Avoiding Prison & Other Noble Vacation Goals (8 page)

Now I was in a similar situation. I had never smoked out of a hose before, but I sportingly placed the tube to my lips and took a deep breath, as self-conscious as an adolescent Arabic girl taking her first inhale out of a
nargeileh
in her high school bathroom.

Other than the fact that there was a tube in my mouth, it was like smoking a cigarette—a berry-flavored one. Nicotine flooded my brain, sped up my heart rate, and made my head spin. But this was just the beginning. Lebanese tradition demanded that smoking a
nargeileh
go on for an entire afternoon. I passed Hadi the hose, took a sip of my coffee, and decided it wasn't such a bad country after all.

On my last weekend in Beirut, I was all for the idea of running off to yet another smoke-filled café, but Peter had a better idea: detox. Although he was a staunch supporter of the virtues of alcohol, like a true Californian he was an adamant antismoker and had every intention of ridding me of the nicotine addiction that Hadi had spent the past few days carefully cultivating.

“We're going to get you some fresh air,” he said, pushing me into his car.

This didn't sound nearly as entertaining as inhaling smoke. “Couldn't we just pick up some muscle relaxants at the drugstore?”

Peter rolled his eyes and started the engine. He was determined to show me another face of Lebanon, an ancient side, and for the rest of the afternoon we wandered about the ruins of one bygone civilization after another.

Our first stop was the Phoenician port city of Sidon, where we roamed through a thirteenth-century Crusader sea castle. The structure wasn't much bigger than a typical house in Beverly Hills, but it was made entirely of stone and appeared to be rising out of the sea. It sat on a tiny island connected to the mainland by a short bridge.

Then, it was onto Tyre, a three-thousand-year-old city that had been conquered by big name headliners such as Alexander the Great and King Nebuchadnezzar. Just feet away from the blue waters of the Mediterranean, Peter and I strolled between the colonnades that had once formed part of an impressive city.

But this was just foreplay. The real deal was another two hours away, the ancient Roman city of Baalbeck. So far I'd been having a good time, but when you got right down to it, ruins were just one rundown building after another. Not Baalbeck. As Peter and I got out of the car, I could see the tremendous structures in the distance, the largest Roman temples ever constructed.

The temple of Jupiter was the most gigantic of all. I got vertigo looking up at its seventy-foot-high columns, imagining what this city must have been like in its day. All around us was what I decided to call “temple dandruff,” huge chunks of rubble that had broken off and fallen to the ground. These colossal blocks of beautifully carved stone contained the ornate moldings of leaves and lion heads. Peter and I couldn't resist climbing over them in spite of their size. Like energetic preschoolers, we pulled ourselves up using both hands and ascended the slanted rock hunched over so that we could quickly grab hold of the stone in the event of losing our balance.

There were three other structures to see so we headed over to the temple of Bacchus, which was the most impressive, simply because it had been so well preserved. It was like pictures I had seen of the Parthenon—a rectangular structure surrounded by columns—and its size was staggering.

“Three hundred years they spent building this place,” Peter informed me, walking up the temple steps. “And they never finished.”

“Talk about a bad case of procrastination.”

“Tell me about it. You know, there are ruins in Beirut too.”

“I know. Hadi and I go to cafés in them.”

“Not the ruins of the war. Ancient ruins.”

“Oh.”

“They've been trying to rebuild downtown Beirut, but half the time, when they begin excavating, they unearth another set of Roman ruins. For them, it's a real pain. They give the archeologists a couple of months to scavenge what they can and then they bulldoze it all.”

“Damn Roman ruins. What an inconvenience.”

Late that afternoon, both of us famished from a long day of walking, we stopped at a restaurant along the highway for
mezze,
which could be roughly translated as “lunch, a whole lot of it.” It always began with a series of appetizers (hummus, tabbouleh, baba ghanoush, plain yogurt, and flat Arabic bread), moved onto main dishes (lamb, chicken, or beef), and ended with fruit and sweets. Food was fun enough, but my favorite part of the meal was the traditional drink
arrack,
a licorice-flavored liquor that turned milky white when served over ice cubes and mixed with chilled water.

Sitting in the outdoor patio of the restaurant watching the other patrons, I couldn't help but think how calm they all seemed. They were, after all, Lebanese. They woke up in a war-torn country, ate lunch surrounded by strife and civil unrest, and lived with the threat of bombs all day. Yet here they were laughing over glasses of
arrack,
asking their family members to kindly pass the flatbread.

These were the moments I had not counted on in Beirut. I had been prepared for guns and bombs and destruction. But this was also a place where people got on with their lives. They got up in the morning, read the paper, headed to work, and returned to have dinner with their families.

After an emotional good-bye, I boarded a flight leaving Lebanon the next day. It was a short journey to Cyprus, then another flight to London, and finally onto Washington, D.C., where I arrived exhausted and jet lagged. From there, I took what Southwest Airlines would refer to as a direct flight to Los Angeles (meaning two obligatory stops at Nashville and Phoenix).

It was during a layover at the Phoenix airport, sitting at the gate waiting for my flight that I began to feel the effect of travel on my outlook. In my own time zone for the first time in weeks, I was having a hard time. It wasn't the fact that my neck ached, my head hurt, my feet were sore, or that my body clock was set ten hours ahead. It was that after Beirut, everything around me seemed so trivial. The conversation going on across from me went something like this:

“Have you had those new lattes?” an overweight woman with feathered and frosted hair asked her friend, pronouncing the word “latte” to rhyme with “batty.”

“You like lattes? Cappuccinos are better. Or you can have them with chocolate. That's called a mocha.”

“How about café au laits? You like those?”

“I don't know. I never had one.”

I was tempted to walk up to them and tell them it was coffee for God's sake—it was some grounds, some water, and some milk, and it really didn't matter. What mattered was the fact that their houses weren't being bombed, that half the people they knew hadn't been killed, that they could sleep at night, not worried that the roof above their heads would soon be lying on their chests.

But I kept it to myself. I sat in my chair, watching the planes take off and land, quietly smiling, thinking that my friends truly did have something to be jealous of, after all.

Chapter Three

Cuba Libre, Muy Libre

All of the boring people I knew—the ones who led lives I didn't want mine to turn out like—they had one thing in common: they all had jobs. I realized this on an especially dreary Monday morning at Hughes Aircraft. Days earlier, I had been fleeing bombs and sniper fire in Beirut, sipping
arrack,
and inhaling the smoke from a
nargeileh,
but now I was back where I had started, looking out at the world through the window in my office. The change I'd undergone in Beirut had been fleeting thanks to a little fun damperer called work.

The monotony was worse than it had been before because now I had a different frame of reference. I had memories of warm flatbread topped with oregano and other spices, dribbled with olive oil and oozing melted cheese. The engineers around me had never tasted freshly heated
mankoushi,
which is why they were able to sit there day after day leading productive, fulfilled, flatbread-free lives—because they had no idea what they were missing out on.

The work itself wasn't what bothered me, rather, it was the predictability of it all. Every day at 8 A.M., the same freeway, the same office, the same boring business attire. The days of my life stretched out in front of me, one after the other, no surprises in store. I wanted my life to matter, to mean something, not just to get used up and discarded like a roll of disposable towels.

Quitting my job would have been easy if it weren't for the simple matter of supporting myself. I had no idea how to get out of working and still earn a living. Had I had some sage guidance from, say, an eloquent and wise mentor or, lacking that, a really good Magic 8 Ball, I might have been able to get some valuable insight into what was soon to occur, a conversation such as the following:

WENDY: Will I have the same job in three months?

MAGIC 8 BALL: No.

WENDY: Will I be broke in three months?

MAGIC 8 BALL: No.

WENDY: What is to become of my life?

MAGIC 8 BALL: Your future is inexplicably intertwined with that of Wink Martindale.
⁷

Since I never did get my hands on that Magic 8 Ball (meaning that the preceding conversation never actually took place) when I met Wink Martindale three months later, needless to say, it came as a complete surprise to me.

My life changed with a phone call. When I received it, I had been at my wit's end, wondering how I was going to pay my rent and the stack of bills that kept piling up while I survived on Top Ramen and adrenaline. The division of Hughes Aircraft where I had worked for the past two years had quit on me (before I got the pleasure of quitting on it), recently having transferred its operations to Arizona, so I had been struggling with the new reality of living without a regular paycheck.

If I had ever been in need of good news, it was certainly that night sitting outside on my porch, nursing a Manhattan, staring at what was left in my glass and realizing that it was my last cocktail; there wasn't money left to spend on any more sweet vermouth. I heard the dim ring of the phone and fiddled with the latch on my door, racing to get inside in time. It was a friend from college, which was nice enough news in itself, but better yet she was calling to tell me that she'd just gotten hired at the
Advocate,
a gay and lesbian newsmagazine, and that the editors were looking for someone to write profiles on celebrities. It would only be sporadic work, but I figured that any income was better than what I was subsisting on now and it turned out to be relatively easy. My job consisted of basically going around and asking famous actors how they felt about gay people. (In case you're wondering, Billy Crystal said he liked them, Jane Hamilton said she liked them, and John Lithgow said he liked them but not nearly as much as he liked dressing up in a skirt and pearls.)

It was a good beginning, but it was still a tenuous existence. For the next few months, I just had enough to pay my bills, assuming I never ate out and was careful at the grocery store. I needed to augment my income with another freelance client, but I had no idea how to go about it. I tried everything I could think of—I walked around my apartment practicing saying I was a journalist, I bought myself a supply of spiral-bound notebooks and Uniball Deluxe pens—but these preliminary attempts were futile. What else could I do? I figured it wouldn't hurt to sit outside my friend Lisa's building with a laptop attempting to look writerly. Fortunately, this managed to do the trick.

One day as I literarily sat on her front steps, her neighbor Bill walked by. I had spoken to him many times before, but I had never managed to grasp how he afforded the rent on his sixteen-hundred-dollar apartment while earning his living as a writer. He had occasionally thrown out clues, referring to his past in New York advertising and his subsequent move to Los Angeles to work in the film industry. Once, I had gone up to his place to take a peek at his ad copywriting portfolio and had noticed that his living room was full of scripts, but how did a writer go about getting such jobs?

Bill's life bore no resemblance to my own. He drove a brand-new Saab convertible and got free tickets to exclusive Hollywood screenings. And he had just gotten a job writing a brand new sitcom, or so he informed me as I sat on the steps with my clunky out-of-date laptop. Speaking of which, would I have any interest in interviewing for the ad copywriting position he was leaving behind? It paid five hundred dollars a day.

He was so casual about it. It was the job he was discarding—to him, it was just leftover material. But five hundred dollars? A day? That would put me in the same league as engineers, doctors, lawyers, and prostitutes. All I had to do was go in for an interview and convince the ad agency owner, Chuck Blore, that I was the writer he was looking for.

Bill acted as if it was no big deal, but I knew that Chuck was a powerful man. He had worked with Hollywood celebrities. He was friends with TV network presidents. He had personally produced all the radio spots for AT&T's “Reach out and touch someone” campaign. What could he possibly see in an ex-corporate writer like myself?

A few days later as I nervously trudged my way up the stairs to his Hollywood office, my chances were actually a lot better than I suspected. Chuck had a personality trait that was about to work in my favor: he prided himself on making brave choices. He had hired Drew Barrymore before anyone had even heard the phrase “E. T. phone home.” He had been taping Christina Applegate's voice since she was a baby. Chuck loved being able to spot new talent. He took chances on people, paved the way for their success, and watched as they moved on to bigger and better things.

The first time I walked into his office, he seemed genuinely happy to see me, treating me like the guest of honor at a dinner party. He had me take a seat, and before there was time to introduce myself or exchange a few words of chitchat, he enthusiastically popped a cassette into his stereo. “These are some of the radio spots I've written,” he announced grandly, pressing play on the machine.

He listened to the tape as if hearing it for the first time. He laughed at the jokes, acted surprised by the endings. His pride was that of a little kid, a joyous five-year-old who shouts out to his mother, “Look what I can do!” I found him completely endearing.

I wondered what I could say to convince him that I was the writer he needed, but once the tape had finished, Chuck seemed uninterested in discussing my experience, a lucky break for me considering there wasn't much of it to discuss. He instantly hired me on a trial basis based simply on a gut instinct he had about these things.

Fortunately, I was a quick learner. After turning in a few mediocre scripts, three days later I came in with a radio spot that had him laughing out loud and he immediately upgraded my trial-basis status to that of a full-fledged writer.

As if the entire experience hadn't been ludicrously lucky enough, the good fortune that followed was the stuff of freelance writing legend. Chuck had been trying to get a television project off the ground for thirty years—one week after he hired me on, the deal finally came through. I arrived in his office just moments after he received the news. Giddy with excitement, he raced over to me and gave me a warm embrace. “Ever-Lovely,” he said, using the nickname that he would call me from that day forward, “now that you're my writer, I have a new challenge for you. Have you ever thought about writing for television? I want you to help me script a TV program.”

A week later the executive producer of the program walked into Chuck's office for the first time. It was none other than Wink Martindale in the flesh.

While other people slaved away at their jobs, trapped by convention and an oppressive sense of impotence, at age twenty-five, I had found the secret trapdoor out. I felt like Jim Carrey finally fleeing
The Truman Show.
I was like the bubble boy inhaling his first breath of mountain air. It was incredible. I had stepped into the life I had always imagined.

The glee was a little bit hard to take. It was such a novel sensation for me that I wasn't quite sure how to behave. I didn't know the norms for happiness. What did happy people do? How did they behave? For God's sake, where did they shop?

If I was having a tough time getting used to my newly prosperous existence, my ATM was even slower to be convinced. Several months into my freelance writing career, I had tried to deposit a check totaling more than eight thousand dollars, but even the normally agreeable Wells Fargo machine seemed to have a hard time buying it.

I had begun the normal transaction process by keying in the total amount of my check. “You have entered eight thousand dollars. Is this correct?” I hit the OK button, figuring the next step would be to insert my deposit envelope—but it was as if this ATM machine had known me personally: “You have entered eight thousand dollars! Are you sure this is the correct amount of your deposit?” This screen had never come up in the past. I didn't even know this screen existed. I had never been worthy of the incredulity screen before. With a big grin, I hit the OK button one last time, realizing that I had finally joined that small rank of people who enter eight thousand dollars on the automatic teller key pad: the wealthy and the dyslexic.

For a while, the idea of having money was more fun than spending it. In my mind, I squandered my entire wealth dozens of time, reveling in pretending to empty my bank account more than actually going through with it. I could buy six hundred bottles of Absolut vodka, I imagined, picturing a whole side of my living room suddenly transformed into a wall of crystal. Or I could purchase a dozen Macintoshes, two for every room of the house. Or I could go to my favorite Goodwill, and like a millionaire let loose on a capricious shopping spree I could clean out the store's entire inventory.

Of course this was all just a good-natured game. I was never really in danger of relinquishing my entire net worth to the Absolut bottling company. I had already spent the past year planning what I would do if I ever got my hands on a significant chunk of dough: I was going to buy irresponsibility.

Unlike happiness, which seemed to be a result of wisdom, acquired experience, or a lifetime spent in the self-help section of Barnes and Noble, irresponsibility could only be purchased. It was the ultimate luxury item. Poor people never got to be irresponsible without suffering for it. If they didn't get their student-loan application in on time, no college for them. If they decided to have one more margarita and ended up an hour late for work the next morning, no job for them. But all of a sudden, these rules didn't apply to me.

My new freelance existence had the capacity to transform my life. I was just twenty-five years old yet I was already going to avoid all those years of drudgery and office work endured for decades by my father. I wanted life to be spontaneous. I needed freedom the way other people craved money or fame, and my recently acquired wealth suddenly made this possible. “I think I'll go to Cuba next week,” I said with the same ease that other Americans used when they made plans to visit the supermarket.

This didn't gel particularly well with many of the people I knew. Even my travel agent seemed to need some sort of justification for my whimsical decision to flee the country. Was it a vacation? Was I going with some sort of political group? No, I explained, no reason. I simply figured Cuba would be the ideal place to pick up the things that were missing from my life: I lacked rum, I lacked cigars, and having been out of college for several years now, I missed having communist friends. (See, this really was just like a trip to the grocery store—I even had a shopping list.)

Had I given the trip more forethought, I might have gotten nervous about the prospect of going. Twenty-five-year-old women didn't just hop on international flights to Cuba by themselves. I would be traveling alone in a part of the world where it was unthinkable for women to do such things, but I was determined to be brave. It wasn't like I was going to a completely unknown place. Latin American culture was familiar to me. Cuba would be like Honduras—with the addition of communists and salsa music.

The fact that it was illegal to go there was slightly more worrisome. Even though I had experience in this particular area (Lebanon didn't exactly top the State Department's list of recommended vacation destinations), in Beirut I'd had a friend picking me up at the airport. And had something bad happened to me there, say for instance, losing my passport, Peter would have found some plausible way out—such as sneaking me across the border to Jordan where we would have entered the U.S. embassy in Amman and smiled up innocently at the officials, explaining that we were two American kids backpacking through the Middle East in need of a replacement passport—and by the way, did they know the way to the nearest international youth hostel? (For your information, the answer to that question is “Go north forty-three hundred miles and when you hit Europe, hang a left.” )