I climbed onto George's motorbike and sat behind him, and we drove down the main streets where bombs fell, where Saudi diplomats had once picked up French prostitutes, where ancient Greeks had danced, Romans had invaded, Persians had sharpened their swords, Mamluks had stolen the villagers' food, crusaders had eaten human flesh, and Turks had enslaved my grandmother.

We sucked the locals' wealth, and offered their daughters as gifts. You see, no one liked us, but they all needed us. And then it happened, that day when the poor walked barefoot into the city, with guns and machetes in their hands, and chased us out of our penthouses. They stumbled over our long chairs, defecated in our mosaic pools, snapped our argilahs (pipes) in half, camped in our marbled saloons with large windows that looked over their primitive villages, their shanty towns that we never noticed, their running sewage that we never smelled, their chocolate-skinned sisters whose bellies we used as pillows, whose pale palms we used as towels for our Semitic semen, for our sweating foreheads behind circled walls and guardian dogs.