From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant: A Novel
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Authors: Alex Gilvarry
FROM THE MEMOIRS
OF A NON-ENEMY
COMBATANT
Alex Gilvarry
VIKING
I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Hunter College and the generous Hertog Fellowship, and to the Norman Mailer Writers Colony. My sincerest thanks to Seth Fishman, my agent, for his smarts and dedication, and to Liz Van Hoose, my editor, a protector of words. Thank you to my friends and colleagues for their tireless support, to Dr. Juan and Selfa Peralta, and to Ashley Mears.
VIKING
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First published in 2012 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright © Alex Gilvarry, 2012
All rights reserved
Publisher’s Note:
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Gilvarry, Alex.
From the memoirs of a non-enemy combatant : a novel / Alex Gilvarry.
p. cm.
EISBN 978-1-1015-5431-9
1. Fashion designers—Fiction. 2. False arrest—Fiction.
3. Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3607.I4558F76 2012
813’.6—dc23
2011032993
Printed in the United States of America
Set in Bodoni Book Designed by Francesca Belanger
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
For Peter and Vilma Gilvarry
and for
Gloria Reyes
The Story of My Bathing Partner
FROM THE MEMOIRS
OF A NON-ENEMY
COMBATANT
With Footnotes and an Afterword
by Gil Johannessen
With the exception of footnote annotations, the author’s acknowledgments, the editor’s afterword, and a supplemental article included with permission, all material herein has been reprinted verbatim from the confession of Boyet R. Hernandez, composed from June through November 2006.
Since everything is in our heads, we had better
not lose them.
–Coco Chanel
The patsy of this wrenching tale would like to extend his thanks to several people without whom I would cease to exist.
To my editor, my dear, dear friend in exile, esteemed fashion editor at
Women’s Wear Daily
, my Virgil, my gondolier, my guide through a hell unimaginable—Gil Johannessen,
salamat
.
To Philip Tang, Rudy Cohn, and Vivienne Cho, oh those wild rooftop parties at the Gansevoort. To John Galliano and Rei Kawakubo for their whisperings in my ear. To Catherine Malandrino, you gave me color, you gave me life! To Coco, Yves, Karl, for their invention and their reinvention—the wheel on the bus was never the same again, yet round and round it goes.
I would be remiss if I did not mention my attorney, Ted Catallano, of Catallano & Catallano & Associates. (If it were not for Ted, where would I be today? Not in the figurative sense, but where would I be, physically? Perhaps in some black site in Egypt being waterboarded naked or slapped with menstrual blood while my interrogator takes a dump on a copy of the Qur’an. If my imagination seems a little graphic, for heaven’s sake, do pardon me, for I have been through a great ordeal.)
Before I lay into every U.S. government agency that has defiled me (DoD, DHS, ICE, INS, CIA, FBI) let me give a big
salamat
to the
New York Police Department, those strapping boys in blue, the true heroes. Never once did they cause me any grief.
For Abu Omar, Shafiq Raza, Moazzam Mu’allim, Hassan Khaliq, Dick Levine. Riad Sadat, for translating his poetry into English so that my heart could palpitate outside of Camp Delta. They took our imagination, but they couldn’t take our words.
For all at
OhCmonMove.org
.
To Lieutenant Richard Flowers, who I only met once, but whose small bungle set the world off its axis.
I would like to acknowledge playwright Michelle Brewbaker’s
The Enemy at Home or, How I Fell for a Terrorist
, to which this memoir is neither dedicated nor immune. Three acts of didactic rumor and defamation, soon to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux—shame on you.
For Olya, Anya, Dasha, Kasha, Masha, Vajda, Marijka, Irina, Katrina, etc.—the maddening dream of your bare white asses kept me alive.
To Ben Laden (no relation), my publicist, old Irish gelding in arms.
To the only people who will still have me! My purgatory and homeland—the Republic of the Philippines, where I was spat into this world, eight pounds two ounces, January 11, 1977, under martial law, the little dark bomb of Boyet Ruben Hernandez.
To you, dear reader, my life
is
in your hands.
To my enemies: It ends now.
—B. R. H.
Every man needs aesthetic phantoms
in order to exist.
—Yves Saint Laurent
I would not, could not, nor did I ever raise a hand in anger against America. I love America, the golden bastard. It’s where I was born again: propelled through the duct of JFK International, out the rotating doors,
push
,
push
, dripping a post—U.S. Customs sweat down my back, and slithering out on my feet to a curb in Queens,
breathe
. Then into a yellow cab, thrown to the masses. Van Wyck, BQE, Brooklyn Bridge, Soho, West Side Highway, Riverside Drive—these are a few of my favorite things!
My story is one of unrequited love. Love for a country so great that it has me welling up inside knowing it could never love me back. And even after the torment they’ve put me through—tossing me into this little cell in No Man’s Land—would you believe that I still hold America close to my heart? Stupid me, Boy Hernandez. Filipino by birth, fashion designer by trade, and terrorist by association.
So here I wait for my combatant status review. Not a college literary journal like the one my ex, Michelle, used to publish her poems in, but a real-life tribunal starring me…on trial for war crimes.
It’s true that I knew some very bad people. Though it is my opinion that everything must be digested in context. If I am to be released, as I have so often demanded, then hard facts contrary to my accuser’s egregious mistake must be presented in a clear
and chronological fashion. And so my special agent here has given me the chance to write out my true confession (to be used as formal evidence in my tribunal). A pen and legal pad have been provided to me. “Spare no detail. Leave nothing out” were my special agent’s instructions. “You can start with your arrival in America.”
According to the
New York
Post,
where I once graced the columns of Page Six—my name in bold, next to Zac Posen and Stella McCartney—I’m the “fashion terrorist.” An émigré candy ass turned hater of Americans and financier of terror. (My special agent has shown me select headlines from the moment I was extraordinarily rendered here. The papers really think I’m their man.) I was a fiction from the beginning. We see only what we want to see, do we not? And when what we want to see isn’t there, we create it. Tah-dah! If I could somehow put all the pieces of my “secret life” together according to what’s been said about me in the tabloids, it would go something like this:
Fed up with being the immigrant turd that gets flushed over and over and won’t go down, Boy Hernandez finally worked up the nerve to take aim at America. Be it the White House, the Empire State Building, or a Boeing 747 out of Newark bound for Tallapoosa, Missouri.
1
Big-ass, bald-faced, barbed-wire lies.
My first day in America, September 13, 2002, was the most eye-opening day of my life. I never had any foul intentions, especially toward the city that took me into her unbiased arms, wrapped me up in her warm September skin, and gave me a big maternal smooch.
Mwah!
New York City was a utopia.
By contrast there was Manila, my hometown. I grew up on the north end in a wealthy suburb. Tobacco Gardens, corner of Marlboro and Kools (no kidding). Though I didn’t come from tobacco money. My parents had a private practice, which made us middle-class at best. Hernandez y Hernandez, Ear, Nose, and Throat. I left the suburbs at seventeen to attend fashion school at FIM.
2
It was there that I began to choke on my own city’s mistakes—the crowded motorways, barrios, dirt, and smog gave me a bad case of acne and an all-consuming desire to get the hell out of there. And Manila was no place for a serious designer of women’s wear. One had to go to New York or London. After graduation, I couldn’t imagine staying put. What is it that they say? Home is where you hang yourself.