The Thong Also Rises (19 page)

“Are you waiting for a man or woman to give meaning to your life?” Eckhart, the homunculus, asks. I picture him perched just inside my frontal lobe clutching a four-leaf clover. My mom stares straight ahead and when I look at her she says, “No, not you.”

By tape #4 I am so conscious of trying not to be used by my mind, to be in the now, that I feel like a Zenbot. I think
about the miles whooshing past me and how they are sort of my
now
but just as quickly they are my
then
and I wonder if the tenets of the book should be modified for road tripping:

Because I am only an aspiring Lilliputian I think:

• Who do I like better: Air Supply or ELO?

• Are there any circumstances under which I would consider a boob job?

• Why, if Jewish men and women are mixing their gene pools, do the women have rhythm and the men do not?

Feeling brilliant again I say this last one out loud. My mom, who is knitting now—a red, cashmere poncho with fringe—pauses a moment and then says, “I don't know.”

I nod, knowing it's one of those unknowable things. I hold my hand out. “An extra chocolate-y one please.” She reaches in the Hello Kitty bag and places a particularly lumpy cookie in my hand.

After a gas-and-pee-and-coke-slushy stop, my mom is driving now. Always open to new taste sensations, I dip a shard of jerky into my slushy and hand it to my mom. She tastes it and nods which means: don't do that again.

Fed up with now and the power of it, I put in a mixed CD self-titled, “All Covers All the Time” and crank up the Red Hot Chili Peppers doing “Brandy, You're a Fine Girl”:

“What a good wife you would be,
but my life, my lover, my lady is the sea”

First of all, it's “are the sea” and second, “What a good wife you would be if only I could stop sailing my dick around the seven seas.” As I say this out loud, my mom and
I look at each other—front teeth covered in chocolate—and throw our heads back and laugh.

Music is Disco's calling and to show he is a Jewish woman at heart he barks his head off and prances around in the back seat. I turn down the music. “It's O.K., Disco,” my mom says scratching the sweet spot under his chin. He then calmly rests his head on my mom's left shoulder and closes his eyes as we barrel through the flatlands of Nebraska.

• What happens if you just have the kit and not the caboodle?

• No nagging feeling ever really goes away.

• Is Prince Matchabelli really a prince?

• What if Elvis sang “Oops, I did it again”?

• You're only as good as your worst photo.

We've traveled far, 1,500 miles, with an overnight in Bismarck, North Dakota during which Disco expertly performs the job no one gave him: to bark at all suspicious noises including his own farting. When he finally does sleep, it's on my mom's bed nestled up against her back. I feel betrayed, then pathetic, and finally, petty. It dawns on me I am in the middle of east bumble headed to pot-smoking, computer-geekville without a clue as to what I hope to do when I get there.

Eckhart Tolle's words drone on:

In my panic I start to cry. After a few moments of quiet crying, I kick it up a notch to get some attention. Disco
notices first because, well, it's his job. Then my mom wakes up. I blow my nose.

“Are you O.K.?” she asks.

“Not really,” I say.

“What's the matter?”

“Idon'tknowhatI'mdowhatthehellamIIdon'tIdon'tknoww hereI'mgoingandIandIandI…” and in the middle of all that I feel a nudge. It's my mom with her ticket (pillow) pushing me over as she crawls into bed beside me. She kisses my cheek, holds my hands and tells me it's going to be ok. Disco jumps up and paralyzes my left leg which is his way of saying, “Maybe, yes, maybe, no, but what are you going to do about it
now
?”

Epilogue
: my mom liked the dog so much she got herself a cat.

Book author and humorist Laurie Frankel knows pain is the root of all comedy and is thrilled her life is so damn funny. When not penning grocery store haiku or telling it like it is, this former East Coaster can be found whooping it up in southern California. You can reach her at
www.laurieslovelogic.com

He had visions of dessert.

I
F YOU ARE A YOUNG WOMAN TRAVELING ALONE, THERE
is one thing you can count on: lots of attention. Sometimes, you might even want it.

On my first solo backpacking trip, I learned this truism. It's the joy of solo travel: You meet many more people. It's the bane of solo travel. You meet many more people.

I met the Ravioli Man through another guy I'll call Hans, a curly-haired blond Swiss with sensuous lips whom I met one day in the Tuileries. We got to walking, talking, I was wary but curious. He looked striking in white, Good Humoresque attire. My hotel, I said, was too expensive. Turns out he knew a place. Still fool enough to listen to beguiling Swiss strangers, I packed my backpack, said
adieu
to Laurent the desk clerk, and followed the ice-cream man to another part of Paris.

Remember that it was summer, and there were few inexpensive rooms at the inn. We emerged from the Metro into a Dickensian scene of stump-legged beggars and belles
with brusque tones, ambiguous makeup, and rather less ambiguous track lines on their arms. But the room in the Hotel Splendide was cheap and clean, and the tobacco-stained fingers of the night were encroaching, so I thought wistfully of Laurent, said yes to the room and no to the ice-cream man who, after much kissing and cajoling (his), went away.

I prided myself on my backpacker thriftiness, my conquest of a statuesque, limpid-eyed Swiss, my giddy placement near the gritty underworld of the City of Light, and went in search of libation. The bread-cheese-water combo was beginning to wear, doubly so by the certain knowledge of rich creams and sauces stirred to silky smoothness behind the café curtains of each brasserie—but I did have that Swiss Army knife I had to keep in fighting trim. So I wended my way back through the thickening cluster of ravaged women and narrowly avoided baguette theft to arrive safely at my haven.

And that's when things got interesting.

No sooner had I laid out my repast on the tiny metal table in my room than came a knock on my door. In my faulty French and state of high suspicion, I asked who was there. Lo, my concierge, concerned about the state of the water supply in my room (I had a wee sink). Not yet the seasoned traveler, I let him in. With an elaborate display of lingua franca gestures and his and my broken French (he appearing to be of Middle Eastern stock), I deduced that he felt the trickle of water spilling from my faucet insufficient. It's nothing, I said, go away. He went. Exhausted from swatting away amorous Swiss gents and lurid junkies, I was relieved.

I sat down to the chunk of cheese and was just then breaking my crust of bread when I heard another knock. Years of training demanded that I answer. It was my concierge-cum-handyman, overly interested in the state of
my sink. Elaborate gestures, elaborate protests. Of course I had broken all the rules of logic and Hotel Splendide decorum by actually answering that knock, so the man sat on the rickety chair and eyed my dinner. Now he was concerned about my nutrition, and I about getting him and his roving eyes out, not to mention pondering how my discreet friend Laurent in the Hotel-Out-of-the-Backpacker's-Budget was doing right about then. After much operatic negotiation and repeated insistence that, no, I didn't want to share a meal with him, he went away.

Ah, peace! The cheese was pungent, the water a tonic, the bread perfectly crusty and my book a brace. I'd just shifted to a nice long stretch on the bed when—the knock again. It pains me to write this, but I answered. Only this time (the process of learning is slow and fraught with danger) I opened the door but a crack, blocking it with my shoulder in ready position to slam it shut. There was my concierge, a plate of steaming ravioli in his hand. He wanted to come in. Finally, I found the voice to be emphatic. No! I said, and slammed the door in his face. From the other side I heard, in a bewildered voice, this time in English, “But I am not Iranian!”

I went to sleep with my bed pulled in front of the flimsy door, wondering at the myriad implications of his one English phrase. I woke laughing, and just a short time later I kicked the dust of the Hotel Splendide off my shoes and shouldered my backpack, on to other adventures.

Elizabeth Fonseca has taught English in various locations around the world, including the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East. Her interests include travel, poetry, and cross-cultural communication. Overcoming her fear of ravioli, she has moved on to pen restaurant reviews and write for the
Abu Dhabi Explorer
guidebook.

How do you say “My backside hurts” in Spanish?

I
T
'
S KINDA HARD TO LOOK CASUAL WHEN YOU
'
RE PACKING
a fluorescent orange Ziploc with a radioactive symbol on it labeled DANGER-BIOHAZARD-Specimen Bag. And how do you get rid of the bubblegum-purple medical gloves, the little cup and the wooden stool collection spoon when you're sharing a bathroom with a Guatemalan family and their only wastebasket has no lid?

It had all sounded so simple while I was safely at home and surfing the web.The banner proclaimed, “FREE SPANISH LESSONS!!!” I just had to be a guinea pig in a Johns Hopkins University clinical trial for a vaccine against travelers diarrhea. I would merely agree to drink a slippery-salty concoction made up of killed E. coli bacteria and cholera. As long as I promised to check in with their nurses to provide blood, and “other” samples, they'd pay for three weeks of Spanish classes and a homestay in Antigua, Guatemala.

My less frugal friends (O.K., everyone I talked to) seemed incapable of recognizing the beauty of this offer. What's not
to like? My twenty-year-old stepson was more astute than most. “Let me get this straight.” He leaned forward for clarification. “They're
paying
you for your shit.” Well yes, that's another way to put it.

Five
A.M.
I descend from the heavens into the bedlam of Guatemala City. I spot a taxi driver holding a battered piece of cardboard with a pretty close approximation of my name. I jump in his cab and am immediately wracked by doubt. I may be off the plane but now I'm really flying. Pedestrians are duly warned by blasting honks. Careening suddenly seems like such an evocative and completely right word. Riding shotgun also takes on a new meaning as we pass a Coca-Cola truck with an armed guard hanging from its side. There are bullet holes in the door panel. My taxi's cutoff seatbelts aren't doing much to reassure me. What is this some sort of cosmic test? Look God, no protection!

We turn off the highway and bounce along the cobbled roads down wall-lined
avenidas.
The taxi dives deeper into the maze of empty streets. How do I know it's me he's supposed to have in this cab? Where the hell are we? My mind is in that suspended frame I go to whenever I'm overwhelmed. I feel I have as much substance as a clay vase and about as many thoughts. Jesus just stares at me from his perch on the dash.