“We were just saying hello and our names. I asked him if he spoke English. I bet he does. Most Persians learn English in middle school,” I told Lucky.
“Yes! I e-speak English. You in Iran long time?” Like cabbies worldwide, our cabbie was chatty. His name was Nader. He was an engineer who loved David Bowie. He had a wife who worked as a nurse and two teen daughters. We listened to “Rebel, Rebel” while driving on the freeway into the city as Nader chain-smoked Winston cigarettes, flicking the ashes out the open window and swerving through traffic vigorously.
“You good friends or you brothers?” Nader asked us, looking back at us sitting in the backseat of the cab.
Lucky looked to me to see what I’d tell Nader. We’d decided ahead of time to tell strangers we were close friends but tell officials that we were married, however making this decision while in San Francisco was one thing and testing our shiny new Persian identities with Nader the cabbie was another. “We’re good friends.”
Lucky ventured a nervous “Salam.” We’d been practicing Farsi, but this was the first time she’d spoken it to a real Persian.
Nader looked startled at Lucky’s voice. It identified her as either female or a man with a very high-pitched voice, but he recovered. “Salam Meester Lucky!”
The drive from the international airport into the city took a little over an hour, most of it on the new freeway. Well, new to me. When I’d left Iran they had just opened the first leg of the freeway system, and it had seemed impossibly modern back then. I missed the camels and donkeys by the side of the road. I glimpsed Mount Damavand, its familiar snowcapped peaks overlooking Tehran, and I teared up again with love.
“Baby, look. It’s Mount Damavand. Isn’t it gorgeous?” I pointed out the mountain in the distance.
Lucky squeezed my hand. “Yes, it is.”
We approached the busy center of the city, crowded, noisy, and alive. Lucky looked a little pale as we narrowly missed plowing down a gaggle of giggling uniformed schoolgirls crossing in the middle of a busy six-lane boulevard, only to nearly sideswipe a scooter being driven by a manic, elderly, gray-bearded cleric and piled high with neon plastic crates crammed full of squawking chickens.
“Aren’t there any traffic rules here? Oh fuck, watch out for that little dude on the bicycle!”
“I told you driving here was a little lawless. Tehran-i are known for their wonderfully erratic driving skills.” I grinned, stuck my elbow out the window and sniffed the diesel fumes. It felt and smelled like home. The street was lined with tiny crowded shops and trees. Music spilled from shop loudspeakers and men gathered on the sidewalks to smoke cigarettes, argue, and gossip. It reminded me a little of the Mission in San Francisco.
Suddenly, Nader squealed left across four lanes onto a narrow, one-way, one-lane cobblestoned kuche and careened several blocks. The kuche was lined with jubes, poplar trees, and beautiful, elaborate, painted-metal compound gates in front of homes. Women in black chadors strolled down the alley carrying string bags of groceries and alley cats walked majestically on top of brick compound walls. We were in mid-Tehran, and despite my fears, much looked familiar.
“See the jubes!” I pointed out the shallow waterways flanking the street excitedly to Lucky. Trees grew beside the two-foot-wide water channels, and there were narrow arched bridges over them every block or so.
“Hotel-i Golestan is near by. We may have passed. I look,” Nader informed us. With a curse and a fresh Winston, Nader stopped and put the taxi in reverse, driving quickly backward down the narrow one-way street flanked by jubes, barely missing trees, a vendor selling greens from a red wheelbarrow, and several hapless pedestrians until he reached an intersection with a statue in the center that he’d passed on his way down, then made a sharp turn to the right.
“Oh my god. He is crazy!” whispered Lucky, clenching my hand tightly.
“No, no, no. That is how you drive here. We all drive backward on one-way streets when we need to. It’s easier and faster that way,” I explained patiently. I knew as soon as I said this that I’d crossed over into another culture. I could feel America slipping away and Iran taking its place.
Lucky blinked incredulously. “I suggest that you don’t try this in San Francisco,” she said drily.
The taxi screeched to a halt. “Agha joon, een ja Hotel-i Golestan hast!” (“My dear sirs, here is Hotel Golestan.”) Nader tossed his smoldering cigarette to the pavement and hopped out, opening the car doors for us.
It felt disorienting to be called agha, not khanom. When I left I was a sixteen-year-old girl called khanom-i Jenny. Returning to Iran, due to the transformative magic of testosterone and men’s drag, I’d become a middle-aged man called agha-i Behrouz. It was more jarring and difficult to make this gendered change in Farsi than in English.
I knew that Tehran would be different from when I left in the early 1970s. I’d talked to folks who had returned after decades and they’d mentioned in part horror and part amusement Tehran’s pollution, growth, and the religious influence, but even with the new freeways, modern skyscrapers, and surplus of clerics, Tehran still felt like home.
Lucky got out of the taxi, her legs shaking. Hotel-i Golestan was in a four-story beige stone 1970s building located on a cobblestoned street, between a teahouse with dark windows and a small packed chair store, chairs of all colors and varieties spilling willy-nilly from the front door. I took a deep breath of the familiar smells of Tehran, exhaust fumes, grilled kebabs, cigarettes, roasted corn, and ripe fruits and vegetables. The hotel’s entrance was flanked by two four-foot potted trees, there was a stained bright red carpet in front of the doorway, and three Iranian flags fluttered over the hotel. It was off Hassan Abad Square in Southern Tehran, near the historic Grand Bazaar, the Royal Jewelry Museum, and Park-i Shahr. Some might have called the hotel shabby, but I thought it was homey and I loved the centralized location. We got our suitcases from the trunk, bargained with the beaming Nader for the fare, and staggered into the lobby of the Hotel-i Golestan, “Suffragette City” blaring from Nadar’s car as he careened away.
The lobby was small and badly lit. It had an ornate walnut front desk with a vase of a dozen red roses on the countertop, manned by a young, wiry, bored-looking clerk in a yellow polo shirt, with thick black wavy hair, muttonchop sideburns, a luscious unibrow, and a verse of poetry tattooed upon his forearm, the elaborate Persian calligraphy wrapping its way around his muscular hairy limb. He was preoccupied with texting someone and took a minute before he looked up at us.
“Salam! Man ghablan otagh reserv kardam. Esme man Behrouz Bedford hast,” I said as confidently as I could manage. (“Hello! I reserved a room. My name is Behrouz Bedford.”)
“I e-speak Engleesh.” The clerk opened his reservation book and found our reservation. “Meester Bedford and Meester Bronson? You have one room?”
“Yes. We have one room. Yek otagh.” (“One room.”)
“You have one room and you have one bed?” The clerk pursed his narrow lips, looked at our reservation, then looked skeptically at Lucky and me for a long minute and shook his head sadly at the crazy ferangi men. He rang his bell for assistance. “One bed not good for you.”
The manager hustled over, smiling officiously. “‘Ello! This room has one bed. It for married meester and missus. You two meester. You want room with two bed. We have.” He raised his bushy white eyebrows, looking at Lucky and me hopefully.
“We are a missus and mister. We are a man and a woman. We are married.” I reached into my rucksack for our passports and our marriage license, displaying my wedding band ostentatiously as I laid our documentation on the counter. I said dramatically, “Lucky is my wife.”
Lucky blanched at the word wife, but stood fast. The manager and the clerk conferred excitedly in fast Farsi before they handed us back our marriage license and passports, “Agha-i Bedford va Khanom-i Bronson, velcome to Hotel-i Golestan!”
With that solemn pronouncement we became a straight married couple, wort
hy of sharing a bed in Tehran. The clerk scurried from behind the counter, picked up our suitcases, and led us to our room. I suddenly felt straight as fuck as my wife and I walked up the carpeted stairs and down the narrow carpeted hallway toward our room.
Our room was midsized, with a queen-sized bed covered in a gold satin matelassé coverlet, a large window overlooking Khaiboon-i Hafiz with white lace sheers and gold brocade drapes, two maroon overstuffed modern armchairs, three cheap blue and gold Persian carpets, a modern brass and frosted glass chandelier, a massive oak armoire, a white mini-fridge, and a small table with two straight chairs. The walls were painted robin’s egg blue and there was a still life of pomegranates over the headboard. The room smelled like lemon cleaner and faded cologne.
Lucky was looking cranky. Between jet lag, feeling left out when Nader and I were talking Farsi, and heteronormative privilege, she was heading for a meltdown.
“I’m sorry,” I started saying.
“It’s okay this time, but next time you’re the wife,” Lucky barked.
I didn’t think this was the proper time for a conversation on why the word wife was so jarring and the possible misogyny behind this reaction. I also wanted to live to be sixty-three, so this seemed the ideal time for some decompression and alone time; I started unpacking and headed for the bathroom to take a shower, leaving Lucky staring in tired fascination out of the bedroom window at the busy street below. We could hear street vendors barking their wares to passersby and dusk was falling.
Fortunately, the water pressure in the hotel was good and the shower was hot. The hotel had been remodeled recently: the shower stall was tiled in hexagonal tiles in shades of pink and turquoise and the floor was tiled in pink marble with gold metallic veining. There were pink towels on the gold metal towel bar, matching bright gold fixtures, and a pink marble sink and sit-down toilet. The whole thing was very femme spa meets faux Versailles.
I unwrapped a new bar of amber-scented soap, reveling in the hot water, sudsing my chest, and tweaking my nipples until they were hard. I washed myself, cleaning off the dry airline air and sweat of too many hours in flight and airports. Then I soaped my asshole, fingering myself lightly. Just enough to feel more human, my cunt swelling up, getting wet and hard. We hadn’t fucked since that quickie the morning we left, and I missed Lucky’s hand inside of me already.
I wrapped myself in my robe and stepped out into our bedroom. Lucky was sprawled on the bed, naked except for her rubber harness and her eight inch black cock, her brown nipples hard and pointed, her cock pointing toward the ceiling and waiting. She had lubed it up and was stroking it, smiling sexily. When I came into the room she arched her hips, pointing her cock at me. “Get over here.”
I could feel my cunt getting wetter as I walked over, my breath becoming jagged. Lucky reached over to the bedside table, picked up a pair of tit clamps, and gestured for me to come closer. I came over, breathing heavily, and she twisted my nipples, then fastened the clamps onto each tip. I gasped at the sharp pain.
“Get up here, now.” She smiled lazily, jacking off slowly.
I climbed over Lucky, her cock beneath me, waiting to fill me. She stroked the thick length of it, and said, “Sit on my cock.”
I didn’t need to be told twice. I grabbed Lucky’s cock, aiming it at my asshole that only minutes before had been filled with my fingers. As Lucky pulled on the chain between the tit clamps, I teased myself with her cock, pulling the head in gradually, fucking her slowly, inch by inch. I wanted to tantalize us until we were desperate to fuck. I filled myself with two inches of hefty cock, then withdrew until just the head rested on my asshole. My asshole twitched needily, but I waited until I groaned and my whole body twitched. I then sank halfway onto Lucky’s cock slowly, letting each inch of it slide into my grateful asshole. Lucky was gasping, her hips arching, and she pulled on my tit-clamp chain with excitement. My nipples burned, the pain from the clamps swelling my cunt, everything hard and dripping. I couldn’t hold off another minute, and with a groan, I sank onto the full length of Lucky’s cock and started fucking her in earnest. I jacked myself off as I fucked Lucky, pulling on my slippery engorged clit and stroking my labia, all hard and swollen with desire. I wanted Lucky inside of me, beside me, filled with me and me with her. It was always like this with us, this hotness. I sped my rhythm up, slamming into Lucky’s groin and filling myself over and over, feeling her cock reach into my belly. Lucky grunted and came, yanking my tit-clamp chain with her neck thrown back and sweat pooling between her olive breasts.
“I can’t get off!” I panted. I was too tired from the trip and too excited by being in Iran to come. Lucky smiled, her hand fondling my hairy breast and then wandering to my throat for a playful squeeze.
“Oh, baby. Let me help you,” Lucky threw me off of her, got up, bent me face down over the side of the bed, grabbed the back of my neck, then thrust her cock into me, sinking it full length in the first stroke.
“Oh, fuck,” I moaned as Lucky pulled out nearly all the way, paused with the tip of her cock inside of me teasingly, then sunk in again until her hips rested on my ass. She tantalized me slowly, until I started to beg, “Please fuck me, please. Deeper. Please.” I was desperate. Lucky drew back, waiting a second, then slammed in fast and started fucking me quickly. She went all the way in with each brutal stroke, growling as she forced my hips into the side of the bed. I grunted with each stroke, as her cock filled me, stretching my asshole. “More!” I gasped. I reached down to my drenched cunt and rubbed my clit between my forefinger and middle finger. Lucky grabbed a faded bruise on my hip, twisting the tender flesh. The unexpected jolt of pain pushed me over the edge and with a yell, I finally came.
We lay there panting for a minute, the smell of our sweat filling the air.
“It’s a good thing I remembered how to cure jet lag with the five s’s. Sex, shower, sleep, stroll, and supper. Now all we need is sleep, stroll, and supper.” With that, Lucky set her phone to ring in an hour, put her arm around me, and we snuggled under the covers for a postcoital afternoon nap.
We woke up to darkness and the alarm clucking like a chicken. Lucky rolled out of bed to take a quick shower as I tossed on my denim overalls, a long-sleeved orange-plaid flannel shirt, harness boots, and a brown corduroy jacket. She came out of the bathroom, letting a burst of sandalwood-scented steam out with her, and got dressed in jeans, an olive-green-and-red-striped crewneck wool sweater, her worn brown leather jacket, and a pair of Wesco engineer boots. It was time to hit the streets for the last two s’s, supper and a stroll.
We went downstairs and asked the desk clerk where the closest kebab-i was located. He recommended Kebab-i Grand, just five blocks away. It had cooled off and was a little chillier than San Francisco at night. There were wispy clouds flitting across a three quarters moon and the streets were still noisy, bustling with people and street-food vendors.
We found Kebab-i Grand easily. It was small, crowded, lit by strings of clear party lights, and filled with spicy smells of chelow kebab. We were ravenous, finishing our plastic plates of a giant mound of basmati rice, grilled charred tomatoes and onion slices, lemony juju kebab, juicy kofte kebab, lavash, and buttery tadig without exchanging a single word. We topped off dinner with small glasses of black tea, almost falling asleep over our table in exhaustion, and staggered back to the hotel sleepily.
We woke up the next morning in Tehran. It seemed like magic that we were here and not in San Francisco. I could hear the ice-cream cart vender screeching “bastan-i” in his shrill high-pitched voice, children laughing, and cars honking their horns. I opened the wine-colored brocade drapes and poked my head out of our bedroom window. It was breezy and mild, perfect for a day of carousing in the ancient Grand Bazaar and Park-i Shahr. We dressed quickly, giggling in anticipation of an adventure, and made our way to the tiny hotel restaurant for a traditional Persian breakfast of flat, still warm barbari and sangak breads, quince jam, sour-cherry jam, salty goat milk feta, mint leaves,
sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, dates, and small glasses of hot sweet black tea.
We spent the morning walking through the bazaar, soaking up the sounds and sights. It was familiar yet foreign to hear Farsi spoken in the streets. It was like being in a dream about flying, where you do something that you know is impossible, yet concurrently it is natural. Persian words filled my head, occasionally a familiar word penetrating my consciousness. The tone and rhythm, as soothing as a song, could have lulled me to sleep.
The historical Grand Bazaar was divided into corridors or neighborhoods, each lanky road covered by high, arched, ornate brickwork ceilings. The stores were mostly tiny and cramped, piled high with goods. We easily found my childhood favorite, the metal section, through the clanging of metalworkers banging out and engraving trays, jugs, and bowls. I loved the sharp scorched smell of metalworking chemicals. Lucky was fascinated by the ghashang magpie sparkle of all the gleaming gold, silver, bronze, brass, and copper, and honed in on a particularly charming antique copper and silver squat-lidded tobacco urn engraved with ornate filigree arch motifs, bargaining the shop-owner down in her halting Persian. We sat on a Persian carpeted bench as the shop-owner pressed glasses of tea and sugared almonds on us, alternatively flattering and insulting us with his entreatments to buy his goods.
We made our way through the rug section, the carpets vibrant and glowing and presided over by black-haired, tea-quaffing men entreating us into their carpeted caves. Nearby was the spice and nuts section, with burlap bags of fragrant cinnamon, cumin, dried limoo and other delicacies. We lingered to ogle the overflowing bins, and bought several bags of pistachios and cashews for later. We were finally stopped dead by the jewelry and gold corridor. The covered hallway glittered and gleamed like Oz, with tray after tray of gold filigree work, carved carnelian seals, faceted jewels, delicate chains, and more. We meandered slowly down the jewelry aisle, feeling glazed and overstimulated. I’d wanted a gold puzzle ring for years to replace the one I’d gotten as a teenager, which had been stolen. We stopped at one of the sparkling shops. I tried on several rings and bought one. Worn out from the Bazaar, I was too tired to bargain. Insulted and chagrined, the shopkeeper added a pair of cheap silver and enameled Isfahan-i cuff links to our purchase to make up for the lack of haggling. We gathered our purchases and hurriedly found our way out of the bazaar, desperate to be away from the hordes of shoppers, visual stimulation, and narrow aisles.
Behrouz Gets Lucky Page 20