the_taliban_shuffle_-_kim_barker

that money was an issue, for any of us.
The Fun House soon threw a Halloween party, which also marked
my thirty-sixth birthday. Farouq and I made another trip to the World
of Child toy store, where I bought a semiautomatic BB rie and a BB
pistol. Wearing shorts, a tank top, and Doc Martens, I was the comicbook
character Tank Girl. Farouq made plans to come to the party—for
years we had celebrated each other’s birthdays, even though birthdays
were typically not observed in Afghanistan and many Afghans didn’t
know their actual age. For his costume, Farouq took the easy route. He
dressed as a member of the Taliban, although his turban and matching
long shirt and pants could just as easily have qualied him as a Pashtun
tribal member in the south. That was the thing about the Taliban—they
blended.
More than a hundred people crammed into the house and the yard
outside. We had Marilyn Monroe, a pirate, Death, the Quaker Oats guy,
Cat Woman, a convincing Kim Jong Il, and a belly dancer, along with
various sexy witches. Tom bought all the bandages from various
pharmacies in Kabul and wrapped himself like a mummy. We danced
in a large group, until Tom started to sweat through his bandages,
which produced a stench similar to either an antibiotic ointment gone
bad or dead people. A shady Afghan American with an Elvis hairdo
showed up at about 2 AM—the month before, he had crashed a barbecue
at the Fun House and peddled toothpaste tubes full of cocaine for $150
each, snapped up by many foreigners, who judged it bad cocaine but
minty fresh. His was a novel business plan—in a country ooded with
marijuana and opiates, this man was importing cocaine. (Eventually he
figured out the profitable angle—exporting heroin—and was jailed.)
For Halloween, the Afghan Elvis arrived not with drugs but with an
entourage including DJ Besho—whose name meant “DJ Diamond” in
Dari—an Afghan rapper who set up an impromptu show in the living
room. He cleared the dance oor with his rap, which included shoutouts
to Wardak and other Afghan provinces. That eectively ended the
party. On their way out the door, a member of the rap entourage
pocketed my housemate’s cell phone.
Later it seemed as if this Halloween blowout was the last gasp of the
kind of freewheeling fraternity-party craziness that had become normal