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.