Avoiding Prison & Other Noble Vacation Goals (6 page)

All those years of plate tectonics and fossils and chemistry—as a kid, I had naively believed the lessons were about science—when all along my dad had been talking about life. In forbidding me to memorize and forcing me to think, he had been ensuring that I'd never coast along on autopilot, that I would only adhere to beliefs I had fully thought through. He had made me question everything, giving me permission to pursue life on my own terms.

As I watched my mother and the government official in our kitchen form the cookie dough into little round balls, my dad bounded into the kitchen, anxious to show me the latest batch of opals he had just polished up in his shop. He couldn't wait to extol the virtues of his new diamond-tipped lapidary sander, one of his new projects now that he had eliminated the annoying working-for-a-living part of his life—my father now
lived
for a living.

It seemed so simple, yet few people were ever able to accomplish it. Was the secret to happiness as simple as buying a ticket to Honduras? If that were the case, surely American Airlines would have taken advantage of this in its advertising campaign. (“We are your ticket to happiness. Low one-way fares to Tegucigalpa.”) Perhaps it was that my parents had had the courage to make unconventional choices, to discard what didn't matter, separating out what was expected of them from what was really essential.

As my father laid the specimens out on the table for me to peruse, I couldn't help but imagine myself at his age. When I was fifty years old, would I look back on what I had done and regret that I had traded happiness for stability? I had already let my childhood pass me by. Would I give up my early adulthood just as easily?

I had been so content for the past two weeks in Honduras. I had had fun with my family. We'd all been so distracted by the newness of the place that we hadn't had time to remember all the old resentments and gripes.

All it took was this simple realization to completely turn my life around. After all, happiness was like alcoholism—it began with a single sip.

Chapter Two

The Only American Tourist in Beirut

Back at home in Los Angeles while I contemplated the sorry state of my life from the safety of my bed, it occurred to me that if there was anyone who could teach me to lighten up and have fun, it had to be my friend Peter. For the past eight years, he had been showing up at my apartment in L.A. whenever I needed a few laughs. In general, his levity-inducing methods were mild, but on occasions when I was particularly resistant to his charm, he wasn't above resorting to force. When necessary, he would shove me into my walk-in closet, follow me in with a fifth of tequila, and assure me that my freedom could be obtained as soon as I had consumed two shots. I would squeal and plead, realize that I had no chance of overpowering my six-foot-two-inch captor, and finally accept his terms, reluctantly downing one drink and then another.

Peter always kept his word—after I took the recommended dose of alcohol, he would graciously open the door, but by then the tequila would begin taking effect and whatever productive activity I had been consumed with an hour earlier would seem trivial compared with my duty to the closet and my responsibility to continue, um, consuming.

Peter's good-natured efforts on my behalf had gone on for years, something I attributed to affection as well as force of habit. We had met as high school foreign exchange students in what was then West Germany, and from the very beginning I had admired the effortless way Peter always managed to have a good time. I had never met anyone like him, someone who could be smart and popular too. In the tiny towns I had grown up in, making the fatal mistake of letting a word like “onomatopoeia” slip out just one time was enough to get you relegated to the geek table forever.

I had liked Peter immediately, but I was also somewhat in awe of the way he took hold of his whole foreign-exchange experience. I was a shy and insecure sixteen year old, a result of years of torment at the hands of my American peers, but Peter seemed unintimidated by anyone or anything, even when presented with an entirely new culture. Unlike myself, who very courteously spoke to her host parents in the German formal
Sie,
Peter sat his parents down, explained that he was going to be living in their house for a while, and he would be damned if he wasn't going to call them by the familiar
du.

He handled his teachers in much the same way. When they began to complain that he rarely showed up for school, he explained that it was merely a misunderstanding on their part, that he was receiving no high school credit for his year abroad, and that instead of harping on his absences, they should consider it extra credit every time he decided to show up in a classroom.

Before I met him, my biggest entertainment had been sitting alone in my bedroom making strange guttural noises that in any other country would have been a sure symptom of demonic possession (in Germany, this was merely called “practicing your consonant sounds”). But Pete insisted I have some real fun. There was a spontaneous journey to Copenhagen, a week spent in Sweden, and a stay in West Berlin, where I ran my hands across an ominous wall that would come tumbling down a year later.

After Peter and I parted ways in Germany, we met up again in California, first in Peter's hometown of Stockton and later in Los Angeles. While I was going to UCLA, Pete was alternating his time among Santa Monica College, San Diego State, and Berkeley, doing his part to contribute to California's entire higher educational system without playing favorites. (“I've dropped out of some of the best schools in this country,” he was fond of saying.) He was never more than a six-hour drive away and he'd always find some excuse to come see me in Los Angeles.

Our visits usually ended at the international terminal of the L.A. airport—Peter was continually jet-setting to some foreign destination, taking advantage of his in-between-colleges time by traveling to whatever country was offering cheap tickets. There had been several visits to Germany, a trip to see his aunt and uncle in Mexico, a week in (what was then) Czechoslovakia, even a last minute flight to Poland.

The last time I had seen him, he had been waving good-bye to me out the window of an Amtrak train, the beginning of a journey he planned to take by land to the farthest tip of South America. From what I understood, he got as far as Guatemala, had a revelation that more or less dealt with how much he disliked squeezing into overcrowded buses filled with livestock, sped to the nearest international airport, and hopped on the next flight to Europe. From there, my knowledge of events gets kind of confused, but there was something about reading a Middle Eastern guidebook in a bookstore in Germany, Peter's subsequent journey to Jordan, and finally a trip to Lebanon—a place he had yet to return from.

He had been living in Beirut for the past three years, which made it a lot tougher for him to drive over to my apartment any time he suspected I was in need of a good time, so he had resorted to calling me up every few months or so and insisting I come and see him. I had continually rejected the idea, not because I was against it on principle—I was as fun-loving as the next twenty-five-year-old subscriber to
Scientific American—
it was just that as a person paying her own way through college (subsequently followed by being a person paying her own way out of student-loan debt), my financial circumstances had ruled out jet-setting as a potential lifestyle choice.

“When are you coming to visit?” he'd ask at the end of every phone conversation. By now, the question had become so routine that he put it to me more out of habit than in the hopes of receiving a sincere reply.

“No time, no money,” I'd automatically answer.

But this time when the phone rang, just weeks after my return from Honduras, for the first time I gave Pete's query some actual contemplation. Going to Lebanon—what would that mean? I imagined myself sitting in a Middle Eastern café, sipping thick coffee, gazing out over the Mediterranean and picking the tabbouleh out of my teeth, gracefully sliding my chair out of the way of any wayward bombs. Later, we'd ride camels through the desert (I'd call my camel Sandy), the wind blowing through our hair, our billowing white tunics flowing behind us. We'd camp with a group of nomads. We'd eat dates we collected ourselves. It would be glamorous, exciting, and just a bit risky—exactly the qualities that were discouraged among the employees of Hughes Aircraft.

There was just one obstacle. If I remembered correctly, Peter had once mentioned that visiting Lebanon was sort of illegal. When I asked him about this, he explained that this was true only if you were the kind of person who happened to take seriously the advice of the U.S. State Department, and given the disdainful way Peter spoke this phrase I was sure this was the type of individual that I definitely didn't want to be.

There were ways around these restrictions, he insisted. The U.S. government didn't have to
find out
I was traveling to Beirut. I'd buy my ticket in London and the Lebs (as Peter affectionately referred to them) would be more than happy to allow me into the country. All I had to do was go to the Lebanese consulate in Los Angeles and bring along some official-looking papers (that Pete would provide me with) that declared I had legitimate business to conduct.

“And if that doesn't work,” Peter advised me over international phone lines, “just flirt your way in.”

Peter was from a respected upper-middle-class family. His father was a judge, for God's sake. If Peter said it was okay to break the law, I had to believe him. So armed with several passport photos and a few documents in Arabic that Peter had faxed to me, I made my way to the Lebanese consulate wearing a short dress and a big smile, feeling for the first time gleefully dangerous.

My conversation with the man behind the counter went something like this:

WENDY: I'd like to get a visa.

LEBANESE VISA GUY: May I see your passport?
[Wendy hands over pass
port, makes eye contact. Smiles seductively. Man notices it's an American
passport.]
Americans aren't allowed to go to Lebanon.

WENDY: Yes, but I'm a writer. [Then, in as sexy a voice as it is possible to
use when uttering words like “The documentation that I am providing
attests to the fact that the Lebanese Ministry of Tourism has hired me to
write some brochures,” Wendy says:]
The documentation that I am providing attests to the fact that the Lebanese Ministry of Tourism has hired me to write some brochures.

LEBANESE VISA GUY:
[Man looks at documentation suspiciously, looks at
Wendy. Big smile from Wendy. A small wink. Man thinks a moment.
Then:]
No problem, beautiful lady. You want some coffee?
⁴

[Wendy spends the rest of the afternoon drinking co fee at the consulate's office chatting about what a lovely time of year it is for visiting Lebanon.]

One of the disadvantages of vacationing in Beirut is that it deprives you of one of the greatest pleasures of taking a trip in the first place: the jealousy of your friends. I realized this a week before my departure when not one of the people I knew expressed the slightest tinge of envy at my impending visit. As I emphasized the phrases “international trip,” “vacation abroad,” and “on the coast of the Mediterranean,” they looked at me with a mix of fear and concern and mentioned something about bombs. (The good news, as I would learn later, was that they were small bombs. “Very small bombs,” as my Lebanese friend Hadi would helpfully point out.)

Even my guidebook seemed less than optimistic. On the subject of the country I was soon to visit, it had these words to say: “If God created a training ground for the Armageddon, Beirut would be the stage. . . . Populated and run by tribes of fanatical gangs, the realities of Beirut would challenge even the most creative scriptwriter. Religion, drugs, war, love, and death all interact in this biblical epic of death and destruction.” This was not encouraging advice, but neither was the title of the book I was holding. Unable to find Lebanon listed in
Let's Go
or
Lonely Planet,
the guide I had resorted to was called
The World's Most Dangerous Places.

On the bright side, the book had devoted an entire chapter to the country, including lots of important travel tips such as: “Kidnapping is a fine art in Beirut. . . . Have a driver meet you at the airport with a prearranged signal or sign. If not, take the official airport taxis. If you take a taxi, officials will write down your name and destination so the news media can get it right after you're abducted.”

Of course I wouldn't be faced with such problems. I had Peter, a guide who spoke fluent Arabic, owned his own car, knew his way through Hamra and Achrafieh the way I navigated around Hollywood and Santa Monica. I had nothing to worry about—except maybe Peter. On my first day in Lebanon just hours after I had descended from my plane, before I even had a chance to adapt to the contradictory sights that bombarded my senses, intricately beautiful Byzantine arches side by side with decaying buildings that had been hollowed out by bombs, Peter informed me what he wanted to do: go sightseeing—in southern Lebanon.

There was something ominous about this suggestion. In fact, during our phone conversation several weeks earlier when I had expressed a slight concern over my safety, Peter had gone out of his way to explain that violence in the country tended to be concentrated around certain areas, that all we had to do was avoid perilous places like the border between Lebanon and Israel, and everything would be okay.

But now this was exactly where we were headed. I couldn't help but be concerned. “Pete, aren't we in danger of the shelling going on there?”

“Don't worry, Wend. They usually only shell in the morning,” my friend said with a maniacal grin.

The southern border of Lebanon was not a warm, fuzzy place to be. It was like a huge dodgeball field—though instead of avoiding the path of a red rubber ball, today's task would be to drive out of the trajectory of any shells pelted at us from the Israeli army on one side, Hezbollah guerrillas on the other.

It sounded terrifying, but I had decided to say yes to the possibility of excitement and danger. I was determined to take life less seriously.

“So why is it that everyone wants to kill us?” I asked Peter, trying to sound as nonchalant as possible as we began our trip through the hilly and dusty brush-covered terrain.

“They don't want to kill us, silly,” Pete said, consoling me. “They want to kill each other. We just happen to be driving down the middle of their firing zone.”

This was not the Lebanon of thirty years ago. Several decades earlier, Lebanon had been one of the Middle East's success stories, a nation where Christian, Muslim, and Druze
⁵
families lived side by side in relative peace and harmony. Beirut was “the Paris of the Middle East,” a thriving adult playground on the shores of the Mediterranean filled with exotic restaurants, expensive nightclubs, and international shopping centers.

Shopping lost a lot of its allure in 1975 when civil war broke out. Initially, the Muslims had felt they weren't adequately represented in the government, and it was a war between Muslims and Maronite Christians, but after a while the situation got so complicated and the alliances so tenuous that it was nearly impossible to remember who was against whom at any given time. One day it would be Sunni Muslims against Christians; the next week, it would be Sunni Muslims allied with Christians against Shiites. And then the alliances would shift all over again, like a game of musical chairs.

These days, the country's internal religious conflicts had simmered down, making Beirut a relatively safe city—so Pete had wanted to drag me down to the southern border of Lebanon, where a different but equally complex conflict was taking place: Hezbollah guerrillas were fighting against Israel.
⁶