Yes,
they've got us hemmed in down here along this road - just close
enough to see, but far enough away to suit them. Far enough all we
can do is interview each other...I think you're right; it's a study
in the banality of evil. Ms. Arendt was right. Definitely. - TV
anchor personality interviewed at the time of the Branch Davidian
standoff, 1993
The
phone would often ring in those days during my afternoon naps – not every
day, but often enough that I would expect the calls.
Mickey
was usually very well-oiled by then; it was past midnight in Rome,
long after he left the BBC studios for the day, long after he boarded
the train at the railway station where he bought his international
telephone cards at the news stand.
He
would call from his kitchen in a stone cottage originally built as a
tool shed on a little farm granted a Roman legionnaire after his
retirement many centuries in the past.
Sometimes,
he sang his mother's favorite song, a number recorded by Marty
Robbins called “El Paso.” Had I ever heard of it? No, how does it
go, again?
Mickey
would ramble, but he told the same stories in the same way, almost
word for word, as if watching the action unspool from a video he shot
so long ago it was inscribed in his mind, something he could stop and
start, reverse and fast forward.
“London
paid extra for the pink mist,” he would say. “You know what I
mean? Have you ever seen the Zapruder film?”
Yes,
of course. It was shot in my home town – downtown - on the
courthouse square.
Sarajevo.
The Yugoslavian campaign in the power vacuum.
He
was from Canada, said of persons he despised, as the Canadians
sometimes do, that he or she was a “kun-tah.”
Short
vowels, broad a, accent on the first syllable of an unprintable
one-syllable word.
“He
kept telling him 'No, you don't want to go there. Very bad. BAD!'”
But the correspondent wouldn't listen. He wanted the shot.
The
correspondent insisted. He was a kun-tah. When they got there, they
learned the woman had been accused of consorting with a police
official, serving as an informant, sleeping with him, betraying
people who disappeared and had never been seen again.
“Do
you know what a necklace is, Jim?”
Of
course. Who didn't?
The
woman, he said, was wearing pink panties that the mob had pulled down
for unspeakable reasons. In her death agony, her hands tied behind
her back, she reached down to the waist band of those pink panties
and tried to pull them up.
“She
didn't want to die with her bum showing,” he would always say.
“Pulled them up with her last breath, then keeled over and burned
to death.”
Did
I know London paid a bonus for the pink mist?
“The
snipers always tried for a head shot. Always a head shot - with a
.308,” he would say – every time.
By
now, he had moved on to the BBC, but it was the AP when he was in
“the Afghan,” and back to Reuters when he was in Israel and The
Sudan. Lebanon, said Mickey, was "the Levant."
Miguel
got killed in Sarajevo. “He got too close with his camera. Up until
then, we played it like it was a game, but he got too close...”
The
funeral was in Spain. He accompanied Miguel's remains home, stayed
for the funeral.
Then
he would cry.
“They
blamed me,” he would always say. “They blamed me.”
Had
I ever heard “El Paso?” He would sing it.
It
was his mother's favorite song – back in Winnipeg.
Like
any drunk, sometimes he would put his wife on the phone. She was an
advertising executive in Rome.
“Why
you no coming here, Cheem?”
I
wouldn't know exactly how to get back home.
What
did her agency handle?
“We
working for the government,” she would say. “You know, airplane,
taxi, hotel – movie, telvision?”
No
Catch'a twenty-two?
“What
is?” she would ask. “Catch'a twenty-two?”
I
could never quite explain it.
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