I Have Iraq in My Shoe (20 page)

In one of her frequent emails she joked, “You’ve not been to the track? Lordy. You haven’t LIVED!”

“The track” was the Erbil Speed Center, which was a mile down the road from our compound. It was composed of a sleek-but-smoky bar, a sleek-but-smoky restaurant, and an actual racetrack, neither sleek nor smoky, where you could drive go-karts.

Katherine invited me to the racetrack to “meet an astronaut.” Astronaut Bill Shepherd was going to be at the racetrack and was being honored for something or other. Although I had never heard of Bill Shepherd, and wasn’t particularly interested in the space program, I thought “Meh” and decided to go.

After a narrated video and speech from the guest of honor, Katherine and I were introduced to Astronaut Shepherd by his cohort Duke, a slight, thinning-gray-haired, weathered man in his sixties, wearing a polo shirt and khakis. The first thing out of Duke’s mouth was, “See, Bill? I told ya we’d have girls for ya.” I may have audibly groaned. I mean, really, dude? I was a teacher and Katherine was an attorney, but as far as Duke was concerned we were just a couple of hookers.

The astronaut was nice enough. He seemed fairly jet-lagged and bewildered at the surrealism of the racetrack bar in the middle of Northern Iraq. Duke, on the other hand, was neither nice, nor bewildered, and when he started a sentence with, “Listen, honey…” I had to tune him out. I chose, instead, to entertain myself by imagining Duke dressed in a pink ballerina tutu, licking one of those giant, round rainbow lollipops, and fluttering his false eyelashes at the other men in the bar.

You weren’t allowed to bring pork products into Iraq, but there were more than enough servings of pig to go around.

Katherine was a force of resilience and diplomacy. She had built up a very high tolerance for bullshit and didn’t mind going to the track for social interaction. “Carey and Scott are here from the university, and Sirwan is taking them to the track tonight. If you wanted to go say hi.”

Carey was the director of finance, who had been my immigration partner back in March (and the one who didn’t complain about unsuitable sleeping accommodations and smelly pillows). Scott was a friend of hers from home who had recently been hired at the university. I totally appreciated that they had not asked to stay in my villa, but also thought it was odd that one of Warren’s drivers (Sirwan) would be taking Carey and Scott to the racetrack. Maybe it was a different Sirwan. I responded to Katherine and asked questions like “Where are they staying?” and “Who is Sirwan?” and “How does he know them?” and then pointed out that I was being pretty gossipy.

Katherine’s response:

Her gossip was definitely better. Katherine was ten years younger than I and had more energy for the hooking up and running around and drinking. I had done all that in my twenties, and while it was fun at the time, I was thoroughly relieved not to be doing it anymore, particularly here, where the world seemed to be shrinking at an alarming rate.

The Sirwan she was talking about was not Warren’s driver, but the brother of Rana, Princess Smelly Pillowcase. According to the Erbil gossip, Sirwan was a bit of a man-whore and had been nicknamed Sleazewan by a number of people. I wondered if Rana had given Sirwan a copy of the Cultural Awareness pamphlet.

I didn’t want to completely give up on a social life in Erbil, so when Katherine suggested I go with her and a few friends to Hawaiian Night at The Edge, I said okay. I let my curiosity about the social whirl of Erbil’s gossip get the better of me. The Edge was a bar, which was in the middle of the concrete maze of the USAID compound in Ainkawa, and consisted of a shabby room with a bar, and an outdoor patio with swimming pool.

The USAID compound was exactly like the Iraq you would see on CNN, complete with gun-toting guards and high concrete walls garnished with curling barbed wire. After going through a security check, and having to leave our cell phones and cameras at the front checkpoint, we walked through the concrete maze of streets to the “bar,” where we were greeted by a pretty Western girl in her twenties, handing out leis, dressed in a grass skirt and coconut bra. I was taken aback as it had been awhile since I had seen that much skin. I mean, I get it, it’s
Hawaiian
Night, but seriously?

The girl’s name was Corey, and she was well-known around the expat scene, in the notorious sense of “well-known.” To me she seemed like a genuinely friendly, nice person. She exhibited none of the competitive cattiness that is prevalent in many social situations with females and would probably have no place in Chancellor Tom’s lioness scenario. A couple of Katherine’s friends referred to her as “Whorey,” which I thought was kind of nasty and pretty catty. I just felt sorry for her.

I was talking to one of the ex-military/security guys later by the pool, and I asked about Corey. He said she had told him once that she felt like a nobody back in the United States, but here she felt really special, like she was really important. That was heartbreaking to me, but I guess if she felt special, then her life here was a sort of improvement. I still wanted to give her one of those “You’re better than this!” pep talks, and a sweater to put on over the coconuts.

Later on in the night, after many mai tais, Katherine admitted to me, “Whorey hates me ’cause apparently she was sleeping with Sirwan and saw me and him out heaps.” (“Foster’s” is Australian for “beer.” “Heaps” is Australian for “a lot.”) It was just like college. Rana really should have her brother take a look at that pamphlet.

I made a halfhearted effort to be friendly and social at The Edge, but my favorite part of that night was discovering the pound cake on the buffet table.

At both the Speed Center and The Edge, I felt like I was part of an exotic traveling exhibit at a woman-zoo. The male-female ratio was probably close to twenty-to-one. The Western men there were a mishmash of entrepreneurs, consultants, and ex-military/security personnel (and astronauts), and the vibe was palpably predatory. It didn’t even matter what you looked like; you were female. There were just so
many
of the men, leering or saying, “Well, hellooooooooo there,” eyebrows waggling, and their inconsequential wedding rings flashing and clinking on their beer bottles.

It was almost worse than being in a woman-zoo; it was more like being a juicy cheeseburger in a room full of starving desert-island castaways. Everyone looked really hungry and really creepy. It would not have surprised me one bit to run into Brandon, of the Royal Jordanian flight, spitting his chewing tobacco into a glass and screaming obscenities into his cell phone before turning to waggle his eyebrows at Katherine and ask if she wanted marry him in Lebanon, or Leinenkugel.

Erbil’s expat social scene was something I could only handle in very small doses. Or really just one dose, like a tetanus shot. You only have to get boosters for those every ten years.

The social antidote to the creepy, lecher-ridden bars was the Katherine-helmed Progressive Dinner in English Village. This was a monthly occurrence and included all expats living in the English Village compound. The casual, emailed invitation would usually look something like this:

Like Warren loved giving nicknames to people, Katherine loved giving nicknames to her villa. She sometimes called it the TRC ranch (TRC was the name of the consulting firm she worked for), and at other times would refer to it as Club 319 (her villa number).

When I was first invited to Club 319, I was confused. Once again, my subconscious was crying out for a dance club, and I exclaimed, “Oh my God, Erbil actually has a dance club?” I should have remembered, per Dalzar, that it did not.

English Village was home to so many Westerners I hadn’t known were there: Dean, from England, who worked in insurance; Piers and Alan, also from England, who owned, and did the accounting, respectively, for TRC; Eric and Martha, an American couple who worked for a tomato-processing plant; Liz and Matt, who used to work for the U.S. State Department but were both now doing consulting work; and a whole mess of Swedes. It felt more United Nations than anything else. The Cultural Awareness pamphlet did not apply here.

Parties like the Progressive Dinners allowed us expats to temporarily forget that we were living in Iraq. The food was Western (courtesy of the deli counter at Bakery & More), the drinks were Western (Jacob’s Creek Chardonnay), the dress code was Western (no Capri pants necessary), and the conversation was Western. We could just drink and laugh and discuss politics, religion, and sex freely. I hadn’t changed that much, though: I was still uninterested in politics and really preferred to talk about my dress.

There were always hangovers following the Progressive Dinners. Always. And the best way to cure the hangover was a pool party at Katherine’s villa. Katherine would fill up the new paddling pool she found at Naza Mall, one of the large local Targetesque stores, and invite a bunch of women over to sit on the cushy lawn chairs in her completely fenced-in backyard to enjoy the frothy drinks, made in the blender I dragged over in a duffel bag.

“Completely fenced-in yard” meant we could loll about in the sunshine in our whorish bikinis, slurping the frothy alcoholic drinks of the infidels, and complaining about our probably-deserved hangovers. This was the Real Housewives of Erbil: the cookie-cutter villas, the pristine, manicured lawns, the bright, hot sunny days, and the inane conversations about our kids.

Katherine’s kid was her thirty-nine-year-old boss, Piers, who, while creatively entrepreneurial and dryly hilarious, was incapable of doing anything himself (he once sent her to his villa to get his “good shoes” because they had clients coming). My kids were Renas and Dalzar. There was also the incessant bitching about the gardeners and the housekeepers. Someone’s gardener had left the hose on overnight and flooded her backyard; Katherine’s housekeeper continued to wash her clothes, even after shrinking several cashmere sweaters and having Katherine beg her not to touch her laundry. Liz’s housekeeper decided not to show up for a few days but still expected to be paid. Slurping our blender drinks, we unanimously agreed, “It is so hard to find good help,” and then burst out laughing at ourselves.

I was down to one kid. Just one. Dalzar was still in the nest, but Renas had flown away to greener pastures. Can I mix animal metaphors? Renas would be attending the University of Texas– Austin. Hook ’em horns! And I had hopefully armed him with enough English to keep him from being wedgied, swirlied, or locked in someone’s locker. That was really more of a high school thing, but I was feeling protective of my now-former student and was really hoping that everyone would be nice to him. If I were in Texas with him, I’d be packing his lunch and writing little notes of encouragement on his napkins. I was a little worried about an Iraqi Kurd going to Texas. I had seen an episode of
Primetime
that John Quiñones did on people’s treatment of a Muslim woman at a convenience store somewhere in Texas, and it wasn’t too encouraging. I just had to cross my fingers that Renas would have a positive experience there.

I modified the class (you know, the class of one) to suit Dalzar’s learning needs. We would begin with essay writin’, continue on to some book learnin’, and then take a half-hour break where we would adjourn to the deck to have conversation practice, or as I preferred to call it, Chatty Time, with Adam. I thought it would be helpful for Dalzar to hear two native English speakers having conversations, in which he could also participate. Naturally, given Dalzar’s mild ADD, we occasionally veered off topic. One day we were discussing the textbook’s unit topic “Controversial Issues” and wound up discovering that Dalzar was a part-time beekeeper. Or had a beekeeping facility at his workplace. Or liked the letter “B,” but I was pretty sure it was beekeeping-related. To my knowledge, beekeeping was not controversial in Iraq.