Driving the Saudis

by Jayne Amelia Larson

  As on our other nights out on the town with the chickadees, I didn’t have any security in the car while we cruised around; it was just Malikah and me as usual in the convertible tailing the group of teenagers. Rajiya and her friends were packed into one SUV ahead of us, followed by their female security and nannies in five other SUVs behind them. I usually brought up the rear because my car was only a four-cylinder; it had a lot of kick but not a lot of power so I was forced and also accustomed to playing chase with the big V8s.

  Rajiya almost never had any security assigned to her, probably because her parents were more Westernized and didn’t like to draw unnecessary attention to themselves. The best hotels and restaurants in Hollywood are filled with stars and their security, but many of the most famous don’t surround themselves with bodyguards because they draw too much attention. I suspected, however, that Rajiya’s parents knew that Malikah was the best security any teenager could have: she was fearsome and vigilant.

  Only two of the girls had their own regular security, but the whole pack of spirited teenagers didn’t need more than the chick duo working that night. One of the women was a former Los Angeles County sheriff who had obviously busted down a lot of doors. Even so, she was surprisingly feminine and immaculately groomed, with french-manicured fingernails and pin-straight bright copper hair pulled back in a tightly coiled perfect bun. She packed a Colt in her jacket, and another handgun strapped to her ankle, and she had three phones. She appeared to know everybody in town: every doorman, every maître d’, every cop. If she didn’t know them, she knew somebody who did. The other woman was an ex-marine and looked like a mixed martial arts welterweight fighter. She wore tight T-shirts revealing that she was seriously ripped, and she had better-looking guns than any gymhead in West Hollywood with HGH-fueled bulging biceps. I don’t know when she had time to stay so buff because the security personnel were pulling the same hours as the rest of us, usually sixteen or eighteen hours a day, but she was superfit and looked as if she could break a brick without breaking a sweat. Both of them were attractive and sexy women in spite of, or maybe because of, their unusually masculine vigor. This was the first time I’d ever worked with them, but we ended up spending weeks together, and they were the only other American women I met on the job.

  Suddenly all the SUVs ahead of us made a fast turn into the parking lot behind Chin Chin on the Strip. The Saudi girls quickly got out and moved toward my car as I pulled up next to the already-parked SUVs. Malikah left the vehicle to see what was going on, and when she did, several of the girls jumped into the backseat of the convertible; then Rajiya and another girl took over the front.

  “Drive,” ordered one of Rajiya’s friends, another princess but slightly older and definitely the bossiest girl in the group. I pretended not to hear her.

  “Drive!” she said again as she swung her hair at me. She had a carefully tressed long black mane that she used to punctuate her commands. She was astonishingly pretty; she knew it, and she already knew how to use it as a weapon. Her beauty made her powerful. She was also shockingly bold in her dress and usually wore very short skirts, halter tops, and high-heeled strappy sandals, as if she were going to a party at the Playboy Mansion. The other girls, including Rajiya, were still ultra-Hollywood chic in $200 Free City T-shirts and True Religion skinny jeans, but more modestly dressed than the bossy Princess TeenBee. It was strange to me that the girls led such carefully circumscribed lives but were allowed to dress as if they were twenty-something clubbers looking to get laid.

  “Excuse me?” I asked. “You want me to drive all of you?”

  “Now!” said Princess TeenBee and waved her hand dismissively for me to go.

  What a nasty little creature, I thought, and decided to ignore her.

  “Rajiya,” I said. “I’m sorry but I cannot drive all of you in the car at once; there aren’t enough seat belts.”

  “But we want to be in the convertible. We do it all of the time,” said one of the other girls.

  “Yes, many times,” said another.

  “We want to go now!” said another.

  I’m sure that if I got to know them each better individually and not en masse, I would see that each girl was unique and interesting and complicated, just as I knew Rajiya to be, but in this pack, they blended together into a blur—a blur of brats.

  “I don’t know about your mothers,” I said to them, “but I know Rajiya’s mother would not be happy about this and would not let it happen.” That quieted them down for a minute.

  Rajiya’s mother, Princess Aamina, had made a strong impression on me. On my first day of driving her daughter, she came out of the restaurant where the family was having lunch to meet the woman who would be chauffeuring her child. “Ah,” she said taking both of my hands firmly in hers the same way Malikah had done, and holding my gaze for a long while. “I am so pleased to meet you, and I thank you for being available to drive my lovely Rajiya. I can see by looking in your eyes that you will take good care of her. Please do, I beg you. And I thank you. She is my only daughter, and I love her very much.”

  I couldn’t help but stammer out, “Yes, yes, madam, of course I will do this,” as if I were a medieval knight sworn to a high and noble service. I was moved by the fact that she took care to know who would be driving her daughter and to determine if I could be trusted. This was not typical of most of the parents I had met while working as a chauffeur. In my first few months of driving professionally, I was often assigned to drive the children of wealthy Los Angeles families who used a car service to escort their kids—which usually meant shuttling the kids of divorced couples from one parent’s house in the Palisades to another parent’s house in the Hollywood Hills. None of the parents would come out to meet me or to say a final good-bye to their children, or even wave from the door the way my mother still does when I leave her home. The kids were usually quiet on the drives and didn’t talk even to each other. I found those trips unbearably sad.

  Princess TeenBee jumped out of the convertible and announced, “It has to be all of us. Now! We want to ride together,” and charged over to her female security on duty. The other girls started jabbering away in Arabic, and I had no idea what they were saying, but I could hear the ringleader complaining in English about me to Copperhead and the Welterweight. I figured out that Copperhead worked for her family, because Princess TeenBee was threatening to call her father. She was trying to have me overruled, and it was clear by their body language that the rest of the brats were endorsing this. The chick security duo were not pleased about the assault, and the shrill racket the teenagers were producing was making us all wince.

  I looked at Malikah, who was closely watching the conflict, and saw that she was powerless to stop the onslaught. Normally she would have intervened. That was a bad sign and could only mean that TeenBee must have been from a very important family. I had seen the compound where her family was staying in Beverly Park, which they owned and visited several times a year. It had to be at least 20,000 square feet. It had two pools and a guesthouse the size of a bed-and-breakfast. It was faux Italian Renaissance and ugly as hell.

  The other drivers were leaning against their cars watching with their heads down and one eye open. I could see that they were astonished by what was happening. They began to fidget and whisper among one another and then walked several steps away to distance themselves from any potential backlash. I didn’t recognize any of them: they worked year-round for Saudi families who owned estates or rented compounds in Bel Air or Beverly Park. Most of them took great care in their appearance and dressed in Melrose Avenue hipster clothing, and two or three of them were sexy, in spite of their asshole demeanors, with sullen, smoldering good looks. Many were Romanian or Eastern European, and they made it clear to me early on that I was only a sexual object to them—and not a particularly desirable one at that. In spite of the fact that we ended up driving caravan-like together for weeks on end, I never became friends with any of them. In fact, they rarely spoke to
me in the many hours we worked together, and if they did speak, they were invariably churlish. I wondered if they found me threatening because I was doing what they thought was a man’s job. I was tempted to say, “Hey, asshole, I don’t want your f’ing job. I can’t wait until this f’ing job is over, so no need to be so nasty.”

  By now all the girls except Rajiya had gotten out of the car and were assailing Copperhead and the Welterweight. They had surrounded the two and were vigorously pleading their case. Every now and then one of them would snarl in my general direction.

  I turned to Rajiya and said, “Listen, I’m sorry, but I absolutely cannot drive all of you in the car; it’s completely illegal and dangerous. There aren’t enough seat belts.”

  “But I told them we could do it,” Rajiya said quietly into her hands, which she clenched together tightly in her lap. Her knuckles went white with the effort. “I already told them that we could all ride in the convertible.” So that was it. Hers was the cool car, and she wanted to show it off. Rajiya kept glancing over at her friends working the security. Her face was flushed, and I could see she was trying with all her might not to cry. I understood that she just wanted to impress her friends and secure her standing.

  “I told them we could do it,” she whispered again.

  “Okay, Rajiya. I can take three of you on one trip, and then I’ll come back and get the others. Okay? And you can go both times because it’s your car.”

  She looked at me plaintively: “But it has to be all of us at once, please. We want to be together. I told them we could do it.” She looked so sad. She wasn’t ordering me; she was asking me.

  After a long noisy huddle with the blur, Copperhead walked over to the driver’s side of the car and said in a low voice, “Just go up and down the Strip a few times. Drive slow. Don’t worry about it. It’s not going to be a problem.” I didn’t say anything. All the girls had jumped back into the convertible. Then Welterweight came near and said, “Just to shut them up. Make it quick, and it’s gonna be fine.” They walked several feet away and stood next to each other, hands on hips, and nodded to me as if everything was copacetic.

  When I was a teenager, my mother warned me off riding on the back of a boyfriend’s motorcycle by saying, “It would be one thing if you were killed, my dear, but what if you were to lose an arm . . . or your beautiful nose . . . or were horribly disfigured in some way? That would be truly ghastly.” I never rode the bike again after that warning.

  I got out of the car, walked over to Copperhead and Welterweight, and said, “Really? The bars and nightclubs just closed. You’re going to guarantee me that some drunken loser is not going to hit us? And that these chickadees, with no seat belts on, aren’t going to go flying out of the convertible? Maybe one of them loses a head, or an arm, or a nose? That’d be nice. I’m sure their daddies would like that. You sure that’s not going to happen?” Both of them sighed deeply, as if I was making a big deal out of nothing, as if I was being difficult. I could see it was a show for the brats. They were the good cops, and I was the bad cop, but they were the ones with guns.

  Princess TeenBee piped up again: “Do not make us wait any longer!”

  Something in me just snapped. I almost slapped her, and I can’t remember ever wanting to slap anybody ever—except one of my brother’s friends who pushed me up against the wall when I was sixteen years old and alone with him in the Plaza Hotel elevator when he tried to kiss me. I slapped him hard but had lousy aim, so I hit his nose instead of his cheek, and that activated his tear ducts. When the elevator door opened and my brother saw me red-faced and gasping and the guy crying, he said, “What the hell happened in there?”

  I leveled my eyes at the girls in the car and said nothing. There was no way I was going to let a spoiled little brat tell me what to do. I’d had enough. Weeks of watching entitled nincompoops spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on shoes and sweaters were taking their toll on me. I knew the right thing to do; I needed to exercise a little philotimia.

  I opened the passenger door and said, “Get out, all of you.”

  Nobody moved. Princess TeenBee yelled, “You have to drive us!”

  “Yes, you must. You must. We always do this!” chimed the others. Still, nobody moved. I took my hand off the door and put the car keys in my pocket.

  “Out,” I said evenly, “and you’re lucky if I don’t tell your parents what almost went down here tonight.” My voice had dropped a full octave; this was the only way I could produce sound because I was so worked up. I was paralyzed with panic but my acting training came in handy at that moment. By lowering the pitch, I could force some air out, and a deep rumble emerged from my diaphragm. Even I was surprised by the timbre I was making; I could have been mistaken for a man.

  The truth is, I had no idea what their parents would do or say; I didn’t even know who their parents were. I only knew Rajiya’s mother, and I hadn’t seen her for days anyway. I was just saying what would have worked with an American kid even though I had already seen that no one said no to these girls ever, and certainly not a chauffeur. THEY WERE PRINCESSES! The tension was thick. The other drivers were looking at their feet whistling sotto voce or kicking at the gum on the concrete. One of them snickered. By this time, I’d been working over sixteen hours. I was fried. I was pretty damn sure I was going to lose my job, and I knew that a $20,000 tip was totally off the table if I did get fired, even if I was most likely saving these girls’ lives and noses. But I had the moral high ground, and that would be just fine.

  Finally Princess TeenBee said, “I want to go home. This is boring.” She made for her SUV as her driver scrambled around to open the door for her. All of the other brats got out too and walked to their separate cars as if the whole thing hadn’t happened.

  Before she walked away, Copperhead turned to me and said, “Name’s Cheyenne, and this is my partner, Cassie. Happy to meet you. Nice work. Sorry we put you through that. Hope to see you on the job again.” She put her hand out for me to shake, and I took it. Cassie, the Welterweight, grinned at me and jogged over to pat me on the back and shake my hand too, “Yeah, man. Awesome. Kudos.”

  Malikah got back in the car, smiled at me, and said, “I am so glad you are here to protect us. For this, I am very happy.” Rajiya was quiet on the way home, but I could tell by the way she looked at me that something had changed for her and that I had passed a test that neither of us had even known I was taking. I had stuck up for myself and what I thought was right in a way that she wasn’t able to do because of her age and the pressure of her peers. For a brief moment, I saw myself through her eyes. She did have the cool car, and I had just shown everyone that she had the cool female driver too.

  20

  The Lockbox

  As I began to better understand the workings of the family and the job, I regularly learned disturbing information that confused or upset me and about which I felt I could do little. One afternoon, Malikah, Zeinab, and I were sitting at a café at the Grove mall while Rajiya and her princess friends had lunch a few tables away from us.

  Zeinab was the cheery Egyptian nanny of one of Rajiya’s friends. She was twenty years old and as pretty as a cherub. She wore brightly colored and comely hijabs and tunics, and long shawls that she flashed about as she moved, and always carried candy or lollipops in her pockets to share. I knew that Malikah was keeping her eyes peeled for a nice Arab American Muslim man for Zeinab to marry so that the young woman could stay in the States, which was her deep desire. Malikah told me that she’d already had several matchmaking successes over the years and was certain she could find an appropriate suitor. She spent time speaking with all the workers she met during her travels with the family in America, assessing the crop of potential husbands. “Someone kind and gentle,” she said. “A calm man would be best for her. She has enough spark for two people, perhaps even three.”

  On most days Zeinab was as lively as a firecracker and sang and danced even when she was just chaperoning her charge while s
trolling around the mall, but today she wore an anxious expression on her face and I knew something was worrying her.

  “Don’t you feel well, Zeinab?” I asked her.

  She looked at Malikah and me with tears in her eyes.

  “Will you walk with me please, Janni?” she asked.

  “Um, sure,” I said, “if you want.” It was an odd request but I agreed. We got up from the table and started to walk toward the bustling farmer’s market just ahead of us. I looked back at Malikah and saw that she was staring out into space with a wistful expression on her face. I had now spent many weeks with Malikah, as well as many other nannies and servants; I sensed right away that there was big trouble afoot.

  “Please, Janni, I must to tell you this,” said Zeinab, clutching my arm as we walked. “I must. I had to say things at the American embassy, Janni, to obtain the visa to come to America. I do not want to lie. I do not lie.” She kept an eye on her little princess while we walked in a wide arc; when we got more than 20 feet away she would guide me back nearer the tables where the girls were having lunch.

  “Yes, Zeinab. I know. You consider it haram [forbidden] to lie.”

  “Nam, nam. There was a man who works for the embassy. My young princess’s mother, Princess Nihad, she knows him, she tells me I must speak with him. He tells me what I must say to the questions for the visa with the American official the following day. He says I must say that I work only eight hours a day and that I am very happy with the family and things such as this so I am not . . . an escape risk? Nam? Otherwise they do not give me the visa to come to America with the family, and I must come! If this does not happen, Princess Nihad is very angry. I must to look after the little princess. And I want to be here! I want to stay! But you see how I work, Janni? How we all work? Sixteen or seventeen hours a day, and every day, and then one day after many years, the family they can say, ‘Out!’ And I must go, back to Egypt. There is no one there for me anymore. Nam. Nam. What will happen to me then, Janni? You see my employer holds the passports, Janni? You have seen the lockbox the security keeps? For me, and Malikah, and Maysam, and Zuhur—all of us. It is the same in the Kingdom. We cannot leave at the moment when we want; this is not possible. We have not a passport.”