The President of Iran Is Sick And Deranged.
By Jorge Ossio.
[A touch, or press with the lips against someone's mouth
or other body part as an expression of love.]
A kiss is an important thing. Sometimes, we miss sight of that. And, who wouldn’t? In Peru, you kiss thirty people every time you enter, or leave a dinner party. You kiss people you have never even seen before in your life ever-so-tenderly, and call everybody ‘Aunt,’ or ‘Uncle.’ But it’s always there. Judas killed Jesus with a kiss. And Michael Corleone condemned Fredo in the Godfather: Part II with a really weird kiss on the mouth. Whether fiction, or real life, kisses can be a lot more meaningful than they seem.
Case to point: Mahmoud Ahmadenejad is getting murdered.
It starts two weeks ago, really, with the police. A new memo had been passed around, where it was stated that a high-profile crackdown should begin, one that enforced “correct” Islamic dress codes. In the first few days, policewomen dressed in long, black chadors (a long tunic that wraps around the body, and covers everything but the face) strolled around the city, looking for women not correctly attired. Girls who wore tight jeans, tops that didn’t conceal the hips, or make-up would be the prime targets, although a little bit of hair shown would’ve been enough to get you detained. If you walked around the city of Tehran (in the Islamic Republic of Iran) large buses would’ve been parked along the streets, waiting for the long lines of “indecent” women, who struggled, as the enforcers bundled them into the heavy vehicles.
The Western World is different. We kiss, that’s what we do. We do it all the time, so many times, in fact, that it’s lost its meaning. It used to be that you kissed somebody in the mouth when you were married to that somebody, or were going to be in a near future. I mean, that was the rule, at least in public. You saw some couple kissing in the streets, and said it was just rude, indecent. You didn’t get them into a truck, and shot them in the back of the head, or prosecuted them, but it was frowned upon. Of course, behind the scenes it’s a different story. I’ll never know for sure, but I’m pretty certain there was some sort of, let’s say, indecency. What I mean is, that I’m sure my grandmother’s mouth –even though I try, I try really hard not to think about it- touched more than just my grandfather’s lips in her lifespan.
So, two guys I know...
I guess that starting from the beginning would do you no good. The story is long, and largely inconsequential, especially if you’re one of those guys who do the sort of thing that is about to happen all of the time. All you need to know is that there was this girl. And, keep in mind, this is a good-looking girl. And, see? She knows this. She’s one of those girls that’ll never pretend to be somebody else, or be good to somebody they don’t really like, simply because she doesn’t have to. People come to her. And she loves the attention.
And, there are these two guys.
They’re friends. Not real close friends, or anything. I mean, they don’t call each other every night to talk about the bed-bugs, but they hang around with the same circle of people. They like the same jokes. They go to the same parties. And it used to be that one of them was, maybe, getting involved with the girl previously mentioned. There were calls involved, there was defiantly that. And rumors. You know, rumors: did you hear about them the other night? What’d she say? What’d he say? Was there grabbing? That sort of thing. But there’s a problem. This girl, she’s too young. Not too young for him, I mean, in a “decency’s sake” sort of way. If they were together, and you heard, hey, this cat’s sixteen, and she’s thirteen, it wouldn’t be frowned upon. (My dad’s ten years older than my mother) The thing is that the girl, she’s young. Mentally, I guess. Now, you know what I’m talking about. There’s women who grow up faster than others. No. Not that. The other thing. There are some girls that start doing things at an early age, and are already experienced in those things by the time the slower ones start catching up. (The first girl I ever kissed was twelve. She tutored me on the ways of the tongue. Where did she learn to do that?) She was one of the girls that didn’t have much experience. And after the first couple of kisses. And after watching the first couple of movies, I guess, she started thinking, maybe. Is that it? This is the guy I’m going to be with for the next couple of weeks? Months? Years, even?
Curiosity killed the cat. In this particular case, it killed him.
Football. A little bit of the old background information on Mahmoud: it had not been the first time he had been under fire for things involving women. Last year, he proposed that women should be allowed to attend football games. He said that the best seats should be reserved for women, and their families. Two years earlier, he had been speaking about how punishing women was wrong.
The critics came down hard. Soon after his remarks about football, many high-ranking groups of clerics, and marjas, whom are God knows what (Wikipedia: “Literally means ‘source to imitate, or follow.’ It is the label provided to Shia authority, a Grand Ayatollah with the authority to make legal decisions within the confines of Islamic law for followers and less-credentialed clerics.”), publicly announced their objection to the decision, promptly calling for a public announcement from the president, in which he retracted. In the end, no measures were taken, and no laws were passed. But he didn’t apologize either. Now, it seems, Mahmoud has done something wrong again. He’s kissed, and embraced a woman in public.
He was cought on photograph, and on film, bowing to kiss an elderly woman’s gloved hand, and then hugging her at a ceremony. Almost immediately, charges of indecency were made by the popular –and influential, not to mention extreme- newspaper Hezbollah. Although the woman was completely covered, sporting thick black gloves, a headscarf, and a long, black coat, avoiding skin contact isn’t enough for the public. They say he violated the laws which state that he can’t have any physical contact with any woman, other than his wife. “The Muslim Iranian people have no recollection of such acts contrary to Shariah law during Islamic rule,” the newspaper printed. “This type of indecency progressively has grave consequences, like violating religious and sacred values.”
It used to be that…
I don’t know when it was exactly, but there must’ve been a time were I lost all the morals I used to believe in. Maybe it was a necessary sacrifice for when I started going out. I mean, carrying all those values, and outdated ideas to a party, or a pub would’ve been out of place. Or maybe I didn’t believe in those morals, or values in the first place. You see, maybe it was that I just thought I did. That I was adhering to those sets of rules, and limits, simply because it made feel greater than other people. And because I thought that was what the people I looked up to would want me to believe in. Or that by thinking I really believed those things, I was a much better person that all of those… dirty guys.
All it took for me to shrug at these values was one night.
It’s not that I don’t respect women. I do. I seriously do. I respect them so much that I know when I’m not wanted, or when to stop pushing. But all of those girls who keep going at it, and then feel bad about it later, that’s not really my fault, is it? I found out that there were no consequences. Not real ones, at least. You may upset somebody. Or hurt somebody’s feelings, but this is highschool. These things pass. And when I went out with my brother for the first time, and saw all these people trying to tongue-wrestle each other with no apparent concern over what might happen, and what might people think, and saw that girls were ready to accept that, and were as bad as we were…
The thing about girls is, however, that even though they are exactly like us guys in that sense, they don’t like to show it. Because, and this is well known, a guy makes out with three girls in one night, and he’s a player. A master, or whatever. A girl makes out with three guys in one night, then she’s a slut. So, they have to keep it beneath the surface. They feel offended when you talk about it, but won’t deny it. They’ll never make the first move. They’re smart. I remember what one guy told me once. This person has been involved with a girl for over two years, but before she knew her, and this one time they broke up for a few weeks, we went out to the parties, and danced with girls, and carry on like that. And after one night, it’s three in the morning, and we’re riding in cab, and he’s just been with this beautiful girl, right? And he doesn’t even know her name, and he says: -I don’t know. I mean, I understand men because… Hell, it’s in out nature, but I could never be with a girl… You know, that went around kissing guys she just met at parties. I could never be with a girl like that.
It’s in our nature. That’s what he said.
I couldn’t help but smile.
First. My mother first kissed my father in a long weekend. One of my father’s friends -and please read this, because this was embarrassing information to get- had this chacra, were he wanted to take my aunt to. They were already girlfriend and boyfriend, my aunt and this bloke were, but the thing was that my grandmother would have none of that nonsense. Them alone, together, amongst the crops? Over her dead body. So, she tells her: “You’re taking your sister with you. And that’s that.” So, now my father’s friend has to get someone for his girlfriend’s sister to go with, or else he’s screwed. And, not in the way he would’ve wanted to be. So, he calls up my father, and tells him: “I got this real nice girl for you. What are you doing for the weekend?” And before you know it— They played ping-pong, and swam in a pool, and ate grilled chicken.
They say the first kiss in a relationship that’s gonna last is something special. It’s probably because it’s the most fun. All of the other kisses, you know they’re coming. This is your girlfriend, you kiss, that’s what girlfriends are for. But the first one, it’s almost like a game. You don’t know where you stand, exactly. You don’t know when to go for it, or even if she wants you to go for it. And you start hearing voices in your head. Telling you to do it. Telling you not to do it. Telling you that you should stop looking at her like she was a piece of meat. Telling you that your lips are dry, or that your hair is messy, or that you’ve got your stupid face on, or that you really need to let go off her hand, because you’re sweating like a madman. And then it happens, and it’s the best thing. Even if it’s not a good kiss, mind you. Because it’s still a thing you’ve been aiming for during the last couple of days/weeks/months. It’s the only thing you’ve been thinking about, and now you’ve done it. And it feels so freaking satisfying, that you’re wondering why you took so long in the first place, and then you realize that if you hadn’t, it would’ve been a completely different kiss. That those minutes you took thinking about it, or that time you ran out of credit for your phone, and didn’t speak to her in, like, two days, make the difference. Without those delays, without that desperation, this kiss would’ve been like any other. Yet, not quite. Me? I’ve never felt that.
That’s never happened to me.
So, now this girl’s in a pickle. She’s with this guy, and doesn’t want to be. I mean, she likes him, sure, she may even be in love with him, but she wants to know what it’s like. What… What older girls have already experienced. Flings, kissing a new guy every couple of weeks. Flirting. And with this guy, being with this guy, it would end that. It would deminish her chances of ever getting to know those things she’ve never experienced. Meanwhile, this guy who’s never thought of himself as an attractive cat is now with a girl that he’s been lead to believe is way out of his league. And he feels good. He talks to people in a different manner, he walks with his head up high, he tells anybody who’ll listen about her. When they go out, he can’t keep her hands off her. He keeps hugging her, and kissing her in front of everybody. And, I could tell it wouldn’t end well.
The girl shook him off when he put his arm around her. She told him to behave himself when he raised her face towards her. She was uncomfortable, with him, even though she had no reason to be. They had known each other for a couple of years, this was a natural evolution of what had been building up for the last number of months, why would she feel that awkwardness? That awkwardness should’ve been gone. Those kisses with the eyes opened. Those empty looks when they were holding hands. Nothing to talk about. Uneasy silences. And after a while, you could tell he was starting to fall apart. The girl kept bringing him down, and he just couldn’t figure out why. He wooed her, he complimented her, he told her jokes, and nothing. And then it comes. He doesn’t have that shine anymore. He doesn’t smile when he’s walking, he doesn’t talk about her. He doesn’t even mention her name. And exactly then, everybody knew: the thing was over.
Of course, the thing always takes it’s time to die. Even if they weren’t together anymore, there was still some drama. The girl’s friends came and talked to him about how bad she felt, and how he should give her another chance. Next day, it’s a different story, and they’re talking about how she hates his guts and it’s all his fault. We, his friends, take him out and hook him up with some foreign exchange student. The girl finds out. Is offended. They chat in the computer, and talk about how they want to be friends. Phonecalls in the middle of the night. Rants in the middle of the day. Until finally, finally, some months pass, and they start getting involved with different people.
Our friend started something up with this girl from his neighborhood. The girl started things up with a lot of people. Until she started something up with the wrong guy: meet cat number two. This guy, he’s different. He knows he’s a charming man, and has been with a bunch of girls. He keeps getting himself into these situations where he’s with several girls at a time, and still ends up looking like the innocent, nice guy at the end of the day. So, he knows he’s good-looking, and he starts noticing that this girl is kinda giving him the eye. So, one night, he chats her up. And there’s alcohol. And dancing. And the other guy isn’t there, so they end up in the littlest corner of the place, scraping their teeth together. Word goes out.
The first guy finds out. And maybe, he tells himself, the thing wasn’t as over as he thought it was.
The scientific name for kissing is osculation. As in, I’ll osculate your mother. It derives from the Old English word cyssan, which means “to kiss.” It’s origin, many believe, is actually onomatopoeic. Personally, I don’t know where the word comes from, but I sure do know that giving a kiss doesn’t sound like it’s pronounced, so we can scratch that secret origin. In terms of why we do it, things are a little different. Anthropologists are on debate (yes, there are people who study the kisses) whether it is an instinctive action, or that we learn to do it. They argue that it may be related to the courting seen between other animals, like dogs licking each other, or maybe as a result of sucking on your mother’s… you know, when you were little. And this here’s a tricky part, so I’ll just— The thing about kissing is that it allows people to taste, and smell each other pheromones, those little things animals release to attract each other in a sexual manner. Although us humans aren’t really susceptible to those, they still play a small part on relationships. And: “Women are subconsciously more attracted to men whose major histocompatibility [?] complex portion of their genome is different than their own.” This would explain why couples break up in account of not feeling the right chemistry. Many other non-primate animals exhibit a kissing behavior.
There are also different kinds of kisses: a French kiss (tongues), a kiss with puckered lips, an air kiss, a blown kiss or even an Eskimo kiss, which consists of two people rubbing the tips of their noses slowly, and affectionately together. There’s a couple of other more, too. And these are just bizarre: the caterpillar kiss in which you rub your eyebrows together, or the butterfly kiss –this one is pretty creepy- which consists of the two participants, if you will, putting their eyes closely together, and flickering their eyelashes against each other.
Some societies find kissing repugnant. In ‘Burmese Days’ by George Orwell, he speaks about how the Burmese don’t have a word to describe the action of kissing, simply because they don’t practice the act. The first on-screen kiss happened on a short film actually titled The Kiss, released in 1896. Consisting a forty-seven kissing scene extracted from the musical “The Widow Jones,” it was the first film publicly screened in Canada.
It was considered scandalous. As I mentioned before: rude, indecent.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says…
By the end of the day he apologized. He had been trying to win back the early popularity he enjoyed when he was first elected (by sixty-two percent of the voters, almost twice of what his predecessor had won with), and to do so he was making desperate decisions. The dress-code crackdown was his attempt to make amends with the more extreme conservatives, after his remarks concerning the football games. The football games remarks happened to get support from the looser, westernized section of the country, that is, the middle upper class. Finally, the kiss itself was an attempt to win over teachers, who were starting to become increasingly critical of him. He didn’t think his idea could backfire. It did.
He issued a public apology a couple of days later. Nothing big, just something he said through his representatives. He spoke about being ashamed, and embarrassed for this very public fiasco. He asked to be let known that his government strictly follows the Shariah laws, and that Mahmoud understands the public’s concern over him, who should be setting an example, breaking it.
A year after he was elected in 2005, his popularity was still soaring, and he was enjoying some seventy percent of the public’s approval. Now, it seems that his popularity has eroded some. Fifty-six percent. That’s fourteen percent less.
And then the fight happened. The couple of days after the party the second guy didn’t show up at all. He said he was sick, and missed school for a couple of days. The first guy called him, demanding an explanation, but the second guy didn’t even answer the phone. He was embarrassed. Of course, he was. But did he feel wrong about what he did? I’ll never know. Maybe if he had apologized right after it happened it would’ve worked out better. Day after day, the original cat seemed to be angrier with him, as old feelings about the girl started to resurface. Me, and a couple of other blokes tried to talk to him. –Hey, I said, you haven’t been with this girl for a really long time. I mean, you’re already involved with someone else, aren’t you? So, why fret it, man?
-It’s not what friends do, he kept saying. If you’re a mate, you just don’t do that. He said the words quickly, like he didn’t really believe them. Of course he was mad, but I don’t think he was mad at the other guy. I think he was a little mad at the girl, for getting over him so quickly. But he knew that wasn’t her fault, he knew he wasn’t the kind of guy you’d remember. What I think is that he was even madder at himself, because the more he thought about it, he kept ending up in a scenario where he told himself he would’ve done the same exact thing was he in the other guy’s position. I mean, why not? She’s a really nice-looking girl. She’s not involved with anybody, at least not anymore. But still. Even though he sympathized, didn’t mean the other guy would be forgiven that easily. Society expected him to do something, and he couldn’t really go on without doing it without his reputation, and manliness completely shattered. So, the Thursday the second guy came to school, and walked up to him, and tried to apologize, he simply walked away. He didn’t want to hear any excuses.
Then, at break… All fights start with a push. Then, that push is returned with another one, a bit harder than the first. Then the punching starts. To be fair, the first cat was the one that started that. We were already forming a circle around them, waiting for what was expected to happen, when he punched him in the nose. Cheers. Laughing. Damn it, we were cracking up as two of our friends were beating themselves to death. Kicks are rarely useful in one of those, all they do is make people lose their balance, and they usually land on places where they don’t hurt at all. Even if they do land, the other guy may grab your feet and throw you to the ground, and then you’re done for. There was… I remember a sound. It was like the cracking of whip, and then I saw the first cat falling down. And then I looked at the second one, and saw he was scared to death. There was blood on his hands. That’s when we broke the fight off. Because even though we enjoyed these things, we couldn’t let the kids kill each other. Two hours later, the second guy apologized again. They shook hands. Hugged, and smiled at each other. I love you, man. I love you, back.
I don’t think they talk much anymore.
One more thing. They weren’t always nice girls, I’ll tell you that. I mean, many times they weren’t even nice to look at, and even so I would end up with them. I don’t know why. It just felt nice to be wanted, I guess, but that just sounds so freaking sad. The thing was that I enjoyed it, and rarely remembered them as memorable events. They were kisses. Momentary distractions to my uneventful nightlife. Sometimes, I would get interested in somebody, but those moments rarely lasted. I remember almost getting into a relationship with a girl whom I had been hunting for a couple of weeks after finally making out with her. She asked me: -Was it just a kiss, or did it mean something more? And I went: -I think it was something more, right before I went up and ignored her for a couple of months. It’s not something I’m particularly proud of, but it’s not something I feel sorry for either. I know I didn’t hurt anybody, even if it looks like I did. Especially when you see the same girl you thought about being with necking somebody else you know in a party a couple of weeks after you cease communications with her.
But there was this one time… I didn’t feel bad about it. I just felt empty. Unfulfilled. It happened on one of those gatherings that are solely created to get people drunk. So, I was there, and I was starting to get to know this foreign girl who happened to be leaving in a couple of days. I liked her. Maybe it’s that my English is funny, and I made her laugh a lot, but I was really having fun just talking to her. It was me, and this other guy I absolutely adore, and we were goofing around. It wasn’t that we were spending all of our time with the girl, it was just momentary lapses. We would go out, dance around, drink, and then bump into her. So, this one time we stand up, and walk away. Then another girlfriend of ours comes, and says that the girl we were talking to has just told her that she fully intended to make out with somebody tonight, being her last night in Peru.
And now it’s a competition. And yeah, we’re following her. And trying to get her to dance. And I start realizing that maybe she’s giving my friend more attention than she is to me. And then my friend tells me that: -Come on, man. I’m not like you, I never get to do this. So, I back away slowly. Five minutes later their in some shadowy place tongue-wrestling.
And I say: I can live that. And carry on accordingly.
Half and hour later, however, I’m walking around and catch a glimpse of the girl again, who’s talking to one of her friends. I walk up to her, and start a conversation. Her friend is telling her how bad it is that she would just do that with a boy he just met, and the girl says: -It doesn’t matter. It’s just a kiss. I won’t remember him, I’ll remember you. You’re my friend. A kiss… It doesn’t really matter. And then she looks at me. And she puts her arms around my neck. –I could kiss him, and it wouldn’t really matter.
And of course, I go: -Yeah! She could kiss me, and it wouldn’t really matter. That’s a great idea. She smiles at me, and at this point, her friend has given up, and just walked away. Given up. I know I’ll end up with her in the immediate future, and I start thinking about it. It was the first time it had happened so easily. It usually took some effort. Not much effort, sometimes, yeah, but at least a little bit. Just a little bit of effort. And I keep looking at her eyes, waiting for it to happen, and thinking about her words. It doesn’t really matter. I won’t even remember him. It doesn’t matter. And so, when she puts my lips against her I feel completely numb. And then, when her friend comes back to split us up, I feel immeasurable relief.
I end up avoiding her all night. And vomiting in my friend’s carpet.
The End.
This was my second attempt at Gonzo journalism, and probably my worst try. I mean, I like what I wrote, but it wasn't really Gonzo journalism at all. It's something else entirely. I hope you liked it.
