Something happens the first time a man encounters a beggar from his country in America. He was a small fellow with a bent back that made his movements awkward. Nobody had to tell me that there were all kinds of beggars in Iran, but something about his being in America and being a beggar here – I thought of our language and how now it became the language a man spoke to himself in at the end of a day of asking Americans for money. I had not wanted it to be a language like that, but it was strong enough to handle it. I saw that it had been strong enough all this time. I had always known how gentle it was, but I saw that it was just as strong too. And then I spoke to him, and I saw how gentle and strong it was at once. He was Iranian and I knew about being Iranian in America but I did not know about being an Iranian beggar in America. I didn’t know if we could speak about something shared or not. It was lousy not to know for sure if we could. The whole business of loneliness seemed to be moving towards the moment of meeting someone who knew about loneliness, but he seemed to have a vast loneliness in him, as big as the distance between the two countries and as locked away as the night. If there was any joy in him in meeting a countryman, it did not seem like he could afford to show it. The whole thing would have been a perfectly sad and lost encounter of the kind that a man craves when he is young, if it weren’t for the fact that I was drunk.
I thought of him in the bar with some friends, a little while after we’d met him outside the place, and I ran out of the place to either tell him or to hear something important.
They don’t know what it is, I thought, to meet a man from your country like that in America. It changes everything.
I didn’t know how it changed everything, but that was what I was hoping he could tell me.
I ran up Columbus and found him walking ahead, towards the park.
“Hey!” I called.
He turned around, looking scared. That was how I knew I was drunk, to have made him look scared like that.
I tried to summon up all the sobriety I had in me, but my sobriety would’ve stayed in the bar and been sad and not tried to figure everything out all at once.
I didn’t know what to say. I had wanted to see him. I had wanted him to see that I wanted to see him. I had wanted him to see that an Iranian was looking at him as a fellow Iranian. I couldn’t do it so well with my friends. He was begging and I was drunk. I wanted him to know that at the bottom of those truths was a miserable quality to the world, a misery that I had a particular understanding of as an Iranian in America. I wanted him to know that there were some very good reasons for my being drunk. I imagined what he must think if the one fellow Iranian he met today turned out to be roaring drunk. My friends wouldn’t understand. They could meet an American bum some night when they were drunk and whatever happened, they could forget about each other a few minutes later. How was an Iranian supposed to forget? For my part, I knew I was going to remember him forever. There was a part of meeting him that my drunkenness couldn’t touch, least of all the part that forgot what had happened the next day.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry for yelling. I’m sorry for being drunk. I’m sorry for everything.”
He didn’t look any less scared now that I was apologizing as when I’d yelled.
Jesus, I thought, this was something past loneliness. You could meet a Chinese bum in San Francisco, or a Mexican bum, or a black bum, and if nothing else, you could know that at least they had streets they could walk down that were made of their people. I didn’t have enough Iran with me to give him that feeling, and I got the feeling that even if I were sober, even if I had made it part of my daily practice to study the language of Farsi the way my parents wanted me to, I still couldn’t have done it, because he had accepted loneliness as a truth, and the truth was I did not particularly want to dissuade him from that. I didn’t want to dissuade him from anything. If anything I wanted to dissuade myself from the notion that I could go out and get drunk without any consequences. I wanted him to know that I was trying to learn the consequences. There was something inherently foolish about it, but I was trying to learn the consequences.
What I respected in him was a sober perspective towards loneliness. It was an important skill for an Iranian in America to have. It was an important skill for a man to have, but it was very important for an Iranian in America to have. We didn’t have streets of our own we could walk down, at least not in San Francisco, we had only individuals we met.
“I am drunk,” I said. “But I am sober when I am sober.”
“Good,” he said. “I hope your parents are well.”
“Thank you,” I said. I wanted to hope that his parents were well but I felt foolish when he was not well himself.
He knew San Francisco deeply, I felt. He knew America deeply. It was no good to be romantic about the life of a beggar, whether or not he was from one’s country, but facts were facts.
I wanted very much to know what he knew of America, but any chance I had of that, it was going to come the long way. It was not going to come by running out of a bar and chasing a beggar down the street and scaring him half to death. It was going to come the slow way. It was going to come as slowly as a world moved for a man who had only sobriety for his choice.
My friends came running out of the bar and found me on the street.
“These are my friends,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “Okay. Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.”
I walked back to the bar with my friends. As I did, I thought that I would drink beer with them tonight, and then tomorrow I would call them up and tell them that I wouldn’t be doing this for a while. I knew I was serious because I didn’t feel compelled to tell them right away. I would call them up and tell them there was something I needed to learn from sobriety. There was something I was already learning from it, but it felt a little too much like I was forgetting everything when I got drunk. It felt a little too much like I was calling sobriety an enemy, and sobriety was a part of me, and I didn’t think I should be calling any part of me an enemy, at least not in some closed and final way. I would tell them that it wasn’t going to be forever, but for a while I would have to go into my sobriety and stay there and do whatever needed to be done there, including finding some daily practices there, which might mean studying the language of Farsi the way my parents wanted me to, but which would certainly mean finding a way to call sobriety a friend, as good a friend as I would have in the world.
