“So happy! I want to do this with you!” she said, her eyes pleading.
And so, much like the first time I tried Ecstasy a blue-haired man found on the ground in the name of saving another trip, I snorted my first and last bit of Special K off a credit card in a bathroom stall at age thirty-five to save this one. And then Alex and I danced, and then stared at a ceiling fan, and then did split leaps, and then sat on a curb with our heads in our hands, and then danced again, and then ran outside to sit on the curb again, just like best best friends. I can only assume that was because the horse tranquilizers were organic.
One day I finally snapped, and told Alex I was ready to see Australia, and I was going to force her to let me pay for it so we could do so. I got us a car, and we drove from Byron Bay into the rainforest, to hippie outpost Nimbin, where backpackers are brought by the busload to buy pot from Rainbow Park, a little grassy drug mall behind a pot “museum.” We bought some pot cookies from a woman who assured us—not to worry—they were cooked over magic stones, we played pool with an ancient bearded madman who used to crochet bikinis for Harrods in the sixties, we got pictures of our auras taken at a crystal museum with a machine called an Auratron 2000.
I checked us in to a perfect little inn deep in the trees surrounded by deadly snakes, next to a river containing a deadly platypus. Everything in Australia, apparently, is deadly. Including, it turned out, Alex’s attitude. The rain stopped falling the minute we left the beach and entered the rain forest, and Alex would sit in the room I was paying for and complain that we weren’t still on the beach. We eventually made our way back to a different beach to appease that need, and I managed to get her to the late Crocodile Hunter’s zoo to pet kangaroos and koalas by three p.m. one day. So, we both tried.
I had already planned on heading off on my own to spend a few days on a boat trip around the Whitsunday Islands, to see the Great Barrier Reef. So the time came to leave Alex, and we both pretended we hadn’t been driving each other crazy, and hugged good-bye.
There are a lot of boats that cruise the Whitsundays, a chain of pretty little green-treed, white-sanded islands off the northeast coast of Australia. I chose my boat, the Kiana, carefully. The decision was price-based, but not because of money concerns. I knew that the cheapest boats would be filled with backpackers (college kids) and the most expensive boats would be filled with rich people (older couples). It’s hard to find single thirtysomethings at all, but if you’re going to find them anywhere, it’s in the midpriced, slightly comfortable, but not super-fancy sphere. This is my best travel advice for solo grown-up travelers: shoot for the middle.
I showed up to the docks, and spotted my group of fourteen fellow sailors. They were perfect. Other than one fiftyish Irish nurse on holiday after a month volunteering in the Australian outback (whom I mentally celebrated for making me only the second oldest on the trip), they were all in their midtwenties to midthirties. There was only one couple among them. They were perfect, even though they were almost entirely German.
We all smiled at each other, and started to introduce ourselves. And that’s when I met Dino.
Wearing only board shorts and flip-flops, Dino was very tall, very lean, and golden brown, with a smile that stretched across his face and possibly around the back of his head. With crazy, curly, sun-kissed hair styled similarly to Carrot Top’s, Dino was the goofily cheerful kind of German.
Dino would later tell me that the moment we shook hands, he knew we were going to get together. It wouldn’t happen for a couple of days, though. During those days, our boat collectively fell in love. We all sailed around in the perfect water, and snorkeled with five-foot-long turquoise fish who swam back and forth in front of us like dogs as we petted them. On one untouched white-sand beach, I wrote Ben’s name in the sand and took a picture, to prove that I was thinking of him, wondering if he was thinking at all of me. There had been a cyclone in the ocean the week before, and so the water was cloudy, the perfect swimming-pool clarity ruined for our week. Things were no more clear above water, because through all of this, Dino and I circled each other.
One night, we stopped circling. It was after an afternoon and evening of beers and language exchange. (The Dutch taught us the word swaffle, which means “to hit something with your flaccid penis.” This is apparently something the Dutch do often enough that they needed a word for it.) We were all sitting on the deck of the small boat, looking at the millions of stars in the hot night. And that’s when Dino made the most hackneyed of all moves, the move that has been done so many times that I recently wrote it into an episode of The Neighbors in a scene where a teenaged boy had to make a ridiculous, obvious move that our teenaged girl would reject, because it was so ridiculous and obvious.
He reached around my shoulders to point out the constellations. As you know from seeing this move in movies, it positions the pointer’s face right next to its intended target: the pointee’s face. So, now cheek to cheek, Dino showed me the Southern Cross.
And, because I was on a boat, and he smelled like coconut sunscreen, and the move was hilarious, and I feared I was spinning my romantic wheels at home and could come home without a romantic story only to be rejected by a guy I suspected was dating me out of morbid curiosity … it worked.
We kissed for about four hours on the deck of that tiny boat, first in front of everyone, then, after everyone went down to our communal sleeping area, just in front of the captain. It was very PG and very, very hot. Like if Olivier Martinez from Unfaithful was starring in High School Musical.
We spent the next two days as the ship’s couple. Snuggling, kissing underwater, buddying up on dives. Dino turned out to be a former rapper, and rapped for me in German, which was the only thing more hilarious and ridiculous than his Southern Cross move. I vacillated between feeling guilt about Ben and confidence that this was the only logical way to protect myself. Of course I wouldn’t be doing this if Ben had taken me back with open arms. Yes, I wanted things to work out with Ben. But … what if they didn’t?
Ben had been right. I had taken a passive-aggressive trip to Australia, just like, really, I had taken a passive-aggressive trip to New Zealand the year before. That trip had been to prove to everyone and to myself that I was not the kind of girl who cried at home after a work failure. And I was also not the kind of girl who waited for a man who couldn’t promise that he would let her back into his life. But what that meant was that I was apparently the kind of girl who goes back to someone she rejected, says she loves him and wants him and is ready for a relationship … and then kisses a German on a boat.
Ultimately, this trip was me proving to myself that I hadn’t lost myself. But let’s be honest: if you don’t ever lose yourself, it means you’re not entirely in the game.
After four days, the boat pulled back into harbor. Dino and I had one night in town together before we were flying off in different directions. We got a hotel room, and showered, and changed. And that’s when I saw Dino in clothes for the first time, after a week of only swimsuits.
Oy. So European.
Tight, sleeveless red T-shirt. Way overproduced jeans, seams and bleach splashes and extra pockets everywhere. So much hair gel. So much cologne. And, on top of it all, a white trucker cap spray-painted with multicolored fluorescent graffiti.
“Ooh! Look at you!” I said.
It’s funny how you can tell so much more about a person dressed than you can naked. If I had met Dino on land, in clothes, we never would have gotten together. It’s so easy to fall for someone when you’re floating in the middle of an ocean, metaphorically or actually. Back at home, or even back on land, all of the little things that keep you from falling in love a thousand times a day when you aren’t on vacation come flooding in, and ruin it.
10
“Even Björk Is Having Babies”
Los Angeles International → Reykjavík Keflavík
Departing: July 18, 2009
The only thing sadder than finding yourself on a trip with
a terrible traveling companion is finding yourself on a trip with a perfect one. And that is because they never last.
Sasha had been my best travel buddy in my twenties, but then she met her husband and spent several years getting knocked up, and I lost her. I had gotten her back for a few days in 2009 for a trip to Hawaii, our first girls’ trip in the six years since she’d started her family. And she cut loose by not having a single drink the entire trip. She didn’t like the way alcohol made her feel anymore. We woke up early, and played in the sun, and went to bed with books after an early dinner. And her one-piece mommy swimsuit kept her crooked Russian barbed-wire infinity tramp stamp hidden the whole time.
Parker was Sasha’s replacement when she started breeding. We met through a mutual friend when she moved to Los Angeles after a year in Hong Kong with a long-term boyfriend. We were twenty-nine, and both single for the first time in our adult lives. One night at the end of their time in Hong Kong, Parker’s boyfriend had proposed, and, just like in a romantic comedy, the word No had popped out of her mouth despite the fact that for years she had been sure it was going to be Yes. Fun, adorable, newly single and game for anything, she had been a real find for me. But I messed up: I met an adorable, smart guy, who was friends with my then boyfriend, and I introduced him to Parker. A couple of years later, my ex and I were throwing them an engagement party.
Parker did not, ideally, want to meet her future husband when she did. She was only about a year out of her six-year relationship, and she and I were both gearing up for our first swing at single-girl-land. Parker’s realization that she had met the love of her life was a bittersweet one: she was glad she found this great guy, but she really wished she had done so a year or two later.
Maybe as a result of this, Parker did a much better job of staying fun than many of my other hitched friends did. She accompanied Emma and me to Greece, where she happily tossed plates onto the floors of bars shouting “OPRAH!” all night long. Her husband still complains about the monthlong “Vegas flu” Parker brought home from a Halloween girls’ weekend in Las Vegas, where we danced the night away dressed as two members of a very sluttily garbed Girl Scout troop. At around five in the morning, Parker had a love affair with a lollipop that was so intense she felt the need to share said lollipop with the mouths of half of the club. Don’t ever do that. The World Health Organization almost had to be called in.
So when I invited Parker to join me on a trip to Iceland, she happily left her nice husband behind for a week of throwback single-girl travel adventures. But this time when Parker packed her girl-trip bag, it was not filled with slutty versions of children’s uniforms, or Grecian beach-wear. This time it was filled with fertility drugs, thermometers, and pee sticks.
Parker was trying to get pregnant. She woke up every morning of the trip to take her temperature, write down the results, and take her pills. She had been at all of this for a year, too, so my normally easygoing friend was on edge—still a great time, but irritable, concerned (understandably) about the hot springs and copious amounts of vodka involved in a trip to Iceland. But the year of chasing babies had also made her feel heavy, and old, and she needed this vacation.
I was on edge, too. I was six months into my second round of dating Ben, and he was not coming around. He had finally started sleeping with me, but was not diving in emotionally.
“He wants to be in control,” Hope said. “You popped back into his life and he wants to control how he reacts to it.”
“I’m afraid of being a goner,” was how Ben put it.
Work, or the lack thereof, was not helping me be patient with Ben, either. The comedy business had slowed way down, and I was not working on a show that year as a result. I was writing a pilot for Warner Bros. (about a group of terminally single friends with broken romantic pickers who decide to just give up and “marry” each other—where do I come up with this stuff???), but that required very few hours per day. Meanwhile, Ben was in a crazy work mode, so time was passing in a much different way for him. I was laying myself out there, and full of time and energy to give to him, and he wasn’t. And I was starting to think he was never going to.
“He’s different,” Parker said. “You might have broken him.”
“He knows that as soon as you really get him you’ll come up with a reason for it not to work,” Sasha said.
Ouch. So I went to Iceland.
Iceland is maybe the weirdest place in all the world. If you’re like most people, what you know about Iceland adds up to one word: Björk. There was no one in the U.S. who did not respond to the news that we were going to Iceland with the sentence “Cool, you gonna see Björk?”
Little does the entire world know that there is so much more to see! For starters, there are all of the fairies, gnomes, ghosts, and trolls. Now, that might sound like I am being just as ignorant as the people who think that everyone who goes to Iceland sees Björk, but if you go to a tourism office in Iceland, you will see that on their official tourist map, in addition to the drawings delineating the locations of whales, puffins, and waterfalls, there are drawings of fairies, gnomes, ghosts, and trolls. If you’re like us, you will wonder, “I wonder what this ghost drawing represents!” and then you will look at the map’s legend, which will tell you that what the ghost drawing represents is a ghost.
Icelanders love to tell you that it’s a stereotype that they all believe in otherworldly creatures. And then you read about the Iceland Road Authority bringing in a medium to ask the elves who reside in a pile of rocks that lie in the path of a proposed road if the elves would mind if the rocks were moved. When this happened near a town called Hafnarfjörður (not misspelled), the medium said that the elves unfortunately did not want their home relocated. Since plenty of “suspicious and unexplainable phenomena” had been occurring near the job site, the Road Authority listened to the elves and rerouted their road.
“Our basic approach is not to deny this phenomenon. There are people who can negotiate with the elves, and we make use of that,” the state-employed engineer told Reuters.
One night on the Snæfellsnes Peninsula (Parker and I just called it Snuffleupagus), I noticed on our map that there was a ghost icon in the hills behind our hotel. I went up to the front desk, and asked Björn (real name), the handlebar-mustachioed desk guy, if ghosts really lived in those mountains.
“Oh, no,” he said, scoffing. “Ghosts live everywhere.”
So, they’re weird. But there’s just no reasonable way they couldn’t be. What if you were one of like ten people living on an island in the North Atlantic that is dark half of the year? Ever since a couple of boats of Vikings made their way to this frigid island carrying the prettiest women they could rape and pillage along the way, Icelanders have been getting weird to get through the winter. And they’ve done well. It’s clear their ancestors raped only the best. (And have you seen Thor? Maybe they didn’t so much have to rape. “Oooh, Thor! No! Please don’t take me by force from my toothless Welsh farm husband! No, really, don’t throw me over your big, bare shoulder!”) Those first Icelanders were so good-looking, to this day Iceland proudly claims to have the most beautiful women in the world, a claim supported by this tiny country’s unusual number of Miss World winners.
This flies in the face of my theory that the best-looking people are always in countries with large, diverse, mixed-up genetic pools. (Versus, say, New Zealand, where too many Brits bred with each other for too long on a small island. Big teeth, no chins, real mess.) But in Iceland, the good taste of the Vikings has caused a small gene pool to turn out great! That isn’t to say that Icelanders are backward, and think mixing too closely with your relatives is okay. In fact, to keep that from happening, an enterprising Icelander recently invented the “Accidental Incest” app. In a country of 320,000 people, the odds of accidentally kissing your cousin are far higher than you might like. So with this app, you and the hot Viking at the bar just bump phones, and it tells you if you are related. “Bump the app before you bump in b
ed” is the catchy slogan. Really.
All of those semi-related, tall, white, blond people went nuts for my tiny, gorgeous, Peruvian friend, Parker. We would go to pay for our dinner in restaurants only to find that the bill had been anonymously paid by a “gentleman admirer” who had enjoyed watching Parker eat cod. We got pulled over for speeding, and the Chippendales-looking Icelandic cop asked Parker where her family was from, complimented her skin, let us out of the ticket, and led us to our destination, a nearby farmer’s hot springs. After years of traveling with her tall, white husband, who was always the exotic person of interest in countries where the people were smaller or darker, Parker had a great time. Her sad little unimpregnated heart grew five sizes that trip.
One of the many Icelanders who fell for Parker was a Viking masseur. It was during one of the top five travel experiences of my life: a floating massage at the Blue Lagoon.
The Blue Lagoon is Iceland’s biggest tourist attraction; annually it attracts more people than live in Iceland. Almost twice as many. It turns out that a glacial-blue, milky hot spring in the middle of an isolated black lava field is Valhalla. Surrounding the huge, steamy, mint-colored pool is creamy, soft white mud that bathers slather all over their faces before wading up to a wooden dock in the middle of the pool for drinks. Even in July, when the days are twenty hours long, it doesn’t get much warmer than fifty degrees, so your beer stays perfectly cold as you swim around in the warm water in your face mask. We had booked “floating massages,” not really knowing what they were, but we were told to head over to a semiprivate corner of the lagoon to get them.
Two Vikings in swimsuits met us, and waved us onto thin, floating mattresses. Thor (actual name) and Dante (same) then took fleece blankets, soaked them in the womb-temperature water, and covered our bodies with them, so we wouldn’t be even the least bit chilly on our exposed side.
What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding Page 17