A Saudi Customs Officer caught me with a joint in my pocket at the Riyadh, Saudi Arabia Airport. The forty-seven days following that indiscretion proved even more unsettling than a marriage I had of a similar duration. Given the choice, however, I'd go back to the Saudi jail before I'd get married again.
Anyway, marriage was not what the Saudi Customs Officer that caught me had in mind. Although it did seem like he spent an inordinate amount of time looking at my butt during the strip search. Two-tenths gram of marijuana rolled into a joint was all that remained of a sinful sojourn to Thailand. The weed and some pictures, that is.
I tried to eat the joint, but the Agent put his thumb and forefinger between my cheek and gum before I could swallow. He fished out the joint, checked all my other suspicious bodily orifices and transferred me to the Narcotics Police Station.
After some initial investigation, I was admitted to the holding cell of the Narcotics Division. It was a room about the size of a tennis court, housing more than sixty men. The yellow walls were illuminated around the clock by rows of fluorescent lights. The days were spent silently facing the shiny enameled wall alternately sitting and standing at the whim of an omni-present guard. The nights passed trying to sleep shoulder to shoulder, head to foot, on thin blankets. A human jigsaw puzzle made from sixty unrelated pieces.
I was allowed a phone call on my first day in jail, which I felt certain, would lead to my timely release. If anyone ever makes a survey of times when you don't want to talk to an answering machine, they should note this one. I left my dire message after the beep as instructed and began having serious doubt about the immediacy of my release. Shortly after making the call, my head was shaved. The trusty sold me a towel for five-dollars and a stick for brushing my teeth for another dollar and a quarter. He also hit me up for $2.75 for the balladeers. These were explained to be the people that cleaned the jail and not crooners as the name might suggest. Anyway, the fee was not negotiable. I believe the deal was that you either paid the money or you became a balladeer.
During those initial days I was taught to accomplish certain actions of toilet without toilet paper, which further demonstrated why Arabs don't use their left hands for eating. A fellow prisoner demonstrated dishwashing for me. He poured a little Tide Detergent on the stainless steel tray and rinsed it with water. Later I watched the balladeers clean the floor by the toilets with the same Tide and buckets of water. When I enquired what we used for bathing I was handed a small box of Tide and a bucket fresh from floor duty. Had it not been for the fact that the toothbrush sticks were so effective as not to require toothpaste, I'm sure I would have used it for that purpose as well. Obviously Tide was an all-purpose detergent. It just goes to show how a person can be mislead by advertising. Until this I thought Tide was mostly for washing clothes.
The trusty, Abdullah, was generally regarded as crazy. I liked the man, personally. He couldn't have been much over five feet tall but he had to weigh close to 300 pounds. Mostly butt. But as far as crazy, just because he'd spent six years in one room with sixty strangers and the lights on twenty-four hours a day, not necessarily. He did like to make speeches in the evenings. I don't mean weak recitations of rules, I'm talking chest pounding, boo-hooing, "Let's win this one for the Gipper", sermons. I couldn't understand a word he said, every time I asked for a translation I was told "He is just cray-cy." Indeed the atmosphere among the Arab speaking inmates came closer to pity for the man than respect. I was reminded of Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart and wondered why Americans hadn't been as perceptive.
Five days after I was arrested I went to what I think was an Arraignment. I'm not sure. The Indian translator didn't squander much of his time on superfluities such as information about what was going on in my life. He asked me how I pleaded to the charge of possession of two grams of marijuana. I corrected him that it was two-tenths of a gram and confessed that I was guilty. Usually humility will bring mercy from Arabs. I was guilty and it was pretty obvious.
The judge looked as though he had suffered a stroke. He was paralyzed on one side and wore thick glasses. I heard him say "Khalas, khalas," and wave his good hand, which I translated as "Enough, enough," and expected to be released at any moment.
The next day, early in the morning, my name was called with others. A bi-lingual prisoner told me I was being transferred to the Central Jail. I didn't take it as a good sign.
"The Central Jail is very good. You will like it there," my broken-English speaking jail mate consoled, "you can smoke!"
"Rather like Valhalla, huh?" I replied feeling uncharacteristically depressed.
An old Bedouin who had come to my defense during the debate over shaving my head asked the translator why I was unhappy. From his spot behind a wall he put two knobby fingers to his leathern lips and danced a cat-like jig, his nonverbal way of telling me, "Life at the Central Jail is sweet. You can smoke."
As soon as I stepped out of the van onto the white-hot cement at the Central Jail, I remembered my shoes. They had been taken from me at the Narcotics jail and not returned. Now I was dancing like a cat on a hot tin roof and sure enough my feet were smoking. I flashed to the old man dancing a jig and realized he had meant for me not to forget my shoes. If only I had studied Arabic more during the eighteen months I'd worked there. The guards and obligatory by-standers took great delight in my screams and jerked gyrations as I tried to traverse a cement parking lot in the most expeditious of manners, all the while chained by the ankle to an Englishman.
Two years earlier, my ex-wife talked me into going to a fire-walking seminar in Los Angeles to fix me. I spent five hundred dollars to cross fourteen feet of two thousand degree coals barefooted and thereby become impervious to adversity. I decided to put what I learned into practice. Damn it, I'd never really needed the ability to walk on fire before but now I did.
Well, I think it would have worked except for the screaming Brit at the other end of my chain. He hadn't been to the seminar. He didn't know he should subliminally convince himself the sun-baked, near-molten concrete was actually cool moss and harmless. His shouts of "My bloody feet are burning! Wake up you silly bastard, can't you smell the flesh burning!" caused me to lose concentration as I attempted to internalize the mantra "cool moss, cool moss." As a result we shrieked and stumbled to the nearest shade in record three-legged race time. Unlike the Los Angeles seminar there was no new age nymph waiting at the other end to spray my feet with cool water, just a snaggle-toothed guard with a sub-machine gun laughing at my misery.
During my admission to the Central Jail I was allowed to speak with the American Consul who had come to visit. He collected the details of my crime and informed me that the best thing for me to do was be a model prisoner. His best guess about my sentence was deportation sometime within the next two years. He promised to visit when he could, insisting there was little he could do. He assured me the electronics company I worked for would be more effective in securing my release.
The introduction to my potential home for the next two-years left me utterly speechless. At first sight I couldn't believe such a place existed outside of a theme park. Six Flags over Hell or something. The chipped, filthy walls hinted at once having been yellow. No longer noticed notices in Arabic peeled along with the paint. The cement floor was worn black and smooth from years of pacing by anxious inmates. A loudspeaker broadcast prayers and sermons in Arabic. The only moisture in the air came from the bodies of men. Beyond the seemingly unattainable hope of individual freedom, everyone hoped foremost that the air-conditioning would soon be repaired.
Section Five was known as the "Meet and Greet Section". Everyone passed through here on their way to longer-term residency in Sections segregated by crime category. Section One was murderers, Section Thirteen was alcoholics, Section Six was sex offenders, etc. Five was intended to be an indoctrination.
My classification of "Foreigner" and subsequent transfer took four days. During that time a Saudi Shipping Magnate distantly befriended me. He bought me a blanket, cigarettes, a bar of soap, and a real toothbrush from the murderers at the end of the hall. They apparently had the sales concession for this Section and no one questioned it. He even gave me an old onion sack to carry my kit in. On the weekend he invited me and the Brit to watch censored reruns of The Waltons and Wally Gator cartoons on the TV in his room. He said he'd been to college in the United States and was glad to have company that could speak English.
Apparently some of his employees had conspired to smuggle a large quantity of marijuana from Thailand to Saudi Arabia using the company as a front. They were caught. As is the practice, my friend, the President of the company and therefore the person ultimately responsible, was brought to jail pending an investigation. He seemed sure, as did we all at first, that he would be released very soon. In the mean time he felt the humbling experience was healthy for him. After ten days of captivity with no end in sight, I felt as healthy as I ever wanted to be.
There to meet me at the Foreigner's Section was another Englishman. He lead us down the long dingy corridor to the room reserved for English speakers when there are any. It measured ten feet by thirteen and was devoid of furniture except for an overburdened refrigerator and some metal shelving. Beds were made of folded blankets and laid out over every inch of floor space. We were lucky to have so much room.
Three of my jail mates, Dave, David, and Allen, were British. I met Dave the night I was arrested. He came into Riyadh on a Saudia Airlines flight from Bangkok and expected to change planes a few hours later for a return to London. He had no business or desire to be in Saudi Arabia except to change planes. Dogs sniffed his luggage during the transfer. Subsequently, joints packaged as Thai cigarettes were discovered. The luggage was traced to Dave and Dave was carted to jail.
At first he called himself a Financial Planner but as we've gotten to know each other fairly well he has confessed to being an insurance salesman. A nearly full, aluminum ashtray and pack of Marlboro cigarettes were never far from his face. Even in sleep he insisted on having cigarettes near him.
David was the man who met me at the door to Section Four. Eight months prior, the police raided his apartment and found a quantity of wine and homemade moonshine. The two-year sentence he received for the few gallons of alcohol will make him fifty-one when he gets out.
David taught English to bank tellers before the police cut his career short. A man of character, he maintains an amazingly good attitude. He went well out of his way to make the rest of us comfortable as we trickled in. His seniority made him the unspoken room leader.
Allen belonged least of all. His strong devotion to his family gave his oversized frame a defenseless quality. It seems that on the train from his home to the Airport in London he had been drinking wine. He put the bottle in his carry on bag when he left the train and didn't remember it until he was on the Saudia Airlines plane headed for Saudi Arabia. Not thinking much about it, he poured the contents of the bottle, maybe five or six ounces, into a glass and drank it.
A Saudi passenger saw Allen commit this offense and reported it to the airport police upon their arrival. The police held Allen for three days in solitary confinement and then brought him here where he has been for almost three weeks.
Strange as it seems, Allen fears losing his job as a Baker at a military hospital foremost. More likely he fears losing the dreams that justified the high cost of his high-paying job.
Two young Yemeni, Munir and Hedji, occupied the back corner. Fellow countrymen become quick relations in the crowded isolation of a foreign jail.
Munir, maybe twenty years old, had been hired from his homeland to be a chauffeur. He was caught as part of a gang stealing from their French employers.
Munir begrudged me my bed. I can't blame him, the location near the door has some advantages. It was his bed when I arrived. Then he was taken away to another jail for interrogation and it became my bed. Who would have guessed that he'd come back? When he did come back he never exactly asked for it and I never exactly offered it to him. The fact that I'm close to fifteen years older, a foot taller, and a hundred pounds heavier than he is may have influenced him some, too, but I hope not.
Hedji slept on the outside trying to absorb any available coolness in the concrete block wall. Above him the only window, mostly obstructed by a defunct air-conditioning duct, whistled in just enough air to sustain respiration.
Hedji had thick, bullish limbs and a presumed proportionate skull. He was convicted of murder and had been waiting to be executed for three years. His story began when he and seven associates attempted to rob a warehouse. A watchman found them in the act. The entire group beat the watchman with whatever weapons were available, mostly wooden sticks, resulting in his death. Since Hedji beat the man with an iron bar he was found to be the cause of the death and has received a death sentence. The others received jail terms.
Beheading takes place Fridays around noon. Because of that, Hedji stayed up all night every Thursday doing his prayers, not ceasing until ten o'clock Friday morning. If "The Captain" hadn't come for him by then he knew he was going to have at least one more week to live and fell deeply asleep.
I can't remember ever meeting a gentler man, at twenty-two practically still a boy, than Hedgi. One look into his tragic, doomed, eyes revealed his true crimes, bad judgment and trust. Realizing the next time he left these walls would be the day he died made my situation seem paltry. Even if I had to serve two years like the American Consul said I might, at least I knew I'd get out someday.
The remaining confinee sharing the room, Emil, was Lebanese. He spoke a form of English dangerously well. He claimed to be a very wealthy financier who came to Saudi Arabia from Switzerland to save an innocent employee from false imprisonment. In fact, he embezzled a few thousand dollars from his employer, a shopkeeper. Because of his incessant, unbelievable tales the Englishmen bestowed upon him the title "Prince Ballockchops". You get a feel for how long someone has been inside by the shade of their skin. Ballockchops had been in at least six-months. The sharp contrast of his time-whitened skin and bushy black moustache along with the faded, red, towel he wrapped around his head made him seem like a supporting character in a cartoon.
The only fresh air in the room came from a sunny picture postcard of the Alps David stuck to the wall with toothpaste, another under-used and under-rated product. The skinny ceiling fan was about as effective as a dragonfly on a brick oven. Once we tried soaking blankets with water and hanging them for an evaporative cooling effect. All it did was make the room hot and steamy and smell something awful.
The food can best be described as rudimentary. Breakfast alternated between green, beige, and brown gruel. Sopped up with flat bread, the green and the brown gruel were tolerable, even pretty good. Although, I think I would start to appreciate sushi if I had nothing else to eat for more than a month.
Lunch alternated between boiled chicken and boiled mutton. I think it was mutton, the fellow who identified it for me described it as "the meat that goes baa baa." These were served with large trays of spiced rice and bowls of potato soup. All of which consumed using only the right hand for reasons mentioned earlier.
Dinner consisted of little more than a piece of fruit and some bread. Usually some individual servings of jam and cheese came with the bread. It became a source of irritation with me that I never seemed to get any of the strawberry jam. I always got stuck with the orange marmalade which even the Yemeni consumed only after the parsley and garlic salad was gone. I swore that I would never be without strawberry jam when I was returned to civilization. I knew what I was seeing was a small model of why Communism won't work, self-preservation. The strawberry jam went to the quick who pleaded ignorance when confronted with the fact that neither the cockroaches nor the ants would eat the orange marmalade.
David and I split the cost of a bag of instant coffee, ten dollars. In the evenings we would get hot water from the trusty and savor a plastic cup of instant coffee as if it were rich cognac. David secured some creme-filled wafer cookies and our evening respites became almost too decadent. We were forced to ration ourselves to only two cookies per evening lest we find the surroundings too attractive and lose our desire to leave.
I heard some incredible stories during the hundreds of idle hours spent fighting the heat and hope. One Filipino fellow claimed he had been arrested for possession of a Polaroid snapshot of his girlfriend back home wearing a bikini. The same bespectacled judge that waved his hand at me had given this guy a six-month sentence. With administrative lethargy added on he will be in jail at least eight months.
I squatted in the corridor with an old man from Bangladesh. He told me through a translator that he bought a live chicken to take home for dinner. Not an uncommon occurrence in Saudi Arabia. The religious police saw him with the squawking bird and deduced he intended to make a sex object of the chicken. I gave him a cigarette and he pointed to another man sitting about ten feet away. That man had apparently been arrested for forcibly raping a goat.
It struck me that although the food was of sufficient quantity and quality to sustain physical life the mind had no nourishment at all and probably would deteriorate at an advanced rate. I noticed the longer I stayed inside jail, the more my fantasies turned toward food and less toward sex. I was pretty well used to sex deprivation but this decent food deprivation thing was starting to get to me. I remember waking one morning from a satisfying dream about bacon. Rolling over, I was startled to find that I had become aroused by the dream. It was a widely spread rumor that saltpeter was added to the tea to prevent such embarrassment. Apparently, the dosage was not high enough to overcome sizzling pork. I found this very frightening and vowed to drink more tea.
On my forty-first day of imprisonment I was again transferred. This time I went to Section Twelve, the Deportation Section. This was definitely good news. Before I could be transferred I had to pay my fine. It came to one riyal, or about twenty-seven cents. I couldn't believe this and argued with the guard. I was sure there was some mistake. It was inconceivable that I could spend more than forty days in a hellish prison and then the fine was only twenty-seven cents. I thought I should pay more, much more. The guard just poked his hand through the barred door until I put a bill in it. Boy, did the guys back in the room get a laugh out of that one riyal fine.
Section Twelve made the other three places I'd been seem like country clubs in comparison. If prisons were rated with stars this place would get four black holes. Again, the heat was stifling. Occupancy was far above humane. Days were spent second by second, shoulder to shoulder with other inmates waiting for the daily ice delivery. We were allowed to buy a limited amount of ice from a vendor each evening, if he showed up. This produced ice water which was communally controlled until it ran out, usually before midnight. Beyond that the only drinking water came from a tank on the roof. By ten in the morning that water was too hot to bathe in.
Nobody really slept there. We just fought the heat from sucking the life out of our bodies until finally we passed out. My sleeping space came to five feet by one foot. And then I had to endure a knee in the back from the Thai guy that slept next to me.
I got to know some very interesting people in this Section. I met some Somalians arrested for drinking. They feared getting deported to Somalia and the incessant civil war going on there. I met some Palestinians waiting for deportation to somewhere, anywhere. One Afghans wanted my address in America so he could bring over a pound of heroin. I told him he was crazy. He'd go to jail for twenty years. He replied that he didn't mind because American jails are air-conditioned and have color TV.
On my fourth day in Section Twelve, I told my new friends that in protest of the sub-human conditions people were forced to endure for weeks, months, and even years, I would refuse to go home when they called me. Two days later, my name was called and I was outside the door before anyone noticed I was gone. I shouted an Arabic goodbye. All one hundred and fifty men in the Section chorused farewell. I think they understood. Martyrdom is for saints; I'm out of here. Forty-seven days is my limit.
A small, aging guard escorted me, handcuffed to the airport. We had a couple of hours to kill alone together. I had a limited Arabic vocabulary and he had an even more limited English vocabulary. I asked about his wife, which I remembered was considered poor manners. It is very hard to quickly change the subject when it took fifteen minutes to convey the first one. He seemed like a very kind man and bought me a Pepsi.
I was allowed to board the flight first. My congenial escort removed my handcuffs and bid me peace. I was freer than I had been for forty-seven unbelievably long days. I found my seat and buckled up. An American stewardess came over to offer me something to drink. I began a brief conversation and explained my disheveled condition. I was so happy I felt I might explode. A few minutes later a uniformed airline ticket agent came to my seat and asked me to come with him. At first I told him I wasn't interested in going with him, I was going home. He persisted and led me from the plane.
My escort quickly returned the handcuffs to my wrists. I demanded an explanation of what was going on. Finally the bi-lingual ticket agent told me that the plane I had boarded stopped at another city in Saudi Arabia before it went to New York. The concern was that I might get off there and stay in Saudi Arabia. The airline, therefore, could not and would not guarantee that I had been expelled from the country as was required by law. He added that it was not a big problem, however, there would be a direct flight to New York in two days.
Two days! Doesn't he know rocks don't live that long? I had a full color vision of the squalor I had called home low these many weeks and decided then and there I wasn't going back peacefully. My escort spoke to the ticket agent in my behalf. I think he genuinely felt sorry for having to ruin my celebration of freedom.
This did me in. For forty-seven days I had no idea when I would be leaving and then they put me on an airplane only to drag me off. I wouldn't take it.
I reasoned with the ticket agent that if all that was required was for me to be out of the country of Saudi Arabia, I would willingly buy a ticket on the first flight to anywhere in the world. Anywhere. But I wasn't going back to that jail.
The ticket agent said he didn't have enough authority to make the changes. I would have to talk to the Airport Supervisor. At the time I would have spoken to King Fahd himself, if I could, to keep me out of that stinking jail. I explained the situation to the Supervisor who at first showed little sympathy. As my story grew more emphatic, he agreed to schedule me on a flight to Paris and then to New York. I thanked him heartily and he ordered some tea for my relieved escort and me.
The next time I boarded a plane was not as happy. I was worried even after the wheels went into the wells that the flight might be recalled and I might yet be returned to prison. I'd met a man that had been on a plane called back from the runway.
An hour or so into the flight an Egyptian stewardess brought breakfast. It was a standard airline breakfast, green eggs, a fruit cup, and a cold roll. One thing made it special, an individual serving of jam, strawberry jam.
