Avoiding Prison & Other Noble Vacation Goals (31 page)

The first time the phone rang in response to our ad, I was pleasantly surprised. When Francisco hung up, I walked over to find out what had happened, but the phone rang again. Francisco gave me an excited smile and went to answer. And when he replaced the receiver five minutes later, the phone rang another time.

That day, I did not speak to my boyfriend. There was such a surge of interest in our trip to Florida that Francisco didn't even have time to eat. And when he finally couldn't hold it anymore and absolutely had to go to the bathroom, he handed the phone over to me so that I'd take over the incoming calls.

Frankly, I couldn't believe it. In Colombia, most people had even cut down on food—the other day our grocer had shaken his head and complained, “I don't understand why
my
business is suffering. In a bad economy, people still need to
eat”—
yet Francisco and I were having an incredible amount of success promoting a luxury trip abroad.

“Maybe they're bored,” I said to Francisco, lying in bed later that night. “None of them have jobs so they look through the classifieds. And they call our number because they have nothing better to do.”

Francisco shook his head and laughed.

“Well, how do you explain it?” I asked. “It doesn't make any sense.”

“Well, we'll just see who shows up tomorrow.”

We had told all of the interested callers to meet at the house the next evening at seven. By seven fifteen, the living room was packed. We had used up all the chairs, people were crammed onto the stairs, and latecomers were squeezing through the crowd trying to find a place to stand.

Meanwhile, I was going crazy in the kitchen. My job was to be a Proper Latina Hostess, which meant getting lemonade out to all the visitors. But we only had seven cups so as I squeezed lemons in the kitchen, Stephanie and Jenny would distribute drinks and then hover over the guests, waiting to snatch up an empty glass, which I would subsequently wash and refill for the next person.

Francisco was busy in the living room, charming the crowd that had gathered for the event. When he was in a good mood, Francisco could be eloquent and persuasive, and he talked about the trip in such compelling detail that he had managed to convince even me that we were headed to a tropical utopia, a place of happiness and sunshine that served as a model of peace and prosperity for the rest of the world. And the crowd was eating it up.

Everything was going great until he opened up the meeting to questions. I figured we'd get things like: “Does the hotel have a swimming pool?” “What meals are included?” “How much time will we have at the beach?” But the actual queries were nothing like this.

“So, no one's going to be following us around, right? Like, say at Disney World. We won't have a tour guide the whole time, right?”

“No, it's just a shuttle there and we meet up at the end of the day to return to the hotel.”

“Okay, if we don't make the flight back home, no one's going to look for us, right?”

This was starting to get weird. “Well, if you want to extend your visit, I don't think it would be a problem.”

“Right. So if we decided to stay, everyone else would go home. And no one would follow up on what happened to us, correct?”

And that was when I realized what was going on. No one cared about going to Disney World. They were looking for a way in to the United States. And our package deal provided them with a good shot at a visa, which was cheaper and safer than crossing the Mexican border illegally.

After the last one had shuffled out of the house, I shook my head and said to Francisco, “Oh my God! We've turned into coyotes!”
¹¹

Now that our big trip to Miami had ended in failure, Francisco and I were getting more and more desperate about earning a living.

“Well, what is it exactly
you
want to do?” Francisco asked, losing his patience. “Explain it to me one more time.”

It had always been a difficult concept for anyone living outside of NewYork or Los Angeles to grasp. Whenever I said I was a writer, people would stare back at me with a puzzled expression. “People
do
that?” I would be asked. So I was prepared to give Francisco a bit more explanation. I told him that I wrote radio commercials, magazine articles, television scripts—but these jobs weren't exactly in overabundance in Cali.

“Well, you're just going to have to do something else here,” Francisco insisted. “Unless your writing experience extends to doing ransom notes.”

It was an interesting idea and there certainly was a market for it in Cali: “Give your kidnapping the image it deserves. Hollywood writer will let people know you mean business, increase your chances of success, and ensure high profits.”

“I want to write for TV and film,” I explained to Francisco.

Francisco was still frustrated with me, but I could tell I had just given him an idea. “What is it?” I asked, wanting him to tell me what he was thinking.

“You know, you can find just about anything you want in the Yellow Pages,” he said mysteriously.

Francisco, who must have been a Hollywood agent in a past life, quickly took to the idea of having a job that involved getting paid when someone else worked. He hastily transformed himself into my unofficial manager, made a few calls to his new contacts picked from the pages of the phone book, jotted down some notes, and kept dialing. But by the fourth call, I realized that the case was pretty hopeless.

“Francisco, you have to accept the fact that we're in Colombia and you're not going to find a worthwhile film industry in a country where there isn't a significant Jewish population.”

Francisco ignored my comment and spoke into the receiver. The conversation that followed wasn't exactly encouraging.

“Good afternoon. Is this Studio One?”There was a pause. “Oh, is there an adult there I could speak to?”

“Hang up,” I insisted. “Give up.”

But he continued undaunted. “Could you put your dad on the phone?”

By the time Francisco hung up, he informed me that we had a date to do coffee with a Colombian film director.

Two hours later, we rang the bell of a once luxurious Spanish-style home that was now in need of a new coat of paint. A short, blue-eyed man with white hair, a beard, and a round belly answered the door and for a minute I began to think we had arrived at the North Pole instead of northern Cali. But the address seemed to be correct and since the only short people running around turned out to be his children, I assumed we were at the right place.

“Please come in. I'm Manfred Hirsch,” the man said, his eyes all a-twinkle.

“Colombian?” I asked.

“I'm Jewish,” he said. “Colombian too.”

I gave Francisco a knowing smirk and we made ourselves at home.

Colombian film was about as common as Alaskan oranges, meaning that neither one of them got a whole lot of press. If he really had wanted to make it big, Hollywood was where Manfred Hirsch should have been, though geography wasn't exactly his family's strong point. At least this is what I gathered when he told me that the reason his parents had wound up in Colombia in the 1930s was that they were trying to go to the North American continent.

“There seems to be some logical step I'm missing out on,” I commented to our host, who had turned out to be an amiable and funny man.

“Well, their English wasn't very good and they thought they were headed to
British
Columbia.”

Jewish exoduses always seemed to be riddled with problems: If it wasn't the Red Sea, then it was the Caribbean. I imagined the Hirsch family disembarking from the plane expecting to see maple trees and people who said “eh,” and instead finding themselves surrounded by coca plants and people who said, “Give me all your money or I'll kill you.” It must have been some shock.

Before meeting Manfred and his wife, Cristina, my biggest sense of personal accomplishment had come from leaving to buy bread in the morning and returning home without being kidnapped. But now my days were spent with Francisco at the Hirsch house, mornings filled with mugs of steaming coffee and afternoons spent dreaming out loud of a burgeoning Colombian film market.

For the next four months, it seemed that every time I looked up, there was Manfred in front of me, grinning mischievously, smoking a cigarette, wearing cut-off shorts, an old T-shirt, and cheap flipflops. He was a bit of an eccentric as far as wealthy Colombians went. Whenever he was invited to any social function, he meandered unselfconsciously among the overly dressed and overly jeweled socialites, never wearing anything more formal than faded jeans and the occasional long-sleeved shirt.

The four of us would sit in his living room filled with worn antiques, and although Cristina and Francisco did their part to contribute to the stories and ideas being shared, it was obvious that the group camaraderie centered around Manfred and me. He and I were a strange pair—he was more than thirty years my senior and had a wife and five kids—and I'm sure that anyone who ever saw us walking down the street struggled to figure out the nature of our relationship, but he wasn't a father figure or even a mentor to me. As bizarre as it may have seemed, Manfred and I had become best friends.

We simply couldn't get enough of each other. Practically every afternoon (never in the morning—Manfred and Cristina were night owls and never got up before noon), Francisco and I would head over to their house and spend the rest of the day engrossed in the kind of intense conversation I had rarely experienced since college: personal anecdotes, philosophical musings, and funny stories. When this had gone on for hours and the guilt started to set in, we'd finally buckle down and get some work done.

In addition to enjoying each other's company, Manfred and I had discovered that we were perfectly suited as creative partners. What Manfred's business lacked was a good writer and what my writing lacked was an income, so the two of us hoped to pool our experience in producing TV ads.

Manfred had never invested much effort into marketing himself and his production company had collapsed along with the economy, but we had a strategy to revive his flagging business: Francisco would be in charge of rounding up clients, I'd write the ads and come up with some cutting-edge promotional materials, Manfred would direct, and Cristina would oversee production.

We'd already invested months in the project and had yet to see any income—Manfred couldn't afford to pay us until we actually sold a commercial. My savings had dwindled down to just over a thousand dollars, but it was still okay. I guess I had been in the country long enough to let a little bit of Colombian optimism seep in.

December rolled around, which provided me with a unique problem: I really didn't want to go to Bolivia for Christmas. Why didn't other people have these kinds of dilemmas? As I lay in bed staring out the window (Francisco was still asleep), I searched my memory for any advice I might once have heard, but there simply wasn't any—not one time had a single friend of mine come up to me and complained: “My parents just don't get it. I don't want to visit the Andes.”

I didn't want to go to Bolivia, but my reasons had nothing to do with what was surely a very nice country. Basically, I didn't want to be anywhere near my parents, two people who would require a lot of nice happy chatting from me in spite of the fact that I was jobless and nearly broke in Colombia.

Just a month earlier, I'd made a difficult attempt at self-revelation, trying to tell my parents the truth of what had been going on in my life. Through several e-mails and one long distance call, I had somehow managed to give them the condensed version of meeting Francisco, freeing him from prison, and fleeing to Colombia, but as usual news of my life seemed to fly right past them. I have no idea how my father took this information, but my mother (who was always the one to write or pick up the phone) was just interested in knowing if life in Colombia was like she had seen in the movies, and she asked hopefully if there was any chance that I was hanging out with CIA agents, drug traffickers, and hit men. The only thing she had to say on the topic of Francisco was that she was glad I finally had a boyfriend, and was there any chance that it was serious so that she could look forward to me settling down?

I had hung up the phone, even more convinced in my belief that my parents had never actually listened to me. Was there nothing I could do to get them to pay attention to
my life
instead of their own?

No, probably not. So I decided I wouldn't be bitter or ugly about it, I would just move on. We'd break up, the same way women and men did all the time. Our expectations didn't match so it was time to look for someone more compatible. It really was in everyone's best interest. Besides, they were young and attractive; they'd find themselves a new kid. And maybe after a little while, we could even be just friends.

Could it be as simple as that? No, of course not. Everyone needs to know
why
you're dumping them if they're going to move on. Should I pause before giving them the reason so they'd think I hadn't been dwelling on this for the past decade? Hmmmm, let's see, what could the reason be? Here we go, this is it, simple: “You never once said, ‘What can I do to help?'” There's your reason, Mom and Dad. Happy now?

That was my reason, but I didn't have the guts to say it. I sucked at breaking up. So I'd see them and pretend that everything was okay, just like I had always done.

As if the thought of spending two weeks with my parents didn't distress me enough, there was also the troublesome issue of how I was going to get there. In my most recent phone conversation with my mother, she had explained the complicated logistics of my impending trip. The first step was to pick up my plane ticket, which she had arranged to have waiting for me at a nearby airport, conveniently located just three hundred miles away.