What started out as an impulsive trip below the border was fast transforming into a pilgrimage, and I didn’t hate it.
* * *
I decided to go to Argentina on a whim. When my apartment building caught fire—forcing me and my few remaining possessions to briefly move in with my parents—shit got unsettled. I was now a new person, with new clothes and a newfound appreciation for renters insurance and the FDNY. I found a new apartment, but it meant I would move to a strange neighborhood with two strange people, living in a strange room with a strange empty bookshelf and a strange empty set of drawers. And other things were new. There was a boy I knew well, had liked, and thought liked me. But after I slept with him a few times, he dropped me, and now he was strange to me, too.
I never much liked change. For me, it always seemed like a threat, like a sign that when things were good they would assuredly turn bad. But after the fire, change seemed like something to embrace. It was nice to no longer feel tied down to old shit. Things change all the time, and if they could change for the worse, that also meant there was room for them to change for the better. Perhaps the new me, with new clothes and a new home and no too-tight Urban Outfitters dresses around to weigh me down would be braver, smarter, hotter, cooler, wiser, happier. But several months into the newness, everything still felt miserable.
I did not know the new me very well yet when I made the call to take her on a test drive to a new hemisphere. My friend Lauren is much braver than me, and in January 2016, she quit her job at our website and booked a one-way ticket to Peru, whereupon she planned to spend three months traveling solo through South America. I could not fathom doing anything as courageous as this, considering how often I get turned around when I exit my very own subway station.
But in January 2016, I needed a journey, a way to test my new sea legs and the sneakers I bought to replace the old ones doused in toxic smoke. And I needed a brief escape—from New York, from subway blogs, from my tiny new room, from a job that now seemed composed of men who’d rejected me. Lauren told me to come visit her, and though pre-fire me couldn’t make the effort to get to Philadelphia, let alone South America, the new me used the money I’d saved on rent from living at home to book a flight to Buenos Aires.
A thing about traveling in South America is that North Americans tend to do it in big chunks. It is far away and there is a lot to see, so people quit jobs, take sabbaticals, buy big backpacks, and hostel-hop their way through Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile for months at a time. They all do ayahuasca. They all take photos of themselves jumping for joy in the salt flats, a dried-out prehistoric lake in southwest Bolivia. They all return and claim they are now “fluent” in Spanish and have a newfound “appreciation” for Earth. I know several people who have done this exact trip. Not one has brought me back an alpaca. I am bitter.
The point is, it was not especially intrepid for me to meet a friend for a week of mayhem in a major metropolis. But I am not the sort of person who buys an $1,100 plane ticket only one month in advance, and I do not tend to fly halfway across the world to spend a week with someone I had worked with and often drank with but otherwise did not know very well. For me, this was as good as an adventure got. I hoped it would teach me something. I had, after all, once seen Eat Pray Love (coincidentally, on a plane).
* * *
Adventures never quite go the way you think they will, especially when they are backdropped by a lot of Fernet, which we drank like water. Here are some things I did in Buenos Aires:
I spent two hours in the airport after my flight landed because I did not listen to my mother and therefore did not get Argentinian pesos before I left. Only one ATM at the airport worked and it took me several lifetimes to find it. (My mother will hold this over me forever.)
On our first night in Buenos Aires, someone swiped Lauren’s iPhone at a concert venue. Good thing she had only one full month of solo travel left.
On our second night, a sailor from New Zealand tried to flirt with me by accusing the United States of doing military war crimes. He was technically correct, but it turns out in the Obama era I became very patriotic when drunk (on Fernet), and I argued with him until he slunk away. I would come to regret this later.
On our third day, Lauren and I went to Tigre, a town just north of Buenos Aires that sits near the famous Paraná Delta. The big thing to do there is to take a boat ride to the delta, but the only available boat was in the late afternoon, several hours away. To kill time, we walked around and went to a casino, where we won eight Argentinian pesos. Then we finally got on the boat and instantly fell asleep.
On our fourth day, Lauren and I decided to take a vacation from our vacation, so we took the ferry to Colonia del Sacramento, a city in southwestern Uruguay with a bunch of old buildings and not much else. Our hostel had bedbugs. We got lost on a bike ride.
On our fifth day, we returned to Buenos Aires to find ourselves booked into a hostel room with three sets of triple bunk beds, each of which threatened to sway and crumble every time one of its inhabitants moved or rustled or breathed.
On our sixth day, we decided to have a “wild” night out, so we got in a cab and told the driver to take us to a club. He did. The club was called Brooklyn. There were subway signs and pictures of the Brooklyn Bridge on all the walls. Everyone was fifteen.
To sum up, things were not going according to plan. I hadn’t learned very much about myself, other than that I liked Fernet a lot and had a habit of scaring off would-be suitors. I had not found true love or self-acceptance or a showstopping leather jacket. I was still going home to an alien apartment, to owning only two books, to a boy who had hurt me, to a job that was starting to strip me of my energy and, according to at least one optometrist, my eyesight. It did not seem like things were going to be okay.
But we had one more journey to take, one that would prove far more life-changing than anything that happened on the rest of the trip—we were going to Tierra Santa.
I had been begging Lauren to go to Tierra Santa since I got off the plane. I came across it during the thirteen seconds I spent preparing for this trip (i.e., googling “things to do in Buenos Aires.” See also la República de los Niños, an amusement park about “democracy” where children can learn how to apply for bank loans. Also real! I did not get to go there.). I love theme parks, I love historical villages, I love kitsch, and I love things that are wildly inappropriate for kids and yet are somehow geared toward them. It was clear this was going to be my shit.
So finally, on my second-to-last day in town, we breached Tierra Santa’s beautiful plastic gate.
* * *
Tierra Santa was, indeed, my Shangri-la. We went to an “interactive show” about the Genesis, in which decades-old animatronic animals and what looked like sex dolls repurposed as Adam and Eve appeared onstage in flashes of strobe light, the many schoolchildren in the audience cheering when they saw Eve’s boobs. We went to another “interactive show” about the Last Supper, where animatronic Jesus and Judas each moved their head and one arm exactly one time, and nothing else happened.
We walked through at least three plastic nativity scenes, visited Noah’s plastic ark, and snapped photos by the plastic Western Wall. We saw plastic donkeys and plastic Romans and plastic odes to Pope John Paul II, Gandhi, and Mother Teresa, whom I do not recall existing in the Bible, but perhaps I missed them. We saw many bloody plastic Jesuses. We considered purchasing some of the (allegedly nonplastic) Middle Eastern food that costumed employees hawked in the food court, but passed when we saw the prices. You could also buy burgers and pizza, just like the Apostles did in high school.
We spent several hours wandering the plastic grounds, shading ourselves under the plastic palm trees dotting the plastic biblical kingdom. But by late afternoon the crowd thinned and we were ready to go home. There’s only so much shirtless, bleeding, plastic Jesus a person can take in one day, after all. As we made our way toward the exit, we saw a group of people huddled together, p
ointing to the plastic Golgotha just across the road. Then we heard it: Handel’s Messiah.
As the music swelled, a figure started creeping out of the mountain, and when his nose crested its apex, we knew what we were looking at: it was Jesus.
A forty-foot Jesus, in fact, who rose from the rock with such lethargy I thought the two-hour concerto might end before he made it out. At last the bottom of Jesus’s plastic white robes peeked out above the plastic mountaintop, and there he was, in all his glory. “Hallelujah!” Handel’s chorus crowed as Jesus closed his eyes and opened them, approximating what I can only assume was a very slow animatronic blink. “Hallelujah!” Jesus’s arms lifted with the speed of a geriatric sloth. He turned his hands out and opened his palms. You could hear the motor parts creak from our perch, despite the many-yard distance. “Hallelujah!” He closed his palms again. Messiah continued to blast. I pulled out my phone camera. The nuns near me appeared to be crying. “This is so fucking funny,” someone next to me screamed.
It is hard to describe quite what it’s like to watch a giant plastic Jesus—clad in giant plastic robes, with a giant plastic halo attached to his giant plastic head—mushroom out of a giant plastic mountain like an oversize whack-a-mole while nuns cry and children cheer. Truly, there is nothing like it. I laughed so hard the video I took looks like it belongs in The Blair Witch Project. I think the face wrinkles I made that day still live somewhere near my eyes.
But as quickly as Jesus appeared—that is to say, not quickly at all—he drew down his arms and sank back into the rock, where he would rest until the show began in another hour.
We left Tierra Santa, and a day and a half later I left Buenos Aires, buoyed by the memory of my visit to plastic biblical Jerusalem. I did not find adventure, bliss, or a boyfriend, or even a replacement for my smoke-damaged belongings or a job that didn’t make me want to die sometimes. The new me was much like the old me—drunk and dumb and bedbug-prone and terrifying to men from all corners of the earth. Perhaps it would always be like this. Perhaps I would always be the same. Perhaps I would have to learn to seek bliss elsewhere, or accept it was something I’d never attain for long but experience in moments as fleeting as a forty-foot animatronic Jesus rising from a plastic rock in a children’s amusement park. But at least I found that. And for those fleeting animatronic moments, everything felt okay.
Acknowledgments
I cannot heap enough thanks and praise upon Sarah Smith, my agent, and Emma Brodie, my editor at William Morrow, without whom this book would still be a collection of unhinged journal entries. Their patience and guidance (and Emma’s staggeringly good edits) made this whole process infinitely better. It was a pleasure to work with both of them.
To the rest of the team at William Morrow—Liate Stehlik, Cassie Jones, Ben Steinberg, Rachel Weinick, Owen Corrigan, Eliza Rosenberry, Jes Lyons, and Lauren Lauzon—thank you so much for helping me put the inside of my brain on paper, and for trying to sell it. I don’t know why you would agree to do this, but I’m glad you did.
Thank you to Lauren Evans, who accompanied me on far too many of these misadventures, and without whom I would be a much less interesting person. Thank you to Dave Colon, who has let me cry in his apartment at least twice. Thank you to John Del Signore, who made me a better writer, and to Emma Whitford, Nell Casey, and Fraylie Nord.
To Molly Dillon, Christina Padilla, Emma Alterman, Ariella Cohain, Dan Hochman, Alex Finkel, and Remy Nelson—I’m sorry for all the late-night panic texts and phone calls, but I love you all very much.
Thank you to my grandmother, Bunny Hoffinger, whom I miss every single day.
And endless and eternal thanks to Fran, Harvey, and Alice, who have put up with a lot and yet still seem to love me.
About the Author
REBECCA FISHBEIN is a former senior editor at Gothamist and a current writer/television addict. She was born and raised in Manhattan, where at the tender age of two she ate her first H&H bagel. It’s all been downhill from there. She graduated from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars program, and has been published in Baltimore City Paper, Time Out New York, Jezebel, Vice, Splinter, Adweek, The Cut, Lifehacker, and Curbed NY, among other outlets. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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Copyright
The names of some of the individuals featured in this book have been changed to protect their privacy.
good things happen to people you hate. Copyright © 2019 by Rebecca Fishbein. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Digital Edition OCTOBER 2019: 978-0-06-288999-7
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-288998-0
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* This is a long-standing point of contention in Star Wars history. In the original 1977 Star Wars release, Han Solo shoots and kills a bounty hunter named Greedo at the Mos Eisley cantina. But when George Lucas released the Special Edition films in 1997, he edited the scene so Greedo shoots first, making it look like Han was acting in self-defense. This is bullshit. Han is a badass. Han shot first.
* A Sex Date may sound similar to a Booty Call, but they are very different. Unlike a Booty Call, a Sex Date feigns real-date-ness by starting out at a bar or restaurant. You don’t spend money on a Booty Call.
* I know everyone’s crazy about backward cow horse or Wax Alien or whatever, but missionary is underrated. It’s not fancy, but it feels like I’m getting a big hug, and I don’t have to do any of the work. It was also my first sex position (and for way too long, my only one), so I know how to do it, or at the very least I haven’t gotten any specific complaints. If you have any, please direct them to my publisher.
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