Foreign Friends

By Lia Giannakis

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?

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9781667873442

Book preview

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In Loving Memory

of

Sheri Wynne Sussman

1956 – 2020

A special person who was larger than life.

"Free the people you have put in prison unfairly

and undo their chains.

Free those to whom you are unfair

and stop their hard labor.

Share your food with the hungry

and bring poor, homeless people into your own homes.

When you see someone who has no clothes, give him yours,

and don’t refuse to help your own relatives.

Then your light will shine like the dawn … ."

~ Isaiah 58:6-8 (New Century Version)

Foreign Friends

©2022 Lia Giannakis

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Any resemblance to characters living or dead is purely inevitable.

print ISBN: 978-1-66787-343-5

ebook ISBN: 978-1-66787-344-2

Premissions:

I GET WILD/WILD GRAVITY

Words and Music by Chris Frantz, David Byrne, Jerry Harrison, and Tina Weymouth

© 1983 WC Music Corp. and Index Music, Inc.

All Rights Administered by WC Music Corp. All Rights Reserved

Used by permission of Alfred Music. For our 100% control

GIRLFRIEND IS BETTER

Words and Music by Chris Frantz, David Byrne, Jerry Harrison, and Tina Weymouth

© 1983 WC Music Corp. and Index Music, Inc.

All Rights Administered by WC Music Corp. All Rights Reserved

Used by permission of Alfred Music. For our 100% control

CROSSEYED AND PAINLESS

Words and Music by Chris Frantz, David Byrne, Jerry Harrison, Brian Eno and Tina Weymouth

© 1980 WC Music Corp., Index Music, Inc. and Universal Music MGB Ltd.

All Rights on behalf of Itself and Index Music administered by WC Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Music. For our 65% control.

ROAD TO NOWHERE

Words and Music by Chris Frantz, David Byrne, Jerry Harrison, and Tina Weymouth

© 1985 WC Music Corp. and Index Music, Inc.

All Rights Administered by WC Music Corp. All Rights Reserved

Used by permission of Alfred Music. For our 100% control

Dion Fortune, Psychic Self-Defense, Rev. ed. Copyright 1930, 1997, Society of Inner Light. Used with permission from Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC.

Contents

Part I

Everything Old is New Again

Strangers in the Night

Reach Out and Touch Someone

Group Dynamics

Across a Crowded Room

Things Go Better with Coke

Alice Underground

Don’t Forget to R.S.V.P.

Home is Where the Car is

A Night at the Opera

Interlude

Surprise Party

Part II

Detour Ahead

Fly the Friendly Skies

Death is Overrated

Join the Army: See the World

The Postman Always Rings Twice

Don’t Forget to Write

Epilogue

If It’s on Television it Must be True

Part I

Chapter One

Everything Old is New Again

"What is the sound of one hand clapping?"

~ Zen Buddhist koan

Monday, July 6, 1987

Did you know that yesterday, the earth was farthest from the sun? It was the Aphelion.

Brad Perkins is speaking. A man of uncertain age, given to fungus-colored trousers and industrial eyeglasses, his short-sleeved white shirts buttoned at the neck, the vinyl pen holder of Sandoz Labs peering over his ink-stained breast pocket. No one knows exactly what he does here.

What? My mind is on my work. Admittedly, a strange preoccupation at P&P Music Books, since no one employed here has the slightest interest in anything we publish.

His feet rock from east to west on the sides of their black oxfords, the frayed laces of which are many times reknotted. He repeats the question that is more of a statement. What can it mean? Will my cellular tides now shift with an alternate pull, electrolytes unbalanced by that aberrant day?

But isn’t that in the winter? I query.

It has nothing to do with the seasons.

"Of course, it is winter in Argentina now. I muse, trying to be helpful. But as an editor of books about opera, a mere English and music major, my cosmological expertise is restricted to Star Trek and The Empire Strikes Back."

Brad has a telescope in his office that is a midnight cavern of keyboards, video display terminals and LED readouts crowded by star charts, weather maps, astral timetables, galactic photographs, and a celestial globe. On his desk, an astronomical clock, a compass, sextant, barometer, thermometer, photometer, and many other -ometers unfamiliar to me. Perkins rarely speaks. When he does, there is no introduction, never any closure. But he seems to like me, appearing in the doorway of my office every now and then to deliver an Important Message from Out There, a Word from Our Sponsor: The Universe.

I guess that’s because our orbit is elliptical, I venture. His face fractures into an expression that is cousin to a smile. We are over the first hurdle.

This has less to do with our orbit than the angle of rotation, you see, he gestures. "We’re here on the planet at an oblique tilt that leans away from the sun."

An oblique tilt? Gee, and I thought it was my hangover from the holiday weekend.

He looks back with the timid bewilderment of a curious gerbil.

Sorry. Just a little humor there.

We are concerned about whether the gamma-ray source Geminga, might be exciting oscillations in the sun by means of gravitational waves. An analog to this radiation would be electromagnetic waves such as light and radio produced by the acceleration of electrically charged particles. So, there is reason to assume that, following general relativity theory—ripples in the space-time fabric being generated by the acceleration of a massive object—if we could detect these solar oscillations, this might lead us to the object of our concern.

"Aaashlee? a mournful plaint, as April interrupts. Perkins evaporates instantly, before I can find out more about this hiccup in sidereal time. I feel teary." She is Keith’s other half. Tall, bony, each with a surfeit of hair, all drawstring clothes and Shakti shoes, their hollow-cheeked faces are constantly pursed in pouts both adoring and sour. They hold hands while they work.

What’s the matter? I try to be a calming force, the voice of reason.

April erupts into wracking sobs and throws herself at my ankles, grabbing the swivel part of my chair. "I had a dream of you last night. It was … erotic. You’re so beautiful. I want to have sex with you-hoooo," she further sobs.

Thanks, but I’m taken.

Her weeping intensifies. She pulls the framed photograph off my desk, holding the facsimile of my betrothed close to her tie-dyed breast. And Keith is upset too. If I want you, he wants you, and because you are with Ehh-hedd I want to make love to Ed, so Keith wants to have sex with him too-hoo-hoo.

Uh, I don’t think Ed would go for that kind of stuff. He’s a pretty straight guy, you know. Wall Street, etcetera.

"Ohh, April!" Lulu pokes her head around the door and begins to cry at her friend’s distress. Her humid choking brings Melanie running from the hall and she, too, floods with tears as they rush to throw their arms around the Pietà at my feet. They thrill to the chance for a good collective cry, for in doing so, they continue to practice the teachings of their dead guru, Irving Feldstein.

A refugee from the beatnik bohemianism of the fifties, he advocated a doctrine of sexual communicationalism in the sixties: The only truth shall be revealed in total honesty, and the highest candor is sex. Follow your body and speak your heart. Talk is good. Sex is good. Sex talk is better. A counter-cultural Hugh Hefner, Feldstein rejected all intellect and the deception of politesse and social graces that accompany its deployment. Any feeling is legitimate and must be voiced whenever it occurs. His poetry celebrated his insight:

Your cunt is so ugly

as you gobble me up.

Oh, but I am not the only one.

Filled with jealousy

my heart shatters into passion

as this pain teaches me

how much I need your ugly fuck.

We scream together.

Bearded and adorned with the narrow-lensed spectacles of a Greenwich Village café-rat circa 1963, Feldstein attracted young women like flypaper. As the decade careened into high gear, they flocked to him from the hip pads of San Francisco and the drug dens of lower Manhattan, sometimes with their men in tow. Or else, he played yenta to the turned on, tuned in, and dropped out, mating them as he saw fit. By the time Richard Nixon was elected to a first term, they had all loved each other into the One Hand Clapping commune, eight couples spread out among a patchwork of condemned apartments, writhing in a spirit the very opposite of their Zen paradox name.

In dribs and drabs they came to work for P&P, and now the entire troop is dispersed here throughout the lowest paying jobs—janitorial, shipping, warehouse work, inventory control, filing, proofreading, and the art department. College-educated, many of them multilingual and talented, they eschew materialism, making them the perfect office-fodder for the miserly Madame Petrova, publisher of P&P.

If April wants you, we want you, too, Melanie explains, lachrymose at my knees.

"Yesss! Lulu sobs, … and Ed!"

Really, I appreciate it, guys, but I’m just not into group sex, and Ed’s no slick dick.

The chorus of grief grows louder and I begin to experience the same aggravation that has been festering in me each time I’ve tried to find the proofreader and she’s out crying in the stairwell. Or I want postage for a manuscript, and the mailroom staff is crumpled in a heap of flooded hugging in the coat closet. The times I’ve held my lap in pain, waiting for a duet to finish copulating behind the bathroom door. Their interminable use of the interoffice phones to resolve their daily lusts and attendant jealousies. Their pages of diaries and crappy poetry I’ve had to pull from the jammed copier … .

"That’s enough! I’m fed up. Get out of my office!"

Wow.

Oh my!

"Ohh, Ashley!"

"She’s so emotional! Isn’t it wonderful?"

The three of them begin to hug and kiss me, quivering in ecstasy at my outburst.

What’s going on in hyir? Suddenly, the corpulent figure of Lydia Petrova, our boss, throws a shadow of official condemnation across the threshold.

Nothing, Madame, the girls mumble. We were just being friendly to Ashley.

You will please to go back to work immediately, she barks in her heavily Russian-accented discourse. "All of you! She glares at me with directed censure. The commune members slink away in silence, as Madame steps aside, motioning sternly in my direction. You must put rush priority on newest Jaroslav book. I want to take with me to Mexico City when we go for International Music Publishers Association meeting in September."

But that’s almost two months away! I protest. The edited manuscript is just now being proofread.

I don’t care. I want for meeting! I see her choler rising, as she launches into high gear: "We are biggest American publisher of opera books! What is point if we can’t show off Jaroslav’s latest masterpiece? The man himself will be there to sign copies for musicologists, professors, and music librarians. Do I pay you salary to put out books or argue with me? You will stay late if necessary, every day from now until September. I want book out in time!" Her face is now the color and consistency of borscht, as her cogs spring into a sforzando irrationality. And who said you could put up nonsense on wall? She points to a UNICEF poster of Children for World Peace.

Don’t worry, I quickly assure her, I used special tape that won’t harm the plaster.

Who’s talking about that? I’m meaning Communist propaganda! Ideological expressions are not suitable for professional office. You may have only family pictures and music posters. Her music posters, of course. She swivels and stomps off to ruin someone else’s day.

Ah, Lydia. An empress dowager displaced from her throne during a subatomic particle war, a refugee from the realm of quasars, quarks, and black holes. An alien entity threatening to energize into high-frequency sound waves with every apoplectic fit. Still withal, an aspirated husk of a woman, an apple doll crinkled from within by the peculiar distress of a widowed czarist leftover from Byzantium.

Kasimir Petrov, her long-decayed husband, founded P&P Music Books while she was yet a Muscovite mouth at the Bolshoi Opera. In between some purge, denunciation campaign, or politburo shift, she defected to La Scala, and from there joined the Met, bellowing her way into Petrov’s season-ticketed heart. He barraged her with flowers until her dressing room looked as though a coffin were about to be carried in at any moment, and they were married in the extravagant pomp specific to exiled monarchists.

As sensitive as a Cossack, as delicate as a Siberian winter, Lydia arranged to skew the P&P list to the side of Grand Opera, so that by the time Kasimir keeled over from a multiplicity of expensive diseases, leaving her as publisher, P&P had become internationally known for its unparalleled opera trivia, or, La Triviata, as Marian Holt—our only other editor—puts it. Speaking of whom … .

Hi. What was that all about?

Have a seat. Lydia’s on the warpath and the commune has blown a gasket. In brief: No ‘ideological’ wall hangings and an invitation to group sex. And it isn’t even lunch time.

Funny, but they’ve never asked me, Marian reflects.

Sorry. Maybe your hair’s too short.

No, it’s that I use my mind. You know—betrayed by thought, corrupted by intellect, a prisoner of instrumental rationality. Feldstein would have hated me.

How’s your dissertation coming, anyway? I try to change subjects.

Her ink-tarnished fingers press horn-rimmed frames to her nose and mow a path through her cropped mousy-brown hair in a movement that wordlessly illuminates her frustration. Just remember: Never get a doctorate in Philosophy and Semiotics from Columbia University.

Nah—I usually get mine from D’Agostino’s. They deliver.

I wish. Say, the new catalog just came in. Marian hands me a glossy booklet featuring a candlelit proscenium arch and swash type.

Inside:

Why bother, I scoff. "Why don’t we just publish generic books, you know, yellow case bindings, black bands across the middle: Opera Book, Verdi Book—

"—Diva Bio, Music Text. How about a brown paper wrapper outside, four-color laminated porno jacket, titles like: Wagnerian Flesh, Debbie Does La Scala—"

"—Deep Epiglottis, Lydia: The Love Slave. Or, we could do a political series: Opera Versus Communism, The Labor Question and the Tenor, Election Year Thematic Catalogue."

I’ve got it, Marian crows, "a travel series! Around the World with Renata Scotto, Sherril Milnes on Safari, Bel Canto Vacation Hideaways."

"Maybe a housewives’ special three-volume set: 101 Uses for Scratched Caruso Records—"

"—Arias to Do Dishes By, Family Overtures—"

Can I interrupt you guys in Idiotorial for the latest ‘Publisher’s Weekly’? I’m trying to get some of this shit off my desk and can’t find my copy.

From our Advertising Manager’s acid tone, I wonder: Hey, Carlotta. What’s up.

Some asshole tried to mug me in my hallway last night. She shakes the dozens of silver bracelets encasing her brawny arms, "but nobody tangles with me— from under her gauze gypsy skirt she lifts a Nautilus-toned thigh to reveal the sleek sheath of a weapon holstered there—cuz I know how to handle those muthafuckas."

Wow, are you okay? Marian’s eyes are a sea of concern.

Carlotta launches a bass, sandpapered laugh. "What you wanna know: Is he all right?" She slips out the knife, to make her point, and Marian’s cheeks blanch. Carlotta next lights up a cigarillo and inserts it into a silver holder pulled from the sash that clenches her plunging jersey blouse. Exhaling a theatrical puff, she inquires when the latest Jaroslav title is to appear in print. As head of advertising, it’s her job to make this unreadable, narcoleptic behemoth an item of ardent desire for the obliterati, drawing them up to an apex of guilty salivation such that to purchase it will seem like a sinful sacrifice, a forbidden pleasure. Ah, the magic of promotional psychology, higher-order pimp and gamble.

Lydia wants the Jaroslav for Mexico. Super rush. I inform Carlotta.

Yeah, she’s on my back, too. Gonna have to manage most of the fuckin’ show while she takes care of her rat-breeding passion, she spits.

Marian’s face registers a low-level failure of comprehension. Her mind is more at home with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

The shi-poos, I explain.

At that, she erupts into hearty glee. A mate for Mimi! The referent in this case is the fur ball Lydia carries in a basket lined with pink velveteen. The dog’s bangs are held erect with lilac satin bows. Named for Puccini’s consumptive heroine, her bark approximates the sound of an unoiled hinge.

An international exposition of the wretched little beasts, I further elucidate, at which Mimi the Moronic Mutt will be shown—

—and where a mutt butt is gonna be picked for her mate. Lydia will be farting around with toy dogs while I get stuck in a booth trying to promote the crap we publish, Carlotta bitches. "Aie! Ma quella mi rompe le balle!" With that, her Italian temper takes her elsewhere and Marian follows, predicting the eventual canonization of the Petrova pup, if Lydia has her way. She usually does.

A brief, near-monastic silence surrounds my desk, and I am free to return to editing the latest Cunningham manuscript. But the morning’s interruptions have carried me too far from Pavarotti’s pool, and I am thrown back upon the extreme weariness of discontent and ennui that has been dragging me down for months.

It was different, five years ago, when Kasimir was alive. Then, we published books on chamber music; piano composers; biographies of Brahms and Charles Ives; a jazz encyclopedia; a volume on the sociology of music in Viennese life. Not all of the One Hand Clapping commune was yet employed at P&P, the passageways still unencumbered by sobbing embraces, the stockroom free of open foreplay.

What am I doing in publishing, anyway? I started life as a pianist, a child prodigy tormented into performance, the very thing I loved destroyed for me by a mother bent on stardom. "She could have been the next Mozart!" Barbara will have it chiseled on my tombstone as a reminder to practice in hell. She will persuade Daddy to bury the Steinway with me, to make sure I do.

Instead of writing music, my pen recessed to poetry, a belittled pastime safe enough from familial judgment to afford a measure of indifference—forget approval. Verse has no status and rhyming brings in no gold. And so, condemned to editorial anomie, the shapeless dignity of genteel professionalism, I am sentenced to an ‘acceptable’ career that makes good copy in Alumni Notes.

So, blon-dee, wat you doin’ wit dat look so far-ay-way? She’s Jamaican ebony, cooler-than-cool.

Hey, Shevonne. I’m just thinking I’d like to make sausage out of Lydia and that nauseating animal that passes for a pet.

To-day she put a ban on de wearing of radios, came an’ shout at us about our ‘image,’ when no-bod-y can see us from de reception area any-way.

Oh, man. My disgust is not light.

I don’ care. She’s not goin’ to stop Shevonne. I hear de old bag shout-in at you too. But don’t you pay her no mind, Ashley. You know you are a bettuh person than she is any day.

Thanks. But I still have to work for her.

Why you got to work, anyway? I thought your fodder was a richman, and you getting’ married soon enough.

Yeah.

O, dat not de face of a woman goin’ to be a bride, like. You nervous? You goin’ to make a finewife and de best part is you probably quit P&P if I can tell anything about your young man. From de look of him, he can sure afford to pay de rent, mon.

I laugh in spite of myself. "That he can. But even if I leave here, I end up a young Westport matron with two-point-oh perfect children, my life a whirlwind of garden parties, brunches, teas, club concerts, sailing, golf, tennis, polo matches, the maid’s night off, winter in Palm Beach, and can I borrow the Mercedes dear? Barf!"

Maybe you want to live in Brooklyn like de rest of us, wokin’ two jobs to pay de rent and hopin’ your kids don’t get sick because who’s goin’ to pay for it.

"I know: Spoiled, ungrateful rich brat. But right now, all I can see is boredom from here to Alaska. No, not even that. It’s the waste of being predetermined, processed, bland—Velveeta."

People always tellin’ you what to do. You got to make up your own mind like Shevonne. The earphones still hug her head, crowded by the dreadlocks and sunglasses parked there. Jimmy Cliff, UB-40, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Burning Spear, and, oh yes, Prince Lincoln Thompson and the Royal Rastas. A strong, beautiful, licorice stick, Shevonne Powell, P&P’s Bookkeeper.

Well, back to my desk, get those invoices movin’ before dra-gon lady start shout-in’ again. She flicks her inch-long green-glitter nails at me, an incantation