The Rum & Whiskey

Cira 2011

Mistofer Christopher

“Would you like some Bedouin Whiskey?” the young man asked with a thick Arabic tongue forming western English.

“شوووو؟“ (pronounced Shoo, translation - Whuuut in Arabic) I inquired in surprise with a bageled New York City mouth forming Levantine Arabic.

The Jordanian young man, skin the color of wet oak, head wrapped with a brightly checkered red and white keffiyeh, shook his head slowly left to right with a silent smile that warmly, disdainfully smirked: “You have much to learn about my people and our ways, grasshopper.”   Except he wouldn’t have said grasshopper though because I wasn’t in Asia.  He would have said young scorpion, because I was about 4000 miles from China and it wasn’t Saturday afternoon in the 1980’s where the sound track for Karate movies constantly played catch-up with the actor’s mouth.

I was in the east, except it was the middle, Wadi Rum, where the wind materializes on hot, red, copper and gold sand as lateral undulations-snake footprint hieroglyphs-where the Arabs and Lawrence of Arabia rallied before storming across to surprise the Turks at Aqaba.  But for today there were no raiders, just 3 Bedouin male hosts, a couple from Argentina studying plant biology/chemistry in Israel, and me.  We had just inhaled a stewed chicken and rice dinner with three simple tools: bread, hand, and mouth.   We were 45 minutes inside the desert from the nearest town by truck and 3 hours by camel.

“So give me this Bedouin whiskey,” I mumbled dubiously.  He brought over a strange silver-tea shaped canister and set out shot glasses in front of us, seated on the floor.  I muttered to myself and unconsciously partly out loud:  “I thought you guys don’t drink whiskey.”  He pursed his five fingers together and raised them slowly, wait, I will show you.  With his other hand he lifted the silver canister high and, as he poured, the golden fluid flowed out as a singular stream into the glasses.  I reached out to grab the glass.

He cautioned, raised his head, eyebrow, and hand to pause my hand:  “Be careful. It’s hot.”

“Strange.” my inside voice said.   “Hot Whiskey…Oh well, maybe it’s a cultural thing.”  I raised the shot glass to my mouth and slowly sipped it while watching him watching me.  I shook my head puzzled as my brain was trying to compute whiskey with this particular degree of heat and this certain taste.  There was no bite to the drink or that flaming lava warmth travelling the lovely journey from the throat to the soul of a man.  As my Jamaican grandmother with her sweet accent would say:  “It spell but it don’t pronounce.”  Slowly my brain computed… W – H – I – S… This ain't Whiskey.  I shouted out:  “Habibi, this is Shai!”  The Bedouin and his clan of 3 doubled over with loud, obstreperous, gut honest laughter. They rolled around on the carpet covering the desert floor inside the tent probably the thousandth time with the same tricky sincerity as the first time they pulled the Whiskey Hoax.