Year: 2006

Though Minneapolis is seven thousand miles from Mecca, the heart of Islam, that holy place is not far from many hearts that live and work along Central Avenue. This street, which begins in Northeast Minneapolis and runs north into Fridley, is the center of the Twin Cities’ Muslim population, which numbers about seventy-five thousand, according to the Islamic Institute of Minnesota. Over the past twenty years, immigrants from North Africa, the Middle East, and the Arabian Peninsula, as well as India and the Hindu Kush region of Pakistan and Afghanistan, have been settling here. The blocks of Central Avenue running between Sixteenth and Twenty-sixth Streets Northeast are one of the few places locally where signs feature Arabic script and people speak Urdu, Somali, Arabic, Dari, and Pashtu.
At the Crescent Moon Bakery on Central and Twenty-fourth Street, where Afghan pizza is more popular than doughnuts, Abdul Kohistan walks freely between the kitchen and the dining room. He doesn’t own the establishment, but he treats it like home. It takes just one question to send the fifty-two-year-old back to his old life in Afghanistan—and into a history lesson.
“We had many problems before the revolution,” he says, referring to the 1979 overthrow of the Afghan monarchy. “There was poverty and corruption, no jobs. The revolution changed that, but because the Soviets were involved, the United States thought we were communists.” In 1985, in the midst of a war between Soviet forces and the U.S.-government-supported Islamist rebels, Kohistan’s boss told him he deserved a day off. He took it, and then walked with his family for eight days through the mountains into Pakistan, where they found a flight to Minneapolis. “It is the American government that has been a problem for Afghanistan,” he says, “not America itself.”
Across the street from the bakery, at Hafiz Inc. Travel and Tourism, Motaz Orsod looks remarkably fresh for someone who flew in from Sudan the day before. His face is clean-shaven; his orange shirt is pressed; he is as neat as the office he manages. “We arrange trips mostly to Africa and the Middle East,” he says after some hesitation, “but business has been slow lately.” Then he trails off. “I don’t know anything,” he says. “All I do is work, go home, work, go home.” Though he now calls the United States home, his distrust of inquisitive strangers is clear.
North of the travel agency stands the Islamic Cultural and Community Center, together with the Al-Huda Mosque. Their three-story, two-tone brown brick building is a boxy, nondescript place except for its sign with distinctive Arabic script in green, the color of Islam.
Farok Hamod is the director of the center and one of seven imams of his rank in the Twin Cities. He appears a dignified and peaceful figure in his tan robe and black skullcap. On the walls of his book-filled office hang gilded Koranic posters and an oil painting of the Kaaba, the sacred, black-shrouded edifice that Muslims circumambulate when they make the Hajj, a yearly pilgrimage to Mecca. He describes the daily work of helping his followers balance their Muslim backgrounds with American culture and law, and asks rhetorically, speaking through a translator, “Are there problems in the community? Outside the center, yes; but inside, no.” He mentions the needling problem of a next-door neighbor: Central Avenue Liquors. Islam prohibits alcohol, and Hamod sees the store as a blight. “I would like to see it closed,” he says. “The neighborhood would be cleaner without it.”
Brian Erickson works at the liquor store and lives nearby. A twenty-nine-year-old with a six-inch goatee, he swings his tall frame as he stacks six-packs of Milwaukee’s Best to the ceiling. “This store has been here a long, long time,” he says. “It’s been here long before [the Muslim community] ever came, and too long to be forced out because they don’t like it.”
“They own the whole block,” he adds erroneously, “but they don’t act like they’re a part of the community.”
Several blocks away, Waheed Khan stands behind the register at Khan’s Super Meat Market. With his soft brown skin and full head of black hair, he looks younger than forty-one years. His shop carries goat meat, chicken, beef, and Indonesian frozen fish. To the side, shelves display an impressive range of boxed spices: Nihara curry, paya curry for hooves, spice for chicken liver, and dozens of others.
Khan came to Minneapolis five years ago from Hyderabad, a largely Muslim city in central India. Like Orsod at Hafiz Travel, he is skeptical and soft-spoken. At the last minute, though, sensing perhaps the benefits of publicity, he speaks up: “My shop is Khan’s Meat Market,” he specifies. “1835 Central Avenue.” His speech is accented and he’s holding a halal cut of meat, butchered according to Islamic regulations. But he speaks with the pride of a local.

Anyone who’s traveled the back roads of western Wisconsin has probably spotted the bait shops, pole barns, and even semi-trailers that serve as watering holes. On my many passes through the area, en route to a friend’s cabin or a visit with family, I’ve happened upon bars made from substandard shacks and, in one instance, a trailer home. For years now, I’ve been driving past Kappus Bud’s Place, a bar situated inside a dilapidated singe-wide just up the road from an uncle’s cabin. Recently, I ventured inside.
Located on a glistening lakefront near the resort town of Minong, in the northwesterly part of the state, Kappus Bud’s hardly appeared ominous or even out of the ordinary on a recent sunny Sunday afternoon, when my brother and I finally pulled off the road and into its dirt parking lot. Miller Lite banners flapped in the wind, tied between the trailer, with its tan, peeling paint and some nearby saplings. An illuminated signpost, bearing the establishment’s name and an illustration of a heavy-duty truck, towered above the squat building. A new ramp made the front entry handicap accessible.
Stepping inside, however, was like entering the Twilight Zone. Kappus Bud’s Place is outfitted with accoutrements common to Wisconsin’s countryside barrooms: plenty of Green Bay Packers pennants, a cloud of secondhand smoke thick enough to slice, and a crusted-over toaster oven for warming bar snacks. Add to these a couple of inoperable arcade games shoved in the corners and a pool table made unsteady by the buckled laminate floor.
All of three people were sitting at the trailer’s long, narrow particle-board bar. On the far right end, an old man in a Packers cap and baseball jacket sat across from a large TV broadcasting the Jacksonville Jaguars/Philadelphia Eagles game at a deafening volume. At the other end of the bar, a disheveled but attractive fifty-ish man with a long, black beard and Panama hat prodded a video-poker game with his left hand while a cigarette dangled from the fingers of his right. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?” he said, looking up. His voice was clear and warm—a counterpoint to the ghostly-quiet environs. At the center of the bar, the mousy bartender, bespectacled and slight of build, dispensed cans of Miller Lite for a buck apiece. On a shelf above him, the bar’s second television played War of the Worlds, the 2005 version starring Tom Cruise, at a volume rivaling that of the football game thirty feet away. During a sparse and rather eerie movement in the film’s score, sudden crashes of strings were interspersed with bolts of timpani, and long silences in between. Together with the cheering crowds and yipping sportscasters, these dissonant sounds formed the perfect soundtrack to that afternoon’s excursion.
As for bar chat, old-timer football fan muttered indecipherable comments about the game as well as the occasional question. “You hunt?” he rumbled to us, turning his attention from the game for a few seconds and revealing a cleft lip and chlorine-blue eyes. Awaiting an answer, he seemed to chew the air, which set his jowls rippling. “No, I do not,” said my brother, sounding embarrassed. I smiled but remained silent. I knew that the man knew damn well I didn’t hunt. There was no breeze to be shot with the bartender. His deep-set, ferret-like eyes were too melancholic to hold comfortably in a gaze, and he obviously wasn’t interested in idle conversation, let alone eye contact. After collecting our dollar bills and murmuring just enough to betray a nasally speech impediment, he resumed his position on his stool: slumped over, hands hanging limp between the knees, head hung slightly.
I sipped my Miller and bided time by examining items on the shelves behind the bar: dead batteries, defunct fuse boxes, and all manner of metallic junk. Seemingly well-adjusted teenagers appeared in portraits, now yellowed and curled at the edges, taped to a 70s-era fridge. Later it appeared that the bearded man had departed without our noticing, leaving my brother and me alone with these two curious characters. The bartender glanced up at the movie, and then snuck a peek in our direction. The old man chewed air. But mostly everyone sat in silence, waiting out the trespass.

A lot of the house pets that arrive at Morningstar Healing Arts are like aging athletes with sports injuries. They come in limping after chasing a rabbit to the end of their tethered leashes, or suffering hip dysplasia and joint malfunction from jumping in and out of cars and climbing on and off furniture. “Ergonomically, they’re living in a world designed for people, whose legs are a lot longer,” Christine Grams explains.
While Grams mostly does chiropractic work on humans from her South Minneapolis clinic, she also takes several massage appointments a week for dogs, cats, horses, hamsters, cows, sheep, goats, llamas, hedgehogs, ferrets, and even chickens (she charges more for “barn calls”). A genial, animated redhead in her late forties, she uses her hands (size XL) to communicate as well as to heal. They fly about vigorously when she speaks, sculpting the air like those of an orchestra conductor.
Her clinic offers a decidedly soothing environment, with a bubbling fountain, tubular chimes, and lamps fashioned from pumpkin-sized salt crystals. A soundtrack of what Grams calls “new-age woo-woo music” calms man and beast alike. While the place is outfitted with the usual massage tables for two-legged clients, pets get their rubdowns either on the reception-area sofa or a rug spread on the floor. “It’s just the same as I do with toddlers,” she says.
Some twenty years ago, when Grams was working as a registered nurse, an injury from lifting a patient left her with an unstable, constantly painful hip that was resistant to conventional therapy. “I shouldn’t say this,” a colleague whispered to her, “but see a chiropractor.” She did, and the damage was swiftly put right. Grams then soon left nursing to study chiropractic health care. Her animal specialty came about as a happier sort of accident: She was trying to find babies on whom she could practice infant massage, but discovered that few parents were willing to volunteer their offspring to be manipulated by a neophyte. Then she realized that cats, dogs, and even goats were of comparable size—and almost infinitely willing to put themselves in her hands.
Having spent her childhood clutching piglets and chickens on farms that her relatives owned around Hutchinson, Grams was at ease with her practice patients. Once she earned her degree, she continued to practice massage on animals, and soon began receiving calls to “help out” animals belonging to friends, and then friends of friends. Now, her animal clients come entirely through referrals, and in most cases they arrive eager for the treat. “When they realize I’m not the vet and I don’t give shots, dogs will drag people in the door,” she says.
While Grams’ hands-on therapy is rehabilitative, she notes that she is not a chiropractor for animals: In Minnesota, those practitioners are accredited veterinarians, while animal bodyworkers are unlicensed. Still, her therapy has achieved remarkable results, restoring even animals injured in car accidents to tail-wagging good health. Services like hers are growing in popularity. According to the American Animal Hospital Association’s 2003 National Pet Owner Survey, twenty-one percent of pet owners have used some form of complementary medicine on their pets, up from six percent in the 1996 survey.
Animal masseurs face many unique challenges, Grams says. For instance, it’s rare that an animal will remain still for an entire session. For that reason, it is “important to be still within your own body,” to soothe them, she says. “Animals are essentially captives in our lives. We let them know when it’s OK to eat, drink, go to the bathroom, and go outside. Animals are very much the psychological receptors of whatever is going on within the house. This is true of children also, but more so of animals because they are at our mercy. If the household is busy, as many modern households are, the animals tend to get nervous, irritable, or depressed, and these emotions can quite easily mutate into antisocial behaviors, or physical ailments.”
Though she sometimes works with fighting breeds like pit bulls and mastiffs, Grams has never been bitten by a client. “It’s about being comfortable around them,” she explains. “If you’re scared, they’ll be on the defensive and wondering what’s wrong. A gentle touch helps their nervous system to unclench.”
She has also found that pet therapy can be a two-way street. “Animals have taught me I don’t have to be a workaholic. I can have an awful day after a client tells me they’ve been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. But when I go home, my animals are completely in the moment. At the end of the day I’m attacked by a dog and two cats that say, feed me, love me, take care of me. If I’m blue, they always snap me out of it.”