by Matt Gross
But for a long time, that balance was maintained by the Lucy Hotel itself, the antics of whose tenants and staff we observed with equal parts fascination and horror. Mr. Bob, the middle-aged American on the first floor, had lived there the longest, having moved over from the Philippines after the closure of the U.S. naval base at Subic Bay; red-faced, paunchy, and only too happy to show off his full set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, he seemed to move through a different Vietnam from the rest of us, speaking Vietnamese with a terrible accent (he didn’t care) and enmeshed in the operations of his store, the Yankee Peddler, which sold weird, off-brand perfumes and T-shirts. Mr. Bob was also responsible for having discovered Lucy’s front desk clerk, skinny Ms. Luc, who’d had a hard life; the French-speaking daughter of a South Vietnamese policeman, she’d spent the postwar decades going mad, winding up homeless, carrying her young daughter on her back as she sold lottery tickets on the street—which is where Mr. Bob had found her and given her work at his shop. At the Lucy Hotel, she was the mild-mannered rock, kind, approachable, and patient.
Which is to say, quite unlike her boss, Lucy, who could transform in an instant from girlish and helpful to pure raging evil. We guests were mostly safe, but each of us, at one point or another, had stumbled upon her in mid-rant, screaming at one of the desk clerks or security guards about some infraction or another—before she’d turn to us, flash a smile, and ask if we needed anything, bottled water, fresh fruit, new sheets. She’d pay off the police so American guys could have their Vietnamese girlfriends spend the night, and she knew where to find good deals on motorbike rentals. But she also spared no one her wrath—not even Thuy and Duyen, the sweet-faced cleaning girls, whom she fired when they asked to be paid the past two months’ wages.
The next month, however, Lucy hired them back, and it seemed part and parcel of the comedy that was life at the Lucy Hotel—a dramatic but consequence-free interlude in all our lives. Or maybe just in my own naïve, innocent life.
One night, though, things blew up for serious. A Filipino engineer who lived alone at the hotel had been enjoying a visit from his wife, who’d come over from Manila for a week. But the wife’s presence was a problem, because the engineer, as we all knew, had been having an affair with Lucy. For a few days, Lucy and the engineer kept up the landlady-tenant charade, but then, somehow, their cover was blown, and an epic fight began, one we could hear from up in Mai’s room on the fourth floor, where we’d begun another round of cards. And that battle ended (as we pieced it together that night and the next morning) with the engineer’s wife slashing her own wrists with a kitchen knife, after which the engineer drove her to the hospital—in Lucy’s car.
Even though my friends and I had observed this all from the outside, and even though it had nothing to do with us, it was a sign that seemingly stable dynamics might suddenly shift—or collapse. The next crack appeared when Lien left to return to San Francisco. Her last night in Saigon, we celebrated with a vodka-fueled party at the Siberian Hunting Lodge, and I heard whispered rumors she was on the outs with Steve. Then I took off, on a ten-day trip to Taiwan to visit Tammy, my ex, and when I got back, Lien had returned. Had they patched things up? Or was there something else going on? I heard more rumors of other hookups among our crew, and while no one showed anything on the surface, the sudden tensions frustrated me. We’d all been so good together; why did it have to end? Why did there have to be secrets among us?
The thing is, it didn’t end—none of it did. It got a little harder to raise a quorum for cards and drinks in Tuyen’s room, but we still went out together, still rode home to find the Lucy Hotel’s security gate being groggily opened by a shirtless night watchman. New people appeared in our circle—Susie, Wynn, Hien, Khue—and old ones changed jobs. As far as I knew, there were no fights, no cut ties, no subtle breakups. Even Lucy, the engineer, and his wife worked things out somehow; the wife went back to the Philippines, and Lucy and the engineer resumed their affair. But life at the hotel was feeling different, less special.
Even as I was spending time with the Lucy crew, I was also, to my surprise, growing tighter with the Bodhi Tree gang. Jed, the academic, introduced me to the Ubiquity record label and its compilations of dancehall jazz; his girlfriend, a Japanese woman with whom he communicated solely in Vietnamese, lent me a CD by UA, the quirky Tori Amos of J-pop. Ted, the annoying New Yorker, helped me form a biweekly writers’ workshop with Douglas and a couple of other wannabe writers, and although I bristled at his personality and heartily criticized his short stories (and he mine), we seemed to have come to an understanding. We didn’t necessarily like each other, but we related—we were in this together. And we all spent nights drinking and smoking pot on someone’s balcony, playing silly memory games (“One duck, couple of sheep, three brown bear, four running hare . . . ”) and flirting with friends of friends who’d come over from London for a few weeks, or were moving to Phnom Penh next month.
Once or twice, I tried to integrate the groups—the Bodhi Tree gang and the Lucy crew. Steve, Mai, and Tuyen were aspiring fiction writers, so I invited them to my workshop, but they just didn’t fit in with Douglas and Ted—different goals, different sensibilities. The conversation was stilted, unfree. From then on, I kept my circles of friends separate.
But “from then on” did not last long. June rolled around, bringing with it clouds, humidity, the prospect of an end to the intense heat, and the looming certainty that soon I too would be leaving Vietnam behind. In the early spring, before I’d found my rhythm and my place in Saigon, I’d applied to graduate school—and gotten in. I’d looked into the future and seen none for me in Vietnam, and so now, at the end of July, I’d return to America. And without regrets, I figured. A month earlier, you couldn’t have dragged me away from these new friends—the first people who’d accepted me, so calmly, as an equal. Now, after the ups and downs, our parting seemed natural and inevitable, and therefore not something to be mourned. There must have been a going-away party—probably at a goat hot pot restaurant with loads of rice wine—but I don’t remember a thing.
Fifteen years later, here’s how things stand: Mai and Jason moved to Africa, married, then split up almost immediately, and Mai moved to New York and eventually married a guy who used to date Tuyen’s sister; their kid and mine play together happily, though less frequently than we’d like. Steve and Lien lived apart, got back together, had kids, got divorced. Hanh married her college sweetheart and lives in Massachusetts. After stints in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Manila, Hanoi, and, once again, Saigon, Tuyen lives in Mongolia, and remains single. Douglas and I were roommates for awhile in New York, then drifted apart; now we get together for drinks or lunch a couple of times a year. Ted moved to New York and now is one of my closest friends. I guess he mellowed out. Maybe I did, too.
Vivian I sold in Seattle for $1,800. I never heard from her again.
After what felt like thirty minutes but was probably no more than five, I sensed movement on the other side of the police car. The lights were still in my face, and I squinted to catch a glimpse of what I thought would be Cassady’s bruised, handcuffed form being dragged into the road.
Instead, Cassady and the policeman had their arms around each other’s shoulders, and were laughing enthusiastically, like old friends. I didn’t get it. They’d been hurtling toward a confrontation, but it had become something else entirely. The cop clapped Cassady on the back, told us to be careful on the road, and left us in the dark. I was too dumbfounded to ask Cassady what had happened.
“This is my island,” Cassady said as we walked on the shoulder. “I built that road, ha!”
The party was just up the road, in the front yard of a ramshackle house. Twenty men and women on the verge of being rednecks sat around drinking beer and smoking weed, which they eagerly offered me when they heard I was from New York. “Gotta try some of this B.C. bud!” was the refrain.
But the initial welcome soon turned sour. Cassady decided to bring up my New York Tim
es affiliation again and again, and his words had a nasty edge to them, like some kind of taunt. Others joined in the sneering, too, though with less vigor than Cassady. He was drunk, sure, but I was pissed. Hadn’t I stood by him when the police threatened? Did that count for nothing? Instead of showing my anger and resentment, I took another hit off the joint, finished my beer, and said good night. I was pretty sure I would never see Cassady or the others again, and that was fine by me. I’d done my duty, and they’d done theirs: We’d been ourselves, for better and for worse.
________
*Not his real name.
Chapter 4
Poor Me
How I Learned to Travel Frugally and Got the Best Job in the World—and Why I Gave It Up
From: Stuart
Subject: Re: Back in NYC . . .
Date: March 31, 2006
Matt:
How about coming by on Tuesday? I have a meeting from 11–12 and then from 3–3:30, but otherwise I’m free. Meanwhile, something to think about: How would you feel about a three-month, round-the-world trip later this spring, blogging from the road and gathering material for a couple of features along the way, if we were able to make it financially feasible for you?
From: Matt
Subject: Re: Back in NYC . . .
Date: April 1, 2006
Let’s try for 3:30 on Tuesday. That’ll be best for me.
A three-month, round-the-world trip?
Sure, why not? See you Tuesday . . .
Bologna sucked. I only went because I’d already fucked up Venice. And I only went to Venice because the €50 nonstop flight was the cheapest out of Barcelona, an early stop on the round-the-world summer adventure that launched me as the New York Times’ Frugal Traveler, the gig that everybody called “the best job in the world”—and an opportunity ripe for fucking up.
I didn’t realize how bad things were until I got to Venice. Actually, I thought I was pretty smart. For example, I’d heard that lodgings were cheaper on Venice’s Lido Island, so I’d booked a room there (via LastMinute.com) at the Hotel Windsor, on Viale Venezia. But when, after a bus ride from the airport and a vaporetto journey across Venice, I showed up on the Lido and asked around for the Windsor, no one had heard of it. Nor did they know where Viale Venezia was. Finally, the manager of the cell phone store where I was buying an Italian SIM card asked to see the confirmation e-mail from LastMinute.com. I showed him.
Oh, this was easy, he said as if it happened every day: I had the wrong Lido. This right here was the Lido di Venezia, but I wanted the Lido di Jesolo, an hour or so northeast by ferry and by bus—and an eternity from the romance and mystery of Venice. What could I do? I’d already paid for the room, a condition of LastMinute.com, and since my Frugal Traveler budget limited me to $100 a day, or about €80, I couldn’t change course. I took the ferry and the bus, and spent a night in a hotel I’ve since forgotten. The next morning, ashamed of my mistake and unwilling to commute, I fled south to Bologna.
There things improved, but only temporarily. For a couple of midmorning hours, I walked around the city’s historic center, loving the bricks and the cobblestones, the arched windows and arcaded passageways, the feeling of being in a true, old Italian city. At a café near Piazza Maggiore, I heard the echo of choirs singing somewhere and watched thin sunbeams fighting their way through a glittering light rain.
Over successive espressos, I hatched a brilliant plan for staying here on the cheap. It was late May, and the semester at the University of Bologna (founded in 1088!) was coming to an end. Many of the school’s one hundred thousand students were leaving town, and those who were staying were losing their roommates; on notice boards near university buildings, I’d seen flyers advertising vacant rooms. Surely, at least one student would be happy to put up a thirty-two-year-old New Yorker for five or six nights in exchange for several dozen euros. When the rain slackened, I got up and rolled my suitcase down the street toward the university.
At first, I got lucky: roommate wanted; starting May 24; €17 a day. I called the ad’s number on my cell and explained myself in halting Italian.
Okay, come on over, the student said, explaining that I’d have to take a bus or two from Piazza Maggiore to reach his place. Might take thirty minutes. Maybe forty-five.
See you soon, I said. Then I walked back to Piazza Maggiore to wait for my bus.
That’s when it began to rain, harder this time. In about thirty seconds (maybe forty-five), I went from elation to absolute dejection. It all seemed so hopeless. I was tired, wet and getting wetter, and I didn’t really understand where the apartment was or how to take public transportation there, not to mention that the now-heavy rain was (I was being told by fellow straphangers) delaying the bus line by two hours. A taxi was an exorbitant impossibility. And I wasn’t sure I’d want to stay there anyway, since it seemed far from anything I might actually want to see in Bologna. And then what? I’d have to look at another apartment, and another and another, dragging my crap behind me. As I stewed in the rain, a procession of priests and the faithful made its way across the piazza, carrying an image of the Madonna to the Basilica of Saint Petronius.
My phone rang. It was Sarah, a graduate student at the Johns Hopkins University’s Bologna Center. A few days earlier, I’d e-mailed her entire class, telling them I was an alumnus passing through on a round-the-world trip “and since I don’t actually know anyone there, I was wondering if any of you would be up for having a drink or meal with me.” (I did not mention the New York Times.) Now Sarah was asking if I wanted coffee. Sure, I said.
A couple of hours later, I’d landed myself a complimentary spare bed in one of Sarah’s colleagues’ half-vacated dorm room. (I didn’t ask, they offered.) Fine, so I wouldn’t have an Italian student guiding me through Bologna, but I did have a posse of Americans willing to show me the city’s best bars for aperitivi, where drinks are served alongside free, often grandiose spreads: cured meats and salty cheeses and dark olives and slightly overcooked pasta—a dream come true for impoverished scholars and travelers alike.
But after the first night of wine, camaraderie, and complimentary snacks, my Bologna fractured. With exams to take and papers to finish, the students were busy during the day, leaving me to wander the city alone. And that was what I did, clueless and aimless. I slept late, I glanced at the remains of the old Roman stock exchange, and I hiked up through 666 arches to the Sanctuario di Madonna di San Luca, one of many Western European religious structures that failed to impress me. And in a region known for having the best food in Italy, I was eating terribly—cheap pizza by the slice, mostly, with aperitivi-based dinners. All around me, I imagined, Italians were drowning in ragù bolognese, while I subsisted on oily, free focaccia.
Each day I wished I could figure a way to wrap my head around this town, to find something new and exciting, to fit into its strange rhythms, and each day I failed. The problem was, I didn’t understand what I wanted to do here, and when you don’t know that, it’s impossible to even begin looking for a solution. I kept hoping I would stumble upon it by chance, but instead I simply kept stumbling. And although I was living within my $100 budget, I was barely living.
Still, I had a job to do, and Monday morning, after four days in Bologna, I punched out my Frugal Traveler column: 1,200 words that covered almost everything you’ve just read, minus the maundering. I e-mailed the story and photos to my editors in New York, dealt with their queries and changes on Tuesday, and prepared to return to Venice for another shot at conquering La Serenissima.
Wednesday morning my Bologna column ran—“In Bologna (Thanks to a Cheap Flight) on My Trip Around the World” was the not-written-by-me headline—and I awoke to a long e-mail from Stuart, the editor of the Travel section. Its subject line was Your Column, and its point was this: get your shit together.
With my stomach churning in fear and embarrassment, I read Stuart’s criticisms. The column, he said, was turning into a picaresque account of Matt Gross’s adventu
res, not at all the colorful-but-useful series of narrative travel tips he’d hoped the Frugal Traveler would be. By accepting free accommodations from my alma mater, I’d done something no reader could do—a grave violation of the column’s precepts. The writing was flat. I’d even failed to provide the names and addresses of the aperitivo bars I’d liked so much. And this wasn’t the first time. My two previous columns, from Lisbon and Galicia, were just as disappointing.
What, he asked, was the problem? Was I taking on assignments for other publications, and thus ignoring my primary responsibilities? Or did I just not get it?
“If things don’t improve,” he wrote, “both in the quality and depth of your reporting—if I am not convinced by the next couple of columns that you are taking this assignment as seriously as we are—then I am going consider pulling the plug on it. We’ll get you home—as promised—but I am not going to continue to subsidize a column that doesn’t meet our needs or give the readers (or my bosses, to be frank) what they expected when they responded so enthusiastically to its launch. To do so would undermine the progress we are making on the Travel Web site with Web-only material, and also risk tarnishing the name ‘Frugal Traveler.’”
I packed my bags for Venice, trembling. This was serious. Stuart was right: My columns had been terrible—lacking in both relatable, replicable adventures and money-saving advice for would-be frugal travelers. I thought of excuses. The too-brief word count of each column meant I had to squeeze too many things together: The Lisbon story was, for half its length, about the basic premise of the trip—circle the globe, living as well as I could on $100 a day—and my attempts to price out airfare, followed by an account of my first days in Portugal. My material circumstances, meanwhile, were frustrating: I was writing not on a laptop but on a Palm Pilot, with a flimsy, erratic wireless keyboard, and I had neither a reliable Internet connection nor a calm place to work. I was constantly on the move, constantly reporting, constantly collecting experiences. How could I write decently at the same time?
