by Wendy Dale
By this point in the conversation, the Brits will have gotten pretty drunk (and the Americans will have gotten pretty offended), so it’s time to move back to the subject of sex. On this particular evening five days into my visit to Beirut, sitting in the comfortable and cozy living room of Peter’s friend Michael (okay, so it’s possible that he will always be named Michael), the category is dominated primarily by Giles, who has an awful lot to say on the subject of orgasms, especially for a person who doesn’t have them. This is because orgasms are unhealthy, he informs us. He has embarked on the Taoist journey, which encompasses many beliefs none of us really wants to hear about; we want to talk about Giles’ not having orgasms.
It’s not that he doesn’t ever do the dirty, he explains. In fact, he does it rather well. He goes for hours, but he just doesn’t finish the job. Not for himself anyway. Penetration is fine, he tells us, it’s just the loss of those vital fluids—wouldn’t want to sap his psychic energy, you know. I tell him I completely understand and quietly slip him my phone number under the table.
This segues brilliantly into our next topic of conversation: the fact that Michael’s sister strategically places bowls of water in her hallways to help the cosmic energy flow more evenly throughout the house.
At this point, I decide it’s really about time to be hanging out with some more Lebanese.
Five days of my ten-day trip had already been eaten up, and Peter felt terrible about having to go into work. As we ate a breakfast of flatbread, yogurt, and fresh fruit on his balcony, I tried to convince him that I’d be fine in his absence.
“Are you sure? I promise we’ll go out for dinner this evening,” he said.
“Of course, I’ll be okay,” I insisted, stuffing a fig in my mouth.
Peter had mentioned his job to me once over the phone. I remembered that it had something to do with journalism. What was it exactly?
“I’m the anchor for the English news.”
No, that wasn’t it. He wrote some kind of newsletter or something. What was it?
“That was my old job. Now I’m on TV every night. I sit in a studio in front of a live camera and read off the teleprompter.”
This information came as kind of a shock. The man who used to measure out tequila as if it were NyQuil, handing it to me with the concerned look of a mother tending to her sick child, now put on a suit and tie and provided the nation’s international citizens with their daily dose of news. I had never imagined seeing Peter on the news before—in the same way that I hadn’t counted on opening up my closet and running into Dan Rather or Tom Brokaw. There were people you saw on television and there were people you saw in your closet. When these lines got blurred, the whole world stopped making sense.
However, Peter explained to me that this was the job he had always wanted: He got to apply his vast knowledge of Middle Eastern politics, he put his journalism experience to use, and no one was trying to kill him. At his last job, on his first day, the coffee boy had come up and introduced himself to Peter by saying, “You American? I hate American. I kill American. New Jersey kill my brother.” It had not been an auspicious start to his new position (but on the bright side, it was the excuse Peter needed to finally give up that nasty addiction to coffee).
“You can watch me tonight,” Peter explained. “When you and Hadi get home.”
Hadi was Peter’s roommate, a good-natured Beiruti who seemed excited at the prospect of playing tour guide for an American visitor. Later that morning, he began tirelessly dragging me from one attraction to another.
While I was amazed at the devastation that surrounded us, Hadi was determined to show me the best the city had to offer. As we headed toward downtown in his tiny dinged-up car, Arabic music blaring out of the radio (to my embarrassment, the one song I chose to compliment turned out to be an advertising jingle), I pointed to a five-story structure that had been gutted out by bombs, and to my surprise, Hadi acted as if he was embarrassed. He tried to distract my attention by motioning toward the building next door, a beautiful marble high-rise in the final stages of construction.
The rest of the ride, our conversation centered around the same basic theme. “Wow, Hadi, check out the death and destruction on the left!” I would enthusiastically remark, which would cause my well-meaning tour guide to defensively respond, “Yes, but look at the life and renovation on the other side of the street.”
What he didn’t understand—and what I hadn’t realized either until that point—was that it was the death and destruction that I had come to see. Part of the allure of going to a foreign place is that even the problems are foreign. The hollowed-out buildings all around us didn’t apply to me. If I was going to continue traveling, it wasn’t going to be Club Med, the kind of place that allowed you to forget your worries for a week. No, I needed to head to the dark corners of the world, where my problems would seem insignificant by comparison.
Hadi parked the car and turned off the engine. As we exited the vehicle, I was baffled when we suddenly began walking toward one of the decaying structures that Hadi had made such an effort to shield me from. As I stared up at the top stories of the building that had been destroyed, true to form, Hadi drew my attention to the ground floor, which I hadn’t noticed before. It had been completely preserved. Painted titanium white and garnished with shiny brass trim, this was where we were headed.
Just minutes ago, we had been driving through a maze of traffic, surrounded by the remnants of devastation and swirling dust and suddenly we had entered a spotless café, where a white-suited waiter was accompanying us to a table with a smile and a menu.
“Where’s the no-smoking section?” I asked Hadi as we were suddenly engulfed by a thick black haze.
“That would be East Beirut.”
I had initially assumed that religion was what separated the two sectors of the city, but talking to Hadi, I began to understand that it was more a matter of vices. In Christian East Beirut, drinking was the pastime of choice. However, in West Beirut, where Mohammed’s advice was heeded in place of the surgeon general’s, alcohol was a big no-no. The Koran had issued strict admonitions against the dangers of wine, tequila, and peach schnapps—though it had neglected to insert that little warning about nicotine, birth defects, reproductive harm, and so forth. So in West Beirut, they went about smoking anything they could set fire to.
I had never heard of a hookah (this was before they became trendy), so as I gazed around the room, I became convinced that we had walked into an opium den. I tried to be as self-possessed as possible and ignore the fact that nearly every table was equipped with a sophisticated-looking bong adding smoke to the black haze that already engulfed the room.
“Do you want to try?” Hadi asked, as I tried to make myself comfortable at the table.
Hell, I’d been to college. “Sure,” I said.
Hadi called the waiter over to the table and ordered something in Arabic that sounded horribly menacing. I wasn’t sure I really wanted to know what it was, but I timidly asked him anyway.
“Strawberry,” he replied.
This sounded like what you’d order at an ice-cream parlor instead of an opium den. “No, I meant the bong thing.”
“The nargeileh.”
“Yeah. Did you order us one of those?”
“Yes. Strawberry.”
This had to be code for something.
“Hadi, strawberry opium?”
“It’s not opium. Whoever heard of strawberry opium? This is normal, everyday strawberry-flavored tobacco.”
I felt rather foolish at my mistake, but things only got worse when the waiter returned with our order. He was carrying the nargeileh, a vase-shaped glass filled with water and equipped with a three-foot-long hose. He skillfully plugged the upper end of the gadget with a metal tray, added a chunk of tobacco, and placed a disk of red-hot charcoal on top. The tobacco began to burn and Hadi handed me the hose, gallantly insisting that I begin.
I wasn’t sure exactly how to maneuver thi
s apparatus. Normally, whenever I found myself in any awkward social situation, I watched the other people at my table to figure out which fork I was supposed to be wielding, but here I was in the land of Middle Eastern hospitality, where the Lebanese graciously waited for you to start, insisting that guests always go first.
Pete had already told me about the difficult situation this same custom had once placed him in at an elegant party in Beirut when the hostess bounded upon him with a tray full of roasted pigeon. Pete was not really in the mood for roasted pigeon and never had been, but a refusal would have been seen as a grave insult to the woman of the house, who had devoted hours to basting and cooking the birds, not to mention the amount of time she must have spent rounding them up at the park. He was going to have to eat one and what was worse, he was the center of attention; they were all waiting for the guest to begin, and he didn’t know whether you picked pigeon up with your fingers chicken style or used a fork. He timidly reached for a small bird and plopped it into his mouth, crunching on the tiny bones and trying to swallow it out of his life as quickly as possible.
Now I was in a similar situation. I had never smoked out of a hose before, but I sportingly placed the tube to my lips and took a deep breath, as self-conscious as an adolescent Arabic girl taking her first inhale out of a nargeileh in her high school bathroom.
Other than the fact that there was a tube in my mouth, it was like smoking a cigarette—a berry-flavored one. Nicotine flooded my brain, sped up my heart rate, and made my head spin. But this was just the beginning. Lebanese tradition demanded that smoking a nargeileh go on for an entire afternoon. I passed Hadi the hose, took a sip of my coffee, and decided it wasn’t such a bad country after all.
On my last weekend in Beirut, I was all for the idea of running off to yet another smoke-filled café, but Peter had a better idea: detox. Although he was a staunch supporter of the virtues of alcohol, like a true Californian he was an adamant antismoker and had every intention of ridding me of the nicotine addiction that Hadi had spent the past few days carefully cultivating.
“We’re going to get you some fresh air,” he said, pushing me into his car.
This didn’t sound nearly as entertaining as inhaling smoke. “Couldn’t we just pick up some muscle relaxants at the drugstore?”
Peter rolled his eyes and started the engine. He was determined to show me another face of Lebanon, an ancient side, and for the rest of the afternoon we wandered about the ruins of one bygone civilization after another.
Our first stop was the Phoenician port city of Sidon, where we roamed through a thirteenth-century Crusader sea castle. The structure wasn’t much bigger than a typical house in Beverly Hills, but it was made entirely of stone and appeared to be rising out of the sea. It sat on a tiny island connected to the mainland by a short bridge.
Then, it was onto Tyre, a three-thousand-year-old city that had been conquered by big name headliners such as Alexander the Great and King Nebuchadnezzar. Just feet away from the blue waters of the Mediterranean, Peter and I strolled between the colonnades that had once formed part of an impressive city.
But this was just foreplay. The real deal was another two hours away, the ancient Roman city of Baalbeck. So far I’d been having a good time, but when you got right down to it, ruins were just one rundown building after another. Not Baalbeck. As Peter and I got out of the car, I could see the tremendous structures in the distance, the largest Roman temples ever constructed.
The temple of Jupiter was the most gigantic of all. I got vertigo looking up at its seventy-foot-high columns, imagining what this city must have been like in its day. All around us was what I decided to call “temple dandruff,” huge chunks of rubble that had broken off and fallen to the ground. These colossal blocks of beautifully carved stone contained the ornate moldings of leaves and lion heads. Peter and I couldn’t resist climbing over them in spite of their size. Like energetic preschoolers, we pulled ourselves up using both hands and ascended the slanted rock hunched over so that we could quickly grab hold of the stone in the event of losing our balance.
There were three other structures to see so we headed over to the temple of Bacchus, which was the most impressive, simply because it had been so well preserved. It was like pictures I had seen of the Parthenon—a rectangular structure surrounded by columns—and its size was staggering.
“Three hundred years they spent building this place,” Peter informed me, walking up the temple steps. “And they never finished.”
“Talk about a bad case of procrastination.”
“Tell me about it. You know, there are ruins in Beirut too.”
“I know. Hadi and I go to cafés in them.”
“Not the ruins of the war. Ancient ruins.”
“Oh.”
“They’ve been trying to rebuild downtown Beirut, but half the time, when they begin excavating, they unearth another set of Roman ruins. For them, it’s a real pain. They give the archeologists a couple of months to scavenge what they can and then they bulldoze it all.”
“Damn Roman ruins. What an inconvenience.”
Late that afternoon, both of us famished from a long day of walking, we stopped at a restaurant along the highway for mezze, which could be roughly translated as “lunch, a whole lot of it.” It always began with a series of appetizers (hummus, tabbouleh, baba ghanoush, plain yogurt, and flat Arabic bread), moved onto main dishes (lamb, chicken, or beef), and ended with fruit and sweets. Food was fun enough, but my favorite part of the meal was the traditional drink arrack, a licorice-flavored liquor that turned milky white when served over ice cubes and mixed with chilled water.
Sitting in the outdoor patio of the restaurant watching the other patrons, I couldn’t help but think how calm they all seemed. They were, after all, Lebanese. They woke up in a war-torn country, ate lunch surrounded by strife and civil unrest, and lived with the threat of bombs all day. Yet here they were laughing over glasses of arrack, asking their family members to kindly pass the flatbread.
These were the moments I had not counted on in Beirut. I had been prepared for guns and bombs and destruction. But this was also a place where people got on with their lives. They got up in the morning, read the paper, headed to work, and returned to have dinner with their families.
After an emotional good-bye, I boarded a flight leaving Lebanon the next day. It was a short journey to Cyprus, then another flight to London, and finally onto Washington, D.C., where I arrived exhausted and jet lagged. From there, I took what Southwest Airlines would refer to as a direct flight to Los Angeles (meaning two obligatory stops at Nashville and Phoenix).
It was during a layover at the Phoenix airport, sitting at the gate waiting for my flight that I began to feel the effect of travel on my outlook. In my own time zone for the first time in weeks, I was having a hard time. It wasn’t the fact that my neck ached, my head hurt, my feet were sore, or that my body clock was set ten hours ahead. It was that after Beirut, everything around me seemed so trivial. The conversation going on across from me went something like this:
“Have you had those new lattes?” an overweight woman with feathered and frosted hair asked her friend, pronouncing the word “latte” to rhyme with “batty.”
“You like lattes? Cappuccinos are better. Or you can have them with chocolate. That’s called a mocha.”
“How about café au laits? You like those?”
“I don’t know. I never had one.”
I was tempted to walk up to them and tell them it was coffee for God’s sake—it was some grounds, some water, and some milk, and it really didn’t matter. What mattered was the fact that their houses weren’t being bombed, that half the people they knew hadn’t been killed, that they could sleep at night, not worried that the roof above their heads would soon be lying on their chests.
But I kept it to myself. I sat in my chair, watching the planes take off and land, quietly smiling, thinking that my friends truly did have something to be jealous of, after all.
Chapter Three
Cuba Libre, Muy Libre
All of the boring people I knew—the ones who led lives I didn’t want mine to turn out like—they had one thing in common: they all had jobs. I realized this on an especially dreary Monday morning at Hughes Aircraft. Days earlier, I had been fleeing bombs and sniper fire in Beirut, sipping arrack, and inhaling the smoke from a nargeileh, but now I was back where I had started, looking out at the world through the window in my office. The change I’d undergone in Beirut had been fleeting thanks to a little fun damperer called work.
The monotony was worse than it had been before because now I had a different frame of reference. I had memories of warm flatbread topped with oregano and other spices, dribbled with olive oil and oozing melted cheese. The engineers around me had never tasted freshly heated mankoushi, which is why they were able to sit there day after day leading productive, fulfilled, flatbread-free lives—because they had no idea what they were missing out on.
The work itself wasn’t what bothered me, rather, it was the predictability of it all. Every day at 8 A.M., the same freeway, the same office, the same boring business attire. The days of my life stretched out in front of me, one after the other, no surprises in store. I wanted my life to matter, to mean something, not just to get used up and discarded like a roll of disposable towels.
Quitting my job would have been easy if it weren’t for the simple matter of supporting myself. I had no idea how to get out of working and still earn a living. Had I had some sage guidance from, say, an eloquent and wise mentor or, lacking that, a really good Magic 8 Ball, I might have been able to get some valuable insight into what was soon to occur, a conversation such as the following:
