Guest Privileges by Gaar Adams

Author:Gaar Adams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 2025-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

He held fast to my hand atop a metal table while humming Nicki Minaj. I could not see his face. I had heard his humming echoing down the hallway minutes earlier, but he turned his back almost as soon as he rounded the corner and ushered me from the waiting room into his treatment room. He’d sat down to work right away, pulling out metal instruments and pouring astringent liquids into ceramic bowls, his thick swoop of jet bangs coming loose from behind his ears and falling in front of his eyes. He did not offer any chatter; he just grabbed me by the wrists and set upon my cuticles, picking and filing as a Tagalog soap opera played on the TV behind him. I could have watched the histrionics unfolding on the screen, but I was drawn to watching the deft movements of his hands on mine.

I had arrived at the nail salon by accident. I’d walked into a barbershop in Abu Dhabi the afternoon before we left for Dubai and noticed a slight Filipino man sitting in a massage chair in the corner. He shot me coquettish smiles whenever I glanced back at him in the mirror. When I stood to leave, he beckoned me over to his chair and asked if I wanted a pedicure. I apologized, explaining that I was in a rush, that I had just gotten a fresh haircut because I was about to drive to Dubai. With my, uh, friend, I quickly added, as though someone in the shop might somehow discern I was traveling with Sunil. Smiling again, he asked me to hand him my phone. I watched him type in an address to a salon in Oud Metha, explaining that his cousin worked there and that I should visit him.

I had only visited Oud Metha a couple of times for its sagging ice rink. It was an old neighborhood set just back from the creek on the edge of one of the city’s most tightly clustered residential districts. The area had been a thriving, modern neighborhood during the city’s ascent in the 1980s, but as I took in the clutch of squat, low-rise buildings that sat far from the glass towers of downtown, it was clear its degraded buildings once reserved for citizens were now being occupied by migrants of a lower socioeconomic status.

Building after building housed modest salons on the ground floor beneath stacks of apartments. I opened the heavy door at the address the manicurist had typed into my phone. On the floor crouched a man with the same gleaming black hair. He knelt over a basin, toweling off the feet of a man in a kandura, carefully holding back its starched white hem. Apologizing for being busy, the pedicurist pointed me to another salon just down the road.

It was full, too. As was the next, and the next. Like the barbershops I was now used to frequenting in Abu Dhabi, the salons in Oud Metha were all male spaces, filled with the bodies of men in various stages of waiting or luxuriating.

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