Shanty and
Mahmood
by Albert Russo
My uncle tells me that I’ll
get a fatwa if I keep saying ‘damn’
this and ‘damn’ that, on account that
there are Islamists spying on some street corners,
specially in Jerusalem. What’s friggin
freedom of expreshun for, damn it! I’ll
cuss as much as I want and no chadored Mamluk -
them bozos who adore their enslaved women to be
cloaked from head to toe -, Haredim with
spaghetti hair or Pigvangelists who seem
to be born with a mike hooked to their tongue,
will stop me. My ancestors haven’t invented
the French Revolution for the dogs, coz if that
were the case, we would be ruled by French
poodles, chihuahas, and dobermistresses.
So here we were at the
café in Ole Jaffa, me, clutched between sexy Avi
and Miki and dreamy Unky Berky, sitting opposite
Shanty and Mahmood, the two dragabushkins we
were told about earlier, coz she, apart from all
the stalactites dangling from her skinny tips,
like she was a walking altar, had cheeks dabbed
with torero red, so glaring that you needed
sunglasses, while her Palestinian boyfriend had
circles of purple day glo around his eyes and a
zillion little sequins dotting his face and his
fluffed-up hair, as if he’d just come out of
a jacuzzi bath full of mercury or, since I’m
supposed to be a powetess too, as if he’d
fallen off the star-spangled firmament.
I don’t know whether
it was the sight of these two which made my uncle
look so stoned or whether he was fantasizing
being himself a maverick, with the hope of
joining them in a freak triangle, but I was
getting a little worried for him. To be sure he
got down back to reality, I pinched his left
buttock. He squealed with a very piggish sound,
so I was relieved.
“Oh, what a lovely
voice you have!” said Mahmood, whistling in
appreciation, and he blinked like a daft puppet.
“I woudn’t be surprised if you sang
professionally or that you were part of a choir.
Could you give us a taste of your talent?”
Jeezette, what next! And
gap-toothed Shanty who added on cue in broken,
very broken French:
“Oui, oui, nous
vouloir toi chanter!”
“Indeed,” Miki
chimed in, “how about a Jacques Brel song,
like ‘Ne me quitte pas’?”
Where had I landed, amid a
bunch of screwballs, including now our two hunks?
Or were these people typical of this country,
once they left the army, even just for the
weekend? Coz I learned that Shanty too had served
a couple of years as a soldieress, under
much duress. As for grinning Mahmood, being an
Arab citizen, he was not allowed to join the
Israeli military, on account that he might spy
for the enemy and give strategic clues to the
terrorists.
«Whoah ... sss ... jjj!»
I whooshed. That’s what I do when I get
flummoxed and can’t find my words.
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