Ali Eteraz - Native Believer

I busied myself with the music videos and talking to the waitress about the hookah. A song by Myriam Fares played on the screen. In the video the curly haired singer played a dancer, a ballerina. She was in Paris, chased by a taller version of me, even though I had never chased a girl like that.

“That’s hard core,” Candace said when she arrived. “Smoking by yourself.”

She wore a volumized white scarf and a white dress shirt tucked into a polka-dot chiffon maxi skirt.

I pulled some smoke and blew it at her. It spread over her like a cream.

I helped her sit and ordered wine and hookah for her. She vetoed the wine saying she didn’t drink alcohol any longer. I tried to downplay the faux pas by giving her a little lecture about the hookah based on what little I had learned from the waitress; but Candace put up her hand and said she knew all about it. She’d smoked it in Dubai and Turkey and even frequented a Palestinian hookah bar in her neighborhood in North Philly.

“I like your look,” I blurted out. “I loved it at the deli too.”

She smiled and lowered her eyes. “You always made fun of my clothes.”

“I’m not doing it now.”

We sat together and Candace blew O ’s which I both popped and wore on my fingers like rings. She gave me a rundown on Arabic pop music. How Lebanon produced the starlets, Egypt the musicians, and a recording company in Saudi Arabia launched the indecency upon the world. The videos that were released during Ramadan were particularly licentious. As evidence she showed me videos of Elissar and Nicole Saba. Squinting into her phone required sitting together, our legs touching lightly. Candace said she had started taking belly-dancing classes.

“I had always wanted to do it,” she said. “But until I converted I felt it would be stealing someone else’s culture.”

Her comment gave me the opening I needed and I prodded her about how she had taken to Islam. She went on to detail her own coming of age in the suburbs of Atlanta and DC. Her parents, both half-black, were part of the new black elite who turned their backs on her when she decided that she didn’t have a similar love for “black tribalism” that they did. It started when she refused to go to Spellman in Atlanta and opted for a public university. It worsened when she told her father that she imputed no inherent superiority to a black man. Race, she said, was an oppression created by those who profited from making divisions in the world. To agree to belong to a race meant affirming that basic oppression. She couldn’t do it. She needed to belong to something built around inclusiveness, something that erased the differences between people. The natural thing to do would have been to turn to the Christian God, who welcomed all to His flock. But the problem was that she couldn’t erase all of her blackness, and Christianity belonged to the white man. She turned, therefore, to the God of the nonwhites — Allah. Choosing a universalist deity based on somewhat racial reasons was not completely consistent with her initial rejection of the very idea of race, but it was better than living an entirely racial life of the sort her parents led.

We smoked two more rounds before she started wrapping up.

“Are you going home after this?” she asked.

“No. I have this crazy friend in North Philly I’m going to go see.”

“Same guy as from the deli?”

“Yeah,” I said, and in my excitement I pulled up the video of him threatening to kill George Gabriel. “Total original.”

“He’s very. loud,” Candace said.

“He lives near you. We can go up together?”

Candace appeared interested. But decorum still made her cautious. “How is Marie-Anne?”

“Things between us are ending,” I stated. “Are you down or what?”

“Sure, sure,” she said. “I’m down, I’m down.”

We paid the bill and headed out from Byblos toward Walnut Street, where we intended to catch an eastbound bus that would connect us to the northbound transportation. I staggered with an arm around Candace and tried to liken her to paganism, asking her if she had any connections with Rastafari or animism. She laughed and said not at all, she had grown up a good Baptist girl and then transitioned into Islam. God, she said, was a secret she couldn’t ever forget.

I told her if that was the definition of God, then my God might be a girl I just smoked hookah with.

She laughed and told me I was intoxicated.

* * *

The commute took about two hours. There had been a shooting on the Broad Street line and the buses were running forty-five minutes behind. Candace exchanged messages with the newsroom and mobilized a cameraman to go out and find footage. Places like North Philly were neglected in American media and it was her duty as a journalist to illuminate what was concealed. The world deserved to know how the heart of the empire was full of gunshots.

It was well past midnight when we made it to Ali Ansari’s building on Diamond Street. Candace told me that the area used to be a hub for art deco and for jazz, until the race riots of 1964 which began when a pregnant black woman was killed by a pair of white police officers. Since then this part of North Philly had known nothing but murder and mourning.

The front door to Ali’s building was wide open and we let ourselves in and headed up to his second-story apartment. Candace kept the back of her skirt cinched with two fingers like a wedding train. Outside Ali’s apartment there were two women standing in the hallway. Both were topless, texting on their cell phones in heels and thongs.

Candace turned to me and asked what kind of illicit business my buddy was into.

“I thought it was Islam.”

“He’s not a pimp, is he?”

I was about to ask the women about the apartment owner when the door opened wide. There was Ali Ansari, wearing his usual slacks but only a sweat-soaked white undershirt with them. There was a small bowler hat on his head and he held a miniature digital camera. Behind him I could hear the sound of a couple men talking to one another. Ali Ansari hadn’t looked at me or Candace just yet, and proceeded to give one of the girls instructions about her scene. The only words I made out were “Obama” and “hymen.”

I cleared my throat. Ali Ansari’s eyes bulged upon noticing me. He came over to give a hug.

“Ali Ansari, Candace Cooper.”

“I thought the wife was a different complexion.”

“Definitely not the wife,” Candace laughed.

“You know,” Ali put an elbow in my rib, “Muslims are allowed up to four—”

“If there’s anyone who should be talking about polyamorous relationships, it’s you,” I interrupted, gesturing at the two women. “And what’s this about Obama and hymen?”

“Osama and Ayman,” Ali Ansari replied. “Not Obama and hymen. Come in, come in. Let me introduce you to Talibang Productions.”

He panned his hand across the room and led us inside. Tripods, reflectors, flashtubes, and camera batteries were strewn around the bedroom studio. I saw two guys who looked vaguely like members of GCM get undressed and head into the bathroom. The room was covered with other paraphernalia as well. Ejaculating sheaths with hand pumps; bukkake lotion; brushes for concealer paint. Candace nearly stepped into a half-empty jug of piña colada mix and Ali rushed over to save the backup fake sperm. From the bathroom one of the performers complained loudly about discoloration. Ali yelled back and said some discoloration was normal after girth-enhancing fat transfers.

Candace and I leaned against a dresser. The only decorations in the room were a pair of picture frames with stock wedding photos. Ali explained that the scene he was filming involved a couple of Mainline widows of 9/11 who had an inexplicable desire to experience terrorist sex with Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.