Letter from Saudi Arabia: Jeddah Knights and the Nadir of Existence

It’s 15 hours of flying time to Saudi Arabia.

As usual, it’s two o’clock in the morning when the plane approaches–a sterile, flat dustbowl streaked with streetlights that from the air look like endless threads of yellow beads.

And then I’m back in the classroom.

“Teacher, you go corniche last night?”

“No, why?”

“Why you don’t go to corniche? Veddy beautiful.”

‘You think so? I don’t. I find it kind of dirty and smelly, don’t you?”

“Teacher, corniche veddy nice, with many fat boy.”

“Fat boy?”

“Ha ha! Man good, woman no good, but I like young fat boy, every night I go corniche and chase the fat boys, believe me, last night I running veddy fast and I get veddy beautiful fat boy,” – smack goes his fist – “he look same-same baby doll, like Toys-R-Us baby, he have the fat cheek and I running down the corniche to catch him but he run veddy slow because he fat boy so I catch him no problem and” – smack -”believe me teacher!”

“Let me get this straight. You chase little fat boys down the corniche?”

“Believe me, nice fat boy spending the time.”

“And you-”

Smack. “Yes, believe me, teacher, every Thursday night go corniche, find the fat boys!”

“This is the nadir of existence,” another teacher declares. He declares that every day after classes. Nadir indeed. With the usual Office griping continuing as backdrop, I write a mock financial news article while my own classroom encounter is still fresh in my mind. It’s a form of catharsis.

JEDDAH-April 17 (Corniche News Agency). Japanese electronics giants Hitachi and Nintendo today jointly unveiled a new pocket video game designed for the Saudi market.

“In the past, our famous Gameboy has enjoyed tremendous popularity worldwide,” Nomuro Wahdukahodicu [Workaholic-get it?], vice president for marketing at Nintendo, said. “This includes the Arab world.” Wahdukahodicu said the joint project has taken pocket video games a step further. “The new game is not only more sophisticated, it is also market-specific to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. So, after our success with Gameboy, I am pleased to announce Fatboy, the pocket game for the man of the corniche.”

Wahdukahodicu said the new game is more challenging and claimed the graphics are almost “Spielbahg-like.” He said the software graphics depict realistic little Technicolor fat boys running down the Jeddah corniche being pursued by men in thobes and gutras flapping in the wind. The object is to rescue ten little fat boys by plucking them from the sea wall and cramming them into your Land Cruiser before they hurl themselves into the waves.

“It is most diverting,” Takeio Samuraya, sales manager at Hitachi, said, “and clearly suited to the local culture. We would not market Fatboy in Japan, for instance, where the homosexual culture is far less pervasive and overt. So for the Japanese market of mostly straight men, we have developed Groperboy and Molest Man for the male who enjoys vicarious sexual harassment on subway trains.”

For the future, Nintendo will keep an eye on sales in Jeddah. If Fatboy the game takes off like the little fat boys in its graphics, the company has ambitions to market-test a full-sized Virtual Fatboy video game for the more affluent Saudi.

Kenji Companyman [get it?], a software engineer, explained. “The software scenario for this game will be truly interactive,” he said. “Players can cruise the corniche in a new Caprice in search of fresh and sassy fat boys without leaving the comfort of their tea rooms. The object, of course, is to capture a juicy one, but it won’t be easy. Dangerous obstacles abound. At one point, the Caprice’s accelerator sticks to the floor and the car takes off like a rocket. So the driver has to swerve to avoid Pakistani pedestrians, who are everywhere except on the sidewalk. And only a world-class driver can avoid crashing into the police car.”

If the driver does crash, however, there is still a 50/50 chance that the police officer will be tired from Ramadan.

Once the car is back under control, the player can triple-park it and pursue fat boys along the sea walk. But perils persist: some striplings turn out to be Royal Family runaways, others are “not clean,” and still others play hard to get.

The two Japanese companies are also tailoring various new games to specific national markets. “Even now, our software creators are developing fresh new products for familiar markets,” Samuraya said. “Next year in France we expect to market Insecureboy and Culture Controlboy.”

Competing giants are not taking all this lying down. Sony also has plans to penetrate the Saudi market with its own game, called Lazyboy, featuring adventures for the Saudi man of leisure in a recliner.