Egyptian Hell

by Anonymous Friend

 Who ever coined the phrase “Find a penny, pick it up, all day long you’ll have good luck” was a genius.  The Egyptian penny is rare.  As rare as finding a hundred dollar bill while walking down the street in Old Town Sacramento.  In Egypt , instead of pennies, you get Chiclets.  You remember Chiclets…the little white pieces of chewing gum that resemble the pearly white teeth of the slimiest of used car salesmen.  Any grocery store purchase will always result in your change being given to you in Chiclets.  You’d think with all that gum chewing that dental hygiene would be at an all time high.  I assure you that was not the case.  I suppose that’s what made me stand out as a foreigner.  I mean I have the basic standard attributes of the average Arabic woman: black hair, olive skin, and full figure, so my guess would be that my teeth gave me away.  The fact that I actually have all my teeth and they are reasonable close to being white must have made me stand out.  Or maybe it was the fact that I actually walked up straight and looked people in the eye as they passed me by.  In Egypt , women are so oppressed; it’s a wonder they manage to get out of bed every morning.  Walking tall and eye- to- eye contact is probably just too much to bear. 

I moved to Egypt with my Egyptian-born Husband, in search of a better, simpler life.  I was told that he had a BMW and a villa on the Red Sea waiting for us.  However, what I was met with was an old mildewed apartment, a horrific mother-in law that forced me to make her son a sandwich every two hours, regardless of whether or not he was hungry, and no car in sight.  So I was stuck.   

We arrived in Cairo just as the Ramadan holiday was beginning.  The streets were littered with hundreds of sheep, bales of hay and enough manure to fertilize most of the San Joaquin Valley .  Every waking minute was filled with the incessant “baaas”, which eventually lulled to me sleep every night that first week.  The morning came when the “baas” stopped.  The “Silence of the Lambs” reference was not lost on me.  All the lambs had been slaughtered, their caucuses lined the street, and their blood was everywhere in the form of bright red handprints stenciled all around the doors to the houses that lined the streets.  I remember trying not to trip over the hundreds of hooves and horns scattered carelessly throughout the street as I made my way to the little coke stand on the corner.  The sight of all the blood and sheep parts was the least horrifying thing I encountered during my stay.

 I hated my mother-in-law.  She and my husband were always fighting.  Screaming fights in Arabic sound tens times worse then they really are.  She would get so upset she would leave for days and we were left with no money for food.  So we ate bread.  Lots of bread.  It was cheap and you could buy it fresh every day from the bakery a block away.  When the evil mother-in law returned days later and spoke to her son, she was in a glorious mood.  She hugged me and kissed me to no end.  My husband, in all his wisdom, thought she would start treating us better if she believed I was pregnant…so he told her I was.  I wasn’t.  I even suffered the humiliation of having a priest bless my stomach and the non-existent child that supposedly lived within.  I suffered through hour upon hour of Sunday church services in a language I could not understand, but at least life was a little better with me being “with child”.  The never-ending screaming fights stopped and I was being fed well.   A few months later when I should have stared showing and didn’t, my husband told me to tell his mother I had a miscarriage when she returned from spending a few days with a friend of hers.  I refused.  We never spoke of my “pregnancy” again.  Somehow I think she was just used to her son’s lies. 

My mother in-law spoke no English…only Arabic and French.  I had my husband ask her if she could speak in French, so I would at least be able to make out ever other word or so, but she refused.  I guess they didn’t want me to know what they talked about.  Turns out what they were talking about was my worst nightmare.  Through translation from various English speaking friends I learned that my husband used to have a serious heroine addiction.  The scars on his stomach I thought were war wounds from Desert Storm, were actually little souvenirs of drug deals gone bad.  My husband did not have dual citizenship as I was told, but rather was in the United States illegally.  I had enough, and I wanted out.  Trying to escape from a Middle Eastern man is pretty much impossible, especially when in his native land. 

 I got to see the pyramids, Egyptian mummies, the Sphinx, and parts of Egypt most tourists never even think to visit.  To me, every tourist trap we visited was a reminder of the prison I was being kept in.  I started saving bits of money…I thought if I could just flag down a taxi, I could take it to the American embassy and get the hell out of there.  I never had the opportunity.  I was never left alone.  I tried to take a walk around the block and my husband would follow me staying a few paces behind.  There was no phone I could use to call for help.  To make an outgoing call you had to go to a phone center, usually located only in the nicer hotels.   

As fortune had it, my mother-in law decided it was time for us to go back to the United States .  Once I was on my own turf, surely I could dump this loser and get my life back.  Egypt-Air only flies to two places.   New York and Los Angeles .  I chose L.A.   It was closer to home.  All during the flight I envisioned my freedom.  I planned my future, and I smiled with reverence at my new found hope.   But freedom would still be months away.

 We arrived in L.A. and contacted an Egyptian priest that was friends of my mother in-law.  He got us an apartment where the first month’s rent was free of charge, a mattress and some food that had been donated to the church.  I was not allowed in Sunday service, however, because since we had not been married in a church, we were considered to be living in sin.  I didn’t mind.  I had had enough religion shoved down my throat in Egypt to last a lifetime.  My husband was allowed to attend…guess only I was considered a sinner.  So I waited out side and enjoyed my 45-minute taste of freedom every Sunday.  If I had had a dollar or two for bus fare, I would have been gone, but I knew I needed a little time to let everything fall into place.  I found a job right away, and along my bus route found a room for rent in a house.  It was nice, something I could afford and right on a bus route.  So my plan was to rent the room and find another job at the same time so my husband would have no chance of finding me.  I received my first paycheck, but still had no “new job” insight, and I couldn’t leave my husband until I had a new job that he didn’t know about, so I had no choice but to pay the next months rent.  So, I gave my husband the rent money and headed off to work the next morning determined to get another job, any job that was located somewhere my husband would never think to look for me.  At work that day I got a call for an interview for a place on the other side of town.  I feigned illness and spent my last few dollars on bus fare there and back.  I was offered the position on the spot; it was a job selling adult videos and paraphernalia and was three dollars an hour more than my current job.  So I retuned home at my usual time with my husband being non-the-wiser.  But when I got home, my husband confessed that he had smoked all of the rent money, but apparently he smoked more crack then my meager paycheck could afford because in a few days, the drug dealer he bought his drugs from came looking to collect the rest of the money he was owed.  I came home to a brawl between the neighborhood drug czar and my husband.  It’s still a little hazy, but somehow my life was threatened and we ended up being escorted out of our apartment by the police to another location so we wouldn’t be killed.  So, there went my new job and plans for freedom. 

 Once again, we were given another apartment, in another part of town where the first month rent would be free.  At this point I had given up.  I had no strength left to do anything, no plan in mind for my future. 

 In Egypt they have a word for deviousness, it’s called “Cosa”, which literally translates to cucumber.  They call it Cosa because, like food it’s in you and everyone there.  Everyone in Egypt cheats and steals to get ahead, and it’s so common, just like a cucumber.  It was this “Cosa” that allowed my husband to finagle a car.  He got it from a church member on the Installment plan.  His idea of the installment plan meant he would never go back to that church and just got himself a new car.  I felt a new plan coming.  But as in Egypt , I was never left alone with the car.  He would never leave the keys in it when he would run into 7-11 to buy smokes.  It was going to be trickier than I thought.  We decided to leave L.A. and move to Redding .  I had always heard it was nice there, and we had pretty much worn out our welcome to the point where we needed to leave.  So we left for Redding .

After a high-speed freeway chase and a little help from the local police, I did end up leaving my husband.  I got a job right away at the mall making a pretty decent salary, and an apartment a block away.  So life went on and I was happy.  I never thought about filing for divorce as I didn’t really believe in it, and had no plans to ever marry again.  One Saturday, while watching TV, I saw an ad for a free 5 minute psychic reading, and I thought what the hell….why not.  So I put on my best “poker-voice” and said to the psychic…”I’d like to know about my husband” and she told me that she didn’t see him near me (Good News) and that he had been married before (which of course I told her was wrong…) but she insisted I look into it.  So I thanked her and hung up before my five minutes were up.  The next day, curiosity got the better of me and I called the courthouse where we were married.  Not only had my husband been married before, he was still married!!!  He married me 6 months after he had married another unsuspecting woman.  There was no divorce on file, and my marriage was annulled.  If it weren’t for that psychic, I would not ever have known or even suspected.  I contacted the INS and they sent an agent to come interview me.  They were going to deport him and never allow him access to the U.S. again.

I used to throw away pennies.  I found them useless little pieces of metal that weighted down my wallet.  But now, when I find a penny, I pick it up and from that day forth, I’ve had good luck…

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