I’m going to be starting a new feature here, that I’ve seen on other’s blogs. I kept a blog for 20 years. As I look through it, I’ll pull out some of my favorite entries and put them here.
In 1996, I wrote a play called Jahid. It was set in Iraq during the sanctions, and centered around a smuggler, Jahid (this was before the word jihad got all demonized by Fox News and their followers), who was smuggling food and medicine past the US blockade of the country. A lot of Americans believed the war had ended after we invaded Kuwait and drove out the Iraqi occupying forces and restored the “rightful” king. But we were still imposing crippling sanctions on the country and bombing them at least a few times a month (that were reported. The gods only know how much we were bombing without telling the press about it.)
Anyway, it was a short play, around 60 pages, and one of these days I’ll put the script up here somewhere. It never sold or was produced anywhere, but I really liked the characters.
In 2007, I found a document in the dusty corners of my hard drive that contained a few short snippets of dialog from various characters to try to get a feel for how they talk, and how they think.
This one is Jahid himself speaking, probably to one of his “employees”.
I love American movies. Especially their westerns.
My favorite involved a group of bandits. They’d just robbed some train or something. I don’t remember what. Doesn’t matter.
The whole movie was just them, travelling across the desert, trying to get to Mexico, where they’d be out of reach of the law.
These outlaws, of course, argued, fought, and occasionally shot or stabbed one another. Good times. One guy shot a rattlesnake that bit his horse, and eventually had to shoot the horse.
I love that quick-draw they do.
So a little ways into it, after the last horse died, they took as much of the gold as they could, even filling their canteens, dumping out the water.
Yeah, you can see where that’s headed.
So, of course, one of the younger of the crowd kept a couple of canteens full of water, and couldn’t take as much of the gold.
So throughout the movie, between the rattlesnakes and the gunfights and the knifings, and the trudging, trudging, trudging across the desert, he kept selling the others the water. And his prices kept getting higher and higher.
So of course, the kid ends up with all the gold, incidentally meaning he didn’t have to carry most of it himself.
And in the last scene, they come to a river, the edge of the desert and the United States. On the other side lies freedom.
Picture the scene – the sun rises, this group of ragged men, their travails over, rush into the river to drink their fill, and they know they’ve made it, they’re gonna live, and they’re gonna get away.
Except the kid has all the gold, which was the whole point of all that trouble they’d just been through.
“So what happened?”
They shoot him, of course, and take their gold back. The credits roll over the kids body floating face down, blood running into the river as the rest of the men wade across into the distance.