Uzbekistan Blues
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Living overseas, upon meeting other expatriates who I would become acquainted with, I would often find myself questioning whether or not the person was someone I would ordinarily befriend had we met back home, in the U.S.. Here, I would wonder whether a friendship emerged purely by circumstance: two people who happen to find themselves in a faraway place, where they had little in common with most of the locals – and a bond developed purely of this very low common denominator of shared nationality, some basic common cultural reference, the inevitable fact of being located here, where we might feel a desperation to connect amidst what sometimes could be an exceptional sense of isolation and loneliness.
I sometimes wondered if it was desperation of that kind that brought me to hanging out with Jason. Besides both being Americans, we were gay. We discovered after talking over brunch one day that he had spent a summer in New York when he was a graduate student, and would frequent the Boy Bar, a fixture of St. Mark’s Place in the 80’s that I barely had the guts to visit when I was 19, but did once and was nervous the whole time for being caught there, which was completely neurotic. We were both surviving in this place – like survival buddies, trying to make our way here, like all the other expatriates, but a little bit different. And I suppose we became like another one of those odd sets of mismatched friends you saw out here, drawn together by small commonalities, loneliness, common language, alcohol. With Jason, private thoughts I never spoke aloud, we could say to one another; it almost felt like we were the only ones we could tell it to, when we rode around in his car, walked in the streets, talking about things like about men we fancied, about sex that we missed back home, about desire. And then there are the things that gay men could only say to each other. Things that in no way, I could even tell Henrietta. I remembered a drunken conversation with Henrietta and a guy named Phil, who had left a few years earlier about the time I had first arrived in Uzbekistan. The topic was – the most outrageous sexual thing we had done. Henrietta said that she had once dated two men at the same time.
“You mean, you had sex with both of them at the same time – like a Henrietta sandwich,” I asked.
“No,” she said in horror, “I was seeing one guy, and seeing another guy behind his back.”
“Two-timing,” I said, to clarify. “Are you serious?” Phil and I looked at each other in mock horror. Phil, like all men, had two-timed, and there had been a time in New York in which I suppose I had two-timed, possibly three-timed, possibly more. I’d had a feeling that in this company with Henrietta and Phil I was going to come off as far more libertine than either of them, and I couldn’t even think of what was the most outrageous sexual thing that I had done. In New York, I had experimented with everything, well at least almost everything. Phil then shared that he had put his fist up a woman’s vagina. This floored me when I heard it, even sickened me somewhat, left both me and Henrietta speechless. He had outdone me. He said that the woman had already given birth to two children, I suppose, making the case that him putting a fist there wasn’t such a big deal. And, I noticed that he had small, delicate hands. Western men who lived in Uzbekistan had much more exciting sex lives than they possibly would have been able to have at home, as a rule; and for Western women, quite the opposite, as a rule. And for gay men, Jason and I were just figuring it out for ourselves – and that was pretty much what we had between us.
I suppose I’d been told numerous times that one never really understands what goes on between two people. It was the kind of wisdom passed on to me by my mother, at a time in her life when she was making peace with her own divorce and could speak about it somewhat rationally and it seemed to be one of those things that sounded true enough to be taken at face value; one shouldn’t judge people for their bad relationships or for pairings that one might have thought didn’t quite make sense. Still, clinging to mother’s wisdom prevented me from delving in too deeply into that puzzling question as to what it ever was that brought Henrietta together with her husband, how a strong, intelligent, attractive American woman could live in harmony with an Uzbek man raised within Uzbek traditions, “tied to his mother’s apron strings” as the Uzbek saying goes. He was of no extraordinary intelligence or achievement, or looks, and he occasionally made offensive jokes. Like the time we had all gone to the Korean restaurant and he made the joke about all the meat on the menu actually being dog meat. The righteous Americans cringed politely, saying nothing and Henrietta blushed and stared down into her menu as if she hadn’t heard anything. The dissolution of that relationship only seemed inevitable. Others bemused by the odd couple, spoke behind their back and I stayed silent. Perhaps I wasn’t being a good enough friend to Henrietta, the kind of true friend who can tell you that your breath stinks. I just knew that they would eventually split, that it was the natural order, the way things would resolve themselves, much in the same way that I would probably leave this place.
I sometimes wondered if it was desperation of that kind that brought me to hanging out with Jason. Besides both being Americans, we were gay. We discovered after talking over brunch one day that he had spent a summer in New York when he was a graduate student, and would frequent the Boy Bar, a fixture of St. Mark’s Place in the 80’s that I barely had the guts to visit when I was 19, but did once and was nervous the whole time for being caught there, which was completely neurotic. We were both surviving in this place – like survival buddies, trying to make our way here, like all the other expatriates, but a little bit different. And I suppose we became like another one of those odd sets of mismatched friends you saw out here, drawn together by small commonalities, loneliness, common language, alcohol. With Jason, private thoughts I never spoke aloud, we could say to one another; it almost felt like we were the only ones we could tell it to, when we rode around in his car, walked in the streets, talking about things like about men we fancied, about sex that we missed back home, about desire. And then there are the things that gay men could only say to each other. Things that in no way, I could even tell Henrietta. I remembered a drunken conversation with Henrietta and a guy named Phil, who had left a few years earlier about the time I had first arrived in Uzbekistan. The topic was – the most outrageous sexual thing we had done. Henrietta said that she had once dated two men at the same time.
“You mean, you had sex with both of them at the same time – like a Henrietta sandwich,” I asked.
“No,” she said in horror, “I was seeing one guy, and seeing another guy behind his back.”
“Two-timing,” I said, to clarify. “Are you serious?” Phil and I looked at each other in mock horror. Phil, like all men, had two-timed, and there had been a time in New York in which I suppose I had two-timed, possibly three-timed, possibly more. I’d had a feeling that in this company with Henrietta and Phil I was going to come off as far more libertine than either of them, and I couldn’t even think of what was the most outrageous sexual thing that I had done. In New York, I had experimented with everything, well at least almost everything. Phil then shared that he had put his fist up a woman’s vagina. This floored me when I heard it, even sickened me somewhat, left both me and Henrietta speechless. He had outdone me. He said that the woman had already given birth to two children, I suppose, making the case that him putting a fist there wasn’t such a big deal. And, I noticed that he had small, delicate hands. Western men who lived in Uzbekistan had much more exciting sex lives than they possibly would have been able to have at home, as a rule; and for Western women, quite the opposite, as a rule. And for gay men, Jason and I were just figuring it out for ourselves – and that was pretty much what we had between us.
I suppose I’d been told numerous times that one never really understands what goes on between two people. It was the kind of wisdom passed on to me by my mother, at a time in her life when she was making peace with her own divorce and could speak about it somewhat rationally and it seemed to be one of those things that sounded true enough to be taken at face value; one shouldn’t judge people for their bad relationships or for pairings that one might have thought didn’t quite make sense. Still, clinging to mother’s wisdom prevented me from delving in too deeply into that puzzling question as to what it ever was that brought Henrietta together with her husband, how a strong, intelligent, attractive American woman could live in harmony with an Uzbek man raised within Uzbek traditions, “tied to his mother’s apron strings” as the Uzbek saying goes. He was of no extraordinary intelligence or achievement, or looks, and he occasionally made offensive jokes. Like the time we had all gone to the Korean restaurant and he made the joke about all the meat on the menu actually being dog meat. The righteous Americans cringed politely, saying nothing and Henrietta blushed and stared down into her menu as if she hadn’t heard anything. The dissolution of that relationship only seemed inevitable. Others bemused by the odd couple, spoke behind their back and I stayed silent. Perhaps I wasn’t being a good enough friend to Henrietta, the kind of true friend who can tell you that your breath stinks. I just knew that they would eventually split, that it was the natural order, the way things would resolve themselves, much in the same way that I would probably leave this place.
Labels: most outrageous sexual thing
¶ 8:46 PM 4 Comments
