Was it? I didn’t remember him ever taking on the parental power dynamic he claimed now to be sloughing off, he’d never said, “Do this, don’t do that.” Love and latitude—that was all he’d ever offered me. And where did it lead? Was I going to enter early stoned retirement with Lambert? Not knowing what else to do, I went back to a terrible job, one I’d had the first summer of college, in a pizza place in Kensal Rise. It was run by a ridiculous Iranian called Bahram, very tall and thin, who considered himself, despite his surroundings, to be a man of quality. He liked to wear a long, chic, camel-colored coat, no matter the weather, often hanging it from his shoulders like an Italian baron, and he called his dump a “restaurant,” though the premises were the size of a small family bathroom, occupying a corner plot of scrubland wedged between the bus terminal and the railway. No one ever came in to eat, they ordered delivery or took their food home. I used to stand at the counter and watch the mice dart across the linoleum. There was a single table at which theoretically a customer was free to dine, but in reality Bahram occupied this table all day long and half the night: he had troubles at home, a wife and three difficult, unmarried daughters, and we suspected he preferred our company to this family, or at least preferred shouting at us to arguing with them. At work his day was not strenuous. He passed it commenting on whatever was on the TV in the top-left corner of the place, or else verbally abusing us, his staff, from this sitting position. He was in a rage all the time about everything. A flamboyant, comic rage that expressed itself in a constant obscene teasing of everyone around him—racial, sexual, political, religious teasing—and which almost every day resulted in a lost customer or employee or friend, and so came to seem to me not so much offensive as poignantly self-defeating. Anyway it was the only entertainment on offer. But the first time I walked in there, aged nineteen, I was not abused, no, I was greeted in what I later understood to be Farsi, and so effusively that I really felt I got a sense of what he was saying. How young I was, and lovely, and clearly smart—was it true I was in college? But how proud my mother must be! He stood up and held me by the chin, turning my face one way and then the other, smiling. But when I replied in English he frowned and looked closely, critically, at the red bandanna covering my hair—I’d thought it would be welcome in a place of food production—and a few moments later, after we had established that despite my Persian nose I was not Persian, not even a little bit, nor Egyptian, nor Moroccan, nor an Arab of any kind, I made the mistake of speaking the name of my mother’s island, and all friendliness vanished: I was directed to the counter, where my job was to answer the phone, take orders to the kitchen and organize the delivery boys. My most important task was attending to a beloved project of his: the Banned Customers List. He had taken the trouble to write this list out on a long roll of paper and stuck it up on the wall behind my counter, sometimes with Polaroids attached. “Mostly your people,” he pointed out to me casually, on my second day.
“They don’t pay, or they fight, or they drug dealers. Don’t give me face! How you be offended? You know! Is truth!” I couldn’t afford to be offended. I was determined to last those three summer months, long enough to put something toward a deposit so I could start renting the moment I graduated. But the tennis was on, and this made everything impossible. A Somali delivery boy and I were following it avidly, and Bahram, who would normally also follow the tennis—he considered sport the purest manifestation of his sociological theories—was this year in a fury about it, and in a fury with us for enjoying it, and each time he caught us watching it he became more enraged, his sense of order having been deeply disturbed by the failure of Bryan Shelton to drop out in the first round.
“Why you follow him? Huh? Huh? ’Cos he’s one of you?”
He was jabbing his finger into the narrow chest of the Somali delivery boy, Anwar, who had a great luminosity of spirit, a notable capacity for joy—despite nothing in his life seeming to provide just cause for it—and whose response now was to clap his hands and grin from ear to ear.
“Yeah, man! We for Bryan!”
“You are idiot, this we know,” said Bahram, and then turned to me, behind the counter: “But you are smart, and this makes you more idiot.” When I said nothing he came right up to me and slammed his fists on the counter: “This man Shelton—he won’t win. He can’t.”
“He win! He win!” cried Anwar.
Bahram picked up the remote and turned down the TV so he could get himself heard all the way to the back, even as far as the Congolese woman scrubbing the sides of the pizza oven.
“Tennis not black game. You must understand: every people have their game.”
“What’s your game?” I asked, genuinely curious, and Bahram pulled himself up very tall and proud in his seat: “Polo.” The kitchen exploded in laughter.
“Fuck all of you sons of bitches!” Hysteria.
As it happened, I hadn’t been following Shelton, had never heard of him really before Anwar pointed him out, but now I did follow him, along with Anwar I became his number-one fan. I bought little American flags to work on the days of his games and made sure to send out, on these occasions, all the other delivery boys except Anwar. Together we cheered Shelton, danced around the place at each successful point, and as he won one match and then another, we began to feel like we, with our dancing and whooping, were the ones propelling him forward, and that without us he’d be done for. At times Bahram behaved as if he believed this, too, as if we were performing some ancient African voodoo rite. Yes, somehow we put a spell on Bahram just as much as Shelton, and as the days of the tournament passed and Shelton still refused to be knocked out I saw Bahram’s many other pressing worries—the business, his difficult wife, the stressful search for suitors for his daughters—all slip away, until his sole preoccupation was ensuring we did not cheer for Bryan Shelton, and that Shelton himself did not get to the Wimbledon final.
One morning, halfway through the tournament, I was standing, bored, at the counter when I saw Anwar on his bike, riding up the pavement toward us at great speed, then break haphazardly, leap off and rush up to my counter with his fist in his mouth and a smile he could barely control. He slapped a copy of the Daily Mirror in front of me, pointed to a column in the sports pages, and said: “Arab!” We couldn’t believe it. His name was Karim Alami. He was from Morocco, and he was seeded even lower than Shelton. Their match was to start at two. Bahram arrived at one. There was a great feeling of anxiety and anticipation in the place, delivery boys who were not meant to come till five came early, and the Congolese cleaner began working through the back of the kitchen at unprecedented speed in the hope she would reach front-of-house—and therefore the television—by the time the game began. That match went five rounds. Shelton started strong and at various points in the first set Bahram was reduced to standing on a chair and screaming. When the first set ended six?three to Shelton, Bahram jumped off his chair and walked straight out of the building. We looked at each other: was this victory? Five minutes later he sloped back in with a packet of Gauloises in hand, retrieved from his car, and began chain-smoking with his head down. But in the second set things began to look a little better for Karim, and Bahram sat up straight as straight, then stood, and began pacing in a circular way around the small space, offering his own commentary, which had as much to do with eugenics as backhands and lobs and double faults, and as we reached a tiebreak, he became increasingly fluent in his lecture, waving his cigarette around in his hand, ever more confident in his English. The black man, he informed us, he is instinct, he is moving body, he is strong, and he is music, yes, of course, and he is rhythm, everybody know this, and he is speed, and this is beautiful, maybe, yes, but let me tell you tennis is game of the mind—the mind! The black man can be good strength, good muscle, he can hit ball hard, but Karim he is like me: he think one, two step in front. He have Arab mind. Arab mind is complicated machine, delicate. We invent mathematics. We invent astronomy. Subtle people. Two steps ahead. Your Bryan now he is lost.
But he was not lost: he took the set seven?five, and Anwar took the broom away from the Congolese cleaner—whose name I did not know, whose name no one ever thought to ask—and made her dance with him, to some hi-life he had going on the transistor radio he carried everywhere. In the next set Shelton collapsed, one?six. Bahram was exultant. Wherever you go in world, he told Anwar, you people at bottom! Sometimes at top White man, Jew, Arab, Chinese, Japan—depends. But your people always they lose. By the time the fourth set started we had stopped pretending to be a pizza place. The phone rang and no one answered, the oven was empty, and everybody was crammed into the small space at the front. I sat on the counter with Anwar, our nervous legs kicking the cheap MDF panels until they rattled. We watched these two players—in truth, almost perfectly matched—battling toward an elongated, excruciating tiebreak that Shelton then lost, six?seven. Anwar burst into bitter tears.
“But Anwar, little friend: he have one more set,” explained the kindly Bosnian chef, and Anwar was as grateful as the man sitting in an electric chair who’s just spotted the governor through the Plexiglas, running down the hall. The final set was quick: six?two. Game, set, match—Shelton. Anwar turned his radio up full blast and every kind of dance burst forth from me, winding, stomping, shuffling—I even did the shim-sham. Bahram accused us all of having sex with our mothers and stormed out. About an hour later he returned. It was the early-evening rush when mothers decide they can’t face cooking dinner and all-day tokers suddenly realize they haven’t eaten since breakfast. I was harried on the phone, trying as usual to parse many different kinds of pidgin English, both on the phones and among our own delivery crew, when Bahram walked up to me and put the evening paper in my face. He pointed to a picture of Shelton, his arm swung high in preparation for one of his forceful serves, ball in the air before him, paused at the moment of connection. I cupped the phone receiver with a hand.
“What? I’m working.”
“Look close. Not black. Brown. Like you.”
“I’m working.”
“Probably he is half-half, like you. So: this explains.”
I looked not at Shelton but at Bahram, very closely. He smiled.
“Half-winner,” he said.
I put the phone down, took my apron off and walked out.