I decided to go because it sounded like the end of bad weather, as in, yes, “Bah! Rain!” which makes me, I guess, a punning literalist. But then a trip to the worldwide waste-of-time confirmed my hunch. I could appreciate a country that measures its annual rainfall in millimetres (72) after living in a place where the average yearly deluge is over three feet (in millimetres, 11,340). On this tiny island nation, or archipelago really of thirty-three islands—which together make up a land mass a fifth the size of Rhode Island—there were, I learned, burial mounds thousands of years old and in the desert, a gnarled mesquite tree standing all alone: the capital T Tree of capital L Life. It may just mark the exact spot of the Garden of Eden—or maybe not. I don’t really care, but I do like vegetation with a myth attached to it. The Greeks, including Alexander the Great (apparently hot in a pre-Christian sort of way) loved Bahrain for its pearls and cotton and called it Tylos. Before that, some 5,000 years ago—a time span I cannot easily wrap my American mind around—it was likely the site of the Sumerian land called Dilmun. All that sounded great, but critical to my decision was the number of four and five-star hotels and the hopping nightlife fed by Formula One, which meant employment for DJ Whatever-My-Name-Would-Be. (A friend suggested Allah-nis, but I thought I’d wait to commit.)
So I wrote Abdullah Ahmad Abdullah, the personnel officer at the Ritz-Carlton, and asked if they would hire me, citing my extensive knowledge of hiphop, hardcore, bhangra, and eighties pop, as well as my ability to make an entire room of dissolute twenty year olds get up and dance. Less than a day later, Mr Abdullah wrote me back. “Dear Mr McKenzie, Thank you for your inquiry. In fact, we are in need of a DJ at our nightclub, the Funk ‘n’ Punk, immediately. Please come at your earliest convenience, and we will provide you with housing and a driver.” The salary in Bahraini dinars doubled what I was making in Mucktown.
“Actually, it’s Ms McKenzie, which I hope is all right, and please call me Tanya,” I wrote back.
“How perfect! Bahrain’s first female DJ,at the Ritz, of course. By the way, my street name is Triple A or Trippy. Let me know your flight details, and I’ll meet you myself.”
I wasn’t sure what it meant to work at the Ritz and have a street name, but I’d soon find out. So I left that sodden West Coast city and its fairtrade organic righteousness, for someplace ancient, dry, and petroleum based. On my Emirates Airlines flight via Frankfurt, I reflected that the choice now felt a little random, but I had been determined not to head off to someplace where any semi-adventurous American girl would go, her laconic and beard-sporting boyfriend in tow, to become enlightened, unfettered, or simply high. I wanted the other end of the spectrum, to visit someplace more in love with the shopping mall than America is herself (Fendi, Chanel, and Versace would all be there, apparently). I also liked the idea of living in a country where Our Kind aren’t particularly liked, but aren’t especially hated either.
When I’d learned that the second son of the Bahraini king reached out to Michael Jackson during his abuse trial and gave him a palace to recuperate in for a year afterward, I took it as a sign. After all, it was Thriller that let me know my future was tied to music, and if the country was good enough for the King of Pop, it was good enough for me. I also wanted to go someplace small enough that I stood a chance of knowing it. Knowing it—it sounds sexual doesn’t it? But I wasn’t looking for love. There’s Italy, France, and all of Eastern Europe, even Bali, for that. I was really going because nobody else I knew would even consider it.
Trippy met me outside customs. He was handsome in a mama’s boy sort of way—a little stout, in ironed jeans and a white button-down. His face was shiny from the heat, surrounded by unruly black curls, and he grinned. “T-Girl!” He clasped my hand,pumping it.
“Trippy,” I said. “Thanks for coming to pick me up.”
“Man, I feel like I know you. I’ve been reading all about you on the blogs.” Whew. I’d been traveling for sixteen hours, and I wondered how I was going to keep up as he announced we were going to central Manama for some strong coffee and the best lamb kebabs, bar none. “And don’t tell the Ritz chefs I said that. But you really have to see the old part of town first, or you’ll just get sucked into the new.” Trippy drove, pulling a lot of fancy maneuvers in and out of traffic, but with good humour, as if this were a hobby he just didn’t quite get enough time practicing. There was the Bahrain World Trade Center with its own twin towers looking like two spiky leaves piercing the sky, and attached to each other by a three-rungs, a wind turbine on each one.
“See, we’re innovative here,” commented Trippy as he parked his Mercedes in a monstrous indoor parking lot and led me out to the labyrinth of alleyways that could have led to an earlier century, if it hadn’t been for “Don’t stop ‘til you get enough…” playing from a tailor’s shop.
“The whole nation was devastated by his death. We really considered him one of our own,” Trippy said, and I suppressed the urge to hold his hand as we wove in and out of the crowds just so I wouldn’t lose him. While we ate, as he’d promised, the most delicious kebabs and flatbread, Billie Jean reminded me “be careful what you do”.
Trippy did not make his move then or later, and I didn’t either. He was an old-fashioned boy, it turned out, and I liked having a platonic escort, both attentive and hesitant. I worked my four nights a week spinning, plus the occasional wedding, and my gang out there on the checkerboard floor of black marble and white lights was not only Bahraini and Saudi, but pink-faced Brits and sauntering Italians, bodacious Indians and silky-haired Filipinas. This place was, it’s true, Middle East Lite. Yes, you had the Sunni-majority–Shi’ite-minority standoffs and Iran making noise about how the island really belonged to them, despite the seventeen miles of King Fahd Causeway attaching it to Saudi Arabia. But really it was pretty relaxed. Even the local girls in headscarves wore tight t-shirts saying things like “Rules? What rules?” And Americans, thankfully, were in short supply.
Six weeks into it all, I looked down one night and saw Trippy, off-duty, but still in work clothes minus the jacket and tie, sitting at the bar, his expression cheerful with a tinge of dejection, and I left my nest during my break.
“T-girl!” he said and gave me a high five. He had in fact christened me; or I guess that’s not the right verb, but the name stuck, and everyone calls me that now. I ordered a vodka tonic, and he said, “I love that you’re, like, totally modern, but you don’t rub it in people’s faces.” I felt a surge of affection for this person, this friend, and leaned in to ask him something.
Now we’re in back in my high-end dorm room, and out my window I’m watching a date palm sway while Trippy sleeps, the 400-thread count Egyptian cotton sheets twisted around his soft middle, the black hairs curling on his chest. We are bathed in pink from the lights outside as the air system hums. Almost every molecule of air that comes into this place is filtered though a giant machine before it reaches the vents in the walls, stripped of trace minerals from the land and salt air from the ocean—though I guess the dust really is a problem when the winds blow from Iraq—and I have the feeling of being the princess and the pea, except the pea isn’t a pea. It’s the millions of souls—Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Persian, Portuguese, Greek, English—who have passed through this place before me in the last five-thousand (or even ten-, if you count pre-history), distilled into a test-tube of incandescence floating behind my sternum, close to but not touching my heart.