“When you’re a jet you’re a jet all the way!”
I have tried not to pound my latest
book through our BeachGrit, excessively, as
self-promotion is ugly to see and stomach-turning to do but
sometimes but sometimes pride overwhelms and especially where the
Men’s Journal is involved.
Men don’t get journals anymore and the august publication,
floating virtually alone in a modern sexless world, feels like a
glorious last bastion. The only place I dreamed of appearing
outside of Out.
Here is an excerpt from the Men’s
Journal excerpt because I can’t help but
glowing.
We treat al-Mukullah over the next ten days the way sloppy
Germans, Danes, and Poles treat Mallorca, ambling around in the
heat of the day between shops that sell ice-cream and internet
cafés, driving out to the wave for a surf, driving back for a
massive chicken lunch, driving out to the wave for an evening surf,
driving back for a dinner of fried fish balls and banana mush next
to the mosque.
Major Ghamdan mostly stayed in his room as far as I could
tell and seemed resigned to whatever would happen, throwing up his
hands and letting God decide our fate, really and truly getting
into the “inshahallah” spirit the way all good Muslims and
Calvinists do.
Irate younger men would approach semi-regularly, especially
after evening prayers, eyes burning, and tell us that George Bush
is a dog. Yemen was severely punished by George Sr. for holding the
position that Arab nations should not intervene in the business
between Iraq and Kuwait during the first Gulf War and even more
severely punished by Kuwait and her neighbors as thousands of
working Yemenis were expelled without warning.
George Jr. had just taken Baghdad in the second Gulf War not
two months ago as the Global War on Terror found a new theater and
was saber rattling through the rest of the region, demanding that
nations were either for us or against us, and if they were against
us—well, things would not go well.
Depending on our collective mood we would either argue back
that the Bush family was a proud American legacy or agree and
either way the conversations would end with warm proclamations of
friendship and hand-holding beneath the starry skies of Mukullah, a
striking town that grows better with experience.
The way the light bathes it in the day, the way heat
radiates off every surface at night. The mix of Indian, British,
Persian, Indonesian, and East African influences. Architecture,
food, and dress harkening to the days when it was a center of the
trading world. Osama bin Laden’s family chose their region well,
and my desire to live in the Hadramawt grew unchecked.
Most nights belonged to music videos or accidentally CNN’s
international version. The Horse did indeed have televisions and
not one but two music video channels from Saudi Arabia and from
Lebanon, which worked brilliantly when one switched to Live from
Mecca programming unless they both switched to it at the same time.
It blew my expectations out of the water, and even though Josh
would semi-regularly reference how epic the hotel by the mosque was
and how it was also closer to fried fish balls, we all feasted on
Stone Temple Pilots, Ricky Martin, Alicia Keys, Incubus, Uncle
Cracker, Nelly Furtado, and Enrique Iglesias with equal
relish—especially the Enrique Iglesias video featuring Jennifer
Love Hewitt and Mickey Rourke in an epic ballad that brought me
near tears every time it played, particularly when Enrique Iglesias
looked deep into Jennifer Love Hewitt’s eyes and said, “I can be
your hero, baby. I can kiss away the pain.”
One evening, as we traipsed back to our hotel from fried
fish balls, a group of young men followed us into a small, empty
corridor and unsheathed their jambiyas, flashing the curved steel
and yelling that we were Americans. Josh lowered his shoulder and
ran at them like a corn-fed University of Michigan fullback. They
tossed them into a nearby bush and took off sprinting, and the
whole scene felt wonderful, harkening back to a simpler, less
litigious time when back-alley street fights between rival hoods
were commonplace.
“When you’re a jet you’re a jet all the way!” I shouted as
they rounded the corner, Josh hot on their wedge-sandaled
heels.
Another evening as we sauntered back we saw a massive crowd
out front the shopfront where we bought our morning coffees. A sea
of turbaned heads sitting cross-legged on a piece of Astroturf
rolled out for the occasion. As we got nearer we saw they were all
watching a tiny rabbit-earred television, and as we got nearer
still saw the television was showing a pro surf contest from Hawaii
the year earlier.
I couldn’t believe it. Here in al-Mukallah—a thousand miles
from the nearest semblance of surf culture and ten thousand miles
from Oahu’s North Shore—a few hundred men were silently basking in
the Pastime of Kings. I elbowed one wearing a particularly neat
turban-skirt combination, pointed at the television, and told him
that’s what we did, what those men were doing on the television,
riding tables on the ocean exactly like them. His eyes widened and
I almost invited him to watch us live the next day but thankfully
caught myself, realizing that while we indeed rode tables on the
ocean exactly like the men on television, our surfing looked very
different. So different, in fact, that it might have been confused
as a separate water game altogether. One not so graceful or
exciting. Still, the entire scene was so gorgeously surreal it made
me positively giddy for days afterward.
And then, one hot morning, it is time to move on.
What did we find?
Here you go
replete with photos!
What a time to be alive and self-promoting.
Take that, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West!
