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Published: March 22nd 2007
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Considering the capital cities that surround it - Jerusalem to the west, Damascus to the north, Beirut and Cairo just a short flight away - it’s hard to get all fired up about Amman. This town is like the Nick Nolte of the Middle East: impossible to love or hate, largely forgettable, but able to make a good showing now and then. You don’t easily take to the dusty downtown, to the rows of apartment blocks that rise across its endless hills (as many as nineteen, according to some estimates). But you can carve out a comfortable little niche haggling for fruit and puffing
nargileh - or, as I’ve found, shopping for bootleg DVDs in the shops on Al-Amir Mohamed Street, where
300,
Shooter, or the new season of
24 can be had for all of 1JD - $1.40 - a pop.
Amman’s also where you start to understand the grumblings about the “two Jordans.” Downtown, in the old heart of the city, the buildings look like they just got off the boat from 19th-century Manchester. Veiled women glide between the produce stalls or squeeze the soles of cheap plastic shoes; the men squat on the sidewalk outside the
King Hussein Mosque, their rough, lined faces looking as immutable and truth-revealing as scripture. It’s a scene you’d almost recognize in Damascus, in the dusty streets of Old Cairo.
Across town, past the embassies and four-star hotels, there’s an air of immodest wealth and unscrupulous consumption. Never mind Palestine Juice and the cluttered shops of cell phone accessories on Quraysh Street; here the stores bear hopeful names like Via Roma and Boutique de France, and the gated homes are about as far as you can get from the Bedouin caves of a week ago. Late-model Mercedes Benzes double up in the driveways; a few conspicuous Hummers cruise the streets around Abdoun Circle. It’s here that you can see the young and rich and shamelessly fit preening at the cafés for each other, a touch of boredom in the eyes, something suggesting the painful disillusionment of being a long way from Beverly Hills.
It’s with no small measure of self-loathing, though, that I’m spending most of my time in Abdoun. In the ten weeks since I left Europe behind, I’ve started to buckle under the weight of all this piety and chastity: these terrible virtues that most Westerners managed
to shrug off with their first hand-job in junior high. Months ago, when I walked into my first café in Morocco, there was a strange, heady newness to the rows of men puffing
sheesha on the sidewalk, the young guys in a smoky back room playing cards until the wee hours. I was flush with the novelty of Cultural Inquiry, and with my metaphorical pith helmet planted firmly on my noggin, I was happy to root around in the dark corners of a fresh, uncharted world.
But as that world’s grown familiar - and, in fact, has become my own - there’s a weary dissatisfaction seeping in. I’m bored by these long nights in the cafés, the marathon sessions of dominoes and professional wrestling. I shake my head and tsk at the latest American misadventures abroad; I look up hopefully when I see a flash of female skin on the street: some provocative European passing in pedal-pushers, the graceful arcs of her calves curving like an elegant script.
I’m becoming more Arab with each passing day, a development that would undoubtedly send my poor grandmother swooning back in Brooklyn. So I’ve retreated to Abdoun, with its American-style cafés
and fashionable, belly-baring teens. It’s as close to home as I can get, a paradoxical comfort that, I’ve learned, is the only way to maintain your sanity during long stretches on the road. To hear the familiar lexicon of lattes, smoothies, and combo platters; to make eyes at a girl not just because it’s the only part of her I can see. Such simple pleasures - so taken for granted during the daily drudgery of life in New York - have grown as exotic to me as the spice souqs and elaborate minarets of the Middle East, and if you’re beginning to wonder just when my life got turned upside-down, I assure you, you’re not alone.
Still, there are lessons to be learned from these pouting young beauties and suave guys in open-collared shirts, a grave recognition of the difference between being happy and being distracted. After a couple of afternoons in Abdoun, I meet up with Ayman and Akram, a pair of local
CouchSurfers who spend a few days showing me around town. We pop into their favorite cafés and eat
kofta at their favorite greasy restaurants; we watch the soccer highlights from Europe in a bright, smoky
lounge, the acrid air peppered by enthusiastic cheers for the squads from Germany and Spain.
One night, picking me up in front of my hotel, they’re crammed into the back of a friend’s jalopy. We barrel through the traffic heading west, Amar’s foot heavy on the gas, the engine sputtering. Akram is clapping and singing along to a wailing tune on the radio, a popular jingle from an Egyptian cell phone commercial. There’s a faint whiff of something recognizable in the air, and I’m struggling to pick up the scent. Ayman is punching digits into his mobile; Ismael swivels excitedly in his seat, his English flailing like it stumbled into the deep end. “Chris, what’s the program?” he wants to know. And suddenly it hits me: the adolescent excitement, the nervous chatter, the kinetic air that practically makes the hair stand up on my neck.
Tonight, someone in this car will be getting laid.
You treat the fact that kids in Jordan are having sex in the same way the Kansas school board treats evolution: a ruthless lie spun in the face of all the obvious facts. Rumors of secret trysts flit about the cafés like
9/11 conspiracy theories, most involving a French girl on holiday in Aqaba or, as I learned last week in Wadi Musa, some enigmatic figure in Amman. But even here, in the capital, you have to go to the swank Western suburbs to see the sexes mingling freely. Elsewhere, this town has all the sex appeal of a strip of wallpaper in the Holiday Inn.
By some remarkable stroke of good fortune, Ismael and Amar have arranged to see two girls they met at a café last week. Preparing for this furtive rendezvous in the King Hussein Gardens, they seem struck dumb by the incongruities of their lives. Women! Waiting for them! What are the odds! But as we speed toward the irrefutable call of destiny, there’s a lingering suspicion that the night’s prospects might dissolve into the air like wisps of smoke, that only a shade of difference separates a ray of hope from the darkened skies of futility.
When we reach the gardens it’s already half-past eleven; all signs are pointing toward epic disappointment. It’s a cold, blustery night, and we circle the park for ten minutes, Ismael and Amar intrepidly stomping across the playgrounds and dried-up flowerbeds, turning a blind eye to the likelihood of two young, available girls waiting for them at midnight in a frosty park. Their persistence has crossed the frontier from a sweet, earnest place to somewhere far more sinister, and it’s impossible not to recognize the grim topography of sexual frustration. Cold, defeated, we pack back into the car. The engine starts with a lurch and we pull into traffic, the cars racing by on all sides, the drivers looking for all the world like there’s a warm body in a warm bed waiting for them.
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