My ears turned red, and my natural instinct was to brush off the comment. I mean, my whole life, even the tiniest gay joke could dig under my skin and make me feel self-conscious. But then I realized I didn’t have to brush off Jahan’s joke. It didn’t have to be awkward. So I replied, “Sorry, but I’m only one of those things.”
Jahan grinned so wide you could actually hear it, the soft smacking of spread lips and caved dimples.
“So, where are the Italian people in Rome?” I asked. “Between you and Neil, I’ve only met other Americans.”
“With the state of the economy, they all seem to be fleeing. Young people can’t get jobs, there’s a rising far-right movement—but hey, at least we still have pasta.” Jahan sighed. “Don’t get me wrong. Italy is a lovely place to visit, but you’ve got to be out of your mind to want to live here.”
I expected this to be Jahan’s cue to move on to his other customers at the bar, and he did—there were beers to pour, fancy drinks to mix—but Jahan also kept doing the most wonderful thing: he’d pull me into his conversations. “You’ll have to check that out while you’re in town, Amir,” he said after telling one tourist about the Sistine Chapel. “Oh, in America, they hurry you out of the restaurant,” he said about the slower service in Italy, winking at me. “Our people, they’ve been around for a long-ass time,” he bragged, comparing the Persian Empire to the European monarchies.
It turned out Jahan was just half Iranian, on his dad’s side—his mom was Dominican—but after he had had a few drinks himself, all he wanted to talk about with me was Iranian culture.
“Have you heard of Fereydoon? He’s this singer,” Jahan said. “I’m obsessed with him. He was huge in the 1960s, and he had an emo poet sister, kind of like the Iranian Virginia Woolf. He was also deeply, deeply homosexual. Everyone knew! But of course you couldn’t say anything.” And then Jahan got up on the bar—I’m serious!—and he performed a bit from one of his songs, flamboyantly flashing his fingers and kicking his legs, and I just thought, Who is this guy?
The whole night, Jahan told story after story. His nipple story was particularly gruesome—in the best way.
But before we got really drunk and heard the nipple story told ’round the world—from what I understand, that story has spread farther from its initial source than influenza in 1918 or herpes in a frat house—we listened to Joni Mitchell.
“Do you know this song, Amir?” Jahan asked, leaning over the bar.
I definitely recognized the upbeat melody, the lyrics—paved paradise, something about parking lots—but I didn’t know the singer.
“You’re hopeless,” Jahan said. “Gay card revoked.”
It was like there was another rainbow scoreboard for gay men that I had never been exposed to, and I was starting from scratch.
-5: Doesn’t know Nina Simone or Joni Mitchell.
“You know, Joni Mitchell is how I came out to my dad,” Jahan said.
“Um.”
“You don’t have to look so horrified.” He laughed. “It didn’t go that badly. I was in the eighth grade, and my dad asked at the dinner table if I had any crushes, and I replied, totally seriously: ‘Father. Joni Mitchell is the only woman for me.’ The man looked at me, utterly disappointed, shaking his head—but he knew. That was all I ever had to say.”
I couldn’t believe how nonchalant Jahan was about coming out to his dad. I looked over his face carefully, but I didn’t find an ounce of pain, regret, shame, any of the feelings I’d been dealing with these last few months. It was just another story for him, and he went about washing glasses in the bar sink.
“Aladdin,” I said quietly.
“What?”
I looked up from my beer.
“It was Aladdin for me.”
Jahan placed a clean glass on the dish rack and smiled. “How very on-brand.”
I stared in awe as he intercepted a different conversation, this one about a record store in Naples that was run by the Italian mafia. The way Jahan told his tales, with so much flair, they reminded me of the stories my mom and dad had told me growing up. The ones their parents had told them. It felt like part of a thousand-year-old tradition I never thought I would be allowed to be a part of.
The bar emptied out around four in the morning, and I stuck around for another hour. I had been nursing the same beer since midnight, so Jahan made me finish and we took shots of fancy liqueurs. Not liquor. Liqueur. I’d never even heard the word before tonight. I definitely couldn’t spell it. Jahan kept making me try.
“L-I-Q-O—”
“Wrong!” he yelled. Another shot.
“L-I-Q-U . . . O—”
“Wrong!” he said again, giddily. Another shot.
“I shouldn’t be allowed to take shots of this stuff if I can’t spell the word,” I slurred.
“I don’t make the rules,” Jahan said.
We left the bar at five in the morning. It hit me as I watched Jahan twisting the key in the rusted padlock that if I was back home, I would have been alone in my room, feeling—what was the opposite of drunk? Sober. I would have been so sober.
There wasn’t a single other person on the street outside the bar as we walked. But the way it was lit—warmly, oozing orange and yellow, extending an invitation to any and all—I felt more alive than ever. There was something tugging at my chest, like I’d been accepted into a special secret society.
Jahan asked where I was staying, and I suddenly sobered up, remembering I would have to check out of my Airbnb later that day. I told him where it was, expecting Jahan to point me in the right direction. But it turned out Jahan lived just around the corner. He offered to walk me back. I smiled. After a shitty past couple of days—months, really—I was so happy the universe had at least given me this little bit of serendipity.
We took the long way home, because Jahan wanted to show me Piazza Santa Maria, the main square in our neighborhood, Trastevere. It was massive and inspiring, with a few stragglers humming around the bursting fountain in the middle. “The sound of that fountain always reminds me of children laughing,” Jahan said. And the way he said it, with his eyes ambling to the side, just over the tip of the church—it wasn’t a story. It wasn’t meant to entertain. It was just Jahan.
We looped around the piazza, back to the main road that crossed the Viale, a sort of mini-highway. I started tightrope-walking along the grooves of the tram rails, and Jahan looked at me and laughed. “How old are you, Amir?” he asked.
“Old enough to be in Rome by myself,” I said.