Native Believer

by Ali Eteraz

  I pulled some smoke and blew it at her. It spread over her like a cream.

  I helped her sit and ordered wine and hookah for her. She vetoed the wine saying she didn’t drink alcohol any longer. I tried to downplay the faux pas by giving her a little lecture about the hookah based on what little I had learned from the waitress; but Candace put up her hand and said she knew all about it. She’d smoked it in Dubai and Turkey and even frequented a Palestinian hookah bar in her neighborhood in North Philly.

  “I like your look,” I blurted out. “I loved it at the deli too.”

  She smiled and lowered her eyes. “You always made fun of my clothes.”

  “I’m not doing it now.”

  We sat together and Candace blew O’s which I both popped and wore on my fingers like rings. She gave me a rundown on Arabic pop music. How Lebanon produced the starlets, Egypt the musicians, and a recording company in Saudi Arabia launched the indecency upon the world. The videos that were released during Ramadan were particularly licentious. As evidence she showed me videos of Elissar and Nicole Saba. Squinting into her phone required sitting together, our legs touching lightly. Candace said she had started taking belly-dancing classes.

  “I had always wanted to do it,” she said. “But until I converted I felt it would be stealing someone else’s culture.”

  Her comment gave me the opening I needed and I prodded her about how she had taken to Islam. She went on to detail her own coming of age in the suburbs of Atlanta and DC. Her parents, both half-black, were part of the new black elite who turned their backs on her when she decided that she didn’t have a similar love for “black tribalism” that they did. It started when she refused to go to Spellman in Atlanta and opted for a public university. It worsened when she told her father that she imputed no inherent superiority to a black man. Race, she said, was an oppression created by those who profited from making divisions in the world. To agree to belong to a race meant affirming that basic oppression. She couldn’t do it. She needed to belong to something built around inclusiveness, something that erased the differences between people. The natural thing to do would have been to turn to the Christian God, who welcomed all to His flock. But the problem was that she couldn’t erase all of her blackness, and Christianity belonged to the white man. She turned, therefore, to the God of the nonwhites—Allah. Choosing a universalist deity based on somewhat racial reasons was not completely consistent with her initial rejection of the very idea of race, but it was better than living an entirely racial life of the sort her parents led.

  We smoked two more rounds before she started wrapping up.

  “Are you going home after this?” she asked.

  “No. I have this crazy friend in North Philly I’m going to go see.”

  “Same guy as from the deli?”

  “Yeah,” I said, and in my excitement I pulled up the video of him threatening to kill George Gabriel. “Total original.”

  “He’s very . . . loud,” Candace said.

  “He lives near you. We can go up together?”

  Candace appeared interested. But decorum still made her cautious. “How is Marie-Anne?”

  “Things between us are ending,” I stated. “Are you down or what?”

  “Sure, sure,” she said. “I’m down, I’m down.”

  We paid the bill and headed out from Byblos toward Walnut Street, where we intended to catch an eastbound bus that would connect us to the northbound transportation. I staggered with an arm around Candace and tried to liken her to paganism, asking her if she had any connections with Rastafari or animism. She laughed and said not at all, she had grown up a good Baptist girl and then transitioned into Islam. God, she said, was a secret she couldn’t ever forget.

  I told her if that was the definition of God, then my God might be a girl I just smoked hookah with.

  She laughed and told me I was intoxicated.

  * * *

  The commute took about two hours. There had been a shooting on the Broad Street line and the buses were running forty-five minutes behind. Candace exchanged messages with the newsroom and mobilized a cameraman to go out and find footage. Places like North Philly were neglected in American media and it was her duty as a journalist to illuminate what was concealed. The world deserved to know how the heart of the empire was full of gunshots.

  It was well past midnight when we made it to Ali Ansari’s building on Diamond Street. Candace told me that the area used to be a hub for art deco and for jazz, until the race riots of 1964 which began when a pregnant black woman was killed by a pair of white police officers. Since then this part of North Philly had known nothing but murder and mourning.

  The front door to Ali’s building was wide open and we let ourselves in and headed up to his second-story apartment. Candace kept the back of her skirt cinched with two fingers like a wedding train. Outside Ali’s apartment there were two women standing in the hallway. Both were topless, texting on their cell phones in heels and thongs.

  Candace turned to me and asked what kind of illicit business my buddy was into.

  “I thought it was Islam.”

  “He’s not a pimp, is he?”

  I was about to ask the women about the apartment owner when the door opened wide. There was Ali Ansari, wearing his usual slacks but only a sweat-soaked white undershirt with them. There was a small bowler hat on his head and he held a miniature digital camera. Behind him I could hear the sound of a couple men talking to one another. Ali Ansari hadn’t looked at me or Candace just yet, and proceeded to give one of the girls instructions about her scene. The only words I made out were “Obama” and “hymen.”

  I cleared my throat. Ali Ansari’s eyes bulged upon noticing me. He came over to give a hug.

  “Ali Ansari, Candace Cooper.”

  “I thought the wife was a different complexion.”

  “Definitely not the wife,” Candace laughed.

  “You know,” Ali put an elbow in my rib, “Muslims are allowed up to four—”

  “If there’s anyone who should be talking about polyamorous relationships, it’s you,” I interrupted, gesturing at the two women. “And what’s this about Obama and hymen?”

  “Osama and Ayman,” Ali Ansari replied. “Not Obama and hymen. Come in, come in. Let me introduce you to Talibang Productions.”

  He panned his hand across the room and led us inside. Tripods, reflectors, flashtubes, and camera batteries were strewn around the bedroom studio. I saw two guys who looked vaguely like members of GCM get undressed and head into the bathroom. The room was covered with other paraphernalia as well. Ejaculating sheaths with hand pumps; bukkake lotion; brushes for concealer paint. Candace nearly stepped into a half-empty jug of piña colada mix and Ali rushed over to save the backup fake sperm. From the bathroom one of the performers complained loudly about discoloration. Ali yelled back and said some discoloration was normal after girth-enhancing fat transfers.

  Candace and I leaned against a dresser. The only decorations in the room were a pair of picture frames with stock wedding photos. Ali explained that the scene he was filming involved a couple of Mainline widows of 9/11 who had an inexplicable desire to experience terrorist sex with Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.

  Candace and I wanted to watch the scene, but Ali said our giggling was going to be a major distraction and told us to sit in the hallway until he finished. We went outside and sent the housewives in.

  “Aren’t you glad you came?” I asked Candace.

  “Literally the greatest night ever.”

  We sat down on the carpet and shared a cigarette. Candace rambled along about how little money she had. The Al Jazeera paycheck was not enough to cover her expenses, much less help make a dent in her student loans. When she was in journalism school, two of the biggest loan checks issued to her were actually private loans from a bank. The name had sounded very official, very governmental, and she had thought the loans were part of the federal cornucopia. Except they weren’t. The private loans wen
t into default less than a year after graduation. There she was, studying investigative journalism, all while getting hoodwinked. The default became a permanent blight on her credit. Buying a house was out of the question. So was renting at most corporate buildings.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I get to be in North Philly. Feel like this is supposed to be my community.”

  “Maybe you should’ve stuck it out at Plutus. Money was good.”

  “What about principles?”

  “What about student-loan default?”

  “What about principles?” she persisted. “What George Gabriel did to you was wrong. If he could do that to you, then under different circumstances he could do it to someone else as well. To a mixed-race girl with a lot of debt. I wasn’t about to live in fear for the rest of my life.” She eyed me with sudden admiration. “I’m kind of surprised to see that you’re doing so well. Surprised, but glad.”

  “You’ve no idea how bad up I’ve been.” I gestured toward the door. “First off, I’m unemployed. After that, what can be said? I’m sitting in a slum in North Philly with a woman not my wife outside the door of my only friend who’s inside having a couple of terrorists fuck a couple of whores pretending to be Mainline elite. I’m not even including the part that he’s trying to convert me to some numerical ideology that might have to do with celebrating terrorism.”

  Candace perked up. “Numerology? I am the god of numerology. What are you dealing with here?”

  I didn’t have the poetry book on me, so I had Candace download it onto her phone. I showed her the repetition of the number nineteen. “I’m thinking there’s something celebrating Islamic martyrdom.”

  Candace laughed. “Are you saying that the guy filming the terrorist porn inside is some kind of secret jihadist? He’s got a sleeper cell?”

  “I didn’t know he made terrorist porn until tonight. Who knows, that could be his cover, a very good one.”

  She patted me on the back. “I don’t think you really believe any of this. He just seems like a suburban kid gone lost to history. Just like the rest of us.”

  We came back to the question of the number nineteen. Candace said that when she had first converted, the Internet had been her major source for acquiring knowledge about Islam, and one of the websites she used to frequent had a theory about the number nineteen. She pulled up a website and put it in front of me. It referred to something called the Mathematical Miracle of the Koran. Apparently there’s a mysterious verse in the Koran that reads in full, Over it is nineteen! For centuries no one understood what the verse meant, until an intrepid mathematician came along and postulated the theory that the “it” in the verse referred to the Koran. The number nineteen was supposed to be a sort of key, a hidden secret, that hung “over” the Koran, waiting to be inserted, unlocking countless secret treasures. The mathematician, by the name of Khalifa, had found numerous instances of the number nineteen and its multiples making a showing all over the Koran, from important verses to instructive tales about the prophets. And then one day Khalifa, who was living in Arizona, got killed in Tucson, which to many only went further in supporting the viability of the Mathematical Miracle.

  “Wow.”

  That wasn’t the only association with the number nineteen that Candace knew of. Nineteen was also the number of words for “love” in Arabic. She pulled up another web page and showed me the list. From tarrafouq to hubb, gharam to ouns.

  “Wow. Numerology really is your thing.”

  “You were about to wrongly accuse someone of having terrorist sympathies. I would think you’d know better than that.”

  “Guilty,” I said. “But in my defense, I wasn’t entirely serious. Why else would I continue to be his friend?”

  “You tell me: why are you friends?”

  I hung my head. “I’m ashamed to say this, but maybe I was secretly hoping he really was some kind of terrorist sympathizer. Or, to be more accurate, that through him I might meet someone who was plotting against America. Then I could turn that person in and feel like I had done something to deserve being in this country.”

  “Like earning kudos?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But why?”

  “To belong.”

  “You don’t feel American?”

  “Only a part of me does.”

  “What percent?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, guesstimate.”

  “More than 50. But less than 100.”

  “Three-quarters then?”

  “Less.”

  “Three-fifths?”

  I smiled at the reference. “More than that.”

  “How much more?”

  “I would say I feel five-eighths American. 62.5 percent. That’s exactly how American I feel. E-R-I-C-A.”

  “Erica? Who’s that?”

  “I just picked five letters out of the eight in American. ERICA.”

  She smiled. “You could have picked some other five letters. Like maybe A-M-I-A-N.”

  “That doesn’t make a name.”

  “Not a name,” she replied. “It makes a question.”

  * * *

  Ali Ansari finished an hour later. To thank us for our patience he took us to an all-night Ethiopian restaurant. It was off Cecil B. Moore, near a broken-down food truck and next to a lot where men gathered and played chess. Before we went inside Ali pointed me to a well-kempt house next to the restaurant. Masjid ud-Dukhan. That was the mosque he sometimes attended. Candace said she liked going there as well. She was particularly fond of the preacher, Sheikh Shakil, a former felon and archburglar who had given up his nefarious ways in jail. Unlike some of the other religious leaders in North Philadelphia, Sheikh Shakil actively engaged in the political sphere, and had gotten a number of programs up during Mayor Street’s time.

  At the restaurant there was no bouncer or cover or even a line as had been the case in Central Philadelphia. All were welcome, at any time, without any orchestration or intercession by an attendant. As a Honduran jazz pianist performed upstairs we sat down on rickety high-legged chairs. Candace’s legs angled between my open knees. There was a draft in the establishment and her skirt kept rustling against my ankle.

  I directed my attention toward Ali. He wanted to tell us about Talibang Productions so that we wouldn’t make fun of him.

  Like every dandy before him, Ali Ansari became obsessed with aesthetics due to his own lack of attractiveness. In early puberty he was short, bespectacled, with a massive Adam’s apple and black peach fuzz. When he grew tall, the unattractiveness only became more visible to the people around him, including his own mother, who chastised him for not being the sort of exuberant, assertively masculine man that her uncles and brothers back in the Old World had been. Once, for example, she noticed that when shaving he didn’t pull his skin down with his off hand like her uncles used to, and she told him that his shaving style wasn’t manly.

  Compounding his insecurity was that he was the sole West Asian at his high school. There was a group of white kids and there was a group of black kids. Neither accepted him. And if they did allow him in, they never elevated him, which was what he really wanted. Being dark-skinned, he couldn’t achieve the social popularity that leading white guys could claim. And being of small stature, he couldn’t possess the physical authority exuded by the leading black guys. He therefore became interminably jealous of two things at once: white charisma and black strength. “That is the sexual yin and yang of America,” he said, polishing off a Stella. “And I didn’t fit into either.”

  The college years were a time of depression. He tried everything from joining a white fraternity to joining a black stepping group that toured historically black universities. But because he always felt that in these pursuits he was not locating something essential about himself—something he hadn’t yet learned how to define—his efforts never brought him peace. In the end he stopped trying, became a hermit of sorts, and indulged his doldrums by watching interrac
ial porn. Strong black men having intercourse with pretty pale-skinned white girls. In masturbating to the American yin and yang—the inaccessible—Ali Ansari finally found a bit of relief. He dropped out of his premed program and set about getting trained in film.

  After college Ali Ansari told his parents he was going to Dominica to study at the medical school; instead he moved out to North Philly and sent his résumé to various pornographic websites specializing in interracial porn. One company, Aphrodiesel Spanktertainment, based out of Baltimore, recognized his name from the subscription he had bought and renewed at the gold level for four years. They decided to give him a job. Ali was assigned to travel with a Jamaican-American former wrestler named Blake Nails who, due to his fragile mental state and repressed homosexuality, needed a more encouraging cameraman than the one he had. Managing Blake really meant getting him cocaine, holding his hand when he got male-enhancement procedures done, and stroking him until he was hard. “I used a glove at first and then one day I didn’t,” Ali shrugged. On these trips Ali developed his directorial craft. Looping a scene to extend the pounding. Doing the money shot first. Learning to hide the ejaculating hand pump. The use of glory holes and prosthetics. Point-of-view tricks. Camera angles. He also learned about the most up-to-date male-enhancement medical techniques, everything from penile widening to suspensory ligament incisions to platelet-rich plasma injections and glandular grafting. Together Ali and Blake traveled across the country, from motels in Miami to hotels in Houston, from casinos in Las Vegas to private homes in Montana. Under Ali’s management Blake also started freelancing, answering swingers ads from the web. Everywhere there were men eager to give their white wife to a black porn performer and pay good money for it. The freelancing became lucrative and allowed Blake to transition into physical therapy and let Ali buy his own film equipment.

  During his travels, Ali also met others similar to him. People seeking inclusion in America through sexuality. One, like a Kashmiri-American girl named Shazia, believed that she was actually a white girl, and proved it by being contrasted against black skin. Blake Nails had her regularly. Another, like a Persian-Swedish-American named Mitra, demanded that she would only be with white guys, because she was pure Aryan. Both girls eventually devolved into a glassy-eyed sadism. Shazia ended up a sugar baby in Las Vegas, getting five thousand a month from a forty-seven-year-old lawyer and accountant who liked to be forced to eat his own semen. Mitra got pregnant by an Egyptian plastic surgeon who lied and said he was Caucasian. She killed herself and left the baby in Tijuana.