Uzbekistan Blues
Thursday, May 22, 2008
We landed at the Tashkent airport at 1am after an uneventful flight, walking down from the wobbly steps into the little runway bus that took you from your plane to the terminal entrance. There were only about 15 other people with me on this Boeing jet, and the flight allowed all of us to have entire rows to ourselves to stretch out and sleep through the flight. Once in the terminal, since there were so few of us, there seemed like no need to run to the passport check booths, though some did so out of habit, even though there was no one in them, the lights were out in them, and we were already forming a line. We waited, patiently. Uzbekistan has taught me some patience, through much practice by waiting, and often being disappointed, which are practices and qualities that seem to have had tremendous influence in forming the character of the people.
The terminal was almost like someone's house that you come to late at night, a house where everyone is sleeping, where the lights are off, and only after you ring the bell and wait at the door, they come sleepily in their dressing-gowns and bathrobes to greet you somewhat gruffly, tiredly, as you have roused them from their peaceful slumber. A young woman, heavily made up and with brightly dyed hair and a surly expression enters the booth, turned on the light, shuffled some papers on her desk, and as the first person on the line, a young Russian looking man, walked up to her, she cast a reproachful look indicating that they back off until called for. She then beckoned him to approach with a blank unwelcoming expression and a lazy motion of the index finger. Even the lowliest of civil servants here weight considerable power in Uzbekistan, and she was no exception, the gatekeeper who says who may approach and who may not. She took her time looking at the passport, looking at the man up and down carefully before stamping his passport.
When it was my turn to approach, the passport checker took what seeed to be an eternity to go through my passport. I thought how she could, so easily, after my hours of travel across continents, invent or find some reason not to allow me back into the country. I could be refused entry or ejected from the country at any time, actually, though I don't constantly think about it; but at moments like this, I do. It was unusual for foreign correspondents working in Uzbekistan to be declared persona non-grata, to be denied visas or accreditation, or to receive phone calls in the middle of the night from the Foreign Ministry informing them that they are to report to the airport by morning with their belongings, prepared to get on a one way flight out of the country. She punched something into her computer keyboard and looked back at me with a supercillious look and I awaited her pronouncements, expecting the worst. But she said nothing, picked up her stamp to stamp the passport, slipping it through the slot in the scratched and dirty plastic window.
I felt a tremendous sense of relief and gratitude just to be let into the dirty gray room with its ancient baggage carousels, and yet was somewhat amazed that still, after all this time of waiting by the passport control, the baggage of the handful of passengers had not been loaded. To kill time, I filled out customs declaration forms, two copies, from memory wrote in data such as my passport number, my visa number, nothing to declare, no items of value, firearms, poisonous chemicals, livestock, produce. I check off no on print or recorded materials, though I have several books for my own reading pleasure and was never really sure what they meant on the form. I pace around, look at the other passengers, all of whom have made it through passport control, the typical young German backpacking couple, the British missionaries, or what look like missionaries, a young trendily dressed Uzbek, possibly from a wealthy family and attending a boarding school in the US. Some elderly Russians who perhaps have family here, and are from here, but left years ago. Finally, a small piece of hand luggage comes out to the carousel, and the lucky passenger grabs it. But nothing else came out. Unkempt men in dirty uniforms of blue overalls, approach us with dolley carts offerring assistance without language but with hand gestures, there services naturally will cost us, but they don't say, and none of us had any luggage, regardless and even they too are impatient to wait around for the luggage to arrive, and disappear.
When the luggage finally arrived, I noticed that one of my suitcases had a big hole in it with some clothes peeking through. There was little of value in there, so I didn't worry. I took the heavy bags carried them to the security scanner, where a uniformed woman rolled her eyes at a screen that shows a greenish photo negative of my suitcase contents. I was more fortunate than the poor backpackers from Germany, whose backpacks were being emptied and fingered through, full of camping gear and other high-tech equipment most likely unfamiliar to the customs officials. I handed off my two copies of the custom form to an officer who looked tired and scribbled something on the forms, stamping them and handing me back a copy. It was 2AM and he probably couldn't wait until the lot of us would leave. I couldn't imagine that he'd ever stop and read through these forms. And finally, I was free to cross the threshold to the street where a gaggle of Uzbek taxi drivers with mouths full of golden teeth shouting "taxi, taxi," await and who I knew would rush up to me, try to wrest my luggage from my hands and escort me to their cars, which would be old Soviet Volgas or Zhigulis, likely the same ages of their drivers and like their drivers, have weathered better times than these. I regretted having forgotten to call the office earlier and have the driver from the office come to pick me up and save me having to negotiate with the gypsy drivers. They would probably demand hard-currency fares. But I could bargain them down to something reasonable in their language, that will still be too high for the short ride, but likely wouldn't cost me more than two dollars. They would try to cheat me. They would pull some gimmick like not open their trunks for me when I got home and hold my baggage ransom until I gave them more money, like I've heard happening to others. I walked passed them all shrugging them off, my arms weighted by the suitcases as they trounced upon the other passengers emerging. In the back of the gaggle, I found a quiet older man and asked him if he's working. He said that he was and he agreed upon a fare of two dollars with me.
He offered to take one of my bags, but it seemed much too heavy for him. I took it back, giving him my backpack. Already, I could feel Tashkent's dry heat, which cools off at night, but still hangs in the air. The driver walked with me in silence, I determined that he will be a good driver, not ask too many probing questions, about where I'm from, what's my age, my marital status, how much my watch costs. He seemed to have other things weighing on his mind. But I want to ask about the heat, I ask if the "chilla" has begun yet, and he immediately understands that though I may be a foreigner, I know enough about Uzbekistan to know about the "chilla," and that I speak Russian. These are those 40 days of the year in Uzbekistan, in which the sun mercilessly strikes the earth below, the days it is hard to leave the house, to find shade, that office workers leave their poorly airconditioned or non-airconditioned offices to strip down their official wear in the public fountains and dive in to cool off during their lunch and coffee breaks. The "chilla," he told me, doesn't start until the end of the week, though it feels like it's started already.
We got into his car, I got into the front seat beside him and we drove into the city along desolate well-paved roads, along the bridge, past the signs that read in Uzbek and Russian, "Peace to the World" and murals that proclaim somewhat ironically in Uzbek "Uzbekistan is a country with a great future!" He notices me reading the signs and snarls. "You understand that Uzbek sign, do you?"
"Yes," I said.
"You have been here before, right? What kind of future does Uzbekistan have? What kind of present does it have?" He says rhetorically looking at me and I wish he would look at the road ahead of me, fearing that the car would swerve, knock into the bridge railing and bring us to our fatal end, our brilliant future. But he turns back to the road, straightens the car and stares at the road ahead while continuing to talk to me. "Are you hear for business?" This is a question that I have heard so many times, but I continue to wonder, what kind of person would come to Uzbekistan to do business. People stopped coming here to do business years ago, when the government restricted the conversion of foreign currency. Perhaps they meant something else when they asked this question and it was just my poor Russian language skills.
"I'm a journalist."
"A journalist," he said and paused to look out the window as we drove past a small park with sillhouettes visible of girls walking and smoking. "If you're a journalist, then please, do me a favor. Tell the world the truth about what you see here. We used to have a better life. But now things have come to a point that our daughters must work like this. Our government doesn't help, doesn't listen to us. People are desperate and there's nowhere to turn, except to the Hisb-ut-Tahrir," he said excitedly, referring to the radical Islamic underground movement that called for the overthrow of the government and the creation of a Caliphate throughout Central Asia. "If things get much worse, even I would turn to them. Who else is there to turn to?"
Whereas his sentiment seemed perfectly understandable to me, I was shocked to hear it expressed by an Uzbek. No one had ever said this aloud to me. I had interviewed so many of the activists, the sociologists, the philosophers, the poets, who maybe had articulated this to me, from their armchairs, and the ordinary people I spoke to, who I suspected might harbour such thoughts, were not so casual to talk in front of a stranger, in particular, one who openly carried a mini-disc recorder and microphone. There had been such incidents of citizens getting thrown into jail for giving interviews with such opinions to the BBC, and so they were careful not to take such talk outside of the kitchen or couched in the hubbub of the bazaars. But this was my first experience of it explicitly, by a taxi driver who gave off the faint bitter-formadlehyde odor of the vodka drinker. Perhaps things had just gotten so bad for people that they had become emboldened, feeling that there was nothing left to lose and they turned to us, the foreigners, the journalists, desperately seeking any perceived purveyor of justice to save them. The country had been stagnant for so long, I wondered if something would change; it couldn't possibly stay this way forever. Day after day, things remained the same and I would wonder, would there be a revolution? Would there be an Islamic takeover? One day, the authoritarian leader would die, and who would take over? We constantly heard rumours of the President's health -- that he was diabetic, that he suffered from leukemia, that he hadn't appeared on the television in weeks, that he looked very ill the previous day on the television, that his "official" visit to Spain was actually a visit to the doctor.
I told him I would write about whatever people would tell me. But the problem was, no one told me anything. People were silent. Government officials were silent. I have no idea what's happening right now. Maybe only in 10-15 years after the regime is gone will we ever know what is really happening here, I said. Like with the Soviet Union, there were many things we only learned about after 1991. "There will be a time," I said, "when there will be new people in charge. And there will be old police officers, military officers, prosecutors who won't talk now, but before they die, they will write books and tell what is happening. Because there are too many eye witnesses to what is happening."
As everything in Uzbekistan, it would require patience. To learn the truth, patience to wait for years. My job was of course to write that first draft of history, and there was little to write, little to tell. I didn't need to wait 10-15 years to reread everything I wrote and say, look how little I knew. I knew right now how little I knew. I knew nothing.
We drove in silence along an empty main avenue called Shota Rustavelli with noone visible except for by the bus stop the man who sold the midnight bananas, packing his wares. One could always count on the midnight bananas seller, even on a Tuesday and after midnight, with no customers or cars on the street to see the man standing besides his makeshift stand of cardboard boxes piled one on top of the other, some bananas and a small scale. I asked my driver to pull over so that I could pick up some bananas. The seller remembered me, shook my hand. And despite the friendliness, this was commerce and one should always bargain because bargaining, as my local friends told me, "makes life more interesting." So, for his 1000 soums for a kilogram I had to bring down to about 800, by first offerring 600, "they are overripe," I said. To which he responded, "I'll give you a good price of 900," then I responded with 700, 750 and finally he capitulated to 800. There was no logic to this. No market forces operating on this sale of bananas at 2am with not another possible customer in sight. But I was happy that there would be something in my kitchen for breakfast.
Moments later, we were at my apartment block. The driver got out of the car to open the trunk and help me lug out my suitcases. "Don't forget what I asked you," he said, as I handed him money, shook his hand, and got read to go up to my apartment. "Write what you see." ¶ 5:54 PM 0 Comments
The terminal was almost like someone's house that you come to late at night, a house where everyone is sleeping, where the lights are off, and only after you ring the bell and wait at the door, they come sleepily in their dressing-gowns and bathrobes to greet you somewhat gruffly, tiredly, as you have roused them from their peaceful slumber. A young woman, heavily made up and with brightly dyed hair and a surly expression enters the booth, turned on the light, shuffled some papers on her desk, and as the first person on the line, a young Russian looking man, walked up to her, she cast a reproachful look indicating that they back off until called for. She then beckoned him to approach with a blank unwelcoming expression and a lazy motion of the index finger. Even the lowliest of civil servants here weight considerable power in Uzbekistan, and she was no exception, the gatekeeper who says who may approach and who may not. She took her time looking at the passport, looking at the man up and down carefully before stamping his passport.
When it was my turn to approach, the passport checker took what seeed to be an eternity to go through my passport. I thought how she could, so easily, after my hours of travel across continents, invent or find some reason not to allow me back into the country. I could be refused entry or ejected from the country at any time, actually, though I don't constantly think about it; but at moments like this, I do. It was unusual for foreign correspondents working in Uzbekistan to be declared persona non-grata, to be denied visas or accreditation, or to receive phone calls in the middle of the night from the Foreign Ministry informing them that they are to report to the airport by morning with their belongings, prepared to get on a one way flight out of the country. She punched something into her computer keyboard and looked back at me with a supercillious look and I awaited her pronouncements, expecting the worst. But she said nothing, picked up her stamp to stamp the passport, slipping it through the slot in the scratched and dirty plastic window.
I felt a tremendous sense of relief and gratitude just to be let into the dirty gray room with its ancient baggage carousels, and yet was somewhat amazed that still, after all this time of waiting by the passport control, the baggage of the handful of passengers had not been loaded. To kill time, I filled out customs declaration forms, two copies, from memory wrote in data such as my passport number, my visa number, nothing to declare, no items of value, firearms, poisonous chemicals, livestock, produce. I check off no on print or recorded materials, though I have several books for my own reading pleasure and was never really sure what they meant on the form. I pace around, look at the other passengers, all of whom have made it through passport control, the typical young German backpacking couple, the British missionaries, or what look like missionaries, a young trendily dressed Uzbek, possibly from a wealthy family and attending a boarding school in the US. Some elderly Russians who perhaps have family here, and are from here, but left years ago. Finally, a small piece of hand luggage comes out to the carousel, and the lucky passenger grabs it. But nothing else came out. Unkempt men in dirty uniforms of blue overalls, approach us with dolley carts offerring assistance without language but with hand gestures, there services naturally will cost us, but they don't say, and none of us had any luggage, regardless and even they too are impatient to wait around for the luggage to arrive, and disappear.
When the luggage finally arrived, I noticed that one of my suitcases had a big hole in it with some clothes peeking through. There was little of value in there, so I didn't worry. I took the heavy bags carried them to the security scanner, where a uniformed woman rolled her eyes at a screen that shows a greenish photo negative of my suitcase contents. I was more fortunate than the poor backpackers from Germany, whose backpacks were being emptied and fingered through, full of camping gear and other high-tech equipment most likely unfamiliar to the customs officials. I handed off my two copies of the custom form to an officer who looked tired and scribbled something on the forms, stamping them and handing me back a copy. It was 2AM and he probably couldn't wait until the lot of us would leave. I couldn't imagine that he'd ever stop and read through these forms. And finally, I was free to cross the threshold to the street where a gaggle of Uzbek taxi drivers with mouths full of golden teeth shouting "taxi, taxi," await and who I knew would rush up to me, try to wrest my luggage from my hands and escort me to their cars, which would be old Soviet Volgas or Zhigulis, likely the same ages of their drivers and like their drivers, have weathered better times than these. I regretted having forgotten to call the office earlier and have the driver from the office come to pick me up and save me having to negotiate with the gypsy drivers. They would probably demand hard-currency fares. But I could bargain them down to something reasonable in their language, that will still be too high for the short ride, but likely wouldn't cost me more than two dollars. They would try to cheat me. They would pull some gimmick like not open their trunks for me when I got home and hold my baggage ransom until I gave them more money, like I've heard happening to others. I walked passed them all shrugging them off, my arms weighted by the suitcases as they trounced upon the other passengers emerging. In the back of the gaggle, I found a quiet older man and asked him if he's working. He said that he was and he agreed upon a fare of two dollars with me.
He offered to take one of my bags, but it seemed much too heavy for him. I took it back, giving him my backpack. Already, I could feel Tashkent's dry heat, which cools off at night, but still hangs in the air. The driver walked with me in silence, I determined that he will be a good driver, not ask too many probing questions, about where I'm from, what's my age, my marital status, how much my watch costs. He seemed to have other things weighing on his mind. But I want to ask about the heat, I ask if the "chilla" has begun yet, and he immediately understands that though I may be a foreigner, I know enough about Uzbekistan to know about the "chilla," and that I speak Russian. These are those 40 days of the year in Uzbekistan, in which the sun mercilessly strikes the earth below, the days it is hard to leave the house, to find shade, that office workers leave their poorly airconditioned or non-airconditioned offices to strip down their official wear in the public fountains and dive in to cool off during their lunch and coffee breaks. The "chilla," he told me, doesn't start until the end of the week, though it feels like it's started already.
We got into his car, I got into the front seat beside him and we drove into the city along desolate well-paved roads, along the bridge, past the signs that read in Uzbek and Russian, "Peace to the World" and murals that proclaim somewhat ironically in Uzbek "Uzbekistan is a country with a great future!" He notices me reading the signs and snarls. "You understand that Uzbek sign, do you?"
"Yes," I said.
"You have been here before, right? What kind of future does Uzbekistan have? What kind of present does it have?" He says rhetorically looking at me and I wish he would look at the road ahead of me, fearing that the car would swerve, knock into the bridge railing and bring us to our fatal end, our brilliant future. But he turns back to the road, straightens the car and stares at the road ahead while continuing to talk to me. "Are you hear for business?" This is a question that I have heard so many times, but I continue to wonder, what kind of person would come to Uzbekistan to do business. People stopped coming here to do business years ago, when the government restricted the conversion of foreign currency. Perhaps they meant something else when they asked this question and it was just my poor Russian language skills.
"I'm a journalist."
"A journalist," he said and paused to look out the window as we drove past a small park with sillhouettes visible of girls walking and smoking. "If you're a journalist, then please, do me a favor. Tell the world the truth about what you see here. We used to have a better life. But now things have come to a point that our daughters must work like this. Our government doesn't help, doesn't listen to us. People are desperate and there's nowhere to turn, except to the Hisb-ut-Tahrir," he said excitedly, referring to the radical Islamic underground movement that called for the overthrow of the government and the creation of a Caliphate throughout Central Asia. "If things get much worse, even I would turn to them. Who else is there to turn to?"
Whereas his sentiment seemed perfectly understandable to me, I was shocked to hear it expressed by an Uzbek. No one had ever said this aloud to me. I had interviewed so many of the activists, the sociologists, the philosophers, the poets, who maybe had articulated this to me, from their armchairs, and the ordinary people I spoke to, who I suspected might harbour such thoughts, were not so casual to talk in front of a stranger, in particular, one who openly carried a mini-disc recorder and microphone. There had been such incidents of citizens getting thrown into jail for giving interviews with such opinions to the BBC, and so they were careful not to take such talk outside of the kitchen or couched in the hubbub of the bazaars. But this was my first experience of it explicitly, by a taxi driver who gave off the faint bitter-formadlehyde odor of the vodka drinker. Perhaps things had just gotten so bad for people that they had become emboldened, feeling that there was nothing left to lose and they turned to us, the foreigners, the journalists, desperately seeking any perceived purveyor of justice to save them. The country had been stagnant for so long, I wondered if something would change; it couldn't possibly stay this way forever. Day after day, things remained the same and I would wonder, would there be a revolution? Would there be an Islamic takeover? One day, the authoritarian leader would die, and who would take over? We constantly heard rumours of the President's health -- that he was diabetic, that he suffered from leukemia, that he hadn't appeared on the television in weeks, that he looked very ill the previous day on the television, that his "official" visit to Spain was actually a visit to the doctor.
I told him I would write about whatever people would tell me. But the problem was, no one told me anything. People were silent. Government officials were silent. I have no idea what's happening right now. Maybe only in 10-15 years after the regime is gone will we ever know what is really happening here, I said. Like with the Soviet Union, there were many things we only learned about after 1991. "There will be a time," I said, "when there will be new people in charge. And there will be old police officers, military officers, prosecutors who won't talk now, but before they die, they will write books and tell what is happening. Because there are too many eye witnesses to what is happening."
As everything in Uzbekistan, it would require patience. To learn the truth, patience to wait for years. My job was of course to write that first draft of history, and there was little to write, little to tell. I didn't need to wait 10-15 years to reread everything I wrote and say, look how little I knew. I knew right now how little I knew. I knew nothing.
We drove in silence along an empty main avenue called Shota Rustavelli with noone visible except for by the bus stop the man who sold the midnight bananas, packing his wares. One could always count on the midnight bananas seller, even on a Tuesday and after midnight, with no customers or cars on the street to see the man standing besides his makeshift stand of cardboard boxes piled one on top of the other, some bananas and a small scale. I asked my driver to pull over so that I could pick up some bananas. The seller remembered me, shook my hand. And despite the friendliness, this was commerce and one should always bargain because bargaining, as my local friends told me, "makes life more interesting." So, for his 1000 soums for a kilogram I had to bring down to about 800, by first offerring 600, "they are overripe," I said. To which he responded, "I'll give you a good price of 900," then I responded with 700, 750 and finally he capitulated to 800. There was no logic to this. No market forces operating on this sale of bananas at 2am with not another possible customer in sight. But I was happy that there would be something in my kitchen for breakfast.
Moments later, we were at my apartment block. The driver got out of the car to open the trunk and help me lug out my suitcases. "Don't forget what I asked you," he said, as I handed him money, shook his hand, and got read to go up to my apartment. "Write what you see." ¶ 5:54 PM 0 Comments
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
I would miss New York and my friends, even though things had changed and I sometimes wondered if New York was still that same New York that I had always loved and if my friends were still my friends that I had loved. But my last night in the city affirmed my love for the brick, the dust, the people, my friends. Nevertheless, I was ready to go back, excited to get back to my own place, my apartment with its silences, solitary walks to work in the morning in the quiet city, the disjointed feeling of waking up someplace completely alone, isolated, desolate, knowing where those hidden spots of life in Tashkent existed, for contrast. And, I missed Henrietta.
Though I dreaded that long journey back, the eight hour flight to Frankfurt, the two hour layover that would be spent finding the next departure gate I would navigate across trains and terminals and escalators, and time killing to the next leg, a seven hour flight, on a plane that usually would be empty, since hardly anyone went to Uzbekistan, and would afford me an empty row of seats in which I could stretch out and sleep.
That morning, my father left before I woke up as he was catching a flight for a business trip, and I was to leave the keys with the building concierge. I waited in the lobby for Robert who had offered to drive me to airport in his boyfriend's car. I looked forward to catching up with him in what would ordinarily be the first leg of the many legs of the long and boring trip back; he could regale me with his amusing stories on the road travelling across the country for his work on a rock music TV show, working with rock singers and their entourages; he could tell me about his new relationship. Of everyone I knew, I thought that his life was probably the most interesting, most enviable and I looked forward to the ride.
I could see the clean white 4x4 Chevy Blazer pulling up outside. New York is full of these cars, but in Tashkent, where everyone either drives a 20-30 year old Soviet manufactured Volga or Lada held together by duct tape and hope, or one of the lightweight Daewoo cars manufactured in the Ferghana Valley, it is only the internationals, recognizable by their red diplomatic license plates driving these big cars. Or possibly some rich Uzbek mafia type. Regardless, they were rare and on Tashkent's quiet streets, these cars turned heads. I didn't even conceive that the one outside could be Robert's until I saw him emerge from the front passenger seat after I sat there daydreaming. I got up and lugged my beat up bags. He came up to me, gave me a hug, and took one. From the back, I could see that in the driver's seat, was the boyfriend, or so I assumed, talking on a cell phone, not turning around to look at us. "Is that him," I asked, ready to meet the person I'd heard so much about.
"That's Brian," Robert said, smiling, dragging the suitcase full of peanut butter jars, books, four different kinds of sunblock moisturizers, bags of Starbucks coffee, a french press, little gifts and souvenirs for friends and colleagues. "Heavy," he grunted as he picked one up loading it into the back. "Do you have a man in there?"
"I wish...instead, I've got other similar things like that that I can't find out there," I said. "You can imagine that I'm doing without a lot of things. In a way, I realize you can live without a lot of them, but, they're nice to have around." And then I proceeded to tell him that I would keep things like peanut butter stashed away in a special cabinet that I would open only sporadically. In then end, you'd have two jars of peanut butter that would last you a whole year. After a few months the peanut butter would have hardened or taste bad. You would start to realize that you could live just fine without it. It starts out with peanut butter, and then, you discover that there are many other things that you learn to live without, to the point that you realize that you need very little to get by on. And then, before you know it, your whole view of things changes, and the nice comforting things in the cabinet strike you as extraneous next to the really important things that you want in life.
I got into the back seat which was large and I had all to myself, since Robert got into the front passenger. Brian at the driver seat continued talking into his cell phone, before turning on the ignition, turning to me to smile a not particularly warm smile and mouth out hello between exclamations in his phone conversation, which seems to take a leisurely pace and has something to do with taking care of cats. From my momentary glimpse of his face, he has a pleasant, ruddy, bearded face, and I can see that he has a large, beefy figure. He is what they call a "bear." But his voice is all pussycat; nasal, with a New Yorker or gay inflection that was whiny, punctuated by regular sighs, but loud, in such a way that it seems to command my and Robert's silence. And when Robert turns around to say something to me, the boyfriend hushes him with a curt and loud "shhh" and pointing at the dashboard. I whisper to him, "maybe you'll sit in the back with me so that we can chat a little more?" I felt I had so much to tell him.
He whispered back perhaps a few decibels softer than me, "I told him I'd sit up front and keep track of the directions." It would be so much easier to have a conversation if he were sitting next to me. But we drive off, as the boyfriend continues to talk about a very good veterinarian on 19th Street. So, like in any taxi ride I might take to JFK airport by myself, I stare out the window at the Manhattan Queens bridge, the East River below, Roosevelt Island, and then soon Queens ahead, which will be rows of houses, then later some cemeteries, Shea Stadium. It was a pity, Robert and I always had so much to talk about. Over the months, we wrote each other long and thoughtful emails. I told him about my work and my social life, even about Yulia, which I know he had lots of questions about. Upon entering Queens, the boyfriend excuses himself on his phone call, turning to Robert, "I hope you are paying close attention."
Robert turns away from me and watches the computerized map on the very high-tech dashboard of Brian's car. It is so high-tech, that it even gives recommendations based on traffic reports for where there is less congestion. Which confuses me, because we seem to be stuck in traffic that is moving so slowly. He puts down his phone for a moment to ask Robert when it was time to make the turn. "I think we missed the turn, just keep going straight ahead, we'll go on the next turn."
"Goddamn! Why aren't you paying attention!" Brian explodes and abruptly twitches which causes the huge car to swerve ever so slightly and makes me feel carsick.
He changed his voice quickly to the even voice he was talking on the phone with. "Sal, I'll call you back later, OK?" and then he puts down his phone petulantly and as if exercising the greatest effort in controlling a rage boiling inside. "You were supposed to tell me when to turn, so that we wouldn't be stuck all afternoon in traffic."
I was not liking Brian very much and had the distinct sense that he didn't really like the idea of driving me to the airport, that perhaps Robert had too hastily made his kind offer to me. All I wanted was just to disappear and regretted that I hadn't just taken a taxi. I thought, perhaps to offer to get out -- somewhere on the highway, I suppose, and to find myself a taxi. But that wasn't possible, taxis didn't stop on the highway. I was a hostage in this car and there was nothing good I could expect to come of it, except that I would get a free ride to my destination in what would likely be a very long and painful 40 minutes, or less if we were lucky. I was just happy that there was silence, albeit a hostile one -- because it could be worse; they might start to quarrel. I thought that this might do irrevocable damage to my friendship with Robert, who on the one hand, I was upset with for having put me in this situation, and on the other, I could only feel bad for, terrorized by this psychopath boyfriend, and who must feel completely humiliated, after having told me about some of the good things happening in his life, including having found himself a relationship. Perhaps I was over dramatizing it, but I felt that it was all a big lie, that I had been lied to. And that Mark, much like everyone else in New York, seemed to put out a nice face for me, and that all along, I was seeing behind the mask. Robert, I was sure was embarrassed. And I was embarrassed for him. We would probably be too embarrassed to ever talk to one another other again after this incident, which suddenly cast a light on the ugly reality
From the moment I got into the car, I realized I had sensed something was not right. After all, hadn't Robert told him about me? Wouldn't he be interested in talking to me and hearing about my life? Instead he just ignored me and talked about cat care. Further, I had always, in the back of my mind, thought that there was something strange about the way he'd gotten my email address a few months back to invite me to the surprise party he was having for Robert. Of course the gesture seemed nice, holding a surprise birthday party, but how did he get my email? Did he get Robert's entire address book? He seemed the type of control freak that would hack Robert's email account and spy on him.
Upon arriving at the airport after what seemed like an endless ride in silence, I decided to be diplomatic about the entire experience. I had, after all, saved $60 of cabfare. That was how much it would take to feed me for a week or two in Tashkent. All in all, had I taken a yellow taxi off of the street in New York, I too would have ridden in silence. "I am very grateful," I said. "It is kind of you to drive me." Then again, in a taxi I would have been spared the disappointment of not getting to talk with my friend, or witnessing a friend being abused.
"It was nice to meet you," he responded as I walked out of the car straight to the trunk to take my bags. Without looking back, I could tell that Robert got out of his seat and followed me. I opened the back myself, took out my bags one by one, ignoring Robert beside me, who seemed to be trying to help. To break the awkward silence, I said nothing except that I could probably handle my bags by myself, though what I wanted to say and almost did say was that I hoped for his sake that by the next time I'd see him that he'd have broken up with this guy. But I thought it wiser to keep my silence, it would only be the right thing to somehow console Robert, who clearly had it off worse than me. I was going on a plane and would be alone for hours in peace. He had to ride back to Manhattan in traffic with this brute.
"Please let me help you carry them into the terminal." I let him take a bag and we walked in silence to the registration line where I set down my bag, and he sets the other one down beside it. I couldn't seem to look at him, but he stepped in front of me, so that it was impossible not to look directly at him.
"I’m really sorry about that," he said. "You didn't need to be in the middle of it."
"I know," I said and hoped that in my glance, I expressed to him that I wasn't so upset, but more worried about him riding back with Brian. "Good luck getting back." I put out my hand to shake. I realized that handshakes were more Uzbek than they were American. Here they were formal and cold, whereas there they were routine. I went up to the registration desk and felt relieved to be leaving, to be freed of New York and of Robert and Brian and their unpleasant company. To be heading on two seven and eight-hour flights with a two-hour layover in between, in which I would probably not say a word to anyone and would be alone in my thoughts for hours. I sort of felt good about getting out of New York.
Though I dreaded that long journey back, the eight hour flight to Frankfurt, the two hour layover that would be spent finding the next departure gate I would navigate across trains and terminals and escalators, and time killing to the next leg, a seven hour flight, on a plane that usually would be empty, since hardly anyone went to Uzbekistan, and would afford me an empty row of seats in which I could stretch out and sleep.
That morning, my father left before I woke up as he was catching a flight for a business trip, and I was to leave the keys with the building concierge. I waited in the lobby for Robert who had offered to drive me to airport in his boyfriend's car. I looked forward to catching up with him in what would ordinarily be the first leg of the many legs of the long and boring trip back; he could regale me with his amusing stories on the road travelling across the country for his work on a rock music TV show, working with rock singers and their entourages; he could tell me about his new relationship. Of everyone I knew, I thought that his life was probably the most interesting, most enviable and I looked forward to the ride.
I could see the clean white 4x4 Chevy Blazer pulling up outside. New York is full of these cars, but in Tashkent, where everyone either drives a 20-30 year old Soviet manufactured Volga or Lada held together by duct tape and hope, or one of the lightweight Daewoo cars manufactured in the Ferghana Valley, it is only the internationals, recognizable by their red diplomatic license plates driving these big cars. Or possibly some rich Uzbek mafia type. Regardless, they were rare and on Tashkent's quiet streets, these cars turned heads. I didn't even conceive that the one outside could be Robert's until I saw him emerge from the front passenger seat after I sat there daydreaming. I got up and lugged my beat up bags. He came up to me, gave me a hug, and took one. From the back, I could see that in the driver's seat, was the boyfriend, or so I assumed, talking on a cell phone, not turning around to look at us. "Is that him," I asked, ready to meet the person I'd heard so much about.
"That's Brian," Robert said, smiling, dragging the suitcase full of peanut butter jars, books, four different kinds of sunblock moisturizers, bags of Starbucks coffee, a french press, little gifts and souvenirs for friends and colleagues. "Heavy," he grunted as he picked one up loading it into the back. "Do you have a man in there?"
"I wish...instead, I've got other similar things like that that I can't find out there," I said. "You can imagine that I'm doing without a lot of things. In a way, I realize you can live without a lot of them, but, they're nice to have around." And then I proceeded to tell him that I would keep things like peanut butter stashed away in a special cabinet that I would open only sporadically. In then end, you'd have two jars of peanut butter that would last you a whole year. After a few months the peanut butter would have hardened or taste bad. You would start to realize that you could live just fine without it. It starts out with peanut butter, and then, you discover that there are many other things that you learn to live without, to the point that you realize that you need very little to get by on. And then, before you know it, your whole view of things changes, and the nice comforting things in the cabinet strike you as extraneous next to the really important things that you want in life.
I got into the back seat which was large and I had all to myself, since Robert got into the front passenger. Brian at the driver seat continued talking into his cell phone, before turning on the ignition, turning to me to smile a not particularly warm smile and mouth out hello between exclamations in his phone conversation, which seems to take a leisurely pace and has something to do with taking care of cats. From my momentary glimpse of his face, he has a pleasant, ruddy, bearded face, and I can see that he has a large, beefy figure. He is what they call a "bear." But his voice is all pussycat; nasal, with a New Yorker or gay inflection that was whiny, punctuated by regular sighs, but loud, in such a way that it seems to command my and Robert's silence. And when Robert turns around to say something to me, the boyfriend hushes him with a curt and loud "shhh" and pointing at the dashboard. I whisper to him, "maybe you'll sit in the back with me so that we can chat a little more?" I felt I had so much to tell him.
He whispered back perhaps a few decibels softer than me, "I told him I'd sit up front and keep track of the directions." It would be so much easier to have a conversation if he were sitting next to me. But we drive off, as the boyfriend continues to talk about a very good veterinarian on 19th Street. So, like in any taxi ride I might take to JFK airport by myself, I stare out the window at the Manhattan Queens bridge, the East River below, Roosevelt Island, and then soon Queens ahead, which will be rows of houses, then later some cemeteries, Shea Stadium. It was a pity, Robert and I always had so much to talk about. Over the months, we wrote each other long and thoughtful emails. I told him about my work and my social life, even about Yulia, which I know he had lots of questions about. Upon entering Queens, the boyfriend excuses himself on his phone call, turning to Robert, "I hope you are paying close attention."
Robert turns away from me and watches the computerized map on the very high-tech dashboard of Brian's car. It is so high-tech, that it even gives recommendations based on traffic reports for where there is less congestion. Which confuses me, because we seem to be stuck in traffic that is moving so slowly. He puts down his phone for a moment to ask Robert when it was time to make the turn. "I think we missed the turn, just keep going straight ahead, we'll go on the next turn."
"Goddamn! Why aren't you paying attention!" Brian explodes and abruptly twitches which causes the huge car to swerve ever so slightly and makes me feel carsick.
He changed his voice quickly to the even voice he was talking on the phone with. "Sal, I'll call you back later, OK?" and then he puts down his phone petulantly and as if exercising the greatest effort in controlling a rage boiling inside. "You were supposed to tell me when to turn, so that we wouldn't be stuck all afternoon in traffic."
I was not liking Brian very much and had the distinct sense that he didn't really like the idea of driving me to the airport, that perhaps Robert had too hastily made his kind offer to me. All I wanted was just to disappear and regretted that I hadn't just taken a taxi. I thought, perhaps to offer to get out -- somewhere on the highway, I suppose, and to find myself a taxi. But that wasn't possible, taxis didn't stop on the highway. I was a hostage in this car and there was nothing good I could expect to come of it, except that I would get a free ride to my destination in what would likely be a very long and painful 40 minutes, or less if we were lucky. I was just happy that there was silence, albeit a hostile one -- because it could be worse; they might start to quarrel. I thought that this might do irrevocable damage to my friendship with Robert, who on the one hand, I was upset with for having put me in this situation, and on the other, I could only feel bad for, terrorized by this psychopath boyfriend, and who must feel completely humiliated, after having told me about some of the good things happening in his life, including having found himself a relationship. Perhaps I was over dramatizing it, but I felt that it was all a big lie, that I had been lied to. And that Mark, much like everyone else in New York, seemed to put out a nice face for me, and that all along, I was seeing behind the mask. Robert, I was sure was embarrassed. And I was embarrassed for him. We would probably be too embarrassed to ever talk to one another other again after this incident, which suddenly cast a light on the ugly reality
From the moment I got into the car, I realized I had sensed something was not right. After all, hadn't Robert told him about me? Wouldn't he be interested in talking to me and hearing about my life? Instead he just ignored me and talked about cat care. Further, I had always, in the back of my mind, thought that there was something strange about the way he'd gotten my email address a few months back to invite me to the surprise party he was having for Robert. Of course the gesture seemed nice, holding a surprise birthday party, but how did he get my email? Did he get Robert's entire address book? He seemed the type of control freak that would hack Robert's email account and spy on him.
Upon arriving at the airport after what seemed like an endless ride in silence, I decided to be diplomatic about the entire experience. I had, after all, saved $60 of cabfare. That was how much it would take to feed me for a week or two in Tashkent. All in all, had I taken a yellow taxi off of the street in New York, I too would have ridden in silence. "I am very grateful," I said. "It is kind of you to drive me." Then again, in a taxi I would have been spared the disappointment of not getting to talk with my friend, or witnessing a friend being abused.
"It was nice to meet you," he responded as I walked out of the car straight to the trunk to take my bags. Without looking back, I could tell that Robert got out of his seat and followed me. I opened the back myself, took out my bags one by one, ignoring Robert beside me, who seemed to be trying to help. To break the awkward silence, I said nothing except that I could probably handle my bags by myself, though what I wanted to say and almost did say was that I hoped for his sake that by the next time I'd see him that he'd have broken up with this guy. But I thought it wiser to keep my silence, it would only be the right thing to somehow console Robert, who clearly had it off worse than me. I was going on a plane and would be alone for hours in peace. He had to ride back to Manhattan in traffic with this brute.
"Please let me help you carry them into the terminal." I let him take a bag and we walked in silence to the registration line where I set down my bag, and he sets the other one down beside it. I couldn't seem to look at him, but he stepped in front of me, so that it was impossible not to look directly at him.
"I’m really sorry about that," he said. "You didn't need to be in the middle of it."
"I know," I said and hoped that in my glance, I expressed to him that I wasn't so upset, but more worried about him riding back with Brian. "Good luck getting back." I put out my hand to shake. I realized that handshakes were more Uzbek than they were American. Here they were formal and cold, whereas there they were routine. I went up to the registration desk and felt relieved to be leaving, to be freed of New York and of Robert and Brian and their unpleasant company. To be heading on two seven and eight-hour flights with a two-hour layover in between, in which I would probably not say a word to anyone and would be alone in my thoughts for hours. I sort of felt good about getting out of New York.
Labels: No such thing as a free ride
¶ 6:33 PM 0 Comments
The financial district downtown at night looked the same as I had always remembered it. Quiet with a few restaurants lit up, an occasional person strolling. The buildings tall and close together, the streets narrow, the sky blocked out. As we got closer to Ground Zero, I could see the expanse of space fenced off. We got out of the taxi and walked to the fencing surrounding it, There were cranes suspended in motion over small hills of rubble of what was now crushed buildings, bodies, office furniture, indistinguishable from any other dust. So much of the area had been cleared away and now it looked almost like any other construction site where ground was being broken. But it was a large field of empty space, and at night and in the silence, it was meditative and solitary like the desert.
Under the light a starless and empty sky, and of streetlamps nearby, I could see makeshift altars on parkbenches strewn with fresh flowers, stuffed animals, fireman's hats, children's drawings, letters, poems, all a bit dampened from the rain earlier, slightly weather worn, attesting to the fact that here was not just dust, but a place where people had lived and died. But now, it was nothing, the dust like desert sands, hardly bearing a trace of those who trod on its earth.
We walked around in silence,the lightness of drink from only an hour earlier had muted into something somber, like the end of a holiday, like the time to turn out the lights, like the time to sleep before a new day. "You probably need to get up early for work tomorrow," I said to Adrian feeling that I wanted to be alone, but he continued to walk with me. "You can leave if you want, I want to go on the Ferry." I felt the impulse to see what the city looked like without the towers, how this deserted space fit into the landscape of the city. Adrian continued to follow in silence, as I walked to the ferry docks, read the schedule to find that I could take the last ferry out. In my childhood, I rode the ferry and recalled clear days watching the city skyline from afar like a miniature snowglobe. Ad I got older, I recalled riding at night, watching the shining lights of the city.
Adrian beside me, we watched as the the ferry pulled out and saw two blue sticks of laser light reaching to the sky in the place where the towers once stood, looking like phantom limbs or something missing. I felt the sting in the eye of the strong winds off the ocean and wanted to cry, I could see it in Adrian's face too. Somewhat drunkenly, I fell into him and his frame jolted into an embrace and into a silent cry. I hadn't cried with or near anyone in a long time, and through tears I watched the landscape before us grow smaller, slipping away, feeling like we were standing over a gravestone or a funeral at sea, shedding tears over the inevitable, the unreturning, over all losses, and over loss itself.
I tried to hold back tears. Closed my eyes and swallowed, imagined that I would wake up days later far away, in an empty meditative desert.
Under the light a starless and empty sky, and of streetlamps nearby, I could see makeshift altars on parkbenches strewn with fresh flowers, stuffed animals, fireman's hats, children's drawings, letters, poems, all a bit dampened from the rain earlier, slightly weather worn, attesting to the fact that here was not just dust, but a place where people had lived and died. But now, it was nothing, the dust like desert sands, hardly bearing a trace of those who trod on its earth.
We walked around in silence,the lightness of drink from only an hour earlier had muted into something somber, like the end of a holiday, like the time to turn out the lights, like the time to sleep before a new day. "You probably need to get up early for work tomorrow," I said to Adrian feeling that I wanted to be alone, but he continued to walk with me. "You can leave if you want, I want to go on the Ferry." I felt the impulse to see what the city looked like without the towers, how this deserted space fit into the landscape of the city. Adrian continued to follow in silence, as I walked to the ferry docks, read the schedule to find that I could take the last ferry out. In my childhood, I rode the ferry and recalled clear days watching the city skyline from afar like a miniature snowglobe. Ad I got older, I recalled riding at night, watching the shining lights of the city.
Adrian beside me, we watched as the the ferry pulled out and saw two blue sticks of laser light reaching to the sky in the place where the towers once stood, looking like phantom limbs or something missing. I felt the sting in the eye of the strong winds off the ocean and wanted to cry, I could see it in Adrian's face too. Somewhat drunkenly, I fell into him and his frame jolted into an embrace and into a silent cry. I hadn't cried with or near anyone in a long time, and through tears I watched the landscape before us grow smaller, slipping away, feeling like we were standing over a gravestone or a funeral at sea, shedding tears over the inevitable, the unreturning, over all losses, and over loss itself.
I tried to hold back tears. Closed my eyes and swallowed, imagined that I would wake up days later far away, in an empty meditative desert.
Labels: Loss
¶ 4:30 PM 0 Comments
Monday, May 19, 2008
"That was my closest friend in Tashkent. One of my main reasons why I'm happy there," I said finishing a small drop of vodka left in the shotglass, which I noticed quickly disappeared off the table. "In fact it's kind of an amazing thing to think that halfway around the world I meet such a friend. We see each other practically every day. We're like survival buddies because she's married to this awful Uzbek guy. We're so tight, people there think we're sleeping together...but mostly because they are clueless."
"Are you sleeping together?"
"No. It's just becuase she'll come to meet me at the office at the end of the day and we'll walk home together. And it that culture, that's kind of construed as sleeping together." The same phrase in Uzbek language for walking together was used for people dating each other or sleeping together. It wasn't the richest language in terms of nuance. But also, the local imagination didn't have much of a grasp of a man and woman just being friends or of a man being gay. We can sort of get away with it since we're Americans. We're different and they don't completely understand us.
"So, you're not having sex with her. But you're having sex with the ho?" Adrian asked accusatorily.
"It's not like I'm this complete pussy-crazed heterosexual," I insisted.
"Then what's the deal with the ho?"
"I suppose it's just a midlife experimentation with my sexuality."
"Funny, you don't hear much about gay guys swinging back that way," he mused skeptically. "Then again, you don't hear about guys moving to Uzbekistan. You move to Uzbekistan, you turn straight."
"I'm not turning straight, just living my life."
The waiter returned and laid in front of me another shotglass filled with vodka. I hadn't remembered asking for it. When I looked up to him to tell him I hadn't ordered it, he said, "on the house," he said with a smile. I could detect something Slavic in his face, and asked "Russki?"
"Czech," he said and walked away.
"Someone's sweet on you," Adrian teased. "Maybe he could go home with him. Oops, I forgot, you're straight now."
"Enough,' I said, holding up my glass in somewhat drunken solemnity. I raised the glass to him, to Adrian, "to life," I said, though in Uzbekistan I'd learned to make long involved toasts, that included citations from Pushkin, that waxed philosophical, that spoke of friendship, of good fortune, of the meaning of life, of life being more than that dash between the year of birth and year of death on the tombstone. It was the vodka toast that seemed these days to be the height of my current intellectual life.
Adrian answered, "l'chaim." I feared that at the moment, he would break out in a refrain of "Fiddler on the Roof," that decadent American creation, a musical adaptation of lofty literary achievement, as Yulia had once pointed out of what was a classic, revered by the Soviet literati. "Only, in America," she had said. Adrian had a tendency to break out into songs from musicals. I never had pictured him as the type who did musical theater in high school; he wasn't exactly a creative soul, an artistic soul. But he did sometimes break out into little musical numbers. My fears were well founded. Even my vodka buzz couldn't stop me from cringing. I had to stop him from singing. I asked, "have you read Sholom Aleichem?"
"No." he answered. I wasn't too surprised. If memory served me right, he wasn't much of a reader, didn't have much of a collection of books in his home. "Have you?"
"I did, a long, long time ago." I said. "But it's really popular there. Even my ho, who has nothing more than a high-school education, has read it."
"Is she Jewish?"
"No, just the Soviets really liked him." I thought of all of those old Soviet style households with their bookcases full of books, protected by glass. Those were the only books to be had in Tashkent, those sitting in peoples' homes. There were no bookstores, except the official ones that sold school textbooks and the thirteen tomes written by the president about the official ideology. There were some stands on the streets near my house where people were selling their old books. But rarely did one find a new book, something published after 1991. In fact, sometimes I thought about how intellectually isolated we were -- in a world full of new, developing ideas, new books being written and published daily, and how far away I was from it. On the other hand, I didn't feel so sad about the impoverished intellectual environment that I lived in.
Somewhat drunkenly, we managed to order dinners and we talked about random things. I talked about the sad intellectual state my life was in, and how even though I seemed to be happy, it was something of a simpleton's happiness, where I was just happy to have my food, my drink, a few friends, work that I enjoyed. All that life of the mind from New York, intellectual, spiritual, ethical seemed to be somewhat barren, like those wide swaths of desert on the roads outside Tashkent, or the empty city squares and streets. I didn't even care much about the taste of my food, I told Adrian, just so long as it was filling and didn't make me sick, since the food was generally bland, and often prepared under sub-standard conditions of hygeine. And yet, we recalled the times back when I would cook in New York, read cookbooks, teach Adrian how to properly use goat cheese in cooking, something he had never tasted before. And he spoke about how he had been in a relationship with someone who just decided one day to end everything and now, their only conversations were about their joint custody of their dog. It didn't really make a lot of sense, he said. A lot of things in life don't make a lot of sense. Why I was in Uzbekistan, for example. "There is no logic to my being there. It just seems to be a bizaare twist of fate," I said musing about my state of mind the day the vacancy opened, some idea I had at that time about wanting to see more of the world, despite never having much wanderlust before then. And then, of all the places where I should end up is Uzbekistan, where the food constantly makes me sick and there is nothing to read.
"Maybe life is just a series of incidents," he said. "A series of relationships." He couldn't understand why his ex-boyfriend wanted to leave him without any explanation. I felt a little uncomfortable about the topic. "We each responded to 9-11 differently. I wanted to be near someone, but he said he just wanted to be alone. We were a casualty of 9-11."
Another shot of vodka appeared in front of me, just as I was feeling uncomfortable with the topic. "You're still alive, you should be thankful for that," I shot my glass down and felt a bit emboldened. "I think no one woke up the day after September 10th thinking that their entire life would be changed the next day. A lot of people lost their lives, so my dear, with all due respect -- it's overdramatizing a bit to call yourself a casualty. Maybe something else was going on, and you just don't know or haven't really thought about it enough." I remembered that I was the one always in therapy, speaking to a psychiatrist, endlessly talking about and analyzing problems, possibly too much. Whereas, he didn't seem to be interested much in mental health or introspection, he was of the school that "didn't believe" in "shrinks," psychologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts. But he then shocked me by telling me that he was "seeing someone" to talk about his breakup. Funny, I had forgotten that in New York, people said "seeing someone" here to mean that they were seeing as in dating and/or sleeping with someone, as well as talking to a mental health professional.
"That's good," I said. "I'm sorry if I was coming down hard on you."
He shrugged. For me, I told him, my experience of 9-11 was really different. On the one hand, the tragedy was frightening, and yet remote. But the consequences, the war in Afghanistan was a little more frightening and somewhat accelerated my life -- caused more work for me, some travel to Northern Afghanistan, to the south of Uzbekistan to the area around the newly built US airbase. In general, more adrenaline, and less time for introspection. And that's how I ended up in things like a relationship with Yulia. It wasn't emotional. It was purely for physical pleasure. "Strange to think that my real emotional connections are with men, like you and me talking right now. I can't have a talk like this with her."
"Why not?"
"Lots of reasons. First, she's homophobic. Possibly xenophobic. She's not very educated, doesn't read much."
"But she's read Sholom Aleichem."
"True. But so has everyone there. She lives in a completely different world from me. We live in a different world from her. There are things about their lives that we can never understand. They have very difficult lives. I get a sense that she gets by on her wits, on being beautiful, on being sexually aggressive, because someone like me is a possible life raft out of there. But I don't know. You know how there are things that you just don't want to know...There's a lot about her that is like that. Even though I have a lot of downtime, solitary time, it does seem that I'm not really thinking about a lot of these things in a lot of depth. I don't even think about 9-11 anymore."
We sat in silence for a moment. Our smiling waiter left a check down in front of us. "Have you been down there? To Ground Zero?"
"I haven't. I saw as it was happening, the smoke and everything from downtown."
"Let's go down there," I said, inspired as I got up from my seat.
"I have to work tomorrow."
"Then I'll go by myself," I said, heading to the curb, thinking to hail at taxi.
"Ok, I'll go with you," and he followed me into the first yellow taxi that stopped.
"Where do you tell him to go?" I asked Adrian. "It feels weird to say 'where the World Trade Center used to stand.'"
"Bowling Green," he called out to the driver as we drove towards the West Side highway and sat in silence, opening the windows, letting the strong wind blow numbly against my forehead. I didn't feel my vodka buzz anymore, just as stillness, as though I might be standing still with Adrian. ¶ 6:56 PM 0 Comments
"Are you sleeping together?"
"No. It's just becuase she'll come to meet me at the office at the end of the day and we'll walk home together. And it that culture, that's kind of construed as sleeping together." The same phrase in Uzbek language for walking together was used for people dating each other or sleeping together. It wasn't the richest language in terms of nuance. But also, the local imagination didn't have much of a grasp of a man and woman just being friends or of a man being gay. We can sort of get away with it since we're Americans. We're different and they don't completely understand us.
"So, you're not having sex with her. But you're having sex with the ho?" Adrian asked accusatorily.
"It's not like I'm this complete pussy-crazed heterosexual," I insisted.
"Then what's the deal with the ho?"
"I suppose it's just a midlife experimentation with my sexuality."
"Funny, you don't hear much about gay guys swinging back that way," he mused skeptically. "Then again, you don't hear about guys moving to Uzbekistan. You move to Uzbekistan, you turn straight."
"I'm not turning straight, just living my life."
The waiter returned and laid in front of me another shotglass filled with vodka. I hadn't remembered asking for it. When I looked up to him to tell him I hadn't ordered it, he said, "on the house," he said with a smile. I could detect something Slavic in his face, and asked "Russki?"
"Czech," he said and walked away.
"Someone's sweet on you," Adrian teased. "Maybe he could go home with him. Oops, I forgot, you're straight now."
"Enough,' I said, holding up my glass in somewhat drunken solemnity. I raised the glass to him, to Adrian, "to life," I said, though in Uzbekistan I'd learned to make long involved toasts, that included citations from Pushkin, that waxed philosophical, that spoke of friendship, of good fortune, of the meaning of life, of life being more than that dash between the year of birth and year of death on the tombstone. It was the vodka toast that seemed these days to be the height of my current intellectual life.
Adrian answered, "l'chaim." I feared that at the moment, he would break out in a refrain of "Fiddler on the Roof," that decadent American creation, a musical adaptation of lofty literary achievement, as Yulia had once pointed out of what was a classic, revered by the Soviet literati. "Only, in America," she had said. Adrian had a tendency to break out into songs from musicals. I never had pictured him as the type who did musical theater in high school; he wasn't exactly a creative soul, an artistic soul. But he did sometimes break out into little musical numbers. My fears were well founded. Even my vodka buzz couldn't stop me from cringing. I had to stop him from singing. I asked, "have you read Sholom Aleichem?"
"No." he answered. I wasn't too surprised. If memory served me right, he wasn't much of a reader, didn't have much of a collection of books in his home. "Have you?"
"I did, a long, long time ago." I said. "But it's really popular there. Even my ho, who has nothing more than a high-school education, has read it."
"Is she Jewish?"
"No, just the Soviets really liked him." I thought of all of those old Soviet style households with their bookcases full of books, protected by glass. Those were the only books to be had in Tashkent, those sitting in peoples' homes. There were no bookstores, except the official ones that sold school textbooks and the thirteen tomes written by the president about the official ideology. There were some stands on the streets near my house where people were selling their old books. But rarely did one find a new book, something published after 1991. In fact, sometimes I thought about how intellectually isolated we were -- in a world full of new, developing ideas, new books being written and published daily, and how far away I was from it. On the other hand, I didn't feel so sad about the impoverished intellectual environment that I lived in.
Somewhat drunkenly, we managed to order dinners and we talked about random things. I talked about the sad intellectual state my life was in, and how even though I seemed to be happy, it was something of a simpleton's happiness, where I was just happy to have my food, my drink, a few friends, work that I enjoyed. All that life of the mind from New York, intellectual, spiritual, ethical seemed to be somewhat barren, like those wide swaths of desert on the roads outside Tashkent, or the empty city squares and streets. I didn't even care much about the taste of my food, I told Adrian, just so long as it was filling and didn't make me sick, since the food was generally bland, and often prepared under sub-standard conditions of hygeine. And yet, we recalled the times back when I would cook in New York, read cookbooks, teach Adrian how to properly use goat cheese in cooking, something he had never tasted before. And he spoke about how he had been in a relationship with someone who just decided one day to end everything and now, their only conversations were about their joint custody of their dog. It didn't really make a lot of sense, he said. A lot of things in life don't make a lot of sense. Why I was in Uzbekistan, for example. "There is no logic to my being there. It just seems to be a bizaare twist of fate," I said musing about my state of mind the day the vacancy opened, some idea I had at that time about wanting to see more of the world, despite never having much wanderlust before then. And then, of all the places where I should end up is Uzbekistan, where the food constantly makes me sick and there is nothing to read.
"Maybe life is just a series of incidents," he said. "A series of relationships." He couldn't understand why his ex-boyfriend wanted to leave him without any explanation. I felt a little uncomfortable about the topic. "We each responded to 9-11 differently. I wanted to be near someone, but he said he just wanted to be alone. We were a casualty of 9-11."
Another shot of vodka appeared in front of me, just as I was feeling uncomfortable with the topic. "You're still alive, you should be thankful for that," I shot my glass down and felt a bit emboldened. "I think no one woke up the day after September 10th thinking that their entire life would be changed the next day. A lot of people lost their lives, so my dear, with all due respect -- it's overdramatizing a bit to call yourself a casualty. Maybe something else was going on, and you just don't know or haven't really thought about it enough." I remembered that I was the one always in therapy, speaking to a psychiatrist, endlessly talking about and analyzing problems, possibly too much. Whereas, he didn't seem to be interested much in mental health or introspection, he was of the school that "didn't believe" in "shrinks," psychologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts. But he then shocked me by telling me that he was "seeing someone" to talk about his breakup. Funny, I had forgotten that in New York, people said "seeing someone" here to mean that they were seeing as in dating and/or sleeping with someone, as well as talking to a mental health professional.
"That's good," I said. "I'm sorry if I was coming down hard on you."
He shrugged. For me, I told him, my experience of 9-11 was really different. On the one hand, the tragedy was frightening, and yet remote. But the consequences, the war in Afghanistan was a little more frightening and somewhat accelerated my life -- caused more work for me, some travel to Northern Afghanistan, to the south of Uzbekistan to the area around the newly built US airbase. In general, more adrenaline, and less time for introspection. And that's how I ended up in things like a relationship with Yulia. It wasn't emotional. It was purely for physical pleasure. "Strange to think that my real emotional connections are with men, like you and me talking right now. I can't have a talk like this with her."
"Why not?"
"Lots of reasons. First, she's homophobic. Possibly xenophobic. She's not very educated, doesn't read much."
"But she's read Sholom Aleichem."
"True. But so has everyone there. She lives in a completely different world from me. We live in a different world from her. There are things about their lives that we can never understand. They have very difficult lives. I get a sense that she gets by on her wits, on being beautiful, on being sexually aggressive, because someone like me is a possible life raft out of there. But I don't know. You know how there are things that you just don't want to know...There's a lot about her that is like that. Even though I have a lot of downtime, solitary time, it does seem that I'm not really thinking about a lot of these things in a lot of depth. I don't even think about 9-11 anymore."
We sat in silence for a moment. Our smiling waiter left a check down in front of us. "Have you been down there? To Ground Zero?"
"I haven't. I saw as it was happening, the smoke and everything from downtown."
"Let's go down there," I said, inspired as I got up from my seat.
"I have to work tomorrow."
"Then I'll go by myself," I said, heading to the curb, thinking to hail at taxi.
"Ok, I'll go with you," and he followed me into the first yellow taxi that stopped.
"Where do you tell him to go?" I asked Adrian. "It feels weird to say 'where the World Trade Center used to stand.'"
"Bowling Green," he called out to the driver as we drove towards the West Side highway and sat in silence, opening the windows, letting the strong wind blow numbly against my forehead. I didn't feel my vodka buzz anymore, just as stillness, as though I might be standing still with Adrian. ¶ 6:56 PM 0 Comments
As I walked around the city, I only grew more convinced of how the landscape had changed and continued to change. Everywhere there was scaffolding under buildings, there were construction sites, plots of land being cleared out, new buildings going up, buildings I had remembered once being there, now gone, leaving an empty space or with a new completely different building in its place.
It felt very wrong to believe what my sister said, that nothing new really happens in the city, that one restaurant closes and another one opens, that's all. It felt like everything had changed. People changed, city blocks changed, buildings changed. Not to mention, 9/11 happened -- though who could have ever foreseen this -- and they were saying that this changed everything. They said that it changed things that now people were kinder, gentler. People in New York were politer, they felt a common bond, they hung American flags from their windows -- like in small towns around America, Slews of storefronts I remembered from before were now replaced by Starbucks Coffee shops.
I counted three of them in the five block radius between the subway station and Adrian's house, where we would meet. The fourth was right next door to his building, where there once had been a mom and pop type diner that seemed to have been there since the 50's and where I remember we'd occasionally go for greasy french fries at 2 in the morning. I wasn't entirely sure if I wanted to see Adrian. It felt like penance. I went in for a coffee, I had some time to kill and their coffee tasted so good after my diet in Uzbekistan of bitter and acidic Nescafe. The coffee worked on me like a drug. When I drank it, I could even start to feel my head spin, my gestures get speedy, my eyes darting around me stopping momentarily on all of the city activity happening outside, like the dog lifting up a hind leg, a jogger breezing past, a cell phone on a table near me ringing loudly, a pair of eyes meeting mine -- they were Adrian's. He was being led by the leash of that strong dog that had stopped to relieve itself by a tree. I didn't remember him having a dog. This was new. But the dog looked old. Adrian looked up from the dog held out a finger to me and mouthed out "one minute," and pointed up.
I've been accused of breaking Adrian's heart, and it's likely that I actually did, because I felt guilty about it. We were dating for a few months when I had told him that I wanted to cool things down immediately after we'd taken a short vacation together to the coast. By the time we'd boarded the train to leave, I knew that I was probably in love with someone else, but I refused to admit it aloud. I would even call the other guy from pay phones in restaurants, on street corners, anywhere and any moment I could steal away from him, even if just to leave a message on his answering machine. I left Adrian shortly after, to explore the new prospects with the other guy, who turned out to be seriously considering becoming a monk. Not being a Catholic myself, and not knowing many Catholics, there was no way I could have been aware of the red flags. However, just having had this experience, of meeting this guy, I came to realize that there was something attractive to me about the monastic life and I could attribute to having had some influence on me to take an overseas posting in Tashkent and to for once confront being alone and on my own. These were things I told no one, about an indiscretion I told no one about, and feelings that I had no one to share with. Certainly not Adrian. And I felt that he must hate me or should hate me, must think that I'm a bad person for having left him, for no reason that he knew about.
A few moments later, Adrian returned, came into the shop from the street without the dog. He looked much the same as I had always remembered him, lean, with his hairline receding, and always with a bit of a tan, which I looked at when he embraced me and over his shoulder I saw his dark arm against my pale one. In the desert, I covered up and wore layers of sunblock, whereas he in the city would embrace the sun, weekending on the Long Island Sound at Fire Island, the beach where the well-off New York City gays relaxed on summer weekends, drank, drugged, danced, hooked up, had dinner parties, and I am told, sometimes made business deals. The few times I had been out there, I remembered enjoying the decadence, but not without tremendous feelings that I was enjoying a guilty pleasure and perplexed that grown men could live what was like a second adolescence. That was back then. I wondered how I would feel now, having lived among the Uzbeks with their conservative outlook on life, that I worried might be rubbing off on me. "Did you just get back from Fire Island?" I asked thinking that the answer would somewhat differentiate myself from Adrian and what kind of life I might have had, had I never left here.
"I stopped doing that," he said. "I decided to buy a summer home on the Sound, but somewhere quiet." I didn't expect that and was surprised to find myself a bit envious of my friends' acquisition of real estate, while I owned nothing, had nothing save a cabinet of foreign goods stowed away for rainy days in an apartment in Tashkent. "Congratulations," I said.
He could detect my muted tone, perhaps intention. I hoped not. "What's the matter?" he asked.
"Nothing," I said. "Just things change, I guess," I added inconsequentially. "I'm always getting used to things changing these days. After being away, I'm always thinking that I'm the one whose changed, not realizing that everything else is changing too."
"Yeah, things have changed, since you left to..." He paused. "Where is it again?" He reverted to this jackass tone that he had, acting as though it were so hard to pronounce, and the word, a question in itself, "Uzbekistan?" He pointed south along Eighth Avenue. "No more twin towers. And lots of things around here."
It was strange, Adrian repeated what I said, as though what I said was wrong, and then said pretty much the exact same thing, but with some nuance. I wondered if I was hypersensitive, but I felt that I detected a note of hostility in this, as I felt in almost all of our conversations, some kind of tension bordering on hostility. Perhaps it was just his latent hate for me. I thought, if he hated me, then I think I hate him back. These days I was finding myself hating just about everyone. Perhaps it would be best to cut the conversation short, make an excuse to move on, as though I had someplace to be, as though I had hundreds of errands to run before getting on my plane back to Tashkent. Truth was that I was killing time until then. We were silent for a moment, perhaps he was thinking about the twin towers, perhaps he was thinking that I was thinking about the same, whereas I was thinking about whether it was such a good idea for me to spend time with him or anyone here for that matter.
"Are you in any danger in Uzbekistan," he asked with some warmth returning to his voice, "isn't it close to Afghanistan?"
"I don't know," I said. "I don't feel unsafe. I feel as safe as I feel right now, right here." I could have gone into an intensive discussion about the geography of Afghanistan, about where the fighting was happening, which was mostly in the South, and that the Uzbekistan bordered the Western-friendly Northern stronghold and supported its Northern Alliance that battled the Taliban. Whereas September 10th was an ordinary day for most Americans, for us living in Uzbekistan, it was a day of alarm and tragedy since the Northern Alliance General, Ahmed Shah Massoud, was assasinated that day, and we wondered if something was going to change. But my very localized impression of those days, whereas common to us in Tashkent, would likely have seemed out of place or incomprehensible here. This was the time for me to keep silent.
"What's safe these days, after all who could have predicted this?" I told him about how frightening it must have been to be here and how I remembered that in Tashkent at that time I was wondering if I would have a home to return to in New York after the attacks, if one day it would be gone and then I'd just be stuck in Tashkent, for lack of anyplace else to go. I would probably just kill myself if that were the case. I remembered watching for days afterwards on CNN's panic inducing coverage of the potential of attacks on the US using crop dusters, that made me crazy. I remembered talking to friends in New York who said that maybe it was time to move out of New York, but where to go? We all loved this place so much and it was a part of me.
"So why leave," he asked.
"I don't know." Sometimes you leave something you love either because you love it too much or your fear of losing it outweighs your love, I explained. Or maybe because you need to see more just to confirm to yourself your love. Unlike a person, I made clear, unless my intentions were misunderstood, a city was something you could always return to. You were allowed to have an open relationship with a city since it doesn't go away. Though there was some time after 9-11 that I feared that it could.
As we walked down Eighth Avenue and talked, we found our path blocked by a dog that ran behind me, his leash catching on to my leg, so that he could sniff the rear end of another dog. Chelsea's men and their dogs. There were lots of them here.
"So when will you come back?"
"When I'm ready, I suppose." I said, while the dog's owner apologized to me. "Say, since when did you get a dog?"
"It's not mine, it's my boyfriend's."
"Aha, a boyfriend." I said with some interest. "Who is he?"
"Well, just someone I've been seeing for a while."
"Is it serious?"
"I don't know. Hard to tell around here." Then he looked at me, letting me step ahead of him slightly so as to better scrutinize me. "Is it OK to be gay there?"
"No," I said. "Actually, there are laws against it. It's called besalbasik. " I repeated the word because I liked how strange it sounded, through I'm sure it made no sense to him.
"That sucks. And you like this place?"
"Well, sex isn't everything," I said throwing out this unbelievable platitude. I had sort of accepted my situation there and accepted it in stride as the price of having other kinds of happiness and peace of mind. I didn't particularly like the hiding my sexuality part. But, I didn't feel that I had to do anything particular out of the ordinary to pass. On the other hand, I was doing the kinds of things that straight men did, like having sex with a woman. It just seemed to be very much a part of the expatriate lifestyle in Tashkent, especially when you saw these older expatriates, who had been in Tashkent for years. They had local girlfriends who they gave keys to their homes, or even had them move in. The men, usually middle age, sometimes older, had sacrificed their marriages, relationships with their children, for what you'd occasionally hear called "the best sex of their lives," if you got into barstool philosophizing with them. I'd heard these stories more than once, and being confident in my sexuality, my homosexuality, would figure that this living, breathing, drinking cautionary tale was wasted on me. But lo and behold, the same thing could have been happening to me, and it wasn't too late to nip it in the bud. I wondered, what kind of reason could I give Yulia for breaking up? I couldn't exactly say that it was because I was gay. That would be social suicide. Perhaps I could just tell her that I didn't love her, didn't see our relationship going anywhere. I didn't even really see us as friends. I worried that this could be messy. I thought about the KGB uncle she had mentioned a few times.
New York's sunny sky turned an ominous silver, a large cloud now hovered above lower Manhattan, and a breeze came off the Hudson. It looked like we would have one of those summer rains and we started to feel raindrops and soon, my shirt was wet and clinging like a loose second skin. "Let's go in," I said moving to the entrance of a random Eighth Avenue restaurant.
Adrian followed along and we took seats by the window. The place was air-conditioned and I felt a chill. Adrian excused himself to go to the bathroom, and I asked him if I could order him a drink; he said he wasn't drinking. A waiter quickly came to the table, where I sat alone and took my order. I ordered a shot of vodka which earned me a curious look -- this was city that generally drank cocktails.
The waiter brought the vodka over to the table quickly and I took a little sip, appreciating how much smoother the vodka was here than in Uzbekistan. Here it was smooth and not bitter. It quickly made my face feel warm, and seemed to slow down the speediness of the coffee. Adrian came back from the bathroom and watched incredulously as I sipped, then shot, the rest down.
"Impressive," he said. "Something you picked up there."
"I suppose," I said. He never saw me drink since I hadn't drunk much before I left New York. Though I would go out with friends to bars, I rarely touched my drinks and was always the sober one seeing to it that everyone else got home safely. I never suspected that I might be the one of all our friends who would be drinking alone.
"You've changed a bit, I've noticed," he said with a somewhat playful tone. I was wondering where he was going with this.
"Well, when in Rome," I said. "They drink a lot there. One of the many contradictions of the place. It's a Muslim country, but with lots of fun drinking...and fornicating."
"Fornicating, but just not for the gays," he added.
"Well, there are laws against it. But that doesn't mean it doesn't happen at all." I was starting to feel giddy. "You make laws to regulate things that get too out of control."
"So you're saying that there are a lot of gays there swinging off the chandeliers?"
"I'm saying that there are some."
"Are you among them?" He asked coyly. "Among the practicing?"
"Well, it's complicated," I said.
"Is there someone special?" I knew that it would inevitably come to this. He'd already been talking to Jonathan, and there was no way that Jonathan hadn't told him. But I would pretend that I didn't know that he already know this.
"Well, there is someone special," I said, and continued to deliberately keep my language gender neutral. "I mean, this person is not-so-special, but yes, I happen to be seeing someone."
"Would that not-so-special someone happen to be female?"
I feigned complete surprise, "and where would you have heard such a nasty rumor about me?"
"So it's true! I thought that Jonathan was just fucking with my head." He paused to take a sip of his water. "You know, I always suspected that you might be straight! I was never sure about you." He was all excited and chatty. I wanted to hold back my laughter, but that was hard as the vodka had begun to fully take effect. "I knew you were straight."
My cell phone rang. I picked up amidst the laughter. It was Henrietta. "What's up? What are you doing?"
"Drinking."
"As usual."
"With an ex-," I said nodding to Adrian, as though I was offerring a compliment. "But he thinks I'm straight."
"Put him on the phone." I handed the phone to Adrian. I could hear her voice slightly, something to the effect of "he's about as straight as ....and I missed the end of the sentence as it set Adrian laughing. "Don't be fooled by that ho that he's hanging out with. Ask him if he's dumped her yet?"
"Have you dumped her yet?" Adrian asked.
I took the phone back from him, "I will. What are you doing?"
"Ali's driving me crazy," she said. "I should get off. When do you get back?"
"Soon."
"I gotta go!"
"Who is that?" Adrian asked.
It felt very wrong to believe what my sister said, that nothing new really happens in the city, that one restaurant closes and another one opens, that's all. It felt like everything had changed. People changed, city blocks changed, buildings changed. Not to mention, 9/11 happened -- though who could have ever foreseen this -- and they were saying that this changed everything. They said that it changed things that now people were kinder, gentler. People in New York were politer, they felt a common bond, they hung American flags from their windows -- like in small towns around America, Slews of storefronts I remembered from before were now replaced by Starbucks Coffee shops.
I counted three of them in the five block radius between the subway station and Adrian's house, where we would meet. The fourth was right next door to his building, where there once had been a mom and pop type diner that seemed to have been there since the 50's and where I remember we'd occasionally go for greasy french fries at 2 in the morning. I wasn't entirely sure if I wanted to see Adrian. It felt like penance. I went in for a coffee, I had some time to kill and their coffee tasted so good after my diet in Uzbekistan of bitter and acidic Nescafe. The coffee worked on me like a drug. When I drank it, I could even start to feel my head spin, my gestures get speedy, my eyes darting around me stopping momentarily on all of the city activity happening outside, like the dog lifting up a hind leg, a jogger breezing past, a cell phone on a table near me ringing loudly, a pair of eyes meeting mine -- they were Adrian's. He was being led by the leash of that strong dog that had stopped to relieve itself by a tree. I didn't remember him having a dog. This was new. But the dog looked old. Adrian looked up from the dog held out a finger to me and mouthed out "one minute," and pointed up.
I've been accused of breaking Adrian's heart, and it's likely that I actually did, because I felt guilty about it. We were dating for a few months when I had told him that I wanted to cool things down immediately after we'd taken a short vacation together to the coast. By the time we'd boarded the train to leave, I knew that I was probably in love with someone else, but I refused to admit it aloud. I would even call the other guy from pay phones in restaurants, on street corners, anywhere and any moment I could steal away from him, even if just to leave a message on his answering machine. I left Adrian shortly after, to explore the new prospects with the other guy, who turned out to be seriously considering becoming a monk. Not being a Catholic myself, and not knowing many Catholics, there was no way I could have been aware of the red flags. However, just having had this experience, of meeting this guy, I came to realize that there was something attractive to me about the monastic life and I could attribute to having had some influence on me to take an overseas posting in Tashkent and to for once confront being alone and on my own. These were things I told no one, about an indiscretion I told no one about, and feelings that I had no one to share with. Certainly not Adrian. And I felt that he must hate me or should hate me, must think that I'm a bad person for having left him, for no reason that he knew about.
A few moments later, Adrian returned, came into the shop from the street without the dog. He looked much the same as I had always remembered him, lean, with his hairline receding, and always with a bit of a tan, which I looked at when he embraced me and over his shoulder I saw his dark arm against my pale one. In the desert, I covered up and wore layers of sunblock, whereas he in the city would embrace the sun, weekending on the Long Island Sound at Fire Island, the beach where the well-off New York City gays relaxed on summer weekends, drank, drugged, danced, hooked up, had dinner parties, and I am told, sometimes made business deals. The few times I had been out there, I remembered enjoying the decadence, but not without tremendous feelings that I was enjoying a guilty pleasure and perplexed that grown men could live what was like a second adolescence. That was back then. I wondered how I would feel now, having lived among the Uzbeks with their conservative outlook on life, that I worried might be rubbing off on me. "Did you just get back from Fire Island?" I asked thinking that the answer would somewhat differentiate myself from Adrian and what kind of life I might have had, had I never left here.
"I stopped doing that," he said. "I decided to buy a summer home on the Sound, but somewhere quiet." I didn't expect that and was surprised to find myself a bit envious of my friends' acquisition of real estate, while I owned nothing, had nothing save a cabinet of foreign goods stowed away for rainy days in an apartment in Tashkent. "Congratulations," I said.
He could detect my muted tone, perhaps intention. I hoped not. "What's the matter?" he asked.
"Nothing," I said. "Just things change, I guess," I added inconsequentially. "I'm always getting used to things changing these days. After being away, I'm always thinking that I'm the one whose changed, not realizing that everything else is changing too."
"Yeah, things have changed, since you left to..." He paused. "Where is it again?" He reverted to this jackass tone that he had, acting as though it were so hard to pronounce, and the word, a question in itself, "Uzbekistan?" He pointed south along Eighth Avenue. "No more twin towers. And lots of things around here."
It was strange, Adrian repeated what I said, as though what I said was wrong, and then said pretty much the exact same thing, but with some nuance. I wondered if I was hypersensitive, but I felt that I detected a note of hostility in this, as I felt in almost all of our conversations, some kind of tension bordering on hostility. Perhaps it was just his latent hate for me. I thought, if he hated me, then I think I hate him back. These days I was finding myself hating just about everyone. Perhaps it would be best to cut the conversation short, make an excuse to move on, as though I had someplace to be, as though I had hundreds of errands to run before getting on my plane back to Tashkent. Truth was that I was killing time until then. We were silent for a moment, perhaps he was thinking about the twin towers, perhaps he was thinking that I was thinking about the same, whereas I was thinking about whether it was such a good idea for me to spend time with him or anyone here for that matter.
"Are you in any danger in Uzbekistan," he asked with some warmth returning to his voice, "isn't it close to Afghanistan?"
"I don't know," I said. "I don't feel unsafe. I feel as safe as I feel right now, right here." I could have gone into an intensive discussion about the geography of Afghanistan, about where the fighting was happening, which was mostly in the South, and that the Uzbekistan bordered the Western-friendly Northern stronghold and supported its Northern Alliance that battled the Taliban. Whereas September 10th was an ordinary day for most Americans, for us living in Uzbekistan, it was a day of alarm and tragedy since the Northern Alliance General, Ahmed Shah Massoud, was assasinated that day, and we wondered if something was going to change. But my very localized impression of those days, whereas common to us in Tashkent, would likely have seemed out of place or incomprehensible here. This was the time for me to keep silent.
"What's safe these days, after all who could have predicted this?" I told him about how frightening it must have been to be here and how I remembered that in Tashkent at that time I was wondering if I would have a home to return to in New York after the attacks, if one day it would be gone and then I'd just be stuck in Tashkent, for lack of anyplace else to go. I would probably just kill myself if that were the case. I remembered watching for days afterwards on CNN's panic inducing coverage of the potential of attacks on the US using crop dusters, that made me crazy. I remembered talking to friends in New York who said that maybe it was time to move out of New York, but where to go? We all loved this place so much and it was a part of me.
"So why leave," he asked.
"I don't know." Sometimes you leave something you love either because you love it too much or your fear of losing it outweighs your love, I explained. Or maybe because you need to see more just to confirm to yourself your love. Unlike a person, I made clear, unless my intentions were misunderstood, a city was something you could always return to. You were allowed to have an open relationship with a city since it doesn't go away. Though there was some time after 9-11 that I feared that it could.
As we walked down Eighth Avenue and talked, we found our path blocked by a dog that ran behind me, his leash catching on to my leg, so that he could sniff the rear end of another dog. Chelsea's men and their dogs. There were lots of them here.
"So when will you come back?"
"When I'm ready, I suppose." I said, while the dog's owner apologized to me. "Say, since when did you get a dog?"
"It's not mine, it's my boyfriend's."
"Aha, a boyfriend." I said with some interest. "Who is he?"
"Well, just someone I've been seeing for a while."
"Is it serious?"
"I don't know. Hard to tell around here." Then he looked at me, letting me step ahead of him slightly so as to better scrutinize me. "Is it OK to be gay there?"
"No," I said. "Actually, there are laws against it. It's called besalbasik. " I repeated the word because I liked how strange it sounded, through I'm sure it made no sense to him.
"That sucks. And you like this place?"
"Well, sex isn't everything," I said throwing out this unbelievable platitude. I had sort of accepted my situation there and accepted it in stride as the price of having other kinds of happiness and peace of mind. I didn't particularly like the hiding my sexuality part. But, I didn't feel that I had to do anything particular out of the ordinary to pass. On the other hand, I was doing the kinds of things that straight men did, like having sex with a woman. It just seemed to be very much a part of the expatriate lifestyle in Tashkent, especially when you saw these older expatriates, who had been in Tashkent for years. They had local girlfriends who they gave keys to their homes, or even had them move in. The men, usually middle age, sometimes older, had sacrificed their marriages, relationships with their children, for what you'd occasionally hear called "the best sex of their lives," if you got into barstool philosophizing with them. I'd heard these stories more than once, and being confident in my sexuality, my homosexuality, would figure that this living, breathing, drinking cautionary tale was wasted on me. But lo and behold, the same thing could have been happening to me, and it wasn't too late to nip it in the bud. I wondered, what kind of reason could I give Yulia for breaking up? I couldn't exactly say that it was because I was gay. That would be social suicide. Perhaps I could just tell her that I didn't love her, didn't see our relationship going anywhere. I didn't even really see us as friends. I worried that this could be messy. I thought about the KGB uncle she had mentioned a few times.
New York's sunny sky turned an ominous silver, a large cloud now hovered above lower Manhattan, and a breeze came off the Hudson. It looked like we would have one of those summer rains and we started to feel raindrops and soon, my shirt was wet and clinging like a loose second skin. "Let's go in," I said moving to the entrance of a random Eighth Avenue restaurant.
Adrian followed along and we took seats by the window. The place was air-conditioned and I felt a chill. Adrian excused himself to go to the bathroom, and I asked him if I could order him a drink; he said he wasn't drinking. A waiter quickly came to the table, where I sat alone and took my order. I ordered a shot of vodka which earned me a curious look -- this was city that generally drank cocktails.
The waiter brought the vodka over to the table quickly and I took a little sip, appreciating how much smoother the vodka was here than in Uzbekistan. Here it was smooth and not bitter. It quickly made my face feel warm, and seemed to slow down the speediness of the coffee. Adrian came back from the bathroom and watched incredulously as I sipped, then shot, the rest down.
"Impressive," he said. "Something you picked up there."
"I suppose," I said. He never saw me drink since I hadn't drunk much before I left New York. Though I would go out with friends to bars, I rarely touched my drinks and was always the sober one seeing to it that everyone else got home safely. I never suspected that I might be the one of all our friends who would be drinking alone.
"You've changed a bit, I've noticed," he said with a somewhat playful tone. I was wondering where he was going with this.
"Well, when in Rome," I said. "They drink a lot there. One of the many contradictions of the place. It's a Muslim country, but with lots of fun drinking...and fornicating."
"Fornicating, but just not for the gays," he added.
"Well, there are laws against it. But that doesn't mean it doesn't happen at all." I was starting to feel giddy. "You make laws to regulate things that get too out of control."
"So you're saying that there are a lot of gays there swinging off the chandeliers?"
"I'm saying that there are some."
"Are you among them?" He asked coyly. "Among the practicing?"
"Well, it's complicated," I said.
"Is there someone special?" I knew that it would inevitably come to this. He'd already been talking to Jonathan, and there was no way that Jonathan hadn't told him. But I would pretend that I didn't know that he already know this.
"Well, there is someone special," I said, and continued to deliberately keep my language gender neutral. "I mean, this person is not-so-special, but yes, I happen to be seeing someone."
"Would that not-so-special someone happen to be female?"
I feigned complete surprise, "and where would you have heard such a nasty rumor about me?"
"So it's true! I thought that Jonathan was just fucking with my head." He paused to take a sip of his water. "You know, I always suspected that you might be straight! I was never sure about you." He was all excited and chatty. I wanted to hold back my laughter, but that was hard as the vodka had begun to fully take effect. "I knew you were straight."
My cell phone rang. I picked up amidst the laughter. It was Henrietta. "What's up? What are you doing?"
"Drinking."
"As usual."
"With an ex-," I said nodding to Adrian, as though I was offerring a compliment. "But he thinks I'm straight."
"Put him on the phone." I handed the phone to Adrian. I could hear her voice slightly, something to the effect of "he's about as straight as ....and I missed the end of the sentence as it set Adrian laughing. "Don't be fooled by that ho that he's hanging out with. Ask him if he's dumped her yet?"
"Have you dumped her yet?" Adrian asked.
I took the phone back from him, "I will. What are you doing?"
"Ali's driving me crazy," she said. "I should get off. When do you get back?"
"Soon."
"I gotta go!"
"Who is that?" Adrian asked.
Labels: Adrian
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