Myers Heights is perched atop a hill overlooking the southern mouth of Cayuga Lake in the heart of the Finger Lakes region in upstate New York. With its grassy acres and sweeping views of the bucolic countryside and placid waters, the tiny hamlet would be considered prime real estate in today’s market. “Scrape Off-Opportunity with Hundred Acre Wood” a listing might read.
Much has changed in the past sixty years. At the last mid-century mark Myers was a patchy settlement of dirt driveways, car ports, and factory houses built for Arab immigrants who labored deep beneath the lake bed mining rock salt. Neighbors burned their trash in fifty-five gallon drums and tossed their leftover meals over the side of the embankment. The half-composted food scraps germinated into a jungle of wild garlic, tomatoes, and mint interwoven with cattail, poison ivy, pricker bushes, and water-logged baseballs.
At the stern of the hill was a small orthodox A-frame church. It made for a natural gathering place, but the front doors only opened for Easter and Christmas. The side door to the basement, on the other hand, was rarely locked. That’s where a congregation of men took refuge and played pinochle and poker, smoked cigars, studied the horse paper, and commiserated.
The hill was a tight-knit but combustible community. Second cousins married each other, sets of brothers married sets of sisters, relatives fought and reconciled and fought some more. You needed a chalkboard to keep track of old grudges and new alliances and who was speaking or not speaking to each other. Names were just as confusing; there was Abraham George and George Abraham, Johnny Mike and William John, three or four Catherines and at least one George George. Family trees were so gnarled that everyone gave up and just called each other “cousin.”
Whoever planned the housing settlement on the hill didn’t believe in switchbacks or swooping s-curves; the road dropped straight to the bottom like a bobsled run. You were met at the end of the quarter mile chute by a hairpin turn onto a one lane bridge over Salmon Creek. If you were on a banana bike you crossed yourself at the top and sailed down like a bullet train, furiously pumping the brakes and praying you didn’t miss the turn and plunge over the side of the bridge and into the drink.
The nearest traffic light was ten miles away in Ithaca, a bustling college town of hippies and expatriate city slickers. Grandmothers and young mothers caught rides to Ithaca and loaded up with groceries and got their hair done while men passed their time sipping coffee at a Greek diner. With their olive complexion, dark hair, and heavy eye brows, Arab men felt a kinship with their Mediterranean brethren. It helped that the Greeks also liked to gamble. If you wanted to place a bet on football or possessed a horse racing tip (the race track was seventy miles away), Nick the Greek (or Pete or Jimmy) would take your bet.
It wasn’t easy being an Arab in small town America. The Italians had Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra, the Greeks had Telly Savalas and the Olympics, the Irish had the Kennedys, and the Jews had Hollywood. Who did the Arabs have, Danny Thomas? Only a trivia buff knew he was Lebanese. The poet Khalil Gibran was too esoteric to boast about. Casey Kasem might have counted but nobody listened to Top Forty music on the hill; they preferred Dean Martin and Tony Bennett. Arabs weren’t on the big screen or in the big games—they’d have to wait fifty years before Salma Hayek and Tony Shalub arrived. This wasn’t a function of ability, there just weren’t enough of them. Italian-Americans outnumbered Arabs by a thousand to one. The Irish had a fifty year head start. The odds were not good.
No matter. My father’s generation — Otsie, Dickie, Clay, Cal, and the rest — went off to college and left the salt mines behind. They traveled widely, married, and honeymooned in Niagara Falls and vacationed in Vegas. Myers grew older and more removed from the modern world, but when it came time to raise a family, the descendants drifted back. They didn’t live on the hill; that would be too close. The second wave moved to newer houses five miles up the road, homes with built-out basements, paved driveways, decks out back, and best of all, town water (the hill’s well water stunk of rotten eggs).
The family tree grew bigger. Now two generations removed from the Abrahams and Georges, the multitude of grandkids were not ‘hyphenated Americans’. My older cousins recited the Pledge of Allegiance by heart, excelled in school and played every sport imaginable. Summers were spent hitch-hiking to the movies at the Ithaca mall, skipping stones on the lake and fishing for blue gills and sunfish. They cheered for the New York Mets, idolized Joe Namath, rocked to Led Zeppelin, and ogled at bra models in the JC Penney catalogue. Assimilation was fait accompli.
That is, assimilation was complete for all except one. There was still one young Arab left on the hill and his name was Riad Mahar. My cousin Riad (pronounced like Riyaud, the capital of Saudi Arabia) grew up in the house built for my grandmother (Tayta Badia). His mother (Margie) graduated from a state college near Buffalo and took a bank job in Ithaca. Somewhere along the line Margie developed a wild streak and while the other Arab-American women settled down and learned to cook stuffed grape leaves and cabbage rolls, she was booking cruises to the Middle East and Europe, escaping to Broadway shows and vacationing in Haiti.
Around the time Eisenhower was president, Margie fell in love with an admiral from Egypt. The two married, or possibly they eloped—I’ve never seen wedding pictures—and cousin Riad was born a short time later. From there the details get murky. At some point it was determined that an Egyptian sailor was not moving to America much less Myers. Margie and Riad (about three at the time) retreated to Myers to live with Tayta Badia. Riad’s father visited less and less frequently until finally he wasn’t heard from again.
Undaunted, Margie started over as a single mother. She founded a temp agency in Ithaca and continued to embark on excursions around the world. On the hill Riad was in the good hands of Tayta Badia as well as a village of elders. Riad’s extended clan treated him like a prince. At Christmastime he needed a spare bedroom to store his cache of gifts. His trove of chocolate bunnies on Easter Sunday far exceeded everyone else’s baskets — we were green with envy. There were whispers that Riad’s street savvy mom had taken him to New York to audition for a modeling agency.
While cousin Riad was enthroned on the hill, I was growing up in a ranch-style house in a neighborhood of rectangular plots separated by long rows of burly hedges. Like so many affordable homes constructed in the 1970’s, our house was functional, economical, feature-less, and soul crushing. The walls were made of half-inch dry wall; a light jab with your fist would pop a hole in it. The builders clearly skimped on insulation; in the winter you could feel cold drafts blowing through the window sills and door jambs.
This slice of modern Americana was foreign to my father—he grew up with fireplaces, unlocked doors and back yards without borders. Myers continued to be intimate and surreal — the elder Arabs still walked down a dirt path to the lake with a bar of soap and wash cloth draped over their shoulder. Compared to life on the hill, our existence seemed monochromatic and artificial. We barely knew our neighbors, wanly waving to them at the mail boxes and garbage pick-up.
Then there was me. My idea of fun was curating the comic strips found on the back of Bazooka bubble gum wrappers. I collected the world’s most worthless junk: the plastic toys hidden inside cereal boxes. Thumbing through our Encyclopedia Britannica library was how I spent a rainy day. My eyesight was 20/400 and binocular glasses helped my vision but not my image.
In my tepid defense, there weren’t many kids my age nearby. My closest friends lived miles away. There wasn’t anyone around to play catch with or to go hunting for salamanders or make a tree hut. It was a hum drum life devoid of drama and adventure.
My parents were stupefied, especially my father. The Arabs could overcome hard scrabble beginnings, they could deal with cold showers, outhouses and tap water that stunk of sulfur, but raising a weird kid? That was outside their comfort zone.
A decision was made: in the summer before seventh grade I was sent to the hill to live. The hope was I’d get some old world Arab sense knocked into me. Maybe I’d learn to whittle a stick or kill a snake or build a fire. My cousin Riad was there and although a smidge younger than me, maybe he’d be a good influence. It was worth a shot. I was in desperate need of nerd detox.
Trouble was, Riad was no boy scout. If my world was a bowl of fake vanilla ice cream, his was a Friendly’s banana split sundae drowning in hot fudge, cherries, and whipped cream. What’s more, the young Duke of Myers with the treasure chest full of stuffed animals was growing restless with all the attention and preferential treatment lavished on him.
I soon realized that I was not going to charm school. On the first night we were gently encouraged by our grandmother to eat our peas so we would grow up to be big and strong and possibly become president. I dutifully cleaned my plate. Riad blew his nose into a slice of Wonder bread, rolled it into a ball and shoved it in his mouth. That set the tone for our summer. I was yin and he was wang.
The first day we headed out on our bikes to go fishing in the creek beneath the bridge. The downhill road to the lake wasn’t steep enough for Riad. No, he wanted to take a shortcut over the cliff behind the church. There was dry gully that offered a negotiable landing of pebbles, sand, and branches, but it was still a steep drop. I reluctantly stood at the edge and peered down.
“I’ll meet you at the bottom,” was all Riad said. He got a running start and pedaled his bike over the edge, pulled a wheelie in mid-air and landed ass over tin cup.
That was a dig. My bike was a coaster bicycle with broad handle bars and upright seat preferred by movie stars from the 1940’s and Mary Poppins. It wasn’t cool by any stretch of the imagination.
“Ready or not here I come!” I yelled back. What a faker. My palms were sweating and my stomach was knotting up. Like a sad imitation of Evil Knievel I sailed over the edge and into space, flinging reticence and caution to the wind, sliding and tumbling down the side of the embankment to the bottom. Covered in dirt and adrenaline, I got up feeling giddy.
We parked our bikes beneath the bridge and walked along the creek, hopping from rock to rock while leaping over shallow pools of minnows and tadpoles. Before long we spotted a school of rainbow trout swimming upstream. I had brought a donated fishing pole with a worm hook; Riad carried a stash of cherry bombs and fishing net. I cast a line in the direction of the trout but it was too late. Riad lit a match to a cherry bomb and tossed it into the water as it exploded. We covered our ears and squealed with laughter as the microburst of fireworks sent shards of fish and seaweed everywhere and showered us in an acrid and slimy mess.
Blowing up fish was more fun than traditional fishing, but we weren’t catching anything. The waters now muddied, we slogged downstream to the trestle. Viewed with a mixture of anxiety and trepidation, the train trestle loomed large over the creek. In the nineteen-thirties a great flood had washed out the trestle and three boys from Myers had drowned. Snakes could be seen basking in the sun on the rails. Snakes — I hated snakes. And there was always the macabre fear of getting my foot wedged between railroad ties as an oncoming train approached.
I mentioned the thing about the snakes but Riad paid no attention and scrambled up the side of the embankment and onto the tracks. I followed and gingerly tiptoed over the ties to the middle of the span, pausing to look for shadows of fish below. No fish. We waited. Still no fish. We sat down on the tracks and I dropped a fishing line into the water. We waited some more.
While our legs dangled over the side, we talked about girls in school who were getting boobs and boys who had balls the size of a moose. We compared grape leaves to cousa, the Mets to the Yankees and debated whether Mountain Dew tasted like piss. Mostly we talked about everything and nothing.
On the northern bend my private hell was coming to life in the form of a distant train approaching. I quickly reeled my line out of the water and hustled to get up. Riad was not of the same mind. “We’re jumping” he said as he dusted off his trousers and stood up.
The water’s depth looked to be five or six feet — deep enough for a belly flop, but too deep for wading. The train grew larger and more ominous on the horizon.
“Geronimo!” Riad screeched as he cannonballed over the side and let loose a splash. He paddled over to the boulders on the creek’s shore. “You can touch bottom on your tippy toes,” he yelled.
“I TOLD YOU I CAN’T SWIM!” The train was approaching the final turn and coming down the stretch. I was losing my chance to scramble off the trestle like a normal kid from the suburbs. Riad grabbed a piece of drift wood and stuck it out.
“Thanks a lot.” I looked down, pinched my nose and plunged into the stream feet first. I touched bottom and bobbed up to the surface. The chilly water felt oddly refreshing, a feeling that lasted about one second; I needed to get to the banks. I squirmed, splashed and groped my way toward the drift wood. Just as I reached out, Riad let go and it floated downstream away from my grasp.
“ I gotcha,” Riad said as he waded further in and grabbed hold of my flailing arm. “C’mon, don’t be a pussy! Look down, you can see your feet.” He gave me a good jerk and pulled me towards shore. I felt the reassurance of the river stones beneath me.
The train rumbled by overhead as we reached the shore. We sat in silence on the boulders of the embankment. Although the trip from panic zone to safe haven took less than ten seconds my neat and tidy life of watching cartoons, collecting stickers, and perusing encyclopedias floated away like another piece of driftwood. This — whatever this was — was invigorating. I needed more of it — more splashing in the muck, more bobbing in the water, more snickering about girls and boners and titty twisters.
Up the banks we went, plunging off the trestle into the creek again and again, each splash bigger and louder than the one before.
It was getting close to lunchtime. Soaking wet and smelling of seaweed and brine, we pushed our bikes back up the hill. It didn’t occur to me until years later that assimilation was a choice, not a necessity. For some, assimilation equaled conformity, and conformity can be boring. There’s more than one way to get down a hill, to catch a fish, or to dodge a train. Perhaps assimilation had a wiser, younger cousin called ingenuity.
Tayta Badia had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and a bowl of hummus waiting for us. Riad’s sandwich already had the crust removed. It was a perfect lunch.
The earliest generation of Arabs lived on a dirt road in Myers but the word “poor” was never uttered, nor was it ever contemplated. A cousin once remarked, “they didn’t know they were poor, and if they did, it wasn’t in their vocabulary.” On the other hand, there was no shortage of pride. Every generation of Arab-Americans with a strand of DNA linked to Myers feels a deep resonating pride about making it in America. Pride was the scaffolding that built a fortress of character and love.
Yet for the longest time it was hard to ignore that dirt road. The paved road from the state highway that lead to Myers meandered through a rolling meadow for about one mile before becoming a dirt path at the hill’s doorstep. Weather-beaten and pockmarked, Myers Road was a poor man’s cobblestone street. If you drove in with a low hanging muffler, you drove out missing a muffler.
Every few years the town’s dump truck unloaded a pile of gravel near the top of the hill where the pavement met dirt. The gravel was used for infilling the road’s craters and ruts — a short term band aid. As the median age of the hill’s residents sidled past fifty, no one was in a hurry to spread five tons of stone and pebble over the pot holes. The pile was ignored for months at a time, sprouting weeds, spider webs, and nests for garter snakes and salamanders. It had the musty smell of a flooded creek.
One afternoon Riad and I sat under the carport discussing jock straps. Riad was skeptical that my jock was a full size larger than his.
“A jock is supposed to hold your junk up tight, otherwise it’s not a jock, it’s underwear,” said Riad.
Riad’s mother interrupted our debate. If Tayta Badia was the Mother Hen, my aunt Margie was the benevolent drill sergeant. If you visited her at work, she gave you a big hug and walked you over to the Home Dairy for a butter cream-filled chocolate éclair. If you crossed her on the hill, you better run for cover because there will be hell to pay. Having just returned from one of her wayfaring journeys, she wasted no time in urging us to get off our cans and make ourselves useful.
“Looks like rain is moving in,” he replied. In Myers it always looked like it was going to rain. The sky was a dome of gray three hundred days a year.
I jumped up and retrieved two shovels leaning against the back porch. Riad hemmed and hawed before getting up. He un-tipped a battered wheel barrow and together we plodded out to the gravel pile at the top of the road.
There it sat, a semi-porous mound of stones, shards of slate, sand, and invasive flora. We dug our shovels in, scooped the contents into the wheel barrow and rolled it down the road to the nearest boulder-sized divot. Back and forth to the gravel pile we slogged, filling up the wheel barrel, rolling it to an uneven patch, and upending it with a loud clanging motion.
“If the shoe fits,” Riad snorted presciently. Blue collar work would never be his thing. His first purchase after college would be a subscription to GQ magazine. His peers would scrounge for gold cuff links and snazzy ties to wear for the occasional wedding; he dressed like that for work.
Back on the hill, working in a chain gang was not for him. He picked up a rock from the pile and flung it at the mail boxes. Pa-ting! He picked up another one and flung it. Pa-tung!
This time he searched for a rock the size of a baseball. He stood about forty paces from the row of metal boxes.
“Baltimore’s Jim Palmer takes the mound. The Mets’ Cleon Jones steps into the batter’s box,” Riad intoned with a baseball announcer’s velvet voice. “Here comes the pitch.” He went into a full wind up, threw his arms over his head, swiveled his hips and kicked out his left leg toward the mail boxes. He fired the rock over an imaginary home plate.
“STEEE-RIIKE-ONE” he shouted. He walked over and picked up another rock. I lobbed stones into the wheel barrow, half listening.
“Palmer shakes off the signal. He goes into his wind up,” Riad announced. He twirled and threw another rock at the mail boxes. “A swing and a miss! Strike two for Cleon Jones.”
I stopped lobbing stones. In the summer of ‘73 if you placed a math compass on a map of New York State and stuck the pointy end in Queens and stretched the peg leg with the golf pencil north to Poughkeepsie and drew an arc to Niagara Falls and around the horn to northeastern Pennsylvania you would circle a region known as New York Mets country. Four years earlier the “Miracle Mets” overcame a pathetic pedigree and hapless history (they set a record for ineptitude in their first season in 1962 by losing 120 games) and upended the baseball universe by upsetting the highly favored Baltimore Orioles in the World Series. If you owned a kid’s mitt and lived within five hundred miles of Shea Stadium you rooted for the Mets. New York’s other more established team, the blue blooded Yankees, wore pinstriped uniforms, won over twenty championships, and built a Monument Park in their backyard to honor their legion of Hall of Famers, but in the nether regions of New York State, the Mets were king.
“Two out in the bottom of the ninth, the game is tied. And Cleon Jones is in the hole.” Turns out cousin Riad hated the Mets. It was never clear why, other than he liked to piss people off.
“The count is oh and two on Cleon”, Riad intoned, brushing me off. He picked up another rock, rubbed it with both hands, and resumed his wind up. “Here comes the pitch,” Riad announced as he contorted his body and threw a rock as hard as he could. It sailed over the mail boxes and into a rhododendron bush. “BALL! Palmer’s fast ball is above the numbers. One and two the count”.
“C’mon, my turn.” I nudged him out of the way and took the imaginary mound. “Cleon Jones taps his cleats and steps into the batter’s box. Palmer starts his wind up. Cleon cocks his bat!” Clasping the rock, I went into a windup, coiled and recoiled and fired the rock towards home plate. Cleon Jones was poised to hit a home run.
Trouble was, I was a terrible pitcher. My father liked to say I couldn’t hit the side of a barn. It would be years before I displayed a modicum of athletic ability and even then I wasn’t allowed to go near the pitcher’s mound. Coaches usually stationed me somewhere innocuous like right field.
As it happened on that mythic summer afternoon the mighty Mets star Cleon Jones would not drive Jim Palmer’s fast ball out of the park for a game-winning home run. No, there would be no joy in Mudville that day. My first pitch flew high over the mail boxes as if propelled by a grenade launcher. It sailed straight to the upper deck of Frankie Ecker’s house, one of two or three homes in Myers not owned by Arabs.
There was a violent crash followed by a shower of shattered glass. I could have sworn the earth shook. The rock disappeared inside the house.
“I’ll tell you what we do. We run!” Off we went, looping behind Aunty Frieda’s house and high tailing it along the fringe of the embankment and back to Tayta Badia’s car port where we assumed our previous positions in folding chairs. We acted as if nothing had happened.
Riad stood up and surveyed the situation. No one appeared to be home at Frankie Ecker’s so we speed-walked back to the gravel pile and retrieved the tools. I stole a passing glance at the fractured window and felt sickened. A broken window was a code red violation. “Watch what you’re doing, you’ll break a window!” was Tayta’s war chant. Margie was more blunt: “Break a window and I’ll break your neck.”
We slithered back to the car port. “Act normal and no one will notice,” Riad advised. He tried to engage in conversation, transitioning from jock straps to older girls.
“Knock it off,” I snapped back. Under ordinary circumstances the mention of Cyndi Brinkman would’ve whiplashed my attention. Every hormonally active boy in middle school had a crush on the blue-eyed brunette with an Ali MacGraw smile. If she dropped a pencil in the hall we dove for it like a fumble in the end zone. When the bus picked her up in the morning I scooted my fanny over hoping she’d choose the seat next to me (never happened). You could wallpaper your room with Farah Fawcett posters but Cyndi Brinkman parting the bus aisle like the Red Sea was enough for me.
Yet at this moment of heightened anxiety I was too shell-shocked to engage in a game of who-what–where. I was convinced that my life was about to be ruined due to the unfortunate destruction of Frankie Ecker’s bedroom window.
Oh, the bastard. I put my hands over my ears. “I can’t hear you,” I sang back. “I don’t have time for this!”
What a mess. If I was going to survive adolescence, I had to learn how to swim out of emotional tsunamis, not just Salmon Creek. Others might be cool as a cucumber in the face of adversity, but I was jittery as a June bug. At this rate I was looking at a lifetime of sweating profusely before giving a speech or boarding an airplane. I took a deep breath and resolved to get my act together.
The phone rang inside Tayta’s house, followed by a muffled conversation. Margie was heard clippity-clopping down the steps. She had polio as a child and negotiating stairs took a concerted effort. The screen door pushed open and a stout apparition appeared. She stood before us with her hands on her hips. She spoke:
“I plead the Fifth,” Riad said. I have to give him credit — no matter what happened back then or now, he never threw a cousin under the bus.
“Don’t pull that stunt with me. If you’re lying, I will put my foot up your ass.” Margie was blunt as she was lyrical. “Lying is worse than the crime.”
“Now go back there and clean it up, both of you. And when Frankie Ecker comes home you’re both apologizing to him.”
There was nothing mentioned about a butt whipping. Perhaps things might not be so terrible after all.
“If we didn’t have to shovel out a lousy rock pile there’d be no broken window in the first place,” Riad counter attacked.
“Who else is going to do it? Uncle John? He’s seventy years old. Uncle Ebo? He weighs three hundred pounds. He can’t even push away his dinner plate,” Margie said tartly. The thing about Arabic humor: it’s like soccer. If you have an open shot, you take it.
“Why do we live on a stinkin’ dirt road in the first place?” Riad asked. “No one else lives like this. It ain’t 1950.”
This was true, everyone else lived on paved roads. Snob’s Nob farther up the highway was a prim cul de sac with side roads wider than boulevards. Driving southwest towards Ithaca, tony Hillcrest Drive (where Cornell profs lived) was practically manicured. The road’s shoulders were lined and tamped down with cinder; the drainage ditches tunneled beneath driveways. No one would ever think of dumping a gravel pile at the end of their road.
“Do I have to spell it out?” Riad continued. “Our road is dirt. Why doesn’t the town pave it? Instead of dumping a load of garbage on our street and treating us like second class citizens.”
Just as we were on the cusp of an armistice, Riad had to kick the white elephant. Read between the lines: Arabs could travel all over the world and raise a middle class family, Arabs could cheer for the Mets and dream that a high school heart throb will sit next to them, Arabs could look fear in the eye and jump from a trestle or ride a bike over a cliff or even run for president, but at the end of the day Myers was a still a hill with a worn down lane of dirt for a road.
“Second class citizens!” Margie erupted. “Is that what you said? Listen to me you little piss pot. Do you know how hard I work? Do you know how hard your grandmother works? Do you have any idea where your people came from? Let me tell you: FROM THE DESERT! They still they ride camels, there’s no running water, and they live in huts! And you call us second class citizens?”
“Shut up, Buster Brown. I’m not finished. Your aunts and uncles grew up here and became teachers, principals, professors, business owners, coaches, you name it. They worked for every penny they have. They sacrificed to get ahead! And we never forget where we came from!” Margie was on a roll.
It was the first time I ever saw my cousin Riad speechless. If we learned anything that day, or that summer, it was about the depth of Arabic pride. In baseball terms, Margie had struck out the side. Lesson learned, inning over.
“Never mind that,” Margie said. “When Frankie Ecker comes home, you’ll walk up there and say you’re sorry.”
When Frankie Ecker got home, we walked up to his house to apologize. He didn’t answer the door so we left him a note.
Decades later I asked my father what the deal was with the dirt road on the hill. Why was it unpaved for so long? It seemed like an insult.
“But what about the load of gravel? I asked. “Why’d they dump a pile of gravel at the top of the road every year? That seemed weird.”
“That might have been one the Varga boys, I think he worked for the town. He dropped off the gravel as a favor so we could fill in the pot holes. You knew the Vargas were cousins, didn’t you?”
The road on the hill is paved now. Once the paving trucks got smaller and more efficient the town laid down the pavement (and the driveways for good measure.) The gravel pile disappeared, gone but not forgotten.
To this day the sight of a black macadam road on the hill is jarring, like a photo that’s been touched up. Yet at the peak of summer, when the unexpected sun reaches the perfect angle in the sky, heat radiates off the surface of the macadam and the road appears to be gleaming. The pavement stops just before reaching the church.
Chapter Three is now online: https://medium.com/p/31bb7ecbbeb2.
