Google "define:" fail.

I was selected to attend a three months script-writing workshop with a target output of writing a feature film. It’s something I always wanted to be tutored its guidelines. The workshop was reasonable in price, in timing, and in geography relative to where I live and work. More importantly, the workshop was sponsored by an Islamic community service centre – which I assume didn’t know my national ID says “Christian” when I was accepted- thus having room for me to play different mind tricks along the way with people from conservative stubborn backgrounds and all, apart from the usual conservative Copt school of thought which I happen to have dived deeper in. Guaranteed fun in other words.

The film I will have to write will have to be void of any sex. I can’t currently imagine how I – or anyone can write a long feature script that won’t strike you with the dumb idea of dude-there-is-sex-going-on-but-we-won’t-show-you-nah-nah-na-na but that’s another story. Yet that condition is feasible.. shameful and lame, yes.. but doable. The feature will also have to serve a “purpose”, I am not quite clear what’s the definition of this either but I trust myself on faking it when I have to. And finally it will have to be constructive in addressing that purpose.

Constructive... How will I ever be able to fake that?

I didn’t go.

Puttanesca.

Before I gave up wondering why everything

was a lot of nothing worth losing or getting back,

I took out a jar of olives, a bottle of capers,

a container of leftover tomato sauce with onions,

put a generous portion of each in olive oil

just hot enough but not too hot,

along with some minced garlic and a whole can of anchovies,

until the mixture smelled like a streetwalker's sweat,

then emptied it onto a half pound of penne, beautifully al dente,

under a heap of grated pecorino romano

in a wide bowl sprinkled with fresh chopped parsley.

If you had been there, I would have given you half,

and asked you whether its heavenly bitterness

made you remember anything you had once loved.

Michael Hefferman

Of sweat pores, Samia Roushdy and Hamid Sinno.

If there is to be a wonderland inside of Cairo, all the bastard fairies would have chosen Shoubra. A city inside a city with rules unspoken, only known to those who reside it long enough. That’s how my first love affair was like anyways.

It was always summer restricted, even though winter is the season when girls shop for love affairs. That was the only season I survived staying up late in that first-floor balcony on a very quiet street. Across the narrow street was another building, full of Shoubra residents. Some were noisy and veiled, some were old and retired and read newspapers in balconies during mornings – let it be winter or summer. I preferred all the noisy and veiled people in the neighborhood; they smothered us with food with and without occasions. On the last floor however, lived the family of Samia Roushdy, with the whole sons and grandsons formula.

There wasn’t much to do in the summer nights of the early nineties. If you were noisy and veiled, old and retired or a Samia Roushdy grandson, you spent your time guessing which pores will your next humid sweat particles come out from. Nobody used air conditioners in Shoubra. Not in the early nineties. Some do now, but the bastard fairies are working on killing them quietly in their sleep and giving back their place of residence to those worthy of it.

I usually waited till my grandmother found her balancing point in her sleep, and my aunt found hers on the sofa in front of a Mervat Amin movie on TV in a dark hall with a couple of flies making love on the light of the screen. I would then sit in the balcony, pretending to do nothing – and yes, that is doable, but I was really staring upwards to the third floor at the window where the Samia Roushdy grandson showed up sometimes. On the very few occasions he lit the room, he was never by the window, but probably doing something inside the room – a purpose he originally needed the working neon lamps to serve, with more than two flies gathering up and making love on the lit-lamps occasion. Thus, I never saw his face on the times he decided to quench my thirst and show up by the window. All I ever had, was a scene of the upper half of a man, lit by faint poor street lamps, resting one elbow on the window, smoking a cigarette with the other arm, topless and guessing which pores will his humid sweat particles come out of next. As he blew out smoke that eventually fell upon my hair, his radio blew endless tunes of Alphaville, Whitesnake and Supertramp, which were carved in my head.

Winter would come. His closed window would leave me lonely and my pores would leave me bored for no sweat particles would come out at this time of year. I would only depend on Khaled Habib and Nevine Shoukry and the Classic Rock show coming out of poor Casio radio speakers, knowing this is what the Samia Roushdy grandson is listening to behind that bleak closed wooden window.

Years passed and the bastard fairies couldn’t hide me for long and I was plucked out of Shoubra. I went to a lot of other places, which forcibly had air conditioners. I got introduced to people who were not noisy and were not veiled but who smothered themselves in Koky chicken nuggets and McDonald’s home delivery. And as time passed by, I blended in and eventually forgot the Classic rock vows we took and the two-floors apart love we made.

But here I am, in a time that can no longer be called the nineties, sitting in a room that had no air-conditioner, with Hamid Sinno’s voice pouring out of speakers that were neither poor nor Casio, and sweat pouring out of pores even though it’s a winter night. He would open his mouth to tell me how beautiful I am, but I ain’t listening. He would ask me if I intend to say anything witty from my “How about..” series, but I sit there doing nothing – not pretending. I would actually see his face in neon light, hand-memorize it in the dark and see it again in early morning light. I don’t seem to listen to any flies making love now. However, this is not Shoubra and those are not my rules, so I just fine tune and restrict the love I make to the amount he is willing to take – unlike what I’ve done with the Samia Roushdy grandson.