Neith grew up in a town outside of Cairo, with a conservative Arabic upbringing that revolved around family and the value of education. He quickly became an intellectual and made his way to Paris to create a life of his own, one more progressive than his parents. On weekends he did GHB and produced minimal house music in his loft on St Germain. He directed documentaries about hope and traveled to Beirut to interview politicians.
He went to sex parties in castles and had orgies on MDMA. He worked hard in the arts and sustainable impact projects. Neith was able to make a great deal of money from the brilliance of his mind. He shared his parent’s value of education, but hadn’t yet fulfilled the value of family. He didn’t have a real partner, just girls he had sex with during his travels. He was often lonely, and all his childhood friends were now getting married. He was the last single man left in his community.
Neith’s best friend from Cairo, Khalil was having a bachelor party a month before his wedding. Neith flew back to Egypt to attend the celebration. Khalil had an idealized view of bachelor parties from shitty American films. These films depicted bachelor parties as man’s last call for liberation before his bind to a union that would deprive him of a full sexuality. Khalil had said he wanted to get a prostitute and do cocaine off her body. He had never touched a prostitute and he had never touched drugs.
Neith took Khalil’s desire and spun it into action. At the five star hotel, a prostitute came and took off her clothing. She was a gift to his best friend. She lay naked on the king sized bed and Neith made a neat line of blow on her bare ass for Khalil to take. Khalil stood above this naked ass with a tightly rolled two hundred pound bill, which trembled in his hand. He was not thrilled, but anxious. Khalil claimed he loved his wife and this was a betrayal, a silly fantasy that had no right to become a reality. He was a good and loyal man, not the kind who does coke off a hooker’s ass, just one who dreams about it. There is nothing wrong in fantasy if it remains fantasy.
Neith sighed and took the line off her ass because Khalil refused to. Immediately after, Khalil insisted that she put her clothing on and leave, but Neith paid the hooker for an hour of her time. It had only been fifteen minutes. Neith asked her about her life and her hobbies. She said she loved to dance salsa.
For the next forty five minutes the hooker taught Neith and his group of Muslim conservatives how to dance. Duos of hairy dancing Arab men held hands and dipped each other to the rhythm of Latin clave. Their teacher was doing a great job, and the men laughed like they were drunk, but it was a sober pleasure.
They did not need women or sex or substances because they had each other. Neith now knew that a good bachelor party did not need to be a coke fest or a gang bang like the American movies, but dancing with friends. The prostitute was a skilled professor of movement, she gave her body to them for salsa. The only place they touched her was her guiding hand and clothed hip.
Khalil had a purity that Neith believed he’d lost. But in moments like these he remembered his childhood, playing in the field by his house with Khalil and the innocence of their joy. Life in Paris was complex and the search for more; more money, more sex, more drugs, more work. Back home in Egypt, Neith was then aware how much he missed the simple uncomplicated life of his family and friends.
It was rooted in something more real and steady, where family came first. Khalil valued his wife more than any fantasy, and what could’ve been a night of empty sex and blow, became a night of dance and chatter. The Egyptian children raised with strong values became men with strong integrity. Neith wondered if Paris had wrung this out of him, or if he never really had it to begin with.
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