Introduction
Our driver races through the outskirts of Giza. He lurches and skids through a convoluted path of switchbacks, narrow alleys, and dirt roads. Shops rush past the narrow windows of our van in a blur, their open storefronts spilling car parts, groceries, electronics, and ten million other everyday things onto the sidewalks where bored Egyptians sit in rickety plastic chairs, on upturned boxes, and on the bare ground. The long face of a donkey looms suddenly as it passes, drawing a flat two-wheeled cart piled high with cauliflower. On the sidewalk a very sick, very old man in a wheelchair breathing from an avocado-green oxygen tank is served coffee by a child. A family takes lunch in the median surrounded by camels.
We shudder to a stop. I look out the window at a kid selling small glass pyramids balanced on a velvet covered board. He walks toward us, but before he gets close, he’s hit by a car. Thrown ten feet. His baubles shatter in a crystalline spray across the dirty black asphalt. The kid jumps up. Runs away.
I watch a girl wade into a shallow trash pit next to the sidewalk. She pulls KFC boxes out of the rubble then flattens them against her jeans. An old man lurches out from the traffic to glare at her from the edge of the pit. He yells angrily, but she flatly ignores him. He bends down and shoves his hand into the riot of spent cellophane, old food, dusty bottles, Styrofoam clamshells full of chicken bones, and tin cans. He snatches a wadded newspaper page, and as I stare, he carefully unwads it, smooths it against his gebellah, then walks away reading. The girl looks up and catches my eye. I brace for some kind of rebuke—just another judgmental old man. But I’m not an Egyptian. I’m obviously a tourist. Obviously a rich tourist since I’m in a private van and not a bus full of three-hundred people. She can see my plump shoulders and my waggling jowls, so I am also a man made entirely out of food. Holding my gaze, this poor girl in her dirty shirt, with her hair flying all over the place and a streak of soot on her face, a face which hasn’t held hope for, probably, ever, this poor girl pretends to eat. She holds one hand under her chin like a shallow, empty bowl and with the other raises an imaginary spoon to her mouth and my heart, my fat, overfed, struggling white American heart breaks. I yell “ok, ok, hang on!” and start stuffing our unfinished lunches into a bag. But our driver punches the gas, swerves around a disabled Tuk Tuk, then zooms off down the road.
I don’t know what I expected from Egypt, but it wasn’t this.
I’m traveling with [My Attorney] and our mutual best friend, Adelaide. We’re on our way to meet a local purveyor of camel excursions who will guide us into the broad Sahara. Our trip is scheduled for two full hours. Instead of the parking lot of The Great Pyramid of Giza, we’re mounting our animals at a locals-only spot two miles away in Nazlet al Samaan, a historic neighborhood of noble camel drivers and legendary equestrians. Our selfies will be stunning.
We get out at the end of Avenue Gamal Abd El-Nasir next to a motorcycle mechanic shop and a garage-sized nightclub hand-painted in bright yellows and greens. The street is heaped with garbage. Strewn with spent coffee cups, candy wrappers, and empty water bottles. Wild dogs sleep in the middle of the road in lazy, flagrant disregard for the cars hurtling by a hair’s breadth from their bony marimba rib cages. Horses burst out of nameless alleys, whipped savagely by barking Egyptians riding bareback in dress slacks and expensive shoes.
Four enormous camels are parked against the curb, and before we get any instruction other than “lean back,” we’re mounted on our gargantuan animals, captains of our own personal ships of the desert. I glance over at the girls with the town behind them and the people and the brick-a-brack of an Egyptian postcard and a tiny little smile peeks out from my grizzled visage However, in this crucial, almost symbolic moment, things go, as they always do, fucking sideways, and I am hurled into the open air.
Camels get up ass first which is why riders are instructed to lean back. Waaaay back. And I am leaning back. Waaaay back. For a second. But I can’t get my feet into the stirrups. I hunch forward to get a look down at my feet which are hanging six inches above the metal footrests because I have legs like a Corgi. I tilt even further forward to figure out how I’m going to get stirrupped, but the second my posterior lifts off the camel’s back, the camel wrangler whistles ‘giddyup’ through his teeth and my camel pops his ass into the sky, allowing me to take full advantage of the inescapable power of gravity.
Suddenly I’m hurtling face first toward oyster-colored sand ornamented with dog shit and cigarette butts, florid with camel piss, and savagely fanged by serrated chunks of spent concrete like upturned scimitars.
Camels are surprisingly low to the ground when they’re kneeling, patiently waiting for you to throw a leg over. So I am barely four feet off the ground when I begin to fall. My pudgy fingers are curled around the pommel in a death grip. I think maybe I can brace for this, it’s not that different from fallking out of bed. It’s sand, after all, right? Then the camel stood all the way up. The front of its body blasted skyward, and because I’m holding onto the pommel, it drags my falling carcass with it. Now I’m falling up. The momentum flips me out over the camels long neck, ripping fingers off the pommel, as I’m flung into the air. Now I’m falling. I’m sixty feet off the ground (this is a rough estimate), arms flailing, feet kicking, howling my favorite word, eye to eye with a man-eating dromedary.
And so, this is where we are now, gentle reader, here at the beginning of this book. Time has stopped. The world is an alarming, frozen tableau of [My Attorney], Adelaide, our camel driver, Achmed, our personal Egyptologist, Ahmed, and our driver, frozen in mid-shout, hands outstretched toward me, eyes wide with dread, while I hang suspended midway between a camel’s hump and the pee-stained dirt of Nezlet al Samaan and it is here, in this instant, as I am about to enjoy permanent disfigurement and probable quadriplegia that I think to myself: I am not, as I once believed, a man of adventure.
I am not cut from the same cloth as Hemingway. I’m not even Paul Bowles. Instead, I’m Otis Campbell, the town drunk from The Andy Griffith Show, mopping my brow in a jail cell with my fat floral tie, petulanting: “I declare, it is a might warm, isn’t it now, Sherriff?”
I want to be an adventurer. I do. I want to Anthony Bourdain my ass across Spain. I want to drink whiskey and smoke cigarettes in a cheap Parisian bar. I want to walk across India, pilot a narrow boat through the floating cities of Thailand, paddle bravely toward the headwaters of the Amazon.
Or so I thought.
Evidence tells a different story. I had two years to prepare for this trip. A trip I knew involved a ridiculous measure of walking in an unforgiving African heat. I spent a few minutes at the gym, but my family was concerned about Covid exposure, so I quit going. I have plenty of excuses for why I didn’t get into shape for this trip; but the truth is, as much as I’m not a man of adventure, I’m also not a man of gymnasiums.
I hit the ground pretty hard. I get up, dust myself off, insist that I’m fine before I yell “Fuck camels!” perhaps too loudly in historic camel wrangling neighborhood.
I should have seen a chiropractor because when my three-hundred and twenty pounds landed on my dainty feet, damage occurred. As Achmed hauls me in a hastily procured buckboard carriage up the hills to a Bedouin camp overlooking the pyramids, I realize with growing alarm that I’ve fallen off a camel on the first day of a two-week trip featuring daily hikes of three to five miles into the goddam Egyptian desert and yeah, it’s November, but it’s still pretty hot for a guy from Chicago where we wear sweaters in June.
As the backside of Cheops rises over the dunes, and the jarring cart lurches and bounces across every single boulder the horse can find and as my spine and hips and all the muscles in my legs send damage reports filled with exclamation points, my shoulders sag and I rub my forehead, sigh heavily, and whisper to the indifferent Sahara: not again.
Not again will I experience a hideous, truncated, idiotic, poorly timed, stupid-ass vacation.
Not again.
For thirty years, [My Attorney] and I have made every effort to book the perfect holiday. We’ve tried hard to take a grand tour, to hit the global highlights, to lounge on a pristine beach, to travel like pros on a flawless junket from our humble home in Chicago to a magical place where magical things magically occur magically. We thought we’d return refreshed and inspired, forty pounds lighter, tanned to within an inch of our lives, our minds so broadened we’d have carry them in a wheelbarrow.
But no. Every single trip has been at the wrong time of year. Every single journey has borne a hidden agenda of catastrophe. Never, ever have we looked into each other’s eyes and said, “This is it; this is the one: this vacation is perfect.”
Look: the mayhem that follows in this book is dumb. I know that. You’re probably suspecting it by now. If you’re standing in a bookstore thumbing through these pages, you’ve already made some kind of resignation about your own capacity for handling a massive glurge of stupid since you have turned to the intro with the hope of discovering the author is, perhaps, just putting on. That it’s all tongue in cheek. That maybe he’s just piling up bullshit, grinning all the way to the bank.
I’m not. Everything in this book is absolutely true and though I hold fast the rights of an author to exaggerate for effect, I have not exaggerated into the realm of prevarication in these pages.
Much.
I try, very hard, when telling these stories, to be dignified. Honestly, the man you meet on these trips is not the man I aim to be. I want to wear a cardigan and smoke a pipe and read the paper and laugh about golf with my dignified friends. But that is not my life. I wear dirty T-shirts three days in a row and doom scroll through the dark gutters of Reddit and sure, I laugh with my friends, but we’re laughing at public freakout videos because we are shallow, bilious, post-punk thrash freaks riding it out at the end of thew world and we haven’t been in a bookstore in three years. Dignity does not always obtain.
As much as I try to live the cardinal virtues and have a positive outlook and always use my dinner forks starting with the one furthest away from the plate, I still find myself erupting into righteous, furious indignation at the ridiculous, stupid, completely unfair, caterwauling vicissitudes of an observer of the twenty-first century. Also, and I’m serious here, God loves me.
I don’t mean God loves me like God loves Her favored creatures; I mean God loves to watch me like [My Attorney] loves to watch Intervention: with a glass of Chateau Neuf de Pape as she cackles with glee at the wild misfortunes uncoiling before her. I think, and again, I’m dead serious, that the divine (or whatever she calls itself) is sagely indifferent to our daily struggles. However, sometimes it remembers we’re here. In those moments it finds an individual to play as if their life is a highly glitched Mario Kart side quest.
Someone like me.
For example: I recently went to Alabama to visit my family and hang out with my sister to explore Lay Lake on a borrowed pontoon boat. Returning to the marina, a storm gathered itself up into vast dark purple anvils. As we approached the dock, the storm unloaded. Rain like it can only rain in Alabama: in buckets. In torrents. And lightning. Close.
There are too many boats tied up. They cram against each other. They take up too much dock space. It makes our berth almost exactly wide enough to fit, which is not enough during a storm, or really anytime as barges are big, stupid, and unwieldy. Yet there we are trying desperately to wield it into the dock so we can get off the water and wield ourselves into the truck and maybe, you know, live. My stoic brother-in-law pokes the nose of the boat in and out of the slot, but he can’t get it right because the wind is blowing us back out into the lake and, as I mentioned, it does not wield well.
Meanwhile, my niece yells “Hey is there supposed to be smoke?!” We all freeze. Thin greasy vapor is boiling out from under the driver’s console. Also, we’re not docked yet. Also, rain. Also lightning.
“Where is the fire extinguisher?!” I scream.
“It’s in there!,” my sister explains, pointing at the space under the steering wheel. It glows like a forge.
Acrid smoke billows out. Flames lick the fiberglass hull. For a moment there is a perfect dreadful silence except for the song playing over the sound system from my phone (which has, as we discover later, started the fire) the incomparable 70s funk anthem “Le Freak,” by Chic, the lyrics of which are as follows:
Aaaaaaaand, Freak out! Freak out!
It’s just too much. Too on the nose. I shed my normal composure of calm, professorial dignity. I leap onto the dock in the rain and howl into the sky.
“Really? REALLY? CAN I JUST HAVE ONE FUCKING DAY? CAN I JUST GO ON VACATION FOR ONE WEEK AND NOT HAVE ALL THESE CRAZY WEIRD THINGS HAPPEN? I HAVE ENOUGH STORIES! YOU CAN STOP! JESUS!”
And it’s not like this is an isolated incident. When Covid-19 delayed the Egyptian excursion, we rescheduled. I should have at least glanced at my passport. Because a few short months before our departure, my second wife, Adelaide, noticed it had expired. Because of Covid, the time it took to issue passports had been expanded by eight to twelve weeks. Getting a new one would involve crippling stress, talking to the Post Office, and having a coronary.
I can only assume God reached out to her bestie.
God: [calls Satan] Yo, Goat, whassup?
Satan: G dog! Just chillin’. Torching some souls.
God: TORCH!
Satan: TORCH!
God: Remember that Job thing?
Satan: (sighs) Good times, God. Good times.
God: Wanna do it again?
Satan: Oh shit, serious? I am all in.
God: I think this Garlington character would be perfect.
Satan: I mean, I’m already working on his space down here . . .
God: Wanna do it?
Satan: Come on, God. Dude’s always in the middle of a grand and luridly ornamented fuck up. I think you’re already Jobbing the shit out of this guy.
God: I swear, it’s just circumstance.
Satan: You know I can see everything, right?
God: Come on, back me up.
Satan: Are you saying . . .
God: Get thee behind me, Satan.
Satan: But should we?
God: Should we?
There is a moment of false caution.
God: Ha! Who are we kidding? I’m already doing it! Get in here!
Then God and Satan high five across the universe and I don’t get my passport BECAUSE GOD NEEDS MATERIAL!
THIS IS MY LIFE!
So yeah, I try to be dignified, but I have a biblical thing going on. I doubt I’ll achieve dignified for more than three or four seconds in a row. Especially around camels.
Can we achieve perfect vacationing? Can we book the ultimate holiday? Let’s find out.
