You will find short stories on this site. Most are autobiographical. Some are fiction.

SAUDI VINTAGE

Alcohol is not permitted in the Moslem Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Every year, countless men are arrested and put away in Saudi jails for having it in their possession. However, when the opportunity for profit is great, clever entrepreneurs will find a way to smuggle it in. I heard of one, A Kuwaiti who modified a truck to traverse the desert. He would fill his truck with cases of Jack Daniels in Kuwait and drive it across the desert, into the Kingdom to a remote desert rendezvous. Buyers would gather there to stock up. This concept of a desert rendezvous is in keeping with the Saudi tradition of camel caravans, which would meet at desert locations to exchange goods according to their destinations.

Westerners, such as we on the faculty of King Faisal University, did not have connections among Saudis to navigate the elaborate and secret arrangements by which one could buy hard liquor. Nor did we have the high-level connections to help us get out of jail if we were to be caught with it.

This problem is one that has been faced by expats for many years. People who choose to work abroad are, as a class, willing to take greater risks than the average person. Furthermore, when working abroad, there is always the desire to maintain some of one’s own culture. Consequently, expats had figured out a system by which they could enjoy a glass of wine with dinner.

Expats take advantage of the cultural mores of Saudi Arabia, in which the privacy of homes is a fundamental right. This privacy is so strictly held that it is a transgression to look at a residential window when passing on the street. You will not be arrested for doing it, but if a Saudi man thinks you glanced at a residential window, he may well ask, “What are you doing looking in that window?” Consequently, when walking on a residential street in Saudi Arabia, one is compelled to look straight ahead or down at the pavement. This sanctity of the home extends to the police. The police would never presume to enter a home unless there was clear evidence of serious illegal activity happening inside.

As a result, if someone were able to slip booze into their home undetected, it would be safe for them to consume it. This is also true if he were to produce it inside his home and never take it out. But it is not easy to make decent wine in an apartment. The easy part is obtaining several varieties of grape juice, which, in our town, can be purchased at the one Western grocery store. These juices are conveniently sealed with wire spring ceramic caps in 900 ml bottles. These bottles are used for making wine out of the juice. The prospective winemaker need only to add yeast to the bottle and put a weight on the cap, without securing it using the spring cap device. Fermentation produces carbon dioxide pressure inside the bottle weighted cap will release enough of the pressurized gas to prevent the bottle from exploding. And yet the weighted cap would retain pressure in the bottle so that oxygen could not enter and spoil the wine. The more advanced winemakers used water traps to release the CO2.

Some expats used baker’s yeast to make their wine. This made a poor-quality wine. Fortunately, wine yeast can be found in small packets outside of The Kingdom. These packets are easily concealed on one’s person when entering the Kingdom. Saudi customs officers would not search one’s clothing. Saudis are as private about their clothing as they are about their houses.

So it was that most of the Western expatriots that I knew, made their own wine. These wines varied in quality. When invited to a colleague’s house for dinner, we could anticipate anything from good wine to barely palatable, poorly fermented fruit juice. We had to drink it all and pretend to like it because our host would certainly be proud of his wine-making ability.

The downside of this skirting of the law was that if Saudi men, both friends and acquaintances, who enjoyed alcohol, were to find out that I was a winemaker, they would show up at my door. In the kingdom, one is obliged to invite a guest in and offer refreshments, usually Perrier water and some munchies, such as carrot sticks or nuts, would suffice. But these guys would look at the water and ask, “Don’t you have something else?” Or they would say, “I understand that you are an excellent wine maker.” Their persistence would continue until I brought out a bottle, and then another until they were satiated and a bit tipsy. At which point they would saunter out, expressing their gratitude for my extraordinary hospitality. Following their departure, I would be terrified that they would either be arrested for drunk driving or crash their Mercedes. In either event, the police would surely trace their source of alcohol back to me. Fortunately, these Saudis discovered my wine during the last year of our sojourn there. This kind of visit happened only a couple of times before we left the Kingdom.

Near Disaster

There are other, unforeseen risks that come with making wine in your apartment. I would store empty wire clamp top bottles in the back of the kitchen cabinet. They were kept just in case I found suitable grape juice in another type of bottle. I also maintained a bottle of wine yeast as “starter” in the same cabinet. The lid on the starter was held snug with a weight but not clamped tightly so that excessive pressure would not build up in the bottle. One day, my wife, Maura, saw it, a bottle of juice with a loose lid. She clasped it tightly and put it back in the cabinet. Several weeks later, Maura was doing some housekeeping. She took the bottles out of the cabinet, put them in a shopping bag, and told our five-year-old son, Justin, to take the bag down to the dumpster in the street. I was unaware of any of this until I heard knocking on our apartment door. Upon opening it, I found our Indian maintenance man holding our blood-covered son in his arms. Justin had climbed onto empty boxes next to the dumpster and was throwing the bottles into it one at a time to watch them shatter. When he threw the bottle of wine starter into the dumpster, it exploded. Glass shrapnel hit his face and arms, resulting in many small cuts. Fortunately, his reflex to close his eyes had saved them. While he suffered many cuts, none were serious. This was a good thing because we could not have taken him to the hospital. The ER doctors would certainly want a plausible explanation of his injuries. It would have been difficult to fabricate a story in which a bottle exploded that did not involve fermentation. Had I told them the truth, they would have been obliged to report it to the police. We picked bits of glass out of his wounds and cleaned him up. No greater harm came of this potentially disastrous housekeeping errand.

The Unintentional Smuggler

My family and I were in Paris on our way back to the Kingdom for another school year. I was to go a few weeks sooner than the rest of the family. Maura and our children were staying in Europe as the kids’ school did not start for another two weeks. On the night before my departure, I bought two small bottles of French Beaujolais for Maura and me to enjoy before bed. We only drank one. My intention was that Maura would be able to enjoy the second bottle the following evening. I couldn’t find a place to stash the second bottle in the small hotel room. I looked in the closet for a place to put it. The closet was stacked full of clothing and luggage for three children and two adults. The only spot I could find to put it was in one of my shoes. The bottle was small enough that it slid down into the shoe.

I overslept the following morning and had to rush to get my things into bags and catch a cab to the airport. Some time later, when my flight was high over the Mediterranean Sea, I thought back over my rushed exit. I was still anxious, thinking that I could have missed the plane. I recalled the way, still half asleep, I had thrown all my things into bags and rushed out the door. It was then that I remembered the night before, when I had put that extra bottle of wine in my shoe. Was it still there? I had not taken it out. If I were lucky, Maura had removed it. No! That was not likely. She was already in bed when I put it in the shoe and was not yet up when I dashed out. How could I have grabbed the shoes and not felt the weight of the bottle? It must still be in my shoe, on this plane, bound for Saudi Arabia, where I will be arrested and thrown in jail if it is found. If I am extremely lucky, I thought, the customs officer would be rushed and not open my bags. There was no way that I could ditch that bottle in the Saudi airport, as luggage was returned to the passengers at the customs table. Sitting in that plane, I fought back panic, thinking of the terrible events which were sure to occur when that customs official found that bottle of wine in my bag.

The plane landed. The other passengers descended the stair to the tarmac and formed a tidy line into the customs office to claim their baggage. The line moved slowly. This meant that they were checking the contents of the bags. I was shaking when, eventually, it was my turn. My bags were placed on the low steel table between the officer and me. He asked if there was anything I wished to declare. I answered that there was not. He patted the bags as if he were going to tell me that I was free to go. He hesitated, then he opened the zipper. Without removing anything, he felt around in the bag. He would have felt clothing and a pair of shoes. He closed the bag and signaled, with a wave of his hand, that I was free to go. When I got home at 2:00 AM, I opened my bag and celebrated my escape from incarceration with a glass of fine French Beaujolais before going to bed for a sound night’s sleep.