The Taqwacores (17 page)

“Shit no.”

“Cool.”

“Once you settle down,” Billy explained, “you can never go back to being young and stupid.”

“Exactly,” said Jehangir, raising his flask.

“Girl was fuckin’ eighteen,” he repeated. “I’m fuckin’ twenty-three, bro.”

“That’s not too old,” replied Jehangir.

“It’s old enough. Old enough for me to be a piece of shit. You think it’s old enough?”

“Who’s to say.”

“Yeah, I hear that. Fuck it, man, I don’t give a fuck. Right?”

“Right.”

“I was five whole years old before she even appeared on the planet, man! Think about it like that. I had a fully developed personality before she was even conceived. But she was hot. Even through her jeans she had a fuckin’ sopping damp crotch. I wrote a poem about her, you want to read it?”

“Sure.” Billy Plunger straightened his body to reach deep in a pocket, pulling out a folded yellow paper. He handed it to Jehangir, who nodded his head as he read it.

“That’s good shit,” said Jehangir.

“Thanks man. Show it to your boy.” Jehangir handed it to me.

“That’s cool,” I said with a smile.

Billy’s piece went like this:

“There’s a lot of fuckin’ sluts at this school,” said Billy.

“Yeah,” I replied. Jehangir took another swig.

“Fuckin’... cunts, everywhere. At the end of last semester we drove around as parents were all helping load their kids’ shit into the family vans, you know, and we’d fuckin’ yell ‘thank you for your daughters!’ Fuckin’ crazy, man.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Imagine being some old guy and your daughter goes here and some asshole yells that at you. It’d fuckin’ eat you up inside.”

“I couldn’t even imagine.” I wondered how I turned out to be the one doing our talking. Jehangir just stared off into space and drank.

“You gotta own up to that shit, man. Someday you’re going to have a daughter who’s going to have all the rotten things done to
her, in her and on her that you did to somebody else’s little girl. You know what I’m saying?”

“That’s true,” I replied.

“What goes around comes around.”

“Yep.”

“Look at this shit,” he exclaimed, retrieving a pen from his pocket, presumably the pen with which he had written his poem. “It’s a fuckin’ Catholic pen.”

“A Catholic pen?” I repeated.

“A Catholic pen. Check it out.” He held it with both index-fingertips and thumbs and read the inscription. “Newman Centers at UB. Catholic Campus Ministry.”

“Hmm,” I replied, not meaning anything by it.

“It fuckin’ says on the cap, ’if you see someone without a smile, give them one of yours.’ Isn’t that some shit?”

“Yeah.”

“Got it from a girl I work with. She always leaves her fuckin’ Catholic pens at work. That’s how she saves the world, I guess. I know it’s her because she always wears Catholic t-shirts. I think about her the whole drive home, like every fuckin’ day.”

“She’s hot?” I asked.

“Not so much hot as pretty. You know what I mean? She’s cute, real cute and when all is said and done that’s what’s so hot about her. She’s petite, maybe a hundred pounds at best. Ties her hair back in a ponytail. Pointy little tits. Nice ass. Small waist. I’d fuck her.”

“Cool,” I replied. Jehangir looked at the ceiling and sighed loudly.

“Part of it is she’s Catholic and I could just see her all dirty gomping down a dick and choking on it. Do her from behind, smack the white ass pink and yank that little ponytail. I’d fuck ’er real good. She’s an uptight girl, but it’s like the cause of the
uptightness is something buried deep up her cunt by that no-good Catholic Church and only Billy Plunger can dig it out.”

“Wow,” I said. I faked a laugh.

“With my cock, naturally.”

“Later guys,” said Jehangir as he stood up. I watched him walk down the hall, flask in hand. All of a sudden it was just Billy Plunger and Yusef Ali. Looking back on that night, I think Billy Plunger had struck Jehangir with a twisted reflection of himself that he found very hard to deal with. The difference, however, vindicating Jehangir in my eyes was that while Jehangir loved sex, he also loved women. Billy Plunger loved sex and hated women.

“I know what I’m talking about when it comes to that girl,” Billy Plunger continued. “I grew up fuckin’ Catholic.”

“Yeah,” I replied. “I grew up Muslim. We’re fucked up too.”

“I wonder if that girl’d take it up the ass.”

“You think she would?”

“It’s hard to say. At first you’d be like no, no, not that girl, not ever. But you never really know. Sometimes they surprise you. Sometimes man it’s the nice girls that are so dirty, you know what I mean? They’re the ones that, if you unleash it, man they know what to do with a dick. They know what they want, they know how they want it and they will fuckin’ work for that shit, right? My one buddy, he was with this girl who was like the typical high-school sweetheart. The really nice smile, silky soft hair, great smell, never did anything wrong—but she took it in the pooper. The whole time they dated, it was just dirty butt-sex. She was super-paranoid about getting pregnant, so that was the only way she’d do it. Her parents were real strict, you know, they probably would have thrown her out of the house if they even knew she had sex. Isn’t that ironic, man? This girl, to not look like a dirty whore to her parents, she only takes it up the ass. Isn’t that amazing? It really makes you think.”

“Yeah it does.”

“You know who E Scott Fitzgerald was?”

“Yeah.”

“Right.”

“Did you know he grew up in Buffalo?”

“No, I didn’t know that.”

“29 Irving Place, his fuckin’ childhood home.”

“Really.”

“Yep.” Billy took a second to think about it. “Me and my ex, we used to go to fuckin’ historical sites all the time. Just New York state history, I don’t know why. It was just our dumb couple thing. You know, some couples do puzzles together. We were into state history. We went to old graves and battlefields an’ shit. We used to go to plenty of old houses too. Kinderhook: Benedict Arnold’s house on Broad Street. Auburn: Harriet Tubman’s house. I would have taken her to E Scott Fitzgerald’s childhood home too, but we broke up.”

“That sucks.”

“He was no Hemingway, though. Fuck ’im.”

“Was your girlfriend dirty?” I asked, thinking that was the place our conversation would inevitably head. Billy looked at me as though I had just shot him.

“Man, that shit’s not cool.”

“I’m sorry.”

“She was my girlfriend.”

“I know, man. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“You know,” he mused, “there is such a thing as gloomy masturbation.”

“What?”

“I got it down to an art form.”

“Really,” I said.

“Dude, sometimes I go into the bathroom at Butler Library, you know, and I look in the mirror, stare deep in my own eyes and I just punch my own fuckin’ face. I clench up a fist, tighten my face and I wail on myself.”

“Why?”

“I fuckin’ hate myself, kid.”

“But why?” I asked again.

“I’m fuckin’ wounded. Look at me. I’m a hurtin’ sack of shit.”

I then wondered where Jehangir had gone off to and what became of Fasiq and Dawud, and what I could do to ease myself away from Billy Plunger.

 

 

My limited social skills could not provide me with a reasonable exit from the conversation. When Billy finally had enough and decided to call it a night, I began searching for the crew I had arrived with. Fasiq and Dawud were burned-out behind some door, but I had no idea where. Jehangir could have wandered to Seychelles for all I knew. Starting at the fourth, I hit every floor to the ninth—where I found Jehangir, on a lounge couch sitting absurdly close to a beautiful freshman girl (people just don’t sit like that with each other unless they want to hook up). Both of them were too drunk to notice me.

“Your name has religious significance,” he told her.

“Really?”

“Sure. Khadija was Prophet Muhammad’s wife.”

“Oh wow. I didn’t know that.”

“Sure.” Jehangir explained, “Khadija was his first wife. He loved her, like the real true-blue love. He didn’t marry anyone else while she was alive. His later marriages were mostly political, to build ties with other tribes. His wives after Khadija used to complain
that he’d still talk about her too much. But he just really, really loved her. When he first began his holy mission and thought he was going nuts, she was the one who reassured him.”

“That’s really cool,” she exclaimed. “Now what about my middle name?”

“What’s your middle name?” Jehangir asked.

“Ayesha.”

“Ayesha? I don’t know anything about Ayesha.” The topic changed and Jehangir continued his booze-slurred segue into her pants. I stood there wondering if they’d ever see me. She took his hat off and played with his hair.

“Are you in a band?” she asked.

“No.”

“We can be in a band together.”

“Yeah?”

“A secret band, so underground we’re the coolest band because nobody knows about us.”

“So underground we’ve never played a show or put out a record.”

“A band so underground, the band’s two members don’t even know each other’s names.”

“I know your name. Your first name is Khadija, and your middle name is Ayesha.”

“You don’t know my last name. I don’t know any of your names.”

“My name’s Jehangir.” His head became too heavy to support and he just let it gently descend to her shoulder. His forehead then pushed off her for leverage; struggling to hoist his skull back up, they clumsily kissed with awful alcohol-breath, and with that I headed for the elevator.

Outside Porter had died down, most of the freshmen having ventured to the dorm rooms of new friends or the staples of student
life on the Elmwood strip: the gas station, the pizza place, the diners, the bars. Slumped on a picnic table were Rude Dawud and Fasiq Abasa.

“Jehangir’s on the ninth floor with a girl,” I explained.

“Shit,” said Fasiq.

“I think we missed Isha time,” said Rude Dawud.

“What are you talking about?” Fasiq snapped. I then realized that they were both wasted. “You can’t miss Isha time.”

“Sure you can.”

“No you can’t.”

“If it were past Isha,” Rude Dawud replied.

“Does it look like the sun’s coming up anytime soon? You can make Isha whenever.”

“Let’s make it then. Allahu Akbar, Allaaaaaahu Akbar...” And the two of them stood in a hashishiyya jamaat right there in front of Porter Hall. I watched and struggled hard not to laugh. They kept forgetting what to do or say next and what rakat they were in. The prayer never formally ended but just drifted off while they were in sitting position. “I’m moving to Costa Rica in a month,” said Rude Dawud.

“Really?” asked Fasiq.

“Yeah. I met some guys who are going down there and I’m going with them.”

“That’s cool.”

I sat on the picnic table. Fasiq and Dawud stayed on the grass right next to each other as though still praying. We waited a long time for our boy to come out.

“Keeping a pilgrim’s mind is harder than actual pilgrimage,” declared Jehangir as he stumbled out the door. “It doesn’t matter how close you are to a grave or relic, or how far and long you’ve traveled to get there if your mind isn’t a million miles away from the nearest vagina.”

“D’you fuck her?” asked Fasiq.

“Y‘akhi, insha’Allah, you wouldn’t believe her eyes,” replied Jehangir as we began the long walk to his car. “She had these lovely sad eyes that just cried ‘Jehangir don’t fail me, don’t lose that pilgrim’s mind’ and I couldn’t let her down. That was my jihad, the struggle between me and Jehangir Tabari—the greatest jihad, right? Five floors below me was Billy Plunger, a muezzin to all the heterosexual men of the world, calling us to throw ourselves down in sujdah at the feet of our women and not be him. Shaytan lives in the testicles, if he lives anywhere. Yusef, the keys.” He pulled them from his pocket and handed them to me. I was, after all, the only sober one in the group.

On the way home, Fasiq riding shotgun put in a mix tape he had made that had the Rolling Scabs on it, their accidental classic “We’re the Scabs.”

“These kids were like twelve years old,” Fasiq remarked. “They were all on heroin an’ shit. The lead singer went down an elevator shaft when he was fourteen.”

“Kullu ardh’n Karbala,” said Jehangir.

“This song,” said Fasiq, “if you listen to it... it’s like Sufism.”

We all laughed. “No, really. First it’s like ‘I just want to be your sexy scab,’ like
‘Your
sexy scab,’ you know? And second, when they’re all ‘we have no producer, we have no lyrics’ that’s like Sufism, like ’we have no scholars, we have no scripture.’ Like fucked up, take-it-as-it-comes Islam. Like Islam stripped down to its bare core.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Jehangir. “Hey Yusef—”

“Yeah man?”

“Yusef, Yusef Ali, you know that Rumi wrote ‘when the Prophet said put females behind, he meant your soul.’ That’s somethin’ right there.”

“Yeah.” I nodded my head and kept my eyes to the road.

“Bro, I have a big dick that burns out eyes... but Ya‘Allah, grant these balls no victim but me... that’s my du’a, Yusef Ali. Ya’Allah, grant these balls no victim but me.”

“That’s a cool du’a.”

“These vesicles are seminal, bro.”