Looking for Lana

Since when we were in Fourth grade, we all knew that we would be sent away after Ninth grade to high school - somewhere. By Sixth grade it was an accepted fact of life. By Eighth grade it was in our faces. Some kids welcomed it and others were uncertain about their fate, but we generally agreed that the kids whose parents couldn’t bear to separate with their kids and resigned were doomed as they could never experience the joys of being a returning student.

Now anyone in their right mind would do everything possible to avoid being in Arabia in the summer, but we weren’t even close to being rational at that age. Like almost every Aramco kid, I’d rather have ten root canals in a row than miss out on being a returning student. Many kids went to Rome or Beirut or Switzerland, but I was brainwashed into going to the Benito Mussolini School for destroying social graces in the dying town of Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin –a Jesuit boy's school on the edge of Hell. I must admit that there was a certain fascination to going to a school in America. I knew more about Rome and Beirut than I did the USA and thought that it might be interesting to sample the real American lifestyle – mistake number one.

So 1962 I showed up on the banks of the Mississippi with a windbreaker and desert boots. No one told me that it’d be ten below with three feet of fresh snow in a few months. Somehow I acquired a parka, sat on radiators all winter long and was finally released. For some odd reason I flew back by myself though my brother and a couple of friends went to the same correctional facility. I flew into the Rome airport and was wandering around waiting for the next flight when I bumped into the famous Jimmy R. who I had known since before Kindergarten. He was the kid who got caught by his foot upside down in the ficus tree by the swimming pool.

We were both travelling solo so we were as thick as thieves as we boarded the MEA flight to Beirut and then on to Dhahran. We landed in Beirut and took off for the last leg when an engine burst into flames. We returned to Beirut and, in those days, the airlines treated even 15-year-old teen-agers like human beings. They put us up in some hotel, not The Phoenicia, gave us meal vouchers and said they would pick us up in the morning. It was traditional that parents would make sure that we had some cash on these trips, so between us we had more than a hundred bucks for “emergencies.” That’s like five hundred dollars today. It also happened that one of our classmates since Fourth grade, who I should call “the most beautiful girl that ever walked the earth, Praise Allah” – but I’ll call Lana, had moved to Beirut in Ninth grade when her dad was transferred to Tapline. So after dinner Jimmy and I decided that we would find Lana. I mean without an address or a phone number how hard could that be in a city of a million people?

We stepped out of the hotel into the taxi of Mr. Najib. A pot-bellied, older guy wearing a sweater vest beneath a worn hounds-tooth jacket, weary beyond his years with the gentlest voice, he asked where we wanted to go. We told him that we were looking for Lana and figured that ACS would be the logical choice. So off we went in his battered Mercedes, making our way through the chaotic traffic to the American Community School. Of course when we arrived it was closed, not only was it summer vacation but it was well past nine o’clock at night.

Stymied we wandered around in the front of the building for a while until Jimmy came up with a brilliant idea. “Mr. Najib, where do the American teen-agers hang out.”

Mr. Najib thought about it a minute and replied “Kentucky Pizza.” Or something to that effect as I no longer remember exactly. So we headed to the Hamra and Kentucky Pizza. Mr. Najib pulled up to the front of the place, gleaming with bright purple neon and Jailhouse Rock blaring from within, certain that Lana would be here. We walked in to see three surly Lebanese teenagers drinking cokes and smoking cigarettes and two waiters contemplating suicide. Well this wasn’t the place, so walked out to the sidewalk.

As we discussed our next option, Mr. Najib volunteered, “The Discotheque. Miss Lana must be there.”

“Mr. Najib, you are a genius. Of course she would be there.” And we set off for the Discotheque. Now, for those too young to remember, there were two Discotheque eras. The second one, Disco, was the Bee Gees, Donna Summer and Studio 54. The first one was twenty years before, mostly a European thing and consisted of lame French pop music and some unknown English groups. Nonetheless it was all the rage. Absolutely certain that we’d be dancing with Lana in mere minutes – of course we hadn’t resolved the sticky question of who’d be dancing with Lana, we pulled up to a dark doorway somewhere in Greater Beirut. Mr. Najib said that he’d wait for us and we went in.

We were immediately confronted by a skinny, hatchet-faced guy that looked like a Beatnik all the way down to his scruffy Maynard Krebs goatee. Behind a beaded curtain we could hear the music playing. He took a look at us and tripled the price, “Ten dollars and a two drink minimum.”

“For both of us?” I said.

“No, no. One by one.”

Well the money was for emergencies and being absolutely clueless we had no idea what two drink minimum meant, but behind that beaded curtain was Lana, so we pulled out the cash and were ushered in. It was a low-ceilinged room about sixty feet deep, twenty feet wide, illuminated by a single blue 40 watt bulb hanging somewhere half way down the room. There were about a hundred guys and girls dancing in an undistinguishable mass of young humanity.

A pretty young waitress in white boots came up and took us to a table the size of a medium pizza and asked “What drinks you order?” This was completely new to us, so we said “Beer?”

She said, “No, only cock-a-tails.”

This threw us for a loop as we had never drank any cocktails. However we had heard our parents order drinks, so we exchanged a few words and said “Tom Collins.” And because we were so cool and understood the ways of the world and the two-drink minimum, we added “Two each.” She gave us the strangest look and walked off as Jimmy and I tried to adjust our vision to see what the hell was going on.

Gradually our vision adjusted to the dimness and we could see individual people dancing and the cloud of blue cigarette smoke piling up at the ceiling. The waitress came back, charged us ten bucks each and left us amidst the French disco music and the gyrating Lebanese – none younger than twenty-something.

We started on the drinks and they weren’t too bad. About half way through we decided that even though we didn’t smoke we should buy a pack of Winstons and another visit from Tom Collins. Fifteen bucks later we were smoking Winstons and drinking Tom Collins and generally living large. We got half-way through our second drink when Jimmy R. decided that we should seek out Lana. It was so loud and dark and smoky that we could barely discern between male and female but we set out for the back of the disco. No one even noticed us, they probably couldn’t even see us anyway. Eventually we got to the back of the room and she wasn’t there which didn’t bother us too much because we were starting to like lame French pop music.

On our way back to the table, a very pretty, petite Lebanese girl in the tightest skirt with long black hair was dancing apparently with herself. Jimmy who was way more suave than I, started shuffling around, caught her eye and shortly they were dancing like Fred and Ginger. I was watching, just wondering how he does that so easily, when a big guy in a leather jacket, with pegged pants, wearing fence-climber shoes came out of nowhere and shoved Jimmy hard into some other dancers. This guy wasn’t pleased, but before he could follow up on Jimmy, some of the guys he had been pushed into started shouting at the big guy, someone shoved him and I pulled Jimmy away.

We went back, drained our drinks and made our way out of the disco to be met on the sidewalk by Mr. Najib who said, “Miss Lana? Did you see her?”

Glassy-eyed, Jimmy R. replied with a loopy grin, “No, but I danced with her sister,” and then his legs turned to rubber and he settled to the sidewalk like a deflated balloon.

Mr. Najib drove us back to the hotel, I gave him a twenty and Jimmy and I supported each other as we staggered into the lobby. The next morning the phone kept ringing and ringing until I realized it was for me, got up and answered it. The bus was leaving for the airport in ten minutes. I went into Jimmy R’s room, the phone was still ringing and he was half dead on the floor. I woke him up and we made it to the bus.

Our parents were at the airport in Dhahran, my mom came running up and said “Oh Tim, how are you? We were so worried.”

“Oh. We were fine. It was a little boring in the hotel, so we went out for pizza.”