The Cautionary Tale of
Musa and the Christmas Hooker
By Brendan Ray
Once upon a time, I had a hunger; a hunger that could only be satisfied by some spicy mutton vindaloo in the Indian restaurant underneath my flat. So on Christmas Day, in the Year of Our Lord 2004, I went to the “Al-Jebal Al-Akhdar Sub-Continental Restaurant” and prepared for the kind of Christmas luncheon that only the truly damned would unprovokedly inflict upon their own intestines.
Christmas in the Persian Gulf Region is a strange phenomenon. Everyone tries to pretend that it’s just an ordinary day, but everyone knows it’s not. Even the most ardent atheist of North American extraction (for example, me) doesn’t want to work on Christmas, and only the dourest of fundamentalists doesn’t like presents. The religious police, properly called the ministry for the “Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue,” had refused to give Christmas off to my co-workers and I as it was a heretical celebration, but the more pragmatic university management declared the day to be a day of “professional development.” Attendance at this PD-Day was not mandatory, so of course everyone could stay at home for Christmas without offending the poor sensitive religious police. One did have to be careful, as when their delicate feelings got hurt, they become quite irrational.
So I went downstairs and was about to sit down alone to a plate of spiced grease, plastered together with fire and starch, when I saw one of my friends, Musa, sitting across the room from me. We had an odd friendship, based mostly on arguing about politics and religion. Musa had been a tattooed skater-punk drug addict, who in the wake of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, saw the light, cleaned himself up and embraced Islam. He hadn’t opted for a dine-and-dance, Canadian-content multiculturalism version of it, no! He went whole-hog, growing his beard out, wearing a long Omani Dishdasha man-dress over his body and red-and-white khafeyah on his head. He was looking forward to his arranged marriage to a covered Egyptian peasant girl and called Osama Bin Laden “Sheikh Osama.” We were both enthusiastic fans of all things related to “Star Trek,” which oddly to me, seemed to be his only connection to mainstream society.
I was about to call over to him and invite myself to his table, when I saw that he was not alone. Musa Ibrahim (n. John Fitzsimmons in Medicine Hat, Alberta) was sitting at his table with a woman. And what a woman! Here we were in a tiny village in the Hadjar Mountains of Eastern Arabia, and Musa had found himself a fleshy looking white girl. Perhaps being surrounded constantly by Black Birds (women dressed from head to toe in black veils and Abayas) had forced my undersexed mind a little further into the gutter than normal, but this woman actually looked rather skanky from where I was sitting.
‘Fine,’ I decided, ‘I’ll let Musa chat up this newfound Belle of the West, and I’ll just sit here in peace and eat my acid-spiced gutrot.’
“Ya – Dude!” Musa called out. “Come on over here!”
“Musa! I didn’t see you there,” I assured Musa, approached the table and then turned to his curious companion. “Hi!”
“Hiya, I’m Jennifer.” She answered in a throaty voice and a vaguely mid-Atlantic Canadian accent. “I’m kinda lost, and your friend here’s helping me out.”
“Oh, he’s a good guy, Musa here.” I sat myself down and ordered my grub as though I selecting a gas-chamber over a lethal injection. “What seems to be the problem?”
“I came here, and my wallet was stolen, and I’ve got no money, I got kicked out of my hotel, I have no car…” Her litany went on for a while, and I felt genuinely sorry for her. It’s a weakness that I carry: I believe people who claim that outside forces have cornered them into a bad situation. I’ve been given example after example from which I should infer otherwise, but my conscience always tells me try and help. My kryptonite is a damsel in distress. It suspends my ability to discern lies. This weakness was the second thing that Musa and I shared, after our affection for the continuing voyages of the starship “Enterprise.”
“Well tonight, I’m having a few people over to watch the match, and if you need to use my phone to call home, it’s not a problem or anything,” I offered. Let it not be said that there was no room at my inn this Christmas.
“That’s great of you, thanks. You don’t even know me.”
“No problem, always happy to help out a fellow Canadian.” In truth, my chivalrous generosity goes to most women, regardless of national, racial, religious persuasions, but here it made as good an excuse as any other.
She continued thanking me through our meal, and it was only as I finished my vindaloo and began the long and painful process of digestion, that I started to notice the strange curve her line of conversation was taking. She just started talking and kept going long past the point where she should have closed her mouth and counted her blessings.
Apparently, the reason that she’d been evicted from her hotel apartment was that the hotel management believed her to be a prostitute. This, she claimed, was because she was living with her American boyfriend, and the staff got all sensitive about this.
Among her many increasingly outlandish claims in the hour over which we broke bread, she claimed that the school where she was working in Dubai had sent some mafia assassin after her, her boyfriend was gay, and my personal favourite that the Sultan of Oman was after her for his own personal harem. At the end of her diatribe, she emphatically reassured us both that she was not a lesbian, although neither of us were entirely sure what could possibly have elicited such an empassioned proclamation of heterosexuality.
Musa and I made brief eye-contact with each other (to mutually confer that we both thought this woman was bad news) and smiled politely at her.
“I really need some money just to help me get back on my feet,” she said as she tried to force direct eye contact.
She bent into the conversation letting her cleavage lean over as she spoke, keeping predatory eye-contact all the way.
“A hundred Rials (two hundred and fifty Canadian) would go a long way.”
“Well, it was nice meeting you.” I lied. “See you later, Jessica.”
“Jennifer.”
“Of course. See you, Musa.” And I rushed myself out of the restaurant and ducked around the corner. I took my mobile phone out of my pocket and dialled Musa, who also excused himself from the restaurant to answer his phone, claiming bad reception
“Over here, Dude.” I called when he poked his head onto the main street of Nizwa, Oman: regional population 70,000. “Did she follow you?”
“No, God willing,” Musa answered. “I’m really sorry, I didn’t know she was…”
“Yeah, well, she is,” I cut him off. “You’ve got to ditch her before you come to my place for the match. I don’t want this chick to know where I live.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“I mean it, Musa. You dump this bitch like toxic waste on a children’s playground. She’s bad fucking news.”
“I know, I know!”
A third trait that Musa and I shared is a social inability to be rude to a woman. Despite our being propositioned in an Indian restaurant in rural Arabia by tarted up Prince Edward Islander, we both minded our Ps and Qs. Damn our politeness! I’ve since conquered this handicap, but it took much training to reprogram my parents drilling on manners.
I went back up to my flat and went about getting the place ready for my guests later on in the night, who were coming over to watch the Gulf Cup, in which our visiting Omanis were to go on to lose in Bahrain.
Musa arrived at my door a few hours after I left him, we drank some Arabic coffee and gossiped about the crazy hooker we’d met earlier. The second arrival was Temperance. Temperance (she had Mormon parents) was the academic director at the university where Musa and I taught English, and like most women who’d found their way into the ESL world of the Middle East, was not exactly a pretty girl. She was the tallest person in the village, and local children would point at her and call her names. Apparently the story “Frankenstein” appears in Omani popular culture as well. She was nevertheless a genuinely nice person of whom I was very fond. She was raised in a religious community in rural BC, and hence had some old-fashioned morals kicking around in her noggin, but she had managed to overcome those and develop an appreciation for speculative fiction (she’s a larper, and if you know what that means, may God have mercy on your soul), ergo the geeky relationship that bonded her to Musa and I in our non-sexual love triangle.
She didn’t entirely believe us when we claimed that there was a Maritime girl working as a prostitute and passing through Nizwa, but was willing to believe that we believed it. By the end of the night, a dozen guests came and went, and the story had taken on nearly super-human proportions due to the exaggeration that comes from socially deprived ex-pats with nothing to do but gossip. This was the end of the story for a few months.
Time passed, as it does, without much significance. Dramas began and ended in accordance with the usual cycle of office politics and schoolyard vendettas. The university staff numbers ebbed and flowed as some folks quit their jobs when the isolation of the desert became too much for them. In order to fill those holes, new staff was hired on. One day, I was preparing a lesson on some grammar point or another, when I was addressed by one of the new teachers, to whom I thought I had yet to be formally introduced.
“Hi! How’s it going?” a gravel-voiced woman greeted me. She had the look of a woman who was pretty in her youth, but hadn’t yet made peace with the reality that her flower had cycled into wilt. She was substituting “tawdry” for “sexy.”
“Oh, Hi,” I answered politely. “You must be the new teacher, I’m Brendan.”
“Yes, I remember.” She replied. “We’ve met before. I’m Jennifer.”
My mind quickly cycled through my mental catalogue of faces until finally resting at an impromptu Christmas lunch a few months prior.
“…uhhh,” My mind blanked for a moment as I tried to extricate the proper words that were polite and said nothing. “Oh, yeah. How’ve you been?”
“Great. Things are doing just fine. I’m starting today, so I’m really nervous.”
“Yeah,” I wasn’t doing a great job of hiding my surprise at seeing this strange woman again, but it was the best job that I could muster on such short notice. “I’m sure you’re not too shy to be in front of a class.”
God, that came out wrong, but she didn’t seem to notice anything wrong with my phrasing.
“I never taught this book before.” She said indicating the New Interchange textbook “I hope everything goes smooth.”
I resisted the temptation to correct this new grammar teacher. ‘smoothly’ and nodded concurringly to her woes. “Well, good luck. I’ve got to get class. Cheers!”
I taught class with a mildly distracted tone. I had to think about this one. After class, I dropped off my stuff in the teacher’s room and rather than getting into my car and heading home, I stepped outside and sat under the smoking tree; a barren and de-barked skeleton of a tree that some hopeful fool had tried to give roots in the desert sand near the teacher’s bungalow of the uni. It was where the smokers usually congregated, but none were there now.
Under that tree I sat until I saw Musa’s pot-bellied figure come waddling along the stone path towards the bungalow.
“Musa!” I called out. “Come here for a sec!”
“Selamu Alaikum,” He greeted me as he stepped into the sparse shade provided by the smoking tree. “What’s up?”
“Wa Alaikum as-Salam, not much,” I started. “Have you met the new teacher?”
“Nope.”
“Yes, you have,” I answered with a slight grin.
“Where?”
“At the Hindi-shop beneath my place.” My words met a blank expression on Musa’s bearded face. “At Christmas.”
His eyes registered his absence for a few seconds as he tried to flash back to the date in question, and then opened widely.
“Wait…”
I smiled knowingly.
“You’re fuckin’ shitin’ me!” He said, and then cursed himself in Arabic under his breath for swearing. “Are you sure?”
“Go put your stuff away in the teachers’ room, check her out as you do so, and then come back here.”
“Back in a sec.” Musa rushed into the teachers’ offices and then waddled back as fast as he could. “Holy-Oh-my-fucking-God!”
“Yup.”
“We’ve gotta tell Temperance about this.”
“No, we don’t.”
“We can’t let that go, Dude,” Musa insisted. “Our good Mormon girl’s hired a hooker, we gotta let her know.”
“Dude,” I insisted. “Maybe she’s turning a new leaf and moving on from a sordid past. A great many English teachers are trying to do this, yourself included. We shouldn’t step in her way on that.”
“Ya-Brendan, she’s worked here! She has clients in the village. If she wants to start again, she should go somewhere new! It looks bad on the uni, and us as foreigners.”
“Give it a month, Moose.” I offered. “If she’s still up to her old ‘tricks’ then she’ll get canned on her own. We shouldn’t interfere, it’s really none of our business. Also, you don’t want everyone thinking that we’re familiar with all the hookers of Nizwa. At least I sure don’t!”
Musa thought this over, and the angel on one shoulder was telling him to leave it alone, but the devil on the other was telling him that he was sitting on some of the juiciest gossip of the year.
“A month,” he conceded. “Then we’ll both tell Temperance, ok? And you’ve got to promise not to tell her without me. I really want to see the look on her face.”
“Sounds fair,” I agreed, and we parted ways.
I got in my car and drove home, and Musa went to the teacher’s office, and then into Temperance’s office to chat. About a minute into their ‘chat,’ Musa ‘accidentally’ let the ball drop. Some people just can’t keep secrets.
While I wasn’t there for that particular conversation, from what I’ve been told by both Temperance and Musa, I’ve managed to reproduce what I believe to be a reasonable facsimile of their intercourse.
“Tempo,” Musa began timidly, “I’ve got some bad news.”
Temperance was a hard-working and bright woman, but she always had this sad, doe-eyed face, as though she half expected someone to arrive and tell her that she was about to be replaced by someone more attractive.
“What is it, Musa?”
“Do you remember at Christmas…”
“The football match at Brendan’s?”
“Yeah, do you remember that story about the hooker?”
Temperance’s face would have been stone-like, waiting for whatever horrible news was on its way.
“Yes?”
“You kinda just hired her.”
From what the two of them have told of this encounter, at this point, Temperance lowered her brow to slowly collide with the surface of her desk, just to give herself a moment to consider the horrible predicament in which she had now found herself.
“Are you sure?” she asked without raising her head. “Like… really sure?”
“Brendan and I both are.”
“Who else knows?”
“That’s it.”
Temperance had experienced a terrible year, which would eventually end in her hospitalization and public firing, and I wish I could have helped her more… or at least helped her avoid this one.
“Don’t tell anyone, Musa,” she told him. “I have to talk to Ricardo, and deal with this.”
Her honest attempt to quietly pass the buck was unfortunately doomed to meet with failure.
That night, there was a communal dinner among teachers and staff from the university at the Al-Diyar Hotel. The Al-Diyar was one of two hotels in town, and had been used as improvised housing while the school was still looking for flats for the teachers. It also had the most molten-spicy Aloo Ghobi in town. Most of the staff arrived at approximately the same time, and I sat beside a gossipy gaggle of banana-benders (slang for people from Brisbane, South Australia) and Ricardo the program director.
As I finished up my curry and wine, Ricardo leant over to me with a smile on his face.
“So, Brendan... I hear that you have a story about one of our new teachers.” He then started giggling like a twelve-year-old girl.
“Huh? What are you talking about?” at this point, I didn’t know about Musa’s open-secrets policy.
He winked at me and gave me a leery smile.
“I want to hear this story,” he laughed.
‘Fucking Musa.’ I thought. My face ironed up, and I hope that I had a good performance of resisting blushing. “Ricardo, I have nothing to say on this subject to you or anyone else.”
“Oh come on!” he said, pouring me a glass of wine in order to lubricate the truth.
“I’m fine, thank you.” I said and put my hand over my wine glass. “Excuse me for a minute.”
I excused myself from the dining hall and stepped out to the pool for some fresh air. My face had relented to blushing and I felt terrible. In part because of the guilt and in part because the Aloo Ghobi was churning my guts. This was going to put me at the centre of a story of which I wanted no part. I had to think of a lie. Something to politely end this story in a way that wouldn’t hurt anyone.
I then heard a sound from the lobby that let me know that would be impossible.
The hotel staff was in the process of trying to eject their most notorious guest, my colleague and countrywoman. Not actually realising how connected I was to the whole situation, I foolishly wandered over to see if I could do anything.
She was being asked to leave, with all the politeness of a Stalinist relocation program. I walked into the lobby, and saw her screaming like a banshee at the hotel manager, and his Pakistani staff who were trying to physically persuade her and her luggage out the door.
Instinct spoke up briefly, which in hindsight I should have heeded, and told me to turn away. Rather than that, I tried to be helpful. “Excuse me, is there something that I can help with?”
She turned to me and her red face started to erupt with splotches of white. “You!”
As far as I was concerned, I’d done nothing and was rather surprised when turned on me spitting hate and venom.
“You fucking bastard!” She cried. “You fucking bitch-faced asshole!”
It turned out that she was quite conversant in sailor-speech, probably through regular exposure. She also said this loud enough to quiet the entire dining room next door.
“You fucking, bastard!” She screeched in a voice reminiscent of a fork on a chalkboard. “I’ll fucking kill you!”
At that point she fore-handed me with an open fist and just kept going. The fake nails that armed her fingers like bayonets scratched their way across my face and drew blood.
I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve never brawled with a woman before or since. I grabbed her wrists in an attempt to contain her. She writhed against my grip with enough tenacity to leave bruises, which she later showed to the police and claimed that I had attacked her; the police had fortunately dealt with her before and dismissed her claims out of hand.
The grip was strong enough to hold her until the Pakistani bellboys could come to my rescue. They forced her and her meagre belongings to the curb of the desert highway, screaming all the way overtop the bell-boy’s shoulder. They summoned her a taxi and the cab carried her out onto the road to Muscat and beyond.
And the English Foundation-Year Faculty looked on, jaws agog. You could hear a pin drop.
Sarah, an Australian-Lebanese co-worker was the first to get up and break the silence.
“C’mon’ Brendan, I’ll fix that up,” she said grabbing the first aid kit from behind the lobby counter and ushering me out back to the pool area.
“Yeah, thanks,” I followed her and she was kind enough to be quite liberal with the disinfectant, which I believe was for the best. No telling where that girl’s claws had been.
I was glad that she was kind enough not to ask what had just happened, and then the magnitude sunk in that she must have already known. Everyone already knew.
Musa hadn’t attended the dinner at the Al-Diyar, so I found him at home watching TV. He came to the door and had a guilty look on his face when he saw me. He tried not to stare at the scabbing up scratches on my cheek.
I raised a questioning eyebrow to him. “Huh?”
That monosyllabic grunt was apparently all that was needed to make the steel trap of Musa break open.
“I’m sorry!” he blurted out. “I told Tempo, but that’s it!”
“Does it look like that secret kept? You told Tempo, which means that Temperance knows about this in a profession capacity, and so she had to tell Ricardo. If you tell something to Ricky and tell him to keep it a secret, you might as well put in on a loudspeaker and address the comments publicly. Everyone will know everything! I walked into the lobby when they were kicking her out and she went apeshit on me!”
“Yeah, Sarah texted me. She told me you seemed really angry.”
“I am!”
“What the fuck, Dude? She’s just a ho!”
“It was none of our business, Musa,” I shot back. “And now we’re responsible for some of the primest gossip on campus, and for humiliating this girl who’s trying to pick herself up.”
I had decided that my interpretation of her desire to redeem herself was essentially correct, but I’d later learn that it wasn’t quite true, in that she had slept with both the program coordinator, and his Omani brother-in-law in an effort to carve out a safe niche for herself at the school.
“C’mon, man. Don’t be like this.”
“Well, fuck off, it is like this!”
Our conversation continued along those lines for a short while longer and then I went home. For the next two months, that was the talk of the campus. Even some of the students heard about it! I suppose the rumour version of the story skyrocketed into legend, due in no small part to my and Musa’s steadfast refusal to retell the story after that night. I can only imagine the heights reached when witness testimonial refused to limit imagination. Fortunately, new dramas and crises came along eventually. My mauling at the hands of a hooker might not get forgotten, but it slipped out of daily conversation, and life went on.
Temperance was a true friend to me for all the time we worked together, and for some time afterward, though we’ve since lost touch. Musa and I had a colder relationship, strained by mistrust until we finally parted ways, and I have no idea what ever became of Jennifer from the restaurant. The life lessons I gained from this experience were that selective rudeness to undesirable people is a virtue that will pay off in the long run, and that some situations are like spicy Indian food; best avoided!
