What is it like to kiss a mouth full of golden teeth?Frustrated by the surprise of my secret admirer turning out to be a monk, I decided to further explore the idea of finding Sherzod, the boy with the golden teeth that I had been told about at the Piyonerskaya banya. I wasn’t sure how I would find him, but I decided that I would simply have to go to the banya again. It was a Sunday and Saturday night at Lucky Strikes wasn’t too eventful – I came home early with barely a buzz and woke up Sunday morning feeling rested and healthy and miserable of the prospect of having to figure out how to manage an entire Sunday. The banya was one of those forbidden places, and it seemed so shameful that I didn’t even tell Henrietta about it. Apparently, I had not seen the entire space – the dark rooms with little peepholes through which Shukhrat, the attendant, watched men have sex – violating article #120 of the criminal code. Shukhrat, I was certain had seen a lot; perhaps he was in the employ of the secret services. It was probably not wise for me to go there, but I did nonetheless.
As always, I dreaded my Sundays. There was no work to do – and it seemed that work was my only reason for being here. Sundays reminded me that I was alone, had no family, had no responsibilities really save for getting myself up in the mornings, feeding myself, going to work, going to bed. On Sundays, the city was dead. Probably there were others like me who recovered from hangovers, but for the most part, people sat at home with their families, did their weekly groceries at the bazaar. Streets were dead, hardly a soul to be seen. If I went into a restaurant to eat my lunch, I was often the only one there. There were hardly any cars on the street and so when I went to hail a car, I waited so long just until one came by, and I was determined not to bargain for a fare. The custom in Uzbekistan was to haggle – the Uzbek people were always historically traders along the silk route and the tradition continued on until this day. Why haggle, I would ask my Uzbek acquaintances or colleagues and they would say “because it makes life more interesting.” And perhaps it was true – it was some way of engaging, more so than reading a price tag or a taxi-meter. It was like a little game: before getting into a car, you’d name your destination and ask how much. The first price they would offer often would be absurdly high and I’d throw back a line like, “Come off it. Dream on,” and then the back-and-forth began. And if they wouldn’t budge on the price, you’d let them go with the wave of a hand and say, “go on, then.”
Uncertain when the next car would pass me, I told the driver that I wanted to be taken to the ptsitsi magasin or the bird store and I accepted the first price the driver offered, it was higher than it should have been, but after all, it was only one dollar. This time, I took the back seat.
“The bird store – near the banya?” he asked. The bird store was actually not a bird store, perhaps in Soviet times it was and even though it was now just a dingy, empty shop like so many others around the city with cottonseed oil, bread, sugar, when sugar was to be had, and some canned good. I remembered Kirill telling me that the banya was near the bird store; that was how you asked to get somewhere in Tashkent, because no one knew the names of the streets, which were always changing, so no one knew where they were going. Instead, you would ask for something recognizable such as the fourteen-story building, or the Anhor Bridge, the earthquake memorial statue, or the Chorsu bazaar, even if that wasn’t exactly where you were going, but just to orient your driver. Besides, I felt more comfortable asking for the bird store than for the banya. I wondered if people knew that this banya was where the gay underground of Tashkent met; or did they think it as banya #4, its official name, and as no different from banya #1, #2, or #3.
My driver was silent and he dropped me off at the bird store, which was right across from the banya. I waited until he drove off, until the street was completely devoid of people, of cars, until the trolleybus had passed, and then crossed the street to the banya. I paid my 200 soums to the old man in the booth and went up the stairs, greeting Shukhrat, the attendant, who seemed pleased to see me.
“Finally, you’ve shown up. We were waiting for you,” he said. The always said that they were waiting for you and it made you feel like people were waiting all the time. Sure, it was just the way the language translated – waiting, expecting take the same verb in Russian and in the even less linguistically rich Uzbek language. “Stay here!” he commanded, leaving me alone in the changing area with a group of young men, their shapeless bodies wrapped in towels at the waist, dancing around a soviet era tape recorder listening to the music that I recognized as Yulduz Usmanova. They sang along and spun their wrists and waved their fingers as Uzbek women dance, casting ensnaring glances my way as I stood there fully dressed and feeling naked at the same time.
Shukhrat returned, leading me through several doorposts covered with curtains, to a cool, windowless room where Sherzod sat, like a colonial gentleman out of place in wild surroundings in his cream colored suit, beside a table set with tea and biscuits. He stood up, tall and stiff to shake my and to offer a chair for me to sit beside him.
He was strikingly handsome, probably could even be a GQ model were it not for the rack of golden teeth. When he spoke, it seemed like he was trying to hide them, the upper lip either immobile or stretched to cover them. His face, though handsome and kind, had the mask-like expressionless quality that I sometimes saw in Uzbek faces, with the narrow almond-shaped eyes that seemed to veil emotion.
“You have come,” he said in English in a very formal manner.
“Yes,” Shukhrat added saucily, reciting the few words of schoolboy English he knew before leaving us alone. “Good morning teacher!”
“It is good that you came,” he said with a somewhat charming and stilted British English accent that sounded as though it came off of one of those old language-learning tapes, with the very deliberate punctuation of sentences, the awkward phrases. I offered to speak with him in Russian, if it made him more comfortable, but he said that he didn’t speak very good Russian. It struck me that he must be from one of the provinces and I asked him where he was from.
He came from a small provincial town called Shakhirzabz, located in a valley in the foothills of the Pamir mountains. I told him that I had visited it once and had very vivid memories; the town is the birthplace of Tamerlane, Central Asia’s foremost conqueror, who built up the town with grand palaces, some of which remain to this day.
I found myself interested in and inquisitive with Sherzod in the same way Uzbeks were with me. I had to know how old he was. He was 27. I looked at his hands and saw no rings. “Are you married?” He was not. I wanted to ask the next question of the sequence, which was “why not?” And I stopped myself. What I meant was, how, how does one break with the traditions in this highly traditional society. Everyone cares what the neighbors say and everyone follows the rules at least for show. I imagined that it took a strong character to not play that game, to follow the beat of a different drum. This was not a culture of individualism; individualism was subversive and something you kept well hidden. Even I played at that game, so that I didn’t stand out, though it was not necessary, as I was a foreigner -- someone who could pick up get on a plane tomorrow and leave. “We have to live here” I’d heard so many times an Uzbek say when you ask them why not challenge the existing order, be it in politics or in one’s personal life. “A bowed head doesn’t get chopped off.” There is no arguing with that. Then again, without those few over the centuries who risked their heads out of a belief in something they saw much bigger than themselves, we might not be say, have conceived of the world as being round.
He said that he didn’t want to get married and said no more. I was sure he faced strong pressures at home, and I asked about it. He moved to Tashkent to get away from those pressures and to live with relatives; he was, however, in Tashkent illegally. To live in the capital, you needed to have proper registration documentation, which was difficult to obtain. Those who migrated from the provinces, seeking a better life in the capital, paid huge bribes to the OVIR – the residential registration authorities, to the officers who did random document checks on the streets, expecting you to provide a passport or document with proof of legal residency, and to the local police departments, which kept tabs on who is living in a neighborhood, sometimes stopping door to door checking on people. Sometimes they came to my door, but I would never open; in fact, I made it a policy never to even answer any knocks on door by unexpected callers. There were police everywhere in Tashkent and Sherzod was paying out bribes left and right until he could get the documents he needed.
And as he was living in Tashkent illegally, I figured, he also couldn’t work. I asked him what he did. He had just finished his Master’s degree at the economic institute in Samarkand and had been teaching there. “But now, I do nothing. I am a lazy boy.”
I was struck by the unappealing economic ramifications of this and I thought of my discomfort with the possibility of being seen as a potential sugar daddy and my general mistrust of Uzbeks, which was so hard for me to let go of. But quickly, I dropped the thought when he asked if we could go somewhere else and I was going to suggest to my home. “I don’t like this place,” he said.
“Ok,” I said, “but don’t you come here often?”
“Not often,” he said.
“But Shukhrat knows you,” I said and he looked at me with that conspiratorial look that Uzbeks sometimes have when I say something betraying my naiveté about the country.
“He knows you too, but I know you have only come here once. Shukhrat makes it his business to know everybody and to know everything about everybody. And my neighbor, who you met, comes here on Saturdays,” he said, referring to the man who I remembered had worked as a gas-station attendant in New Jersey. “I only have come these days because I wanted to meet you,” he said and added dramatically in something that sounded either from an old movie or from an English language learning tape, “how I waited for you…”
There was something so appealing about his wooden manner that made me a tad nervous, even put me at a loss for words. In such cases, I often just say the first stupid thing that comes to my head, so I asked him about his golden teeth, as I was thinking about what it might be like to kiss someone with a mouth full of golden teeth, imagining that it felt cold or that there was a metallic flavor in the mouth.
His parents had given golden teeth when he was 17, after he’d cracked and lost some of his upper teeth in a fight. “But I hate them,” he said.
“Why?” I asked. I had grown quite used to seeing golden teeth around Tashkent, though when I first arrived, I was shocked and amazed that people had them because they actually thought they looked nice.
“I don’t like the way they look. I will change them,” he said. I wondered if he really didn’t like them, or perhaps at some point someone had told him that outside of this isolated country, the aesthetic of golden teeth was, at best, not understood.
We left the small alcove where we sat, through the quiet changing area. I expected to see Shukhrat there waiting for us, but he and the other boys who not long ago had been dancing to Yulduz Usmanova, crowded around the dilapidated door of one of the massage rooms, peeking through the slit where the door didn’t run flush with the doorpost, not turning their attentions to us. We slipped out unnoticed and without saying goodbye, in the American style – Americans were known for leaving without saying goodbye, whereas it was locals who were known for saying goodbye but never actually leaving.
Outside, the street was quiet and a trolleybus approached. “Let’s ride the trolleybus,” I suggested, “I’ve never been on one.” Actually, I had never ridden on any public transportation at all in Tashkent since I never needed it, I had a driver and gypsy taxis were cheap and in abundance. The trolleybuses were 100 years old and when they passed, you could feel the street quake underfoot like a small earthquake, a not uncommon feeling for this city built on a faultline that often had earthquakes. Gradually, tracks were being removed and the routes of the trolley cut and I thought that perhaps one day, there would be no trolley left. I’m sure no one gave it much thought here – it was simply transport for the people, not the exotica it was for me. And when we got on, there were just a few sad looking men with heavy heads and old babushkas carrying sacks of vegetables they must have bought at the bazaar.
Sherzod paid for us when the attendant came to collect our fares. The attendant was a middle-aged bleached blonde Russian woman dressed sloppily in a pair of faded jeans and a creased brown blouse. It seemed that paying for public transportation was done on something just short of an honor system, the attendant collecting your fare after you had taken your seat and then giving you a small coupon. I didn’t even know how much it cost to ride on public transportation. It didn’t cost much – only 50 soums per person, which was something like ten cents. I always felt a little ashamed when someone here paid for me, as though I should be the one paying, since the money meant so little to me, no matter how small the amount was. But it was in the nature of this very generous and hospitable people to outdo even their own finances in honor of their guests.
“Did you know there are many gays on the trolley,” Sherzod whispered to me, to which I responded back with a skeptical look. “Yes, during rush hours -- trolleys, buses, and the metro. And they all stand in the back. And they do such things…” he said as though referring to the unspeakable and furtively making that little gesture of an open palm over a closed fist which was used to indicate sex. I made a mental note that I might want to observe this at some time. It seemed too unbelievable to be true.
On the way to my house, the trolley stopped in the middle of its tracks and from the window, I could see an eruption of sparks from above, like fireworks exploding. I had seen this happen before, from the street, when the trolley poles dislocate from the overhead cables, releasing a burst of electric currents; then the attendant gets out of the car and using what looked like a broomstick, props up the poles and realigns them onto the cable track. The system was falling apart. It was, after all, 100 years old.
When we got off near my house, I invited him up to my apartment. He said that he couldn’t stay for too long. We entered my building and stood close and in silence in the small elevator. I thought to reach over to him, to kiss him, but held back. The doors opened soon enough to my floor. We entered the apartment and he removed his shoes and walked around, surveying the large and rather minimally furnished space, eyes wide open, “you live in this alone?”
“I do,” I said with a bit of a guilty feeling. It was a three bedroom apartment, and in Tashkent, I knew sometimes six person families or larger lived in fewer rooms than this. I lead him to the kitchen where I offered him tea and sat beside him, in silence watching the mask-like expression on his face soften into a childish smile and his voice grow delicate and shy. “I think you have many boyfriends,” he said.
“What makes you think that?” I asked, puzzled. Besides the fact that I hadn’t had a boyfriend since I left the US, I wondered what constituted many boyfriends in this seemingly big village that they call Tashkent - probably not many. “I don’t even have one,” I said watching him, thinking how much I wanted to touch him, to kiss him, as though I could not say anything more until after I had accomplished this. And so he drank his tea until his cup was empty and, according to the tradition, I refilled his cup. But he looked at his watch and said he needed to leave.
“But I would really like to see you again,” he said.
“Ok,” I said, “give me your phone number.”
He didn’t have a phone. Actually, this was one of those common things that always amazed me about Tashkent. In the 20th century, people were still very much living as though they lived in the time of the bible. “But I can take your number and I will call you when I am at a telephone.”
So, I scribbled down my number, realizing that the ball was now in his court. But I was reassured that he would call me, when I walked him to the front door and he bent down, surprisingly, impulsively to kiss me. And then, I finally found the answer to my musings as to what it felt like to kiss someone with a mouth full of gold teeth. Not that I’d remembered what it felt like to kiss someone, but as far as I could recall, it was a kiss like any other wonderful kiss.