The 4th

I decided to suck it up and make it out to 4th of July event the “Maadi Community” was behind. I couldn’t find the address on the map, so I realized I was going to have to mess with a cab. I got out there cheaply, at 10LE. I wandered around checking out the American crowd, then ate some hotdogs and beans. I wandered up to the Marine run bar and drank a Bud Light, but was out of money at that point, so I decided there was only so much hanging around by myself I could take without another beer. As usual with these events everyone there appeared in big groups and seemed to know most of one another. Someone had to play the fading role of the American loner though and I was happy to oblige. I enjoyed the stroll around with my beer while taking in the scene.

Lot’s of corn-fed looking guys my age strolling around in Polo shirts and flip flops; tall, big bellied older men in their shorts and t-shirts or jeans and cowboy boots, quite a few plump women watching over their kids underneath the pavilion as some shitty band rolls out standards I feel I should recognize but can’t place. Children run everywhere. For a moment the faces and bodies I see make me feel as if I were at a state fair in Texas or Iowa. This must be the collection of the American missionary community in Egypt, and a collection embassy staff and businessmen who’ve maybe been in Egypt a little too long. And to be fair there were a number of dual citizens who benefit from our presence here. I saw numerous women in head scarves, young Egyptian children and even a few Indian families eating hot dogs under the gaze of a multicolored spacewalk. The only tune I recognize is “New York” as I take in the scene, quickly sipping down my Bud Light and staring out across a landscape bathed in that beautiful light that spreads out from the setting Egyptian sun. I take in a scene filled with the with the excrement of US urban planning; skeletons of massive, incomplete apartment high rises that are built on the large hills which surround the city’s outskirts awaiting another influx of Cairo’s lower and middle class to pour in and send the elevators humming and burning off to the sky. Towering cranes rest among the buildings, awaiting the coming of another day. What a view!

“The sky is the limit” Horatio Alger must have once said to himself and over 100 years later his dream is the world’s dream, with millions upon millions of people scrambling to climb up the consumer food chain and here all we Americans are under a foreign sun playing out some role in this dying empire. Let’s eat our hot dogs and burgers and drink our Bud Lights and have a toast to the end of the American century as we sit inside a 2-mile long security cordon of Egyptian police and military. Not that I’m complaining. I don’t think anyone here in Egypt would be that concerned with attacking a July 4th party, this isn’t Saudi, but I’m happy knowing the Egyptian government is willing to comply with our request to make a show of security.

The event was held at the newly completed British Maadi International School which sits in the middle of nowhere; or Waddi Degla as it’s called, a collection of medium rise middle class apartments that must have been built just a few years ago. There is no sense of anything important here, it is merely a sprawl of emotionless buildings jutting out into rocky desert. Why the American 4th of July celebration was held here I can’t say, but I suppose there was some careful planning and consideration put behind this event so I’ll have to trust whatever community board compiled this. You would think something nice could be put together in Garden City or Zamalek, or even closer in to Maadi, but anyway.

I was happy to meet a cab driver on my way out since I was thinking I might have a long walk ahead of me. Kamish was happy to drive me back to Maadi in his new Daewoo and he put on Nile FM’s house mix for me. Listening to some dated progressive house with a front-tooth missing Egyptian cab driver and his secret service Captain friend who we picked up on leaving the first security checkpoint was a typical Egyptian moment.

I had to stop for an ATM run and to pick up beer. Kamish wanted one too, a Meister Max. I figured I’d get one too since it’s supposed to be the cheapest, strongest brew in the markets here. It was the most expensive I’ve bought in a store though, and I was a little shocked to see my 20LE nearly disappear. While I was buying, Kamish had picked up a man named Jim. Jim is an American who has been living in Egypt for over 10 years now, and I wouldn’t have found this that strange had he been dressed differently, but his outfit of t-shirt, baggy jeans, and Air Jordan’s looked 10 years old. Kamish and Jim said they knew each other from way back, and Kamish was going drive Jim home back to Wadi Degla where we had come from. Jim seemed nervous and anxious, friendly but with that pensive, confused vibe you get from drug users. Kamish seemed to start sweating too with all of us in the car as Jim and me started talking.

Jim told me he had once worked in Saudi Arabia, and then his company asked him where he’d like to go next, and he said “anywhere.” So they sent him to Egypt in 1997. I’m assuming he’s in oil, but he didn’t have the look or attitude of your typical oil guy. He just kept nodding and smiling, his eyes darting around the car as I looked back at him while he told me I needed to come and meet his wife sometime and he’d take me around and show me some good shots in old parts of Cairo. I thought that sounded good and got his number as I’m curious to see what’s his story.

Kamish got really agitated when I tried to bargain with him on the ride since I’d purchased him the beer and by the time I pulled out the receipt to show that I’d already spent 9LE on him and didn’t owe him another 20 for the goddamn ride he started getting visibly agitated and Jim kept telling him to “stay cool” and “take it easy on me.”

I got out giving him 10LE on top of the beer, which was a slight bit of robbery on his part I thought, but the vibe in the cab was getting uncomfortably strange for a quiet suburban road.

Still, I walked away with Jim and Kamish’s number and we all smiled and shook hands at the end of the situation. I walked home the remaining few minutes. I came home to a dark, heavy-aired apartment and found my bedroom light had blown out again.

Later that night I started investigating the bookshelf, and hit a jackpot. The previous tenant had been in Egypt for a year on some kind of major Standford funded writing grant; he’d left behind a small collection of books but there were a few gems; some Tom Robbins, a textbook on deconstruction and the literary narrative, a Guns of Navarone DVD and a book about the 1956 Suez Canal “incident.”

I started reading on the floor with a pillow for a headrest and fell asleep under the A/C unit sometime later.