The Coyote's Bicycle (31 page)

“Are you okay?”

“Yes,” she said. “I think so.”

“Can you open your door?”

“No,” she said with effort, “it's too heavy like this.”

Juan unbuckled and, standing on the door beneath, he helped Marta unbuckle herself and open the driver's door. Then he supported her as she crawled out of the van.

“Is everybody okay?” Juan asked the others.

The erratic migrant began scuffling with those on top of him.

“You,” Juan said, pointing at the visible portion of the man's face. The crazy
pollo
became wide-eyed and quiet. “How about everybody else?” Juan asked. “All right, I'm going to get out. Help each other and follow me.”

Then Juan emerged from the van. Marta looked shaken. “Are you hurt in any way?” he asked.

“No,
nada
,” she said.

The migrants began climbing out of the van and Juan stepped back to help them. He also helped the crazy man. “You need to get out of here,” he said, “before the boss finds out. None of us will be able to help you.”

But the man sat down on the tilted van. He put his head in his hands.

Marta collected herself with resolve. She addressed the
pollos
: “Listen up, we're going to walk the rest of the way. It's not far. Whatever your needs are, we can attend to them there. If you still want to cross, you can do that as well.”

The group gathered and walked down the hill. Marta was in charge again. Juan noted only a slight tremor in her gait.

22

“Sure, I've used the bicycles,” said Tarek Ahmad Albaba. “They don't always work that well, but you can mess around on them.” As an actor and role player for Stu Segall Productions' war subsidiary, Strategic Operations, Albaba had traveled to bases like Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and Fort Bliss, Texas, among others. “And yes,” he said, “the bikes were always there when we arrived.”

In the days after my visit to the Baby Baghdad on Ruffin Road, calls made to higher-ups at Segall Productions yielded little result. While dialing, my mind's eye pictured the yellowed parchments of their purchase and shipping records—and tangible answers to my questions block-printed upon them. I believed that an agreeable chat might result in access to those numbers. But I spoke only to a receptionist and then to answering machines. In the absence of an official response from the brass, I altered strategy. I decided to go looking for the hirelings who'd actually handled the bicycles—the people who'd wheeled and pedaled them—realizing en route that these were the very people I had been wanting to talk to all along. Like me, they were simple witnesses standing on the banks of a strange river.

Albaba and I shared mutual friends, and I knew that he'd worked at some sort of training facility on account of a story traded casually
among our peer group—that, while role-playing as an Iraqi insurgent, he'd been attacked by a squad of marine recruits and knocked unconscious with the butt of an assault rifle. On coming around, he was said to have possessed the presence of mind to verbally disabuse the greenhorns as to the difference between role-play and reality. I'd heard the story before becoming aware of Strategic Operations, before I knew of Eric Kiser or even Terry Tynan. I gave Albaba a call on the off chance that his role-play had occurred at Segall Productions—as well as the improbability that he knew anything, anything at all, about the swamp bikes. And as it turned out, Albaba had ridden them for both fun and profit in distant states. He'd already been privy to some studio discussion about my inquiries. Citing our mutual friendships, he agreed to meet.

At twenty-seven, Albaba was handsome and athletically built. His parents had immigrated to the United States from Lebanon and Palestine, and had prospered. And now Albaba's own dreams of writing and producing films appeared to be coming to fruition. I met him at an airy office space—his first—astride a San Diego fishing wharf. He welcomed me in and we sat with a view of the docks, boats, and pelicans. I took out a voice recorder and placed it on the table—something, admittedly, I wouldn't have done in Mexico. The effect is often the same as withdrawing a camera only to watch smiles fade into strained simulations. Eyeing the device, Albaba described the interconnected nature of making TV and films in this backwater satellite of Los Angeles. It was a small pond. He intended to offer his contacts, as a friend—but times were tough, I should know, and jobs could disappear. “That's my only thing,” he said.

About himself, however, Albaba proved exceedingly open. So I asked if there was any veracity to the story I'd heard about his being knocked unconscious by an overly enthusiastic recruit. He didn't answer directly, but instead began to speak about his hometown, Charlotte, North Carolina. His family was well integrated into the
community there. They'd assimilated and built relationships. On the success of a family auto shop, the family had traveled the United States and a bit abroad. In high school Albaba played for an elite soccer team, and felt every bit the American teen he was. Then the Twin Towers were attacked. In the aftermath, slurs rained down on the family by the “shit ton.” He remembered soccer games in which opposing fans and parents screamed “terrorist” in his direction. “It was a traumatic experience,” he said—something he chalked up to being surrounded by nowheresville hicks. So upon graduating, Albaba wanted to get out to the liberal, tolerant West Coast. He wanted to try his hand in show business. He got an agent, and a bit of paid work. Otherwise, he filled in as an extra whenever he could. Then Albaba's agent sent him out for a different kind of role: playing an insurgent at Segall Productions.

“They told me they were looking for Arabic-looking, Arabic-speaking actors, or whatever, and the pay was decent,” Albaba said. “It is acting. You are acting an Iraqi villager. And anything you can do to hone those skills and increase experience—that's where my head was at.”

On the set, the difference between role-play and on-camera work was emphasized: there were no set lines of dialogue, and improvisation from scene to scene was not only encouraged but also essential. If stopped by a soldier, an actor could submit to arrest, or flee, or fight.

“You were allowed to get into it with the marines,” Albaba said. “I was young and felt strong. I had martial arts and wrestling in my background. So when they said I could play, I really did play. I mean, I tossed some marines on their asses. You would hear superiors getting pissed off at the soldiers.”

It was role-play, Albaba said, but he added soberly, “I really am Arab, and they really are soldiers.” He heard epithets like
towelhead
,
haji
, and
sand nigger
thrown around. “I was reminded of high school,
and those same seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds who have that view—and here they are now, going to war. It was scary to me. I knew that once they got to Iraq, they weren't going to treat the people with respect.”

The premise of the scenario in question was that a knife had been discovered in one of the village “units.” It could have been a bunker, or it could have been a house. The villagers/insurgents were either to submit to arrest and further searches or resist. Albaba found himself with a short file of marines coming at him. He could have easily raised his hands and surrendered. But he grabbed the first soldier by the pack straps and threw him to the ground. The man didn't pop to his feet as Albaba expected he might and Albaba realized the military gear the soldier wore was too heavy. So Albaba used the same technique on two following men, but now the first was up, which caught his attention, just long enough for a fourth soldier to strike Albaba with a rifle butt in the back of the head. The actor went down, but would not admit that he was out.

“These were trained marines; if I took down a few of them, it definitely felt like some sort of victory,” he said. “But it was getting to the point where it was starting to hurt. They had full gear. I just stopped. It wasn't worth it.”

Albaba stepped away from role-play but continued to cycle back to Stu Segall Productions for various gigs. He wanted to emphasize that as the “Shock and Awe” portion of the Iraq conflict evolved into the “Hearts and Minds” phase, the demeanor and professionalism of the troops improved, as did the sets. The bikes, for various reasons, seemed instrumental in creating that common ground. People on bikes, pedaling to market, are the same everywhere.

Albaba and I talked at length about his life and work before I got around to a question that had been needling me. “Why the company resistance to my interest in used bicycles?” I asked. “Is there some national security concern?”

“Well, kind of,” he said. “They bought those bikes under the table. There's no paperwork. They didn't even know where they came from. They could be hot, probably are. And then, the studio is selling those bikes to the United States government.”

In fact, they were selling them with an impressive margin. Tynan kept his best finds and sold the serviceable ones at the swap meet for twenty bucks apiece, which was still a fantastic deal for a reliable set of wheels. But then, through his connection with Kiser, he sold third-rate bikes in bulk to the studio. Segall Productions sold each of these as set dressing to various branches of the military. They were Tynan's worst bikes. And Albaba was right: they had most likely been stolen at some point. But that was not their exact status when Tynan raked them out of fields and trenches. The only crime was abandonment and existing without papers. It struck me that, with shocking speed, the border bikes had been transformed from America's stolen goods and joyrides into pennies-on-the-pound police auction fodder, then transnational contraband, then swamp trash, then something akin to the infamous $640 government-contracted toilet seats—all with little to no change in their actual appearance or operational mechanics. I realized the price of a bike has nothing to do with its ride, purpose, technology, or age. It has to do with to whom, where, and under what circumstances it is sold. It has to do with hearts and minds.

Stu Segall was well known for refusing interviews and shunning publicity. His stance may have been due to the proprietary nature of his business, or even legal troubles and controversies drummed up on the lot. But his past was almost certainly a factor. It had been described as “spicy” by the local press. Employees used the words “shadowy” and “dark.” Just about every production shooting south of Los Angeles ran a portion of its business out of the Segall lot, for logistical reasons. It possessed all of the necessary equipment, as well as links to local talent and the trades. Further, the San Diego market
wasn't big enough to go after, so there was little fear of competition from LA's major players. In effect, Segall Productions was the only consistent movie gig in town—and from what I'd gathered, the boss ran it that way. The lack of competition was felt primarily by the workers. They got experience on his lot, but they also got suppressed wages and no job security. In exchange, their loyalty was demanded. For good reason, few with ties to the studio talked out of turn. Yet each knew some piece of Segall's personal story.

Born just after Christmas in 1944, Segall hailed from the small seaside town Swampscott, Massachusetts. Before graduating from high school in the early '60s, he split for Los Angeles, where he enrolled in community college and took odd jobs. The transition from small-town New England to the booming liberal metropolis must have been an exhilarating one. Segall drove a forklift, among other gigs. But his most pivotal engagement during this period was a three-year stint working as a private detective. The job was an education; it seemed to give the young transplant confidence, and further, it turned out to be a chip shot into the movie business. As Segall told Bryan Senn, the author of
The Most Dangerous Cinema: People Hunting People on Film
, “I used to be a private investigator. And I ran into a guy through a mutual female friend who was a makeup artist in tittie movies, the T&A business. He was fascinated by me being an investigator, and I was fascinated by what he did.”

What the guy, Ray Sebastian, did was put makeup on naked people who were preparing to have or simulate sex. Sebastian soon invited Segall to act as his assistant makeup artist on a production featuring a number of well-endowed women, and now it was Segall's turn to enhance their body parts. “You know, you have them lined up on tables, and you just went down this line and you put makeup on these girls.”

According to Senn, Segall continued taking gigs as a makeup artist but he also filled other film set positions like “grip” and
“generally doing whatever needed doing on a low budget movie set.” A book titled
History of X: 100 Years of Sex on Film
claimed that Segall got his start “as a porn actor working for Ted Paramore,” aka Harold Lime, a writer and producer whom Segall worked with in other capacities. Whatever the route to his decision, Segall told Senn that he took a figurative look around and concluded,
I think I can do this
. And on borrowed funds, Segall made his own movie in 1969. With that title,
Harvey
, Segall took up the director's chair just in time to meet what critics now consider the Golden Age of Porn.

In a hint at what was to come, the dawn of the 1970s saw a couple of productions that featured explicit sex and also received widespread release. But in 1972, when
Deep Throat
premiered at New York's New World Theater, the film was met by cultural forces that vaulted it into a phenomenon. Tagged as “porno chic,” it was at once conflated with sexual liberation and the target of obscenity trials, the coverage of which only heightened its notoriety. Forty-eight weeks after release,
Deep Throat
still ranked in the top ten of box-office revenues. Then, in 1973, the United States Supreme Court narrowed its definition of obscenity from “utterly without socially redeeming value,” to the current standard delivered in
Miller v. California
: that which lacks “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” With increased production values, plots, and even character development, the creators of pornographic films could now argue that their products included artistic merit. Suddenly, the nation's thicket of local and national anti-obscenity laws and prohibitions was cut back, which greatly expanded the genre's potential audience. This led to bigger budgets and more creative license. The movies were now shot on 35 mm film, were shown in sit-down theaters, and every major city included a boulevard that crammed a string of such theaters into a marquee-studded parade.