(Raj and Kim at the Willow Bar- both players in the Great Game).
So, one of my pals wrote this morning with the Weather Report. He said there was another of these goddamned winter storms coming this way. “Thirteenth named winter storm this year!”
I wrote him back and said that while I support a more robust snow-pack in the mountains, I am still incensed that the Weather Channel has taken to naming things that do not merit the honor. “Presumably to boost their ratings.” I am so done with this winter. I think they are calling this one is called “Maximus,” or something, which is just nonsense. I like naming the Hurricanes, now that they alternate by sex for fairness.
It is about weather, not ratings, right?
So, I can’t flee the City to the west without running into the front, which I have been thinking about for a while, and the way south is still clogged with abandoned cars in Atlanta and more to come. I sighed, and realized I might need some reading material. I ordered the Kindle editions of Max hasting’s new Catastrophe 1914 to see if there was any insight on how China and Japan could drag us unintended into something nasty, and a copy of Olivia Laing’s A trip to Echo Spring to explore why great writers are also great drunks.
I welcome the insight, not that I am either of those. In the pre-dawn darkness I tried to retrace my steps as I listened to the Polovtsian Dance movement from Borodin’s Prince Igor for some reason- maybe it is the fund drive this week on my classical music station that is playing the “Top 100 Classics,” like it was the countdown on Casey Kasem’s American Top 40.
I bought it (again) last night after I got home and was surprised to see how many copies of it I had already purchased in my iTunes library.
It had been a raucous last-Friday–of-the-month night. Old Jim was pissed off- it was to have been a double Cod Slider event for him. He has been grousing- I think fairly- that the disappearance from the Nosh bar menu was an unfortunate choice, due to its superb taste and texture.
Tracy specially ordered some cod just for him, due to his preference for the fish on Kate Jansen’s delicious mini rolls, served with just hot sauce the way he liked it.
There was some miscommunication between Jasper and Brett behind the bar and Robert in the kitchen. Tracy herself was in the kitchen slicing the beef. She popped out briefly to remark that she did two steamer rounds this time due to demand. Anyway, Jim thought the sliders would be out at five thirty and he got progressively more steamed as six thirty was coming around.
Ray from the White House was decompressing next to Jim. The Lovely Bea and Jon-Without breezed through for a quick drink before heading on to a dinner at some new place in Rosslyn, and John-With hung out with a red wine or two awaiting two Beef on Wecks “to go.”
Jim’s sliders arrived as he had paid his check and was going to stomp back up the street to the Fishbowl where he lives, the glass of the first-floor unit providing him a unique command post from which to observe on street life. A compromise was hastily arranged, and he took the sliders “to go,” just as Barrister Jerry grabbed my sandwich, which arrived courtesy of slim and elegant Dante.
It was his legal opinion that his order had been placed first, though I think I could have won on appeal, but I permitted him to grab the plate with the beef piled high on Kate’s Kummelweck rolls, crusted with fennel and sea-salt and topped with three deep-fried olives on a stick.
I told Jasper I would take the attorney’s sandwich when it came out, no problems, and somewhere in there Raj sidled up and told me he had a couple pals he wanted me to meet. We used to do business in my former existence, and though I am fairly militant about not using Willow for reasons of commerce, but I allowed as how I would be pleased to meet them before Buffalo night was done.
I had noted them in the corner before his arrival. Raj is starting his own Defense Contracting Business, and when I was working full time, I made it a point to use the power of my contract vehicle to secure “Facilities Clearances” for my small business partners. Yeah, sure, I am a hell of a guy, but it was almost purely self-interest. I figured meeting the Agency’s social goals and being compliant with the Director’s vision would help win work.
I was mostly right, and ran into all sorts of interesting things. Like, without a Facilities Clearance, small business can’t bid on work. You have to have one to get the work, but without the work you can’t bid. Catch frigging 22, you know? Only with the Government.
I figured out a way to use the overall Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) omnibus contract vehicle to secure the clearance, three of them, while I was still working, and it was been a win-win sort of thing. DIA likes me, the Smalls like me and it is no skin off my many-times broken nose.
Anyway, the pals Raj brought along were an interesting pair. One was wearing a pakol, one of those soft woolen Afghan men’s hats atop a dark hawk-like Pashtun visage. Handsome guy in that dark-Aryan way that evoked the troopers of Alexander who stayed behind in the Kush when the mayfly empire of the Great Macedonian collapsed after his early demise.
I am prepared these days just in case I meet any jihadis, and naturally I saw the pakol as I did my scan of the bar before sitting down next to Jim. Like General Mattis said, “Be professional, be polite, and have a plan to kill everyone you meet.”
Anyway, with all the confusion and comings and goings, I saw that Raj’s pals had gone outside to smoke, and I decided to get the meet-and-greet crap out of the way, and went out to join them.
Raj is a burly dark man with a shaven head and a two-day stubble on his chin. He grew up in a diplomatic family with his formative years spent at his father’s State Department posting in the Congo. We yammer in patois once there is enough Happy Hour White in our veins to bring my fluency up to his. A smaller man stood next to him, pale in comparison, and I knew him. His name is Kim, and he has a great story.
I don’t know if he took the name as a nom de guerre, but he has a great story. See, Kim is right out of Kipling’s Great Game, and if there is anyone who exemplifies the show-down between the Raj and the Czar, it is him.
Kim was born a Russian, and he is our age. After University in Moscow he did his service in Afghanistan in the long sad war the USSR fought there. Moreover, he was an officer of the spetsialnogo naznacheniya, the dreaded SPETSNAZ “special purpose forces.”
He survived that installment of the war, and got out of Russia with his family as things fell apart with the death of Communism, or actually its relocation here. His language skills and cultural experience were significant, and in the period after 9/11 he found himself back in Afghanistan, this time as a US citizen and government employee. He has been trying to get back in the war as a contractor since the drawdown ended his position.
He introduced me to the towering Pashtun, whose name was Ghairat and whose English was excellent. Both of them, said Raj, have TS SCI clearances, and are fluent in several languages, a talent highly useful to the mono-lingual Americans whose hubris thought they could put the Young Republicans in command in Kabul and live happily ever after.
We smoked and talked. Ghairat had a story, too. He had lived through the time of the Iran-Iraq War as an Afghan private soldier, and then the mire of the Russian War, and then decided to become an American in our edition. He proudly told me he was the 79th civilian ever awarded the Purple Heart by the ISAF Commander, David Petreaus.
We talked of wars won and lost, and I thought to myself, as I disengaged and threw the cigarette butt in the flowerpot by the door, that Great Americans come in all sorts of flavors, you know?
Back inside, Kate Jansen brought me the two boxes of Kummelweck rolls to go with the Culpeper tri-tip I am slow cooking to feed the people I foolishly invited over to trash the apartment tomorrow night while watching the Superbowl.
As I carried the boxes and my half-sandwich out to the Bluesmobile for the weave home, I passed Raj and the boys. Ghairat insisted on giving me a bear hug, and who could deny him?
Raj patted me on the shoulder, and said: “You know what his name means, don’t you?”
I shook my head. My Pashtun and Dari are for shit.
“It means bravery,” he said, and gave me a wink.
“Great Americans come in all flavors,” I said, and then made the right decision and disappeared into the darkness.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303