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STEP 1: FILL CUPS WITH BEER
- Fill 20 cups 1/3 full with beer.
- Mr. Kosten, can you please tell us where the game got its name from?
- The first distant tremor wakes me up.
It is a bright morning and the sea outside my balcony is splashing in a friendly way against the promenade.
I decide to sleep in.
It is Sunday morning.
- At twenty two past six on a still Sunday morning,
a Mercedes truck with a yellow railed bed and a gray cab,
entered a parking lot two hundred meters South
of the four story Battalion Landing Team (BLT) headquarters at Beirut International Airport.
STEP 2: ARRANGE CUPS
- Arrange the plastic cups in 2 triangles of 10 on opposite ends of the table with the tips pointing to the center.
- Thinking back, I believe that the game got its name based on an analogy between
ping-pong balls flying across the table and landing on the opponent’s side;
and an idea that the U.S should bomb Beirut as a result of the casualties in the area.
The name of the game reflects respect for the Marines and the U.S losses in the region.
- A few seconds later,
another gentle quake,
a very slight, intimate change in the air pressure in the house.
A second bomb.
I lie in bed for another four minutes.
- The truck was a commercial model with no markings.
STEP 3: PICK TEAMS
- Pick teams of two; one for each end of the table.
- How did the game become so popular?
- The phone rings.
It is my landlord who lives on the ground floor.
His voice is breaking with urgency:
‘MR. ROBERT, MR. ROBERT, IT IS ME, GET UP, GET UP, THEY HAVE BOMBED THE MARINES.
MR. TERRY AND FOLEY ARE LEAVING.’
- Its civilian license plate number was 508292.
STEP 4: TOSS BALL INTO CUP
- One person begins the game by trying to toss a ping-pong ball in any one of the other team’s cups.
Tip: The toss is all in the wrist; so hold the ball at above eye level,
lean in,
and lob it up so it drops down into the cup.
- The popularity of the game stemmed from it being a fast way to get drunk.
It only took 15 to 20 minutes for the consumption of over 10 beers.
As one brother once said:
‘ If you played Beirut, you got bombed.’
- They cannot have bombed the Marines.
Where?
In the street, Anderson is running for his car, Foley beside him, camera dangling from his shoulder.
‘Terry, wait for me.’
Anderson would have gone without me.
He drives fast, viciously, down the Corniche.
Foley’s face is fixed on the road and he talk without looking at me.
‘ They got the Marines and they got the French, car bombs. That’s all the radios are saying?’
‘How?’
- In the basement of a building fifty meters to the North,
I lay awake on my cot beneath a tent of green mosquito netting.
STEP 5: IF THE BALL MAKES IT IN…
- A member of the opposing team has to drink the cup of beer it lands in.
If the ball misses, it is the other team’s turn.
- I heard that in addition to organizing Beirut tournaments,
the brothers of Theta Delta Chi created a Beirut table with the map of Beirut on it.
If the game was so popular, why did you advise against playing it in your fraternity after a while?
- Foley is angry.
‘How the hell do I know? It may be a load of crap but I heard the explosions.’
The airport road is deserted,
but there is a cloud of white smoke steaming upwards from the far end where the Marines are based.
- The soft methodical breathing of those sleeping around me,
a beam of early morning sunlight sparkling with dust motes slanting into the room from the doorway,
the smell of dank air.
STEP 6: IF THE BALL LANDS IN AN EMPTY CUP…
- You have to drink one of your own beers.
Tip: Set aside a cup filled with water so the ball can be rinsed off if it lands on the floor.
- The poor judgment and behavior the game encouraged troubled me.
So when I spoke to my successor as President of theta Delta Chi,
I told him that the one thing he could do for the benefit of the house,
would be to cut up the Beirut table with a chainsaw.
- ‘We’ll find Bob Jordan. You try to find him in the press room, I will look for him in the BLT.’
But when Anderson stops the car, he is frowning.
- I’ve always thought that in the moment before a disaster I would feel a precognition,
a sense of dread, of foreboding,
that would prepare me for the cataclysm.
STEP 7: REBUILD TRIANGLES
- Rebuild triangles as you play:
When there are only six cups of beer on a side, make a smaller triangle.
Then do so again when there are only three cups.
- And did he do it?
- ‘ Where is the BLT?’
‘ At the other end of the fence, Terry.’
‘It’s gone.’
‘It’s behind the smoke.’
- Actually the feeling was of laziness and pleasantness.
STEP 8: WINNING
- Keep going until one team wipes out all the cups on the other side.
The winners get to make the losers drink the remaining cups on their side.
- No he didn’t.
But the Beirut table did not survive into the 1990’s.
- ‘ It isn’t.
It fucking disappeared.’
- Sundays were usually relaxing days highlighted by a picnic and a spirited game of volleyball.
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