December 20, 2004
Letter #5 from Saudi Arabia
A weeklong Eid break
R.F. Burton
Private Papers

The hollow-eyed zombies I bade farewell to at the end of Ramadan are reappearing at work. All smiles and kisses, they hug one another and wish humankind a Happy Eid. The metamorphosis is amazing. There's nothing like a vacation after a month of sleep deprivation and overeating to put the spring back in one's sandal.

Even though I already know, I ask each what he did over the weeklong Eid break. One went to Beirut, another to Cairo; a few flew to Dubai. But most of the Magic Kingdom's denizens fled to, of all places, Bahrain.

Fifteen miles off the coast of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain is little more than an accumulation of sand in the Persian Gulf. Once a British protectorate, it was the first Arab country to strike oil. The Brits packed it in long ago, and most of the reservoirs have been sucked dry. The climate is nasty, hot and humid. Tourist attractions are nil. Yet millions of Saudis travel to Manama, the capital of Bahrain every year. So what's the draw?

Alcohol.

Blame it on the British and their damn colonialist influence. Unlike their Saudi brethren, Bahrainis pooh-pooh the immoderate restrictions practiced in the Magic Kingdom. In Bahrain if you want religious intoxication, go to a mosque and pray. If you want secular intoxication, go to a pub and have a pint of ale. If you want a mixture of both, sit around in a hotel lobby and you will be approached by a Russian woman who, if there were any justice in the world, would be strutting down a Parisian catwalk of la haute couture rather than picking up men in Manama.

It wasn't always easy to get to Bahrain. Before the mid 80s you had to fly or take a dhow - a short-mast wooden ship with a triangular sail, used by pearl divers in the Gulf for centuries - to reach the island country. Now you can drive to Bahrain. The King Fahd Causeway was completed in 1987, bridging the 15-mile abyss between abstinence and delirium tremens. I watched the jubilee from the rooftop of my apartment in Al-Khobar through a pair of binoculars. Fantastic fireworks display.

My first and last Eid in Bahrain was many years ago, before the Causeway was constructed. The Gulf Air flight from Dhahran Airport to Manama was advertised as the shortest flight in the world. Six minutes up, six minutes down. The plane never even leveled out. Most of the stewardesses were British. All were young and voluptuous. There was an ugly rumor that most of the Gulf Air stewardesses were working girls on the side, hooking for a couple of years to return to old England with enough hard cash to buy an estate. Watching them eye the male passengers on the plane made me think of young lionesses scanning the Masai Mara grasslands for something plump to eat.

After checking into the hotel, like everyone else, I dropped my bag in the room and headed straight for the pub.

Inside were a few expatriates and a lot of Saudis. The Westerners sat at the bar; the Saudis occupied the booths and tables where they could pull their bare feet up under their thighs. I found an empty barstool and ordered a Guiness. With a lithe flick of her wrist the barmaid formed a shamrock in the head of foam when she topped off my pint. Before the shamrock had a chance to relax into the frothy head a Saudi male thirty sheets in the wind sidled up to the bar. The barmaid poured a double-shot of Johnnie Walker Black Label into a tall glass and topped it off with Coke. The Saudi paid, drank it straight down in one gulp, then wobbled off.

A moment later I heard a resounding thump.

The Saudi who had downed the scotch was in a heap on the floor. Several other Saudis were struggling to help him to his feet.

"Stupid wanker walked right into the wall," an overweight, rosy-faced Brit sitting at the corner of the bar said, laughing merrily. "Right into the wall, like it wasn't there. Poor buggers don't know how to drink."

A couple of barstools away a young American was showing his tattoos to a barmaid who was busy washing mugs. From his conversation I picked up that he was a diver working the offshore rigs. He was short, compact, and strong. He pulled up the sleeve of his T-shirt and flexed his oversized biceps, making the tattoos twitch. The barmaid's gaze must have lingered a moment too long, because the diver suddenly leapt up onto his barstool in one deft motion and stepped on top of the bar.

The room went silent.

"What do you think of these?" he asked the barmaid, pulling off his shirt.  His back, chest, and shoulders were covered in inky grotesqueries that wiggled and writhed as he contorted his body in various competitive bodybuilder poses. The barmaid stepped back from the bar, dumbfounded. The Saudis in the back corner of the room started yelling.

Perhaps the diver thought the Saudis were cheering him on because he unbuttoned his Levi's and pulled them down his legs and shook his butt at them. He wasn't wearing underwear. Tattooed on his buttocks was USDA: US on his left cheek, DA on the right. The Saudis went berserk. Some shook their sandals over their heads menacingly; others stood up screaming in Arabic.

The diver turned around to face the screeching crowd, and with a motion of his hand said in Arabic, "Ma fi mushkila," ("no problem"). Suddenly, two huge bouncers pulled him down from the top of the bar and dragged him off.

Several pints later, after several other patrons had been escorted from the pub for causing one disturbance or another, I heard another resounding thump. I didn't even bother to turn around.

For seven days and seven nights I was stuck in Bahrain.  I hired a driver to take me out to the middle of a vast desert wasteland to see the Tree of Life, a scrawny 400-year-old mesquite tree that would have been cut down a century ago and burned as firewood in America. I visited the Grand Mosque, a nice and squarish structure with lots of minarets, but it wouldn't amount to a pimple on the dome of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul.  I walked along the Sheik's beach and watched flaccid waves unroll on barren sand. I explored the souk and fingered fake Rolexes and listened to Hindi pop songs. I'd done it all. There was nothing left to do. I returned to the pub. By the third day of the Eid the pub's patrons seemed to border on dementia. I felt like a prisoner of Pandaemonium, Milton's capital of Hell.

Since that first Eid, I've returned to Bahrain many times, but never longer than for a day or two.

Later in the day I ran into Abdullah at work. After telling me he didn't like Bahrain anymore because they close the bars at 2:30 in the morning, Abdullah asked me where I spent the Eid.

"I stayed here."

"You stayed here? For the entire Eid?" he asked incredulously.  "What'd you do?"

"I brought back some books from vacation. They ate up a lot of the time," I said.

"Books?" Abdullah said, a look of benign horror spreading across his face. I might as well have said I spent the week eating spiders.

"When Ramadan is over, everyone runs from Riyadh," Abdullah said. "Everyone runs to Bahrain. You should run with them."

I wanted to tell him that Eid is the best time to be in the Magic Kingdom because most of its inhabitants are gone, but I don't think our friendship would survive such honesty.