Avoiding Prison & Other Noble Vacation Goals by Wendy Dale

anyone who could teach me to lighten up and have fun, it had to be my friend Peter. For the past eight years, he had been showing up at my apartment in L.A. whenever I needed a few laughs. In general, his levity-inducing methods were mild, but on occasions when I was particularly resistant to his charm, he wasn’t above resorting to force. When necessary, he would shove me into my walk-in closet, follow me in with a fifth of tequila, and assure me that my freedom could be obtained as soon as I had consumed two shots. I would squeal and plead, realize that I had no chance of overpowering my six-foot-two-inch captor, and finally accept his terms, reluctantly downing one drink and then another.
    Peter always kept his word—after I took the recommended dose of alcohol, he would graciously open the door, but by then the tequila would begin taking effect and whatever productive activity I had been consumed with an hour earlier would seem trivial compared with my duty to the closet and my responsibility to continue, um, consuming.
    Peter’s good-natured efforts on my behalf had gone on for years, something I attributed to affection as well as force of habit. We had met as high school foreign exchange students in what was then West Germany, and from the very beginning I had admired the effortless way Peter always managed to have a good time. I had never met anyone like him, someone who could be smart and popular too. In the tiny towns I had grown up in, making the fatal mistake of letting a word like “onomatopoeia” slip out just one time was enough to get you relegated to the geek table forever.
    I had liked Peter immediately, but I was also somewhat in awe of the way he took hold of his whole foreign-exchange experience. I was a shy and insecure sixteen year old, a result of years of torment at the hands of my American peers, but Peter seemed unintimidated by anyone or anything, even when presented with an entirely new culture. Unlike myself, who very courteously spoke to her host parents in the German formal
Sie,
Peter sat his parents down, explained that he was going to be living in their house for a while, and he would be damned if he wasn’t going to call them by the familiar
du.
    He handled his teachers in much the same way. When they began to complain that he rarely showed up for school, he explained that it was merely a misunderstanding on their part, that he was receiving no high school credit for his year abroad, and that instead of harping on his absences, they should consider it extra credit every time he decided to show up in a classroom.
    Before I met him, my biggest entertainment had been sitting alone in my bedroom making strange guttural noises that in any other country would have been a sure symptom of demonic possession (in Germany, this was merely called “practicing your consonant sounds”). But Pete insisted I have some real fun. There was a spontaneous journey to Copenhagen, a week spent in Sweden, and a stay in West Berlin, where I ran my hands across an ominous wall that would come tumbling down a year later.
    After Peter and I parted ways in Germany, we met up again in California, first in Peter’s hometown of Stockton and later in Los Angeles. While I was going to UCLA, Pete was alternating his time among Santa Monica College, San Diego State, and Berkeley, doing his part to contribute to California’s entire higher educational system without playing favorites. (“I’ve dropped out of some of the best schools in this country,” he was fond of saying.) He was never more than a six-hour drive away and he’d always find some excuse to come see me in Los Angeles.
    Our visits usually ended at the international terminal of the L.A. airport—Peter was continually jet-setting to some foreign destination, taking advantage of his in-between-colleges time by traveling to whatever country was offering cheap tickets. There had been several visits to Germany, a