It was hot. It was always hot. In the Middle East, it goes without saying that it will be hot, but for it to be worth saying—well, that means you should stay inside. It’d be pretty easy to begin listing off the numerous, numerous qualities about that region of the world that I hate or could state as a reason to stay inside or to go blind and deaf. I can recall five or six things that have even made me question the act of waking up. That is neither here nor there, although…it is most definitely there. There. In the Middle East. In Doha.

In this country, it’s a sign of disrespect to let a native see the bottom of your shoe. In this country, pornography is illegal and bestiality is impressively common. The main shopping mall has an entire floor devoted only to women. I don’t mean this in the way that shopping malls in general are more or less 100% devoted to women; men weren’t even allowed on that top floor. What the hell was going on up there? I shudder to think.

I’ve met multiple of the Qatari who’ve openly admitted to penetrating a camel or a goat or a sheep or something. Not only did they admit it, they seemed somewhat shocked and disappointed that I didn’t say ‘Cool!’ They told each other it was cool.

The place has a good economy, at least until the gas runs out. That aspect of it, I have to say, is something nice; 60 cents for a gallon of gas, a dollar for a pack of cigarettes. Though those are cheap luxuries, and nice to have at such a price, the best luxury was by far the most expensive for the amount sold. That’d be hash. The hash in the Middle East is so good, so smelly, so sticky, and so, so tasty. I’m sure that my friends and I overpaid, but such is the way it works when you are the child of a diplomat and you frequent a private school. It isn’t like it wasn’t worth the money. This is Qatar I’m talking about. What else are you going to spend your money on?

Food? It’s all cheap and it all delivers.
Gas? Ha.
Movie ticket? What’s the point? It will be edited to hell.
Call me a simpleton, but I need little more than cinema and food to get by happily. And of course, the quality of those movies and that food is going to be multiplied when you put Hash into the equation.
Hash, when put into the equation, is generally softened by heat and then broken apart inside of some tobacco leaves, rolled into a joint and then smoked (and enjoyed, naturally).

I see I’ve rambled, but as I was saying: It was hot. There was a lone, little cloud hovering in the atmosphere, mocking me. You couldn’t walk barefoot, you’d damage your feet. I sat there in the heat, waiting. Waiting. Waiting. I’d smoke a few cigarettes between each session of solid waiting. Eventually the taxi came, I got it in, it moved and I waited some more.

The driver was named Saleem. He gave us the best prices since we all used him and gave his number out to everyone. They way he said my name was a cross between “Pitch” and “Peach,” depending on how excited he was. He was Nepalese, I think. He really liked Hash. Just saying the word around him will make him squeal “Hashish! Hashish! Hashish!” again and again until you shut him up and stuck a joint in his mouth.

Driving through the city is depressing. If you were an Alien in a UFO, you wouldn’t think people lived there. They couldn’t live there, for Christ’s sake, its too hot! You would only see SUVs and the dark-skinned servants in uniforms, filling up the gas tanks and building the buildings.
I’d like to sit here and describe the scenery I encountered on the drive, but this just seems stupid. Nobody would want to read, “There was dirt. There was some more dirt. I think I saw a rock in some dirt. Oh, there was a lot of dirt there.” Nobody would want to write it either. Although somebody just did both right now.

I neared my good friend Eli’s house. There was a large sign made of plastic letters sticking from the gate of the compound that read “TEBAH GARDENS.” I paid for the cab at the gate and went in. Eli lived in the bottom right-hand corner of the compound. He greeted me with a joint in his doorway, freshly rolled. The usual meet and greets commenced and we made our way to the pool, talking about women or sex with women or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or Naked Lunch or the Internet or racial jokes. He and I smoked the joint behind a plastic 3-dimensional dolphin.

It was rare to come to Eli’s and be the only guest. Of course it wouldn’t last long, it was the weekend (beginning on Thursday, there) and people flooded his house on the weekend. I told him then, right when the joint was finishing “we smoked the first jay of the day, just me and you and we’re going to smoke the last jay of the day, just me and you.”

It was far from just him and me for most of the night. There must have been 20, 25 people there, all crammed into this tent in his backyard. I suppose I should take a few lines to create the image of this tent. Don’t picture a camping tent. It was about as big as a living room with a circular plastic table in the middle with some chairs. The floor was just dirt, there was a fluorescent light hung from the ceiling and a ‘No Smoking’ sign hung on the entrance.

I saw some good friends of mine that night. I met some new people that night. I wouldn’t say ‘meet’ really, because it went really no further than that. They came, bought their hash, and then left. Most people stayed to smoke it and I was definitely reaping the benefits of that.

Somewhere between the 10th and the 20th joint, I found myself reaching for an Iced-Tea can. I picked it up and took a sip only to immediately spit it all back out, all over the table. It didn’t have any Iced-Tea in it; all it had were ashes and some fucking chewing-tobacco spit. I nearly got sick.
At one point I got very hungry just as a new joint was being lit. It came around the circle to me, I took a few hits, ran to the store, got some chips and some drink, ran back and when I got there, the joint had just gotten back round to my part of the circle. They called it a miracle. I believed them.
We’d nicknamed the supply “The Giggler.” There really is no more of a suitable name, because when you smoked this, it didn’t matter if your house burned down, if you ran over the neighbor’s only son, or had a sexual mishap in the kitchen; it didn’t matter because you were just going to sit there and giggle about it.
“Hehehehehehe!” That’s what you’d say. And then everybody else would say it with you and it would almost sound like a choir of inebriated hyenas. Unless you were sober, then it wouldn’t sound like that.

At one point of the night, this guy–this fucking bozo–came. I think his name was Karim. Eli was telling me how Karim had never gotten high before and how he planned to change that.
So Karim shows up, says hello and all that bullshit, and he picks up the piece of hash that’s on the table. And this piece is beautiful—at least 15 grams of the highest quality.
“What’s this?” He asked.
“The hash…” Eli told him.
“What? How? It isn’t in a bag. Or green.”
“It’s hash.”
“Isn’t that weed?”
“Just sit the fuck down, Karim.”
Karim sat. He held the piece in his hands and looked at it. “Can I have this?” he asked. Everybody just laughed. Nobody was laughing with him. Nobody ever laughed with Karim Badra, he was just there to be laughed at and scorned and cast out like a bald cat.
So we started smoking with him. Eli and I had tried our hardest on making a point of explaining how to inhale smoke to Karim.
“Like a cigarette, right?”
“Yeah,” I told him.
He puffs the joint, opens his mouth and wastes all of the smoke. I snapped the spliff out of his hand. I took a drag of smoke into my mouth, and just kept it there. I got Karim’s attention and had him watch me inhale the smoke into my lungs.
“You see what I did there? I breathed in after I took the drag.”
“Oh okay,” he said and I handed it back to him. Fucking bozo did it again without inhaling.
“Dude!” Eli said.
“Karim, when you don’t inhale it you are wasting the smoke,” I said to him.
“What did I do wrong?” he asked.
“Look—take a drag and then keep your mouth closed.” He did this. “Now,” I told him, “take in a deep breath through your mouth.”
He may as well have not even tried to do it; because the second he tried to inhale he coughed it all out like a madman trying to divorce one of his lungs.
“That’s better,” I said.
Eli eventually busted out his own personal artistic peak. It was a tube with an eyedropper stuck in the side. How it worked was, you would light a joint, put the roach-end of the joint into the eyedropper, cover one end of the plastic tube, put your mouth over the other and suck. The vacuum would suck smoke from the joint, conceal it in the plastic tube at which time you would remove your thumb from the other end and take the smoke out of the tube and straight into your brain. He called it “The Cortana.”
Of course Karim failed at using this, but I guess he got high. He sure made a point to let me know he thought he was high.
“Why aren’t you high, man? You smoked so much!”
“I am high,” I told him.
“Then why don’t you seem high?”
“Because I don’t suck at being high,” I told him.

I don’t remember why, but at one point of the night he really pissed me off and I threw an empty can into his face and said I’d kill him with a pair of scissors. He got scared of me and apologized incessantly. It was ridiculous. I am a skinny little bitch; a human stick figure. I didn’t want him to apologize. He has to talk to apologize and Karim Badra talking is not something I want to have to subject myself to. Sorry folks, Karim never crossed paths with my scissors.
Not that long thereafter, we all mutually decided that going to get cheeseburgers was the best idea to ever have bestowed all mankind. Myself, Eli, Brian and Karim approached Brian’s SUV.
“Woah,” Karim said, “you’re not driving, are you?”
“I am driving as a matter of fact,” said Brian.
“But you’re high.”
“I am very high.”
“And you can drive?”
“You think I don’t know how to drive? I’ve been driving since I was, like, fourteen,” Brian told him. Brian was 18 and he had a beard and a car. What a beast, I love that guy.

We all sat in the car while Karim stood, looking in through the windows with the eyes of a parent or a nun. Then we drove off and Karim stood there, alone in the parking lot. Once again, a solemn soul had listened too diligently in the special school assembly. Once again, society spat out a Karim Badra, in spite of itself. Society had groomed him, expensively educated him, luxuriously washed his hair, prepared his dinner plate, ironed his shirts —and then— it just left him there, hungry and alone in the parking lot with a new smell in his shirt to explain to daddy.
The burgers, of course, were sublime. Sadly, I couldn’t order a cheeseburger with any bacon on it, seeing as the country prohibits swine. The small shed of American Patriotism in me must shudder and recoil with revulsion at the notion of not allowing a paying costumer to wrap his grilled, dead cow with fried, dead pig.

We returned, and eventually it was just Eli and me again. We smoked one more joint (the 22nd one of the night, I kept count somehow) outside of his tent, just me and him. I’m sure we talked about the stars or some girl somewhere who sent him a picture of her pussy. This is for you, Eli. I couldn’t have posted this here on the internet before you were arrested.