They take me to a police station. No English is going down at this point. When they arrest me at the airport, nobody speaks English. Your only hope is this translator, and you don’t know what the hell he’s translating. His ear isn’t even trained to capture my English. So you’re saying shit and he’s repeating it back in Arabic, and the officer is looking at you, and you don’t know what they’re talking about. Then they give you a paper, the paper is in Arabic, nothing in English—I didn’t even know they read from right to left, it took me a long time to figure this out—and they tell you to sign it and then you can go home. But I didn’t know what the paper said! They’re translating what I’m saying—I’m saying I don’t know what’s going on. I never been here, I don’t know nobody here, I came here for a music show—but I don’t know what they’re translating, if he was saying what I was saying. You just don’t know. And it’s discrimination—I had my hair down and I got dreadlocks, I got tattoos.
This is Thursday, November 19. Everybody had gone, because I’d already said I’ll take care of this and see you later. We’re American, so we think you’re gonna get up the next day and get bailed out. But it don’t work like that in Abu Dhabi.
They say, “Grab some extra clothes because you’re gonna be here for a couple of days.” So I was like, “A couple of days? I thought y’all was takin’ me home right now!” Then they take me to the jail cell and I never came back out.
When you first get in there, you don’t know what’s going on. First of all, I’m the only American. It’s Pakistanis, Saudis, Afghans, Kuwaitis, Iranians. And then you got some Africans, like Somalians, Nigerian, Egyptians. All these people was the people in jail. So when I come in, the first thing I’m seeing is like, How am I going to communicate with these people? I don’t know what to do.
One of the guys who could speak a little bit of English, he was saying, “U.S. Embassy, call the U.S. Embassy.” But I don’t know how to get my U.S. Embassy’s number, how to get a calling card to call them, what kind of money they use. I don’t know nothing. I’m just in here.
The next day you go see a prosecutor. There’s no rights. When they arrest you, they don’t have to say you have a right to this, you have a right to an attorney, you have a right to remain silent. There’s no judge, no jury. They assign you to a prosecutor, and the prosecutor can just do what he wants with you. They don’t have to tell you anything. They don’t even have to explain what the charge is.
You get a piece of paper, and the paper is in Arabic. I still don’t know exactly what it said to this day. But I would go find somebody who could read Arabic and knew a little bit of English. It said something like: You gotta go to court on such and such date and you’ve been charged with drugs. It could’ve been cocaine, it could have been heroin, it could have been marijuana, they treat it all the same over there. So I’m in there with people who had 10, 12, 20 kilos of cocaine from Brazil. There’s an old man in there right now, 67 years old, he stole a box of candy from the airport, and he still in there. He’s still in there right now because his paper just said he stole something and now he’s in the same category as the people who stole 850,000 Dirhams. So there’s an old man in there right now, I can see his face, and he’s going crazy over a chocolate bar!
So they give you this paper that tells you in seven days you gotta go to court, but then you only get to say one word. They ask you, did you bring a drug into this country? You don’t get to explain. You just get to say yes or no, and you have to say yes because if you say no, then there’s a whole ‘nother case going on. So you say yes, and then they give you another paper for 14 days. Then you get thrown in Dubai jail. I don’t care what you did, how minor it was, you can’t do anything for the first 21 days, no matter what.
It took three days to get the U.S. embassy’s number because the guards wouldn’t give it to me, because there’s a language barrier and they really ain’t trying to help you like that. I found out the third day that you had to hit 1-3-3 on the prison phone and then they give you embassy numbers. So I called the U.S. Embassy, and I’m like, “Yo! I’m American and I’m in Abu Dhabi prison, get me out of here!” And they were like, “Aight, we gonna send somebody down. Visit days are Tuesday, we’re gonna have somebody down there no later than Tuesday.”
So now I’m like, Okay, Tuesday it’s going down. My U.S. Embassy, they coming, and I’m getting out of here. People was like, “He’s American! He’s American! He’s gonna be outta here in three days.” Everyone keeps saying this because they’ve never seen an American here. It’s like I’m a fucking unicorn, for real. They’ve never seen an American where they can walk up and touch him. It’s like I’m an extraterrestrial.
Tuesday the Embassy comes. Two people show up, and—first of all, I almost broke down because I’m just happy I see an American that’s talking English. I’m sitting there like, “You guys came to get me right? So, what’s the fastest I can get out of here?” And I’m thinking they’re gonna tell me, like, now. But then they’re like, “Well, with cases like this it’s probably gonna take eight weeks.”
I’m like, Hold up. Eight weeks? You can’t tell me nothing better than this?! I think I blacked out. My whole body went numb and I was just thinking my life is gonna be over. There’s no way I can survive eight weeks in here, mentally. I cuss out both people from the U.S. Embassy, and then I walked back devastated ’cause that’s when it hit me—I’m not getting out of here. Every night I was having dreams that I was doing something else, then I would wake up back in jail. Waking up used to be the worse.
In the jail it’s two sides. There’s the Arabic side and the other side is predominantly African. and it’s like a war between both sides. But I could go on both sides ’cause I wasn’t neither. When I first moved in, both sides were tryna see who was gonna get the American. And I’m like, I know I’m gonna be cool with them Africans over there, but I need to make sure I’m cool with the Arabic side too. We had one dude in there who’d been in the Taliban, and he was celebrated. He got caught because he fell asleep when he was supposed to be detonating a tank. He was waiting so long that he fell asleep, and the U.S. found him with this bomb in his hand and he said he got tortured by the CIA for 40-something days. With no clothes on, in the cold. And he never gave no names, so the U.S. let him go. This was his little legend.
All of the people there were so far from what I’ve ever known. People carrying kilos of coke in their stomach. Stuff I wouldn’t even imagine doing, these people are doing to try to make it. These folks was living crazy, but I learned from them. Like, there’s a difference between North and South Pakistan. I didn’t know that in Cameroon they speak French. You learn about Islam. In prison they pray five times a day. They just put me on. I talked to everyone about their government and their language. Like, while I’m here, I got to figure it out.
The only thing you could really do is try to make yourself exercise, like on some Rocky shit. You gotta do push-ups, sit-ups off the cell bars. People were making dumbbells out of six liter water bottles. I wanted some books, something to get my mind off the situation. But the embassy couldn’t even get my books in. I stopped talking to the embassy. They were always two steps behind.
I used a whole lot of money on phone cards, I was talking to my mom all the time. Otherwise I didn’t want to talk to anyone else from America. It makes you think about what you miss. You think of the food you was missing, you think of the club, the
