by Arvin Ahmadi
And here I blurted, “Your partner!” like the fool that I am.
He gave me this sideways look and went, “Yes …”
And then he wrote down another spot and asked if I’ve heard of Pigneto—“It’s like the Bushwick of Rome”—and I told him I don’t even know the Bushwick of wherever-Bushwick-is, and he laughed. Then he wrote a third spot, and a name. “Jahan. That’s the name of the bartender there. He’s an incredible poet, too.”
Suddenly, a shard of sun sliced the bookstore clerk’s hair, turning it from brown to blond, and once again, my mind flashed to Jackson. I thought about the texts he’d sent me yesterday—where are you, what the hell Amir, answer me damn it, are you okay, should I call your parents—
NO, don’t, I finally replied, I’m fine, family emergency.
And just like that, all my troubles came flooding back.
I quickly said thanks to this gorgeous bookseller (whose name I didn’t even catch) and went on my way.
Outside, the streets were busy and crowded. I came to a fourway intersection and froze. My heart was beating out of my chest, and it was like this entire ancient city—its Colosseum, its Sistine Chapel—had come crashing down over my head.
My thoughts swirled between the bookstore clerk, his slick brown hair, and Jackson, whose hair was getting longer and blonder every day. From Jake, who still owned my secret, to my parents, who still didn’t know. At least, I thought they didn’t. Who knew what could be happening in my absence?
I swallowed the tightness in my chest long enough to find my way back to the Airbnb. I drank some water and lay down in bed for a couple hours. Then I moved to the floor. I rested the back of my hand over my burning forehead and closed my eyes.
Interrogation Room 39
Afshin Azadi
THIS IS ABSURD. You’ve been questioning me nonstop about my background. I’ve already told you. I was detained once before, just like this. It was ten years ago. Why do I look different from that photo? Because!
Because I shaved off the beard.
The whole experience frightened me. When you people went through my things and made me feel like a bad guy. I was merely traveling for a work trip. I was carrying a briefcase with chemicals I needed for a convention in Texas, and I believe the intention of my trip was simply … misinterpreted.
We never told my children about this, no. They don’t know. We didn’t want to scare them.
Interrogation Room 37
Amir
I WOULD ABSOLUTELY love a glass of water, yes. You know, sir, you’re not nearly as intimidating as I would have expected you to be. Which is kind of messed up, when you think about it.
Twenty-Nine Days Ago
I MUST HAVE drunk half the water out of the Tiber River after my panic attack in the bookstore.
The bed in my Airbnb was lofted up by some weird chains that rattled every time I went down the creaky wooden stairs. It also meant that I had to duck my head whenever I went into the kitchen to fill up my glass.
I wanted to go home. My real home. I wanted to be back in my room, with my stupid participation ribbons and the ukulele that Soraya played more than I did. But I couldn’t. That was the same room was where I had spent these last couple of months, miserable and depressed. It was the room where I had spent entire weekends with my door shut, scrolling through internet forums that were supposed to help me feel better but only made me feel worse. There are a lot of bad coming-out stories on the internet. I shouldn’t have read them all, but I did.
Going home wasn’t an option.
Then I remembered the hot bookseller’s list of recommendations, crumpled in my pocket. I unfolded it, smoothed the edges, and saw the bartender’s name he had written down. Jahan. It was an Iranian name, meaning “world” in Farsi. What were the odds?
So, just before midnight, I decided to leave the apartment and check out this bar. I was more than a little nervous to be out alone in a foreign country. But it was too good of a coincidence, this Iranian bartender in Rome, and besides, a real drink at a real bar sounded like an upgrade from the warm beer Jackson kept in his glove compartment.
It had gotten dark outside, but the streets of Rome still flaunted their effortless beauty. Like, they weren’t trying hard at all. The buildings were all worn and painted over in perfect creams and pastels, illuminated by the streetlights, and laundry hung outside the windows, wide sheets and shirts and bright little dresses. The colors all worked together in such a way that it felt like they were a part of the fabric of the neighborhood. And the streets themselves—yes, the cobblestones were uneven, but I was figuring out how to walk on them.
The bar was on a small, dark side street, where you had to ring a doorbell to get inside. Sitting at the bar, there were two women with short-cropped hair; one of them had a huge sunflower tattoo on her bare arm. And behind the bar was a short guy with a big smile and even bigger drunk eyes. Not the kind that were actually drunk—he seemed to be pretty composed, balancing two bottles and a shot glass—but the kind that were always a little red and had bags under them. The cute kind.
“I’m looking for Jahan,” I told the bartender.
“That’s me,” he said.
I looked at him again. Was this man messing with me? I don’t know how else to say it, but this man did not look like any other Iranian person I had ever met in my life. I mean, his name was more Iranian than kabob and Persepolis. But his skin was covered in tattoos. And quite a few shades darker than mine. Burnt caramel, versus my milkier caramel.
He finished the drink he was making and handed it to the sunflower tattoo lady. “Jah-han. You even pronounced it right. The Italians always manage to bastardize my name. You must be Persian. Are you Persian?”
“I am,” I said.
“I knew it! I knew it when you walked in. What’s your name?”
“Amir.”
“Amir,” Jahan repeated. “Befarmah, welcome. Take a seat. What would you like to drink?”
I sat at one of the tall barstools, my feet dangling above the ground, and rested my elbows on the wet bar. “A beer?”
“What kind of beer?”
I glanced up at the ceiling. “Oh, I’ll drink anything.”
Jahan gave me a funny look. He could definitely tell I had never ordered a beer in my life.
“One beer, coming up. So how did you find us?”
“I was at this bookstore earlier today,” I said, “and the bookseller recommended this bar. Well, specifically he recommended you.”
“You met Neil! Oh, I love Neil,” Jahan said. “He’s the sweetest person in the world.”
“Jesus Christ, he’s friendly, too?”
Jahan laughed and filled up a tall beer glass for me. “Congratulations. You have eyes,” he said.
I felt embarrassed, knowing that Jahan had figured out that I found Neil attractive, and I took a long sip of my drink. I was pleasantly surprised by how nice it tasted compared to the warm PBRs in Jackson’s car.
Jahan kept tending the bar, humming along to the song that was playing overhead.
“What song is this?” I asked.
He looked at me like I came from Mars. “You don’t know Nina Simone?”
“That’s the name of the song?”
Jahan’s jaw dropped. He turned to the two women at the bar and threw his hands up. “Hopeless! This boy is hopeless! Either he’s under twenty-five or a flaming heterosexual.”
My ears turned red, and my natural instinct was to brush off the comment. I mean, my whole life, even the tiniest gay joke could dig under my skin and make me feel self-conscious. But then I realized I didn’t have to brush off Jahan’s joke. It didn’t have to be awkward. So I replied, “Sorry, but I’m only one of those things.”
Jahan grinned so wide you could actually hear it, the soft smacking of spread lips and caved dimples.
“So, where are the Italian people in Rome?” I asked. “Between you and Neil, I’ve only met other Americans.”
“With
the state of the economy, they all seem to be fleeing. Young people can’t get jobs, there’s a rising far-right movement—but hey, at least we still have pasta.” Jahan sighed. “Don’t get me wrong. Italy is a lovely place to visit, but you’ve got to be out of your mind to want to live here.”
I expected this to be Jahan’s cue to move on to his other customers at the bar, and he did—there were beers to pour, fancy drinks to mix—but Jahan also kept doing the most wonderful thing: he’d pull me into his conversations. “You’ll have to check that out while you’re in town, Amir,” he said after telling one tourist about the Sistine Chapel. “Oh, in America, they hurry you out of the restaurant,” he said about the slower service in Italy, winking at me. “Our people, they’ve been around for a long-ass time,” he bragged, comparing the Persian Empire to the European monarchies.
It turned out Jahan was just half Iranian, on his dad’s side—his mom was Dominican—but after he had had a few drinks himself, all he wanted to talk about with me was Iranian culture.
“Have you heard of Fereydoon? He’s this singer,” Jahan said. “I’m obsessed with him. He was huge in the 1960s, and he had an emo poet sister, kind of like the Iranian Virginia Woolf. He was also deeply, deeply homosexual. Everyone knew! But of course you couldn’t say anything.” And then Jahan got up on the bar—I’m serious!—and he performed a bit from one of his songs, flamboyantly flashing his fingers and kicking his legs, and I just thought, Who is this guy?
The whole night, Jahan told story after story. His nipple story was particularly gruesome—in the best way.
But before we got really drunk and heard the nipple story told ’round the world—from what I understand, that story has spread farther from its initial source than influenza in 1918 or herpes in a frat house—we listened to Joni Mitchell.
“Do you know this song, Amir?” Jahan asked, leaning over the bar.
I definitely recognized the upbeat melody, the lyrics—paved paradise, something about parking lots—but I didn’t know the singer.
“You’re hopeless,” Jahan said. “Gay card revoked.”
It was like there was another rainbow scoreboard for gay men that I had never been exposed to, and I was starting from scratch.
-5: Doesn’t know Nina Simone or Joni Mitchell.
“You know, Joni Mitchell is how I came out to my dad,” Jahan said.
“Um.”
“You don’t have to look so horrified.” He laughed. “It didn’t go that badly. I was in the eighth grade, and my dad asked at the dinner table if I had any crushes, and I replied, totally seriously: ‘Father. Joni Mitchell is the only woman for me.’ The man looked at me, utterly disappointed, shaking his head—but he knew. That was all I ever had to say.”
I couldn’t believe how nonchalant Jahan was about coming out to his dad. I looked over his face carefully, but I didn’t find an ounce of pain, regret, shame, any of the feelings I’d been dealing with these last few months. It was just another story for him, and he went about washing glasses in the bar sink.
“Aladdin,” I said quietly.
“What?”
I looked up from my beer.
“It was Aladdin for me.”
Jahan placed a clean glass on the dish rack and smiled. “How very on-brand.”
I stared in awe as he intercepted a different conversation, this one about a record store in Naples that was run by the Italian mafia. The way Jahan told his tales, with so much flair, they reminded me of the stories my mom and dad had told me growing up. The ones their parents had told them. It felt like part of a thousand-year-old tradition I never thought I would be allowed to be a part of.
The bar emptied out around four in the morning, and I stuck around for another hour. I had been nursing the same beer since midnight, so Jahan made me finish and we took shots of fancy liqueurs. Not liquor. Liqueur. I’d never even heard the word before tonight. I definitely couldn’t spell it. Jahan kept making me try.
“L-I-Q-O—”
“Wrong!” he yelled. Another shot.
“L-I-Q-U … O—”
“Wrong!” he said again, giddily. Another shot.
“I shouldn’t be allowed to take shots of this stuff if I can’t spell the word,” I slurred.
“I don’t make the rules,” Jahan said.
We left the bar at five in the morning. It hit me as I watched Jahan twisting the key in the rusted padlock that if I was back home, I would have been alone in my room, feeling—what was the opposite of drunk? Sober. I would have been so sober.
There wasn’t a single other person on the street outside the bar as we walked. But the way it was lit—warmly, oozing orange and yellow, extending an invitation to any and all—I felt more alive than ever. There was something tugging at my chest, like I’d been accepted into a special secret society.
Jahan asked where I was staying, and I suddenly sobered up, remembering I would have to check out of my Airbnb later that day. I told him where it was, expecting Jahan to point me in the right direction. But it turned out Jahan lived just around the corner. He offered to walk me back. I smiled. After a shitty past couple of days—months, really—I was so happy the universe had at least given me this little bit of serendipity.
We took the long way home, because Jahan wanted to show me Piazza Santa Maria, the main square in our neighborhood, Trastevere. It was massive and inspiring, with a few stragglers humming around the bursting fountain in the middle. “The sound of that fountain always reminds me of children laughing,” Jahan said. And the way he said it, with his eyes ambling to the side, just over the tip of the church—it wasn’t a story. It wasn’t meant to entertain. It was just Jahan.
We looped around the piazza, back to the main road that crossed the Viale, a sort of mini-highway. I started tightrope-walking along the grooves of the tram rails, and Jahan looked at me and laughed. “How old are you, Amir?” he asked.
“Old enough to be in Rome by myself,” I said.
“Fair enough,” he replied. “Though, to be honest, I thought you were on a family trip and had snuck out for the night. It’s what I would have done.”
I stumbled off the tram rails, and Jahan jumped on. “And what are you doing in Rome?” he asked.
“Writing,” I said, because it seemed as good a bullshit answer as any. Though in a way I was figuratively rewriting my life. I mean, who isn’t a writer in the figurative sense of the word?
Jahan chided me for being a writer who doesn’t know Joni Mitchell and therefore a disgrace to our entire species. I remembered that he was an actual writer, a poet. Neil had told me just earlier that day.
“Oh, you can’t trust anything that man says. He’s sick,” Jahan said. “Sick in love. His boyfriend, Francesco, is proposing to him in two weeks, on his thirtieth birthday.” He winked at me then, and I felt that in trusting me with that secret, he was inviting me deeper into this secret society of Americans in Rome. “If you insist on assigning labels, then yes, I’m a poet,” he said. “But I’m a procrastinator, too, so that should tell you how much poetry I actually write.”
He dropped me off at my door with a stern warning: “Listen to Joni Mitchell. There will be a quiz next time.”
I smiled, because all night, Jahan had been so incredulous about every “icon” I’d never heard of: Joni Mitchell, Nina Simone, Joan Crawford. It was like I had told him I’d never heard of oxygen. I was smiling all the way until I reached the chain staircase to my bed, when my phone in my pocket buzzed. And buzzed and buzzed, like the barrage of shots we took at the end of the night. It must have just connected to the apartment Wi-Fi.
I took out my phone and saw notifications on the screen: my parents had called literally dozens of times since I had left for the bar. Not through my number, because that was deactivated internationally, but on Skype. FaceTime. Facebook Messenger. I didn’t even know you could call people on Facebook Messenger.
Drunk as hell, I called them back like it was a reflex. “Mom and Dad?” I said, as if
it was a normal phone call.
“Amir! Where are you?” My mom was having a heart attack through the phone. “We’ve been worried sick,” she said, her voice sharp as knives. “And whatever is going on, we need you to talk to us.”
I sobered up immediately. “I can’t,” I said. But I could only act so sober. “I can’t.” I choked. “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t …”
“You’re scaring us,” my dad said. I could picture him through the line, holding my mom. “First you skip your graduation ceremony, and now you’re scaring us. Is it college? You worked so hard in high school, and we didn’t mean to put pressure on you with those rejections.”
The knot in my stomach grew so tight. “It’s not that,” I said. That knot had stitched my mouth shut. Even though I had distance, even though I was safe, I still couldn’t say the words.
I bit my lip, hard. The points just didn’t add up.
My family was still on the phone. “Amir, is it the pressure?” my dad said. “We thought you’d come home, like the last time you … went off like this. But we don’t even know where you are. Please, you can talk to us.”
Could I, though?
Something shifted in me, right there, and I stayed quiet.
In a lot of ways, I’m lucky. I know that. I get to exist at a time when being different is okay. My generation embraces its differences. But sometimes, when I feel like my family doesn’t understand, can’t understand, who I am … I wish I were different in a different way.
“Amir … joonam, azizam …”
The tally system is only necessary when you’re different from your family. Being Iranian and Muslim is one thing—it comes with its own set of challenges—but at least my mom, dad, Soraya, and I fight those battles together. We deal with the same shitty remarks, the same stares, the same stereotypes. But when you’re gay—your family isn’t different like you anymore. They don’t understand. And worst of all, they might hate you for it. The family you were born into, the people who are supposed to love you no matter what, might hate you.
