Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile

By Benjamin Bartee

Is God dead, as Nietzsche assured us He was?

¡Call 911, or a priest!

Notes From Exile is a firsthand coming-of-age narrative of a twenty-something discovering (or inventing) purpose in the far-flung corners of the world - or at least getting existentially okay with ambigui

• Language: English
• Publisher: Polyverse Publications
• Release date: Jul 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781959111085

Book preview

CHAPTER 1:

Arabian Nights in Exile

"I’m off to [Saudi Arabia], learn the laws of Islam

Fundamentalism, forget that rock-n-roll

…

I’m not insane, I’m not liquored up

I got nothin’ to do, nothin’ to lose

I got no place to call home

One thing’s for sure, I’m all outta angst

Society don’t bother me, there’s something wrong with that"

-’All Outta Angst,’ NOFX

October 21, 2010, 2:00 a.m.

My Last Early Morning in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia:

In a one-man pre-dawn raid at our military-style fortified compound -- where all the Western infidels who dare step foot on the Holy Land must live --the S.S. (Sweaty Stubs, or, alternatively, Stubby Sweats) woke me up with a bang on the apartment door.

I was barely awake, because it was two in the morning and because I had spent the last week medicated. I had no idea who was pounding on my door and probably should’ve been more apprehensive about opening it. But I wasn’t.

There stood the S.S. He was characteristically covered from head to toe in sweat – but even wetter than usual – with his wife-beater soaked under his bountiful mammary glands.

The S.S.’s t-shirts stayed covered in what some people call under-boob sweat, a reference to the undercarriage portion of the breast tissue, perhaps what could be deemed the support structure of a hefty pair of breasts. The S.S.’s t-shirts, which stayed covered in his under-boob sweat, were almost always white. His hair, and his fire-pink nipples (the S.S. was a natural redhead), and even his chest acne which lingered into this twenties or early thirties or whatever age he was were usually visible too. The dog tags from his service, which he still wore daily, hung over all this.

WHAT DID YOU DO TODAY?

That was a rhetorical question. Whatever I had done -- which I didn’t remember clearly myself at the time -- the S.S.’s tone made it clear that he knew all about it and that he was none too pleased.

I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything and just looked at him. By now I was aware that not answering the S.S.’s rhetorical questions really got him worked up.

YOU’RE GOING TO GET US ALL KILLED!

Lights turned on in the apartments around us. Faces peered through curtains into the Arabian night darkness at me and the S.S., standing together in my apartment doorway.

I still didn’t know what to say, for reasons mentioned already. So I didn’t say anything.

YOU STUPID SON OF A BITCH. YOU JUST – YOU STUPID SON OF A BITCH – WHY THE FUCK -- YOU’RE GOING TO GET US BOMBED. WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?

I got a call the following noon. A few hours after that, I was on a flight to London to a connecting flight back to Atlanta.

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October 8, 2010, 1:00 a.m.

A Compound in Dammam. Saudi Arabia:

We got into Dammam late, and by the time we got through customs it was even later. They searched every piece of luggage on that flight for paraphernalia that they had forbidden – and the list was long. They dug up Bibles or crucifixes or rosary beads or other artifacts, glanced suspiciously at them, debated amongst themselves whether were for personal use or for spreading blasphemy.

In the end, they either gave them back or threw them in a bin according to their arbitrary conclusions. That was the Bible/ rosary/Jesus accessory rule as explained by the flight attendants: religious stuff was permitted, so long as it was expressly for use in a private setting and never discussed in public.

I wondered what happened to all the treasured confiscated religious possessions of wayward pilgrims coming through the customs line.

Our passports were examined for Israeli stamps or other suspect markings. Passports containing Israeli stamps were flatly rejected.

At the metaphorical intersection where Islamic fundamentalist doctrine meets bureaucratic sludge, perfectly in the center sits a Saudi immigration official. Customs officers are annoying in any variety, but Islamist customs officers? These guys were unbearable.

Officious and dogmatic – what a hell of a combination. At least standard-issue American DMV bureaucrats don’t seem to believe in much. A lot seem like they gave up on life. They are banal, and impotent. Religious zealotry mixed in to arbitrary power and boredom of a nonsense government job like border inspector, though, was a new kind of demon.

There were two of us from the flight bound for the same place, me and Brad. We got to our military-style compound with the armed guards and the mirrors for bombs at the entrance and the twenty-foot walls with barbed wire all along the perimeter, at two in the morning.

Brad was also an American. Brad and I met the S.S. together at the doorstep of Room 112, where we were told the S.S. awaited us after our arrival. We knocked on the door.

Things didn’t go well from the start.

The S.S. was a retired Marine who had done time in Iraq – several tours, actually, many more than was a good idea. None of us morons hired as English teachers, his subjects, had any formal psychological training. We didn’t need any, though, to identify the sure-as-shit PTSD.

The S.S. nursed a lingering, unrelenting suspicion that jihadist terrorists were plotting, at all hours of the day, their next move to blow up the compound where we lived to eradicate the infidels from the Holy Land.

In this S.S.’s defense: It’s true that elements in Saudi Arabia are none too pleased with foreigners, especially Americans and Brits, on the land where their religion was born. Lawrence of Arabia was an exception to the rule.

A flaw in the S.S.’s analysis of the terror threat at our compound in Dammam: What’s even more true than the Saudi dislike of foreigners on sacred land, though, is that the Saudi royal family needs the expertise of the oil engineers who stay on compounds like ours and the goodwill of the West’s military apparatus to prop up their favorable position against their biggest regional rival, Iran. In the grand equation, economic and military hegemony wins out against even the most sincerely held zealotry of the fundamentalist Wahabbi clergy that dominates Saudi life.

I tried to explain that to the S.S. once -- in the beginning, when he still talked to me in an indoor voice -- in a good faith effort to calm his fears of an impending rocket attack on our home away from home. Reason didn’t take. If anything, he got more paranoid as time went on.

Honest to God, I don’t remember the S.S.’s actual name. I want to go with Robert, but I’d just be making that up. The truth is that the S.S. earned his nickname so quickly, on account of his excess weight and constant sweating and his poor attitude which begged for a cruel nickname -- and it spread so rapidly among his subordinates like me and Brad and Graeme -- that the first night we met was probably the last time I addressed him by the name his mother gave him or heard any of my comrades do the same.

We’re getting up at 6 to go to the university, the S.S. told Brad and me.

To reiterate, it was two in the morning and we had just flown halfway across the world.

I’m not doing that, said Brad, just like that.

What?

We’re not getting up at 6 to go to work. We’ll go Tuesday [the next day], Brad said unflinchingly.

By the look of it, the S.S. was not accustomed to being told no.

The S.S. looked at Brad, then at me, then back at Brad. He shut the door without further conversation, and we didn’t go to work the next day, or Tuesday as Brad had suggested, or ever, actually. The S.S. had blacklisted us almost as soon as we landed in Dammam. We didn’t realize it at the time, but we would never see the inside of Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University, our workplace, to teach a single English lesson in Saudi Arabia.

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October 9, 2010, 11:15 a.m.

The Compound, Dammam:

The teaching brigade left the morning after my arrival at 6, leaving me, Brad, and a British fellow I had yet to meet named Graeme behind.

My phone rang. It was the S.S.

I need you to go to Room 223. Tell Graeme I need his grades. Tell him to call me.

At 11 a.m., it was already hot as hell. The digital thermometer at the compound said 36 degrees. I had no idea what that meant, on account of the Fahrenheit/Celsius divide. Add 69 and divide by 666 and minus 88 to switch from F to C or something, my chemistry teacher said once. I wasn’t paying enough attention to retain knowledge.

This is what flying to Hell feels like I thought to myself as I walked to Room 223.

Graeme answered the door.

Someone called for you. The boss. I don’t remember his name.

Sweaty Stubs? Just like that, a nickname was born.

I guess.

The fat one, the American?

Yeah, that one.

And, what did he want?

Some papers or something. He said to call him.

Do you want some tea?

I guess. I don’t know if I ever drank tea, actually.

Fuck, said Graeme, I guess about never drinking tea.

We talked for a while. I found out Graeme had been blacklisted a week earlier by the S.S. for some minor transgression and had been idling away at the compound since then -- stuck in limbo here in an immaculately decorated Hell decorated of garden plants which never would grow naturally in this desert and that had to be watered by a Bangladeshi migrant worker to keep them from withering under the harsh sun.

While we talked in his apartment by the window where the Bangladeshis migrant worker was pulling weeds, I caught something with my eye, like a forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, an oasis in a desert – drugs in the Kingdom! Drugs in the Kingdom! Sweet, sweet, forbidden fruit. How I related to Eve in the moment!

On his coffee table sat boxes of Klonopin, fresh in their original packages, neatly arranged like hors d’oeuvres. Klonopin is a benzodiazepine, a lesser-known cousin of the Xanax and Valium family, but almost equally potent.

Here, take a box, Graeme said.

A whole box! I’d paid $3 a pill for these things in college. And this angel from Heaven in palm tree Hell just gave me a whole box for free!

I just picked them up in Thailand before I came, he said dismissively. I don’t even really want them. My girlfriend said it would help me sleep. But I sleep fine.

Graeme never did explain how he managed to get these entire boxes of controlled substances through rigorous airport security. I never asked.

----------------------

October 14, 2010, 3:30 p.m.

The Compound, Dammam

Day 5:

The Bangladeshi was out in the desert garden with a hose, his blue tunic, or whatever the name is for Muslim outfits, covered in sweat. Three of them worked at the compound. I had come to learn that Saudis themselves don’t care too much for manual labor, and since they happen to be sitting on one of the world’s richest oil fields they don’t have to do it. Instead, they import the global Islamic poor from places like Bangladesh and Pakistan.

Muslim nations of the Third World are preferable to heathen nations because there is no difficulty assimilating these people into fundamentalist Islamic culture. They are preconditioned, in their homelands, to tolerate theocracy. Westerners, on the other hand, apostates and perpetrators of those great criminal Crusades, are not trusted in the same way.

The religious police, the Mutatawwi, keep watchful eyes on the Western blasphemers. It’s clear, whenever you walk the streets, that you are a visitor – an alien, and, although you may contribute your work here, you ultimately will not be welcome. It is an odd sensation, the feeling of a closed of place juxtaposed with the sprawling fat desert as far as the eye can see.

You ever seen hooch? a guy from Florida named Greg asked me. He was 45, looked like he had been a few places, crowned on his head with deep lines.

Like, prison hooch?

Greg laughed.

Yeah, sure. Hooch, like in prison.

I’ll show you some later. I got it in my room.

I haven’t seen Greg since. I never got to see Greg’s hooch, but I got it on good authority that he was actually brewing fruit wine in plastic bags, prison-style, in his apartment here on the military compound. Whether Greg left on his own or was forced out by the authorities, by the company, or was in jail, or back in Florida drinking good old-fashioned beer you can buy in a store, I had no idea. Things in terms of management are on a need-to-know basis.

That’s how the S.S. kept things around the compound. Things were on a need-to-know.

----------------------

October 16, 2010, 4:58 p.m.

The Compound, Dammam

Day 8:

Graeme and I spend the day bullshitting. He drinks tea and I take his drugs. We talk about stuff. It’s hot and sunny all day every day, and the sky is always cloudless and blue, and days here feel like weeks.

Thailand’s beautiful, mate, he said today.

Tell me about it.

What do you know about Thai women? he laughed.

I don’t know anything about Thai women.

They’re the best and the worst women on the planet, simultaneously.

How so? I asked.

Ploy really takes care of everything. She’s great when we’re together in Thailand.

It turns out, Ploy was the impoverished daughter of an even more impoverished rice farmer in the poorest region of Thailand, Isaan, the eastern rice growing section of the country with the worst soil unsuitable for growing anything else.

As I would learn later, reeling middle-aged wandering Western men, such as Graeme was in spades, is a major industry in Isaan. Famously among Isaan bar workers in Bangkok, most working girls in Bangkok have an Isaan family back home they’re desperately trying to support, It’s a commercial endeavor, Thai women meeting Western men. Things often go sour, men lose all their money, and if they’re really unlucky or ask too many questions, they end up taking a fall off a condo balcony.

In fact, older Western men falling to their deaths from heights is so common that some expat websites document them. The police usually write them off as accidental or suicides.

… She’s great, he continued. But I have to support not just her, but her whole family. There’s always an uncle with cancer or a dying water buffalo which the whole family’s livelihood depends on.

That sounds rough.

Yeah, I don’t get enough in Thailand teaching, actually. That’s why I had to come here to this godforsaken desert. For the money.

How much do you give her?

A thousand, usually.

Jesus Christ, every month?

Yeah.

A thousand US dollars?

A thousand pounds, he replied.

Jesus Christ. A thousand pounds?

"But that’s not the worst part. She hacks my computer. Or, at least, she did at one time. I don’t know if she still can. But I’ve to give her all my passwords.

Jesus Christ, I repeated, out of confusion; I didn’t know what to say.

I have to call her every morning and night on video chat so she can have a look around. I told her there’s not even any women for sale here. We can’t even see them in the fucking streets or at the store. But she doesn’t believe me.

He paused to sip his tea.

She calls them Arabian whores. But I don’t think such a creature exists. They must exist, but how would you ever find one here? Liable to get your head chopped off.

I hadn’t ever heard of an Arabian whore. I hadn’t even seen a woman’s foot since I got off the plane.

----------------------

October 18, 2010 5:56 p.m.

The Compound, Dammam

Day 10:

Ricky was the kind of guy who went to work every day, without a hangover, happy to be sober, and eager to perform. This was probably as true when he lived wherever he lived in the U.S. as it was in Saudi Arabia. The S.S. liked him for his Protestant work ethic and ultimate deference.

Initially, I was indifferent to Ricky. As time marched on, though, I had come gradually to hate him.

That’s their culture. It’s impossible to rewire it from a Western perspective Ricky said, in reference to street beheadings – common public spectacles that attract the whole family, like a day at the baseball stadium for the hometown big league team might on another continent.

You can’t rewire it according to Ricky, who had a PhD in neuroscience from somewhere and always spoke in these mechanical terms.

How did it get wired? I asked Ricky.

Evolution, said Ricky.

But how the fuck could you make the leap from hunter-gatherer wandering the desert for water and dates or whatever edible survives in the desert to, one day, finding yourself cheering on a masked thug in the town square chopping off people’s heads with a curved sword for insulting your Sky Father?

How simplistic, Ricky said.

In retrospect, my position was simplistic. Fuck Ricky, anyway, is the moral of the story.

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October 21, 2010, 10:36 p.m.

The Compound, Dammam

Day 13:

After the S.S. ambushed me outside my apartment at 2 a.m., when I had time to reflect and to put the pieces together of what I might have done to anger him so greatly, I uncovered the truth:

The prior day -- another long, endless heatwave the-sun-is-a-skin-rapist kind of day that drags on for an eternity -- I had eaten quite a bit of Klonopin supplied by Graeme (per a daily midmorning ritual in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia since arrival). It occurred to me then, as I contemplated the landscape before me, that I would likely never return to Saudi Arabia after leaving. And, knowing my days were numbered because of the S.S.’s searing animosity, I assumed that I would soon be leaving the country for pastures anew.

Because the drugs take some time to saturate the blood and get a nice brain soak, I clearly remember getting in a taxi, and pointing to Arabic writing I had gotten transcribed which said mosque. I had no aim for any particular mosque – big, small, beautiful, obscene – other than a desire that it be as fundamentalist as possible. My thinking was the most extreme mosques were destined to be the most authentic.

It turns out, my expectations of authentic were mostly nonsense – things usually don’t turn out how you plan. The world’s full of surprises. The imam I met and spoke to, in the unknown mosque somewhere in Dammam which the taxi driver delivered me to, was in fact educated at Cambridge University. He spoke perfect English and used his lingual skills to wax poetic in seemingly modern liberal parlance.

I asked him a lot of questions, which I had pondered beforehand. Things like:

How do you feel about 9/11?

How would you feel about a synagogue being built across the street here?

Should women be allowed to vote?

I suppose asking questions like these to an imam in the most ultra-fundamentalist theocracy on Earth takes a certain amount of courage – courage, or alternatively, stupidity, or reckless imposition of neo-imperialist Euro-centric values on another victim. I leave such judgments to the reader. I really just wanted to ask and receive answers.

Like, do you need an agenda to ask questions? How did we all get so cynical? I just wanted to see through the lens of a real, thoroughbred Arabic Muslim in the Middle East. I had no agenda.

To my shock, the imam was appallingly liberal in his answers.

9/11 was a tragedy, he said.

A synagogue would be acceptable across the street, he said.

Women should have full and equal rights to men, he said.

The Cambridge-educated imam, whose views were more enlightened than many in secular countries considered socially advanced, was unexpected. Our conversation was pleasant, we had some Saudi-style tea, and we exchanged compliments.

I blacked out. The rest, including however I got back to the compound, is lost to time.

The S.S., somehow, got wind of my unsanctioned mosque tour, and also of the contents of my naughty conversation with the imam. The news led to the ambush, in the early morning hours of October 21, outlined at the beginning.

The last vision against the starry backdrop of an Arabian night, in my last days in the Kingdom: the silhouette image of a sweat-caked, borderline obese retired GI proclaiming Armageddon for us and all our western compatriots on our compound by a terrorist bombing.

I spent the last day saying goodbye, contemplating life back in the US, reminiscing about all the things I remembered doing over the course of the last two weeks and wondering -- like someone looking down on himself during a near-death experience as people who nearly cross over the edge but come back just in time – about all the things I had done in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia which I didn’t remember.

There is probably some lesson I could have learned. I shook hands with Graeme, he gave me some more Klonopin for the plane, and I forgot all about Saudi Arabia altogether on the flight back to the U.S.

You’ll sort yourself out, Graeme said as we parted.

He didn’t give a timeline for his prognosis, though. It turns out problems follow you across the seven seas.

CHAPTER 2:

Stranger in a Strange Land

(Killing Time)

February 2011

Nantou County, Taiwanese mountains:

No, the knife isn’t hot enough yet. It’s gotta glow red before you’re good to go. You’re wasting the fucking hash.

During my first extensive experience as an expatriate, after the ultra-brief Saudi thing -- a three-month stay in Zhushan, a small city in the mountains of Taiwan -- I spent a good deal of time contemplating the lifestyle I had adopted.

I had technically been a resident of Saudi Arabia for a month or so prior and had been elsewhere as a visitor, but never a longterm inhabitant of any foreign land. After a day of changing young lives at Joy Language School (inappropriately named), I had gone to my American friend’s apartment, a former marine from Mississippi, veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom with a filthy sailor’s mouth.

Greg taught English to five-year-old Chinese boys and girls at a nearby kindergarten. Between the two of us, we comprised precisely two-fifths of the non-Chinese demographic in Zhushan, and even though we may not have ever been friends in our home country, we shared a kinship in Zhushan.

On that overcast afternoon, we were smoking a bowl of hash on the porch of Greg’s sixth-story apartment in a gray, squalid, very Third World-esque apartment building.

In Asia, except in the exceptionally trendy areas catering to Westerners, normal apartment complexes don’t come with names like Wonder Garden Spring Falls or whatever, and they don’t have well-manicured gardens or the amenities that the coddle Western consumer expects. They’re just utilitarian, nondescript blobs where people pay rent.

Despite that Taiwan’s drugs have to rank among the worst-quality and least-convenient-to-purchase on the planet -- one of the many drawbacks to the conservative, ultra-Orthodox Chinese culture -- we took what we could get and lit it up. Greg introduced me to a new method for getting high which he called kniving-heating up two knives on the stove to the point that they are glowing red, then removing them from the heat and immediately pressing them together with the hash in between. It burns in a very manageable way, it’s efficient, and can be executed with the simplest of household appliances. Perhaps best of all, there is no obvious paraphernalia involved to implicate us in crimes in case the authorities popped in unexpectedly.

Search warrants, like apartment complex amenities, are foreign concepts in the Asian mind. Rights don’t exist, or, if they do, they exist in different, inscrutable ways.

From the vantage point of the panoramic, omniscient view of Greg’s tenement-style apartment balcony, we surveyed the landscape. A banana farmer was chopping down old trees in his field just on the other side of the river. For whatever reason, probably on account of being high, I fixated on him, methodically moving from tree to tree, being at most a tenth done with his task. If he could have seen what I saw, perhaps he would have been discouraged at his progress. Chopping down banana trees is quintessential manual labor. It would certainly have discouraged me, but he appeared undaunted and hacked the dead trees with his machete in steady rhythm.

It was then, with THC-induced lucidity, that in a collaborative effort my friend and I articulated what I had been thinking about abstractly for several months but had been unable to form the right words for: namely, what it is exactly about living in a foreign country, of an alien race that speaks a foreign language, that appeals to the disaffected Westerner. Of course, there are many peripheral benefits, as well as drawbacks, but what is the core enticement that makes the experience so inviting? Certainly, materially, life is generally more comfortable in America than in Taiwan. And more convenient. And often, less lonely -- at least in the traditional sense of the word.

A common thread I had noticed among ex-pats -- even then so early on in my foreign career, and especially among the ones who had basically forsaken the notion of ever returning to the West -- was a disdain for organized society of the kind they had left behind. They most especially were disillusioned with their home countries, the ones they were most familiar with.

Reasons to leave the known world behind and experiences leading up to that decision vary widely, but the bottom line is something had soured their taste for their homelands. And I suspect that few of them harbored and desire to integrate or assimilate to any society again. One might be inclined to label these people as anti-social -- a generally vague and sloppily applied term of the contented reactionary who can’t fathom why a person might be disenchanted with his environment.

A purely clinical Anti-Social Disorder diagnosis from a white coat cannot explain this particular angst, though. Many of the people I met possessing this kind of worldview were very outgoing and friendly and, dare I say, freely affable in a way that only comes from the heart.

The process of the evolution of dogs from wolves occurred over millennia. Certain wolves that were too old, too slow, or otherwise unable to run with their packs began to hang around early humans’ camps and patrol the fringes of the campfire, fending off any potential predators. They were not of the same race as the humans, and I would surmise that in their own limited way they understood that they were not. At the very least, if they did come to view themselves as human, they understood their divergent, peculiar role on the perimeter of the society.

Regardless, the dogs and humans built a symbiotic relationship that could mitigate any conflict arising from the suspicions caused by being different species. They were not expected to behave as humans, and they retained, at least to some extent, their natural instincts and habits. Unlike the human born that night in the camp, the puppy born on the outskirts would never be subject to indoctrination. The puppy inherited its unique societal obligation to behavior through DNA sequences via its mother and father, and would forever be free in a way the human baby in the interior, embraced by the warm glow of the campfire, could not.

Membership has its privileges, as they say, but also its costs.

As a foreigner, particularly of a nationality and race that the locals admire (American and white), the expat can stay safely on the margins of society without ever necessarily being marginalized to an undesirable extent. Social infractions of the alien are immediately forgiven, for he knows not what he does. There are no unbearable limitations placed on social mobility (for the white alien, that is) or access to resources, and movements from the cold and open fringes to the embrace of the warm and suffocating center and back again are made freely. He might not be able to live at the heart of society, but he can warm his feet before returning to his domain on the fringes. Everything that the expat needs that can only be gained from the expertise or labor of others -- like acetaminophen or motor oil or cellphones, the material bases for social cohesion -- is within arm’s reach.

But for all of the perks, there is a definite, unshakable loneliness that comes with being an expat, and it can be comforting, saddening, disturbing, exciting, and depressing all at the same time.

It’s a peculiar loneliness -- not the kind of being lost in the woods at night, but the kind a person feels in a huge crowded room when, despite all the noise and chatter all around, there persists a detachment from the whole scene that can be at times infinitely more disturbing than the lost-in-a-national-park kind.

In that vein, I found myself in a car full of my Taiwanese peers (some native teachers from Joy Language School) on a newly-constructed mega-highway -- a twelve-laner to rival the industrial grandeur of any American interstate. We were headed to an amusement park in Taichung for some fun in the visible part of the sun that peered through the charming smog native to the island.