Guest privileges, p.6
Guest Privileges, page 6
I grew restive listening to the whirr of machines roll past me in both directions, never seeming to land on my floor. How could a twenty-five-story residential building swell into a fifty-story tower to house double its planned number of tenants? I wondered whether the lift doors would ever open, but when I heard the elevator chime closer to my lobby, I fretted also whether someone might suddenly appear from behind them. Even when James’s plan for the evening amounted to little more than tearing into a bag of Doritos during a repeat viewing of The Devil Wears Prada, heading to his apartment always felt illicit. I made a point of wearing my work clothes as I traveled from my front door to his, hoping they might act as a sort of international signifier, that a man in stiff loafers and a starched button-down could deflect any curiosity about why he was wandering between residential floors.
I discovered the tower’s staircase tucked off a corridor one afternoon while trying to find the trash chute. I started ducking into it to make my journey downstairs, savoring the emptiness, grateful that the low hum of the interior ventilation shaft masked my descent from landing to landing. I relished the feeling of the roughcast concrete steps on my feet and the gritty unpainted walls as I traced them with my fingers. It was an aesthetic that divulged a secret: this stairwell designed not to be seen. Discovering this emergency exit, and realizing that a hasty getaway existed just down the hall, slackened the unease that gripped me walking to James’s apartment. But what, exactly, unsettled me—the health and safety implications of the tower’s alleged rash changes, its sheer number of residents, the peril of so many watchful eyes—was obscured. I felt a kind of calm in that empty stairwell the same way I experienced the rumor of the building itself: as something I internalized without interrogating it fully.
James’s studio was smaller than my apartment, with a bed that abutted his coffee table, but we spent most nights at his place. I didn’t think much about why we whiled away those evenings curled up on his loveseat when we had an ample corner sofa waiting five floors above us, but it reminded me distantly of the way we had cocooned ourselves within his New York dorm the previous year. After he had asked me out, I spent entire weekends with him tangled in an unwieldy Ikea duvet, smoking joints and studying Christina Aguilera music videos on repeat, subsisting off delivery McDonalds and only leaving the apartment to buy more rolling papers from a corner shop in the East Village. Even then, I teased him about the ironic nomenclature of our relationship—“dating,” “going out”—when in fact we rarely greeted the city together, two boys blinded to the bright world of Manhattan by a windowless bedroom.
We lived a similar existence those first few weeks together in Abu Dhabi (except for the joints, which, like homosexuality, featured prominently on the laundry list of activities illegal in the UAE)—devising ways to wring comfort out of makeshift familiarity. He ordered us delivery Pizza Hut. I torrented all his favorite Meryl Streep films. And when we failed at ordering our favorite board game, Settlers of Catan, to Abu Dhabi, we handcrafted it in its entirety, piece by painstaking piece.
One evening, while cutting little hexagonal cardboard pieces with dull kitchen scissors, I suggested a quick excursion to the nearby Indian embroidery shop to source some more materials for the board game—lurid glass gemstones and cheap plastic chains like I had seen with Imran. When James insisted on staying to whittle the most important game piece from a wine cork, I joked that he had the resourcefulness of a prison inmate. Settling back into the loveseat, the call to prayer rang out but he continued hacking away at the cork with a cheap butter knife. Nothing could fracture his singular focus. I instinctively looked out his window to watch people head toward the mosque, but there was no reason for him to look up, I realized; from his vantage point, he had no view of the city other than the darkening sky.
Holed up in his apartment those first few months, I was dimly aware of wasted opportunities to figure out Abu Dhabi’s landscape, but I tried to let any agitation roll off me as I did when our intercontinental phone date made me miss my first suhoor with Imran. I had felt claustrophobic by the end of those weekends crammed together in his New York dorm, and restless also earlier that summer sitting down to dinner every night at his parents’ house upstate, but we had always emerged. And whether it was for a walk through the West Village or a drive down the smooth tarmac of the I-87 outside Albany, I would grab his hand and feel grateful for that cloistered time, aware of how unreachable building a life with another man had felt even just a few years earlier, before leaving the Midwest.
At my most impatient, as Ramadan wound down and I left texts and invitations from Imran’s BBM group unanswered, I wanted to ask James if he would have taken his job if I hadn’t been offered mine first; if he really would have left his tight-knit family behind and stepped into this new life with me. But I held these questions back, throwing my energy instead into helping him nest, into creating a domesticity for us so that we might emerge here together, too. I reminded myself that it had taken time for me to find my way into the streets alone, and that we would also now have to fashion an entirely new kind of rhythm in public as a foreigner couple, something I told myself Imran could not advise on as a single man: a sort of reactive syncopation to the unfamiliar cadence and meter around us.
My early forays into work in Abu Dhabi were littered with similar unease and handwringing from Americans. Like the teaching assistants, most of the administrators at the university had been poached from leading liberal arts schools across the States. The only glaring exception was the new chief operating officer, an austere and surprisingly willowy former Navy Seal who chaired a weekly meeting for something he called the Master Work Plan. Though he didn’t have any experience working in higher education, he imported an elaborate traffic light Excel document from his deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan to project manage the logistics of getting the university ready for students’ arrival.
Sitting at a wooden boardroom table with professionals for the first time, I listened to several administrators inquiring about an item that seemed to have perpetually stayed in the untouched “red” category on the COO’s document: mental health services for the university community. An uncomfortable silence pervaded the room; no one seemed to be able to speak to what, if any, private or municipal services might be available for faculty and the administration outside of the university’s own health professionals. The task of finding out was finally delegated to someone, as the COO put it, who “had been on the ground” the longest and had had “their eyes on the frontline.” Even as we filed out of the conference room behind him, his militaristic language seemed to hang in the air like we were preparing for an unexpected siege, or protracted trench warfare.
After the meeting, I stood in a snaking lunch line behind two administrators lamenting the state of their hair. Both middle-aged women had arrived a few months before me and were looking for a stylist, worried about finding someone who could match the skill of their hairdressers “back home.” Grabbing a plate of mashed potatoes, one woman suggested checking out an online message board she had heard about called ExpatWoman “for military wives and trailing spouses.”
Later that night, while James used his newly acquired copy machine access to print hundreds of black-and-white images for our board game, I pulled up the forum on my laptop. ExpatWoman: the name made me cringe, it sounded so suburban. But I also figured that I might use some of the advice myself, at least for a haircut. My last trim had been a few days before graduation—a shoddy hack job in a Lower East Side basement barber shop open a few hours once a week for heavily discounted but questionably executed student cuts. But in order to access the forum, I needed to first register an online profile.
I quickly dismissed keying in some variation of my name or initials. The hours I had spent lurking in online queer message boards and chat rooms as a pubescent kid had taught me both the safety and thrill of creating a fake online persona. I thought about the language and signifiers I had heard that day spent interacting almost exclusively with Americans, trying to inspire my message board handle: “Military wives.” “Boots on the ground.” “Frontline.” Why had we marched out of a university conference room behind an Iraq war veteran whose “regional experience” was in two countries thousands of miles away? “Trailing spouses.” Was that James? “Expat.” Was that me?
On the table next to James sat the neat stacks of images he had printed. In Catan, players fight over five resources to determine control over burgeoning cities. Merciless expansion and shifting empires propelled the game, and we decided to change the resources to five that felt more regionally apt: camels, sand, palm, gold, and oil. These were the denominators we saw, the prism with which we understood our new home. We called our version Settlers of Abu Dhabi.
Stumped for a fake online profile name, I thought about AbuDhabiSettler, but it seemed too on the nose. I settled on CatanExpat instead. “Expat”: it wasn’t a word I had known to use on myself; even in Yemen, I had seen myself as a student. Expatriate was a word for British people; expats had mosquito nets and drank quinine by the gallon. It was a word for conquerors and exploiters recreating home amidst what they viewed as a hostile, inhospitable place.
As James stuck tiny paper images of camels and gold to the game board, I spent a few minutes trawling the message board and jotting down any phone numbers I could find for hair stylists recommended at the Sheraton, the Hilton, and a handful of other hotel chains. But after placing a few calls, it was clear they were all outlandishly out of my price range; I hadn’t even yet received my first paycheck. Reaching for my phone again, I decided to message Imran for advice. Though I’d been ignoring his messages for weeks, his response came through in moments.
You want a barber? They are on every street. Walk outside brother!
I read his terse suggestion again: walk outside. It seemed so obvious. The thing I wanted to be doing; the one thing I wasn’t. Softly running my hands through James’s unkempt mane, I asked if he might want to find a barber with me, but he was adamant about finishing his glue job.
I looked down at the scruffy game board, our piddling cuts to each sheet of cardstock, suddenly aware we had made the board much too small. But I wasn’t sure I had the fortitude to tell him we might have to throw the whole thing out—or that I didn’t think I had the resolve to recreate once more the fragile little world we’d built.
It was the creativity inherent in the barber shop names that initially caught my eye, and then the patterns that emerged from the torrent of neon signs. I first noticed the idyllic-sounding ones wedged inside tight residential blocks: Green Hills Salon, Happiness Gents. Then there were the three named after sparkling gemstones—Diamond Bright, Ruby, Red Emerald—strung like a bracelet along a perfect five-kilometer axis I walked parallel to Electra Street. And, seemingly everywhere, the curious propensity of shops inspired by weather patterns and the cosmos, scattered across the city with a vastness their very names evoked: Clouds Gents, Uranus Saloon, Half Moon, First Star.
Most of them were entirely glass-fronted, and it was the energy inside that kept me in rapt attention whenever I walked past: men in crisp white smocks unscrewing jars filled with a rainbow of lotions, rushing to slather men with velvety shaving cream or layer them with steaming cotton towels. Globular vanity lights rimmed wide mirrors, lighting up barbers as they fussed over clients like makeup artists brushing up actors backstage. Whenever I mustered enough nerve to take a step toward a window for a closer look, the bright, illuminated mirrors always created the uncanny illusion that, even as I stood frozen on the sidewalk, I was somehow already inside.
I felt particularly drawn to one barbershop crammed between a mosque and a currency exchange around the corner from my apartment. Full-length windows lined the shopfront, frosted along the center so that I could always see the tops of barbers’ heads but never any patrons, their chairs reclined in an opaque haze. Only the narrow doorway was fully transparent, offering me one furtive glance inside per day on my stroll around the block. In my wariness not to be noticed, I could only make out the sound of laughter and the mint green of the shop’s walls, never precise movements or to whom they corresponded. I was reminded of the voyeuristic contrivances I felt on an ice rink, attempting to size up other skaters while simultaneously trying to mask my curiosity.
One evening, as I tried to take my casual peek into the shop just after dusk, I was met by the unblinking stare of a barber in the doorway. He stood, smocked arms folded, with his nose nearly touching the glass, his eyes cast on me like security floodlights. The intensity of his stare made me feel as though he had already been keeping tabs on me, like he had not just clocked my daily glances weeks ago, but that my curiosity about the inside of his shop was embarrassing in its conspicuousness. I checked across both my shoulders in hopes that he was actually looking at another passerby, but there was no one else; his hard stare was meant for me alone.
When I turned back to him, his face softened and he pointed to my hair, ushering me inside with an urgent wave. I thought I had been walking past this shop for over a month because I wanted to know what was happening to all the men beyond the clouded glass. But as the barber pushed the door open for me, I realized that what I really wanted was to be concealed along with them.
Only one of the five chairs was unoccupied, and yet the stout barber still physically directed me to the empty station, clutching me by the forearm all the way to the far-left corner of the shop. I completed the set: a patron for each chair, a chair for each barber, and a barber for each washstand with matching green ceramic sinks and ovular mirrors. Confronted by the reflection of my own wild hair and a barber staring expectantly at me, I realized that I didn’t actually know what kind of style I wanted. I had always been notoriously fickle with my haircuts, binding myself to roughly two-year cycles in which I attempted to grow my hair to my shoulders. Since the release of “MMMBop” in 1997, I had aspired for Taylor Hanson–like locks. Though my initial quests were hampered by a series of unfortunate mullets—my flawed understanding of hair growth as a child meant I thought I only needed to grow the hair on the back of my head—the real truth was that I never mustered the diligence to make my long locks work. For years, I had impulsively colored, chemically straightened, or dramatically chopped my hair into some new style, always finding a way to sabotage myself along the way to my ultimate goal.
The barber smiled at me for the first time, his thick mustache rising high on his face to reveal two rows of gleaming teeth. When it was clear I would only be meeting his smile with a vacant stare, he made a scissors motion with his fingers and cocked his head to the side. Remembering my awkward first encounter with Imran, I finally replied in English that I wanted my hair short on the sides and longer on top. It didn’t seem like the right time to start another cycle of aspirational Hanson hair, I decided. My barber responded by wordlessly rifling through his drawer and pulling out two different clipper lengths, a number two that he held above my ear and a number five he pushed into the forest of curls atop my head. Before I had time to nod my approval, he turned on the shaver and mowed past my temples. As he sheared me, he began humming a harmonic third above the electric buzzing of the shaver.
The laughter I had heard so often walking past crashed over the shop in waves as I leaned back in my chair. Two chairs over, a man spoke with his barber about plans for the Eid al-Adha holiday. The two men on the far side of the shop shouted in Arabic about the soccer match blaring from the screen mounted on the wall. And the patron to my right watched his barber deftly swirl two wooden sticks through a bubbling vat of black goo like a concessions worker gathering cotton candy at a fairground. Without hesitation or ceremony, the barber pried open the man’s nostrils and shoved both sticks up his nose. As the barber pulled them out—along with clumps of nose hair—I tried to offer the man a smile of solidarity, but I saw it materialize in the mirror as an involuntary grimace. His only reply was a quick, stoic wink.
My barber shaved the sides of my head with the same confident resolution and speed as the nostril-cleaning beside me. But when it came time to cut the hair atop my head, he carefully pulled scissors from his drawer and hovered mere centimeters above me. Seeming to take five snipping motions for every hair he actually trimmed, my barber fretted endlessly from side to side, checking every conceivable angle for symmetry. Before he had even finished half my head, the four men in the seats around me had been replaced by four more; by the time he held up a little handheld mirror, four more had replaced them as well. As I inspected the back of my new cut, I realized that we hadn’t spoken once during our forty minutes together. Leaning forward to rustle my wallet from my pocket, he grabbed me by the forearm again and yanked me back into the chair.
“Massage,” he said simply, gently closing my eyelids with slow, circular motions of his fingertips. I was taken aback by the sureness and care of it all—the quick work with the electric shaver, the meticulous crafting with his scissors, the thoroughness of the massage. I couldn’t remember ever being touched by another human on my eyelids, and yet he was applying the perfect amount of pressure on one of the most sensitive areas of my body. With my eyes forcibly shut, I remembered meeting his knowing stare outside, how it felt like he had clocked my curiosity before I had even said a word.
