Africa....(First Draft)
The first thing you notice when you step off of a 14 hour flight from Houston to Luanda is that it is fucking hot. The second thing you realize, if you are anything like me, is that you have never traveled outside of the United States before and even though every movie you have ever seen clearly wouldn’t steer you wrong, the outfit you have on looks completely ridiculous. So there I am, trying to clear customs in a land that I have never been to before, about to meet people I have never met before, in flip flops, khaki cargo pants, and loosely buttoned forest green short sleeve shirt with pockets on both sides of the chest. I am a walking cliché.
Luanda smells like old leather, mildew, and sweat all mixed together. This wonderful bouquet fallows you around everywhere and eventually you just get used to it. As I am still adjusting to the odor I walk outside of the airport and realize very quickly that I have larger things to adjust to. The primary of which is a feeling that I had never experienced in my life. It hits you in the gut. It is very primal to say the least. It is a feeling of fear, but not panic. Your senses are heightened and immediately you feel very unpleasant in your own skin. This feeling I was experiencing is called minority. As a white male growing up in a country club in a suburb in Louisiana you can imagine this new sensation was something I could have done without. All of a sudden I realized that being a white face in a crowd could be a very dangerous thing. Being a white face, dressed like I am going on a god damned safari in the middle of a populated city is even worse.
It took all of five minutes outside of the airport for me to realize that the quicker I separated myself from the American thought process I have had for 24 years the better, especially considering the amount of AK-47s there were in plain view. As an American, every movie you have ever seen, the good guys are shooting at the people with AK-47s. Think about that for a minute. Try to find one reference in our American culture where the good guy uses an AK. You can’t, unless he is picking that gun up off of a dead terrorist or evil minion. Hopefully, I thought to myself, if something goes down these guns will be firing in the opposite direction. Come to find out, the people with the guns know how much they scare Americans. I had only been in the country for 3 hours when I had my first run in. And afterwards I got to change my outfit because I just about pissed my pants.
Now let me save you some time on Wikipedia and explain to you a little bit about Luanda. It is a city compromised of about 5 million people. This is a fact, what wikipedia will not tell you is that there are about 8 million cars in the city. I would say out of that maybe 100,000 of them actually run. This is pertinent to the story because as you can imagine, parking in this city, with the ratio of cars to people, can get a little tricky sometime.
After touching base with the main office in the city, I was heading to check into the hotel with one of the managers of the area, Mark, and his maid, who was a native Angolan woman. We hopped into the range rover to bring me to the hotel. Mark was driving, the maid was sitting shotgun, and I was directly behind Mark in the back seat. As we began to back the vehicle up there was a loud thud on the hood of the car. Mark immediately slammed on the breaks and we look to find that there is a police man banging on the hood. Mark puts the car in park and the moment he does this the back passenger side door opens up and another police officer jumps in the car with his gun. It has become very clear to me at this point, that the police officers have seen the velociraptor scene in Jurrassic Park one too many time. I see the gun, pointed in my general direction and all I can think to myself is “Mother fucker, my tombstone is going to read, Here lies Richard, he got raptored in Africa” It should also be made clear that, despite their tactics these aren’t exactly elite commandos here. They are very thin men, who stink to high hell, and talk way too loudly. Dude, you’ve got the gun, therefore you also have my undivided attention, please procede with your request using your inside voice.
Apparently, unknown to me, this kind of thing happens all the time here. Mark turns to the maid and asks her to talk to them. The speak very poor English and Mark speaks very poor Portuguese so as you can imagine negotiations begin as a complete cluster fuck of broken phrases and lots of pointing. The maid informs us that Mark and I are being placed under arrest. The charge is illegal parking. And we have to drive the police officers back to the jail. So that they can book us. Yes that right, we have to drive the police back to their own jail. My thoughts quickly switched from my tombstone to what the calling shotgun rules are if you are getting extorted by the police in a foreign country. I quickly came to the ruling that AK beats shotgun and whoever had the most bullets could sit wherever they damned well pleased.
So back to the charge of illegal parking. Getting arrested in a city with millions of cars for illegal parking is a lot like getting kicked out of a public pool for getting too wet. Mark knew the cops were just looking for a bribe and he asked me to very calmly step out of the car. So the three of us step out of the car which just pisses the police officers off. Now they are yelling at us in Portuguese and pointing there guns at us. Mark, who I am about 90% sure at this point has a death wish, pulls out his cell phone and calls everyone in the office to come downstairs to help out. The bigger the crowd in these situations the better. As he is calling me one of the police officers yells something at the maid. She translates to me that he wants to know who he is calling. I told her to tell him that he was contacting the American Embassy to let them know that we were being arrested and that they could contact us at the police station. She didn’t have to translate that one back to him. The second the word embassy shakingly dribbled off of my tongue his eyes got wide. “No, no embassy” he said. This quickly got the attention of the other police officer who came over to find out what was being said. I quickly told the maid to repeat what I had just said. She told both of the men the story again and the men quickly came back with a new demand that they weren’t going to arrest us, but there was a fine we had to pay. I told them that we had already contacted the embassy and that they were on their way down to the jail. The men sheepishly turned and just walked away.
It was as simple as that. No running, no yelling, it was like I was an upset mother who had told two sons to go to their rooms. They just kind of slumped away and turned down the next street.Mark hangs up the phone and turns to me to find that the situation has been resolved. He asked if I had paid them. I told them I had not. He then asks, “Well what did you say to them” I just slapped my under developed biceps, gave him a wink, and responded, “I told them not to fuck with me.”
