In these final frenzied days of shedding everything we’ve accumulated in the last four years, we generally are taking a major

Leaving Egypt: The Final Frenzy
Including a confession of uncoolness

In these final frenzied days of shedding everything that we’ve accumulated in the last four years, we are, generally speaking, taking a major financial loss: selling stuff in a hurry for a lot less than we could have gotten if we had done it strategically; or just giving it away.

Hopefully the cost of the sell-off will not negate the advantage that we’ve enjoyed here in the low cost of third-world living. Overall.

Tallied separately, our second-to-last day in town was a bit of a wash.

We start with:
2200 Egyptian pounds

(» $380 U.S.)

. The security deposit, of which we hope to get back as much as possible following today's inspection by the landlord.

The landlord, Mr. Saad (pronounced like sod), a kind-hearted father of two, tends to look for ways to avoid paying for repairs, which I suppose is how the landlording game is played, God bless ’im. At the same time, Mr. Saad (his first name; the family name is Ashour, like "assure") is a little squeamish when it comes to the hard-nosed negotiating part of being a landlord. We sense that the unseen landlady is the force behind the key property management decisions.

I came to exploit Saad’s discomfort. Like when the door on the washing machine broke and he argued that we should pay the full cost of it. I said I would be glad to, but that I’d be taking it with me to America when we left. He caved.

When he came down for the inspection visit, Saad brought backup in the form of his son Noamaan (pronounced "no man."), a peppy, callow version of the father. So as we sat down at the dining room table (scratched), I squared off against two sets of bespectacled eyes, dim and wary.

I confessed, and Saad deducted the estimated cost of:

- miscellaneous damages

Hardwood floor: Gouged by claws of dog wriggling under the bed every night

Glass lid for stovetop: Shattered into infinite pieces when I dropped it while cleaning, although, for the record, the hinge was already bent

Shower head: Smashed by toddler

Etc.

We also confessed but Saad, flustered, forgot to deduct:

- 0

Half the plastic seat covers: Torn by dog

Kitchen exhaust fan: Melted from overheating, although it’s debatable whether we should be held responsible.

We had the sense there were other things stepped on, cracked, smashed and thrown away, that we had forgotten about. After two-plus years of hard livin’, it all starts to blur.

Then Saad says he expects we’ll pay for:

repainting the place for the benefit of the next tenants.

> Mr. Saad claims the outgoing tenant usually pays in Egypt.

C I told him the American way is that painting in between tenants is part of the landlord’s cost of doing business.

Saad and Noamaan quickly offered a compromise:

- half the cost of repainting the place.

Which I accepted with no resistance, beyond some subdued adolescent-like pouting, because:

Mr. Saad doesn’t realize that scores of gallons of dog piss have saturated the living room floor and rug.

He doesn’t realize the back of one of the couches is bare frame because we cannibalized the fabric on the back to patch something that Zoser (the dog) destroyed.

He didn’t notice that the dog had worn down a couple of the couch cushions to near-baldness.

The kid removed all the drawer knobs in the house.

The bottom line is that Saad gave us back:
= 800 pounds

(» $138)

This sheepishly gotten sum had no time to corrupt us because, as it happened, it quickly passed into the pocket of the security guy who sits in front of our apartment building.

Ahmed is actually one of a small cast of slave-wage men who sit in a shack on the curb for 12 hours a day, most days of the month, and perform measly little tasks for the middle-class tenants of our building and the one next door. Ahmed is our favorite. Good company. Mordant wit. Helpful. Nice guy. Wife had a kid just a couple months after ours was born. We planned to give Ahmed a farewell super-tip just before we left. This is above and beyond a previous emergency grant to replace his eyeglasses, which broke when he fell down the stairs at the building next door; and a small medical grant when he fell down the stairs (a different time) and broke his arm.

A couple weeks before zero hour, Ahmed confided that his boss (the pimp of the security guys, a shriveled and malevolent-looking 60-year-old) planned to fire him soon and so saw no reason to give Ahmed his final wages, and the rent was due. We gave Ahmed the rent, 200 pounds. (He lives in the low-low-low rent district two hours south of Cairo. Calculate that commute on both sides of a 12-hour shift and imagine how much time he gets to spend with his baby son.)

Added to the previous 200-pound rent grant, our 800-pound deposit-remainder made a nice round thousand. So we gave it to him.

That left:

zero pounds

and zero piasters.

I gazed upon my empty palm. Reflected that I had quit my job and that they had quit paying me. We had only two days left on the continent, to-do items on the list were getting cancelled and jettisoned in a mounting mania. Nevertheless, as I surveyed the paltry leftover possessions that had accumulated in the living room, I grasped for a way to convert them into cash. Half-tipped over on the sofa was a box full of frames from pictures we had de-framed. I recalled a shop where we had a painting framed (we snickered at their sign advertising "FREAMS -- MATING.").

Who, in this town, I asked myself, realizes the value of a frame more than the man who sells them to make his living?

So I stuffed our son into the car seat and went down to see the freams and mating man.

I plunked the whole boxful on their worktable.

The owner was like a brick wall.

"I already have all I need," he said, apologetically.

"Make me an offer," I said with the phoniest of bravado.

"I don’t want them," he replied.

I pretty much begged him to give me 20 pounds ($3.45) for 12 frames. He gave me:
+ 15 pounds

(» $3.50)

I accepted it in humiliation.

The shop next door sold chicken "shish tawouk" sandwiches. In self-pity I ordered one and a Coke. Cost:

10 pounds

and 50 piasters

(» $1.80)

Or so I was told by the churlish teen-aged boy who seemed to represent the joint.

Then I waited for the tawouk for far too long. Beaten down financially, impatient, I paced, with the boy clinging to my side. But I didn’t want to stroll too far to the left because the frame guys would snicker at me again, and I didn’t want to stroll to the right because the churlish young man was trying to make time with a headscarved teen-age female who also apparently worked there, although sitting on the stoop in front of the store they could well have been patrons, neighborhood kids, loiterers. For lack of options I walked into the sandwich shop, now abandoned by the employees. I set the kid on the lone chair and let him play with their phone.

I peeked through the hole in the wall to look at the food preparation area and wished I hadn’t. Sitting on an un-plugged-in salad-bar cart were metal bowls of various food items of unknown age, placed wherever, not covered, with flies passing by, and with the dusty outside air breezing in through the giant opening in the far wall, big as a loading-dock bay. Never mind, I told myself: You simply have a warped sense of how sanitized things ought to be because you’re from a rich developed country. You will not die from eating some slightly old, possibly dirty food with a few fly flecks in it. These folks do it all the time. You’re not trying to suggest you’re better than them, are you?

I suppressed my revulsion and walked, with the kid in tow, around the building. On the street the churlish guy was tormenting some little girl (his much-younger sister?), picking her up by the jaw. I walked to the loading-dock-size opening, looking for any sign that someone was working on my sandwich. Some dude walked out in street clothes and scuttled away. Then in one instant I saw a guy in a white chef’s jacket and kitchen-worker-type pants as he walked out and -- zoom in on this -- wiped his hands on the thick drape that half-covers up the kitchen area. The drape was absolutely blackened with old grease and dirt and unknown matter. As he casually pressed his hands against the drape, I envisioned that action repeated ten dozen times daily by every nose-wiping, no-soap-using layabout who passed through. I did not need to see this. And I worked at Wendy’s as a teen-ager, so I’ve been hardened.

I queased out. Freaked out. And then did one of the most uncool things I’ve done in all the time I’ve been over here.

The churlish guy had momentarily allowed the little girl to escape. I strode up to him. "Number one, don’t hit the girl, she is small," I said in Arabic. "Number two, I am waiting a long time, and I don’t want the tawouk." Why? he asked. "Because the restaurant is dirty, so give me my 10 pounds." He was smiling casually, stalling, asking questions, asking if I was a foreigner, trying to enjoin me in small talk. I felt sure he planned to keep my money. This, I could not abide. Not today. I went from testy to white-hot and demanded, "You have 10 pounds? Give me my 10 pounds." I got in his face. "Now. Give it to me." When he kept talking I jabbed my fingers into his pocket: "You have 10 pounds in here?" This is called low-level physical assault.

All this while I was holding my 21-month-old son in my left arm.

This makes me

= an *sshole.

"Total f***ing idiot" also would cover it.

But the young man did return my

+ 10 pounds

And even, as I walked away, followed me and insisted I take back my 50 piasters as well.

Perhaps I was getting ready to transition back to the pushy/impatient/customer-is-always-righteous mode of America. More likely I was just tired and stressed from getting ready for the move, and my inner asshole came out.

Sorry, guy.

I headed across town with the kid to do one last to-do item.

The seatbelts on the car had broken for the third time. We’d hate to die on our last trip to Cairo airport. While the mechanic finished retooling someone’s engine, his arms outrageously coated in motor oil past the elbow, the kid and I cooled our heels in the nearby streetside café, which in downscale Greater Cairo means plastic chairs stuck in the street (in a so-called parking lane that encroached so far into the street that the charcoal tray of your sheesha pipe rattles from the cars whizzing past). The sun set in exhaustion and twilight burnished the plastic tables.

In the muggy supermarket next door, I spent

- a few pounds

On juice for the kid

and potato chips to share.

Then I sat down at the café and ordered, again, a shish tawouk. Cost:

41 pounds

1.50 tip

2 pound tip to another waiter who ran to buy me a two-pack of toilet paper because ...

The kid spilled, and

They don’t do napkins at this kind of café.

We’d have been in the negative column for the day if I’d had to pay the mechanic, but he told me to come back the next day. So I still had a couple of pound notes molting in my pocket from the picture-frame cash-in and sandwich confrontation.

So we’ll say we broke even on the day.
-- May 26, 2005

We start with:	2200 Egyptian pounds (» $380 U.S.)	. The security deposit, of which we hope to get back as much as possible following today's inspection by the landlord.
The landlord, Mr. Saad (pronounced like sod), a kind-hearted father of two, tends to look for ways to avoid paying for repairs, which I suppose is how the landlording game is played, God bless ’im. At the same time, Mr. Saad (his first name; the family name is Ashour, like "assure") is a little squeamish when it comes to the hard-nosed negotiating part of being a landlord. We sense that the unseen landlady is the force behind the key property management decisions. I came to exploit Saad’s discomfort. Like when the door on the washing machine broke and he argued that we should pay the full cost of it. I said I would be glad to, but that I’d be taking it with me to America when we left. He caved. When he came down for the inspection visit, Saad brought backup in the form of his son Noamaan (pronounced "no man."), a peppy, callow version of the father. So as we sat down at the dining room table (scratched), I squared off against two sets of bespectacled eyes, dim and wary.
I confessed, and Saad deducted the estimated cost of:	- miscellaneous damages	Hardwood floor: Gouged by claws of dog wriggling under the bed every night Glass lid for stovetop: Shattered into infinite pieces when I dropped it while cleaning, although, for the record, the hinge was already bent Shower head: Smashed by toddler Etc.
We also confessed but Saad, flustered, forgot to deduct:	- 0	Half the plastic seat covers: Torn by dog Kitchen exhaust fan: Melted from overheating, although it’s debatable whether we should be held responsible.
We had the sense there were other things stepped on, cracked, smashed and thrown away, that we had forgotten about. After two-plus years of hard livin’, it all starts to blur.
Then Saad says he expects we’ll pay for:	repainting the place for the benefit of the next tenants.	> Mr. Saad claims the outgoing tenant usually pays in Egypt. C I told him the American way is that painting in between tenants is part of the landlord’s cost of doing business.
Saad and Noamaan quickly offered a compromise:	- half the cost of repainting the place.	Which I accepted with no resistance, beyond some subdued adolescent-like pouting, because:
Mr. Saad doesn’t realize that scores of gallons of dog piss have saturated the living room floor and rug. He doesn’t realize the back of one of the couches is bare frame because we cannibalized the fabric on the back to patch something that Zoser (the dog) destroyed. He didn’t notice that the dog had worn down a couple of the couch cushions to near-baldness. The kid removed all the drawer knobs in the house.
The bottom line is that Saad gave us back:	= 800 pounds	(» $138)

I pretty much begged him to give me 20 pounds ($3.45) for 12 frames. He gave me:	+ 15 pounds (» $3.50)	I accepted it in humiliation.
The shop next door sold chicken "shish tawouk" sandwiches. In self-pity I ordered one and a Coke. Cost:	10 pounds and 50 piasters (» $1.80)	Or so I was told by the churlish teen-aged boy who seemed to represent the joint.

This makes me	*= an sshole.**	"Total f***ing idiot" also would cover it.
But the young man did return my	+ 10 pounds	And even, as I walked away, followed me and insisted I take back my 50 piasters as well.

In the muggy supermarket next door, I spent	- a few pounds	On juice for the kid and potato chips to share.
Then I sat down at the café and ordered, again, a shish tawouk. Cost:	41 pounds 1.50 tip 2 pound tip to another waiter who ran to buy me a two-pack of toilet paper because ...	The kid spilled, and They don’t do napkins at this kind of café.