Iran was as different from northeastern Turkey as was possible. Immediately there were superhighways and modern buildings. Even small towns we passed through teemed with men dressed in snazzy gray modern suits. Handsome, thin, dark men who might have just stepped out of Milan. The women, however, were covered from head to foot in chador, robes that let the eyes peer through only a screen of lighter fabric. And throughout the entire country there were only five patterns on these chador, each assorted variations of black. I found Iran drab and insulting. Small but modern cars drove down clear-sailing roads and highways. Buildings had sprung up wherever you looked; but they were modern buildings that looked like the ones on the periphery of the Belt Parkway landfill into Brooklyn; modern, but in an East Berlin sort of way. Whenever I meet Iranians and tell them I visited their country in 1973, they go all glowy and murmur, “Ah! The good old days when the shah was in power!” But I didn’t like the country one bit and couldn’t wait to get through it. I would
have enjoyed the primitiveness of eastern Turkey more had I known we’d be back in civilization the moment we crossed the border. I hadn’t understood that throughout our journey there would be pockets of the past and then bursts of modernity. I’d thought we were spiraling downward into a continual past. I did not know then that the influence of the West was intermittent.
Then one night I found myself in the back of Harry’s van. Reiner was driving. I’d thought things through and felt better. I was glad to have the bed to myself and I stretched out comfortably. When we stopped to tank up, Tupelo threw open the side door. Reiner was in the front seat. She said, “They’re playing poker in the back of our van. They are drivink me crazy. Can I sleep here?”
He was thrilled to have her aboard and told stories and jokes one after the other to impress her. He wanted to be chummy with a famous girl. You could tell. We’d entered Teheran. Between the berserk and rattling cars and carts, he had to keep a sharp lookout. I turned my back and froze Tupelo out. But she covered the both of us with another opened sleeping bag and lay herself sideways in front of me, her rump to my front. I certainly didn’t want her. What did she think, she could find me whenever she felt like it? No. The last time was just that: the last time. But before I could even turn, she flounced her skirt up to the middle of her back and pushed her naked rear end into me. I went to wrench her from me but she wriggled so seductively that I took hold of her fiercely. She went limp in my arms.
If Reiner had any idea what preoccupied intent was going on behind him that night, I doubt he’d have bothered to waste his best stories. As it was, his outlandish boasts flew around us like butterflies, weightless and dancing on silently quivering air.