Two Legs in Lebaon: Last Leg

That overpowering weakness, that helpless sense of the inertia of the universe finally getting the best of me had happened once before in Lebanon, on my first trip to the country a year earlier. After my first stint at Baalbak, the Roman ruins, I took a white van to a little wine city called Zahle. I got off on the main drag, Rue Brazil, and went out to one of the few local clubs in the city. I had a few drinks, but nothing to do major damage, and woke up with a feeling like the world was breaking to pieces around me. I’d come to the town to hit up the famous wineries for some tasting, but there was no way I could drink that day and probably the next, so I sucked it up and caught another anonymous white van back to Beirut. When I got back to the city I went over to Hamra, (though it would be another year before I was aware of all the excellent watering holes that existed there) because I’d heard they had some decent mid-range hotels.

I checked into one and as soon as I got into my room I popped. I threw up and then immediately tried to sleep it off, but before I could fall asleep my body was lurched with an attack from the other end. I spent the next 12 hours existing in a hell that consisted entirely of vomiting and diarrhea. I called room service and had them bring up some giant bottles of water, and though nowhere near hungry I knew I had to put something in my system so I ordered a breakfast spread. The only thing I could touch was the toast. After 18 hours in the hotel, unable to move further than the toilet, unable to eat or hold anything down, barely able to even move the breakfast tray off the bed when a column of ants appeared from nowhere to devour it, I had to admit that this was probably not caused by a half dozen vodka and red bulls. Sometime around midnight I tried to drink as much water as I could and summon up the energy to take a shower and change clothes. I went down to the front desk and asked them to call me a taxi for the hospital.

The cab dropped me off at the nearby American University Hospital and I shambled in. Every muscle ached, my head throbbed, and I probably couldn’t have lifted a folding chair if I wanted to. I was in the hospital alone, after midnight and the hallways were nearly deserted. Some guards finally pointed me in the direction of the reception desk, and I began to fill out forms, but I was having trouble focusing enough to even read what they said. I think I was lucky though, because after the forms were filled out there was no line and they took me straight into a bed in triage. A rather attractive doctor lady came over and I described my symptoms and she asked me about what I’d been eating etc…

I was too laid up to think of even the obvious cause of food poison in the last day. Then, talking to another human being for the first time in about 24 hours it dawned on me. The water. You might not remember it because it happened about 20 pages ago, but a few days before a cabbie had driven me to a mountain village, poured out my bottle of water, and filled it up at that “famous mountain spring.” “The water,” I told the doctor.

The doctor looked at me with a mix of curiosity and pity and it occurred to me that I might have stopped talking about five minutes ago, that my brain was moving at glacial speeds, and I just blurted something out completely out of context. “I drank the spring water in Bcharre.”

The pretty lady doctor hooked me up to an IV of saline and took some blood to run a test. I was left in the quiet, empty triage room for a while as I watched my body soak up the saline like a desert plant. After about ten minutes the entire IV bag was drained and lacking anything going in, blood started going in the other direction, up the tube toward the bag. Knowing absolutely nothing about medicine this seemed to me like a bad thing. I called out, but probably in a weak voice, for someone to come do something authoritative and medical as my horror rose with every centimeter the blood moved up the tube. A male doctor opened the curtain and looking at it actually said, “Damn, that was fast.”

He immediately hooked up a new bag. This one lasted a little longer, but also drained in less than a half hour, and they hooked up a third. I had had no idea how badly dehydrated my bouts of toilet explosions had made me. I don’t know how long it was before the lady doctor came back in and told me that I had Giardia. An intestinal parasite had climbed down that god damn mountain and lodged itself into my intestines with that stupid spring water. After I’d been re-hydrated they gave me a few medicines they said would help the symptoms but other than that they said that I had to just “wait it out.”

I walked out of the hospital not feeling much better than when I went in, and managed to hail a lone cab a few blocks away. I slept for a while and then shambled out to an internet café to find a cheaper hotel to “wait it out” in. I wrote down a few names and addresses and phone numbers, checked out of my hotel and put my giant, now incredibly heavy backpack in the trunk of a cab, and told him where to go. He had no idea where to go. I got out of the cab and closed the door and the cabbie took off down the road…with my bag in the trunk. I could barely walk when I got into the cab but somewhere in me I found the adrenaline to go into a full sprint for three blocks before the cab was finally slowed down by traffic and I hammered the trunk with all the force I could muster before he opened it up. I grabbed my bag and started screaming at him but he looked more indifferent than shamed or angry. People in the nearby cafes starting staring, I had completely lost my cool, and when the traffic eased he simply drove off. The expense of all that energy that I didn’t have to spare took its toll immediately, all I wanted to do was pass out for a month. The backpack felt like it was filled with cement when I finally got it back on, and I walked. I walked, and I asked for directions, and I walked, and I asked for directions and I walked. The cheap hotel, across from the American University of Beirut was close, only ten or fifteen blocks at most, but it took at least an hour to get there. By the time I checked in and got into the small elevator my sense of space and time had become so distorted that I might as well have been floating into space, and not the third floor.

The room was surprisingly large, had a little couch and table area and two beds. The bathroom was small but clean, and the TV had about a dozen channels and two or three were English language. This was home for the foreseeable future. I was asleep before my head hit the pillow.

When I woke up it was dark out. While the last 48 hours had simply been a grind from one awful moment to the next I finally had to take stock of my situation. I was absolutely and completely alone, in a country that was alien to me, a city I didn’t know very well, with a language I didn’t speak, bed-ridden with an intestinal parasite that would keep me that way for god knows how long, not nauseous anymore but still plagued with diarrhea every hour, with a splitting headache, no computer, no internet, and a phone without any numbers in it. I would consider this a rather low point in my travels.

There was a McDonald’s next to the hotel, but even the word Mcdonald’s turned my stomach. There was a convenience store about 50 feet from the hotel. That is the farthest I would move for five days. In the prison of my hotel room I would drink water and Gatorade and eat crackers and bread. Then I would shit all of it out and start over again. I would sleep whenever sleep came and shower a couple of times a day. I read Foucalt’s Pendulum and watched bad action movies on TV. To those of you who know me well, this may mean more, but for a week in that room I didn’t even have the energy to pace. I was still in many ways lucky though. The hotel was cheap and my bank account was flushed with cash anyway. I still had another week of vacation before I had to get anywhere near my job, and I bought a few books in the days before. I didn’t have malaria, I didn’t have dysentery or dengue fever, the doctors seemed fairly convinced this little bastard wouldn’t do much permanent damage, still, I was a little bit upset with Lebanon for fucking poisoning me and I vowed never to drink spring water again.

I wish I could say that this bout of sedentary suffering brought me to some kind of spiritual clarity, some mind-altering revelation in the bliss of inner solitude, but when I look back at my notebooks there is simply a dead space. I wasn’t dying, there was no love affair with a nurse, and there were no great flashes of inspiration. It was just a waste of time. It was an absence from a world that wasn’t particularly missing me at the moment, because I’d already been gone so long. The vast majority of people I know didn’t know where I was, probably didn’t know what country I was living in, let alone where I was sick on vacation. If I was Sartre or Camus this void might have had profound implications, but I am not nor will I ever be blessed as they were to turn the pangs of boredom into labyrinths of philosophy. If you’ve even managed to get this far into the drunken haze of these travels I’d count you a saint. And so it was that I woke up during the day or night, with equal meaninglessness as the clocks of the world continued to peel away the flesh of time. And on the fifth day all was right again. It was September 11th.

I woke up early in the morning and felt good enough for a walk. I strolled down to the Corniche, breathing the air of the Mediterranean like it was fused with narcotics. I was not feeling particularly adventurous so I walked into the hard rock café and devoured two full, massive American sized meals one after the other. As I coasted back to the hotel I noticed a hubbub on Hamra street. It was the last day a street festival, the first time they’ve held it since before the last Israeli incursion a few years ago. After five days of not seeing or talking to another human being it was refreshing being surrounded by so many, selling art or shirts or home-made foods of some kind or other. I wandered from one end of the festival to the other, at one side there was Arab rap, somewhere in the middle Arab indie rock, and at the other end a young male American Idolesque pop act. This was the same night that I had tickets to see Above and Beyond though.

As night fell I took a cab to the edge of the city to the Forum de Beyrouth and almost danced into the VIP line where I was quickly ushered to the upper floor. On the ninth anniversary of the Trade Center I stood in the middle of the darkness as the first notes of a British Trance act wafted over a crowd of Christian and Muslim Arabs drinking vodka and rolling on ecstasy. It was a good night.

On the last morning of my second trip to Lebanon I woke up early for once, and caught a cab to one of the tourist sites I’d missed my first time in the country, missed again while sleeping in after a night out with the best man, and determined to get to if it was the last thing I did (and it was) in Lebanon. The cabbie was a bit rotund, exceptionally pushy, and jovial. I also discovered that Lebanese national treasures were not the best places to visit during Lebanese national holidays…and that day some god damned saint was recognized for something or other. The Jeita Grotto, a series of massive limestone caves, was located in a valley about 40 minutes from the center of Beirut. We crested a mountain where a gigantic my buddy Jesus statue was built (think the one you constantly see pictures of above Rio de Janeiro) and began moving down toward the parking lot. Cars were parked on both sides of the narrow mountain road for at least three miles from the entrance. There must have been 50 tour buses parked at the gate, and I was surprised when the cabbie got out of the car and expected to tour the site with me. I was even more surprised when he asked that I pay for his ticket, but a little less surprised that the only reason I got a ticket was because he put his head down and charged headlong into the line, pushing people out of the way in a bull rush.

He disappeared into the mass of people and ten minutes later popped out with two tickets, which was probably worth the few extra bucks for his entrance. We then moved up a hill dotted with small statues and bizarre little animal cages filled with garden variety farm animals. The mountains stared down with their particularly Lebanese sense of majesty mixed with disappointment and five minutes into our climb my cabbie/guide needed a break to catch his breath. In English our conversation was limited to him yelling, “Steve wait,” or after he stopped me, “Steve look.” However, the man was a natural conversationalist in Arabic as I think he engaged almost every human being in the park in conversation and pinched the cheek or kissed the foreheads of more babies than a long shot Republican contender for public office. When we got to the upper grotto I was introduced to a half dozen Iraqis by the cab driver, and as the conversation almost always inevitably does our talk took about thirty seconds to devolve into discussing brands of whiskey.

The upper grotto was an absolutely stunning and magnificent cave system, elaborately lit, with impressive and even safe walkways throughout. I remain firm in my belief though that there is no location, moment, or image nature has ever created that cannot be destroyed or diminished by being viewed along with too many other people. The Arab notion of “inside voices” is also wildly different from our own. After the upper grotto we waited on another line at the lower grotto. After we got inside we waited on another line, to get onto a boat.

On the boat line my guide had ample time to make friends, but I was on a bit of a deadline as I had to be on a plane in a few hours and the delay was beginning to irk me. I suspect it began to irk others as well. There were apparently rival groups of teenagers or twenty-somethings or whatever age Lebanese boys are imbued with more testosterone than brains and some kind of screaming, demonstrative argument broke out between bunches of guys about 50 feet apart in the line. I was excited because the group directly in front of me looked like they were ready to climb the rails and attack the group behind me, and I’d move up in the line a bit. A group of older men seemed to embarrass them into shutting up a while later and that was that. It had a bit of a Jets vs. Sharks feel to it and I wish someone could have explained to me what it was about, but I have no idea whether this was a high school rivalry, Shia/Sunni/Christian rivalry, mountain people/sea people rivalry, or a crips/bloods thing, but nobody got sliced and we finally got on the god damn stupid little boat a half hour later.

The natural opulence of the chamber we floated through was absolutely breathtaking. The rock formations, shaved to their spindles by dripping water for millions of years created incredibly complex geometric sculptures everywhere. Our necks craned skyward and for about a minute and a half nobody said anything. It was a wonderful blissful moment of peace after the crash of humanity in the hours before. It was of course broken, as everything around Beirut usually is, by excited conversation. Boats passed each other, people hollered, some sang soccer songs, and I figured fuck it, so I started singing to. I started singing the Willy Wonka acid trip boat song…”No one knows where we’re going, or where the oars are rowing,” and to my surprise they were all so mystified by it that they stopped what they were doing to listen to me. I was staring up the whole time and when I looked back down the dozen people in the boat were all staring at me. My cabbie punched my arm, “Steve, what song is that?”

I thought for a second, knowing and explanation would be impossible, and said, “The Rolling Stones.”

The whole boat nodded in unison as if they now recognized the song. Soon after my frees-style, cave-karaoke boat ride was over. I got back in the cab and waited on the hill in traffic for an hour. Cutting loose of the interminable tourists was like reaching escape velocity from the corona of a black hole, but it was smooth sailing back to my host’s apartment after that.

On the last ride to the airport my host points to the left, “that is the Palestinian camp (Shatila) over there, the one where the Phalange and the Israelis had the massacre in 1982.”

And at that I wonder how long it takes the remnants of gore to become a history worthy of remembrance. At what point does the majesty of a crusader castle engulf the atrocities associated with the life around and within its now quiet walls. The life the people of Lebanon lead is hard to imagine for me, and that probably holds true for any time in their past.

My host smiles again as he says this, just playing the tour guide, and I’m transported back to his balcony, staring at a circular hole in the plaster that was made by a stray round from a machine gun and has never been patched, maybe on purpose. In Beirut if something looks like a bullet hole, it is. I see the hallways in his apartment where he says they slept, to be away from the windows through the gunfire and mortar blasts. Everywhere in this country are the shrapnel of man and the shrapnel of time, each chipping away the chance for peace.

Days before one of my Christian, mountain guides drove me through the manicured roads of the new downtown, a place where the city was so damaged that it simply melted away. He bemoans the loss of a Christian haven, rebuilt by Hariri’s monolithic construction company, a Lebanese Haliburton, gerrymandering a whole swath of cityscape under Muslim control. In a mixture of grief and pride are population statistics spoken by Christians. There are twelve million Lebanese living outside of Lebanon, and four million within the borders. The country would be sixty percent Christian if all were to return, and without them it is sixty percent Muslim inside the border. In the next breath he will move to how successful the Lebanese are abroad, how they blessed the world with its beauty in the form of Shakira and Selma Hayek and the less famous but just as beautiful cross-strains of their lovely DNA. Their loss is our gain, and if you Google Lebanese restaurants, regardless of what city in the world you call home, there’s probably one not far away.

I spent a lot of time drinking with a Muslim bartender who took shots of Absinthe from a bottle with a picture of Van Gogh on the label, discussing American culture, Lebanese life and the invisible enemy of hate. One night at the Boston bar a TV tuned to the fashion channel silently droned a commercial full of bikini-clad beauties and ended with a plea to visit Tel Aviv from the Israeli Ministry of Tourism. It would be the equivalent of Osama bin Laden urging citizens to Jihad in a commercial during the Superbowl.

There is a precarious balance on the individual level that incorporates every possible kind of contradiction. Beirut is like a Middle Eastern autoclave spinning these disparate pieces of humanity together at speeds that defy reason and logic in a furious attempt to manufacture a vaccine against its own history. The country ripples with the energy of a patient emerging from a hospital after cheating certain death, re-energized. The construction is everywhere, from the sleepy mountain towns to the blasted center of the capital.

Lebanon is nationalized motion. A place where you not only learn, but you feel, to the core, that compromise is not a synonym for weakness, but one for progress. In Lebanon the capacity for love and hatred of your neighbors is sometimes dimmed and muted by their proximity, and sometimes amplified and accelerated by their ferocity, but in the end all sides strike a peculiar balance. This small country has its own system of tectonics, plates of religion and class and ethnicity and history that grind into the viscous volcanism of war, and divide into an aquamarine abyss where music and vision dance out to the starry perimeters. There is no sense of moderation in the movements of its past or the lives of its people. There is simply an eternal high-wire act between the extremes.

When I came back to Saudi and looked through my notebook I saw a page that I didn’t remember writing, it was scribbled in sometime during the last night of my Hamra bender by the Fresh Prince, and it stands like an epithet to the journey:

“If you’re gonna wright about the truth, wright about the truth that’s afraid to be told as the truth, that really is the truth, that’s lied about the truth to the truthful people, and to the people who seek the truth, know that they need to be mature enough to realize that there is no true truth.”

This story may contain only the ramblings of a traveler impressed with a place that in a decade I could never hope to truly understand, but the ultimate truth, that there is no universal truth should be qualified with one parting shot against the chaos. The truth is something we believe because it’s something we make. We are all hoarders of our own collections of truth, we love because of it, we kill because of it, we carry it with us to the grave where it is lost forever, its strands collected in the people we’ve touched, its shards reconstituted, re-formed in the crucible of our struggles to understand that which we cannot see.

A Palestinian author, Elias Khoury, once quipped that, “Memory is the process of organizing what to forget.” So I sit here, struggling against the inertia of memory, thinking that the search for the truth is simply the process of endlessly asking yourself why you remember.

Two Legs In Lebanon: Part III

Consequently, six days was also the length of time I’d spend in Beirut after my friend’s wedding in Kfardebien. The day after his wedding, while he and his wife were exploring the finer points of Italian cuisine in Southern Italy, we piled our bags into two cars and flew down the rainy mountain into Beirut, to the apartment of a Lebanese guy who was a Hash friend from Jeddah (this refers to the running group “Hash House Harriers” and not a drug dealer or stoned acquaintance).

There were 7 of us in all, and this ungainly number led me to do something I swore I’d never do, rent a car in Beirut. We were splayed out across all the rooms of his sprawling apartment, and if we were going to travel anywhere we wouldn’t be able to do it in one compact car. In the morning of our first day in Beirut I found myself smoking a cigarillo in a little office not far from our apartment waiting for a man to come give me a car. His secretary was disappointingly marmish, but what came after made up for it. The rental agency was not “legal” per say, and the man told me because I was a foreigner and insurance would be nearly impossible to procure. So I went to an ‘underground’ rental agency, was rejected for the obvious reason that I had no business driving feaux rental cars from an unlicensed rental agency and was then spirited away to the Lebanese equivalent of Hertz.

Every time I rent a French car I understand that our change over to renewable resources is going to be painful. It’s not that these shitty, underpowered French cars actually run on anything other than oil, but when I see the car struggling to get up a hill, like a retiree with a plastic hip, I think that in a world without oil this is similar to what many will be driving for a while.

Into this abominable snow-globe clambered the best man and the Canadian wife as we made our maiden voyage in the rental car. We were going to…Baalbek. Yes, the journey you just completed a few paragraphs and one year ago. The destination looked just as I’d remembered it. The new adventure, however, was driving there. Lebanon is a country of mountains and valleys. I discovered this first while trying to dodge the heat in Byblos when I slipped into a tourist information center for a dose of air-conditioning. A helpful young lady and her flamboyant friend explained the four finger rule of Lebanese geography to me.

The first finger (the index finger) is the coast, the Mediterranean Sea; its beaches and wharfs and rocks, the bulk of the population, the bulk of the parties, the bulk of the booze, and the bulk of the Christians. The second finger was a range of mountains; this includes Mt. Lebanon, Kfardebien, where the wedding happened, Bcharre and Hachet, where the other wedding happened, and a bunch of other mountain people towns. It seems to be mostly Christian, Sunni Muslim, and Druze. The third finger was the Bekaa Valley. This is the breadbasket of Lebanon, where the bulk of cereal crops are grown, where the bulk of grapes used for wine and Arak (a national licorice-flavored, grape-based firewater), and where the bulk of the Shi’a Muslims hail from (also home of Hezbollah). The fourth finger is the dominant mountain range that makes up the Syrian border. It is dead, dry, and porous.

For those of you who are at all interested in the region, you may also note that the fourth finger is the very likely start of the Middle East’s next war. (or if I’ve been too lazy to post this very quickly “latest war”). Syrian dissidents living in Lebanon, and now an increasing number of army and military deserters, have been running across the Syrian-Lebanese “fourth finger” border for the last few weeks, conducting hit and run raids against caches of weapons or directly against Syrian troops. Often they’ve been mixing with or coming directly from the refugee camps being hastily erected. It is a situation very like the Afghan-Pakistani border and will probably end just as well for everyone involved. We’d be driving from the first finger to the fourth on this little journey.

I’ve been told that in Canada driving is not measured by miles or kilometers, but by hours. In Lebanon, such a tiny country, I have a very different measure of drive-time distances. When I ask how far something is, people would invariably say, “oh it’s too far away,” when in reality almost nothing in the country was more than a three hour drive from Beirut. It’s not the time (which is usually very short) or the distance (which is also usually very short) but predicted number of Near Death Collisions that should really mark the length of a calm, country excursion. Our drive to Baalbek was less than three hours, but since it required going from the first finger to the fourth finger, it was about 284 NDC’s.

Following another driver around Lebanon is not the easiest task. Through Beirut we were cut off on a street by street basis, and the best man and I developed a rapport over the next few days that closely resembled what I imagine the driver and the dude with the map have in rally car racing. Soon a language devolved from English, through grunts, into clicks, and finally a sort of meditative nodding and eye-blinking that required the least amount of effort to communicate that I was about to get smashed by a fucking truck and I needed to move over. This was necessary as our hosts had propelled themselves time and time again around blind corners into oncoming traffic to get around trucks, buses, slower moving cars etc…The lawnmower engine housed in the plastic hood of our car struggled to get enough speed to pass the trucks on the hills, but we made it to Baalbek eventually.

It was interesting approaching the Bekaa Valley from a different angle. From the north, there were the American fields converted from Opium to cash crops, and from the south we saw a long series of lights on the highways sporting both solar panels and wind generators. This string of highway lighting was donated to Lebanon by none other than the helpful Sunni Muslim overlords of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The geopolitics of philanthropy is not something I’m very well versed in, but Lebanon must be an interesting case study.

I wasn’t very excited about seeing the ruins again. I rarely even travel to the same country twice, let alone the same ruins, but we were rewarded handsomely for our death defying drive through the mountain. Atop the highest point of the missing temple, I saw a group of police approaching with sub-machine guns at their hips. They ringed the ruins as a large group of tourists crawled around the broken pieces of forgotten gods. It was reminiscent of visiting the Pyramids of post-Mubarak Egypt, where every group of white people had a submachine-gun toting Egyptian following behind them in a suit.

Naturally we started talking to all of the Lebanese police showing the group around. It was revealed that these cute old European people comprised a French choir of some kind that was performing in Lebanon and had the tour arranged by the French embassy. The great pile of Frenchies stood awkwardly blocking the doorway to the temple of Bachus, and they had become a minor nuisance. Five minutes later they decided to arrange themselves on the stairway to the altar and sing a few songs, and they had become the entire reason for visiting the ruins.

A wall of sound washed over us, kneading into the cracks of the 2,000 year old limestone blocks. The echoes moved around the room like tracers, and pieces of words, elongated syllables, tried to claim some meaning from the air, but to me they were just beautiful sounds in language I didn’t understand. The choir sang three songs, designed for the open space of a church or cathedral, and I think the old temple amplified their power. It was a moment I could have never predicted when I woke up that morning, and as such, I felt blessed to be a part of it.

Following that poignant, unexpected concert was a pile of meat pastries. One of the armed guards gave us directions to a restaurant specializing in this particular Baalbek meat pastry, of which we ate about two kilograms between the seven of us. The drive back to Beirut, while stressful, was at least attempted on a full stomach, and before we knew it we were back in the capital.

Once back in Beirut with the group I was close to discovering the best man’s superpower. By day he was a mild-mannered monster, but by night and without any preparation, he becomes the bartender-whisperer. We decided that night to take a walk out to the corniche (boardwalk), as I think Beirut’s is probably the longest and nicest that I’ve seen in the middle east. We soon discovered that the quickest way to derail any plan is about 6 shots of Jagermeister.

On the way to the corniche we stopped at a bar called Boston. The bartender, a young kid, was busy talking up the talent of some long-haired, gypsy guitar monkey by the name of Slash. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone describe Slash’s talent before. I thought the generally accepted pop cultural reference to Slash was that he’d play your kid’s bar-mitzvah if you threw him an 8-ball and some cash. The best man quickly jumped into the conversation with some Slash trivia and by some magic or other we had free shots of Jager in front of us. And then another, and then another, etc…

The kid had a strangely familiar story. He was born and/or grew up in New York until he was 17, when his parents kicked him out of not only the house, but the country, for some “trouble” he got into. Now he was bartending at 18 and apparently doing well in the acquisition of lady parts. He was dubbed The Fresh Prince of Beirut, and that’s what we called him for the next week. He would be a fixture in the 5 day bender that was just beginning. The bar closed relatively early as the best man and I were the only customers left on whatever weekday this happened to be, and we started wandering back.

We were called, as all drunks are, by the thumping of bass a few blocks away. Here we discovered the next fixture of the week, The Alley. The Alley is what it sounds like, an alley, filled with six almost identical bars. The six bars are, to the best of my knowledge, owned by two people. They all stayed open until about three and seem to be the only late night game in town in Hamra, the touristy shopping area that houses the American University of Beirut within a few minutes’ walk. At the Oscar Wilde bar we met an old soul slinging beers and drinking absinthe. The best way to describe him, in the words of a good friend, is “chill.”

I don’t know what particularly endeared us to him, but I have a feeling it had to do with the fact that it seemed like a little college bar, and bars filled with college students typically don’t tip very well. We stood at the bar drinking for a while and then parted to engage in meaningful drunken conversation. Truth be told I was just amazingly happy to be surrounded by people who were under 60. I felt like a vampire, feeding off of their youth and enthusiasm for hopelessly doomed idealist notions of the workings of the world but I encouraged them nonetheless. During one conversation I looked over to the best man, who was teaching a group of kids how to shotgun a beer, and unfortunately for all involved the only beers they had in cans was Guinness. Three Lebanese boys comically left the bar with t-shirts covered in long brown streaks from the neck to the waist.

We closed down the bar and had a last few drinks with the bartenders, one of their friends had come over and plugged his IPOD into their stereo and the best man and I took turns prowling through his music before we headed home. Heading home was a task easier said than done however. It was a solid 15 minute walk from the alley back to our host’s place. It was a matter of maybe eight to ten turns, and we’d both made a habit of remembering dozens of landmarks to get us where we needed to go. We didn’t realize how many of these landmarks depended on lighted streets and businesses being open, neither of these were the case at three in the morning. After some twists and turns and double backs to the big park at the halfway point we made it into the apartment at around five.

We were looking forward to some shut eye as our plan of walking to the sea and coming back in an hour had turned into roughly nine hours of drinking.

Four hours later we were in the car following our host through the insane traffic patterns of West Beirut. I woke up feeling much more refreshed than I should have, which led me to the conclusion that I was either still feeling the effects from the night before, or that getting lost and walking for two straight hours while chugging a few gallons of water should be an absolute staple of my future bouts of heavy drinking. Once we reached the city limits I can only remember driving in the same direction that I always find myself driving in Lebanon, up.

We headed to a little town of some significance whose name I’m convinced that I wrote down wrong (Dur Al Hamar) because a phalanx of nimble leprechauns were tap-dancing in spiked heels across my brain. I wanted to throw up, and then take some Tylenol, and then throw that up. Somehow, I managed, while our host way saying something of historical importance about a statue, or church, or Mosque or whatever the hell the town had in it. While the girls were shopping for souvenirs I was pacing and chugging water and searchingly desperately for some dry, bready product. We went to a mosque at some point and managed to climb up on the roof which offered a breathtaking view of the surrounding country.

Our next stop was further up the mountains to the presidential summer palace of Bettedine. On the way I’d purchased a huge bag of breadsticks with a little bit of a sweet aftertaste. I mention this because I remember those bread sticks far more fondly than I remember Bettedine. It was a beautiful palace, set on a picturesque mountaintop among immaculately clean and well maintained streets and parks. Moving on.

The next place we stopped was the kind of awesome that only bat-crazy insanity can account for. It was called Moussa Castle. I was finally returning to my senses on the way there, and had absolutely no idea what I was in store for. From the outside, the castle is not too impressive, it almost looks like a movie set version of a real castle built to a 1/8th scale. When we strolled inside the doors we were hit up for entrance money and given a little pamphlet about the construction of the castle. I think my favorite aspect of the weird little place was that it was literally built out of a lifetime of spite. The man who built it, and who can trace his family’s weapons manufacturing business to sometime in the twelfth century, before the Ottoman Empire formed had apparently loved a beautiful woman whose father would not let them get married because the man did not own a castle. Sometime later, and not much later, he decided to build himself one, alone.

The man had also apparently had a bizarre fixation with manikins. As we tourists strode through the castle, every room was adorned with a scene from yesteryear. At the entrance to the castle a bunch of Bedouin manikins were stopped in a scene of preparing food and milking goats, and it all has that same creepy vibe as “It’s a Small World.” Actually, imagine yourself on that boat in the famous Disney ride, now cancel all the sounds and music and have all the animatronics stand still. Then imagine instead of the whole world of awkward stereotypes all of the dummies acted out scenes from the Arab world. As you silently float down that little river I expect you would be creeped out. It was awesome.

Imagine our surprise then when we came upon the manikin surrounded by musical instruments and the instruments of coffee, and the damn thing offered us some coffee…in English! It took us a moment to realize there was a dude sitting in front of us, but then I immediately took some coffee and made a new friend.

When “It’s a small Arab world” finally ended the third part of the castle museum was worth the visit by itself. When you ask most 16 year old boys what part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art they liked the best, you’re probably going to get mostly the same answer: Arms and Armor. The man had collected so many knives, rifles, bandoliers, swords, halberds and pistols from so many different time periods that he could have supplied the props for a few war movies. My advice to anyone in the area, skip Bettedine and go to the castle.

After the castle madness was over we went to see some trees. The Chouf Cedar reserve was further up in the mountains, actually it was the top of the mountains, and some of the trees, those most weren’t actually Cedars were old, majestic, and beautiful. One that sat about halfway between the gate to the reserves and the top pre-dated Jesus according to our host. At the top of the mountain we watched the sun dive into a valley and listened to the sounds of hunter’s rifles ripple up to us from the lowlands, their bullets chasing the last vapors of dusk toward their prey.

Afterward we drifted down the mountain a bit and headed for an old-timey Italian restaurant in the middle of nowhere.

The dark ride back to Beirut was somehow both more and less terrifying than the drive up the mountain hours before, and when we made it back we endeavored to grab a few beers. As we walked down towards Hamra again, we asked our host at one intersection why he turned right, when the best man and I had discovered that it was much quicker to simply go straight.

“Because right down that street is where I got kidnapped when I was seven years old,” our host replied. And he said it so cheerfully and followed it with so natural a laugh that one would think that it was as simple a superstition as avoiding a black cat. At that moment I realized that there are such depths to the human animal that my American, spoon-fed, middle class, suburban upbringing would probably forever prevent me from truly reaching or understanding them.

We returned to Boston, but the FPoB (Fresh Prince of Beirut) was nowhere to be found. On the bright side the terrace was open and we sat upstairs in the open air ten feet above the pavement. The best man and I remarked on the incredibly seedy joint across the street called “Candle Light.” It was fenced it and the small entrance was generally guarded by a burly figure of some kind. Upon further inspection the floors that rose above the fence had black windows, all of which, up the ten floors, were covered with metal restraining bars. As it turns out, this little den of iniquity was a unique spot in the city during the civil war. Whichever sect happened to be in control of East Beirut, whichever faction was making gains across the green line, whichever alliances shifted beneath the rubble strewn streets left Candle Light as neutral territory. Leaders could meet there, foot soldiers could smoke together, and nobody tried to shit where they fucked. The brothel had come out of the war unscathed and has continued uninterrupted in its dark and gloomy corner since.

After a few beers the team split up, and the best man and I walked down a ways to a Jazz Bar called The Blue Note. It was closed. We really had to pee, and Beirut is not the most accommodating city to find a little corner to go in, so we went to a bar across the street. Electronic music blasted through the thick, steel door marked only with the word, “WOLF.”

Now I’m not a man to brag about how many gay bars I’ve accidentally walked into over the years, but you would be surprised at how often not reading or speaking the language of the country how easy it is to wander into one. Suffice to say, wolf seemed to focus exclusively on a single sub-sect of the not so open gay culture of Beirut.

“Dude, I have to say, we are by far the best looking couple in this bar.” There was a very strange kind of pride that came with this statement. Wolf, very aptly named, was a bear bar. There were giant, hairy men everywhere. I ordered us two beers ( I mean a bar is a bar) as the bartender, who would have no problem picking me up and throwing me through that steel door, leered at me in a way that made me subconsciously clench. Being a New Yorker, an educated, liberal guy, I have no issues with the LGBT community. I’m in favor of gay marriage and yadda yadda. At the same time, I have always had this nagging sense of fear the times I’ve wandered into a gay bar and had to use the bathroom. We both took turns watching the beer and using the bathroom without incident and after the surreal awkwardness had washed over us, we chugged our beers and took off.

We walked back in the direction of the Boston bar, and though it was closed we stopped in front of it, we both knew why, and I suppose the nagging curiosity was tugging at both of us, bolstered by the oddness of the last random bar. Then the best man summed it up nicely.

“Man, we’ve got to go inside.”

His logic was undeniable.

Thirty seconds later we were past the sleeping Nigerian guard and stood inside of a dark and dirty hallway. We’d entered Candle Light. A stooped and aged gentlemen wearing gold-rimmed glasses quickly sat us down at the bar in front of two very bored looking girls.

I was simultaneously underwhelmed by the dark and dingy atmosphere of the bar and overwhelmed by the five middle-aged Syrian gangsters who glared down as they silently formed a phalanx around us. The man in the glasses seemed to sense that I was about to crap my pants and shooed them away a bit. We ordered two Almazas for 30,000 Lira each. This was about six times the price at any bar within a mile of where we were sitting. Though the bespectacled gentlemen spoke pretty good English the girls spoke absolutely no English whatsoever. The overall silence of the environment, the nagging sense of being closed in by an army of potbellied pimps and the recent sensory overload of Wolf was putting my head in a bit of a tailspin. After a few minutes I was pulling out every piece of broken Arabic I could muster, which led to the only moment of anything resembling a human connection with the people on the other side of the bar. One of the girls remarked on my monkey hair and the best man’s complete lack of hair on his arms. He gestured to his head, and his chest and the girls began giggling. Interspersed between the lapses in conversation were a few not so subtle offers of sexual services. I managed to get across that the girls should pay the best man if they wanted him to take of his shirt and see his hairless glory.

When he got up to walk down the long hallway to a dingy bathroom, the best man walked back through a little living room where the Madame was watching TV with her little dog. Never missing an opportunity for conversation he began revealing all kinds of random trivia about whatever breed the dog, named Pooch, happened to be. By the time we’d gotten halfway through our outrageously priced beers the girls seemed almost relieved that they wouldn’t be sleeping with us, and half the Syrians had lapsed into REM sleep. I couldn’t be sure, but their hands moved as if they were counting money in their dreams. When we finished our beers the last bit of sad comedy came when we gave the girls a tip for the beers. I don’t think the paper had actually even hit the bar before the man with glasses reached out his hand like a venus fly-trap closing around its prey. He pocketed the money before he could even see the denomination of the bill.

As we left the bar we began going over all the awkward quasi-dangerous environments, that as doofy travelling drunks, we’d encountered over the years. We both agreed that Candle Light would probably remain in the top three a long time into the future. On a much less entertaining note, those girls were slaves. There isn’t a doubt in my mind, and despite all the gains most countries have made in modernizing throughout the twentieth century there are probably as many girls sold into this kind of physically and mentally abusive hell as any time in world history. It’s with a sense of regret that I say I was glad we wandered in, because it makes for a good story, but at the same time I could never imagine the kind of life those girls must lead, locked away in dark rooms with bars across the windows. I personally would never (and I say this with both conviction and hope) find myself desperate enough to take advantage of such an evil establishment, but by patronizing and paying for drinks, I have helped it continue to exist. But before this gets too depressing, and as our own stories dominated our walk, we found ourselves subconsciously in the middle of the Alley again.

We closed down the Oscar Wilde Bar with some celebratory shots of Absinthe. We were charged almost nothing for three hours of drinking. When the bar had been closed down A. took us out to the 24 hour bar a block away. This is where all the bartenders congregated after their shift was up. We sat around for a few hours with two bartenders from Oscar Wilde and a blonde Lebanese/Russian mutt, who at 19 was informed by her professors that early Americans treated the Native Americans with less than affection. The best man and I were roundly criticized for our role in the affair 200 years before we were born.

We left the bar at about 5:30 for the Odyssean voyage we were about to undertake back to our host’s apartment 15 minutes away. After we had been hopelessly lost for about an hour and a half we decided it was late enough to buy breakfast food for tomorrow. Of course, the best idea was to buy a fifteen pound watermelon and some other fruits, because surely we’d be home any minute. We must have swapped that god damn watermelon a half dozen times as the, “I think it’s on the next block” comment hit on its 40th or 50th iteration. When dawn was finished and the sun was beginning to rise in earnest we had returned back to the little park that was our last true landmark for the third time. A random Lebanese kid stopped the best man and commented on his Michigan State sweatshirt. Then he asked a rather bizarre question.

“Are you a donkey or an elephant?”

“What?”

“Are you a donkey or an elephant?”

“Oh,” our drunken brains finally caught up, “I’m a penguin.”

His look of utter confusion was enough to power me for the next thirty minutes of aimless wandering. At about 9:00 in the morning we’d finally spied the right block, and I bought enough pastries at a little bakery to feed an army before the sagging eyes of our host opened the door. He’d waited up for us, and I felt awful. As the amazingly gracious host that he was, he will never admit to the fact that he’d worried about us through the night, wondering if we’d been kidnapped or fallen into a ditch somewhere, but it was written on his face. I ate half a piece of some pastry and then immediately fell into a coma. The best man went out drinking with the Canadian until four in the afternoon.

The next day we both woke up around eight in the morning. The best man hadn’t moved for sixteen hours. We were the only ones there. The rest of our haphazard travel group had gone out sightseeing somewhere or other. The best man and I then began a long battle against Lebanon itself. It is amazing how cut off from it I was in the two weeks I’d traveled around the country a year before. Power outages and water shortages were chronic in our host’s apartment building. I imagine this extended to most of East Beirut. The hotels, even the cheap ones seem to have a vested interest in providing generators and some kind of water capacity outside of the main lines, but the average citizen seems to take the intermittent outages as par the course for daily existence. It seems remarkably sad to me, that Lebanon, a tiny country that accounts for more art, design, music, movies and culture than all of the Arabian Gulf put together should suffer such embarrassing lack of necessity for the dumb luck of existing in a land without oil. But having had a day, even one without a hot shower, to recover from our collective hangovers, the group was ready, on a rainy morning to set back out across the four fingers once again, for a wine tasting.

Driving through Beirut in the rain was no picnic, but meandering up and down its voracious mountain roads was near insanity. As soon as we cleared the city we were met by a fog that was so tenacious that I often drove simply by following the hazard lights of our hosts, pulsing through the wall of vapor like a distress signal in binary code. Blink, blink, left, blink blink, oh shit a truck, blink, blink…and this continued on unabated for two hours. We would get a brief reprieve from the monotony atop some crag or other where we would get an astonishing view of the drenched and verdant landscape below before being swallowed up again a mile down the mountain. We passed the stretch of highway with the Saudi streetlights once again. The wind turbines were spinning fast enough to be invisible and the solar panels looked hopelessly out of place.

The Ksara Winery was an austere wood building which gave no hint to the astonishing treasure of vineyards that lay beyond. We were met by a somewhat mild college student at the front door that led the group to the obligatory mini-documentary that seems all the rage among tourist traps these days. After the movie ended we were taken down to the cellar. Like almost everything interesting in Lebanon the winery was built on top of something else, in this case an ancient, Benedictine priory. (translation: old churchey thing) There was some kind of wine making going on around the premises for almost 700 years, broken only by the occasional catastrophic war. The “cellar” was actually a massive cave system discovered by accident when one of the monks was chasing a fox that had eaten some of their livestock. During the Lebanese civil war, which dragged on for some time, the cave system was expanded to hold munitions and a very large community of civilians and fighters who were happy to live in a bunker.

When we returned through the ever present fog we made a bee-line for a very passable Beirut burger joint called Hani’s. We then joined up with the bride’s brother and very sick sister in Gamayze, the trendiest, fashioniest, hipsteriest bar street in the capital. We spent a great deal of the time (guzzling down 13 dollar mixed drinks paid for by the bride’s brother) looking over pictures of the wedding, while constantly chiding the bride’s sister for not going to a doctor. Later that night the best man and I took the Swede down to our watering hole, Oscar Wilde, in the alley. A. our awesome bartender friend gifted the best man with a very cool souvenir. The bar had ordered a case of Absolut Vodka bottles with an Oscar Wilde Logo and packaging on the bottle. The best man had a new center piece for his soon to be built bar in a new apartment, and as a resident of Saudi Arabia I wasn’t offered one, because he knew I couldn’t bring it back with me anyway. The most remarkable thing about this minor binge is that we finally made it back to the apartment in the 15 minutes it should have taken us the last two times.

The next night was the best man’s last night in Beirut and we had a very elaborate plan for the bride’s brother to join us at these Hamra bars we had raved so much about. This plan was de-railed by the most delicious meal we had in Beirut. There is always something incredibly authentic and satisfying about a home cooked meal in a foreign country. Our host’s mother laid out an enormous spread, and typical to Lebanese meals, it was impossible to tell when new plates of food would stop arriving, or even when the main course was beginning until it was already over. We had planned on leaving and going to Hamra to begin our last bender together, but halfway through the meal we’d had to text the bride’s brother and tell him to wait in the bullpen for a while. By the time we finally finished desert, about 4,000 calories beyond being full, there was only time for a quick beer and then a drive to the airport.

The bride’s brother and I deposited the best man at his terminal and then drove off in the direction of a place called the Keyrouz Bakery. I had no idea what to expect from a bakery at midnight, but in Beirut nothing closes early on the weekends. We met up with a coworker of the bride’s brother, and his entire drunken extended family in a massive space with a three piece Lebanese band playing entirely too loud. This musical setup seems pretty typical of the more traditional, drunken, family-oriented watering holes in Beirut. There was a singer preening in Arabic, sometimes shaking a tambourine, a keyboard player that covered virtually all the instruments in the band electronically, and a drummer. They played Lebanese songs well enough to excite the giant group of high school kids dressed in evening-wear in the next room.

Meanwhile I was pushed down into a seat next to a flamboyant, middle-aged relative with a shaved head. When he screamed at me much of what he said was amusing, and it wasn’t thirty seconds before I had a huge glass of whiskey filled to the brim in front of me. I screamed pleasantries at the two couples seated across from me, and they screamed small talk back. When we left an hour or so later I watched some of the bleary eyed men give their keys to their wives, and others get into the driver’s seats with their red rimmed corneas, and drive home drunk. It is one of my biggest complaints about Beirut, with so many parties and so little public transportation, driving drunk seems to be inextricably linked to the weekends.

On we went though, with the bride’s brother driving and his twenty-something co-worker in the back seat we went to a lively joint called, Shah, on Rue Monot. A grungy version of the previous Lebanese three piece band played what I guess was younger people’s music, in Levantine Arabic, and though I could only catch a fleeting “habibi” (a word which is as ubiquitous as ‘hello’ or ‘how are you’ in many Arabic speaking countries is roughly translated as “my darling” but is as commonly referred to by men to their men friends as men and their girlfriends) once and a while. A few ladies in the audience sang a song once and a while, and the bride’s brother’s eyes lit up when a particular woman took the stage. He told me she was a fairly famous Lebanese songstress. She also sang a song with a lot of Habibis.

When they dropped me off at Hamra again, around 3 am, they were skeptical that I was going to continue drinking, as they were convinced nothing was open in East Beirut. There is always that little glimmer of pride that comes from discovering something about a place that the natives are unaware of. I bounced into Oscar Wilde as they were closing down, a few celebratory shots concluded the end of the work night, and off I went to the 24 hour bar with A. and a couple of his friends. Our conversation at some point was hijacked by a pair of Arab-American college kids from the states, seemingly flushed with cash, staying at a 300 dollar a night hotel, and complaining that they couldn’t get laid. After a half hour or so of their rambling A. bought them a few shots of Absinthe, at which point they immediately went to go throw up at their hotel. He had determined that the ladies of Beirut would likely continue eating puppies like that alive. They’ll let them buy drinks all night long and then ditch them when they get bored. This is probably another reason why so many expats slaving away in the restricted Gulf Countries take all their long weekends in Bangkok, or Dubai, or Bahrain. Those places are essentially filled with prostitutes, whereas Lebanon is filled with people that despite hardship still live and party with their pride. My notebook says I got home around 6:40, so I’ll assume we crawled out of the bar around then.

The next day I woke up in an apartment without any running water or electricity again, alone, with a nagging hangover. This shouldn’t be any slight on my hosts as the apartment was both exceptionally spacious and tastefully decorated. It was a home, and a nice one. It is one of the many paradoxical aspects to such a powerful, intelligent culture that has been at the wrong end of so many regional tensions. None of this changed the fact that I really needed a shower. My alarm woke me up at the crack of 10 and I had to drive my rental car back to the agency. I then went back to bed until 5. When my host returned he said he nearly electrocuted himself pulling some breaker or other in the basement of the building, so I made sure to get a good shower out of it.

When I finally ventured out, still a bit sick, I made it to the Blue Note, that little Jazz bar, about an hour before the band was set to come on. Unfortunately every damn seat in the house was taken and I didn’t particularly feel like standing for an hour waiting so I bit the bullet and went back to Boston. I was happily greeted by the FPOB (Fresh Prince of Beirut) and a really good band that was playing that night. Again, I didn’t understand a word of what was sung besides the occasional habibi, but the bass player was incredible, the drummer slammed down a bongo now and then, and the singer played an arab stringed instrument that I have no idea how to spell. My hangover was nursed by a parade or experimental cocktails by the Fresh Prince, and when the band finished he came with me to the alley.

We were joined by an incredibly drunk friend of the FPOB, whom we spent the better part of two hours trying to convince not to drive home since standing up was becoming an increasingly difficult task for him. At some point in the night he managed to slip away and I assume got home. The Fresh Prince knew a bartender in one of the bars across from Oscar Wilde so we had a few free drinks there while crammed between the pack of Lebanese college kids. Eventually the night ended much as the last few had. About six of us rolled down the street to the 24 hour bar and waxed philosophically about the twisted fate of the world. I think Beirut had for me become a surrogate New York for a time, I don’t know if these people could be considered friends in more than the Facebook sense, but I was immensely grateful for everything they had given me, from the free drinks to the endless conversation. It was something that I had probably been missing a lot more than a was consciously aware of, a real city, the energy of my own generation, and the fleeting opportunity of belonging to a moment. What I have written about them does no justice to the generosity of spirit that they all had for me, and it’s unfortunate that so much of our time together came in the waning hours of the night when the details of conversation are immediately pressed back somewhere deep into the subconscious that is virtually inaccessible in the happy, drunken fog of daybreak.

They held a minor bon voyage for the last night I’d have with this minor crew of maniacs and ate breakfast as the sun had long passed dawn. Despite the amazing time I had with my new friends, this last night with them led pretty directly to the moment of which I am most ashamed and saddened by on this trip to Lebanon. The next day, again waking up sometime in the afternoon, the bride’s brother, and previously sick sister had planned to take me out on a final night on the town. I don’t know what schemes they had hatched but I’m sure it would have been very exciting. The colossal, stomach lurching, head-splitting hangover that had been building for the last week had finally struck. I went out in the late afternoon down to a restaurant in Hamra to try and shove enough dry bread and sprite down my gullet to satisfy the beast, I tried to make myself throw-up a few times before I left, but nothing was working. Something in my system had finally decided that enough was enough. When I was picked up at the restaurant I was finally ready to pop. They drove me back to my host’s apartment and I lost at least three or four lunches. Even afterwards my muscles were shaking and I felt too weak to walk quickly let alone go out clubbing. The last casualty of the bender was a night out with two of the most exceptional people I’d met in Lebanon. When they’d left, clearly disappointed, I went to bed in my host’s apartment for the last time. Well, collapsed in a fully dressed heap is more accurate.