out swimming in the flood

Today after dinner I decided I wanted to go get a sheesha (hookah). It had been a long time since I'd had one and I decided that it was important to scope out places for a couple prospective visitors. I like being able to take people places I've been before. When I was young I played war and now I play tour guide. I like it. I sat down after my koshari dinner, and after checking prices to see if I was walking into a ripoff I ordered a sheesha and a Turkish coffee. I love Turkish coffee, and I love smoking sheesha. And I mean smoking. I don't really care for the tobacco or even the taste, but I love blowing the smoke all over my face and doing my best dragon impression. I never pretended I was a dragon when I was a kid.

The place is this cool little hole in the wall behind campus. A bit pricier than the normal ahwa, next to campus and all, but if your still counting differences in cents, your alright. I'm alright.

Too say I sat down is a simplification. I left koshrai as if to take the metro home, or actually, to the wireless cafe I normally go to one stop away. I turned around. I slipped a street kid a pound. I walked around the block. I picked up some readers for next week right next to the ahwa, scoping it out for seats. Full of my peers and intimidating. I walked around the corner again. I walked half-way back. I stopped at the wall around the corner from the ahwa, staring at the wall of the library, gathering my courage. You gonna do it Alex? I dare you! I double dare you!

I should elaborate further. This ahwa is right next to campus, more accessible than the ones in my neighborhood. Those are really intimidating; all those guys have been going there for years, eternities practically. Generations live and die there. Who knows. There's this one right around the corner from my place that I've passed a few times, longingly: oh, but for the neighbors. This would just be practice. A home away from home. I practically live at the library anyway. Finally, I stumbled around the corner. Everyone saw me, and having already stumbled around a bit, it was too late to back out again. I sat down.

Okay, there. Apple sheesha and a Turkish, mazbut, just right, on the sugar. Delivered. I dug into the sheesha, and I didn't cough. I don't cough much on them anymore, even the harsh ones. I thought maybe I'd found a place, settled in, done the Egypt thing.

I should explain. The other day I phoned my friend from the wireless cafe, this wireless cafe, and I told him I was at a cafe. He was impressed. So cool he said, the neighborhood coffee shop, I was there, just kickin' it. Oh, no no no, I corrected him, I'm at Starbucks Egypt, well, not quite, the local version, misleading named Cilantro, plunking major dime for a place where my laptop doesn't make me a precocious freak. And then I felt sort of bad. Like, I should, as a confused writer and American emissary to the world, soak as much of it in as I can, and squeeze my exotic goodness all over everyone when I get back.

So I sat down at the ahwa, doing my best to soak, but not thirty seconds later and I was getting stares. Or at least, I thought I was getting stares, I was seeing stares, even from these AUC Egyptians who must see me, the Americans, all the time, punky and precocious, sitting wherever they damn well please and coughing like amateurs all over the national pastime. I didn't cough but I still knew I was getting stared at. Shorn of an intimdating pack of buddies or newbie confidence, the stares cut me to the core. (You know, I loved my friends from last semester. But the truth is I came to Egypt to be alone. Yeah, yeah, at the bidding of that stupid journeyman trope. But I did. I know I 'll go with my friends anywhere, take them anywhere. But facing Egypt--anything--alone, that's all new. Interrogated, where, why, what are you doing here? Where are we going ? I just don't know. And it's kind of interesting. Sometimes it makes me bitter.)

To be honest, I don't much like sheesha save for the conversation and the smoke. But the conversation was with myself and the smoke was the winds. Winds are good for poets, hurricanes, and kites, but shitty for sheesha, because it blows the smoke all over the place and makes smoke rings impossible. Usually, I prove I'm a freak but not a newbie by blowing a few smoke rings, of varying caliber, but they get the point across.

Nicotine, or tobacco, or whatever the fuck it is in sheesha that has it on the American Lung Association no list makes your stomach turn. Worse than coffee, and I had a coffee to. It turned my middle from esophagus to intestines into an vomity, firey, farty pit, like all my lost conversation was turning into Pepto Bismol fodder. Oh, God, it was so lonely. I tried staring at the building in front of me. Really, it was crumbling and ancient and romantic, a great picture. Faded glory, the order of all of Cairo. Colonial, reemerging, surviving. Contradictory and everything else in your social science readers. It was beautiful, really.

But the stares were driving me crazy, the attendants wanted to close, it was only 930! wtf! and I was going nuts inside. Nucking futts man. I couldn't take it, so I left. Funny how that happens. That's my story. Now I'm at the wireless cafe, blasting 'Baby Britain,' because that is my new favorite song.

God, there is one other thing. I was--am--so glad to be here. So glad. Oh kay, that's all for now. This all has a more simple, less hysterical explanation, but hysteria is all I have energy for right now. Now its back to my Research Paper. Ha Ha Ha