When my close friend of nearly two decades, the celebrated New York Times reporter Anthony Shadid, died suddenly last week of an asthma attack while crossing the border from Syria into Turkey, the plethora of tributes to him over the course of the next day helped me overcome the shock. Still, as someone who knew Anthony well and shared so many things in common, I could not help but think of what was left out of the portraits drawn by his colleagues in the media business.
Perhaps I can illustrate a small part of this—as Anthony no doubt would—through a story.
Late one Sunday night in January of 1996, Anthony and I met up in his rented flat in central Cairo to hatch a plan to watch the Super Bowl. It was before Cairo was very plugged in at all, so our prospects weren`t great. But we had heard rumors of Super Bowl watching parties at one or more of the big hotels, so we started with them. When nothing turned up at the first two we called, I felt discouraged, but my journalist friend`s instincts for investigation kicked in. Before I knew it, two eccentric and rather reckless American photographers had joined us to help in the quest, (Anthony always seemed to have wild photographers in his orbit), and although they both seemed to be quite drunk that did not stop them from pouring us all more drinks. Anthony and I were both embarrassed when they began to call more hotels in some sort of patois that they imagined to be pidgin Arabic, and we were relieved when they settled on another strategy. One of them had an Egyptian friend with a much coveted (and rare at the time) super-deluxe satellite dish. He lived not too far away, but he hadn`t been answering his phone earlier. Now, with renewed effort, they found him at home, and—as soon as we picked up more drinks—we were off for an overnight, impromptu Super Bowl watching party.
Our host was a young, professional looking Egyptian in a sweater vest, who occupied a couch to the left of the large screen. He had just come back from work as a producer on a live late night Arabic television show, and when I expressed guilt about intruding on him so late, he waved off my worries. It was the holy month of Ramadan during which he fasted all day, so staying up at night afforded him a chance to eat and rehydrate, he explained. Meanwhile on a couch on the other side of the television, the photographers had started rolling each other joints. Surrounded thusly by piety and debauchery, Anthony and I enjoyed from the middle couch the first close Super Bowl in many years. I still remember Anthony`s smile of pleasure, a mark of his joie de vivre, throughout the evening as he alternatively engaged his fellow journalists, talked local politics and local media with our host, and consumed one of his great passions: American football. By the time the game ended, dawn was breaking and I was faint from the haze of our adventure, from lack of sleep, and from seeing the team I had watched as a boy—the Dallas Cowboys—pull out a last minute victory. Anthony was probably not much better off, but—intrepid and indefatigable friend that he was—he agreed to walk with me down to the bridge across the Nile that led to the neighborhood where I lived, and we bid each other good "night" a few feet from soldiers who had stood guard all night at a checkpoint on the bridge, the last sobering image from a dizzying evening.
I don`t think I have another friend with whom I could have shared that Fellini-esque evening. Anthony and I were both early-career Arabs from the Southwestern US living in Cairo. We both worked full-time and paid for extra Arabic lessons to perfect our long-lost ancestral tongue. Our interests were diverse, and we were both happy to spend an evening smoking hookah and discussing Middle East policy with young Egyptian activists and then cap it off with a late-night run for French fries at an American fast-food restaurant. All our common interests make it perhaps unfair of me to point out small things about Anthony that last week`s obituaries never mentioned. Anthony`s reading tastes spanned from academic tomes—by Daniel Yergin about energy or Hanna Batatu about Iraq—but equally to a tell-all ghost-written memoir by Dennis Rodman. He was fanatical about spaghetti westerns—the original ones with Clint Eastwood, directed by Sergio Leone—and he loved the old British sitcom Fawlty Towers. His opinion of Sophia Coppola`s performance in Godfather III was pronounced, and he always had something to say about one of his great avocational passions: the Green Bay Packers.
Of course, I understand that most would agree these are not the things that made Anthony famous, and so they have no real place in his obituary, but I am not so sure. The last time I saw Anthony was three months ago when he came to Houston to speak. On that occasion in a workshop with students and faculty here, he stated his belief that the moment of enlightenment rested in the granular detail of stories. In the years after Super Bowl XXX, Anthony would go on to tell enlightening stories about Iraq, Palestine, his native Lebanon, and the Arab Spring. In the aftermath of the September 11th attacks and the US invasion of Iraq when the American perception of the Arab became unstable, his steady-voiced stories intervened. With his untimely death that seemed to come at the height of his influence, we who were close to him cannot distinguish between our mourning for the stories he lived and our mourning for the stories he will not write.