I entered Hotel Darna for the second time since our arrival in Morocco, an arrival in which 100 other (mostly white) Americans and myself (definitely white) piled in with little to no awareness of our absurd, colonialist presence. I, as this story will show, had still not gained that awareness.
The plan was that a group of us would take this opportunity for a rare night away from our host families and go clubbing before the 4am flight to Amsterdam everyone would be getting on but me. In actuality, only four of us had the energy to even leave the hotel.
We opted for a more modest activity: walking to a nearby ocean lookout at the edge of Rabat’s Kasbah. We, idiots that we are, thought we could just walk through this historic section of the city in the dead of night and right onto the lookout. The world, fully prepared to let us test the limits of our idiocy, responded in the form of a middle-aged Moroccan man who told us we could sit there half an hour for ten dirham.
We dangled our legs over the ledge of the lookout and chatted while sipping from a Sidi Ali water bottle filled with gin. A break in the conversation came, and as we looked silently at the dark Atlantic Ocean with whatever post-adolescent, Orientalist lens we had, Gloria decided:
“Guys, let’s go skinny dipping in the ocean.”
We tread into the ocean in our underwear when, looking back, we realized we had put our clothes much too close to the tide. We moved everything further up the beach and re-entered the water.
I am frankly embarrassed by how beautiful the next 30 minutes felt, so spare me from explaining the Zach-Braff-Garden-State-I’m-so-alive bullshit I was on that night. I could tell you how lovely it was, splashing around in the ocean under the moonlight with three of my friends. I could also tell you that the water was just perfect, as were the weight of the waves crashing in at a beautiful syncopated rhythm, but let’s just move on here.
We went back to the shore to change.
“I’m absolutely not going to put my shorts back over my wet underwear,” I said, “so whoever wants to see my ass has a free view and whoever doesn’t, look away.”
The exact moment my soaked, red boxer-briefs had reached my ankles, I hear a rush of water and a loud, “Shit!”
Momentarily incapacitated by the wet, cotton-mesh fabric around my ankles and the sea breeze on my genitals, I rushed to put on my shorts. Peering over my back, I watched Hubert and Agnes running after the slowly receding tide carrying our clothes.
My shirt was soaked and covered in sand, so I instead laid a damp, gray cardigan over my chest. I slid in the three large buttons in the front, and the second I let go the garment drooped down close to my navel.
I looked around the beach once, twice, and then asked, “Um, where are my shoes?”
My gray slip-on shoes from Gap were, and potentially are still to this day, in the Atlantic Ocean.
The walk from the ocean back to the hotel was a straight shot on the main street that bordered Rabat’s old city. Agnes captured my embarrassment walking barefoot in shorts and a soggy cardigan with a picture and cackled at the way the cardigan clung to my ass cheeks. It was fine—I would change and sleep in the hotel.
Maybe ten seconds after we entered, dripping, into the lobby, we were informed that I do not belong. It’s insane how four Americans, three white and one biracial, ever thought they could do anything inconspicuous in Morocco, but there I was left outside the hotel in sartorial purgatory.
The hotel staff knew I wasn’t staying there because only one of the multiple study abroad programs in that area was staying there that night. That program had two men, and it was only a coincidence that the unwelcomed third was baring his wet torso and toes at them. I, in a different study abroad program, had instead lied to my fairly conservative Moroccan host family and said I was sleeping over at another house.
Hubert, meanwhile, had lost his hotel key in the ocean. He banged on the door to wake his roommate, only to discover that the door would not open from in or out. The only key they were given was at that point probably bobbing its way to the neighboring city, Salé. Hubert’s roommate became anxious and claustrophobic—he had recently been locked in an elevator with the sheep his host family would slaughter that day for Eid Al Adha.
Agnes told a series of lies to the receptionist, unaware of the anxious boy pretending to sleep inside, in order to get the spare key to open the door.
Hubert returned my backpack to me, and I changed into a dry shirt. I could not explain to my host family, or rather make them sit through an explanation, of how I ended up wet, drunk, and shoeless at 1am and had nowhere else to sleep.
“Well, where will you even go?,” asked Gloria.
“I don’t know, back to the beach—stroll around there?”
“No, you will get murdered if you do that. No, no….Listen, my host brother is really cool, and he was like, ‘If anything happens to you, I can cover for you, so my mom and dad don’t find out.’ I’m gonna call him, and you’re going to just slip into my house and sleep there.”
Because of the confusion the old-school Nokia burner phones imparted on us poorly-adjusted, affluent Americans, we decided on a weird game of phone tag: me walking to the house, me calling Gloria, Gloria calling her brother to confirm that I’ll be at the door, her calling me back to confirm the confirmation—rather than her just...giving me her brother’s number.
Now defacing the main street of Rabat’s old city with my bare colonizer feet, I walked to the house and waited at the door. I remembered Gloria saying offhandedly, “Just tell him something believable for why you don’t have shoes,” and I had hoped her host brother simply wouldn’t notice.
“Why aren’t you wearing shoes?” The words escaped his mouth the second I entered the doorway.
“Oh, I, uh, didn’t know house rules, so I just, um, put them in my backpack before I came in.” I was really harnessing that cultural training given by Mama Aziza, wherein she mimed squatting over a Turkish toilet for us.
Her host brother laughed momentarily—but weeks later Gloria would inform me that the two of them actually spent a solid hour laughing about me.
I was to sleep on the first floor, which had multiple rooms spread across the perimeter with a large courtyard in the middle. The rest of the family slept upstairs, and I had to leave by 6am before the parents could discover me.
I am the only one to blame for having done this many stupid things, endured this much embarrassment, and yet still I thought, ‘Why not some more?’
For the first few years I told this story, I would skip this next part and say that I woke up at 6am and snuck out. I then found small flip flops lying next to some trash in the old medina (American skepticism of trash systems in the Global South meant that no one ever questioned me), rinsed them in the very ocean where I lost my shoes (believable enough dramatic parallelism), and returned home.
Instead, I lead with my stupid, gay, colonizer penis.
There was one corner in the room that allowed me to connect to the wifi, just close enough to the outlet where I needed to charge my phone, but far enough that the wifi would continue to drop in and out. I messaged a Moroccan man I had been chatting with, who somehow agreed to meet up with me even after discovering I had no shoes.
While nailing down the details of the meet-up, I silently searched every inch of the downstairs with my cell phone flashlight, including crawling in and out of a bedroom window, for shoes. The only footwear I found were swimming flippers, which were about 3-feet long and had been used by Gloria’s host brother during the aforementioned slaughtering of sheep on Eid Al Adha.
I instead snuck quietly out of the house and placed two plastic bags on my feet. I raced down the remainder of Mohammed V Street, walking past at least one group of Moroccan men who noticed the loud swishing of the plastic bags on my feet, and hailed a cab.
My hook up greeted me downstairs and then snuck me through his living room where his mother was sleeping on the couch. I think when I finally decided I was ready to tell this part of the story, I still lied and said that he didn’t tell me he lived with his mom. I’m almost certain he had, and it didn’t stop me.
We sat on a low-seated couch in his bedroom, one foot away from a large flat screen from which he played...Katy Perry music videos. We had some form of sex along the way, and then he told me that I could only sleep for a couple hours and would have to leave before his mom woke up.
We slept more than a couple hours. When we awoke, he realized he would have to explain to his mom--almost definitely unaware that her son is gay--who the fuck I was. He panicked for a little, while I reflected somewhat on my actions, though certainly not enough on the potential repercussions.
He walked out of the room and explained to his mother that I was an American friend of a friend who suddenly needed a place to stay in the middle of the night. I awkwardly greeted her as she just looked at me, and then I left with my heels hanging off the back of his tiny flip flops.
I returned to my host home expecting questions, but no one said a word.
I spent a few days concerned about the wet, sandy clothes stashed in my backpack. I did not know exactly what my host family’s reaction would be, but considering that they told me to never eat out at restaurants again after one bout of food poisoning, I didn’t really want to find out. I placed the sandy clothes in the middle of my laundry basket and attempted to quickly hand wash them while my host mother tended to her own meticulous laundry routine on the opposite side of the roof.
I had almost finished when my host mother, noticing me washing clothes in the wrong order, flipped over my basket to teach me her system yet another time. We both spent a second staring at the article laying on top: bright red, cotton-mesh boxer briefs covered in sand.
Darren
Photographs by Darren
Comments