5 - Street Terrorism

Summary

The rich bring cars to us and play with us.

– Bubu

Public Disorder

I first encountered joyriding during a night of January 2002, three years before I started fieldwork. As I was waiting behind the steering wheel at a traffic light on Takhassussi Avenue, in the Central Business District, I heard a horrifying shriek coming from behind my car. Looking into the rearview mirror, I saw a huge cloud of dust closing in on me at lightning speed. I barely had the time to put the car into first gear, release the clutch, and turn down a perpendicular street. The drifting car swerved at more than 140 mph in the exact spot where my car was seconds before, and continued its course on the avenue. Jumping out of my seat, I stood on the pavement, my limbs shaking and my forehead drenched in sweat. I needed a good fifteen minutes to recover my composure. A driver stopped next to my car to ask if everything was all right, only to pull out with a shrug after I’d told him what had happened.

Yet the scene wasn't over. The drifting car soon came back, its tires screaming, leaving behind a billowing cloud of dust and smoke. It fled across the asphalt as though suspended by invisible threads, like its body had been freed from the laws of motion. The noise was deafening. With a police patrol on its tail, the car made a right onto Thirty Avenue (Share‘ Thalathin) and jumped above the traffic island onto the other side of the road. The police car clumsily passed over the island behind it, while the joyrider was crossing back again in an attempt to dodge the cops. Its lights flashing and its siren howling, the patrol crashed against a streetlamp while trying to pass the island a second time. Two cops got out, apparently without a scratch, and looked at the drifting car turning onto King Fahd Road and disappearing from sight.