4: Per Audacia Ad Ignotum

“Go with God,” my teary-eyed mother said to me as we stood outside the departure terminal at Los Angeles International Airport. “It’s not too late to back out,” my father said. “I know, Dad,” I said. I slung a backpack full of clothes over my shoulder as I gathered the rest of my bags. “I love you, son,” he said for, like, the second time ever. I always know when my father is at the extremes of emotions like fear, pride, or sadness - he says things like, “I love you,” or “go get ‘em, dipshit.” Maybe in this case he felt a bit of each.

It was surreal, boarding that Royal Jordanian flight. After a year of hyping to exhaustion those around me, I had finally done what I said I was going to do. I was going to Jordan with a one way ticket, and as far as I was concerned, I wouldn’t be coming back until I had made it. The easy part was over.

The plane pushed back from the departure gate, and 18 hours later I was crossing the Mediterranean Sea, at the continental intersection of Asia, Africa, and Europe. On the seat-mounted TV screen in front of me, cities appeared on the flight map: Aleppo, Haifa, Cairo, Jerusalem, Gaza City, Ramallah, Tel Aviv, Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, Erbil. Amman. These were the places I’d studied in college. They were places I’d hoped to spend a career as a diplomat. In my mind’s eye, they were cities of rich history, colorful street markets, and vibrant people. I was satisfying an urge that compelled me to see what ordinary life was like for people who lived in these places. At the same time, I had studied abroad in Italy years before, and wasn’t going in a starry-eyed halfwit, full of wanderlust. At least I hoped not.

The plane descended for final approach at dusk, just as a city of low-rise concrete structures came into view. The desert sunset gave cast a haze over the buildings which seemed to blend into the middle distance, save for the bright lime-green hues marking the scores of mosques. A few tall buildings, were visible, but the city looked like a sprawling maze, closely hugging the hills and valleys on which the city is built.

The plane touched down at Queen Alia Airport, and I slowly disembarked amid a din of bustling passengers as they rummaged through the overhead bins and spoke to each other loudly in Arabic.

In the arrival terminal, I stepped into the line to obtain a foreign visa. The passport control officer was dark-skinned with wavy black hair, wearing a light blue collared shirt and shoulder pads denoting his rank. I approached the counter after being beckoned over, as the officer started asking me questions in Arabic. I stared blankly at him. “Mi dispiace, non parlo…” I started. He stared blankly back at me. Duh, this guy doesn’t speak Italian. “Uh, I mean, I don’t understand. What do you need from me?” I said. For eight months I had passively taken Arabic lessons, and the first language to come out of my mouth in Jordan was Italian — a language I don’t really speak anyway. Had my Arabic instructor back in California been standing next to me in this moment, she would shouted, “Booooo,” while giving me a thumbs-down.

The passport control officer was asking me for money — for a visa — not a bribe. I paid him, received my visa, and walked to the baggage claim. I retrieved my worldly belongings from the baggage claim an walked up the ramp toward the arrivals pickup. As I dragged my bags across the the terminal, I was met by a balding, mustached man holding a placard with my name scrawled in bold letters. Talk about taking the third-world experience out of the third world. The driver, an Egyptian named Khalid, helped load my bags into the back of an SUV before driving me to Mike and Sarah’s home in Amman.

On the drive, we made small talk, but Khalid didn’t speak much English. And I very quickly learned I didn’t know a single fuckin’ word of Arabic. I had been studying Fus-Ha which is the Arabic equivalent of learning Olde English and speaking in iambic pentameter. Since I’ve never bequeathed anything on anyone, nor used the phrase, “where for art thou?” without irony, so equally useless was the dialect of Arabic I had studied. And so instead, I stared yonder out the window of the mechanical buggy.

Khalid drove us past a vegetable farm with greenhouses dotting arid fields of dirt and weeds. Hanging on the perimeter fence of the farm was a large Monsanto sign. My fellow Americans had made their mark here long before I knew this place existed. Driving into the city, the sun had finally set and the town was awash in neon lights. We passed a KFC, then a Holiday Inn hotel, then a row of restaurants with valets. It felt so, familiar. And then I saw an unmarked security vehicle flash its LED red-blue lights to get through traffic, transfixing my gaze from the neon comforts of home to the reality before me — I was very much in another world.

We finally reached reached Mike and Sarah’s house. Walking into their walled compound, I passed a gorgeous pool and hot tub, over which was a terraced hanging garden, illuminated by blue and pink colored lights. Standing in a rear doorway to the massive stone house, stood a tall, blond American woman. She extended her hand and uttered with earnest sincerity the words, which would later become an ironic bane to my ears: “Welcome to Jordan.”