Alkie's Black Eye

The phone rings. It's my oldest son, Alkie, the one who's a gay country musician in Nashville.

"Why, bless my aging heart," I said, when I heard his voice. 

"My heart soars like an eagle to know that you've called in to check and see if your old man's alive."

"Do whut?" he said, instead of "hello." "Oh, yeah, I pressed the wrong speed dial. But what the hell, how are you, Daddy?"

"I'm fine," I said. "Who were you really calling?"

"Uh, the pharmacy," he said. "I need some base makeup."

Base makeup? Alkie is many things, but he's not into drag. Something was up. I turned into Detective Dad instantly.

"What have you done NOW?" I asked. "Did you get in a fight?"

He immediately went on the defensive. Good. I like that quality in children.

"I didn't get into a fight!" he said. "C'mon."

I waited in silence.

"My landlord got in the fight, OK?" he said. "I just tried to help him get out of it."

I paused. His landlord is a 49-year-old straight man named Andy, who drinks. My son is a 

29-year-old gay man, who also drinks.

"Why were you out drinking with your landlord?" I asked. "You two don't exactly seem like you have a lot in common, socially."

"I had to. He offered to buy."

I should have expected this kind of logic from the child whom I once had to bail out of jail for setting fire to construction site port-a-potties. His excuse then was "I had to. My buddy said they would explode."

"OK, son," I said. "I assume the two of you were NOT at one of Nashville's finest gay bars."

"Oh, HELL, no, Daddy. The landlord hates fags. He'd probably throw my ass out if he knew I was gay."

I cleared my throat. I have often lectured my kids that it's probably better not to go drinking with the homophobes, once you've identified them. But Alkie is not one to heed fatherly advice, especially if there's liquor involved.

"So what was the name of this fine watering hole for heterosexuals?" I asked.

"Hell if I know. I don't remember."

"What, exactly, were you drinking, son?"

"Four shots of Jack Daniels, five shots of Jim Beam, a coupla Jell-o shots, six Bud Lites with lime 

 and at least one Suffering Bastard --- but who was counting?"

"Hmm, so you were taking it easy, were you?"

"Well, yeah, I didn't want to abuse his generosity."

"About this fight you got into ..."

"It wasn't my fault!"

No, it's never his fault. Like it wasn't his fault the time his car got impounded because he forgot, when he got into his designated driver's vehicle, that he had left it parked in front of a hardware store's "We Tow Parking Violators" sign the night before.

"Of course not, son. Let me rephrase the question I was about to ask. How did the fight get started."

"This guy took a swing at my landlord."

"Why did he do that?"

"Because the guy's girlfriend was mad."

"Why was the guy's girlfriend angry?"

"Because someone called her a fat diseased ho with a stinky cunt."

"Who did that?"

"The landlord."

Well, at least it wasn't Alkie. Someone raised him right. Sort of. At least I taught him that if he meets a woman in a bar, he should be polite, because the only women he's  likely to meet in the kind of bars he usually hangs out in are probably lesbians. And lesbians can  be mean and scary if a guy is rude to them.

"So you felt the need to defend your landlord for insulting a woman?"

"No, I wasn't defending him. But he was still buying."

I sighed.

"Son, who hit you? The woman or her man?"

"Neither of them. It was the guy that none of us knew who broke a bottle on the bar and was coming at my landlord's throat. I had to hit him."

"To stop him from hurting your landlord?"

"Well, yeah, that, too. But mostly it was because  it was my Bud Lite with lime bottle that he broke. I had to hit him for that. And then he hit me in the eye. What's a good shade of Cover Girl makeup to cover up a black eye?"

"I don't know, son? There are many things you can come to me for advice about, but makeup tips are not one of them! Call Queen Latifah!"

"Um, I think she uses a darker shade than I need. Besides, isn't she a lesbian? I don't think they use makeup ..."

"Son, are you calling me from jail?"

"No, Daddy, doggone it, you always think the worst of me! We just got thrown out on our asses by the bouncers. Some big dude, looked like one of those pro wrestlers, grabbed me and tore my shirt and dumped me in the parking lot. We've been banned from whatever the hell that place was."

"What happened with the people you were fighting with?"

"They got thrown out, too. The woman complained, but the bouncer told her to keep her diseased ho's mouth shut. We and the guys we were fighting with had a good laugh about it and made up in the parking lot."

"Son, this is terrible. You're almost 30. Being a bellicose drunk and getting into fights is no way to go through life."

"Daddy, I don't even know what 'bellicose' means."

"I know, son. I forgot who I was talking to for a minute. What did you learn from this?"

"Um ... learn?"

"Son ..."

"Probably nothin'. Oh wait, you want me to say, "I won't go drinking with straight people anymore,' right?"

"Well, something like that."

"I didn't learn that. The landlord wants me to go out with him again sometime. He said it's the most fun he's had in some time."

"Son ..."

"Wait, Daddy, I DID learn something!"

"What's that, son?"

"The bouncer  --- the one who tore my shirt? I got his phone number. We're going out clubbing this weekend ..."

Ahmed Sharif

've stayed away from the debate about the proposed Islamic Cultural Center that is being planned for construction near the site of the World Trade Center bombings.

I've avoided it so far because it seemed like a non-issue. The plans to build it were approved a long time ago and it's privately-owned property. The folks who own it should be able to build whatever they like, as long as it meets zoning regulations. Nobody said much about it at the time New York City officials approved the plan. It's only been since Fox News picked up on the blog rants of a professional Muslim-hater named Pamela Geller that any large amount of opposition erupted. It's a phony issue, based on bigoitry, and talking about it feeds the trolls who want to stir up hatred against Muslim Americans.

This week, the discussion crossed the line. Michael Enright, an alcoholic 21-year-old with mental problems, responded to the increasingly loud and hate-filled public discussion, by getting into a New York City cab and suddenly stabbing the driver, a Muslim American named Ahmed Sharif. Enright, who was drunk at the time of the incident, is now charged with committing a hate crime, and justly so.

Here in East Tennessee, near the Kentucky-Virginia border, we don't have many opportunities to meet Muslims. I do have one friend, Ismail, who is a naturalized American from Egypt. He and his wife Cathy, a Southern Baptist by birth, have three college age children --- Karima, Adam and Khaled, all of whom are dark-skinned, very beautiful, physically and intellectually, and have accents that sound like they stepped out of an episode of "The Dukes of Hazzard." They're American as apple pie.

Ismail teaches mathematics at a local community college. He is a short, stocky man who was as handsome as a movie star in his youth before he immigrated to America. Today he is gentle, very soft-spoken, and very devout in his religious beliefs. I became acquainted with him and Cathy while partnered with another gay man. I was amazed that they invited us into their home, considering their distinctly conservative religious backgrounds. But they are both committed to diversity in society, something they've obviously had to learn the hard way in a community dominated by Pentecostal and other fundamentalist religions.

When I see the Fox News-fueled protests against the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" --- it's not a mosque, it's an Islamic Cultural Center, and it's actually three blocks away from the "hallowed" ground of the former World Trade Center at the site of a somewhat-less-hallowed Burlington Coat Factory --- I think of Ismail and his family and how singularly unthreatening they are to the world around them, except to people who object to anyone whose skin is darker than theirs and whose religion is anything other than fundamentalist Christian.

And when I heard about the unprovoked attack on Ahmed Sharif, I immediately ictured Mr. Sharif as looking like my friend Ismail or one of his sons. And I thought, how could someone hate them enough to hurt them?

I've been posting about this on Huffington Post today and have exchanged banter with people who share my views and those who obviously don't. One person said, "Do you believe the (Muslim) person who shot up Fort Hood was inspired by Fox News?" Meaning, of course, that he assumed I did not show sympathy for the victims of that crime, which resulted in multiple deaths at the hands of a disturbed Muslim-American military psychiatrist. It was a stupid argyment, one easily refuted by saying that all crimes of violence are heinous, the degree of which is determined by the results, in terms of victims. The other argument is, "No, the psychiatrist/shooter wasn't inspired by Fox News. Fox News only encourages hatred AGAINST Muslims, not BY Muslims.

Of course, Ahmed Sharif is nothing like my friend Ismail. He is a distinct individual with his own life struggles and dreams and political beliefs, none of which I am familiar with. But he has now become the symbol of what happens when bigotry erupts against minorities, much as the four little girls in Birmingham, Alabama's 16th Street Baptist Church symbolized the racial wars of the 1960s, and Matthew Shepard's death became a rallying cry against homophobic violence.

"When will we ever learn?" goes the line from "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" an antiwar song of the 1960s. When will we ever learn?