Procrastinet

Amman, Jordan - 11/24/04: WMD Found

filed under: Despatches

A continuing series of periodic Procrastinet Despatches from Amman, Jordan. By Nicholas Seeley.

[Editor's Note: In honor of Thanksgiving, here's something for which we should all be thankful - none of us are currently nursing Nick's hangover.]

WMD Found!

That’s right, I know where they are.

It all started with this trip to Dahab. Never fucking go to Dahab. It’s like something out of a low-budget horror movie, it’s a bad seafood nightmare, the place they send you when you’ve sniffed way too much glue… the horror, the horror.

But I digress. Egypt may be a throne in the pantheon of Hell, but it has one recommendation as a vacation spot: it’s even cheaper than Tijuana, and with fewer underage hookers. Even the beer in Egypt is cheap. The beer is also crap. After several days of drinking the straight-from-the-red-sea pisswater the orphaned children bottle and sell you in Dahab, some friends and I decided to pool our money and buy a jug of the real hard stuff – usually it comes with labels that say things like “Johnny Waller Black Table,” but it’ll get you drunk.

We got ourselves a liter bottle of Rum for 40 lira, in this bar that was shaped like a boat, and proceeded to open it, sprawled on farshas in the back room of aforesaid bar. Actually, it was “Rhum,” according to the label, which featured a picture of a delirously smiling (and oddly mustachioed) Aunt Jemima – maybe she’d been drinking the stuff. And it was fucking purple. Never fucking drink any liquor that’s fucking purple.

40 Egyptian lira, by the way, is equivalent to, oh – sixty-five cents, U.S.

Now I must digress again. Previous to this night, the foulest drinking experience I had ever had had been in college, when a group of us returned to our castle at 2 am, and scrounged up all the liquor we could find for an impromptu game of asshole. Someone, I don’t know who, pulled out of the back of their closet a large jug of yellowish fluid: it was the color and texture of lamp oil, but it had what appeared to be a dessicated hot pepper floating in it. No one could recall what it was, or where it came from -- perhaps abandoned by a previous inhabitant. It was covered with dust, and when opened, smelled like WD-40.

Of course we drank it anyway. To this day, I am not convinced it wasn’t, in fact, lamp oil. I only had a few shots before deciding that I wanted to live to a ripe old age, and passing it along. My friend Abe finished most of the jug, and wound up naked on the floor in a fetal position.

Which brings us back to the Rhum. Tentatively, I poured a few sips of sticky purple stuff into a glass, and tasted it. Take this from where it’s coming when I say, I’ve never tasted anything like it. Mix cough medicine with antifreeze and lighter fluid and you’re getting close. And it was fucking purple.

Of course, we drank it anyway.

It's fortunate I was sitting, because after the first shot, I keeled over sideways. Most of my major motor functions went haywire, and I think my stomach and my liver got into a fistfight over who would have to deal with the stuff. I couldn’t move for a good five minutes.

Needless to say, after an experience like that, the first thing I needed was a drink.

After the second shot, the walls were wobbling, and my friends were talking in that slowed down, you’ve-sprinkled-too-much-ritalin-on-your-special-K voice. Needless to say… this went on for a while. At one point, I believe I actually went blind briefly. I don’t know what the fuck was in that bottle, but I’m certain it wasn’t alcohol – more likely, it originated in some underground lab in Iraq.

Yes, that’s right. You can call off the war, folks, I’ve found the weapons of mass destruction, they’re being bottled and sold as liquor in Egypt! Oh, come on, can you really say you’re surprised?

So as I lay me down to sleep tonight, I can rest easy knowing I’ve done my bit to keep the world safe from terrorism and glue-sniffing Dahab bootleggers and those little yellow insects that crawl all over your eyeballs. But mostly the terrorists… God knows what that purple shit would do if it were loosed on the world.

- Nicholas Seeley, 11/24/04

Posted by rjt at November 24, 2004 05:15 PM