
5. Creepy Irish Girl, I Am Thine
6. Biblical Is Out
7. Go Back, Shane!
THE SECOND STRAW: LOST IN THE ATTIC
8. Over the Hill to Grandma’s House
9. The Eyes of Araby Are Upon You!
10. Waterproof, Shockproof, Anti-Magnetic and Wrong!
11. But Will They Get It in Jerusalem?
12. Security Leak
13. The Building That Went Places
14. I’m Invisible to Arabs
15. The Sphinx vs. Honeysuckle Epstein
16. Allah Is Their Copilot!
17. What Do You Do for Kicks?
18. A Camel Too Frequent
19. Curse You, Abdullah Dalton!
20. Nineveh, Please, and Hurry!
21. The Magruder Correspondence
22. Beirut Confidential
23. “Don’t Bomb Me, I’m a People!”
24. Take Down That Service Flag, Mother, Your Son’s on the B.O.A.C.
THE LAST STRAW: FOUND IN THE THRONE ROOM
25. You Tell Me Your Dream
26. My Favorite Prince Is Me
EPILOGUE
COPYRIGHT
“AT LEAST FOUR GOOD CHUCKLES TO A PAGE”
William Blatty is a real live pixie, a Lebanese leprechaun, so to speak. And a very, very funny man.
From the opening sentence: “My mother is an Arab, which would make me half Arab, except that my father was an Arab, too…” to the end of the book, Blatty manages to produce at least four good chuckles to a page and often they develop into 100 pct. belly-laughs.
His book is a kind of autobiography, but it’s quite evident the author takes many liberties with the facts of his life. He begins, literally, in Brooklyn, product of a more-or-less broken family. His father wandered away one day and his mother supported the household selling “home make” Lebanese quince jelly to Park Avenue dowagers.
Blatty manages to get through school and the war, but the bulk of his story, and the most delightful part, takes place when he becomes an information officer with the U.S. Information Service in Lebanon. His experiences there, with his Irish wife and Arab-Irish-American children are hilarious.
Here’s a book to make even the holiday season seem funny.
—Bill Burkhardt in the
San Francisco Call Bulletin
Author’s Note
ON THE morning of July 15, 1958, exactly 754 years following the surrender of Richard the Lionhearted to Saladin, the United States Marines landed on the beaches of Lebanon in what wide-eyed Arab bystanders, unbelieving in their swimsuits, must surely have taken for a Crusader attempt to have another go at it. The Marines, for their part, were equally disoriented by the strange and wondrous nature of the “enemy” resistance, which consisted in the main of several onrushing waves of befezzed, beswarthied and bewildered Lebanese peddlers intent on vending Pepsi, Coke, Eskimo Pies and fried pine nuts to the invaders.
The Marines were puzzled. The Secretary of State was puzzled. Even Ed Murrow was puzzled. As a matter of fact, I was puzzled, and that’s actually a rather creepy bit of intelligence for I had once lived among the Lebanese!
Yes, Grushkin, I was there. For two sunburned years I keyfractured typewriter ribbons in Beirut, Lebanon, for the United States Information Agency. I was an editor. I was a propaganda man. I was sweating. And I wondered, occasionally, how I happened to be there.
Right now I’ve got two guesses: the Crusades and my mother. See if you don’t agree with me, ducks!
WILLIAM PETER BLATTY
Prologue
MY MOTHER is an Arab, which would make me half Arab, except that my father was an Arab too. But already I digress.
What I actally meant to say was that my parents were born in Lebanon, but I was born within sight of American Legion Post #804 in Manhattan and that’s your cue, Dr. Freud—I’m all yours.
At the age of four I was the Philip Nolan of the infant world: a tot without a country. I was living in America, all right, but on an island Araby—a body of odd customs entirely surrounded by my mother.
Naturally, I fought back. At the age of eighteen I escaped to Georgetown University where I traded my burnoose for Ivy tweeds. At the age of twenty-two I invaded Hollywood and hurled tear grenades into arty theatres showing old Rudolph Valentino movies. And at the age of twenty-six I joined the United States Information Agency.
But that was bad. The Agency sent me to Araby where for two years I lived on an island America—a body of odd customs entirely surrounded by my Ambassador.
Mixed up? I’m sick!
Now let’s have it, Doc—am I an Arab, an American or a frumious bandersnatch?
Never mind. I’ve figured it out for myself. But I had to wait twenty-eight years and become a prince to do it.
Here is my ghastly story.
The life of a man is like a camel’s back: littered with one goddam straw after another.
—ABDULLAH BLATTY
THE FIRST STRAW: LOST IN THE BASEMENT
1. A Sheik Grows in Brooklyn
MY PARENTS emigrated to the United States from Lebanon in 1923, and from the moment I toddled into the age of reason my mother initiated vast attempts at driving me back out of it with incessant verbal blasts about the beauty and wonder of the “old country.”
“Will-yam,” she would begin in her inimitable Arabic dialect, “Will-yam, when you grow up I’m sending you to Lebanon so you can marry an Arab girl. My God, Arab girls are beautiful!”
Well-meaning neighbors to our Lower East Side apartment made now and then feeble passes at advising my mother not to “nag the boy too much,” but trying to intimidate Mama was like buttermilk trying to intimidate Hungarian goulash. A dark-eyed, stubborn, truculent woman, she barreled through life bent on ignoring roadsigns. Only once, when my uncles pressured her to apply for United States citizenship, did she ever give the appearance of being swayed, but when the court examiner asked her to name the President’s replacement in the event of his death in office, my mother craftily replied, “The President’s son,” and scored her usual smashing victory.
Another time, in the summer of 1939, the President himself visited our neighborhood to officiate at the formal opening of the Queens Midtown Tunnel. The tunnel spilled out onto East 35th Street, just three doors down from our apartment building, and “I wanna meet him,” rumbled Mama when she heard FDR was coming. My uncles—Moses, Elias, and Abdullah—told her it was “impossible.”
On the day of the ceremony, my mother and I, together with my uncles, were standing at the outer circumference of a cordon of spectators about thirty feet from the President’s automobile. In her left hand, Mama held a mysterious, brown paper shopping bag, but I paid no attention to it at the time.
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All eyes were on FDR as he reached out from his car with a gold-plated scissors and neatly snipped the broad, blue ribbon that stretched from one side of the tunnel entrance to the other. Then, before anyone knew what was happening, my mother was grimly advancing on the President. It must have looked like an assassination attempt, because flashbulbs started exploding, the President dropped the scissors in horror, and a covey of Secret Service men drew their revolvers and surrounded the car.
They were too late, Mama had gotten to the President.
“I wanna shake you hand,” she rumbled at FDR, and then she reached out and crunched the President’s paw in her effortlessly dynamic grip. FDR smiled weakly.
When Mama leaned over and reached into the mysterious shopping bag, two of the Secret Service men made a dive for her, but they barely got a glove on my mother before she had withdrawn from the bag a large jar filled with a murky, rust-colored substance. She handed it to the astonished President.
“Homemake jelly,” Mama grunted. “For when you have company.”
“Might be nitro, Chief!” warned one of the Secret Service men. But FDR winked at him and accepted the jar. “Thank you, Madam,” he said.
“Quince jelly,” added my mother matter-of-factly. “Lebanese quince jelly. My God, it’s delicious!”
FDR smiled and shook my mother’s hand again, and I had to card him for sheer guts.
Three Secret Service agents escorted Mama back to the spectators’ circle, and as her gaze fell upon my uncles her eyes flickered briefly with triumph. She was unstoppable and she knew it.
ii
My mother’s irresistible force has even been commemorated in sterling. I had once copped a silver loving cup in a “Beautiful Baby” contest, and “My God, he was a beautiful baby!” Mama would roar exultantly whenever she looked at the trophy. Occasionally she would cap her performance by leering cunningly in my direction and murmuring: “You Mama take good care of you, Will-yam.” I never knew what she meant by this. I asked one of my uncles about it, finally, and he reluctantly confided that Mama had “take care” of me during the Zwieback caper by bribing one of the judges, thus rendering me the only living mortal ever to have won a “fixed” beautiful baby contest. My emotions, during this revelation, were indescribable, but one thought was clear: no Everest was beyond my mother’s reach. Her page of life had been printed in boldface.
My father, on the other hand, was light italics. A pixieish, introspective sort of Arab, he separated from my mother when I was seven, and it was all because of a newspaper. Mama had for years been baffled in her sporadic and impatient attempts to learn written English, and my father, who’d mastered it quickly, had a little trick of deliberately infuriating her by sinking into an overstuffed chair in the living room, luxuriously rustling and unfolding the evening newspaper, and reading it.
“Looka him! LOOKA him!” my mother would roar in a white fury. “LOOKA the devil! He’s a DEVIL!” She was insanely jealous of his ability.
Of course I’m not sure that that’s all there was to it, and it could be that Papa had finally had his fill of Mama’s torture-logue about the “old country.” But whatever it was, one night my Arab daddy just folded his newspaper and silently stole away. I missed him.
Had he hung in there a while longer, my father might have proved a paper-rustling Coeur de Lion set against my mother’s onrushing Saladin. But the way things worked out, it was Mama’s boat race all the way, and the first language that I conned was Arabic. Which is how I was exiled at four. That’s right—four. I’m certain about the age because I have almost total recall, and what I can’t remember my mother has filled in, for all my life she has boasted of my feats as a tot. “My God, my Will-yam he never dirty his diaper!” was one of her more incredible brags in the presence of strangers or girls I was trying to impress, and a frequent and interesting variation was, “When he was two, my Will-yam he look just like Baby Jesus!” Swell. Mama had her memories—I’ve got mine. Here are mine.
iii
I was four and chumless, and we lived on East 17th Street. Each day I would stand alone at the curb, watching the pale-faced boys across the street playing with their forts and lead soldiers. They were rich. Anyone who owned lead soldiers had to be rich. So it staggered me mightily when, one day, as I stood brooding on things sandy and Arabic, they beckoned me to cross the street and join them. Zockers, gang! I was “in”!
The boys were considerably more mature than I—about six, I would say, and accustomed to giving orders to four-year-olds. The only thing they weren’t accustomed to was giving them in Arabic.
“Fin’ me a thtick,” one of them lisped at me, and I guess he wanted it for a sword, but being somewhat inexpert in lisped English, my only response was to fix him with a glassy stare.
“Fin’ me a thtick!” he shouted. My eyes widened in bewilderment. I took a step backward, and suddenly had a runny-nose awareness of my heel crunching against fragile, myriad, uniformed lead.
“Ooh, you thtoopid, you thtoopid!” shrilled the lisper, and glancing behind me, I saw that I had scattered and crushed a platoon of lead infantry, a cannon and an obviously senile old Indian scout. Confused and distraught by his screaming, “Ruuh moot,” I flung at the shouting boy, which is an old Arabic expression meaning “Blow it out your barracks-bag, Charley,” and I fled whimpering across the street. That was my last attempt at rapprochement with the pale-faced children in that neighborhood, or any neighborhood, for a long time to come. And the beginning of my Arab exile.
Once I did find a companion in a little colored girl named Frankie. She couldn’t speak Arabic either, but at least she didn’t lisp, and besides, there was precious little communication required for the making of mud pies. Frankie was muy sympatico, all right, but Mama ended that little affair, and believe me, Mr. Wirin, it had nothing to do with race. What happened was that during a routine medical check-up at a public health clinic an awe-inspiring surfeit of wax had to be removed from my ears, and my mother was convinced that I had “caught” it from Frankie. “You catch it from Fran-gie!” she bellowed, and the contradictory and crushing weight of medical opinion in this regard had about as much effect upon her as a weak-jawed mole trying to burrow through Gibraltar. If Albert Schweitzer had come riding into our kitchen on a unicorn to tell my mother she was wrong, she would merely have roared, “You shurrup, you crazy! He catch it from Fran-gie!” and the good doctor would have been immensely relieved to get back to Africa and some nice predictable head-hunters. As for Frankie, I was forbidden to speak to her, and as far as that goes, I couldn’t bear to look at the hurt in her eyes. Her mouth open, a shovel and pail hanging limply from her hands, “There’s mud pies that need makin’,” her sorrowful expression seemed to be telling me, and each time I saw her, I would instinctively poke a finger into my ear, scrape it around a little, and wish that I were God. But this was not possible.
2. My Kingdom for a Freckle
FOLLOWING MY father’s Arab Houdini act, even living seemed impossible. Mama was left to fend for five of us: my sister Alyce, my older brothers Michael, Maurice, and Eddie, and myself. This was actually well below her capabilities. She could have supported the entire cast of “Ben Hur.”
Not that we were among the monied Arabs. We were, in fact, comfortably destitute. Mama provided the comfort, but she did it in a way that was maddeningly Lebanese.
She would outfit me in undersized, tattered knickers and drag me to New York’s Park Avenue, where she would dart in and out among the intermittently halted traffic, peddling “home-make” quince jelly to crusty dowagers and open-mouthed men in homburgs sitting in the back seats of automobiles. I believe I was a stage prop, although actually my mother would have done well enough without me. She could cry pathetically at will, and was able to use the story of my father’s desertion to incredible advantage.
I was then eight and sensitive, but whenever I complained about our Park Avenue ploy, my mother would hold high a jar of jelly and cry ou
t, “In old country, peddling is honorable profession!”
“It isn’t just peddling,” I would whine, “it’s practically begging.” But my mother’s invariable answer was to ram a two-penny halvah into my mouth and boom, “In old country, begging is honorable profession!” and I had no topper for that one.
We applied for home relief, but when the social worker came calling on us, my mother wound up beating her over the head with a stale loaf of Arabic bread. The social worker, a Mrs. Empathy Frond, had made the mortal error of asking questions in a patronizing tone, and my mother chased her into the hall, where the poor woman ran whimpering, her questionnaires clutched tightly to her startled bosom. How anyone could feel patronizing or superior in the presence of my mother is something I was never able to understand, and I daresay Mrs. Frond got the message. As for my mother, she really couldn’t have cared less about home relief, for her quince-jelly haul was enormous. One night I watched her as she sat hunched over the bare, scarred wooden table in our dimly-lit kitchen counting the day’s take of coins that she had just spilled out of a ragged leather purse. The forty-watt bulb in our kitchen ceiling cast a weird glow over her bronzed face, and she looked like an Arab Ethel Barrymore as she peered up at me slyly and grunted, “Let’s hope your father doesn’t come back.”
ii
But I don’t think she meant that. I mean, I’m thinking of the time, years later, when my father pulled his famous reappearing act. We were living on East 31st Street then, and mutual friends of both my parents had arranged for Papa to come by for lunch and a “talk” with Mama. As the appointed time approached, both my mother and I were leaning out from the living room window, scanning the streets, watching, waiting. Then my heart began to race as that familiar figure, that familiar, shy walk, appeared, crossing Second Avenue. It came closer, closer, and then, when it was so near that I could almost see the pixieish flickering in those sad eyes staring up at me, my mother, perhaps out of her old hurt, perhaps out of a shyness of her own, leaned out for a bellowing attempt at getting her usual upper hand: “He’s back!” she roared. “The genius! The big reader! He’s back! Go get a newspaper somebody!”