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Our meeting today began with him showing me a photo on his mobile of a customized Suzuki streetbike. Next came an image of an ATV (a Banshee, his favorite), which led into tales people driving on two wheels while they cruise the dunes south of Doha... and how this technique carries over into show-off driving in the city after football matches. Only in Land Cruisers, not ATVs. "Yeah, I saw a guy on an ATV go up on two wheels in one of the roundabouts. I thought he was just going too fast and was about to wipe out, but I guess he meant to do that." "Oh, yeah, people do it all the time. They'll go for blocks and blocks up on two wheels." (I'd already heard about this from the principal, who I was riding with when I saw the guy on the ATV. "I've seen them go around and around with the car half in the air," she said.) Anyhow: "Some guys from the States came here with Bigfoot to one of the football clubs. That was 1996 or 1997. They had some bikes, like Banshees, but they had to use ramps to go up onto two wheels. They didn't know how to do it without them." "So what do they do?" In response to my question, the student drew up a diagram of a roundabout and the roads that lead away from one. "See, this is the area where the cops stop and park, right? So a guy drives like he's going to make the right turn. He goes reallll fast and then he pullllls it over to the left and he's up on two wheels. Or they'll weave right and left, and right and left, and then it's on two wheels and they just go." A pause. "Do people drive like this in the States?" "Yeah, maybe in the desert... and at auto shows. But I've only seen it in pictures." "You know how we take Land Cruisers out into the desert for tours?" "Yes." "You do? Have you seen it in person?" "No, no, just in pictures." "Oh, you have to come out, then. You have to come with us." This is the third time one of the students has invited me to come out on one of their hard-drivin' desert outings, and you know what they say about the third time being the charm... My student also mentioned how a lot of this freestyle, two-wheelin' happens when guys cruise around Landmark Mall on Thursday nights. "You'll have to wait until after Ramadan... You'll see all these guys trying to outdo each other with all these cars. BMW M3s, M4s, M5s, Bentleys, Porsche, Ferrari, Mercedes. And each guy has a car better than the next one. Do people buy cars like this in the States?" "They do, but not as much." I recalled the lemon-yellow Lamborghini that My Lady Friend and I saw on Denny Avenue in Seattle just before I left. The driver caught us looking and gunned it up the hill at about 70 mph -- and then came to an abrupt stop at a red light like everybody else. My student: "They don't like to buy cars that are made from outside America? 'Made in the USA?'" "Oh, no, no. In fact, the best-selling car is..." And I paused to think of whether it was the Accord or Camry, but he'd gone on to talk about how some people have so many cars here. "A guy might have six or seven cars. He'll have a Hummer for his 7-year-old, a Land Rover for his 13-year-old..." -- and I sat there thinking, "I know things are different here, but 13-year-olds driving? Buying a Hummer for the kid to use in 10 years?" -- but then he added, "It's crazy. I don't want to live my life like that. My father shows me a different way, he doesn't have me going around with a driver" -- which explained the 7-year-old's Hummer -- "acting like I'm somebody all... I hate those guys. When I see them on the street, I skid in front them." And here, he meant drifting, which, along with smoking tires, rolling up on two wheels, and other things, comprises the impromptu shows that the local boys put on as part of the scene after the inter-Arab football matches (who wins the game seems to be irrelevant). I only know about drifting because I made the connection between what this student described and some scenes from one of the Gumball 3000 videos. "I wouldn't want to be one of these guys, sitting in the back" -- and he made this ridiculous, pompous face that had me falling out of the chair, laughing -- "thinking I'm so important with my music turned up loud and my driver. So I skid in front of them, and the Indian driver gets frightened, and if they try to chase me I get away because I'm always looking and weaving in traffic. If they're beside me they look at me like 'What are you doing?'" and he made his ridiculous, Don Corleone, hanging-jaw face again. Somehow (likely related to football), the conversation shifted to how people in different Gulf states act. Apparently, some bad business went down at last year's Gulf Cup tournament, with a Qatari player who was already down getting kicked by a player from Kuwait, and all hell broke loose. This led to my student's assertion that Qataris aren't well-regarded in the region. "The Bahrainis like Qatari, the Emirates, Oman, some of the Saudis... but a lot don't like Qatari." Of course, this led into what goes on in Saudi: "Man, those Saudi guys, all they do is talk about 'I'm from Saudi Arabia, I'm from Saudi Arabia.' They're so... They want to be American so much. They want to be negroes. They wear big, baggy jeans" -- and he gets up from the desk, wearing his thobe, and brings his hands out away from his legs by about a foot -- "big jeans like this, down to here, something your grandfather would wear. And they've got the shirt with '05' (Fubu), this long shirt down to here, the hat down behind their head, and just..." -- and he begins to lurch off to his left with this Neanderthal slouch that had me falling out of the chair again. "I saw this guy, this emir, he was at a club with his bodyguards and they were having more fun than he was." Meaning they were more relaxed. "They were Sudanese, they were black, so they had the same clothes on, but they looked nice, bandanas wrapped around their heads, a nice watch, drinking coffee, smoking shisha and eating. But this guy, he's" -- and he does the walk again -- "trying to do this and talk to girls. "Girls are so smart, they just laugh at these guys. He's walking around talking about 'My number's 562-blah blah,' and he's got three phones in his hand, two in the right, one in the left. They get all excited if they see a girl look at them: 'Oh, look, they're smiling at me, look!' But I just go to the club, if a girl smiles, I smile back and just sit down. If you like a girl at a table, you write down your number and give it to the maitre d' with some money, and he gives it to her. Not all this other" and he does the walk one more time, and then I realized we'd gone on like this for most of the half-hour session, and so I eventually got him to do the last two reading exercises and we stopped. "Thanks for the talking." "Oh, thank you, I always enjoy it." Hard drivin' and profilin' |
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