Beirut Noir

by Iman Humaydan

  Three belly dancers stormed out of their rooms laughing, the eastern gate blown to hell, thank God, the chador keys thrown away for Allah is away on business and nothing beats reporting to an absentee boss. These virgins of heaven were flashing me their bosoms as we spoke, giggling as they went from room to room.

  A stallion and vixens I swear to god we are, we Oriental god-looking bastards. God made us out of His own disgusting spat image. Read your scriptures, Euro-trash! It’s all there. We are as tempestuous and cruel and gorgeous as Yahweh. You too-whites, you too-blacks, you too-yellows are simply mutations of the image of the god of Genesis. You’re like us, but you’re a little fucked up. But it’s nothing to be ashamed of, really. Weather and living conditions do take their toll.

  Then . . . splaf! Glass under my nose, very fuckin’ fast that was! I looked at him. He smiled at me with green teeth showing. “Come here, you. The Ayrton Senna of bartenders, I knight thee.” And I put a ten-thousand-lira bill in his pocket.

  “EuheuheuEuheuheuGeuheu!” he slyly remarked.

  “You may go now,” I told him.

  I nosed the glass. Very rancid, of course. He made it in a second to impress me. I took a sip, tonguing it up and down, left and right, in my palate for testing. Oh fuck it, what am I doing? Al kohol is al kohol, and the tongue will just have to take it. No?

  I say yes.

  No?

  I don’t know, I think I’ll go with yes.

  Then a lilylilhoe, delightfully underage, freshly cropped, tallish, she came out of nowhere, I swear, she grabbeth my face and licketh my ear. Oh the nasty schlupka! Ayayay ya Allah, not the bloody ear! For you see, ya akhi, due to a horrific childhood collision injury I was smitten as a result with a G-spot there. The lilylilhoe must have had inside information for she went at it with knowledge.

  So she laughed and of course she asked for a drink.

  “Ya walad, give the lady what she wants.”

  She shrieked, “Yiiiiih! Shu mahdum! Lady! Hahaha!”

  I smiled.

  “Yiiiiih! Leish hek snenak? Your teeth are all black, mister! Pourquoi?”

  “Later, ya amar,” I said to her, and then after a wink, “Mesh in public, okay?”

  “Hahahahaha!” she retorted.

  It became clear I was just regularly spouting pearls of comedy because everything I said made her laugh. So I kept talking as she dreamily observed my mouth move and being moved like a leaf when deep sounds came out. Every inch of my skin was a map that she devised with care like Christopher when his sailors began to rebel. And every time I spoke she nodded, and it was Holy Scriptures that she wrote down on her little tabula rasa.

  “Badde fuut ‘al bathroom, okay?”

  “Okay, ya amar.”

  She smiled and she swooshed away just like that, and her hair zebrafied the lightbulb, and I saw her squeezing between the jiggling, giggling fat bodies and the harharhars of her horrible friends.

  “What’s with ze rosy schlupka, eh? Shu? You like rosy schlupkas? You don’t like zis?”

  I was still looking back, smiling like an autistic kid, when she came along.

  I looked back once more and oh my goodness—we were under assault yet again! Mojo soldiers! Left flank, left flank! This time by a sharminga like no other, I swear. So I eyed her really proper to give a frank answer as to whether I want zis or not and, by Jove, cabbie! Hooooold! For she was a yummy-yummy-swallow-every-drop kind of wench, ya cabbie! Her lips were warm and sanctified beyond perfection by the god-trampler Silicon. Her breasts seemed to gasp for air under her Victoria and Fatima’s Secret. An oh-just-tear-me-apart soiree dress and really outlandish earrings. Perfect hourglass figure but time was running out. 36, I give her, 36 or 37, not more. She was staring at me right through the eyelobes, and then without prior warning, she looked down at Eri. Eri grumbled. A steady slow hum. She ran her heels underneath my sheikhly black dress and she woke up Eri who was in a deserving slumber. Blitzkrieg Allah almighty! I thought to myself.

  “Shu ismik ya amar?” I asked.

  “Esmeh Chastity,” she answered.

  Hahahaha, how bloody goddamn cute! Her name was fuckin’ Chastity.

  “And what’s the name of the rosy schlupka bi sharafik?”

  “Esmah Fidelity.” She was getting jealous so she said that as if she just ate a whole pile of horseshit.

  “Fidelity, is it?” I said with a huge grin.

  2:11

  So I followed the sharminga home and she felt suddenly motherly toward Fidelity so we were three. They discussed a price between themselves and then informed me of their findings, which I thought reasonable. We got downright nasty halfway through in the cab, and the cabbie was bearded and all, and was going apologies to Allah for us, and he dropped us in Bourj Hammoud after hurling us with some calligraphied insults. Aaaaaaaah Bourj Hammoud, the den of Armenian thieves and jewelry carvers.

  So we entered the crummy tasteless apartment and we went at it, humping humping hohoho all night long, as if we were to die with the light of day, ya know, the John Donne’s kind of hatred to the fucking sun, oh why dost thou thus through windows and through curtains call on us, ey? Why? Hurry hurry, one more fuck baby girls before the light shines us blind like the residents of Plato Hotel. One more kamikaze squadron of children projects missing Pearl Harbor by miles. Oh lonely egg thou art. On your backs, a genocide in your mouths, on your hair, on the curtains, watch out! I’m gonna spill an Africa on your fingers, in your mouth, I swear, an Asia plus two Chinas on your bosoms. Get the lifeboats, baby girls, for I am coming and my ancestral swine will sustain it until we are all dead. Oh how lonely thou art, oh you egg.

  I got them bare like fallen vineless Eves and I served them real proper. The time of their lives, they told me.

  And the wind blew in the room. Our long hair flew here and there, this way and that, slapping about, as a sol diez drowned the room with utter madness.

  I wiped. I wore my pants and went out.

  4:32

  It was geese-bumping-in-walls kinda weather, really fuckin’ cold, so I walked faster. Having felt no additional warmth whatsoever, I walked slowly again.

  Bravo, boy. First fuck in ages. Paid for and billed. Romance at its utmost sickening point.

  Chastity and Fidelity were looking real nasty in my craney now, I could only vision those snapshots where they were ugliest, where I felt they were most inauthentic, and I could remember distinctly and in a demonically distorted way every time they talked or smiled or winked at each other without me knowing why.

  The nastiest snapshot of them all was when I gave them the liras. They snatched away at the cash like junkies and they quickly melted it in a blackened tired spoon and injected their veins with green. Fidelity’s nostrils leaked green and I got frightened when I looked. She smiled stupidly and her teeth were deep green.

  So I walked and I walked and Bourj Hammoud is what I left behind. I passed by Karantina. Oh good fuckin’ God, what aroma! I inhaled gloriously. Hmmmm, oh the marvelous smell of the total surrender of the diseased and the deceased to come. Karantina, baby boys, all the fuckin’ foreign niggers and yellows rotting in their foreign diseases, and seeping through the walls decades of Falestinian and Christian blood. Genocides leak for a good while, ya know? And the earth is ever-thirsty for more. A very charming place, walla. Top of the list for things to see if you’re passing through.

  The alleys are very narrow in Beirut so there is almost never a horizon. We can’t eye the sky anymore, a web of electric wires shades the sun, and there was a little moonlight zebrafying the whole landscape.

  Shit, I couldn’t even feel my Eri.

  Oh good God, it was almost day. Fuckin’ lovely. Yalla, prepare ourselves: the soundtrack of Beirut in the morning we will ear in a while for it is dawn. Time for work and prayer, oh you little shits! Yalla, wake the fuck up!

  I waited.

  The first ziggurat chanter hit the first note. Envy stirred all the others and an amalgam of chanters shatter
ed the cold morning sky, competing in volume and in a very Oriental way, constantly evading the right notes to praise the Allah. Oh yes, we prance around him, the Allah and his Prophet, ya know, that’s why we can’t draw them. They feed on vagueness, and they wither away if defined.

  For you see, me broder, we play music and pray to God the same way we speak here, yamin shemal, left and right, nothing we say means what you think it means.

  Westerners, they usually get to the point quite quickly. We in Arab Bay insinuate everything we want and eventually, as a consequence, our musical notes as well. Might this be it? Or this or that? Who knows? And a sitar goes wild in the background to emphasize the existential disaster. Tininini. Who knows? Tininininini. Wlik, who knooooows? And then we fall into the Tarab state, which is a typically Oriental state of musical mystical ecstasy, and we are thrown yamin shemal from one yalatifness to another, and we weep out of delight as we’re flashbacking to memories of first kisses, premature ejaculations, and warm milk from well-endowed mothers, and then, at last, after such a long, painful wait, when he, or she, hits that note, that fuckin’ note we came to ear, we just flip backward, shiver and quiver while foaming on the floor, socially aware no longer, space and time coagulating into one, our teeth clicketing and clacketing. Yeah, we fall, ya akhi. Again, in a very clumsy Oriental kind of way.

  As for the West, these Catholic Nazis, well, they hit a sol diez, stop at that, ponder, mutter a boring hmmm, and write it down on old parchment and dream of glory forever as they are devising the next note. Do you think such a culture, even if given all the time in the world, can devise something so repetitive and so pointless and yet so hypnotizing like swirling dervishes or belly dancers? Of course not, they don’t have the total lack of discipline and the easiness of elation we have.

  As for our Muslim chanters, oh they never stop chanting their monotonous chanting. Fugue after fugue after fugue. Fuguing and prancing here and there, bouhouhouing five times a day, and the swings of personnel are necessary, of course, because it is a very hard job to cry genuinely all the time.

  And I’ve grown tired of prancing, to be honest, and I ache for a bit of Nazi in my soup really. Some order, some discipline, some straightforward speech, get to the fuckin’ point, don’t interrupt! I wish we were Germans, man, we would wait with anticipation for the verb. We Arabs, on the other hand, put the verb first then shit two hundred adjectives and go hahaha then bouhouhou all of a sudden and reminisce then reluctantly place a point while panting. And we are always shocked when we are interrupted.

  From afar the ziggurat looks like a gigantic archaic razor. The real tangible filth can only be experienced once you get near. The whole thing triangular and black or straight-up sky-scratcher material, panoramic and black. It’s always black anyway. All the temples of God are painted black now.

  So many times have I wished to set all these goddamn temples on fire. Yes, I am a man of god (well, I was) and I crave to see all His temples razed to the ground, yes mortals, for the Lord He is offended by your edifices. Your temples are but abominations in the eyes of our Lord God. Aaaaaaah fuck this. Set them all on fire mygod, aaaaaaamen baby boys, my order first and then all the remaining ones, all of them. All of them, I pray to god. All of them, goddamn ignorant cunts looking up, always looking up and waiting, looking so unevolved and all, instead of looking in and laughing so much everything around us is so fuckin’ hilarious.

  The ruin might be heartbreaking, it’s true (just like all ruins are). But the children will finally have the fuckin’ space they need to play at ease. And whatever you were afraid of will be gone, and all the lilylilhoes will be virgins again, I swear. No harm done, Hymen. The betrothed of thee, Antigone, oh he will come back and save thee on time. Just you wait. Be patient. Be good. And kill the clergy every chance you get.

  5:05

  Khalas, it is known, I might be awful in every single way, but seriously, look at this place! Akh Ya Allah. Look at it. It is done. It can no longer last. Just look at it, ya akhi. The knees of this place are shaking under the weight.

  I have to leave this hellhole of a godless, dripping-with-disease place before it blows in my fuckin’ face.

  No Ka in my spine, of course. My bones are hollow and the forty-seven winds of the East blow through them.

  I craved to be clean so I could just walk safely home. I don’t know why, but something felt very unright and not even getting home offered me consolation. Something in my belly was going crunchy crunch, and it was not butterflies. Nothing this sugary, I’m sure. I felt as if there were a satanic baby inside me, screeching and squealing with black horns and green ejaculations from every hole in its body, and eating avidly at my insides with fork and scissors.

  05:36

  He climbed the last flight of stairs, went toward the fronty-door, head facing hell, looked through his pockets, clickety clack, where for art thou keys, clickety clack click clack, where for art thou? Can’t we simply barge into our own houses?

  The door squeaked open.

  “Dirty Teeth!” She paused. “Priest Renzin akhiran decides to show up.” She was waiting for me, in the dark, on the stairs, like a gargoyle from Notre Dame de la Faillite.

  I was not startled. No, I just closed my eyes in an I-knew-it kinda way. I looked at her.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Can I come in first?”

  No.

  No.

  No.

  Fuck no.

  No fuckin’ chance in fuckin’ hell no.

  “Sure.”

  Eesh went in first, her bag jingling jangling, and her hair pitchblacking the little light there was. He followed her in and closed the door behind him. And as the door closed, his stomach churned the way it churned when he would lock himself outside without the keys, or worse, when you closed the door on a chunk of your gut.

  “You don’t seem too delighted to see me,” she said, smiling as she put down her things, obviously planning to stay. Renegade locks were brought back to the original chignon and she resembled a predator when she did that.

  I stared at her and didn’t answer.

  “I need a place to sleep, walla, c’est tout. Would you do that for me?” She got closer and looked me straight in the eyeball. Her nostrils quivered. Sniff . . . Hmmm . . . He smells of women . . . “Can you do that for me, ya habibi, ya Dirty Teeth?”

  Yeah. This is what she calls me. Dirty Teeth. Because . . . well . . . because I never brush my teeth and they really look horrible, because the quality of your words and the intention behind every phrase you utter apparently affects your gum. There is a certain negativity that one spews as he cusses and badmouths, and it makes our teeth rot faster. So I eared anyway. In any case, you should take one eye at my teeth and you can immediately tell that I am not one to be trusted.

  So yeah, Dirty Teeth. But then again, baby boys, what’s in a name? No, really, what’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, no?

  “Fine. But I can’t hang. I need sleepage. I’m fucked really bloody tonight. Sorry.”

  “Do you have any left?”

  Oh good cunt almighty! It would have taken me two decades of shame and stuttering and finger civil wars to utter a request as such. Oh God, this intolerable boldness! This savage carpe diem dressed with the robe of total need.

  I didn’t answer. I took off my pants, searched my pockets, and took out the last remaining brown I had, leaving nothing for myself. Having drunk this much I won’t be taking that tonight anyway, this goes without saying.

  And she deserves the whole stash for the way she asked me for it.

  And if you’ve gone in and out of brown, me broder, you surely know that giving your whole stash to someone can only mean one of two things: ONE, you want a specific something from the person you are giving your stash to, and he surely and of coursely knows what it is; or TWO, something that goes along this line: Here, take it, you have it, no please, take it all. Happy? Good! Now, I don�
�t want to eye your fuckin’ face ever again. The most vicious of gifts, a white Pandora’s box grinded. Walla.

  “Here, take it.”

  “I’ll leave you some.”

  “No need to, Eesh. Really. No need to. Goodie nacht and the like.”

  “Goodie nacht, Dirty Teeth.”

  My knees gave in. And as I was crumbling I aimed at the mattress and collapsed on ground zero. Yes. Floor mattress. No bed. Takes too much space.

  One fleeting thought, and then another, then I multiplied Z by a trillion and they spread in my room.

  6:02

  Go child. Go child, they said to me. So I went, naturally. You always do in dreams, there is no notion of good sense there, you just go anywhere you’re told to go and nothing feels like it is your decision, so I did and I ended up walking on clouds and I realized at that point that clouds were naught but the white fingerprints of God as He tries to caress our world. And then I followed my Allah like a hunter hunting a haunted wounded deer in the desert. Then the deer turned mewards and swooshed just like that into a beautiful woman and swooshed again into a gigantic old man who just stared at me with loving hatred in his eyes. I was instantly burned like a Cathar in a spontaneous combustion, burned for all the mischief I had made and caused, and I accepted my punishment, ya akhi, though painless it was surely not. I was then redeemed for all I have done, and I was caressed by a figure in the heights which was bright as bright can be. It was probably the sun itself, can’t really vision it now.

  Then, out of nowhere, god savagely attacked me and filled my neck with love bites, and my neck was as mistreated as the necks of the likes of Moe, Jesus, Akhenaton, and such as, combined. I screamed: Enough! But all I wanted was: more, more, embrace my torso with your strong legs and squeeze the life out of me.

  I knelt and I eared an eerie voice telling me: Oh Renzin, ya Sheikh Renzin, you’re forgiven. And I fell down from heaven in slow-motion like a Prometheus on fire, burning like a gigantic zeppelin, and thousands and thousands of little ones were crying and going bouhouhou, I don’t believe it, bouhouhou, Renzin is down, children, Sheikh Renzin is going down!