Avoiding Prison & Other Noble Vacation Goals (35 page)

My friend Michael begged to differ. He was one of my oldest friends and the best thing I'd gotten out of a miserable year of high school in Montana. Over the course of a week's worth of lengthy phone chats made secretly from my aunt and uncle's balcony (drinking had a way of making me indifferent to the financial consequences of long-distance calls), he had been insisting I come stay with him and his wife for a while. Their home was small but it had an extra bedroom. I could stay months if necessary—whatever it took until I got the money to return to Cali.

It was a simple matter to quickly pack my bags, wish my sister all the best in Peru, and manage a disingenuous but cordial-seeming farewell with my relatives. Then it was a quick flight to Jacksonville and a slightly longer shuttle ride to Gainesville, and by the end of the day I had arrived in a humid, tree-filled city where everything was named Gator. There was Gator Gasoline, Gator Books, Gator Car Wash, Gator Insurance, and of course lots of Gatorade. And there was my friend Michael sporting a blue-and-orange Gator T-shirt, the same as I had remembered him: warm and funny with a smile that had a way of erasing all the years.

It had been a long time since I had last seen Michael. After graduating from college, he had moved to some remote country in Africa so I had been forced to content myself with the occasional postcard or news from secondhand sources about what was going on with his life. I hadn't heard anything from him for several years when an envelope covered in stamps from Namibia arrived at my apartment in Los Angeles. Michael was asking me to be his “best man” at his wedding. I desperately wanted to fly out to Africa for the ceremony, but the announcement had arrived too late—I had already purchased a nonrefundable ticket to visit my parents in Honduras.

Michael and his new wife, Sharon, a slender and graceful black South African, had returned to the United States a year later and had settled on Gainesville practically at random. They had wanted to live in a university town—both of them eventually hoped to complete their master's degrees—and Gainesville offered the added advantage of humidity. Having spent the past few years in arid Namibia, Sharon wanted to experience the rain.

I arrived on their front steps pretty much resigned to being miserable until I saw Francisco again, but goodwill diffused its way through their tiny home, infecting me in the process. I settled in to the sky-blue room they had painted in anticipation of my arrival and was amazed at how far out of their way they went to make me feel welcome. Over the next few weeks Michael raced ahead of me every time there was a cash register in sight, paying for any purchase even when I was picking up personal items at the drugstore. Sharon started showing up with small gifts for me—on different occasions, I received a shirt, a purse, shorts, lotion, and sweet-smelling shampoos. Apparently, the idea of two lovers being separated by a continent was a story that struck a cord with her, and as we huddled around the kitchen table over her exotic homemade curries, she would press me for information about my relationship, reveling in all the romantic details of my meeting Francisco in a prison. On a few occasions, she even dragged me down to the Western Union office and handed over a handful of twenty-dollar bills to be wired to Colombia to ensure Francisco's survival.

I was embarrassed at their generosity, but reluctantly accepted the money. By now Francisco's precarious situation had become a source of continual worry. Instead of earning a salary, cabdrivers lived off of the money handed over by passengers. Unfortunately, the rental fee Francisco paid to the owner of the vehicle often exceeded what he made in a day. Day after day, I could feel him losing hope. I kept reassuring him that there was an end in sight, that I'd be returning to Cali with money, that we'd move to Bogotá where the economy was better and we'd quickly find work. He just had to hold out a little while longer.

My plan was to get a quick job and make the money I needed to return to my boyfriend, and Michael and Sharon's plan was to get me to Colombia in as sober a state as possible. My current lifestyle that included drinking before noon was not exactly gelling too well with their lifestyle that included eating a well-balanced nutritious breakfast, so I figured I could at least make an effort, and I started adding orange juice to my vodka in the morning.

Trying to get a handle on all of my vices and please the friends who were being so kind to me, I decided to also cut down on my cigarette use, limiting my smoking to the time I was drinking. It was a good plan in theory, but now according to my own rules every time I wanted a dose of nicotine, I also had to pour myself a cocktail—so instead of cutting back on smoking, the result was just an increase in my alcohol consumption.

Realizing that this couldn't go on much longer, I decided to resort to drastic measures. With a great deal of effort, I finally threw out my pack of cigarettes, slept through my last hangover, and fit myself with a new pair of running shoes.

I liked the track where I had chosen to go jogging. It was just four blocks from Sharon and Michael's house, was usually uncrowded, and partially shaded by trees. The only problem was that it was next to a mental institution. Unfortunately the lunatics liked to use the track during their free time (which people living in asylums seemed to have a little too much of).

Now had it been the personality-less catatonics who were accustomed to head out for a nice leisurely stroll, there wouldn't have been much of a problem (other than the getting-them-to-move issue), but for some reason my running track seemed to attract every loudmouthed patient with Tourette's syndrome. Each time I passed them, they would bark “woof woof woof” at me like angry German shepherds.

Then there were the people who didn't quite understand the purpose of the white lines painted onto the asphalt. Instead of seeing them as friendly guides to help them stay in one lane, the patients viewed them as obstacles to be jumped over. Every time they heard my footsteps behind them, they would begin hopscotching over the lines, determined to keep me from getting past. I'd go to the right, they'd go to the right. I'd move to the left; they'd do the same. The only way around them was to head onto the grass, which for some strange crazy reason they seemed to have an aversion to.

But the most unsettling patient was the “I want some of that ass” guy. Each time I would sprint on ahead of him (I wouldn't have had nearly as many problems had the lunatics been in better shape and run a bit faster than me), he would launch into a lengthy monologue on the quality of all of my most private physical features (most of which were described as “juicy”) and remind his companion that he was gonna get himself some of that juicy ass.

The bright side was, I ran extra fast on lunatic days.

I still missed Francisco terribly, but somehow over the next two and a half months, I managed to settle into a simple routine that was pretty close to being happy. The change was physical as well as mental. The healthy food and exercise were having their effect and my body was turning into a mass of hard muscle that I no longer recognized. I'd run my hand over my newly flat stomach, my toned limbs, amazed that with all the experience I had owning arms and legs (twenty-seven years), not once had it occurred to me that they could ever look like this.

In the past, my muscles had been like petulant children, doing my bidding only at the prospect of a reward. “Come on, if you take me to the fridge, I promise you'll get a beer.” “Just a few laps around the track and we'll have some nice chocolate, the kind you like from Switzerland.” But now, there was every indication that my little limbs had finally grown up. Getting them to move no longer required guilt trips or pleading. They did my bidding simply because I asked them to. Now I could run five miles a day without struggling. Even when I was simply strolling across the room, there was an agility I had never experienced before.

The improvement I was making to my physical self began spilling over into the rest of my life. With a bolt of confidence, I had whizzed my way through an interview at a nearby temporary agency and was now a full-time secretary at the City Attorney's Office, which sounded dull but was actually a mellow job working with nice people. My boss was a well-meaning, slightly timid lawyer just a few years older than me, who treated me as his equal, enthusiastically accepted my edits to his dictated letters, and cheerfully tolerated the misspellings I inserted into his correspondence, a result of having written exclusively in a foreign language for the past two years.

For the first time in my life, I didn't mind the routine of going into work every day. This was partly because I realized how important my job was to my future—it was my only means of returning to Francisco—but there was something else as well. Now when I looked outside the window of the office, the world looked different, in a way that had nothing to do with the view. In the past, having a job had meant missing out on something. But now, instead of longing to be out there, instead of wondering what lay beyond the window—now I knew.

This realization was almost spiritual. For someone without religion, whose actions weren't centered around earning brownie points to be redeemed in the next world, my creed had long been an attempt to get the most out of the life I had, the existence I was sure of. I had been striving to avoid the destiny that plagued so many of the people I knew. Growing up, I had gotten the same advice repeated to me—sometimes it had been from a teacher, other times from a friend of my parents, a woman in line at the post office, or a man selling shoes at the mall—the faces were different but they all had the same thing to say: Don't marry prematurely. Don't have kids early. Travel as soon as possible. You're only young once.

I had done exactly as they had advised, but without the end result they had anticipated. They believed that if you managed to cram enough happiness in by the time you were thirty, it would last you for the rest of your life. You'd always have a pleasing memory to call up from the reserve tank when times got tough. I was free of children, I had yet to get married, I had traveled, but my attempt to avoid responsibility had been fleeting. Travel didn't protect you from the dark side as I had once hoped. It merely allowed you to experience everything—the good with the bad—more fully.

When I relived the memories of the past two years of my life, I recalled terrible things: hunger, fear, sorrow, and loss. I had seen prisons and war, crime, and injustice. I hadn't found lightheartedness; I had discovered intensity, which probably served me better. The people who had populated my childhood still looked out the window holding on to the illusion that happiness was out there. I looked outside, content for once to be where I was, aware of the fact that I wasn't missing out on anything.

Of course, just when you think you've got it all figured out, just when you're sure the foundation for your life is sturdy, one new piece of information can shift the continental plate of your existence, making your whole worldview come tumbling down in an instant.

When I opened the e-mail from Francisco and read the introduction, I knew to expect the worst.

Dear Wendy,

Something has weighed down on me for weeks. I thought I would tell you about it when you got here, but I can't stand the guilt.

This was not my favorite e-mail greeting. As far as good openings went, I tended to prefer the romantic “You are the best thing that has ever happened to me,” “My darling dearest,” or even the trite “How are you? I am fine” to the heavy “There's something I have to tell you” bit. This was not good, not good at all.

The e-mail confirmed what I had feared all along. Out of hunger, fear, and a desire to take action instead of idly sitting by, Francisco had gotten himself a fake passport in the hopes of scoring a trip to transport drugs abroad. He regretted it, he was sorry, he promised he wouldn't go through with it. It was the only solution that had occurred to him on a day when he hadn't had anything to eat.

The e-mail terrified me, but I forced myself to see his side of the situation. After all, I knew the power that hunger could wield. Francisco hadn't carried his plan out; he had confessed. I would have to forgive him. I would be there in just three weeks. Twenty-one short days to go.

Just for the sake of argument, let's imagine for a minute that Francisco wasn't a part of my life. Let's say that something happened to him, something painless and relatively benign—he got abducted by aliens (the nice kind, not the cavity-probing variety) and they decided to take him off to their home of Politak, a planet where they spoke a slightly modified version of Portuguese and (in what turned out to be an incredibly strange intergalactic coincidence) spent their days preparing for Carnavalak, a holiday that consisted of wearing elaborate costumes, a festive parade, and the consumption of Tumorak, the planet's most popular beverage (a success it had achieved in spite of the unfortunate double-entrendre of its marketing tag line, which roughly translated meant “This tumor's for you.”)

Okay, so let's imagine that Francisco is out of the picture, residing far away on a bucolic planet drinking lots of
cocteles do tumor,
and I'm in Gainesville, Florida, living a relatively contented existence now that all the city's known serial killers have been rounded up and prosecuted. What would I do? How would my life change if I didn't have to consider Francisco's welfare?

Okay, so maybe these weren't the nicest kinds of thoughts to be having, but it could have been worse—I could have had Francisco stranded on Ort, a place without festivities of any kind where the only variety to be experienced in this homogenously boring planet covered completely in sand was the ingestion of a drug called
plob,
which was the earthly equivalent of getting shot up with novocaine. I had the decency to get Francisco exiled to an intergalactic paradise, which I actually considered pretty generous on my part. On second thought, after learning what Francisco had recently done, perhaps Ort was a better place for him.