Driving the Saudis Page 8

  In much the same offhand patronizing manner with which Fahima treated me, it didn’t seem to register with the other royals that their drivers were actual people, with personal lives and families waiting for them at home. In spite of the many hours they spent with their employees, it didn’t appear that the royals ever considered for a minute that their servants and chauffeurs were working impossibly long hours, were likely desperate for money, and might not actually enjoy dedicating their entire existence to the whim and fancy of the uber-rich. The Saudis just didn’t seem to think about it. Why would they?

  If you’ve always had money, say hundreds of millions of dollars, it must be almost impossible to negotiate a path of empathy toward understanding what it’s like to have nothing, or to work night and day for a few hundred dollars, or to save for years to buy a coveted item. It’s just so foreign. And even if you come from nothing and then you have money, usually you try to forget what it’s like not to have any. You put it out of your head, very far away. As far, far, far away as possible because it makes us feel inferior, and we define ourselves by our superiority to others: We want to forget that we were ever inferior.

  Aristotle called this philotimia—the love of honor, the need to feel morally superior. But if you take the moral aspect out of the equation, I think we just need to feel superior because feeling inferior makes us feel shame. I see that this shows up in how we live, where we live, and what we have. It’s not just things we own; it’s other stuff too: the influential friends we know, the talented children we have, my two Ivy League degrees, for instance, that I consciously and sometimes even unconsciously mention when I want to advance my standing or support an argument that I’m making—so people think better of me. These elements document our superiority, and that superiority validates us. Having people think that I was an FBI agent, armed with important information, survival skills, and perhaps even a handgun, when in actuality I was just an overworked and mistreated lowly chauffeur, made me feel better about myself. The same must go for princesses who cannot vote or drive but who have a different Birkin bag for every day of the month. These things make us feel more worthy. I don’t know why we need it, but we do. I need it, the Saudis need it, we all need it—except maybe the Dalai Lama. I’m really hoping he doesn’t need it, and I doubt he does much shopping anyway. He looks so darn dashing in those saffron robes that they’re probably custom-made for him.

  8

  I Will Survive!

  After the day’s shopping and evening’s coiffure were wrapped up, the royal hairdresser insisted I drive him to the casinos near Palm Springs, where he drank, smoked, and gambled all night. Every night. Michel liked to play slots. The only slots near Beverly Hills are 120 miles away, just outside Palm Springs on the American Indian reservations such as Pechanga or Morongo.

  Gambling is a big business out on the reservations. They’ve worked out a deal with the state of California that only certain games can be played in certain locales. So even though you can play cards at Hollywood Park Casino in Los Angeles, where I’d try to persuade the hairdresser to go to avoid the Palm Springs schlep, the only slots permitted in California are on the reservations.

  Morongo is particularly surreal. When you come upon it at sunset, silhouetted against the glowing orange desert sky, it looks like a mirage. It’s as if a Disney-inspired high-rise space station were plopped down in the middle of the sand as a kind of freakish Sixties-style oasis, pulsating in garish neon light to attract the masses. It even features an oasis pool and waterslide.

  It takes two hours to get to Morongo from Los Angeles, and that’s if you’re driving 90 miles per hour in the middle of the night with no traffic. But at 5:00 P.M. in bumper-to-bumper traffic, the trip could take three and a half hours or more, and that’s always when the hairdresser was ready to go.

  “NOW WE GO CASINO! NOW! NOW WE GO!” he screamed.

  “Sir, this is not a good time,” I said. “Everyone’s trying to get home from work.” I don’t know why I bothered to call him sir, he was acting like a three-year-old.

  “WE GO DIFFERENT WAY NOW!”

  “Sir, there is no different way, at least not one that’s any faster. There’s only one road to Palm Springs, and everybody’s on it,” I said.

  “TELL THEM OFF THE ROAD! WE GO CASINO NOW. LATER THEY GO HOME!”

  “Uh, that’s not the way it works in this country, sir. They have a right to be on the road just like us.”

  “TELL THEM OFF THE ROAD!”

  He must have been joking when he said that because obviously there was no way I could tell all of the thousands of drivers to make way for us, but it didn’t appear so because he was practically spitting with rage. He had a terrific sense of entitlement that at the time I found loathsome but in retrospect I quite admire. Maybe I’d have nailed more movie roles and more credits on films if I’d had a greater sense of privilege and demanded what I wanted even half as often as the hairdresser. NOW! NOW! I am star of picture! I am producer! I have single title card! NOW!

  He chain-smoked in the car the whole way there without letting me open the windows (“LA! LA, NO WINDOW, LA!”) and sang along to the music he liked on the radio, loudly and badly. He sounded like a wounded dog with damaged vocal chords, crying for his master to come home. His favorite was Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” which he wailed between drags on his cigarette. He didn’t know most of the lyrics, but that didn’t stop him from yelping along at the top of his lungs with complete and enviable abandon. My ears rang with pain.

  Casinos are an odd environment—almost like an enormous man cave but where women are allowed and even encouraged to visit, preferably wearing miniskirts, sporting high hair, and carrying trays of free beer or rum and Cokes. There are no windows anywhere. The lights are kept at a consistent level so you don’t know whether it’s day or night, your circadian clock goes awry, and you never know when to be tired, so you just keep on gambling. A hotelier friend from undergraduate school told me oxygen is pumped in to keep you awake to help you stay at the tables longer. The casino owners ply you with free booze so your judgment is severely impaired, and you’re likely to gamble away your house or baby daughter after you’ve been awake for seventy-two hours and eaten nothing except pretzels for forty-six of them.

  A few years ago, I did a voice-over campaign for a major casino chain, and the read they wanted for the narration was “a cross between Cate Blanchett’s fairy queen in Lord of the Rings and a sexy dominatrix who’s totally intimidating but still totally hot.” Okay. The ad copy was equally challenging; it went something like this: “You are KING of the world! MASTER of all! Everything can be at YOUR disposal! BUT you must EARN it! You must LEARN how to be a king. At our SUPREME resort you will LAVISH yourself with sumptuous SPA SERVICES that cater to your every need, the finest culinary DELIGHTS in the world, and five thousand GAMING tables, all at YOUR command! It is your time to REIGN!” In other words, come to our casino so you can spend most of your money on massages and hookers and learn how to act kingly, lose whatever you have left at the blackjack tables where the house always wins, then end your suffering by jumping out a window when you finally realize the havoc you’ve wrought. Thankfully, most casino hotel windows specifically don’t open in order to prevent such a demise.

  Michel took to the casinos like hairspray on a beehive hairdo and loved spending hours on a stool surrounded by dirty ashtrays and half-chewed plastic cups filled with gaming tokens. After a few double whisky sours, he often became quite chatty. He told me that even though there is no gambling in the Kingdom, he had frequented casinos all over the world while traveling with Princess Zaahira, who spent a large part of the year away from Saudi Arabia visiting family and friends in London, Paris, and Marbella. Now that her children were all nearly grown, she went home only when her husband summoned her or when duty called, for example, if she had to attend the funeral of a relative. Michel said the husband gave her a long leash because he was so fond of her.

  The hairdr
esser claimed that Le Grande Casino in Monte Carlo was his favorite gambling spot because he loved the beautiful people there, but I don’t see how he ever would have been allowed entrance to such a posh place. His hair looked like a science experiment, and I never saw him outfitted in anything but distressed dirty jeans and smelly T-shirts. Then again, maybe he owned a tuxedo that he whipped out if Princess Zaahira had a hankering to go to Monaco. She must have bankrolled him too, because he seemed to have an endless amount of cash.

  He also loved Morongo because it has over two thousand slot machines, including Rich Little Piggies, Dean Martin’s Wild Party, and IGT’s video slot Marilyn Monroe, which features a lifelike voice-over of Marilyn cooing as she’s being played. I thought that was a nice touch.

  The first night I took him there, he won $40,000. I know this because the casino demanded an address for his tax information; they wouldn’t accept the hotel as a valid address, so they asked for mine as well after I confirmed that I knew him and verified that he was staying in Beverly Hills. Then they flooded my mailbox for months with promotional material: fanny packs, foam beer koozies, and dozens of coupons for free weekends, which I distributed to my casino-loving friends.

  After the happy blush of those first huge winnings, the hairdresser lost thousands of dollars night after night and became surly and abusive. He would gamble until 4:00 or 5:00 A.M. while I waited in the parking lot drinking $9 espressos. Casino parking lots are lonely; there isn’t much activity. The gamblers park their cars and then disappear for days. The casinos suck them in like a neon black hole. Periodically throughout the night, I’d wander inside to go to the bathroom or check on the hairdresser, to get him cigarettes or save his place at his machines while he went to the loo, and I’d watch the action at the tables or the slots. No one seemed happy.

  On the way home, the hairdresser would sleep in the back stretched out on the leather seat—grunting, snorting, and farting—while I drove 90 miles per hour back to the hotel. The California Highway Patrol never bothered the Crown Vic. It’s a cop car, so they probably thought I was an undercover cop cruising by on official police business. This one was black, so that made it particularly undercover police–like, although I’ve also seen them in army green and dark blue depending on which governmental organization is using them. The Federal Building on Wilshire Boulevard has a parking lot filled with white and gray ones, usually with several long curved antennas coming out of the back hood and windshield. When you see one of those pass you on the 405 freeway, especially if it has four fierce-looking men in it sporting aviator sunglasses and flattops, you can be sure it’s the Feds. The cop version is called the Crown Victoria Police Interceptor (CVPI) and is not available new to the general public, but it is widely sold or auctioned off as used, which is how they end up at rental agencies.

  Racing back to the hotel, I thought about how the hairdresser had dissed the Crown Vic that first day by insisting that he was meant to be in something more substantial. He was sadly mistaken. I learned quickly that the Crown Vic has a 250 horsepower V8 engine that picks up powerful speed in seconds and also has a hard-as-hell chassis, which is useful for tactical ramming and maneuvers in car chases, so it’s the sedan of choice for law enforcement agencies. I know it sounds like I’m a car chick, but actually I am not. It’s just that after months of being stuck behind a wheel for hours on end, I couldn’t help but develop a profound respect and appreciation for a vehicle that was so smooth and so fast. I nicknamed my car “The Rocket.” One morning, The Rocket and I made it back to Beverly Hills from Palm Springs in 85 minutes instead of the usual 2 hours; we were flying. That car was my friend. Usually Rocky would get me home at 7:00 A.M. to catch a few hours sleep.

  Each afternoon back at the hotel, Princess Zaahira wanted to hear about the previous evening’s escapades since she did not go to the casinos. I presumed she was forbidden to do so by her husband, but perhaps it was her own sense of propriety that prevented her. I knew the Saudi Army officers on constant duty carefully monitored her activities, so she had little wiggle room in any case.

  The hairdresser had noticed that I was a pretty good mimic and started to enlist me to help re-create his activities from the previous night. “COME, Janni!” he yelled as he waved for me to join him next to the princess’s Mercedes parked in front of the hotel. He wanted me to act out the goings-on at the poker tables and slot machines that I saw when I went in to check on him.

  “NOW! Tell the princess how you see at the blackjack! NOW! Tell the princess!” He pushed me toward the open door of the car, and I could see the princess sitting in the backseat looking relaxed and regal. She smiled benevolently at me and waited expectantly.

  “NOW!” he said again. My participation was not a request; it was a demand.

  Michel set up the blackjack table scene for her in Arabic, and then I cursorily portrayed all the different characters one after another: the disinterested croupier, the drunken loser, the tentative newcomer, working up to the main action featuring the hairdresser. As him, I looked around as if I were at a poker table, mimed looking at imaginary cards on a table in front of me, lifting the edge of my cards covertly, and checked out the other imaginary players and the imaginary croupier. Then I looked at my cards again. I sighed. Then I mimed sipping a drink from a glass and grimaced to make it clear that it was a strong alcoholic beverage. I glanced around worriedly. I counted imaginary chips. I checked my cards again. I wiped imaginary sweat from my brow. I checked my cards again. I scratched my head as I mumbled to myself: “Card? No card? Card? No card?” I pretended to ask a player next to me: “Card? No card? Card? No card?” I paused, checked my cards again, and then said reluctantly, “Hit me.” I watched the cards, cringing with dread as they were dealt. I paused dramatically, then cried “Noooooooo!,” throwing my face into my hands and fake sobbing with despair. The princess and the hairdresser howled with delight.

  Princess Zaahira asked me to act out various scenes for her again and again; this regular ritual was my only contact with her other than when I delivered things to her hotel room, the Presidential Suite. I could sense that she envied our nights out on the town. I also thought that in spite of her lavish lifestyle and limitless access to everything that money can buy, there were many things the princess probably wished she could see and do and yet could not. She seemed to accept her fate with grace and equanimity, but with a little sadness too.

  I could see that Michel had his own buried sadness. It seemed clear to me that he was gay but had sublimated his own desires and needs in service to the princess, as if he were a court eunuch, and that the repression was making him mean. I had tried several times to take him to the West Hollywood clubs (anywhere instead of Palm Springs) so he could at least dance off a little of his bad temper, but he always adamantly refused to go. Sometimes I even went out of the way to drive him home along Santa Monica Boulevard or past the Abbey on Robertson so he could see the early morning boy-on-boy action that he was missing in Boystown. He never acknowledged what he saw as we drove by and never asked me to stop. Homosexuality is forbidden in Saudi Arabia and punishable by death, so perhaps he had just shut that part of himself down forever, even though he spent much of the year in Paris and elsewhere traveling with Princess Zaahira.

  We had developed a curious semblance of camaraderie, and I knew that he liked me, in his screaming way, but three weeks on the job was about all I could stomach of the nightly driving jaunts to Palm Springs with the hairdresser. Michel was extremely difficult to be around. He was overbearing, demanding, and insulting, and my lungs took a beating every night because of his incessant chain-smoking on the long drives. I could see that he was lonely and unhappy, but it didn’t make the abuse any more forgivable.

  One morning, I stumbled into the command post and told security that I was going to quit if they didn’t reassign me. I was still considered a lowly member of the hierarchy, but I knew that it reflected badly on the whole group if someone resigned in spite of how quick they wer
e to fire. The royal family didn’t want defectors. Also, by this time, they didn’t want to lose me. I had started to become somewhat valuable, and I knew this—there are some things they could or would ask only a woman to do. Security agreed but said that I must clear the change with the hairdresser.

  I told Michel that I couldn’t drive him at night anymore because my “husband” was unhappy that I was coming home so late. Within the first few days, I had already started wearing my grandmother’s wedding band to support my “husband” story, as well as to deflect advances from the chauffeurs and security, so this worked out quite well. Pretending to be married was a trick from my bartending days that came in very handy as a chauffeur, and then especially with the Saudis. In Arab culture, it is understood that a husband has every right to forbid or approve his wife’s activities. Even so, the hairdresser was clearly hurt that I left him, and from then on, he would look away like a jilted boyfriend whenever I tried to say hello. I didn’t miss him.

  9

  Who Are These People?

  I had never met any Saudis before I started the job, so whenever I had a free moment, I would steal away to surf on my laptop as I waited in my car for the next call from security. I didn’t have an Internet card so I would drive slowly along the Beverly Hills city streets near the hotels, trolling for a signal on which I could piggyback.

  Saudi Arabia is mostly desert, or semidesert, and only 2 percent of the landmass is suitable for cultivation. There are no permanent year-round lakes or rivers. There is very little tourism except for religious reasons. Saudi Arabia is considered the birthplace of Islam and is home to the two holiest Muslim shrines: Medina, the burial site of the Prophet Muhammad, and Mecca. To be a good Muslim, you are obligated to visit Mecca at least once in your lifetime; the hajj is one of the five pillars of Islam.