The Hashish Waiter by Khairy Shalaby

Author:Khairy Shalaby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
Published: 2019-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

Early Morning Hep Cats

The changes that had come over Mustafa Lami were striking. He’d abandoned his classic style, which was at once modest and elegant—you know, the way a man wouldn’t look respectable unless he were dressed in a blazer and tie free from any shiny, embarrassing sweat spots. He, too, had started wearing coarse, ratty, jeans, with loads of pockets and bright yellow copper rivets, but he still retained a certain stylish distinction. Over the jeans, he wore a knit shirt and a wide-necked wool sweater capped off by his shirt collar. On his feet, he wore black shoes so shiny they looked like they were covered in plastic. Thus Mustafa Lami started looking like Talat al-Imbabi, except that Talat was tall and reedy and Mustafa was shorter and relatively stocky. Likewise, he turned against people who stuck to their conventional styles and he made fun of their fossilized minds, or rather their bourgeois minds. They were as worried about maintaining conventions as they were about preserving their reputations and dignity, which in the past had meant success and a place at the vanguard of society.

Clothes—of any kind—were not the sort of phenomenon that could hold our attention for very long, especially not since we’d discovered Rowdy Salih, who’d demolished the myth of ‘the clothes make the man’ for us once and for all. We no longer took any notice of his appearance, which was drowned out by his character, and it never occurred to us that he was shabbily dressed even though his clothes never left his body except in one tear after the other until he was left naked, or nearly so, and he had to hurry over to Wikalat al-Balah to buy a secondhand shirt and pair of trousers. He presented us with damning evidence that a human being was his character, not his clothing, and that people who thought differently were—in his opinion—idiots, duped by the scams of a frivolous society.

“No offense, but this society’s nasty. How do you expect me to respect it? You should just respect God for your own sake and leave it at that. Got the hang of it? Well then the hell with all the rest! Boss, our society dresses itself in fairy dust. Everybody acts like they’re respectable. Everybody wants to scare everybody else with their fancy-schmancy clothes.”

Interestingly, this sentiment got us to look at how the tourists dressed and we got the impression they were of the same school as Rowdy Salih: they wore raggedy, torn-up clothes, but they carried expensive books around with them so that they could seize any opportunity to read. They also seemed to be imbued with the same character as Rowdy Salih, especially as they knew their way to dens in the twisting depths of old, run-down alleys; they even knew their way to the hash dealers in al-Batiniya, Zaynhum, and al-Gamaliya. Hakeem’s den got the largest share of the hip tourists because it was in the heart of downtown. We’d usually see

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