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<A brief snippet of immigrant US> A short time ago, I lived in Houston with 3 Pakistanis: a devout Muslim & his coke-addict son, & a germaphobe who had a broken leg & used crutches. The devout uncle had been a security guard at the US consulate in Karachi, & after retirement...
...they awarded him US citizenship with one family member. He had 14 kids, but he chose to bring his youngest son with him, who had somehow become an alcoholic & a coke-addict in their neighborhood of Malir, Karachi. I worked at a ‘casino’ that was registered as a gift shop.
My roommate was the germaphobe uncle in his 30s. He made sure nobody sat at his chair or side of the sofa, & wiped everything with his special cloth before touching it (door knobs, faucets, etc). He would throw out stuff on the suspicion that someone touched it, once threw out...
...a whole pan of food on the suspicion that a visitor touched the ladel. (He hadn’t.) He & the other uncle worked night shifts at gas stations; the boy worked at a Taco Bell. They all loved watching Van Damme & Vin Diesel movies. Almost everyone at the apartment complex was...
...Hispanic. I became good friends with the boy. He’d tell me stories about violent gangs of Malir, about several deaths due to the corrupt Sindhi varieties of alcohol, about Hispanic girls. Uncle was desperate to fix him, but even here he’d bring younger desi kids home with...
...him & do lines of coke. Then one day things got violent. One of his friends had rented a DVD from a desi uncle’s video/porn store. (I did say this was a short time ago!) Many of the porn stores in Houston were, & I guess are, run by desis. They returned it late, & refused to..
...pay the overcharge. Things got heated, boy picked up one of those landline phones from the counter & started hitting the owner’s face with it. His father pleaded the owner to drop the charges but he refused. He got 3 years jail time. I talked to him later once; he said he...
...was completely out when it happened, doesn’t remember a thing, & that he is terrified of the people around him in the prison. I worked in the ‘gift shop’ with 2 desi guys, K & S. Both were doing Masters at a university. K was in love with a girl he had met in Karachi, but he..
...met a white woman here & they started dating. K was 5’2” in early 20s, & woman was 6’5” in mid-30s. Soon she got pregnant & they married. But K’s girl in Karachi refused to leave him, & was adamant that she’d marry only him. K’s mother hated the lower-class Khi girl & still...
...dreamt of marrying her nice son to a nice upper-class memon family. The store was owned by a shady uncle who never came. He had left it to K & S to manage, both of whom pocketed extra cash from the slots every night. It was rather depressing watching same old (mostly white)...
...men & women glued to their slot machines from morning to closing time. The door was always kept locked, & we looked at the camera screen before allowing anyone in. Still one night, several black men with guns pushed their way in with K. They held us down & took all the money.
Apparently, this wasn’t the first time the store had been robbed. Since it was legally a gift-shop, we couldn’t go to cops, which is why such stores (there were many) were favorites of the city’s robbers. I left it, & started working at a gas station at a predominantly black...
...neighborhood. That neighborhood was a different world. I worked the night shift with a security guard & kept a gun under the counter. The guard was from the Dominican Republic, in his 20s, mostly watched Hispanic hiphop videos, flirted with girls there, & was always paranoid..
...that his gf took too long to pick his call up, so she must be talking to other guys. He also had a DUI, his license had been revoked, yet drove a car every night to work. Told me, dude as long you don’t get caught it’s all fine. The most interesting time at the station was...
...weekend nights after clubs closed at 2 am. They’d turn the station lot into a club, cars blazing hip hop with v v loud bass, drunk men & girls dancing (& peeing), folks trading drugs. Until cops would show up with their sirens & shoo everyone away. The drug peddlers and...
...prostitutes always returned. In the mornings, two old black guys would come to stock up drinks & beer for 2 packs of cigarettes, Joe & Billy Joe. Joe was from New Orleans, had left it to go to Chicago years ago, but met a girl on the bus & decided to drop with her in Houston.
Billy Joe had early Alzheimer’s. He had been a cook in the army in Vietnam. He spoke of the time he saw his grandmother chained to a tree by white folks of his town, & the time in Vietnam when helicopter pilots would invite him to shoot ‘gooks’. Then when he returned home, he...
...found his wife cheating on him, went back to Vietnam, married a Vietnamese woman there, & brought her here. Now she had tongue cancer. A Gujarati guy owned the store along with 8 other stores, & a Punjabi woman managed them all for him. Blacks of the neighborhood had their...
...stereotype of Pakistanis: v v shrewd (chalu), quick-witted, always on the look out for opportunities, sharp eyes everywhere. Often in the mornings, White truck drivers would show up to fill up & yell ‘Hurry up! This is America’ & would pass snide remarks like ‘moochers’ on...
...blacks of the neighborhood. The prostitutes of the neighborhood would take out cash from the worst places. (I still wonder how the germaphobe guy managed to work at gas stations.) All sorts of scammers came who’d slide someone else’s cash to you. Once a white couple clearly...
...high on Meth left the station & got hit by a truck. A helicopter soon came to pick them up but I saw the man dying. Later, I found out that the shady owner of the ‘gift store’ had to leave the country, & left it entirely to K. I heard that K also started a consulting agency...
...that hires IT professionals, train them briefly, cook up their resumes, & place them. He had invested over a million dollars in bitcoin. He also has kids with both of the women. I left the devout uncle’s apartment & briefly lived with my new friend, the Dominican guard. End.
