Iranian Rappers And Persian Porn (17 page)

In the car, Pedram explained that he had to pick up a girl friend of his from the bus station and give her a lift to her aunt’s place. As we drove, and chatted away, I was struck by how Western Pedram seemed when compared to other Iranians I’d met thus far. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why but I got the distinct impression that he and his friends all came from well-off families.

I was left in the car while Pedram met his friend, who was a large but attractive girl of about twenty. After we dropped her off, Pedram told me that she had invited me to her sister’s party when I came to Tehran. I was hugely excited at the prospect of going to an illegal gathering of drunken students, which I was sure few tourists would get to experience. Pedram said I could crash at their apartment tonight if I wanted, so we made a brief stop at my crummy hotel, where I grabbed my stuff, paid up, and got my passport back. Back at the apartment, the guys were all sitting around in shorts playing cards for money. The game was brought to a swift conclusion when Pedram and I turned up and they brought out what looked like an eight-pack of beer. On closer inspection, I discovered they were actually cans of whisky. I’d never seen whisky in cans before and asked the guys if this was normal. They’d never heard of whisky in bottles before.

We started the night off with a shot mixed with just a suggestion of cola. It was bloody strong and I knew I’d end up loaded before the night was out. A copied DVD was selected from a wallet full of illegal discs and slipped into the player. We all reclined on big cushions with another shot of whisky as the film began. It was
Basic Instinct
with the delectable Sharon Stone. We watched about fifteen minutes and just before the money shot, the DVD started to malfunction. A cry of horror went up from all around but it was no good, and despite Pedram’s best efforts to right the problem, we had to admit defeat and were forced to abandon the film.

It has to be said, I was quite looking forward to the novel prospect of watching Sharon uncross her legs in Iran. I needn’t have worried though, as this was fully compensated for by the next DVD selected by the lads, which contained acts that the lovely Miss Stone would be far too prudish to attempt on screen and which would have been of borderline legality in certain states of the U.S. until recently, let alone the Islamic Republic of Iran. I wondered what horrendous penalties there were if you were caught in possession of or watching such material whilst consuming vast quantities of hard liquor. I thought back to the television documentary I’d seen on human rights abuses in Iran, which had shown a man having his eye cut out for looking at “something immoral,” and wondered if this Persian porn would count in that department. I knocked back a few more shots and no longer cared. It was a late night and by the time I passed out, I’d consumed a hell of a lot of booze.

I awoke feeling awful with a splitting headache and a desire to curl up into a ball and quietly die. It didn’t look like I was the only one. I had planned to visit the Jewish shrine this morning before catching the bus to Tehran but that plan went out the window now. All I wanted to do was nothing. I had to make a move though, and decided to push through it and get to the bus terminal. Pedram, who looked in a worse condition than me, offered to give me a lift there. Pedram’s fat friend, Behzad, who looked surprisingly sprightly considering how much he’d drunk, said he’d tag along as well. As Behzad got dressed one of the guys, whose name I was in no state to remember or jot down, grabbed the poor guy’s flabby breasts and said jokingly to me, “He is breast boy, no?” Even breast boy laughed at this one.

At the terminal, Pedram whisked me past all the sales guys shouting out their destinations to a bus company called Seir-o Safar. Pedram said it was the only bus company worth traveling with in Iran. He tried to pay for my ticket, but I put my foot down and handed over the money. What he did next was a great help. He phoned one of his friends in Tehran and arranged for him to meet me at the bus station when I arrived and to take me to a hotel. In a city of a staggering 15 million people this would be immensely useful. Pedram was going back to Tehran tomorrow along with Behzad, so he gave me his number and insisted I call him and stay at his parents’ place when he got back. Things were going amazingly well.

The first thing you notice about Tehran as you approach it is the smog. It’s situated in a natural valley surrounded by mountains, which lets the pollution build up and leaves the air a horrible brown hue. As we drove through the endless streets, I realized what luck it was to have a local waiting to help me at the bus station. It was one hell of a big sprawling city, and it would have been a nightmare to try to cope with it after a heavy night on the booze. A hangover is
not
a state most people are in when they first arrive in Tehran.

I got off the bus, collected my bags and within a minute was approached by two sharply dressed young guys in shades. One asked, “Jamie?” We shook hands and I was led toward their car, which like Pedram’s was a modern European one. Neither spoke much English, so I just followed their lead. We drove through the most insane traffic and nearly crashed several times. The smooth two communicated that we were going to grab some food, and as I was hungry, this was just what I wanted to hear.

Along the highway, we passed two roadside murals in ornate frames depicting the infamous Abu Ghraib torture of Iraqis by U.S. forces. One was the well-known picture of the Iraqi with a leash around his neck, the other of the hooded man with the wires coming out of his fingers. The images contained some Persian text, which I subsequently discovered read something along the lines of, “Yesterday you were torturing Palestine; today you are torturing Iraq.”

We stopped for lunch at a fast food restaurant called Apache, where my hosts ordered a mountain of burgers and fries along with some obligatory soft drinks. Despite my protests, and believe me I tried, the guys categorically insisted on paying, and I was literally physically forced to put my wallet back into my pocket. Over our food I got out my guidebook for them, and pointed to the hotels it recommended. They were adamant that these weren’t up to much and wanted to take me elsewhere. As far as I was concerned, they were the bosses, as I had no idea where I was, and in a city this big it would have been a real mission to sort things out for myself.

Seated nearby were two young women sporting what looked like fresh Band-Aids across their noses. After a bit of miming to the guys, I managed to ascertain that these were nose job bandages, and that it was quite common. I later learnt that, amazingly, more plastic surgery is carried out in Tehran than in Los Angeles.

After feasting like kings, we got on the road again. We drove around and around for over an hour, passing a cinema showing Michael Moore’s
Fahrenheit 9/11
, but for some reason we stopped at no hotels. It seemed the guys were no longer quite as confident about where to take me. They explained in their limited English that they were now taking me to a library instead.

“What the hell is going on?” I thought. I didn’t want to sit down with a Harlequin novel—I wanted to get some accommodation sorted.

We turned up at a library nestled in a little park in the north of the city. Here the guys made hotel inquiries with one of the library assistants and not surprisingly came up with fuck all. I was grateful for their help but couldn’t see why we were wasting time or why they were so adamant that the hotels in my guidebook were no good.

By chance, a professor who spoke better English than I did was also at the library. He sounded like an Oxford University don and was a charming fellow who was more than happy to translate. He told them to take me to my chosen hotel, which as far as he was aware, was an “awfully good little place,” and said he didn’t know what all the fuss had been about.

I thanked him, he gave me his card, and we set off again.

Tehran went on and on forever with very few prominent landmarks from which to get your bearings. The amount of people and traffic was something else; it seemed like all 15 million of the city’s residents were out on the streets today. We stopped at three other hotels, all of which were full, before we got to the original one I’d selected. It was also full. This wasn’t good news as it was now late afternoon, but the reception guy recommended a place around the corner. It was thirtytwo dollars a night, which was by far the most expensive place thus far on my trip, but I paid it gladly and was just pleased to have a roof over my head. I thanked the guys for their help and headed up to my room. It was absolutely fantastic. It had a double bed, a TV with BBC World, a shower room with a proper toilet, a fridge, and to top it all off, the price included breakfast. I got on the phone to Leyla who arranged to pick me up in three hours, though she still hadn’t heard from Ricardo. That gave me ample opportunity to shower and put my feet up and watch the BBC’s
Hard Talk
program before indulging in a nap.

The phone jolted me back to reality from a deep sleep. Predictably, it was Leyla on the line, who told me to meet her in reception. The first thing she said when I turned up was, “This is not a good area.”

Leyla told me there’d been antigovernment demonstrations near the hotel two days ago and that the police and the government’s Basji Militia had tear gassed, beaten, and arrested loads of students. The demonstration had been inspired by an Iranian exile, Dr. Ahura Pirouz Khaleghi Yazdi, who had broadcast the call to protest from a satellite station based in the United States.

She expressed her relief that I hadn’t arrived a couple of days earlier, but the journalist in me was genuinely gutted to have missed the opportunity to record the events and get some photographs.

Two of her friends were waiting in the car. The girl spoke good English but the boy spoke next to none. Both Leyla and her female friend looked very Western with makeup and jeans. Although wearing the compulsory hijab, they were of a lightweight material and covered only a fraction of their hair. We drove through the city, which was surprisingly quiet now that it was dark, and arrived at a little restaurant in the north of Tehran. It was an upmarket place and all of the customers looked very wealthy and Western in comparison to other parts of Iran, dressed in expensive-looking clothing, and the women wearing makeup and minute hijabs.

Leyla’s friends were both twenty years old and were dating each other. Although it was officially not allowed, they said it was common for young people to be in relationships and to keep it from their parents. The girl, whose name I didn’t make a note of, told me that her father had discovered her relationship and had gone crazy. He had told her to break up with her boyfriend but she had steadfastly refused. Surprisingly, she said, he had eventually come to accept it. Like Leyla, the girl had grown up abroad and had recently moved back to Iran when her parents returned (her boyfriend was Iranian). In Canada, her father had enrolled her in a Catholic boarding school, despite her being a Muslim, because he was determined to keep her away from boys.

I asked her if she would return to Canada when she got the chance after finishing her studies. I was surprised when she told me that she planned to stay in Iran forever. If she’d grown up here, I wouldn’t have been surprised, but since she’d spent most of her life in an open society, I thought it odd she’d now happily live indefinitely in such a repressive one. She explained, rather unconvincingly to my mind, by saying that the state repression wasn’t such a big deal to her personally and that she was Iranian and this was Iran.

Leyla was not in agreement with her and planned to be off within a year. Of the two, she seemed to be much more of a free spirit, and as a result I liked her far more.

It was very interesting to chat with them both and learn more about their lives and their attitude toward their government, which the Canadian girl said now just about everybody despised. I asked her then why she thought more people didn’t rebel against the state. She put it down to the Iran-Iraq War having caused half a million Iranian deaths and people not wanting to cause any more bloodshed by rebelling. Leyla added that if you stepped out of line politically, you didn’t just get reprimanded, you got killed or worse—which, of course, is a pretty effective deterrent.

When it was time to get the bill, it was no surprise that Leyla and friends wouldn’t let me chip in. They insisted that I was their guest and that in Iran it was customary for them to pay for me. It was actually becoming hard to spend any money here at all due to the overwhelming generosity people were showing me.

On the way back in the car, we drove past a special jail that Leyla pointed out. It was specifically for people picked up off the street with either a boyfriend, girlfriend, or an inappropriate hijab. Leyla told me that the police did big swoops in certain areas and arrested loads of people all at once. She said that she knew of people who’d been there and that as jails go, it wasn’t too bad, and that on the whole you just spent a night there for these offenses.

Near my hotel, Leyla spotted some cops on the side of the road. She got nervous, said once more, “This is a bad area,” and pulled up her hijab conservatively. I asked what was wrong with the area and she said that a lot of people get arrested here for being with unrelated members of the opposite sex. When we pulled up, Leyla stayed in the car and said, “Hurry.”

“Why?”

“I can’t be with you,” she said. “I could go to jail.”

I got out and went inside.

Once in my room, I got really pissed off. I couldn’t get my head around how she could have been arrested simply for being in a car with me, and I couldn’t get my head around the apparent apathy of her Canadian friend who considered it no big deal. To me, it seemed a huge deal, especially when people were getting killed and tortured for simply stepping out of line. I went to bed highly annoyed.