Inside Straight

Posted Today 11:42 pm

EGYPT | DEPRESSED | “ROCK THE CASBAH” — THE CLASH

There was a time not all that long ago when I thought poverty was not having enough cash to order a bucket of fried chicken. I may have been optimistic about that. When it comes to pure human misery, pencil in the Necropolis outside Cairo for your touristy needs.

I came here from Las Vegas, specifically the Luxor. I have moved from the fantasy of Egypt to the reality. Given the choice between drinking and playing craps with a fake Cleopatra whose tits are always just offering to fall out of her dress, and walking through the slums of Cairo, I’m not sure which I’d recommend. The fake is a beautiful dream, but there’s nothing like reality for reminding you just how toxic dreams like that can be. I have gone from the city of excess to the city of desperate want. The change has left me a little nauseated.

The first day here, we started at the pyramids. They were, indeed, amazing. They’re bigger than you think. Start about the size you imagine them, then up it by another half or two thirds. They’re huge. You can see why the idea of them made it all the way to Vegas.

But they’re also not Egypt. Egypt came when Lohengrin was moved to charity. He started handing out euros to the beggars. We were swamped so bad it took half an hour to make it the thirty feet back to the car. If a couple of the kids got stung, I can apologize and feel like shit about it, but at the time it seemed like the only option.

Imagine being in the middle of a crowd of forty, fifty, maybe a hundred shouting kids, their hands out, pushing against each other and against you. The air smelled like unwashed bodies and desperation, and there we were. Westerners with money. Aces, no less. You wouldn’t think I’d have been frightened, but let me just tell you, there’s something in a hungry kid’s eyes that doesn’t have anything to do with pathos or gratitude. At the time, I thought it was just hunger. And yeah, it scared me.

That’s been the signature moment of the trip—the flat, angry eyes of hungry children. And that, boys and girls, was just tourism. It doesn’t even touch on the riots.

So, yeah…the riots.

Things were quiet the first few days we were here. During the day we’d try to track down Fortune when we weren’t taking in the sights. At night, we pretty much stayed in the little faded hotel room with its yellow wallpaper and air-conditioning that smelled vaguely like fish, watching old American sitcoms dubbed into languages I don’t speak. The fifth day there was a news brief that broke in. It was local, and neither of us knew what the guy was saying, so I got online and looked it up on the CNN and Al Jazeera sites. Turned out there was a riot going on right here, near Cairo.

A little background: After the Caliph got himself assassinated in Baghdad, the leaders of the Ikhlas al-Din called for retribution on the killers. And, hey, cool by me, I say. Someone offed the president, I’d be happy to see them strung up, and I didn’t even vote for the guy. “Root out the terrorists and the people who shelter them.” That was the slogan. Again, I’m all for it.

On paper at least.

The thing is, how do you know who the bad guys are? If a Muslim kills the president, does that make all Muslims bad guys? If a joker organization kills the Caliph, does that mean all jokers are guilty? If the Twisted Fists are a bunch of joker terrorists and the Living Gods are also jokers, does that make them allies?

The answer is, apparently, yes.

Through the night, other riots bloomed all through the Middle East. Alexandria, Port Said, Damietta. The temples of what they were calling the Old Religion burned. There was some particularly ugly footage of Hathor being pulled from her temple by the horns. The talking heads on CNN and Al Jazeera both talked about these being “spontaneous outbreaks.” Kamal Farag Aziz, the local Ikhlas al-Din strongman—added “of righteous wrath,” but the basic sentiment was the same. The fans of the Caliph were mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.

We found Fortune the next day in the Necropolis. The spontaneous outbreak of the previous night had been teams of well-organized men with guns and tasers, all wearing black fatigues and black-and-green keffiyeh, moving through the poorest parts of the city and slaughtering whoever crossed their paths.

The Necropolis is a great, huge, sprawling suburb of the dead. Ancient mausoleums with whole families of squatters living inside. No food, little water. Squalor, though.

Yes, most of the people living there are jokers, but some are just poor. John Fortune—Sekhmet, really—showed us a lot of bodies. Most of them were new. The Cairo police were around, too, allegedly taking statements, but most of what they did was assure people that the streets weren’t safe, that there weren’t enough police, that the time had come for the jokers to get out of town. Their eyes were flat, just like the beggars’ had been. That was when I figured out that what I’d seen in those children around the pyramids hadn’t been hunger at all. It was hatred.

That night, Fortune and Lohengrin and I joined up with the local folks to patrol the Necropolis. There were a couple death squads we came across. But the graves here go on forever, and there were other groups we missed. The night after the riot, we lost another couple dozen people. They might be dead, they might have been taken prisoner, they might have done the sane thing by saying fuck this and heading south.

Okay, so why south? What’s the silver lining? The jokers do have someplace to go. The farther up the Nile (which is to say south) they go, the more refuges there are for the Living Gods. The nearest big stronghold is Karnak. Already, the Necropolis is emptying. The jokers are putting what few belongings they have on carts or in grocery baskets, or tying them to their backs and walking south. There are other poverty-sick people swarming in to take over the prime gravesites, the mausoleums with the best roofs and the fewest bodies.

The Egyptian army, seeing the mass flight, is offering what protection it can on the road. Fortune’s going, too. So’s Lohengrin. And so, God help me, am I.

Internet access is what you could charitably call spotty out on the road. My cell phone does have upload options, if I can get a signal from a satellite. There are, I’m told, villages with land lines I could use to dial up if there’s nothing better.

I may be a little scarce for a while, folks, but hang tight. This is news really happening, right now. And I’m going to tell you how it comes down.

One side note. We were getting ready to head out, Lohengrin and me, and I said something about how well organized the “spontaneous outbreaks” all seemed to be. I just want everyone to be very clear that it was the German guy who brought up Kristallnacht.

I wasn’t going to go there.

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