Avoiding Prison & Other Noble Vacation Goals

by Wendy Dale

  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 passport, 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 th
e 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 Druze5 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

  I was at one of the world’s most notoriously dangerous borders, one of the hotspots in the ongoing conflict between Muslims and Jews. But my friend and tour guide made it sound as if we were just taking a ride through Disney’s Small World attraction.

  “On the right-hand side, you’ll notice the Israeli bunkers, the mounds of earth on the horizon, and on the left, don’t forget to snap a photo of the Hezbollah flag.”

  He was right—a real black and yellow Hezbollah flag was waving in the wind right in front of me. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I wanted to grab the flag and take it home, the ultimate travel souvenir, but contented myself with snapping a quick photo.

  As Peter sped up the car and drove on through the dust, I wondered if my friend was right—maybe this was no big deal. Maybe there was nothing to be afraid of.

  “And coming up ahead,” Peter continued, “those men with camouflage gear and machine guns—those would have to be soldiers.”

  I knew from all my reading that a Hezbollah soldier encountering an American basically took one of three actions: (1) killed the American, (2) kidnapped the American, or (3) screamed,“Welcome to my country. Would you like some coffee?” In Lebanon, you really had no idea which of these actions was most likely to take place, because guerrilla logic on the subject seemed to be open to some debate. Some felt that Americans were Israeli allies and therefore the enemy. Others thought that since the United States was generally considered a Christian country, it should be left out of this religious bickering. And then there was the ever-popular international view that Americans were to blame for all the world’s problems.

  Maybe this excursion hadn’t been such a good idea after all. The men up ahead were brandishing huge firearms. Just the sight of these weapons terrified me.

  We stopped in front of a barbed-wire fence that had been strung across the road and a grim-faced soldier peered into Peter’s car. I held my breath and tried to look as Muslim as possible.

  “You speak English?” he asked in a strange accent.

  Peter nodded.

  “That’s a real spot of luck. We do too. We’re from Ireland,” the soldier said.

  These were not Hezbollah guerrillas; they were UN troops and this was one of their checkpoints. This didn’t quite put us in the clear. After all, we were in the country illegally. What did the United Nations have to say about that?

  “Welcome to Lebanon!” the soldier said, extending his hand for Peter to shake. Then they cheerily raised the bar blocking the road and waved us on through.

  I spent the rest of the day awed and amazed. We steadily made our way through a barren and monotonous landscape with few people, few structures, and very little to see. Had this been the Sonoran Desert, I would have been apathetic and bored, but this was Lebanon. I was driving through thousands of years of history; not only that, my life was in peril. Nothing of note was going on outside, but there was the constant threat that this calm could be disrupted at any moment. In Lebanon, life could be changed in an instant.

  Visit a friend abroad and it’s nearly a given that at some point you will take part in an expatriate gathering. This highly ritualized event consists of you sitting in a room with lots of alcohol with people who all grew up speaking English (although most of them speak it with a funny-sounding foreign accent). The conversation always includes the same three topics: (1) international politics, (2) sex, and (3) boy, you sure got the wrong end of the deal when you had to be born an American.
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  The night always starts out with Topic Number 3. The first thing all the Brits have to do (believe me, there will always be at least one or two Brits) is imitate your accent. “Golly gee whiz guys” and “like totally awesome” are the two phrases that invariably will be chosen to demonstrate the fact you do not speak English, you speak American.

  After you’ve cleared this hurdle, they will ask if you have ever met any movie stars and, if so, do you have any gossip to tell? After racking your brain for sordid tales about the people you watch on the screens in dark movie theaters and brush elbows with occasionally as they’re walking down the streets of Los Angeles, your host Michael (well, he won’t always be named Michael) will then top your stories with “real dirt.” For instance, if you come up with a story about a famous male artist who has sex with boyish looking twenty-year-olds while they’re wearing football uniforms, Michael will give you an in-the-know, step-by-step, detailed account of the sex act in question, right down to the number on the uniform.

  Then it’s on to international politics, which tends to overlap a bit with the “America sure is a lousy country” category. We begin with “America sure has a lousy foreign policy,” move on to “America sure has a lousy president,” and top the topic off with “Americans sure have a lousy knowledge of other countries’ affairs.” Which is just the point you’ve been waiting for all evening. Now is your chance to strike.

  You dazzle the guests by quoting verbatim from the latest tome by Chomsky, drone on intelligently about a recent editorial in the New York Times, and roll off subjects like Sinn Fein peace talks and the possible opening up of Cuba when the room becomes encompassed in an awe-filled silence. After paying their respects, your host Michael (he won’t always be named Michael) will inevitably break the quiet with the following compliment: “Wow. You really aren’t dumb like most Americans.”