The Sixth Part in which Steve has an Unsatisfactory Restaurant Experience
- Tipping was mandatory
Tell me if this counts as baksheesh: One morning I ran out to get a couple bottles of the viscous, super-sweet, neon solution that passes for orange juice in Luxor. The way to the market took me past a restaurant where three young soldiers were lounging around a patio table. Wearing dark combat uniforms and heavily armed, they exhibited the kind of excrutiating boredom distinctive to teenagers, which is exactly what they looked like. As I passed, one of them said something I didn’t quite catch. I stopped. I shouldn’t have.
“I’m sorry,” I said, eyeing their serious-looking military hardware and speaking with what I hoped looked like great friendship. “Did you say something?” One of them stood up, nonchalantly retrieved his rifle from the chair next to him and sauntered nearer. He looked even younger up close. “American?” he asked. He wasn’t smiling, but he wasn’t exactly not smiling either. It looked like he’d been working hard on his first mustache without much success. “Yes, American,” I said, unveiling the winning smile I normally hold in reserve for job interviews and encounters with the DMV. “Can I help you guys with something?” I wondered why he’d picked up his gun, then decided not to wonder about that anymore. He may have considered the bonds of fellowship uniting our respective nations to be so strong and universally acknowledged as to be not worth mentioning, because he didn’t mention them.
“One pound,” he said, blandly. His two buddies, still sprawled across their chairs with elaborate indifference, turned their faces toward us with something approaching vague interest. “Why?” I asked, really wanting to know. For explanation, he tapped his chest. “You…give me…one pound.” The words “no baksheesh” formed briefly in my throat where they silently choked to death. On the one hand, I felt that this was an egregious abuse of the baksheesh principle. On the other, these were kids with guns. I fished out a pound note and handed it over. He accepted it without comment. I nodded and turned to leave. “Eh, eh,” he said. He pointed first to one inert friend: “One pound ”, and then to the other: “One pound.”
Damn and damn. Luckily I had two more pound notes in my pocket. One-pound notes are the standard currency of baksheesh in Egypt, and surprisingly hard to come by. I paid them off and fled. Back at the hotel, I breathlessly recounted the whole shabby business to Sweet Apricot, who was outraged, although by that time she existed in a more or less perpetual state of righteous indignation. She thought me craven and stupid for letting the punks shake me down without a fight. That I would have been fighting armed soldiers over a buck-fifty was, in her view, irrelevent. Right is right, wrong is wrong, and you’ll get my three pounds when you pry it out of my cold, dead hand. I’m not saying Sweet Apricot was wrong, but I am saying that on that day, on that hot, fly-blown street, I saw no profit in extending the uncomfortable association any longer than necessary. If three pounds was the price of a ticket out of there, I was content to pay it. In hindsight, I don’t generally regard the incident as baksheesh-related, since it felt more like armed robbery. Then again, anybody who knows me will tell you I’m a nervous sort, and prone to self-dramatization.
Next Time: A drama unfolds!