Foreign Friends (eBook)

Lia Giannakis (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
292 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-6678-7344-2 (ISBN)

Infos

Ashley Hall, a rich preppy from Connecticut works in Editorial at the world's craziest publishing company. Bored and fed up with everything and everyone--especially her sexist moron fiance--she's receptive to a mysterious late-night phone call inviting her to live dangerously for a radical cause. Pursued by a nyphomaniac commune, a bespangled lesbian amazon, and some very nice guerrillas, Ashely is in for more change than she bargained for. One thing leads to another, and all hell--as well as hysterically outrageous comedy!--breaks out. This novel is as funny as it gets, because it's deadly serious about what's wrong with the upper class and conventional mindsets. It's comedy as protest!

Lia Giannakis is a first-generation Greek-American who lived in New York City for ten years, where she worked in publishing. As a journalist, in 1984 she traveled to Nicaragua to cover the Sandinista revolution. Passionate about social justice and systemic change, she considers it part of her mission in life to make people laugh. Lia believes that finding humor in everyday events helps keep one's sanity in a world gone mad.

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Ashley Hall, a rich kid from Connecticut, was always an oddball with an irreverent sense of humor. Now, at 33, she's fed up with everything and everyone. Trapped in an engagement to a reactionary sexist moron and working at a dead-end job in a loony bin, she's itching to bust out of her conformist life in every way. But how does the voice on the phone know that? A mysterious late-night call leads Ashley to unexpected involvement with Central American revolutionaries. One thing leads to another and all hell as well as outrageous comedy breaks loose. Ashley and the guerrillas are both fighting for their lives, their dignity, and their freedom. Can they help each other toward victory?

Textauszug

Chapter Two

Strangers in the Night

“I get up by climbing out

How did I get home?

I’ll survive the situation

Somebody shut the door

Beautiful

Beautiful

Climbing up the wall

I get by on automatic

No surprise at all.”

~ “I Get Wild/Wild Gravity,”
The Talking Heads (1983)

Monday Evening, July 6, 1987

Things. They have a life of their own in my apartment when I’m gone all day. Cut flowers shrink and desiccate. Sliced lemons develop green fur. Garbage molts and dust emerges from the oubliette of unattended corners. Framed prints create bleached rectangles behind their backs, while the sleeves of my blouses engage in silent wrinkling as they crush each other in the dark prison of my closet. My busy home awaits, beloved refuge whose magnetic pull restrains me mornings past the requisite departure time (I’m perpetually late to work), and whose Velcro reliability reattaches me each night.

I have spun my own cocoon here, in which I curl with the pending revelation of all larval occupants. On my wedding day, I am expected to emerge as the white-winged creature everyone anticipates, trailing my lacy wings with a virginal battement that all will recognize and award the name of triumph. I am to sacrifice one individualism for another, more circumscribed, in which I am to live not for the aloneness of my single self, but for the equally solitary existence of another person—my husband.

Privacy. The ultimate luxury that sets the rich apart from the poor. The flint-eyed roaring bliss of Mine never touching, or ever being seen by Yours. As history unfolded, this was thought to be the criterion, the very essence of freedom. Fighting our way out of crowded centuries of being forced to share under scarcity has given certain kinds of collectivity a reputation for oppression. Self-contained idealists, our class is reluctant to admit to those collectives we hold dear: family, alumni, club members, corporate colleagues. Groups of pre-packaged persons sharing not one another but rather, a name, a reputation, a status, an ideal.

Since the age of ten, I’ve had treacherous leanings. Secret yearnings for the dangerous loss of particularity through mass-generated world-historical events. The appeal of class action, the self-effacing discipline of an organization devoted to a vast spectrum of Others. A marginal longing to flout disaster through insubordination in messy mobs. The muted calling of a world my mother warned me about. “Always live your life so that no one can ever blackmail you” is the sort of thing that composes the agenda of Barbara Hall’s worries. Commonness and breach of etiquette are greater threats than nuclear war.

As I unlock the half-dozen security devices on my Manhattan apartment, I am admitted into my sacred space, yet feeling obscured once again by the murky haze that crept up on me at the office; a drowning blindness of fatigue that blocks the usual pleasure of reentry. I locate a lemon yogurt in the fridge and follow it with chamomile tea. All I seem to want or need is calling me from the five feather pillows heaped upon the quilts in airconditioned calm one room away.

Here on Lexington Avenue at Eighty-Second, the only sound is the cricketing of muted traffic and the chorusing of coolers. There isn’t even an electric view but only trapped air filling the shaft across from my window. The ancient bathtub has feet and wears the ring of my domestic revolt, a sign of how tired I am of everything and everyone. Normally, I am a neat person. My spinet piano fits into a corner stacked with music scores, and there’s a warming red Tabriz beneath the indigo sofa and a comfy Queen Anne armchair; a green glass shade near my books and records, and quality framed engravings brought from France.

Ridiculous, going to bed at half-past nine. But I reject the courage demanded by the act of opening mail, the self-awareness necessary for washing dishes, or the enormous fortitude that television requires. Lacking the confidence to take on the gargantuan task of undressing and undertaking the nightly ablutions, I simply strip and crawl under the covers.

The bed is cool and smooth. I imagine myself a pure glass creek against worn pebbles flashing mica up through reflections into sky. I stretch, enjoying the fact that my heels stick over the end of the mattress. It’s funny, I’m a kid again. In bed, walking up the wall with my feet, my nanny running to investigate the noises that kept me from the bogeyman. Or was it just to be perverse. The crisp linen smell of the sheets Express Mails me into precious oblivion.

I am swimming in darkness, tossed among piano keys, my father’s voice echoing as from a well, and someone is ringing, ringing, ringing.

“Hello?”

“Meese Ashley Hole?”

“Hnh.” Crap. What time is it?

“Meese Hole?” A Hispanic-accented voice is saying “Miss Hall.”

“Yeah already. Who’s calling.”

“A friendly party. Please do not be afraid.”

“I’m not afraid, just mad. What time is it?”

“We are sorry to have awakened you. It is only half-past ten.”

“Well, who are you, and what do you want.”

“We would like you to help us with a very important cause.”

“I gave at the office.”

“We think you would be very good for this job. We think highly of your merits.”

“Who is this?”

“Please do not worry. We are not crazy people and we have no intention of harming you. We would like to enlist your assistance in a project we think you will find satisfying.”

“I don’t know why I’m not hanging up on you.”

“Then may we talk?”

“Yeah, but … .” I begin to have an intuition that this is a conversation better not had over optical fibers. “Are you sure you want to talk on the phone?” Probably drugs. They want me to unload their coke or smack for them because I couldn’t look illegal if I tried. Couldn’t pretend to be a criminal even if I wanted to. That’s New York for you. Drugs and real estate. Maybe they want me to sell a hot condo. No. How do you steal a condo? I’m really not awake.

“Would you like to meet in person?” the voice asks.

“Look, maybe. I don’t know. This city is full of nuts and weirdos and you are a man, so how the hell do I know what you’re up to?”

“Please be assured this is quite legitimate. But you are correct that the telephone is not the best to discuss business. We will contact you soon. Thank you for speaking with us. Goodnight.”

“But?” Nothing. Only the mournful wail of the disconnected instrument peals into the blackness.

Dammit. Probably Armando in one of his coked-out highs trying to freak me. Armando, a petite Cuban exile romance novelist whose sexual preference has nothing to do with his heroines. He favors shiny organ-hugging pants and Qiana shirts in danger of rupturing should he breathe deeply, as well as an assortment of gold jewelry and a pomaded pompadour that would make Wayne Newton jealous. Madame P. employs him as a typist, which is how he knows my phone number. I press the illuminator button on the digital clock beside me: 10:35:23. They were right, it’s not even eleven. My tranquilizing night invaded by strangers. Tomorrow I’ll have a rotten headache from having my rems rerouted.

Tuesday Morning, July 7, 1987

Ante meridiem. A.M. Time for most New Yorkers to hurtle themselves into screaming airless tunnels, nightmares of danger and speed through solid granite, the press of cramped angry flesh, each unit seeking to defend itself inside a newspaper or extended sleep facsimile. Drugged by morning, purposefully amnesiac, I fail to notice why the subway car I enter is only half-full at the apex of the rush hour, until my nasal alarm directs my attention to an empty bench filled only by a homeless man. I feel sorry for him, but must move to the next car, there laminated to the other cowards, all sweating—some more politely than others—in the regrettable lack of coolant.

A Puerto Rican couple in disco-tight jeans and abbreviated T-shirts loudly demonstrate their juvenile attraction to one another in a nonexistent space by the motorman’s door. This causes a nearby woman in a navy blue linen suit and running shoes to peer twice as hard at her double-folded “Wall Street Journal.” A Hassidic Jew is seated opposite my knees. He’s the first one I’ve ever seen wearing a Sony Walkman. The Torah on tape? An Asian woman in a rose-flowered dress reads a “National Enquirer” that boasts, “Woman, 87, Gives Birth After 61-Year Pregnancy!” As we reach Grand Central an enormous exodus belches out onto the platform. “Leddemoff, leddemoff, watchaclosindoors, watchaclosindoors,” the conductor intones. I move to a better seat.

“Greetings, earthlings!” A saxophone rift shimmies through the car. “My spaceship has crashed on your planet, and I find I have no earthling currency so I can get it fixed.” Another blast on the horn, shades of Albert Ayler. A tall, African-American man, he’s...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 6.1.2023
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• ISBN-10: 1-6678-7344-X / 166787344X
• ISBN-13: 978-1-6678-7344-2 / 9781667873442