The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah

by Adam Valen Levinson

  This is the land of the indoor ski mountain, of the tallest building in the world, of the billionaire’s name HAMAD carved so large into the flesh of a private island that it can be seen from space. This is the home of perfect winters and oil-cooled summers, of cars, and cars, and cars. This is a place where we could ask for nearly anything we could imagine—and it would be delivered, as if by magic, like a rabbi in a hat.

  THE GATHERINGS ALWAYS DISSOLVED. I could only touch noses—an Emirati greeting—with these faint hints of community.

  It felt like something to communicate in Arabic with the Egyptian security guards, but it still was what it was: superficial small talk between employees of a building and a resident.

  Instead of giving me clear windows into the greater Middle East, Abu Dhabi gave me playdates with alter egos. I could cast myself as a traveling businessman, or a crawler of seedy bars, or a new man entirely. But I didn’t feel like much of a man lounging in constant detachment, watching the clock tick at the top of an Excel sheet.

  And then, two weeks after my bar mitzvah, Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in central Tunisia, and the world began to watch itself shift.

  The Arab Spring, I learned to call it. But it was still winter then: electricity. Bashful excitement—what were we allowed to feel?

  The next month, restaurant-owner Abdou Abdel-Moneim Hamada Jaafar Khalifa self-immolated in the heart of Cairo. Now the Egyptians were talking of true things.

  “Eh rayik ‘an thawratna?” What do you think about our revolution? Ahmed the Egyptian security guard swelled behind the desk at the back entrance of Sama Tower.

  “Freedom is beautiful.”

  “Yes!”

  In those days, they were all beaming. The Egyptian contingent of our security force, almost all supporting family back home, were then quite open champions of the overthrow of Mubarak’s autocracy. Supporters of the regime, dejected, made themselves less visible. Engulfed in the politics of the Arabian Peninsula, our American institution made very evident its support for nonviolent protestors, democratic ideals, and the fights of all Middle Eastern countries against their respective “The Man.”

  Over the next year, idealism would be complicated by reality. Now we were all jittery with hope. Everything was up for grabs again, as ministers resigned, governments disbanded. Men doused themselves in gasoline and put fire to their own skin. For the rootless, this seemed to indicate the kind of chaos from which ashes bring only rebirth.

  But aside from the tenuous interpersonal links to the region’s groundswell, the UAE barricaded us in an air-conditioned bubble—a piece apart from the line of dictatorial dominos that wobbled in the weeks after Tunisia. Normal carried on. More curry from Canopy. More four-dollar bottles of dark Old Monk rum imported from Uttar Pradesh.

  When I felt an electrical current in my veins, I had nothing to plug myself into. Protest once meant, for Romans, to “assert publicly.” But here, the most disenfranchised were voiceless resident laborers, not citizens. How could anyone assert publicly in the UAE, when those with the most reason to assert were hardly members of the public?

  In untouchable Saudi Arabia no less: a Day of Rage. It looked like the region really could be reborn of flame. Everything would be shaken with such force that something completely new would take shape from whatever was left. With my feet so lightly on the surface of this place, the vast possibility of re-creation took up all the room in my head. I had never truly known the roots of this region, and now under this smoke they were even harder to see, especially from the air-conditioned pseudoclimate of the UAE.

  We were inches away from the action. The proximity to that heat made the Emirates feel especially chilled. Do something.

  Sometimes even when I didn’t want shawarma, I found myself half-running to Foodlands, to talk with Ali, whose hometown of Daraa was now known worldwide as ground zero of the Syrian revolution.

  “Adam! Kifak Adam?”

  “Ali!”

  It was all the same. Same pickles, same spicy sauce, same toothy grin.

  “What’s up. How’s your mother, how’s your father?”

  “Alhamdulilah. How’s your family?”

  “Alhamdulilah.”

  In the same breath he’d mention some dark effect of the war and then wave it away. His family huddled indoors some nights. It was unsafe to go out after eight, or seven, or six, but it was okay! For me, the world of that fledgling violence was covered in a sandstorm of news coverage and Ali’s smile.

  For a year, my anxiety was tied to the angle of the corners of his mouth above his chin. If it dropped below about sixty degrees, I’d be forced to stomach a brutal truth. Until then, caught between Chicken Little reporting and Ali’s unshakable cheer, I knew that I really knew nothing.

  I had come here to the Middle East to face the fears about this swath of the world that I’d absorbed in 2001. If it was all in flux now, wasn’t it the perfect time? Everything about the implosion of the region told me that now was when I could connect to it.

  IT WAS HARD TO KNOW where to start. Friends from the Arabic program in Oakland began to communicate their movements all around the region: a friend was evacuated on the last government-arranged plane out of Egypt; another learned which squares to begin avoiding in Bahrain.

  Masha came to the UAE when I was itching with comfort. Before starting law school in the fall, she would work for two months in Abu Dhabi taking care of the children of high-profile professors. They had commanded a bright, young, American nanny, and she had been delivered.

  Every day I was ecstatic to come home to her, and every day I felt an urge to leave the UAE like a twitch in the neck. Movement or constancy—I could reconcile that tension for short stretches by being in motion with her, by racing over to the fish market behind the docks where the old wooden dhows still go out to cast nets every dawn, or celebrating my birthday on an island the UAE’s founding father turned into a free-range zoo, now home to cheetahs and gazelles and luxury resorts.

  I distracted my revolutionary urges with luxury, and defended those distractions with the rationalization that getting settled was a sign of maturity. I couldn’t tell which side of me was the devil’s advocate anymore.

  I plopped back down on Dan and Jordan’s couch, eleven steps from my door to this place made holy by the presence of pure grace. Only here, and at the source behind Mariah Mall, and on my couch—or anyone’s couch, really—could I partake in the sacrament of my one true faith. Canopy.

  Again.

  It was in a moment saturated in the vapors of chicken vindaloo that we made a tripartite commitment to break the cycle—me, Dan the filmmaker, and Jake the poet: a Benz.

  With one exciting change, I could have the freedom a car affords, all while reconnecting to my adoptive nation. Movement and stability.

  An old Mercedes is to the highways of the Gulf what a rented vélo is to a Paris bike lane, or what an escalator is to a mall. Driving cars is more Emirati than air-conditioning, and Mercedes, especially the old ones, are the staple of a simpler era with smaller buildings and bigger aviator sunglasses. In the Arab world, models and shapes of the cars have nicknames: late nineties’ C Class were Abu Dama’a, “Father Tears,” for their big headlights; S Class were Abu Ayun, “Father Eyes,” for a similar look. The ’92 model we found on Dubizzle—the UAE’s Craigslist—was called, simply, Shabah. “Ghost.”

  “It’s only 2000$ and its in amazing condition,” Dan wrote in an e-mail to two friends and his mother. “Fit for Sadam Hussein.”

  The dark gray, nearly black sedan had boxy wide hips and drove like a boat. The sunroof was broken and mirrors were missing and the locks didn’t work and the radio mysteriously operated only at frequencies between AM and FM, but the tape deck worked, the mechanic told us, and let us keep the single greatest Michael Jackson cassette ever mixed. From then on, that was the only thing we listened to onboard, in the jammed driver’s seat set permanently to slouch.

  With our aviators down and a
rms out the windows, this was in the family of things that were clearly too good to be true. Behind the wheel of the black behemoth, I didn’t quite feel like I was in my own life, just like Abu Dhabi couldn’t feel like home or like the Persian Gulf doesn’t feel like an ocean. I was borrowing moments from someone else’s day-to-day and from my own fantasy.

  The all-black leather was a debatable choice with indoor parking a luxury and summer temperatures rising to 120 degrees in the shade of nonexistent trees. But it was February. And at the helm of Black Chicory—one of her many nicknames, this one pulled from the coffee Dan had carried in from New Orleans—those problems rooted in “reality” seemed pleasantly far away.

  IT WAS A TRICKY BALANCE—this stillness and motion thing. Detached and reattached, clinging both to autonomy and the need to connect, I darted around the cage of the island.

  Masha’s job quickly became more demanding than mine. When she was too busy nannying, I played tug-of-war with myself: time with her, or time outside Sama Tower. Cheap tickets popped up to Sri Lanka, and I couldn’t hold out. It seemed to make sense: I didn’t know where to go in the Arabaphone world now, but I needed to go somewhere. Jake and I flew away for five days—leaving behind my girlfriend who had come to the desert to be with me—and we rampaged around the island until I ran our rental car into a ditch and it was time to come home. Where else could I run?

  Back in Sama with the Benz keys on the table, Masha and I planned a trip to the eastern emirate of Fujairah. That is to say, I borrowed a tent from Angela the executive assistant, and we picked a weekend. Buddy Guy has a song about a Mercedes, as if he planned our trip in blues lyrics: Gonna keep on driving, I’ll never stop / My baby’s riding in the shotgun seat / Don’t let no grass grow under our feet.

  A cross-country trip in the United Arab Emirates is never very difficult. From Abu Dhabi southwest to the Saudi Arabian border, it takes no longer than four hours. It is no greater distance from the city’s warm insulated nook in the Persian Gulf to the eastern side of the Emirati promontory, where waters are cleared and cooled by the Arabian Sea at the top-left corner of the Indian Ocean. Roads are wide, fast, straight—I could make no more than four turns and be through the low mountains to Fujairah, supine by the sea with a snorkel and a bottle of rum. It would be so easy.

  Although a ’92 Benz won’t be the fastest in any Emirati fleet, it was easy to go the 120 kilometer-per-hour speed limit without trouble—conspicuous radar detectors issue instant two-hundred-dollar fines at 140—but it wasn’t good enough. On the high seas of the Sheikh Zayed Highway, we chose lanes like Goldilocks with mortal stakes: In the right lane, trucks inched along out of everyone’s way; in the center, traffic moved too slowly; on the left, we were prey to the white Land Cruisers racing past. A favorite local driving technique is to charge from behind, day or night, high beams flashing: Give me passage or give me death. A red pickup engine roared at our bumper and I wrenched the wheel to the right—no time to check the neighboring lane. A moment of suspended panic. The pickup heaved unfazed around us into the left shoulder.

  After only an hour, Black Chicory was wheezing. She would reach a top speed and then jerk slower. Michael Jackson sounded seasick in the tape deck. The ship had become a tired horse—in short bursts with my coaxing she stayed speedy, but only for moments. We pulled into a highway gas station and turned off the engine. The battery died.

  One jump start later, we were soon on the Dubai-Hatta Road, following signs for EASTERN REGIONS, and heading deadly straight toward the Fujairah coast. The wheezing seemed to have abated, and golden sand dunes sprung up along the roadside, red-orange from behind my sunglasses. “Whoa,” Masha and I said a lot. My god, the desert is pretty.

  That’s about when I smashed into the back of another car.

  An excuse: the Eastern Regions have a bizarre and thoughtless proclivity for speed bumps. Often unmarked, yellow paint chipped until the lump in the road is indistinguishable from faded asphalt, speed bumps can attack anywhere: just before a roundabout, in a parking lot, between two other speed bumps only tens of meters away, before a traffic light, after a traffic light, in nightmares. This one was in the middle of the highway, half a minute from a confident sign: SPEED LIMIT: 100. No warning, no more signage: just the impending figures of two SUVs parked in the road’s only two lanes. The drivers were chatting, resting their tires on the hump. It takes the eyes far too long to realize they are moving toward something they were only just moving with. When mine did, they sent my brain a brief telegram: Oh shit. STOP.

  Before I could fear, my brain was alight with optimism. It processed everything by reflex and compared what it saw with what it knew. We have enough space and time, it said, and if we hit the brakes now . . . wait . . . why isn’t the car slowing down? No more optimism. Confusion. The car—it was still going too fast, hurtling toward a blue jeep growing larger.

  I cursed the brakes for failing, and I accepted that it might have been my fault for not checking them sufficiently when we bought the car. I felt the surge of approaching danger, and its terror.

  I had time to think about almost everything I had ever thought before. It could have been the battery failing, no? It seemed like something our saintly Syrian seller had known about. It was at least partly his fault, wasn’t it? Am I hungry? I’m hungry. If I die . . . Jesus, my parents are going to be really upset. What day is today? At least we’re in a Mercedes. How far is it from 116th Street to Sammy’s Halal? We shouldn’t’ve gotten an old Mercedes. If Masha gets hurt . . . the loss. The loss. The guilt. Is she scared? I can’t swerve left: a concrete divider catching sand blown across from the desert. I can’t go right: people. This might actually hurt. Do things like this hurt first or only after? The car is new—to us, at least! What will Dan and Jake and Jordan say when I tell them I wrecked our car? I’m secretly proud that I can play decent ping-pong left-handed. What town are we in? Why on earth are these cars stopped in the center of the highway? Why? What luck. This really might ruin the weekend.

  IF THERE WAS A MOMENT of impact, I don’t remember it. I felt the nineteen-year-old airbags flush against my face, the weave of fine burlap.

  Relief. I hadn’t killed my girlfriend.

  On long stretches of empty highway manned only with trigger-happy radar cameras, human assistance is sometimes hard to find. But with some luck, we were totaled near the police station, and an ambulance just happened to be passing through town.

  The hood had crumpled like an old soda can on the beach. Smells of burned wiring and smoking metal, pebbles of glass across the road.

  The officers all wore bemused faces, and never stopped pulling me in and out of the ambulance to look for important pieces of paper in the car. Still, they were kind. The locals we had hit—unscathed, both people and truck—peeked in; I wasn’t sure whether to yell at them or apologize. I just shook their hands with my unbruised arm.

  But as I was hopping back out of the ambulance again, I had the space to see something I might not have had the medics coddled me. Outside the glass and smoke: I was entirely fine. A young man doesn’t need any extra help to feel invincible, but, if only as the gift of German engineering, I got some. The ditch in Sri Lanka and now this—it was like danger didn’t exist, like there would never be a reaction to anything I did. Invincible, but disconnected. Ghostly.

  This was the southern tip of the most conservative emirate, Sharjah, dead center on the UAE triangle in a town called Madam. Madam, I’m Adam, I never said to anyone, to my eternal regret. The ambulance took us on an hour-long drive in the same direction we had headed ourselves, off-road for moments on rough gravel (despite their worries that we might have spinal injuries), bringing us nearer to the beaches that seemed to get farther and farther away with every kilometer we drove toward them. “Weyn al-mustashfa?” I heard the driver call out to our friendly Filipino EMT. Where is the hospital?

  We passed through Madam’s nearest hospital like an afterthought, in and out without a scrap of paperwork.


  As the sun set, we went to find the police, and to take camping gear and granola bars from the shipwreck in the eerie auto graveyard in Madam. “How much?” an officer asked, eying the car. He shook his head when I told him. I hadn’t understood: “How much does it cost now?”

  This was the UAE. If you have something, someone wants it. If you want to buy something, someone somewhere wants to sell it. If someone somewhere is buying something, wallah! I swear, you should be buying it, too. These officers, guardians of the town and its ungodly speed bump, saw deals dropped in their lot every day. With a scrap shop just across the street, there were always deals to be struck.

  Old officers advised rookies, a towering Sudanese sergeant scolded an underling; I took three policemen for walks around the car. A lot of hmmm and uh-huh. I came back days later for a similar hustle until representatives who spoke in Malayalam—a language my friend Iman had compared to the sounds of falling water—came from the scrap shop, made a final offer for Black Chicory’s remains, and set in motion a bureaucratic nightmare that would last three months.

  The deeper I got in the process to transfer the Benz title to the scrappers, the more I felt the tethers to my host country loosen. I’d like to think that no matter what, I would have challenged my mother’s fears and investigated the rumors and reputations of the world outside the Great Carrot. But I could put my finger on it then, how directly the car had helped me feel both connected and free, comfortable and flexible. How it had given me a treadmill—albeit a long one—that could have run out my energy forever. I could have slaked my restlessness with small and frequent steps. But now, momentum choked, restlessness hit me with its full force.