Pedro Loved the Sheesha

It was an all-encompassing, even throbbing desire. The sheesha was like a man inside who drove him to ruin. It possessed a strawberry silkiness, and Pedro quaffed until the small hours. At least, until 9pm, when CSI went on. Pedro watched the television like a man on drugs, and that drug was the sheesha. He cried out to his housemates, "I am seeing spiders, and they refuse to give up the remote."

Pedro regailed us of his Turkish exploits, of his proclivity for coffee and smoke in the cafes of Istanbul, where he would clutch a half-dozen wenches at his side each night and order each one to sing his favourite bagpipe dirges. "You there, in the brown burkah, your timbre is way off," he would yell one particular night. And "you sound nothing at all like my daddy's bagpipes." Pedro loved to harrass the wenches, and he promised the Western world. But he was about to encounter a culture shock that would make him wet his pants, and scream like a whiny boy with his socks on uncomfortably tight. "Please, someone," he said, "show me to the nearest hosiery outlet store." Pedro was always wanting new socks.