Leave the Lipstick, Take the Iguana

by Marcy Gordon

  Who cares about being the rock n roll white girl when there’s a swimming pool and cheap drinks to be had?

  And then a Mariah Carey Christmas song came on.

  Lauren Quinn is a writer from Oakland, California. Her work has appeared in 7x7, the San Francisco Chronicle, and on websites such as World Hum, Matador, and the Huffington Post. She writes the blog Lonely Girl Travels and is currently living in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

  CHERYN FLANAGAN

  Turkish Foreplay

  The consequences of riding shotgun.

  “Where are you from?” the young man asked. He adjusted the rear view mirror in time to witness me reach for the tissues in my purse.

  “San Francisco … California,” I replied to a mop of thick black curls and the big brown eyes in the mirror, my view of the driver from the back seat of the car. My voice came out as a squeak. I’d been feeling sorry for myself and verged on tears.

  Twenty-four hours without sleep, four airports, three flights, a handful of pitiful meals, who knew how many thousands of miles, and I’d arrived in Turkey without luggage. I tried not to be a baby about it. People deal with lost luggage all the time. But still, I felt an overwhelming amount of defeat. In two days, I was to leave Bodrum’s harbor aboard a boat for a weeklong excursion on the Aegean Sea with ten women I didn’t know.

  Traveling alone, I couldn’t share the burden of missing luggage and worried I’d be boarding that boat with nothing but a toothbrush in my back pocket. There was hardly any time to shop, and purchasing a week’s supply of sailing attire felt daunting—I have a hard enough time shopping at home. So I wasn’t feeling talkative in the car on the way to Bodrum, yet the driver persisted in a thick, brawny accent—a contrast to the soft manner in which he spoke.

  “California,” he parroted, and then asked another question.

  “I’m sorry, can you repeat that?”

  “What do you do?” he asked again.

  “I’m a designer. Websites mostly.”

  “Oh, websites.”

  After a bit of strained silence, he asked another question, barely audible.

  “Can you repeat that?” I leaned closer to the front seat to hear better, but that didn’t help. He’d had to ask the question several more times, and with each utterance, I leaned in closer and closer.

  “How long you stay?” he stammered.

  “Only two nights in Bodrum. Then I’m going on a gull-et for a week with a group of writers.”

  “Gull-et?” he asked, perplexed.

  “You know, a traditional Turkish boat. Is that the wrong pronunciation?” I felt a little embarrassed.

  “Goo-let,” he replied.

  The driver seemed especially interested in getting to know me. I assumed his attempts at small talk were to distract me from my visible anxiety. He’d had to wait for me outside the airport for an hour as I ran from one baggage carousel to another. I saw him peering in at me, face pressed against the window with cupped hands, as the hazard lights on his car blinked on and off in the passenger pickup zone while I filled out a lost luggage report. One minute! I mimed with my index finger. He looked impatient, and I didn’t want him to leave without me. There were no other taxis going to Bodrum at that late hour; I’d arranged the car service with my hotel before leaving San Francisco.

  The driver pulled over at a gas station.

  “Would you like water?” he asked.

  “No thanks,” I answered, mostly for having nothing smaller than a fifty lira bill—the equivalent of $40.

  “I am going to have water … please, have water,” he persisted with a smile.

  “O.K., then. If it makes you happy.” I waited in the car, impressed by Turkish hospitality.

  The driver returned from the shop with two bottles, and before getting into the car, poked his head in my window to ask if I’d like to sit in the front seat.

  A little strange, I thought. But then again, I know a lot of people hate feeling like a chauffeur, even though in essence, that was his job. I gathered my things and got into the front seat—I’d been leaning in so close, I might as well have been sitting there in the first place. Plus, I figured there might be better views from up there and perhaps I could stop asking the driver to repeat himself.

  “What is your name?” he asked.

  “Cheryn. And yours?”

  “Ekmed,” he replied, “How old are you?”

  “Thirty-six. And you?”

  “Twenty-five,” Ekmed said. “You have nice eyes,” he added after a moment.

  “Thank you.”

  “Your boyfriend?” Ekmed asked, referring to the ring on my left hand.

  “Yes.”

  “Where is your boyfriend?” he wanted to know.

  “He’s at home.”

  “Is your boyfriend good?” Ekmed inquired.

  I wasn’t sure what he was asking, so I answered to cover all the bases, “Yes, he’s very healthy and wishes he could be here, but since I’m here for a workshop with other writers, he would be bored. And he is a great guy all around. I am glad he is my boyfriend. Yes, he is good.”

  Then Ekmed waved his hand obliquely, saying, “This is good.”

  I thought perhaps he was referring to a scenic view—although it was pitch black outside—or a tasty restaurant nestled in a cluster of buildings I could make out on the shore that ran parallel to the highway.

  I asked, “It’s good? What is good?”

  “This,” Ekmed replied, again waving his hand in a non-directional way that gave me the feeling he was referring to the interchange between us. Surely he could not have meant our conversation, difficult and limited as it was. But with English not being his native tongue, nor a fluent foreign tongue, perhaps it was a good conversation in his view, all things considered.

  “…. Turkish boyfriend?” Ekmed asked.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you mean,” I replied, fearing I did.

  “…. Turkish boyfriend?” he repeated.

  The thought dawned on me that he was asking if I’d like a Turkish boyfriend, but I didn’t want to respond to that sort of question just in case he wasn’t. I didn’t want to look presumptuous or interested or put the idea in his head if it hadn’t been there already.

  “My boyfriend is not Turkish,” I said, to be on the safe side.

  He accepted this as an answer, and—I presume—understanding he would have to change tactics, Ekmed put his hand out, palm up, and looked at me with an expectant expression.

  “What?” I asked.

  Ekmed grabbed my hand and held it in his, intimately, with fingers interlaced. There we were, driving down a deserted dark highway, halfway to Bodrum, holding hands like teenagers on a first date. I had to suppress a giggle as I thought to myself, somewhat flattered by his attention, really?! And then I began to worry, is this that moment before things go really, really wrong for the woman traveling alone? We were in the middle of nowhere. All I could see were the black silhouettes of trees whizzing by the window and a few feet of pavement in front of us, lit by the car’s headlamps.

  “I think you should drive with both hands,” I said, extricating my hand while placing his back on the wheel.

  Ekmed looked a little wounded, a tad embarrassed, but not enough to refrain from asking for a kiss while pointing at a place on his clean-shaven cheek very, very close to a pair of puckering lips.

  “I cannot kiss you,” I told him, “Remember? I have a boyfriend.”

  “But vacation is for relaxing,” Ekmed seemed honestly confused.

  “You’re right,” I said, measuring my words carefully, “and all I want to do right now is sleep.”

  There was silence after this. Awkward silence. But it was much better than awkward conversation and awkward come-ons. We arrived to the hotel and Ekmed politely walked me to the reception desk. Aside from being tired and irritable from all the hours of travel and the missing luggage, I was stunned at what had taken place. I couldn’t stop wondering if this was what
traveling solo is like. Thinking about previous trips with my boyfriend, he and Ekmed would be halfway to drinking buddies by now, and I’d have been ignored in the back seat.

  Later at the hotel bar, I recounted my experience to the woman who organized the trip. She laughed and apologized for not warning me ahead of time; she’d been living in Turkey for a few years.

  “Don’t sit in the front of the taxi,” she said, “it’s a signal that you’re interested in sex.”

  Apparently, Turkey is a destination for lonely women who arrive seeking love and relaxation in the arms of temporary vacation boyfriends. Sitting in the front seat of a car is Turkish foreplay.

  A few weeks later, I again found myself in the back seat of a taxi on the way to the airport. My flight was leaving early, and I’d woken the driver at the taxi stand at 3:30 A.M. by knocking on the window of his car. On the way to the airport, I could see his drooping eyelids in the rear view mirror as his head bobbed to and fro with every bump in the pavement. He was dozing off at the wheel while speeding down the highway. I feared that should I talk to him, the driver would misconstrue my attention, but I feared more the ending of my life.

  “Excuse me,” I leaned in from the back seat, risking my betrothal to the Turkish driver, “what is your name?”

  Cheryn Flanagan lives in Oakland, California, and spends most days thinking about digital interfaces and experience design. But she’s happiest when able to leave the desk behind to explore the world with pen and camera. Her travel stories focus on personal quests, food history, and astronomical phenomena.

  DAVID FARLEY

  Monkeying around in Paris

  An encounter with locals leads the author to lose his monkey-mind.

  A few facts about Paris: More than six hundred people are sent to the hospital after slipping in dog poop each year. One thousand two hundred people who rode the Metro today, ended it without their wallet. And according to Time Out Paris, an estimated 100 lions, tigers, and panthers are kept as pets in the city’s apartments. I had moved into a tiny ground-floor apartment on Rue des Pyramides, a baguette’s throw from the Louvre. One day, when my landlord had dropped by to collect the rent, I mentioned the fact about the exotic, possibly man-eating animals living in Paris. “I believe it,” she said, unfazed. “We French love animals.”

  If you believe that, here’s another fact from my guidebook to twist your mind around: in the Paris suburb Aubervilliers, illegally imported apes have been trained to attack people—and to go for the face when they do. The Paris suburbs are not soccer mom safe havens like in the United States. In places like Aubervilliers, about five miles north of the city, ambulances won’t even answer an emergency call unless accompanied by the police. This much could be true. But man-assaulting suburban apes just outside of Paris? I was doubtful.

  I’d only been in Paris for a month, but the City of Light was already straining my eyes. I had to abandon the article I was writing about the myth of Parisian rudeness because, well, I had no evidence that it was a myth. My French was worse than I thought, as I was reminded just about every time I opened my mouth. And, given my limited budget, “eating out” mostly consisted of sitting on the banks of the Seine with a baguette and some cheese and a bottle of wine to wash it all down with.

  One night, while doing just that, a man approached me trying to hock a French magazine about monkeys. In halting French I asked him if he’d heard of Aubervilliers and then pointed to the apes on the cover of his magazine while making the international “I’m going to tear your face off sign” with my hands. “Oh yes,” he said with enthusiasm. “There are apes in Aubervilliers. But I’m not sure if you want to go there.”

  The next morning I was on the subway heading in the direction of Aubervilliers. Armed with only a return subway ticket hidden in my sock, I practiced a few phrases I had memorized for the occasion. The Aubervilliers stop was near the end of the line. As the train neared the northern border between Paris and its suburbs, ominous-sounding subway stations came and went: Crimee, Stalingrad. I then remembered a friend back in San Francisco warning me that the worst place I could go was the suburbs north of Paris. He had a Parisian friend who lived near there. Apparently, his friend once took a wrong turn on her scooter and ended up in a bad section. While stopped at a red light she was suddenly knocked to the ground. Within seconds, her purse, jacket, shoes and scooter were out of sight.

  When I walked up the steps from the subway, the streets of Aubervilliers looked surprisingly civil. There were no burning mattresses on the side of the street, no roving gangs stealing people’s shoes and, unfortunately, no face-scraping wild apes. I walked around for fifteen minutes, looking into the plethora of seedy bars and cheap textile stores, hoping to get some clue about the apes—and also wondering if one might just run out of nowhere and jump on me. Finally, I wandered into a café where two rough-faced working-class men were drinking beer (it was 9:30 in the morning). I ordered a coffee, trying to give off a vibe that said I was meant to be there. In France, it’s all about attitude.

  I practiced my French ape-related phrases as I nursed my strong, surprisingly tasty coffee. Rain started to pour outside. After taking my final sip, I took a deep breath and made my way over to the two men who were talking about futbol in between swigs of beer. “Excusez-moi, parlez-vous Anglais?” I asked, hoping for a more beneficial exchange in my native language. The man closest to me briefly looked up from his beer, then looked at his friend. I waited five long seconds before asking again. Finally, he responded in French: “You want me to speak English?” His tone was more aggressive than curious. He covered his upper lip with his lower and shook his head slowly, still not looking at me. His friend muttered something indiscernible. By this point, both men and the bartender wore smirks, as if I were wearing a clown suit with a sign on it that said, “MONKEYS SUCK.”

  “O.K., I will speak French,” I said, deliberately slow, hoping I’d used the correct words. “I hear that in this suburb there are killer apes.” The two men set down their glasses. Without turning their heads, their eyes met. Then they looked at the bartender, who was staring at them. In unison, they all shook their heads no.

  “So, it is not true,” I asked in my best, yet still broken French. The man nearest to me rubbed his scruffy brown mustache. “You want to speak English here, huh?” he said still not looking at me. Which I found odd since I had switched to bad French. Then he added: “I’m not going to answer your questions. Go back to Paris.”

  Slightly shaken, I did just that. I briskly walked two blocks to the subway station and headed back to Paris. Disappointed that I didn’t learn more about the killer, face-scraping suburban apes, I leaned back in my seat, took a deep breath and felt relieved that I hadn’t been ripped apart by a French suburbanite.

  David Farley is the author of the award-winning travel memoir/narrative history, An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church’s Strangest Relic in Italy’s Oddest Town, and co-editor of Travelers’ Tales Prague and Czech Republic: True Stories. He’s a contributing writer at AFAR magazine and frequently writes for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and National Geographic Traveler. He now limits his monkey watching to zoos.

  SUZANNE LAFETRA

  Going to the Dogs with My Mother

  Dress for success in winter—more is more.

  The day before my mom and I were to leave balmy California, the dogsledding trip suddenly struck me as insane.

  I called the Wintergreen Lodge in northern Minnesota to double check that the super-double-extra-warm parkas I’d reserved would be ready. “And how’s the weather there?”

  “Oh, it’s warm for January,” chirped the woman on the other end of the line. “It’s one.”

  One? One degree?

  “Yah, I’m not even wearing a hat today,” she sang in her cheerful Fargo-esque accent. “Yesterday was really cold, though,” she said. “Minus fifty, doncha know.”

  Minus fifty? A full one hundred degrees colder than it was in
my garage?

  Last summer, it hadn’t seemed like such a loony idea. My mom and I have always gotten along pretty well, save for some frosty stretches in my teens. But rarely do I break new ground—particularly frozen ground—with my sixty-four-year-old mom.

  “You’re lucky,” my best friend said when I mentioned the possibility of the trip. Her mom had trouble just getting through a game of golf. “Our parents are getting old,” she’d said, shaking her head.

  My mom and I had flipped through the brochures in my sweltering California backyard. From the pages smiled apple-cheeked people petting fluffy, snowy dogs. Glistening icicles dangled from powdered sugary trees.

  “This is going to be so cool, Mom” I said, fanning myself with a straw hat. “More lemonade?”

  I didn’t really think about the trip for a few months. I patted sandcastles with my kids, carved a grinning jack-o-lantern, and peered at columns of dark smoke when the Santa Anas sparked autumn fires nearby.

  Then shopping for Christmas presents it hit me: We were going to the coldest spot in the continental U.S. in mid-January. What in god’s name had we been thinking?

  I flipped through a winter clothing catalog. Sorel Caribou boots, rated to minus forty. I ordered a pair for each of us.

  After New Year’s, my mom phoned me. “Ely, Minnesota is colder than Moscow today!” she was breathless with excitement. “Even Helsinki was warmer!”

  I went to REI and bought super tundra-weight high-altitude mega-wimp fleece long johns. “I need the warmest gloves you have,” I said to the bearded mountain guy in the green vest.