“How did it come to you? How did you know that Terry was sitting on all of these bikes?”
“Just visiting the ranch, going horseback riding,” Kiser said.
I couldn’t envision this Kiser character and the ranch family son, Terry Tynan, trotting along together, enjoying a sunset jaunt.
“And Terry told you how he came into them?”
“Yeah, the Mexicans,” he said.
“Now they’re headed to restricted military bases all over the country.”
“Roger.”
The dispersal of Terry’s “swamp bikes,” I assumed, had everything to do with President Obama’s November 2009 order of a temporary “surge” in Afghanistan. Thirty thousand additional troops were being prepared for deployment at that moment. The common refrain was that few of these young Americans understood much, if anything, about their destination. I stepped around three-hundred-and-sixty-degrees, taking in the hyper-realistic training facility, and I couldn’t have named any one country the set might resemble. It had the flimsy and hodgepodge quality of a third-world fever dream.
In a window cut from a plywood facade about twelve feet up appeared what I took to be a mannequin insurgent. It wore a headdress and a baseball player’s goatee. Its skin was a coffee brown. On closer inspection, I noted its red-rimmed eyelids, furrowed eyebrows, and a gaze that looked both sad and irate. The figure held a grenade launcher that drooped like a macaroni noodle. There was another insurgent with the exact same face and goatee, the same belligerent stare, but this one was bald, his shirt burnt orange, and he held an AK-47 assault rifle. I couldn’t shake the comparison no matter how long I looked—the foam-sculpted insurgents reminded me of Yogi Bear, the chinless cartoon character; the furry one who loved picnic baskets, inhabited Jellystone, and was tailed by a sidekick named Boo Boo. On spring-loaded mounts, Yogi Bear popped up in windows proffering semiautomatic rifles and explosive devices. Soldiers in training were meant to obliterate Yogi Bear on sight.
“Excuse me for saying this, but the sets look kind of one-dimensional. Kind of shabby,” I said. “Are they convincing to soldiers?”
Kiser didn’t register insult in any way; on the contrary. He said, “We provide the sights, sounds, and smells of warfare, but like a TV show, the sets need to change quickly. The materials need to be light, and because they get damaged, they need to be cheap. It’s all down to the lessons Stu Segall learned in Hollywood. He’s the real patriot here. He doesn’t do all of this for the glory. He’s one of the good ones. I would take a bullet for the guy.”
This declaration of foxhole loyalty from an employee caught me off guard. “Are you former military too?” I asked.
“That’s a negative,” he said.
Kiser led me out of Baby Baghdad and into the broader studio lot. Suddenly, as if we’d walked through a curtain, I spotted studio workers commuting building to building on the saddles of bicycles. There were bikes leaning against fences, parked outside mobile office units. The workers of movie magic wheeled from one narrative into the next. In this way, I understood where at least a few of the serviceable bicycles of Baby Baghdad had slipped off to. They’d careened off the war set to other scenes and other lives. Later, I’d learn that many a worker desirous of a certain model had pedaled them homeward. The wounded, almost always, were left behind. Anyone skilled enough to fix a flat, I thought, would have made off with that pretty little Peugeot.
As we walked, Kiser busily explained some of the products that had emerged from their work in military and police training. One item was called a GETFO, which officially stood for Get Forces On/Off, but for people in the know it meant Get the Fuck Off. It was like the mobile version of a fireman’s pole that aided soldiers in exiting the seven-ton transporter trucks. It seemed simple, but in war contracting, he said, “branding is everything.” Another product was called a BUG-V, short for Ballistic Unmanned Ground Vehicle. This was a full-sized foam reproduction of a car, taxi, or light truck mounted on a remote-controlled undercarriage.
“The BUG-V can be used in various exercises: vehicle checkpoints, sniper training, or urban warfare,” Kiser asserted. “Soldiers can literally blow a BUG-V apart with up to fifty-caliber rounds, and after, just sweep up the little pieces.”
In person, the BUG-Vs looked awfully misshapen, as if they’d melted unevenly in the sun. Their spray-paint jobs furthered this perception by lending their soft surfaces the waxy, colored finish of a Spider-Man birthday cake. When the sad and angry coffee-brown foam insurgents were placed behind the wheel and sent rumbling across a desert landscape, I wouldn’t have known whether to laugh or to shoot.
Outside a big, open warehouse we encountered a head-high, onion-domed minaret, probably ten feet in diameter. It had been painted a vibrant Easter egg blue. The artifact would eventually cap a mock mosque in a mock village meant to replicate Islamabad—and was destined for who-knows-what base in backwoods America. At the moment, it was just a chunk of petrochemicals with its paint drying in a Southland parking lot.
Inside the warehouse, a few real-life artisans buzzed about a workplace full of woods, molds, and paints. It resembled a cabinet shop. One man wearing an army-green T-shirt and camouflage pants stood at a desk with a large, marbled side of beef set before him. At first glance, the meat looked blurry. This was because it was really foam. Taped to a board at the back of the desk were photos of real cuts of beef. The artist eyed the photos and used a delicate brush to apply the last strokes of rippling white fat. Impeccably detailed fake fish were laid side by side on beds of fake ice. There were crates of light green cabbages, dark cucumbers, brown potatoes, golden onions, and red peppers. White rice and black beans spilled from plywood platters. In a corner I spotted three Yogi Bears leaning, forgotten, against the shop’s fire extinguisher. Each possessed the same red-rimmed eyes and hackneyed face, but different beards. The human, mostly male artists followed Kiser’s tour with an ear and an eye, but worked as steadily as elves.
Kiser then led me into a back room that was absolutely packed with fake weaponry: Claymore mines stacked like plates, mortars like a pile of yams, grenades arranged like storefront pomegranates. Plastic AK-47s and M16s hung on racks covering an entire wall. I supposed a boy might have seen in that room a wonderland of playtime possibilities. It was if the weapons of green plastic army men had become, like boys eventually do themselves, fully grown. But the close quarters, the chemical smell, the sight of so many phony weapons destined for simulations of wars with ever-shifting endpoints and illusory goals became repellent. I stepped out of the warehouse.
Our last stop was a cluster of rooms that sometimes posed as an Iraqi restaurant, sometimes a hospital, and sometimes a meth lab. With a finger, Kiser lifted a teapot from a crate of them.
“Guys out there want too much money for, basically, junk,” he said, dropping the teapot. “When a contract says we need to buy two hundred beds, we need two hundred beds. The military doesn’t care if they look good, if they’re functional, if they smell. The contract will say two hundred; the auditor will look down the list and count the beds.”
“That’s why you went to Terry for the bikes?”
“We needed a lot of bikes cheap. They didn’t even need to roll.”
The conversation at the end of the tour had cycled back to the very beginning: just a bunch of bikes, dirt cheap. But there were still too many questions the bicycles could not answer for themselves. And grasping for grasping’s sake, I fired some of those questions on Kiser:
“Can you tell me the exact number of bicycles you purchased from Tynan, their makes and models, and on what dates? Do you know the price paid per unit, and what price was billed to the US government? Can you tell me what improvements, if any, were made? Can you tell me how, and how many, bicycles were shipped to each specific location? Is there any sort of retention rate, for the bicycles, at each of these facilities? Is Segall Productions responsible for resupplying bicycles should they roll out of these training exercises without au
thorization? Is there any way to track the bicycles if they do? Is there any sort of manifest as to the entirety of bicycles purchased by the studio and dispersed, for reasons of war preparation, around the nation and the world? How far, that you are aware of—how far, exactly, and for how long, can these border bikes travel?”
“Uh,” said Kiser, “you’re going to have to put that to the big man. Give him a try on Monday.”
21
Marta began to spend the majority of her free time with El Indio. And though this was perhaps normal for women dating at her age, the development came as something of a surprise to the family.
“My daughter never was the type to be getting boyfriends like the crazy girls out there today,” her mother said. “No, not at all. She was with her brother all the time.”
Roberto, while frank about missing the companionship of his former lieutenant, granted her access to his recruiters, the best in the city, as well as various crash pads he used to house migrants. Admittance to Roberto’s business infrastructure sharply escalated the numbers for the bicycle operation. But Marta’s acumen in the business was something special; she had a touch that couldn’t be replicated.
“More than anything,” Roberto noted, “this was El Indio’s big break.”
And on the job, Roberto couldn’t help but notice the chatter that pursued the young coyote. Established polleros would place important clients in his care, knowing his success rate and reputation for honesty. Plus, people just seemed to gravitate toward him. Of more importance to Roberto, however, was that El Indio had also become “the main topic of conversation at the house.”
New vehicles marked the gang’s rise and scale; so too did the number of unforeseen difficulties they encountered.
One day, Marta took the van to meet Juan, who, as they’d arranged, was waiting in the little Zona Norte room with nine migrants. When she arrived, eight of the pollos paced outside with looks of concern, while inside Juan argued with a young man in grubby jeans and a T-shirt. The young man stood in the corner, his hair disheveled and his eyes glassy. Juan stood closest to the door.
“What’s up with this guy? Is he on drugs?” Marta asked.
“I don’t know,” said Juan. “He thinks he’s being kidnapped.”
“Leave him here. We’ll take the others.”
“All right, but his contact checks out.”
“We don’t need it.”
“No, I have to cross,” the man said in a sudden reversal. “Please don’t leave me.”
“Do you still believe that you’re being kidnapped?” Marta asked.
“No,” he said.
“Can you calm down?” asked Juan. “If you can calm yourself, we’ll go. If not, you’re out.”
“I’m calm,” the man said. His breath seemed to be slowing.
Marta and Juan ushered the others into the van. The group avoided the disturbed youth. As an olive branch, Juan offered him the choice of the front bucket seat or the final spot on the bench. The man chose the latter, which caused his immediate neighbors to grimace.
Marta navigated the van out of the Zona and headed west on the International Road. She took a turn near Smuggler’s Gulch that led the group through a ramshackle slum and up a rise to the head of Los Laureles Canyon. Here the road descended into the oldest of the city’s western settlements. The track became thin. It followed a dry creek bed. Dwellings encroached on the road. The van was not going fast, maybe only twenty miles per hour, when the agitated pollo began yelling, “Let me out, let me out.”
The man lunged from his seat and pulled at Marta’s arm. Juan attempted to intervene. But the jerk of her arm caused the steering wheel to turn sharply right. Marta tried to brake but lost control, and the van and its riders careened into an irrigation ditch. The van tipped and its right side collided with the bank. The migrants were thrown on top of each other as the van came to rest at a forty-five-degree angle.
The man who caused the wreck was still clamoring. “Get off of me,” he yelled. Crumpled in the passenger seat, Juan looked to Marta. She was strapped in, but not completely alert. The driver’s side door above her was the only option for their exit. Juan shook Marta’s shoulder. Her eyelids blinked open.
“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.”
The Coyote's Bicycle Page 23
