‘Momma! Momma! I don’t like it here!’ Gabriel is still screaming three hours later. Tod had given up and passed out reading his New Yorker at hour one. He doesn’t even pretend that he can comfort his young son the way Mommy can and most of the time I don’t hold it against him. Tonight I am not feeling quite so generous. I finally take Gabriel out of his crib and bring him to bed with me and we both pass out.
I hear rustling in the morning and pretend to be asleep.
‘Hey, buddy, let’s let Momma sleep,’ Tod whispers, ‘and go get some eggs together and see the dolphins!’
‘Dolphins! Dolphins!’ Gabriel yells. I take shallow breaths until I hear the door click behind them.
I lie still for a minute in fantastic silence but then quickly decide I should assume this exact position out by the pool, in full vacation mode. I pull on my bathing suit, which fits as tight as a condom, avoid the full-length mirror, and tie a scarf around my ass as a faux sarong and head downstairs. I find a vacant chair conveniently placed directly across from a young man who had caught my eye yesterday. His skin is evenly tanned and he has dark eyes and thick, wavy hair. He wears a rawhide string tied in a knot at his wrist that I find myself wanting to bite. His cutoff shorts rest on his sinewy hipbones like he’s just waiting for someone to pull them off.
Why not me, I think, smiling to myself and looking around for a drink. How about because he looks about eighteen and you just left forty in the dust and are here on your first family vacation, Mrs Robinson? Looking at this boy in this way should make me feel guilty. It doesn’t. It makes me feel sexy. Pre-marriage-and-kids sexy. Hungry for the kind of sex the kids chase. Sure, baby-making sex has all the exchange of bodily fluids and friction of sexy sex, but absolutely none of the carefree, illicit, crazy passion of, say, sex with a handsome, sullen, tan boy on a beach in the tropics.
I readjust the incline of my chair, lie back, and run a hand through my hair. I wonder if he’s noticed me in the twenty-four hours we’ve been here together. The smoldering brunette with the sore nipples from breastfeeding a toddler. I close my eyes, take a deep breath and float myself back in time, until I, too, am eighteen. He and I meet over a chilled glass of cucumber/strawberry/lemon/pineapple/mint water at the sparkly gym with the wall of glass showcasing a vast expanse of the Pacific. We’ve made contact a few minutes before, looking up from our individual television screens placed conveniently at eye level on every cardio machine. I hold my gaze with him just long enough to say, ‘I’m in.’ He pours me a cup of water from the sterling-silver dispenser without even asking if I want any. I take it, looking directly into his cocky brown eyes. We stand together, breathing, sweating, recovering, about to speak, and then I hear it.
‘Mommy! Mommy! Come see, come see the big fish, Mommy!’ My eyes fly open and like Cinderella at midnight, everything changes. My laugh lines return to my face, my breasts head south, my heart swells and I see Tod and Gabriel running toward me.
Gabriel is ahead with Tod’s arms reaching out to grab him before he tumbles into the pool. ‘Hi guys! How was it?’ I ask, blocking the sun with my hand, and moving my head slightly, shaking my illicit thoughts away like dry sand.
‘I think he’s really asleep,’ I say to Tod back in the room that night after another dinner al fresco.
‘Cool,’ Tod says, from the bed. ‘Come up here, you little hula dancer.’
I took a free hula dance lesson on the beach while Gabriel napped today and loved it. I quietly hum a few bars of a Don Ho hit and climb up next to him.
He kisses me softly on the lips, untying the string at the top of the bathing suit I’m still wearing. The triangles of fabric fall away and he pulls me toward him. I remember the citrus and cinnamon smell of his neck and the way Tod always holds me with purpose and sink further into his arms.
‘Momma? Momma. Momma!!!!’
I feel sunlight on my face streaming through a crack in the curtains the next morning and open my eyes. After six consecutive hours of sleep I feel like a new woman. I am, however, desperate for a latte. Since the boys are still asleep I dress quickly and sneak downstairs to the Hoku’s restaurant. It’s the fancy one at the resort so I know they’ll have good coffee and hopefully malasadas to bring back to Gabriel. He had one of these puffy fried balls of dough dipped in sugar yesterday and went to sleep, the second time last night, talking about them.
‘I just heard the guys outside talking about record waves on the island. Is it true?’ I ask the waitress as she steams my milk.
‘Fifty-foot waves on the North Shore this morning,’ she says. ‘A couple of the bus boys got up early to drive up and see them. You should go. But leave early because it’ll be a mob scene.’
‘Oh, wow. We have to go!’ I say. I want to see live surfing while we are here since I never have. I take Gabriel’s bag of donuts and get back to our room as quickly as I can. When I open the door, he and Tod are running around laughing raucously over made-up names for the clay turtles.
‘Get dressed, we’re going to see the biggest waves ever!’
‘Get dressed!’ Gabriel says to Tod, mimicking me, and cramming the sweet dough in his mouth.
‘Okay,’ says Tod.
‘Okay!’ yells Gabriel.
We get to the most desirable wave-watching area and people are standing ten deep for as far as the eye can see. I’m feeling distracted because I’m worried that this is not the safest place for Gabriel and that we’re running out of sunscreen – until I see the first colossal wave heading toward the shore. In a matter of seconds we’re watching a wall of water rise up out of the ocean as if being pulled by God. The three of us grab hands and stare, transfixed, looking at surfers the size of fleas catching these waves until they break and fall back into the ocean with a thunderous crash. I look at Gabriel’s face and although he can’t say it with words, it is clear that he has just learned the meaning of awesome.
All the excitement and lack of sleep over the last few days has caught up with him and inching along the coast back to the hotel, Gabriel falls asleep in his car seat.
‘Wow,’ I say to Tod, ‘it really is so beautiful here.’
‘Yep,’ Tod says.
‘So that guy at your reunion isn’t a total ass, I mean, at least he has good taste.’
‘Like me,’ Tod says, taking my hand. ‘It’s good we did this, right?’
‘Yes, it is,’ I say, kissing him on the ear. ‘Thank you.’
Gabriel is still asleep when we transfer him out of the car and wheel him up to the room in his stroller. Tod drops him in the darkest corner of the room and takes the dolphin-shaped chocolate off our pillow. He unwraps it, takes a bite and places the other half in my mouth. We lie down on the bed together savoring the rich taste and the quiet. We kiss, pulling each other’s clothes off like the old days.
Only better.
Boarding the plane at the end of our trip, I keep thinking about four words I read on a cocktail napkin in the lobby when we first arrived at the hotel. ‘Aloha aku, aloha mai,’ on one side. ‘Give love, get love,’ on the other.
Two weeks after we land back in Los Angeles, I find out I’m pregnant.
And not by a teenager.
Through Jordan and Syria
Josh Lucas
Josh Lucas was born in the early 1970s in Arkansas and spent his childhood traveling with his activist parents who organized anti-nuclear protests all over the South. The family finally settled in a small fishing village in Washington State, where Josh’s small public school had a nationally ranked, award-winning debating and drama program. He has been traveling and acting ever since.
To be blunt, this ‘entertainment industry’ I have spent over twenty years working in can kick your ass. In the early winter of 2010, I find myself metaphorically lying in the mud, bloody and bruised, and with a nasty headache. The beautiful promise of a great career job has just blown past me, knocking me viciously to the ground. Rejected, I realize that I’ve taken this loss way too hard and that my pe
rspective is off. So I decide a solo trip to somewhere I’ve never been is what I need to get my head together. Wanting a total immersion outside of my comfort zone, I choose the Middle East.
A few days later, I land in Israel. A sleepless zombie, I whisk breezily through the world’s most secure airport. Exiting customs, I feel confused as all my research has prepared me for a cavity search or at the very least a serious interrogation, and here I stand in Israel without anyone having had even a peek at my belongings.
I take a public bus to the closest stop near the old city of Jerusalem. I enter through Damascus Gate and instantly the ancient market engulfs me in color, sensation, and smells. I’m joyfully overwhelmed, lost for a while in the maze of the old city. I reach the Muslim quarter and quickly leave my bags in the 500-year-old marble-floored hostel I’m staying in. Then I walk into the corridor and find myself uttering ‘Oh my God,’ my mouth literally agape as I fall from experience to experience. I wander through the mass of spirituality and emotion that is boiling inside this mind-blowing human creation honoring God: Jerusalem. There is no doubt about the presence of God here. I also feel utter madness. It is instantly obvious to me why this place causes war and death. And salvation.
Needing to breathe, I head back into the market to a café where I’ve scheduled a meeting with Philip, an African-born, French-raised Jewish war photographer who has been living for the past six months in Jerusalem with his documentary filmmaker wife and their three young children. He has already told me on the phone that he is desperate to show people the hidden side of Jerusalem. Drinking coffee near the Jaffa Gate, this deeply passionate, bright-eyed, playful man, who speaks French, Hebrew, English, Arabic and probably three other languages he doesn’t use while we are together, tells me he is already known by the Israeli military as an ‘Arab lover’ and that he is deeply emotional about this conflict. He describes how he and his wife are documenting it up close.
‘Are you ready to see it?’ he asks. ‘Ready to walk?’
We quickly move through the Christian quarter along the Via Dolorosa, held to be the path Jesus walked, carrying his cross, towards his crucifixion. Philip tells me of the Palestinian plight he has witnessed. Of his pain, his rage, his condemnation of Zionism. We huff and puff our way up the steep Mount of Olives as he explains about the settlements we pass.
We enter into the West Bank. He tells me the Israeli soldiers are watching us. I can see them above us in the gun turrets as we wander down the otherwise empty streets deeper into Palestine. Houses are literally split in half by the giant concrete slabs. We find many large, empty, rocket-propelled shells from a recent battle. We come to a spot where a lonely gas station sits next to the wall at a once-major intersection. When asked what he thinks about it, the station’s owner tells us: ‘This wall will come down. It took thirty years in Germany, and it’s only been seven here so far.’ He smiles.
We walk up to where an Israeli military group is stationed, protecting a large Jewish settlement. Banksy’s street art plays with the other graffiti on the giant concrete wall. Exhausted, we take a Palestinian bus back to the old city, back through Lion’s Gate, and eat hummus at the best hummus restaurant in the city. I tell Philip I want to stay in Israel a few days and then fly to Turkey. He says there is a better way.
‘Through Jordan and Syria.’
Following Philip’s itinerary a few days later, I’m out of the hostel with my ridiculously overpacked rolling backpack into the still boarded-up old city. It’s early. I buy a Turkish coffee and some ring-shaped Arabic bread from a street vendor. I wait below the Golden Wall Hotel for the Palestinian shared taxi to Allenby Bridge – the crossing point from Palestine into Jordan. The plan is to get to Damascus, Syria, as quickly as possible, then hop the train to Aleppo, Syria, then cross through Turkey to Istanbul.
The small bus is full. We sit about an hour. Then we are all made to get off and buy tickets, during which process my window seat is taken. I’m now crammed in the back seat next to a ten-year-old who is eating a nasty-smelling meat pita of some kind. At first he won’t sit next to me. Finally his mother makes him, as it is the only seat left. We drive into the West Bank and then through the desert, past camels, Bedouins driving herds of goats, lots of construction. It’s a beautiful desert. Cream-colored. The little boy turns to me and says, ‘I am clever. Are you clever?’
‘I like to think I am. You speak good English,’ I tell him.
‘Thomas Edison was clever,’ he says. We are friends now. The bus drives over the Jordan River and through the intense military check into Jordan. We get out to pay a hefty exit tax. The official asks for my visa.
‘I’ve done lots of research and I’d like to buy one now,’ I say.
‘Not here you can’t. You must go back to Jerusalem.’
I question this for a while only to learn that, well, yes, I can get a visa – but at the north crossing 130 kilometers away. Through a quick, bizarre negotiation I pay a small fortune to a taxi dispatcher and I’m on the way. Back into Palestine and then into Israel. As I am with a Palestinian taxi, the security check and treatment by the Israeli military is heavy – seriously intimidating. They dismantle the taxi. Another hour and we get to the north crossing. I get out and walk to the crossing point; they glance at my passport and wave me through. No stamp. No questions. Nothing.
I’m in Jordan. That’s it.
I say to the local bus manager that I want to go to the next border and cross into Syria.
‘You have a visa?’
‘No,’ I tell him. ‘They say I can get one at the border; it might take ten hours, but it can happen.’
‘No, you go to Amman.’
After some haggling, a driver agrees to take me through Irbid to the Syrian boarder at Ramtha. On the way he tells me he lived in Texas for fifteen years and misses it so much he almost cries when he speaks of it.
‘Texas is the land of freedom, real freedom, not like this place.’ He gestures angrily out over the desert we drive through.
For the next hour he tells me about his wife, who was also his lawyer, and whom he refers to simply as ‘bitch … excuse me.’ He explains that she had him kicked out of America, even though she is also Jordanian. As we drive, he gets a call, listens for a while and then turns to me: ‘This is your lucky day. A guy I know knows the head guy at the Syrian boarder. He will drive you across, you pay him sixty dinars, he takes you through all the way to Damascus.’
One hundred bucks for a three-hour drive and a visa, sure … We drive through Irbid, which, like all of Jordan, seems rough and tumble. He tells me proudly about the street here that has so many knit shops it is in the Guinness Book of Records. I like him. We pull over and I meet my mule into Syria. He is tough and doesn’t speak English and seems a bit scared. They make sure I have taken out and destroyed any papers, currency or evidence that I have been in Israel. I was prepared for this from my research. I keep thinking how sad it is that the hatred between the Jews and Arabs is so strong that neither will allow visitors entry to their country if they have visited the other’s country first.
‘Do you have money to pay the police?’
‘How much?’
‘Just a few dinars.’
We go. The drive is fast and long to the boarder; the land seems meaner and more barren, the traffic more aggressive. We are waved through a crossing. I smile, and the driver gives me a ‘not yet’ motion. Another checkpoint. We pass easily through as he seems to know everyone.
Then we stop and enter a dirt-floored metal warehouse where a hundred or so men haggle in many lines. The sole female I see wears a burqua and full niqab so I cannot see her eyes. I am the only Westerner. For the first time, I feel real danger here. My guy runs around. I stand in line. He speaks to the customs officer: I’m stamped. We pass through another check and then another and I assume we are in Syria and I relax.
Then we pull up to a communist-style square structure. I follow him inside. This is Syrian customs. Big. Everything else t
o this point feels light. I see one long wall of glass with many lines of people. Behind the customs officers is a section of empty marble floor and, as if in a mirror, another group of officers with their backs to us and a wall of glass. We jockey for position in a few lines, my mule all over the place, and finally I’m in the diplomat-foreigners line. I give my passport to the big man in heavy uniform. A quick glance: ‘No. No visa. Go back.’
My mule starts speaking rapidly.
The big man again: ‘No. Go back. Wait five minutes.’
My mule runs off.
A group of young Chinese businessmen pushes ahead of me and gives the big man their passports.
‘No. No visa. Go back.’
‘But we are also socialist, we come from a socialist country,’ one of the businessmen spurts to the big man in English.
‘No, you go back. Wait five minutes. Sit.’
I wait. Again I approach the big man.
‘Do you speak English?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m told I can wait here, and then you can get me my visa for Syria, from here? I can wait, but is that true?’
‘No, no visa. Go back. Wait five minutes.’
This is happening every few minutes to various people who approach, various groups. I am the only American. It feels like a game, so I wait, then a man quietly sitting in the corner says they haven’t been giving Americans visas to Syria now for three months. I watch my guy running all around the intimidating building. He seems more and more agitated.
I approach the big man again, ‘Okay, if no visa, can I have my passport back?’
‘No, no visa. You go back. Wait five minutes.’
‘I need my passport to go back.’
‘You go back to Jordan.’
‘I will, but I need my passport.’
‘You wait.’
This goes on for another hour, my hopes up and down like a yo-yo, my heart pounding heavily now. Shit, what the fuck am I thinking trying to go to Syria? This is bad. I’m an American at the border between two nations that both hate America and they have taken my passport. No-one knows I’m here. How the fuck did losing a part in a Hollywood movie land me at a dangerous drug- and weapon-smuggling crossing into Syria?
Lights, Camera...Travel! Page 4
