I untied Jane Goodall’s bra from the back, and she undid her pony tail and let her hair hang on her neck and shoulder. I turned her around and kissed her lips. She looked twenty-six, a byproduct of watching a documentary program about her life on Discovery Channel. With a lot of help from some angels who were looking after me, I was having a sexual fantasy at 37,000 feet above sea level at a speed of 600 miles per hour on my way to Europe, the first leg of my travel to Tehran. Up to that point, watching the documentary on the airplane, I always thought she was only interested in chimpanzees, but when I heard she was married twice and had a son, and her husband was dead now, all of a sudden she looked very sexy to me.
The temperature is just about perfect here in Tehran. The air is clean and crisp with no signs of smog, but in the evenings during rush hour air pollution becomes apparent.
Most people here have two toilets in their houses now, in two different places, a squat toilet and a sit-on toilet, toilet farangee, both of them come with a flexible hose. I know how to use squat toilets with a hose. I know how to use sit-on toilets with toilet paper, but I have not yet figured out how to use toilet farangees with a hose. Water gets all over the place, on my ass, my pants, and the whole bathroom.
It won’t be very long before I’d figure out how much to pay for things. For now I take out the largest bill I have with me and hand to vendors and watch the expression on their faces to see if I have not paid enough, or if the bill is too large and they might prefer a smaller one. I hardly have any fear of the nightmarish traffic here now, having gone to Iran before, and having done all my screaming already. From what I heard, my brother screamed a lot on his first outing during the rush hour, too bad I wasn’t in his car when that happened. A couple of times when there was a close call with the car I was in, specially with crazy motorcyclists, a passenger in my car made a comment, ahmagh’ha ra’aayat remikonand, stupid people don’t follow the rules. To which I calmly said, nah negeran nebashid, hich etefagi nemiyofte, no, don’t worry nothing bad will happen.
Everyone here dislikes Ahmadinejad. Okay, let’s make it clear before I go on further. By Everyone, I don’t mean a scientific survey of the population has been done by a credible polling institution and I am giving you the results. I mean it as a way of expressing the feel I get for this place, so far. Everyone dislikes the ruling government. Everyone has an LG flat TV screen with a satellite dish in their houses and watches satellite TV, anything other than what the government broadcasts. When I tune in to programs from seda va sima people wonder why. Everyone says lying is a normal way of living in Iran. The government fears the wrath of the people. People are in control. The people will choose where and when to voice their frustration.
