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The World Bank

Beth kneels on the edge of the bed, re-counting her American money and finding again only five hundred-dollar bills where there had been seven. She leans over, nearly toppling off the sloping mattress, to ferret underneath the mahogany night stand, but comes up only with handfuls of dense brown dust.

Global Villager

An Interview With Pico Iyer

America the notion is still very different from America the nation. What’s touching and almost regenerative is that, whatever is happening in the real America — where the murder rate is worse than Lebanon’s, and there is homelessness and poverty — America is still a shorthand throughout the world for everything that is young and modern and free. One interesting thing is that Mick Jagger, the Beatles, Reebok, pizza, enchiladas — everything that is hip and desirable — are all regarded as American no matter what their true origins.

The Corner Store

A man in a stained shirt and dirty brown pants stumbles out of a mud-brick building, fiddling with his zipper. Giggling, but sober, he shuts his fly and fishes a cigarette from his breast pocket. Approaching a woman grilling brochettes over a fire, he places a hand on her thigh and swipes a skewer of meat from the grill. The woman doesn’t move or speak, just clucks her tongue disapprovingly.

Decline Of The Lawrence Welk Empire

I get a postcard from a place called Paradise, and on the back is a note from an old friend that says, “Free lunch under the coconut trees.” It is the season of disco and dope smoking, of long, ramshackle cars built by cocaine addicts in Michigan, of oil embargoes and promiscuity and awful haircuts, and I look around at the girls and boys in their platform shoes and bell bottoms and everybody divorced or pregnant or stoned or listening to disco and scratching their VD sores, and I know the world is coming to an end, so I call United Airlines and order a one-way ticket to Paradise.

Perry

Perry was just another scrubby desert town tucked behind a minor highway — to us it was a highway; to the state it was a tired dirt road that had been paved in an election year and forgotten.

Accidents

A Vietnam Diary

One of the more shocking things about Vietnam is the number of people with serious war-related injuries: a woman with her face half burned away, men without legs, children with significant birth defects due to fetal exposure to Agent Orange, which remained in the food chain long after the fighting had stopped. Yesterday I counted seven people. Today I counted four more.

The Laundromat

Impetigo

In the summer of 1958, the summer before I started kindergarten, my family — my mother; my father; my sister, Marie; my mother’s mother; and I — took its first and last family vacation.

Sunbeams

I never get lost because I don’t know where I’m going.

Zen master Ikkya