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A man’s mother and his god are sacred, but anything else is fair game. This was the second thing I learned from Husayn, which came halfway through lesson number one—how to roll a joint like a motherfucking pro. We were in the bathroom in the back of his dad’s café where I had retreated to cry after a customer called me a dumb cunt for giving him soymilk in his latte instead of skim. Shahjehan had boomed his brassy third-world laugh and said, “Actually, she is the smartest cunt here. You want a dumb cunt? You take Anya over there.”
Anya cursed in her salty Russian and continued brewing espresso. Shahjehan laughed again and looked around as though anticipating applause. The man demanded a new latte, and I bolted.
There was a knock on the door and Husayn’s head appeared, a Cubs hat and red-rimmed eyes and conservatively trimmed black beard.
“I’m sorry my dad’s an asshole. Smoke?”
Sniffling, I let him in. Husayn was the oldest of the four boys and you could tell he’d been born back in the old country. He was not as seamlessly American as his brothers. His English had the thick-tongued lilt of Urdu still and his style was somewhere between Karachi and Brooklyn, Bhangra and hip-hop. He flipped down the toilet seat and sat backwards on it, laying out his rolling papers on top of the tank and pulling a lighter out of his bomber jacket.
“C’mere, kiddo. You wanna learn how to roll a joint?”
“Don’t call me kiddo. Your dad calls me that.”
“Like this,” he said, scooting over and pulling me down on the seat beside him.
“He only teases you because you’re his favorite here,” he said, taking my makeup-stained fingers in his hands, coaxing them over the thin paper, crushing the green bud. “Also, he’s an asshole,” he added.
“You talk about your dear old abba that way?” I hiccupped and giggled, thinking of the slap of a beer-sticky hand I would have received for speaking to my morose Polish father in that way.
“Yeah, man. You respect a man’s mother and his god, that’s it. Lick your finger.”
My finger tasted dirty and sweaty with a deep sour skunk from the weed. He ran my finger over the edge of the rolled joint to seal it.
“You did it.”
“What about a man’s father, though?”
“You know what the Prophet said about fathers? One of his followers came to him and asked, ‘Whom should you respect?’ And Muhammad said, ‘Your mother.’ And his follower asked again, ‘Whom should you respect?’ And Muhammad said, ‘Your mother.’ And the follower asked again, ‘Whom should you respect?’ And you know what that badass motherfucker, sallallahu alayhi wasallam, said? ‘Your mother.’ So the guy asked him one more time ‘Whom should you respect?’ And Muhammad finally said, ‘Your father.’”
“Moral of the story?” I mumbled through the joint Husayn set between my lips.
“Ain’t nobody got time to respect their dad, not even the Prophet.”
He flicked the lighter and I inhaled.
Shahjehan narrowed his little pigeon eyes at me when I went back to the register, and told me to go back to the kitchen to make some more Mediterranean wraps. Perhaps he repented of his cunt comment; more like he saw how high I was and didn’t want me interacting with customers, with my smeared face and fingers smelling of prime Kashmiri weed.
The weed was making me itchy and paranoid, and the wraps were falling apart in my hands in a jumble of bloody tomatoes and sweaty feta. Husayn had gone back to his window seat, I could see him back there over the front registers and pastry displays, bent over his books, headphones on, probably Public Enemy or Crass pumping transcendental rhythms of power and resistance into a head already swollen with the ninety-nine names of God and the two-hundred and six names of the bones of the human body. Behind him Michigan and Wacker mashed and tumbled together in the sun in a gallimaufry of cars and buses and lunchtime foot traffic. Looking out the window behind him, letting the weed blur and swim my vision, I began to convince myself that the world outside the café had devolved into chaos made flesh and steel and that when the bridge went up over the river the whole city would overbalance and tip into Lake Michigan.
I stripped off my gloves and apron and walked gingerly into the café, as if expecting the floor to tip and lurch like the deck of a seasick ship. I sat down across from Husayn.
“I think I need to go home.”
The great peristalsis of the city clenched and released around me, pushing men and machines through a pattern that ticks in spirals, an urban biological clock. The city is able to maintain homeostasis, but I am not.
Husayn took me home on the 147 bus because it was quicker than the red line, but it was also more crowded. I cringed close to him on our blue plastic seats, shaking and sweating as the bus went marauding onto the expressway and the bodies bounced around us. Legs and elbows and backs and thighs were a continuous wave of flesh from one end of the bus to the other and no one made eye contact; to do so would amount to a severe social trespass.
Once we got off on Foster Ave and began to walk down Marine I could breathe regularly again. My muscles were sore from having been clenched, so I floated loose, marble-eyed and rubber-kneed, beside Husayn, who held onto my balloon string by talking to me.
“When men use words like ‘cunt’ it’s a power thing. It’s a psychological and verbal assertion of male power.”
“So that dude felt that his patriarchal birthright was threatened by a woman putting soymilk in his latté?”
“The latté itself is a symbol of the emasculation of the American male. Caffeine is a virile substance. We’ve taken black coffee—hot, brown, strong, pure—and replaced it with the latté—weak, white, diluted with cream and sugar, a beverage of affectation, a beverage for men who wish to be seen rather than to act.”
“Is this about to turn into another ‘brown good, white bad’ diatribe?”
“Sister, my whole life has been a power struggle between brown gods and white devils, Pakistan and America pull me in a million different directions then dump me loose in the immigrant’s no-man’s land. Remember what the fuckers at Starbucks don’t want you to know, brown people were the first to discover and brew coffee and white people stole it when they invaded those lands and diluted it down to the modern American latté. What that man ordered from you was a concoction of colonialism and emasculation.”
“Okay, I’m kind of lost and still really high. What about your Abba, what does it mean when he calls me a cunt?”
“Abba is a little man. It may not seem so to you because he has money to wag around like a big dick, and he believes in the American gospel of success, and in the West that’s what you call a good man. But Abba is a man of small spiritual stature. He is on his hands and knees trying to creep through a rat hole in the wall of the Garden of Paradise. He knows he’s small, and so he uses words on other people, and he’s like a terrier biting at ankles. Don’t let Abba bring you down any more than a terrier would.”
We passed beds of daffodils at the end of each block, meditating in the new green and clear yellow of late May. Husayn talked like dragonflies dipping through the air, like the slumber of the bench-reclined men in the park across the street, like the old hotels and new condos punctuating the blue above, inscribing a calligraphy of rooftop geometry across my uptown skyline.
“Man, Husayn. All this time I thought all that went through your head was books and school and getting white girls to suck your dick.”
“You just want me to be evil because evil you understand.”
“Because I’m a white Devil?”
“Because you’re lost and amoral.”
“And you’re a paragon of moral behavior? You’re the one getting me high as balls in a public restroom.”
“That was an act of chivalry. I was atoning for my father’s spiritual ankle-biting.”
“Is it your spiritual duty to heal the small wounds your father inflicts upon the world?”
“Not a duty, but a choice. When you decide to own the sins of your family you can heal yourself as well as your ancestors.”
I thought about the sins of my family: Colonialism manifested in the light ochre body and French-tangled tongue of my grandfather; bitching about black people and trying to pass for white; the worship of the trifold gods of alcohol, TV and consumerism, lulling the disenfranchised American into a spiritual rigor mortis and political powerlessness; and above all, our poverty—which in America is a sin far worse than many others, a sin of shame. Could I redeem any of these sins with a mere resolution to be good? Especially when I had no idea what “good” really was?
“You can be good according to the ways of the world or you can be good according to the laws of God,” Husayn said as I jammed my keys into the front door. “But you can’t be both.”
The foyer was high and brown and murky, the only illumination washing from the dusty skylight above the broken old fountain filled with plastic flowers. Our footsteps echoed across the tiles like the knocking of the Angel of Death upon the door of Paradise.
“So which am I?”
“You’re neither and that’s your strength.”
Husayn hung back in the shadows by the fountain as I headed toward the staircase.
“You’re not coming up?”
“I tried to give you peace today, but I think I only gave you chaos. But maybe chaos is something you need to work through to come to peace.”
He backed into the shadows, hands in his pockets.
“So that’s enough. Love, sister.”
“Love, Husayn.”
He went back through the doors, outlined for a moment in white rectangles of light and glass, and I was left with my lonesome death-knock footfalls.
Back upstairs I ate cold leftover noodles and watched Internet porn out of lukewarm boredom and fell asleep in the twilight to thoughts of gendered beverages and the weight of sins strung like a noose over a branch of the family tree and Husayn who was good in God’s eyes and Shahjehan who was good in the eyes of the world, and if I was neither then whose eyes were upon me? I think Husayn meant the Devil.
I remembered the book on the Nation of Islam that Husayn had given me, and what it said about Master Fard Muhammad. The Master was pale enough to pass unmolested amongst the devils but spread the message of Allah through Black America. He said Allah has 360 degrees of knowledge, the Devil has only 33 degrees. Those 33 degrees are knowledge of the material world perhaps, a leaden intoxicating knowledge that tricks one into believing he is possessed of the full measure of reality. The sort of false righteousness that filled the cup of Shahjehan’s laugh, that propelled the man with the skim milk latte on his caffeinated warpath. Maybe what Husayn meant was that I saw beyond the 33 degrees of the Devil but was still light years away from Allah, from the 360 degrees that encompass the universe like a celestial whale swallowing the pearl of the moon. There was hope for me at least, through the chaos.
When I went back to work the next day Shahjehan told me he knew what I’d been up to with Husayn in the bathroom and that he couldn’t have me corrupting his son or polluting his business, that he’d have to let me go. I gave him my apron and my visor, had Vlad sneak me a coffee—black—and walked out. I told myself this was my first step away from the Devil.
Outside the city still quaked with the ancient chaos of Tiamat moving through its bones, but there was a pale daylight moon meditating in the blue sky, as perfect in its geometry as the Ka’aba of my heart.