True Lisa stories (part 1 of 4)

The army base that was the beige texture of nearly three years of my life was a miserable hellhole, a jail in which elongated, drab one-story office buildings and cement walkways laid on dead grass replaced bars and cells. After a while, however, the routine ugliness of my surroundings and the fact that each and every one of two thousand faces was now familiar had transformed my everyday into an experiment in utopia.

As a simple soldier confined to the base, it was easy to ignore the incoming and outgoing traffic and pretend I was living in an idealized autarky, where all of my needs were taken care of within a two mile radius. My clothes were supplied by the base warehouse and mended by the base tailor, my food was cooked in the base kitchen and served in the base mess hall and additional snacks, as well as other miscellaneous items such as tooth brushes, condoms, cigarettes or blank CDs were to be found in the one and only base general store. I slept on a base cot and could have chosen to exercise at the base gym, and I had very few members of the opposite sex to choose from and absolutely no more options. Every person I passed by on the narrow streets of our base was either performing a service or carrying out a mission on behalf of the collective.

Being an Air Force base consisting mostly of bulky transport aircraft, the ultimate missions had something to do with moving troops about or obtaining intelligence from above, but those concepts were kept blissfully classified from lowly service soldiers like myself. Each of us had a job; tailor, mechanic, cook, clerk, guard. Mine was military videographer. I was distinguished by a blue tag on my uniform, meant to pacify any intelligence officers worried about the random soldier out and about capturing military secrets on tape. I was quickly known around the base as the cameraman; everybody knew me but precious few knew my name. We were living out a communist dream, working for no more than the perpetuation of our bubble world and living on a symbolic allowance of sixty dollars a month. The monthly salary of a Sergeant in the Israeli army was roughly fifty cents above the salary of a Private, and that was after two raises. Everyone was equal.

Of course that wasn’t true, but I’d used this fantasy to get through many months of my military service. It was a way of making sense of a senseless situation. When I escaped the base on leave I left the fantasy behind, I was myself again. When I returned to the base my name was left at the gate and I became the cameraman. I toyed with the system and used photographs and videotapes to bribe my way to a better existence, which meant slightly better food and lighter boots. Mostly I went about my day doing no more and no less than everybody else.

Every unit on the base held a semi annual outing. For the purposes of morale and bonding, every six months we’d shed off our uniforms and climb a bus dressed in our colorful civilian clothes. They’d take us out to see a play, roam through a museum, visit a historical site or just splash around in a pool. It was as if all of a sudden our unit commander was actually our beloved teacher, and we were all students once again, flirting on the bus during our class trip. I did my best to avoid these excursions; they were entirely contradictory to my fictional version of the army base. Unfortunately, after avoiding two of these my commander caught on to my pattern. He didn’t bother to ask himself why I’d twice volunteered for base duties instead of enjoying “fun day”, he simply recognized a subtle form of insubordination and squashed it because he could. I would attend our third outing, and that was a direct command.

It was on this day-trip to Haifa that I first noticed Lisa, the clerk from the base bursar’s, or should I call it the base bank, or maybe the base accounting department. In any case, it was the cramped office that held the base safe and the cream-colored formica counter we leaned against to receive our salaries and exchange our used bus tokens for new ones. I had noticed her before, she was a part of my unit and her office was a compulsory visit every time my bus token ran out, but I had only seen her in one light. In many ways she’d reminded me of Julie; she too had an American name that felt slutty in the Hebrew jaw and she too had large motherly breasts, only hers were of such size that they were the first thing mentioned about her, the kind of breasts that gave a girl back pains shortly into her teenage years. That was how I saw her; she was a nervous midget of a girl with huge breasts pulling towards her knees and eyes lost in thick black makeup, a girl who was well known for sleeping with at least twenty soldiers on our base within three months.

That day in Haifa everybody looked different. Lisa wore an ironically innocent sky-blue sweater that rendered her suddenly sexy. She and I lost the lottery and were designated to carry around M-16s the whole day, an incongruous reminder of the fact that we were still an army unit after all. She had a hard time lugging a rifle in addition to her breasts and so I took on her rifle in addition to mine and strutted alongside her with weapons slung in an X across my breasts like a mock action hero. She felt obligated to trudge alongside me the entire day, and I couldn’t help but flirt. Her laugh was so easily summoned, she was obscenely obvious. Before the day was half over we had already become gossip, and one annoying soldier had taken to singing “Love is in the air” in stilted English around us.

The next day we’d returned to normal, only now things were different. I could no longer simply pass by her on the base’s pathways. Every eye contact was now felt in my stomach and crotch. I stared at her with an ache, and she smiled and said “There’s that desperate sexy look again.” No one had ever called me sexy before her. I found more and more reasons to visit her. “I love that sense of humor of yours.” She said, and laughed at my dampest jokes.

She’d penetrated my thoughts in a way that wouldn’t allow me to leave the base behind when I went home. I had a tendency to tell stories to my friends as I’d wished they’d happened, and so during my next leave I told them all that Lisa had hit on me. By telling them that I was telling myself that I actually didn’t believe anything was going on, and that I wanted it. My friends said “That’s great man.”

I strained my ears to eavesdrop on her conversations with her girlfriends in the clatter and chatter of the mess hall. One of these times they sat around a table behind mine, and I picked up that a friend of hers was trying to set her up with some guy she knew. “I think this guy’s gonna worship you, Lisa.” Her friend said. “He’s twenty two and still a virgin. Think about the kind of man who’s still a virgin at twenty two.” I was nineteen, and I had no interest in worshipping; in my experience it would eventually turn to hatred. But a new fantasy had begun to creep in on my everyday life on the base, and it completely took over on the day I walked in to her office on a flimsy excuse and she smiled and greeted me by saying “I dreamt about you.”