Kuwait

The Ugly American Sheiks Things Up

I could tell it just wasn’t going to be my day. After stumbling bleary-eyed off the Lufthansa flight into the Kuwait International Airport, my mind was on only two things: Cold beer and a plate of barbecued pork ribs. Well, wouldn’t you know it? Kuwait is an Islamic state and not only can’t you feast on dead swine, but the entire country – not just selected pockets of the south, but the whole fucking place – is dryer than a Baptist picnic! Are these people barbarians or what?

The news came as such a shock that my grip on my bottle of Agua-Kraut or whatever the hell Germans call their water became vise-like, thus crushing the bottle and sending over-priced tap water spraying all over the place.

Now I was certainly afraid of making a bad first impression so, your old pal TUA being the resourceful type, grabbed a towel off the nearest guy’s head and proceeded to mop up the mess. The next thing I remembered was waking up in a hospital where they were trying to extract the copy of the Koran which had been forcibly inserted into a space where normally one would not expect such an item to be. It brought back bad memories of a similar thing happening in a Denver hotel with a Gideon bible, but the difference was that I had paid for that…well, not that specifically, and I had to pay a fortune to get the negatives. I was drunk, alright? I don’t want to talk about it anymore.

Anyway, after I was released, I went out to hail a cab but the cabdrivers around this hellhole know even less English than their brethren in New York, and my attempts to haggle a price were met with shrugs, but my driver suddenly knew enough to take umbrage when, out of pure frustration mind you, I told him to haul his goat-smelling, camel-humping ass over to the Kuwaiti Naval Base.

Suddenly, I was his prisoner and when he and some friends took off the blindfold and pulled me out of the car, I was staring at the biggest camel I had ever seen. Turns out it is mating season for these horses-by-committee, and the next thing I knew my pants were yanked down around my ankles and I was submitted to the kind of dromedarian indignities that George Michael could only dream about. Ouch!

The car was still moving at a good eighty or ninety kilometers an hour when they dumped my battered body in the dust at the first naval base checkpoint. Figuring I was an interloping civilian thrill-seeker who had insulted the host nation, the Navy cops threw me into the brig with a 300-pound internet prison porn-addict nicknamed Percy the Pipeline, but I threatened to circumcise him with my nail clippers and managed to fend off his advances until a fellow contractor came along to bail me out. After the incident with the camel, I just wasn’t in the mood anymore. I mean, not that I was in the first place, you understand. I dig chicks.

If you want to visit Kuwait, you are obviously fucking crazy and need professional help. Between horny camels and irate Koran ass-stuffers, I’ve already had enough of this place. There’s also a war on and terrorists all over the goddamn place, but that’s the least of my worries.