“But when [his words were] projected by that marvelous voice—together with a wicked smile and naughty, flashing eyes—they soared to new heights to delight friends and terrify foes.”
I arrive at the Bombay Club restaurant at noon, per the arrangement. It is a beautiful, mild day in Washington, sunny but not too warm, probably in the late summer but possibly spring. Under the circumstances, it’s hard to be certain. He’s already there. Christopher Hitchens, my dear friend, is sitting at one of a small cluster of outside tables. There aren’t any other customers yet, but, I think, it’s early. Still, this has the feel of a Lafayette Square weekend, not a bustling workday.
I know the Bombay Club and its immediate surroundings intimately. My office was located in the same building—815 Connecticut Avenue—for seven years and then directly across the street for another four. I am somehow quite sure that it’s Saturday, though for some reason I do not know it, exactly. Even more strangely, the Bombay Club doesn’t serve lunch on Saturdays. Yet here we are. Christopher—it’s never “Chris,” and although I never made that mistake I saw people who did be corrected gently and not-so-gently, depending on various factors. As I approach, I can see he’s already smoking and has gotten a drink. At a glance I can tell that, as usual, it’s Johnnie Walker Black, with just a splash of water. Uncanny as it is to see him, I grin broadly. I’ve missed him desperately, and this is a rare, unexpected opportunity to reconnect. As I get closer, he sees me, too, and beams.
When I arrive at the table, he rises to greet me. We approach each other and, as always, exchange a long hug and two lingering kisses on each cheek. I’m nonplussed to see him, because, of course, he passed away years ago. He seems much less confused about all this than I do, though. On the contrary, he’s relaxed and, as usual, appears to have everything under control. “Christopher—” I begin to say. He interrupts me: “Oh my dear . . .” I begin to struggle for some broad, existential remarks, but again he stops me, deliberately turning the conversation in a more familiar and quotidian direction. “I hope you don’t mind sitting outside, dear boy,” he drawls, “but this smoking repression seems to have gotten rather worse since I’ve been away. Had the devil of a time convincing them to let me puff a little ciggy out here, let alone in there.” He waves in the direction of the restaurant’s interior.
When the smoking ban in Washington’s restaurants started, it had been a real blow to Hitch, a passionate smoker who dined out frequently. One of his solutions was to convince old haunts in which he was a known and valued quantity to figure out how to make an exception for him. The Bombay Club used to put him in or near a private room, but, he says, this time they had only grudgingly agreed he could discreetly smoke at an outdoor table. Frankly, I was surprised they had even granted that. Since there were no other customers seated outside yet, there was also no one to complain, so that obviously made it easier. “I see you people haven’t yet appropriately addressed the smoking question,” he observes, in a mocking and semi-accusatory tone.
We sit at a table in the shade, enjoying the sunny, mild early afternoon. He looks wonderful. Christopher has returned appearing as he was just before he fell ill, a robust, slightly puffy, but oddly youthful and even cherubic middle-aged man. When he was sick, at least in my presence, he never lost spirit, lucidity, or determination. But he lost his hair, a vast amount of weight, almost all his energy, and most of the sparkle in his eye. That was all back now, somehow.
Even his sonorous, mellifluous speaking voice—one of the most potent weapons in his formidable personality arsenal and one that could seduce or demolish with equal efficacy and speed—which had suffered so greatly during the latter parts of his illness, was back in all its majestic, resonant glory. His words were invariably superbly crafted, and in writing he’d been one of the great nonfiction stylists of his generation. But when projected by that marvelous voice—together with a wicked smile and naughty, flashing eyes—they soared to new heights to delight friends and terrify foes.
He lit another cigarette, drawing on it deeply and exhaling in evident satisfaction. “Still smoking, I see,” I observe, recalling how, even when he was very ill, both Christopher and his wife, Carol, used to “sneak” cigarettes when the other supposedly wasn’t paying attention or aware, swearing third parties like me to a faux secrecy that didn’t really exist and wasn’t needed. He grunted, plainly enjoying the cigarette. “Do you smoke”—I ask, struggling for words—“where you . . . are?” He shakes his head vigorously from side to side. “Sorry, dear boy, can’t get into any of that. You know that.” I suppose I did. But I had to ask. There’s almost no doubt that smoking had contributed to Christopher’s cancer, but there was no point in bringing that up now. Many things had contributed, including drinking and, of course, genetics, since his father died of the same cancer, though at a much more advanced age.
The double doors of the elegant Indian restaurant open, and out floats the suave, graceful Turkish maître d’ in his always impeccable dark suit. Funny, I think, he hasn’t worked here for years. But things were now not as they are, but as they should be, or might have been.
“Greetings, Mr. Hussein,” the maître d’ purrs, as emollient and deferential as ever. Before I can order, Christopher points at his own tumbler and says, “I’ll have another of those.” I say I’ll have a coffee. “Coff-coffee? Coffee???” Hitch sputters incredulously, choking on the last drops of his rapidly disappearing dram of Johnnie Walker. “Oh, come now!” I explain that I haven’t been drinking much these days. He reiterates, as he has insisted many times before, that periods of abstinence are not only useful but also essential to the truly committed drinker. However, he tells me, I could and should make this meeting an exception because, as he somewhat cryptically puts it, “no harm can come of it, I assure you.”
I relent and order a glass of champagne. “That’s more like it,” Christopher says with some satisfaction. “Now, would you like it served room temperature, as usual?” I assure him that I prefer it cold, indeed ice-cold. In his company I had been willing to drink large amounts of bubbly unchilled, because, while he usually had champagne, like most other forms of fine potable alcohol, readily at hand, it usually wasn’t already chilled, and I wasn’t willing to wait. Carol, who was often the only other person joining me in preferring sparkling wines over anything else, frequently repeated the comforting conceit that the French somehow prefer to drink champagne at room temperature, the same way the English really do like bitter beer cool but not cold. I knew that wasn’t true, and she probably did as well, but, like many a dubious factoid, it served its purpose.
Christopher explains that he’s already ordered a number of dishes because he knows what he wants.
“You know, the usual . . . tandoori chicken, rogan josh, various tikas, chicken biryani with loads of that yogurt stuff, plenty of naan, lots and lots of mango chutney, and, oh yes, that splendid yellow daal. Thank God they’ve got that. I’m not keen on the brown muck, as you know,” he explains. He urges me to get anything else I might want, but I tell him it sounds perfect, except that “I would like some brown muck, thanks,” and I order a portion of their excellent dal makhni. The waiter serving us is an affable, thin Moroccan who always speaks to me in barely comprehensible Maghrabi Arabic, and it occurs to me that he hasn’t worked there for years either.
I look at Christopher carefully, and it really is the old Christopher back again, inexplicably in the flesh. “We’ve really missed you,” I say, somewhat hesitantly. He snorts. “I should think you have. You’re making a proper mess of things back here, aren’t you? A real pig’s breakfast . . . No, I’m afraid you’ve really let the side down this time.” “It’s not my fault,” I protest. “I did my best. I’m not sure what more I could have done. The country—” He interrupts, waving aside any suggestion of advice, “Not having to participate in such sanctimony and squalor is one of the advantages of my present circumstances. Worked hard to get here,” he drawls languidly. “Came by it honestly, too. Not giving that part up for love or money, dear boy.”
There was a clear understanding, achieved in the same occult and enigmatic way that the lunch itself had been, for want of a better word, “arranged,” that the circumstances and details of his current existence—if any—were not to be discussed at all during this unexpected and inexplicable new conversation. The experience, I was given to understand in a manner that I cannot lucidly describe now and which I am sure will always remain ineffable, was contingent on accepting the mystery and unresolved, unknowable character it was bound to have. At what, if any, level this lunch and the whole experience was “real,” or this figure was or was not in any meaningful sense Christopher Hitchens, or what is implied about anyone other than myself, were all questions that wouldn’t really be addressed, let alone resolved, at the lunch or in the account of it here. But I couldn’t resist wanting to broach the topic anyway.
Helpfully, just then the food arrives, looking familiar but particularly delectable. Another round of drinks is ordered, naturally, but with Christopher switching to red wine, and we tuck into the charcoal-grilled meats and steaming, unctuous curries. After a minute or two he looks up in great satisfaction and asks, “Why does anyone ever eat anything else?” He plainly means it literally. I knew how much he, like many Brits, adored Indian food in general, and appreciated the Bombay Club in particular.
As Christopher got sicker and became increasingly less inclined or able to get out much, I would frequently get big bags of Hitchens family favorites—although the restaurant is an elegant, white-linen affair rather than a takeaway joint—carefully packed to go and deliver them to his Kalorama apartment around suppertime. By that stage, he wasn’t eating much, sometimes virtually nothing. But this gave him the option, and everyone else who was with him had to eat, too, and no one wanted to cook much. At this uncanny new lunch, between big bites, long gulps, and endless puffs—sometimes all three magically and mystifyingly combined, just like in the good old days—he tells me that he’d really missed “this sort of thing.” But he then shoots me a penetrating glare that said, in wordless but no uncertain terms, that I wasn’t to inquire further into any of that.
Lunches were always an important feature, and frequent setting, of our friendship. It was only well into our friendship that I learned just how important some of his own regular youthful lunches, as recounted in his excellent memoir, Hitch-22, and elsewhere, with a group he called the “Demon Lunchers of Fleet Street” had been to the formation of his mature persona, worldview, and style. The informal gang that lunched on Fridays in London in the 1970s included Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, James Fenton, Robert Conquest, Mark Boxer, Clive James, Peter Porter, Craig Raine, and Terry Kilmartin, among others, sometimes even including Kingsley Amis and Anthony Powell. Now that’s a lunch. And Hitch had been part of it, for years. There’s no doubt that these lunches were a key to his informal training and ad hoc education in his early professional years. For Hitch and these others, the usually quotidian mid-day meal could, and did, assume meanings, depths, and heights that the rest of us can only imagine.
Hitch and I first encountered each other at what began as a lunch but took on a life of its own in an organic but remarkable manner that defined a good deal of our evolving camaraderie. Christopher and I met shortly after I arrived in Washington, DC, in the fall of 1998, an obscure and unknown “all-but-dissertation” graduate student serving as communications director and spokesperson for an only slightly less obscure and unknown Arab American civil rights group. My predecessor in that job, Sam Husseini, had been skillfully researching the bombing of a medicine factory in Sudan by the Bill Clinton administration in response to the Al Qaeda attack against the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen. Christopher had contacted him in the course of researching what was eventually titled No One Left to Lie To, his brutal and brilliant evisceration of the Clintons, which one of the book’s various subtitles describes as “the worst [as opposed to the first] family.”
Being an honorable man, Sam apparently felt it was part of his role to acculturate me to Washington and make sure that I met a few interesting people before he totally disappeared. “How would you like to join me for lunch with Christopher Hitchens tomorrow?” he had nonchalantly asked. I tried to maintain the general atmosphere of sangfroid with an equally casual “sure,” but, in fact, I was thrilled. I’d long admired Hitchens’s speaking and writing in general, and his iconoclasm and take-no-prisoners style in particular.
I went to the lunch as a third wheel and, initially at least, tried to be respectful of the fact that the whole point was for Christopher to interview Sam to help build the case against the attack on the factory. So, during the first half hour of the meeting, I kept reasonably quiet, but that didn’t last long. During the second half hour, I abandoned my shell pretty completely, and the literary allusions, snide and snarky comments, crude humor, and militant iconoclasm were flowing as freely as the drinks.
It appeared to me that what had, for Christopher, begun as a pleasant though somewhat tedious chore had turned into some good fun. I admired the man but hadn’t expected to hit it off with him so immediately and powerfully. After about an hour and fifteen minutes, Sam—who had long since faded from a conversation that was rapidly moving away from anything in which he was even remotely interested, and which had now, for instance, turned to the relative merits of various lesser-known P. G. Wodehouse novels—politely but dryly observed that he’d better head back to his office in the National Press Club building on Fourteenth Street. Christopher and I both thought we might be able to choke back one or two more cups of the needful, particularly since his publisher would be paying for this “vital research project.”
The restaurant, La Tomate, was just down the street from Christopher’s apartment, just behind the “Reagan Hilton,” so-called by many Washingtonians because of the attempted assassination that had taken place there in 1981. We were exulting in the company, the food, and the conversation when, just before five in the evening, Carol and their daughter, Antonia, walked by and spotted us. They joined us for about half an hour, the first of countless times I was to enjoy their company (as I still do). But at our first meeting, when it was almost 6:00 p.m., and the then very young daughter needed her supper and bedtime, Carol took Antonia home amid a mixture of pleasantries and Christopher’s promises to be along “very shortly.”
Four hours later, around 10:00 p.m., she called him up and told him that he had been talking and drinking with me for almost ten hours and that was probably enough. He somewhat sheepishly explained that family life could occasionally prove somewhat constricting. After we briefly chortled over the scandalous size of the bill we’d racked up for his publisher, he staggered up Connecticut Avenue toward home while I stood at the corner flapping my arms around in hopes a taxi driver might take pity on me.
I’d had hangovers before, of course. Many of them much worse. But hangovers were frequent, indeed typical, consequences of evenings with Christopher, and these had their own special characteristics. Because Christopher was generous with drinks and kept a well-stocked bar, not only was ample, and perhaps even excessive, consumption typical, but also an arguably ill-advised mixing of various distillations and fermentations of the juice of the grape and the grain could be hard to avoid. On most occasions, I made no effort to avoid it, knowing full well the probable consequences. But Hitchens-induced hangovers tended, at least for me, to be strikingly free from the ghoulish specters of regret, recrimination, and remorse that haunt so many other mornings after.
Less than a week after our extended introduction I received my first invitation to a dinner at Christopher’s home. The first of many, it solidified what was an already rapidly developing friendship.
Many years later, only a week or so before he was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer (as he pointed out, “What’s most significant about stage four is that there is no stage five,”) after a terrible incident in New York, he once again demonstrated his enormous friendship at another key lunch meeting. I was undergoing an emotional crisis over a disastrous romantic entanglement with a severely disturbed woman, and I reached out to him on the phone for counsel and comfort. I explained my situation, and he told me that he had just arrived in Chicago to begin a book tour but that I should give him a few minutes and he would call me back. Evidently he could tell from the briefest call that my poor little brain was struggling to deal with an assault of, literally, mania from the lady I was breaking up with.
I needed help. I needed a friend. I hadn’t said anything of the kind, at least explicitly, but he certainly seemed to get the message clearly enough. A few minutes later, he rang back and told me that he was canceling his next event, would be flying back to Washington that night, and that I should meet him for lunch (where else?) at the Bombay Club the next day.
“No wives and daughters this time,” he averred. “Just us boys.” In any event, he spent four hours with me, patiently listening to my whining, offering wise observations and largely very good advice, and generally talking me down off an emotional precipice.
He’d always taken an interest in my relations with women, for whatever reason, and one of his nicknames for me—“Mount Ibish”—was a play on both my vast bulk (for much of the time I knew him I weighed between four and five hundred pounds, though I’m now half that size, and he liked to say, “You came by that honestly”) and a sly double entendre given that I wasn’t exactly starved for attention. Now, for the first time, it had gotten me into a rather deep hole, and he was kind enough to want to help me out of it, which he certainly did.
He even paid for the meal, beyond having already done that in several ways, by canceling his event in order to babysit my wounded ego, changing his travel arrangements, and in several other obvious and not-so-obvious ways. It was particularly touching because while Christopher had a very generous streak, as I’ve noted, he also took money very seriously. He was more than willing to lend cash, but he wanted to be paid back, and I took care to never borrow any from him. Though he would have gladly lent it, I’d seen unpaid debts come, at least to some extent, between him and other mutual friends, and I didn’t want that to happen to us.
Now, today, the platters of steaming food kept coming at us with great rapidity, and, up to the task, we quickly demolished them, all the while still drinking our respective quaffs. (Christopher was especially besotted with Johnnie Walker Black, which he said he had deliberately cultivated a particular liking for because it was both very good and universally available, including in most war zones and throughout the Islamic world—with a couple of rare exceptions.)
At first, being a perennial guest at his home, I suspected that his apathy regarding red wine held, or at least powerfully articulated, opinions possibly based on some overwhelming economic realities. Great wine can be very pricey, and most people can drink a lot more of it much more easily and carelessly than they can knock back Scotch, for example. Financial ruin could have been a foreseeable consequence hosting so many people so frequently and with such emphasis on keeping the company well lubricated, if he’d ditched the boosterism of plonk. Over time, however, it became clear to me that he deeply believed in this opinion. I began to suspect that constant cigarette smoking had, perhaps, blunted my friend’s taste buds to the point that “the house plonk” really was sort of indistinguishable from a complex Bordeaux, a subtle Pinot Noir, or a profound Priorat.
But that clearly wasn’t true, because I had seen him demonstrate that his palate was actually in remarkably fine working order, at least when it came to certain flavors. At the beginning of the meal, as always, he had ordered a double Johnnie Walker Black with a tiny splash of water. His first sip sent him into paroxysms of outrage: “What the fuck is this?” he bellowed. “It’s . . . it’s fucking lemonade!” The waiter, the bartender, and then the manager were imperiously summoned, in that order, to discover how and why an excellent and innocent Scotch was being forced to impersonate some “fucking kiddies’ lemonade.” A brief investigation determined that the little splash had come from a pitcher of filtered water. All DC residents know that, if you can possibly avoid it, Washington tap water is strictly undrinkable—unless one likes to quaff lashings of chlorine and God knows what else.
Hitchens not only shared this view but took it a step further: he would also cook with only bottled or strongly filtered water. At the bottom of this benighted pitcher, which was rapidly being recast as a veritable anus mundi, was discovered a lone, thin, and entirely forlorn slice of lemon. That villainous shard of fruit, it was universally agreed, must have been the interloper and culprit. In other words, one thin sliver of lemon had imparted the merest hint of flavor to almost a gallon of water, less than a tablespoon of which had then been poured into a double Scotch. From that, and with just one sip, the whiskey was declared to have been so adulterated as to become, in effect, “lemonade.” That’s a great many things, both good and bad. But it is not a crippled palate in action.
The men’s room at the Bombay Club is all the way in the back of the restaurant on the right-hand side. I walk through the front door, past the bar, across the dining room, and into the men’s room. In spite of everything else about this strikingly uncanny afternoon, I am still taken aback by the fact that, while everything is perfectly in place for a normal lunch service—even though this is, I somehow feel certain, a Saturday, and they normally only serve dinner on Saturdays—there are no other customers at all. All the tables are perfectly set, but no one else is there. As far as I can tell, only the Turkish manager and the Moroccan waiter are present, though I do see a light faintly glowing in the kitchen. Other than that, the place is eerily deserted. I don’t mention this when I return to the table.
Much of our discussion is, naturally, about politics. We revisit old agreements, most passionately about the evils of religious politics in almost every form and guise. But we also revisit old disagreements, most notably the 2003 invasion of Iraq. We agree that Obama mishandled Syria dreadfully by ceding the field to Iran, Russia, and Hezbollah, and therefore also to Al Qaeda. We also agree that current circumstances are, if anything, worse in Syria rather than better.
But we also discuss art, films, and literature. An old fan of Bob Dylan, he nonetheless scoffs at his winning the Nobel Prize for literature. “How many Dylan songs could you really not live without, under any circumstance?” he asks me pointedly. I reel off a long list, most of which he dismisses. A few, he allows, are masterpieces. But he thinks the oeuvre as a whole is overrated and that a more critical second look at Dylan’s catalog is warranted. Moreover, he reels off a list of his own: American fiction writers who much more richly deserve a Nobel literature prize than Bob Dylan.
Soaking up the juices of our once-mountainous plates of food, we dragged our triangles of excellent naan through what little food was left. We agree that it’s amusing that the Nobel committee appears surprised that Dylan would snub the ceremony and seem so utterly disinterested in the award. “Who the fuck did they think they were dealing with?” he chortles, gleefully. “Did they sleep through the sixties?” He says he hasn’t seen any recent films, and as far as I can tell, the same applies to the most recent novels. He appears to be aware of recent things, but not, perhaps, with the kind of detail that close reading would require. In that sense, it’s a little different than talking to the old Hitch, at least about new things, but it’s hard to put one’s finger on precisely how or why.
After a few more hours of drinking, talking, and continuing to nibble, he tells me our time is up. He won’t discuss it any further, and he won’t use any other phrase. “Time to shove off, I’m afraid,” he insists. I offer to pay, or at least to split the bill, but he won’t hear of it. The Turkish maître d’, who’s been lurking helpfully by the side of the patio for most of the afternoon and providing us with typically excellent but unusually attentive service, pointedly tells me, “Your money’s no good here, sir.” It occurs to me I’ve heard that phrase somewhere before, but I can’t quite place it.
I rise, and we embrace warmly. I notice the stain of curry on his shirt. Three lingering kisses on each cheek punctuate the afternoon, and with many affectionate remarks and mutual appreciation I turn and walk toward the Farragut West Metro station to take the train home. About ten seconds after I start walking away I realize that, for some inexplicable reason, I haven’t asked him the most important question of all. How could it possibly have slipped my mind? I spin around to trot back a couple of hundred yards and rectify the oversight. But he’s gone. The maître d’ is gone. The tables and chairs are gone. The lights are off. The door is locked. And there is no sign that the Bombay Club was ever open for lunch that Saturday.
Hussein Ibish is a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. He is a weekly columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and the National (UAE) and a regular contributor to many other US and Middle Eastern publications. Many of Ibish’s articles are archived on www.ibishblog.com. Ibish previously served as a senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine, executive director of the Foundation for Arab-American Leadership, and communications director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. He has a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.