Innocents Abroad, or From Lebanon with Love

It’s 4:38am in Beirut and I cannot sleep. The three possible culprits are: one, the maté I sipped until somewhat late; two, the lack of devil juice; and three, the discombobulating dreams I was having just a moment ago. At the risk of recalling their finer points, I’ll spare the reader details. Also, this being the tail end of a rather decadent holiday season, the previous night had been my first one off the donkey-cart in well over two weeks. Some combination of the above has brought me to the breakfast room table at 4:38am with the hope of doing some small justice to this frenzied, fractious and utterly wonderful new fief we find ourselves in.

Though you wouldn’t know it by the barometer, it’s freezing inside the apartment. Not literally, since we’re thankfully no longer in a land where people speak literally, but damned cold all the same. Sunny and brisk by day, the city is chilly if not downright cold at night. True, there are small electric heaters on which to warm your hands, but they often drive the electrical system to a breaking point. Some delicate balance must always be struck between turning on more than several lights, heating the shower, charging an appliance, boiling water or running a load of laundry. Elite-sector second- or third-world problems, to use a dastardly turn of phrase, but a pain in the ass all the same.  

Even in our boogie, vibrant neighborhood only blocks from the sparkling new high-rises, mosques and designer souks downtown, the city’s power cuts are frequent and enduring. Whether an expensive hotel bar or an avant-garde theatre, a pulsating nightclub or a wealthy residential apartment building, the power is apt to go out at any moment. In one acquaintance’s rather sumptuous spot, the host had already lit a small fire and tastefully lit a plethora of candles around the room; when the power shut off in mid-conversation, he quietly slipped away to tinker with the generator while the rest of us continued as if nothing had happened.

Sipping our host’s wine in the candlelight, I mentioned that I found these momentary power cuts most charming and delightful!  You know, in the fun-loving we’re-all-in-the-same-boat kind of way: just as the lights cut out, the busboy spills his jug of water; the baron squirts mustard all over his pants; Madame Marie-Madeleine drives the spoon into her nose, spilling pea soup down the bosom of her garment. Who will trip? Who will go for the cheeky smooch? The pervy Transmilenio booty-grab? On some celestial stoop the unemployed gods are sitting around, sipping tallboys and placing bets on Beiruti power cuts and the social fallout they subsequently incur. My host suddenly pulled himself together: “Nonsense, you only like the power cuts because you’re a silly red-nosed tourist.”

Many of the early 20^th century apartments in the city are large and drafty, ours in particular. Here, on Rue Gouraud, or Gemmayzeh as its known locally and in Arabic, the ceilings are 15 feet high and the doors around 9. I could toss a grape or a peanut to the ceiling and catch it in my mouth on the way back down, but not much else. Not even with those high-school-basketball-calf-enhancers could you jump and hit the ceiling with the tip of a broom. Thanks to Jeppe, the Danish don of dons, ours is the largest apartment I’ve ever “lived” in and is the stuff of lurid dreams: of covetous balls and banquets; the plotting of coups; the hurling of champagne glasses against the wall in fits of passionate fury; the sipping of muddy Turkish coffee and sucking down Camels with the gusto of a Gambian civil servant. Mind you, I do not associate any of this behavior with the Lebanese people or the inhabitants of Beirut: I merely associate it with very large apartments that line crumbling, old, narrow, prosperous city streets. When I make my fortune selling bananas, I shall build an entire city of replicas of this place.

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From Istanbul I arrived in Beirut around four in the morning, somewhat in a daze. We’d put back many a tinto after crashing a party at the Istanbul Modern earlier that night, and hadn’t time to pick up anything more substantial than a bean-paste Turkish taco for dinner. I fell asleep on the bus to the airport, but luckily made a maté once I got through security. Those rapacious dogs at the airport were charging $15 to get online, but Pepe, an Italian aide worker whom we’d bump into on the sidewalk bars the following night, lent me his computer to look up the address of the apartment we were subletting for the month.

For whatever reason, Beirut addresses do not have numbers, though I’ve been told that at some point in time they did. I wonder if it’s a remnant of the civil war, the national equivalent of the ‘streets having no name’. Instead, a Beiruti address is simply the name of a street, followed by the city (Peggy Sue’s Diner, 21^st Street, Duluth, MN). Occasionally someone will specify the name of the building and the floor, but I’m told that most people have a PO box at the post office where they receive their mail. Otherwise, you get by on landmarks. “I live on the fourth floor of the building above the bodega with the poster of an Alpine donkey, just next to _____ Armenian restaurant.” That’s fine, I tell my interlocutor, but how does _____ Armenian restaurant divulge its address? In relation to the Alpine donkey? 

In our case, the address was: “Rue ______, 100m after police station, across from _______ restaurant, light green building with the black iron door.” I’d scribbled it on the first old skittle-stained crumpled library receipt I could find at the bottom of my bag. (A side not: my traveling companion and I are pretending to be aspiring journalists, and yet neither of us ever has a pen or even a piece of paper. Instead, we are reduced to borrowing pens from our interlocutors and scribbling names, quotations, phone numbers, recipes, bank codes, and locations of hidden treasure onto our hands. We have a long ways to go before we do anything to remedy this situation).

At the bottom of the escalator, 100 meters before the passport control, a police or army-man rightly dubious of my credentials momentarily detains me (for all you fellow pompous, aspiring scribblers: never put “writer” as your profession when entering any country within 1000 miles of a war). For Syrians and Iraqis refugees fleeing vicious civil wars, they need papers, cash and credentials to legally enter Lebanon, but North Americans, Europeans and Australians can usually stroll through its cedar gates free of visa with a one-way plane ticket and an illegible address scribbled onto an old receipt: a glaring privilege we no doubt fail to appreciate.

Along with a group of dirty Scandinavian backpackers, I am taken aside. “Where are you staying, silly little man?” In the light-green building with the black iron door. “With whom?” A lady called _______. “What’s her phone number?” I forgot to write it down when I borrowed Pepe’s computer. “Well then find it.” After much struggle, I locate the number and hand it over. The senior bespectacled officer disappears around a corner, only to return 20 minutes later. She must have answered to their liking. “Her name is _______?’ Yes, her name is _______. “Ok, you are free to go.”

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I split a cab with two French girls and a Franco-Lebanese guy who, while charming, has command of neither French nor Arabic nor English. This makes for a poor chief cab-fare-negotiator in a city in which all three seem nearly universally and, at times, interchangeably spoken. All three of them were returning from Frogdom to resume their studies at the American University of Beirut (AUB), a most fascinating place and about which I should like to write a fair deal in future posts.

Now, there are many extremely gratifying aspects of traveling to new countries, but the most important by far is the initial 7-8 minutes after leaving the airport. These precious few minutes are like a first kiss with a girl you truly admire; your first time biting into a watermelon jelly-belly; the light and fiendishly pleasant fuzziness of your first encounter with alcohol. Whether it’s the new billboards; the mysterious hue of a new and unknown urban haze; an endless expanse of magically horrendous towers whose millions of inhabitants one dreams of drinking with some day but never will.

Only in these first few minutes do you know you’ve truly landed. After all, the airport security and passport check might all have been a hoax, a wildly elaborate Potemkin village. The pilot could have just as easily flown us to Arkansas or Azerbaijan and hired a hundred mustachioed ex-cons from gas stations on the Jersey turnpike to dress up as Lebanese border patrolmen. Is that really Arabic they’re speaking? Nay, only when you’ve left the airport and can see the buildings, see the flags, see the military checkpoints, see the ridiculous proportion of motorists that are heavily made-up, fantastically boogie, sunglass-donning, comically attractive Cayenne-and-Rover-pushing 34-year old mommies do you truly know you’ve actually arrived in Beirut.

The driver drops each of the three students off first. With flawless English and, somewhat surprisingly, very decent Spanish, he pontificates, feeding me cigarettes all the way. I’m weary of asking a sensitive question, so I smoke mostly in silence as he drives in circles pointing out local landmarks. We’re “looking for the right exit” but also investing more time in a collective shared experience that will no doubt lead to a magical doubling of the price. Yet since we’d already agreed upon the fare, I was happy to get a free tour and smoke his Marlboro lights.

Alas, in the road of life, all companions must eventually part – and my very first Lebanese companion insists on doubling the price the moment we arrive at said address. Such is the human condition! In the space of less than a minute, we go from the closest of compadres to the bitterest of foes. But, God willing, it’s 5:15 in the morning and I have finally arrived. I ring the buzzer of the light-green building with the black iron door.