True Stories

Now you can see me....

2008-10-25T15:12:00.000-04:00

Through my movies.

http://www.youtube.com/user/ykmovie

A true story about houses and vacations

2006-08-27T17:19:00.000-04:00

My seventeenth summer was shaping out to be my happiest ever. It didn’t take much, just the sun and a bit of promise, and though perhaps it was only a temporary settling down of the chemicals in my veins I was still resolved to make the most of it.

My friend Tomi was off to a family vacation abroad and I set out to meet him and his mother hours before their flight. I masked my excitement as I pocketed their house keys, entrusted to me so that I could water their plants and feed their dog. Tomi didn’t want to leave, he felt kidnapped by his family and stolen away from a special summer of creation. I understood his feelings exactly. I wouldn't have wanted to be away.

I was only supposed to drop by once or twice a day but I made Tomi’s home my own solitary apartment. It was really all I ever wanted, to end my nights alone in peace. In the evening I entertained friends, we carelessly threw darts at the wall and left it riddled with holes, and at night I sat utterly naked on their living room couch, muscles clenched, and watched movies. I was on the best vacation I’d ever had.

A few days into my escape my father’s father went into surgery. I was asked to stay at home that day. The operation went on for hours, longer than expected. My mother called with reports. “It’s not looking good.” She said. I allowed nothing to penetrate my rare tranquility. I had never been truly content before that summer. Late at night she called and said “Saba’s dead.” She asked me to put my little brother on the phone. She broke it to him using gentler words, “Saba didn’t make it.” We waited for the family to return from the hospital to my aunt’s house, which was four or five buildings down the block. I felt mild surprise and a stoic sense of beauty. I was swept up by something warm, my eyes sparked and my upper lip curled.

My brother and I walked down the street to my aunt’s home. I craved the solidarity and human embrace I believed I would find there. Entering the house of grief was a shock so horrible I was tempted to turn and run. There was no beauty there, only loud, painful wailing, spit-soaked snotty choking red bloated tears with no dignity to them at all. We were greeted with shrieking cries of “Kids, you have no grandfather!” followed by out-of-tune bellows. The faces of my cousins had been shrunken into raisins. My father and his sister were nearly singing, endlessly repeating “Dad, dad, why did you leave me, why, why, why so soon… dad… why… why have you left me…why…” My grandmother didn’t want to cry, but surrounded by the contagious flood she joined in against her will. The struggle showed in her glistening features. Her mantra was “I’m begging you, have mercy, don’t kill me...I’m begging you, be strong for me…”

My mother was the only one without tears in her eyes. She took me aside with business-like proficiency and said “Your dad’s going to need some help now, otherwise he’s going to fall apart.” He left to another room and I followed. He sat on a bed and kept crying. He was still wearing the blue hospital smocks and his crotch was dotted with a pee stain. I said “Don’t sink in this. You’re dictating the atmosphere out there.” He said “You’ve got a sensitive father. I’m afraid I’m going to break down.” I looked around at all the crying people. I envied them and pitied them. I could never feel anything with such immediacy. I wondered where their stamina came from. I could never cry for more than fifteen minutes without causing myself a bursting headache.

My aunt’s house was chosen to be the house of the Shiva. My father stayed there for seven days. My strength was a weakness in this place of tears, and so I snuck out and back home as often as I could. My father and his sister changed their mantras, and the wails dulled down to mumbles. His was “I took my dad to the operating room, and I kissed him goodbye…I took him to the operating room and I kissed him goodbye…” She had taken my grandfather’s watch off his dead hand and put it on her own. She tapped his watch and repeated her grief poem, “My dad’s watch isn’t running anymore…My dad’s watch isn’t running anymore…”

My friend Roi took over my duties at Tomi’s abandoned house. Alone at my empty home I played my guitar, despite the fact that music wasn’t allowed for thirty days after the death. To absolve myself I wrote a song in honor of my grandfather. I also edited together a rudimentary movie of all the footage I had of my grandfather from family holidays and vacations. I felt justified in breaking the rules of the Shiva for these purposes. I kept slinking back and forth between houses, up and down our street like a sinner.

I sat with my weeping family and pursed my lips. I went home and called the girl I’d loved from afar throughout all of highschool. She was about to leave on vacation with her boyfriend, his family had a summer house in the North of Israel where they could have uninterrupted sex for days on end. I said “I just wanted to tell you that I love you very much.”
She said “You’re so cute.”
“I didn’t mean to be cute.”
“You have no idea, that’s really not what I expected to hear.” She said.
I asked my friend Oren what ‘cute’ meant. “Cute is good.” He said.
“I know it’s good, but what kind of good?”
“I don’t know.” He said. “No one knows what ‘cute’ is.”
Life was a mystery, and so was death. I asked Oren when he and my friends were planning on coming over to the Shiva to shake my father’s hand. My brother's friends and my cousins' friends had all made their appearances already.
“Hmmm. I guess we’ll have to come today. A bunch of us are going down to Eilat for a few days tomorrow.”
My stomach clenched. “You’re going on vacation? No one talked to me about Eilat.”
“We didn’t think you could come. You’re sitting Shiva, aren’t you?”
“You know what, I don’t want you guys to come.” I hung up.

They came to the house later that day. It made my father happy. He told them “You guys should all stick together like this, the way I stuck together with my highschool friends.” I grimaced a fake smile. I knew that our house of death was just a stop on their way to their hotel room on the beachside of Israel’s southern summer town. They hugged me with dramatic severity, shook my father’s hand, sat outside with me, smiled, laughed and had a bite to eat.

The Shiva house was full of food. Everybody was either eating, arranging food or making sure someone else was being fed. It was as if the fear that we would all forget to eat in our grief and die of starvation was so powerful that it demanded this constant, vigilant overcompensation. The food arrangements grew in beauty and complexity every day until they resembled a fancy buffet at a joyous event. I counted off the days. Things got better, easier. The crying was sporadic, no longer a wall. A telegram from the operating room offering condolences set off another attack of weeping on the fourth day, but that too died down after a few hours. Laughter was heard in the house.

On the last day of the Shiva I crept home for a break and happened to answer the ringing phone. I was surprised to hear Tomi's voice. I believed for a moment that he was calling from abroad since his family wasn’t due back for another week, but he explained that they’d had to cut their trip short because of his grandfather’s unexpected death. “I’m so sorry.” I said. I meant it in a way that I couldn’t have a week earlier. I wasn’t sorry for his loss, I was sorry for what I believed Tomi was about to endure, but he sounded just fine. His family’s grief was muted and the grandchildren were spared its sights and sounds.
“What did you do here?” He asked. “Did you have a party in our house? My dad thought we were robbed when we came in.”
“I actually haven’t been there in a week.” I said. “My grandfather died too. I’ve been sitting Shiva at my aunt’s.”
“Man, it’s like a plague.” He said.
“Yeah.”
He laughed.

At the funeral my dad had cried shamelessly. He looked like a sweating tomato. I was uncomfortable on his behalf. He shrugged and said to family and friends “He’s gone.” in the voice of a broken man. Those nights I dreamt that the death house was full of happy people. Everybody who cried during the day laughed at night in my dream. The harder they’d cried – the harder they laughed. My dad told me that his dad had hated nighttime. “He hated the night, he was afraid of it. He wanted it to always be daytime. He told me it was a disaster for him every time the night fell.” I thought, ‘he’d lived with a daily, dependable disaster in his life. No shocks’.

After the Shiva was over I found my father and his sister sitting out on her porch in the dark. They’d finally been allowed to change out of their mourning clothes, with the small ceremonial rips and the stench of a week’s worth of wetness. I was afraid of shining light on them. I asked “Why are you sitting in the dark?” They said, “Our lives are in the dark.” It took them years to heal, but they did. And I went home and counted off the days till senior year began.

The true story of “Defenders of the Convoy” – The Days of No Shame

2006-08-21T18:33:00.000-04:00

At sixteen I drafted every single one of my friends to act in my new movie, dramatically titled “Defenders of the Convoy”. My teenage productions were never inspired by emotions, messages, themes or content; they were merely the products of the practical resources at hand. That summer I’d received a small video camera which could shoot in sepia. I’d also spotted a particularly large and barren sandy lot from the window of a bus, which upon inspection proved convincing enough as an endless desert if shot carefully from the right angles. A random collection of cowboy music, Purim cowboy hats, younger brothers’ toy guns and grunge-era plaid shirts sealed the deal: we were making a western.

It was my biggest production yet, involving transportation, catering and make-up for the first time, and it took up every day of my vacation. The hardest scenes called for the presence of the entire cast of twelve, none of whom were as devoted to the movie as I was. I spent as much time wrangling in my wandering friends and quieting everyone down before a take as I did actually making the movie. At times they became bitter, especially when the thick, long sleeved shirts and the fake facial hair became unbearable under the beating sun. For the most part they all had fun and were laughing throughout the day.

I shot and directed my friends from a skeletal script I’d written that contained scene summaries of no more than a sentence or two. There were no real action descriptions and absolutely no text was written for any of the characters; all dialogue was dictated on the spot or improvised heavy with private jokes, and some of the action was accidental as well. It was a bold exercise in experimental filmmaking, and I grew more excited about it with every passing day. I’d close my eyes and see it all on a big screen, exploding onto an avid audience and elevating me out of my unpopular highschool existence.

The production itself broke down to fourteen shooting days. By the thirteenth day, which was the final one featuring the entire cast, exhaustion had set in and the takes dragged on. I decided to allow a break for water and rest in the shade. As the convoy of actors trekked towards the only tree on the lot, one of them wondered aloud who was going to see this movie when it was done. Another one worried, “I think he wants to show it to the entire school”. This stopped them in their tracks.

My friends turned to me, shocked and concerned, and exclaimed “You can’t show this to anyone!” Though I was usually prone to opening my big mouth and leaping blindly into any argument, at that moment I stood still and remained silent; awkward and surprised. They argued around me as I scrambled to understand what was going on. What had they thought? What had made them assume we were making a movie that was meant to be seen by no one? Meanwhile the cast was quitting on me. Fake beards were ripped off, cowboy hats and toy guns discarded.
“This is ridiculous,” one said.
Another said “It’s embarrassing.”
“I never would have done this if I thought someone was going to see it.”
“I only came ‘cause I was bored and everybody else was here.”
“There are no girls in this movie. It’s humiliating.”
“We can’t show this to people at school, everybody will laugh at us.”

It never turned into an argument or a fight because I never said a word. They were sixteen years old, they had girls and sex and popularity on their minds and they were painfully ashamed to be seen running around a vacant lot dressed as cowboys. They’d grown up faster than I had and had learned to be embarrassed years before I had. They picked up the props and left. I stayed put. They felt bad for me, and on their way down the hill turned and said “You should find some other actors. Reshoot your movie.” I bit my lips. There were no other actors. There was no movie.

I left the site of my betrayal twenty minutes after my cast abandoned me there. We were all headed in the same direction but I couldn’t bear to face them. I found the bus stop empty and rode alone in the back of the bus. I’d been careless and had gotten sunburned, my face had a heartbeat of its own in each cheek and my eyes stung. All I wanted was to sleep.

When I got home one of my friends called me. He asked, what are you going to do now? I said, nothing. He said, you have to go on with your movie. You have to finish it. “How can I?” My voice wavered. I hadn’t learned yet to be embarrassed by my amateur endeavors, but I knew well enough to feel scared and ashamed of crying. He said “If you give up on this movie now, it will be the stupidest thing you’ve ever done in your life.” I said nothing, afraid of opening my mouth to a whiny, tear choked response.

I lived alone with my failure for a few days. The limbo was good to me. My friends forgot all about the movie. They had only been along for the ride, and now that the ride was over and done with it freed up their days so they could make the most out of the remainder of their vacation. I maintained my silence until I was sure my voice had steadied. I swallowed my pride, called them up, timidly asked them to come back and agreed upfront to all their demands. They returned to the location happily and never rubbed my nose in it. We resumed shooting and completed the movie under that one condition: that no one would ever see it.

I spent two months editing the footage together into an incoherent jumble which we all found highly entertaining as nostalgia, as friends looking back on silly old times. I loved every minute of it. I never critiqued my own movies at that age; I was proud of my creations. Embarrassingly proud. My chest ached because I could not show the movie to anyone.

The tape was shelved. Later it was lost, inadvertently assuring that I would stay true to my word indefinitely and never allow it to be seen. It was the only movie of mine that I’d ever lost. I still had a tape with scattered scenes from my first project, shot when I was eleven years old, but “Defenders of the Convoy” was gone, along with the days of no shame. It was a matter of a couple of years before shame would suck all the joy and pride out of any exposure on my part. During those years before all was lost I wore that tape down with countless repeated viewings. Towards the end it got so bad at certain points that I could barely see a thing.

A true story lifted from the pages of a thick hardcover faded yellow notebook (excerpts from the lost year)

2006-08-18T12:11:00.000-04:00

I wanted to do something extreme so I asked Hadas Karni to pick me up on her way to Yoni’s. “Why’d you sound so surprised when I said I’d pick you up?” Hadas asked. She was barefoot and beautiful, and her car’s crappy cassette-player distorted some already-distorted heavy metal guitar riffs as I told her about the sickness of my days and she understood more than anyone else could, because sometimes she ran away but other times she cut away to make way for the healing. She knew some things about life that I was yet to discover, I hadn’t thought much of her and I’d been wrong, and I realized exactly that when she spoke to me and occasionally turned her face towards mine as she drove us towards Yoni’s house. I was wrong and I wanted to do her right.

Hadas Karni, who fascinated every man around her by dancing and spitting words, who was eaten alive during every silent moment of her life, who plowed the country north and south up and down haunted by her own thoughts, she had the perfect amount of flesh on her and that alone made everything all right. “You all do such great things, you write and play and record and make movies and draw and paint and I do nothing.” She complained.
“You’re a muse.” Yoni smiled to her.
I was sitting on Yoni’s cramped jail-cell balcony with her and with Gil and with one other girl I’d never seen before who’d shown up with seven kilos of marijuana stuffed in her purse and with one other kid with glasses who had randomly slept beside me during basic training almost three years ago and was now a pothead officer who smoked obscenely when away from the base, and I couldn’t even remember whether I’d smoked or not or done something more or done something less but I must have done something because the words rolled on effortlessly and the commas made my friends laugh. I walked alongside Gil on our way to a pizzeria and he told me his stories and I said “I think I’m going to write. I think I’m going to be a writer, I think it’s a crazy way of life.” and Gil said “That’s great, that’s great, being a writer is great.” His voice was very supportive, so supportive that I felt I was already crouched in some back seat of a car with a notebook slamming against my knees and I thought out loud “I’m going to need a backpack.”

We were sitting on the wet grass of a green hill at night overlooking a main road with its swooping bright lights and Yoni said “I’ll make you a backpack.” He added “Nothing we’re going to do is going to be anything like nothing we’ve done.” and we spent some time wrapping our minds around that one but were never surprised when a glance at our watches revealed that the time was twenty seven o’clock at night or thirty eight o’clock in the morning and that morning had arrived without demanding we push any buttons.

Every day brought us closer to strange times; we all had so little faith and so much hunger, we suffered from prison desperation but were also terrifyingly housebroken, sworn lazy people who only knew how to be alone. People disappeared one by one like soap bubbles and my soldier begged of me “Stop it. You’re depressing me.” Cars swished by underneath my guard tower and proved to me that time was not standing still. I talked to Oren and he said “I don’t know… it sounds strange. It sounds strange to me.” I argued, “No, it’s not strange, it’s right.” I called Gil and asked him “What are you doing?” and he laughed and said “Come on… what are we doing…come on…” Then an older friend told us with red solemnity “It doesn’t matter what you plan and how you plan it, reality turns out completely different.”

So we raised potential problems and discussed them and dismissed them, agreeing that everything would be alright. I’d learned to envision sex in a daydream more clearly than ever before, it could happen again for me at any time. So many things were meant to be behind me. Finally the hate was dissipating.

I told Gil “I don’t think this situation will ever change.” He said “I think this situation will change.” I was driving and I pressed the pedal harder and I brought the music up to us with physical presence like a scratchy rug and he said “You’re angry, huh?” I was fighting tears. I wanted to bring Hadas Karni into them but couldn’t, she gently said “Can’t you be a little more specific?” but understood that I couldn’t and said “Okay” and said no more about it. It was very perceptive of her.

I thought ‘the many words chosen to describe the few will only mislead’. With time I could lose sight of me just as poorly. I wanted to say journey or even change, I came up with barely a glance. Tal was in India and missed us all so much. At first it was hard to find my way into his homesickness because all I wanted to do was leave until I realized that it was exactly the reason I craved out. The secret was to be alone amongst others. I imagined myself happy and lost the need for any more pages in the thick old yellow notebook that I had no recollection of buying. Had I lied when I planned it all out? I couldn’t remember the planning either or the lying or whether or not there had been any lies. I’d seen a chance and the pages had rationed out just right.

It lasted for about two days.

2001

A true story about people and god

2006-08-01T22:07:00.000-04:00

One of the few rewards that accompanied the rank of sergeant was a slightly lighter load of guard duties and an upgrade to the gate post. Unlike many army rules and regulations this one actually made sense both for the base and its weary sergeants; two years into their service they were preferred over youngsters for manning the gate since their time on the base had rendered most faces familiar, and by then they were usually sick of the extended isolation of guard towers and enjoyed the way human interaction helped pass the time.

Two soldiers were needed to man the electric gates leading in and out of the base. When incoming and outgoing traffic died down to a slow hum the two soldiers would meet midway and talk; conversation was a luxury when it came to guard duty. During the days when I was at the gate my bored soldier would come out and spend time with me and whomever I’d been paired up with. He wasn't officially allowed to hang out at the gate but he couldn't really be caught either, since he could always claim he'd just been passing through. As his commander I could always corroborate his story and say he'd been sent out of the base on some mission or other. And so my guard duties were often shared by him, even on the hottest of days.

On one of these scorching hot summer days, as sweat-spiders crawled down my back under my battle-vest and dripped into a pool in my underwear, I complained to my soldier about the long painful stretch of last days. I was closer than ever to freedom, but angrier and more miserable than I’d ever been before. The sergeant I was paired up with for the shift was a religious fellow, and he hopped up and ran over when he heard my ranting. "What choices do we have?" I spat. "We can either let go and lose years of our lives, or open our eyes and mouths and wade through the shit and let it fill our stomachs. What is this? This isn’t life." My soldier laughed.

The religious sergeant questioned me about the quality of my faith. My soldier grinned, expecting to hear my cynical response. I let him down with a shrug; it was just too hot to argue any point except for misery. The religious sergeant would not let go. He pulled out his cellphone in broad daylight during our shift and dialed his brother, who was an ultra orthodox Yeshiva student.

After a few discreet words with his brother he handed me the phone and I could not say no. My soldier smiled at me.
“So.” A deep voice spoke to me over the phone. “You don’t believe in god?”
“I don’t know.” I said, apologetically. I was strangely void of any fear of being caught breaking the rules with a phone in my hand.
“Where did you come from?” He asked.
“I don’t know.” I admitted. “I don’t have the answer to that one. I’m just a twenty year old kid, that question’s too big for me.”
“Ah.” He said. “But you’re searching for the answer?”
“I don’t believe anybody has the answer.”
“So you’re not searching for it?”
“No, I’m not searching for it.”
“Ah.” He said. “Alright. Well, when you start searching for the answer, you’ll understand.”
“Okay. Here, here’s your brother.”

I handed the phone back to the religious sergeant, whose face glowed in childlike anticipation. “So, what did he say to you?”
“He convinced me.” I nodded solemnly.

The religious sergeant reciprocated my nod, and my soldier laughed. The religious sergeant, who was obviously dimwitted, laughed along with him. I'd spent enough hours in guard towers, alone except for that possible presence of god, to appreciate the sound of other people. It was all so meaningless that it made me perfectly cool and happy.

A true story about some nights

2006-07-27T02:53:00.000-04:00

Some nights were better than others, and others were so bad they had to be forgotten; any attempt at capturing their numb desperation would crumple overnight and reveal nothing but words the next morning. I’d been suffering through more and more of those nights during my last months in the army, kept up by nocturnal, slow-motion panic attacks that felt artificial even as they took over my vision like tainted contact lenses shoved into my eyes. When I finally got to shut my stinging eyes I was subjected to dreams that could weigh entire days down.

I dreamt about Gil, and the fact that I had yet to meet his new girlfriend Keren didn’t stop her from joining us there, flesh and blood, slick black hair tied back in a mischievous ponytail, clever narrow eyes and thin lips, so real, so flawed and beautiful. I understood immediately why he loved her. I told Gil I’d dreamt about her and he laughed and wanted to hear it. He was especially curious to hear what she’d looked like since I’d never seen her, and he smiled and said “She doesn’t look like that at all.”, but he wasn’t angry, he was gentle.

In the dream I had done the impossible and outlived the army. I was a free man once again and down on my luck. Gil was well established in this dream world, and since I had inexplicably found myself without a place to sleep I was crashing at the grungy apartment he shared with Keren. And yet it didn’t feel like a young couple’s apartment, more like the stuffy home of grandparents. It was furnished in rich mahogany and had couches upholstered in a foggy green that matched the wall to wall carpeting. The air stood still in this dark place, and walking through it I constantly felt the tickle of disturbed cobwebs on my face.

I imagined we were about to do something wonderful, an act that would be clean and pure within this cloud of flith, anything that would keep us alive. I had a glimpse of eroticism; one of Keren’s hands stroking me and the other stroking Gil. I sat with them in their old living room and time passed by, shadows moved on the wall and I understood the sun had set. They led me to my room, which felt like it had never been used. It was no bigger than a bathroom, with barely enough space for a grey cot with an army blanket neatly folded on top of it. I lay myself down in mild disappointment and after two hours of dreamless sleep within my dream I was awoken by the gentle brush of Keren’s hand against my cheek.

“Come.” She said, and I felt happiness.
She led me to the kitchen, where Gil sat nervously smoking a cigarette that he hadn’t ashed once. The sight of him was suddenly shocking; his fingers and throat were freakishly skinny, his face worn out and old with liver spots, his eyes sunken in black, his full head of hair nearly gone and his beard caked in white dust. He flashed an apologetic smile, his eyes brimming with embarrassment.

Keren ignored him. She picked a small brown bottle the size of her thumb off the spice rack, pulled me by the arm back into the living room and pressed my head to the couch. The bottle’s cap was an eyedropper. She pulled my eyelids back and dangled the eyedropper over me. Thick brown drops floated down and covered my vision until Keren’s image smiling wisely down at me was obscured by a curtain of brown.

Gil laughed at the dream. I felt he was happy I’d dreamt about Keren. He told me he was happy with her, even though she sometimes brought on horrible depressions. “Two days ago she gave me the worst depression I’ve had in a long long time.” He said. “I was just walking around at night going nowhere for hours. I called you, but I bet you don’t remember. I think you were sleeping.”
“When did you call me?”
“At night.”
My friend had been lost late at night and he’d called me, but I had no memory of it. I’d slept through his pain. The fact that I’d answered my phone, spoken to him and said goodbye without even nearing consciousness was a scary thought.

A few nights later he asked “So, do you want to meet Keren?” I drove to pick the both of them up from the center of Tel Aviv. I’d devoted time to deciding what I should wear, made sure my hair was relatively glued to my scalp and carefully picked out the right music for the ride. Keren looked nothing like she had in my dream. I liked her very much; it was all in her eyes and in her smile, and in her short curly hair. They couldn’t part and both climbed into the back of my cab. I smiled and winked at them through the rearview mirror.

Keren said “Buy me a lollypop.”
Gil said “No.”
Keren said “Pllleeeeeaasseee?”
Gil said “No.”
We stopped for frozen yogurt, my treat. I felt I owed them that much, since I knew I would be leaning on them plenty in our futures. I handed out small plastic spoons. Keren chewed on hers. Gil took it out of her mouth and pried it out of her hand. My smile wavered. I drove her home. They hugged outside my car window, two headless bodies, their shirts lifted above their belly buttons as they stretched around each other and I saw his hairy stomach and her smooth skin.

Back in the car Gil said “Man, I cried last night. Do you know how long it’s been since I cried?” He sounded strangely happy. When I stopped the car under his grandmother’s house he said “If you feel empty… really empty, indifferent to life… that’s the worst. That’s the most dangerous, it’s worse than depression.”
“You know,” I quietly tasted what I was about to say. “I used to live my life thinking that something amazing was going to happen to me. I think now I just live my life because I’m not dead.”
Gil said nothing. I felt horrible. He was finally happy, and I had to leave my dirty thumbprints all over it. Why was I was dragging him down with me? He’d done nothing wrong.
“I’m sorry.” I laughed stiffly.
“You should be.” He said jokingly. “Anyways, thanks for the ride.”
“Are you kidding? Riding in the same car with you is a rare pleasure in this shitty, shitty, shitty life.”

The true gummy worm tales

2006-07-25T02:20:00.000-04:00

At the risk of letting all tension go slack, I’ve always begun the following stories by giving away their endings. I am lucky enough to be able to claim that gummy worms have led me into serious trouble not once but twice in my life. These twin tales are the kind you stay tuned to for their absurd details, not for their thematically linked conclusions. They are self-admittedly stupid stories, the kind that have to be punctuated by a “true story” promise, the kind I wished my life had more of, even if I did have to pay for their existence by spending a week in army jail or by losing a comfortable job. What better reason to sit in jail or lose a job over than gummy worms?

My first run in with gummy worms was as a young soldier. I spent my first few months on the base filling in the role of unit bitch, which meant that in addition to my full roster of guard duties and kitchen duties I was first to be called on for any ‘unexpected duties’. These ‘unexpected duties’, a title comfortably squished into a slick army acronym in Hebrew, were usually quite expected and anticipated months in advance, but they retained their ‘unexpected’ heading because that allowed them to be dumped unexpectedly upon any soldier without him being able to argue against them.

I was rewarded with my fare share of ‘unexpecteds’, which were usually chilly mornings spent guarding bus stations and parking lots where massive soldier pick-ups took place. All of these soldiers I was protecting were armed to the teeth and, unlike myself, trained in combat, but officially I was there to guard them as they got on their buses to their bases. Also dubbed ‘unexpected’ were the grueling Passover cleaning duties at the base kitchen, where we mopped the ceilings with soapy brooms and actually blow-torched every corner to assure the base Rabbi that no microscopic morsel of leavened bread was left behind. That the army habitually considered this annual holiday to be an ‘unexpected’ event was, quite ironically, not even close to being the most ironic example of military distortion that I came across during my service.

Another perfectly expected event that lent itself to an ‘unexpected’ duty was the occasional overnight visit by the Israeli version of “Air Force One”. Army laws required that a guard be posted outside of the empty aircraft at all times, but specifically prohibited the guard from being armed. This guard wasn’t there to stop the enemy; that was the duty of the guards placed on the base borders. The plane’s guard was given a chair which he was allowed to sit on for ten minutes every hour on the hour, a walkie-talkie and brief orders to stop any other soldier from touching or boarding the plane. As if anybody ever came anywhere near the airstrips at three in the morning, and, more importantly, as if anybody cared. There was no glamour to the Israeli “Air Force One”, and there was no glamour to being the plane’s personal guard on a freezing winter night.

So there I was, walking circles around a grade-school chair perched under a Boeing aircraft and trying to keep what was left of my body heat from slipping away. I was bored senseless. The officer that had hand picked me for this special assignment had known about it for weeks but had conveniently sprung it on me hours before, so I hadn’t even had the opportunity to sneak an illegal book or walkman up to my post. I was bored, I was cold, I was tired and I was miserable. Three hours into my four hour shift my walkie came alive and nearly gave me a heart attack. An indifferent soldier from the war room informed me I would have to fill in for my replacement, at least three hours longer until six o’clock in the morning.

The last paragraph isn’t a description of that moment so much as it is a list of excuses I’ve compiled for myself, just as I did that night. The truth is that a part of me had already made the decision to do something stupid and it was only a matter of time before I gave in to myself. It was a clarity that set me at ease, as if somebody else had cast the die on my behalf. I would peacefully resign myself to playing along with what had to happen, whether it was cutting an entire day of classes at highschool or, as a soldier, boarding the very plane I was commanded to keep anyone away from. I had no choice in the matter.

I had only intended to take a short break snuggled in one of the comfortable first class seats and wait until my teeth stopped chattering. I had no interest in a tour of the plane; I’d seen it many times before and was as bored with it as I was with anything that had to do with the army. I dove into the first seat to the right of the door and closed my eyes. Ten seconds later I opened them so as not to fall asleep. It was then that I noticed them. They were in a thick, black, industrial-strength trash bag that was placed inside a black milk crate seated beside me. I don’t remember what made me peek inside the bag, its exterior hinted at nothing special, but once I had seen them there was no going back. The bag was packed with gummy worms, the most I had ever seen in my life.

I didn’t question the finding. I quickly figured there were way too many gummy worms in that enormous bag for one, two or even fifty of them to be missed, and before I had enough time for the next thought, I was already wrist deep in them. That skipped thought might have been about how bizarre the existence of this treasure trash-bag was in the first place, or maybe about whose gummy worms they actually were, the Prime Minister’s perhaps? I wasn’t thinking at all. I wasn’t hungry, but I was ravenous for those semi transparent rubbery candies.

Luckily for me, I somehow managed to detect the sounds of the nearing patrol jeep over the rattling of chewing between my ears just in time to run out of the plane and around it. As I ran I unbuttoned my pants and made sure I was seen scrambling through buttoning back up as I came around towards the jeep. I did this to support my story, which was that I hadn’t wanted to waste everybody’s time by hailing the patrol jeep and a reserve soldier just so I could pee, so I’d relieved myself behind the plane’s wheel. According to my story, I’d only been gone for a few seconds.

I never learned just how severe the punishment for sneaking on to the Prime Minister’s plane and gorging on the pilots’ favored snack would have been. I was too scared to find out. For abandoning post, even if the wheel was only a few feet away from the chair, I was found guilty and sentenced to a week in jail on my base. The judge was especially lenient, he happened to be one of the officer’s I’d buttered up the most in that short time with precious favors and favoritism. What followed was the most tolerable week from hell I could ever have had. I knew it was a small price to pay for a perfect moment.

It was even better the second time around, because unlike landing in jail this time I was fulfilling that familiar subconscious wish, the wish to be fired. A year into my empty post-military existence I’d given up all hope of finding a good job. It was a hard time for our state’s economy, and a harder time for my state of mind. I’d sent my resume out to every single editing house within the greater Tel Aviv area and landed nothing more than a couple of unpaid internships that never turned into paying jobs or the sporadic wedding and bar-mitzvah editing gig that had me listening to Jennifer Lopez’s “Waiting for Tonight” till me ears bled. A year after I’d sent out hundreds of copies of my resume one studio called me back. It was a television studio located in an ideal walking distance from my house, but they had no need for an editor, they wanted a part time security guard. “But you’ve got my resume,” I said on the phone. “you’ve had it for a year. You can tell I’m an editor, right? It’s what I did in the army.”
“Yeah, but things are bad in the industry these days and there are no jobs, so I thought at least this way I’d be doing you a favor.” The lady said. “Anyway, didn’t you also have guard duty in the army?”
“Well… yeah. I did.”

So there I was, manning the twelve hour graveyard shifts at “Roll studios” with my buttoned down guard’s uniform, my little satellite TV and my little kitchenette for coffee, tea and soup in a cup. There were only two studios at “Roll”, a bigger one for live or live-on-tape shows, either game-shows or talk-shows, and a smaller one for low budget productions with no audience. From eight PM to midnight I had to convey some sense of vigilance while the bad talk-show was being aired; I stood at the door and oversaw the entrance of crew and guests and chatted away with hilarious groupies that would huddle outside the door but always remain respectful of that border. I became familiar with two competing die-hard fans who were not fans of any celebrity in particular but fans of fandom itself. They each had photo albums of themselves posing with any kind of celebrity they could find, and they’d find them all by stalking them outside television studios. They said I was the nicest guard they ever knew, and they hoped I’d stay for a while.

I shared that hope, since after those few hours of activity I got to lock up the doors behind everybody and stay in wonderful solitude in an abandoned building for eight hours straight. I could write, I could read, I could watch satellite TV, I could play my guitar, I could entertain friends, I could do practice SAT tests, I could sleep, I could do it all with the warming knowledge that I was getting paid for every minute of it. Of course I was expected to do none of the above, to remain alert and to patrol the studios and hallways every hour, but I rarely did so. So while in the past boredom had led me to abandon my job and discover the gummy worms, the second time around boredom led me to actually do my job, thereby discovering the gummy worms.

I was bored and tired and had decided to stretch my legs and do one of those patrols that I was required to do but never did. I couldn’t even remember the route I had been instructed to take along the maze of corridors covered in posters for films that had nothing to do with this struggling television studio except create an atmosphere of importance. I enjoyed walking through the two studios; I loved discovering time and time again how differently the sets looked in reality than on the screen, how cheaply painted and poorly constructed they were, how ugly to the naked eye. That night I walked into the smaller studio, which was usually empty, and found a new world had been erected there.

It was the set for a new children’s television show called “Benny’s Attic”, and unlike the larger studio’s shoddy game-show-talk-show sets this one actually looked like an attic. There was an A-shaped slanting rooftop, a nice wooden wall with a small window revealing a blue backdrop of sky hung behind it, a round carpet with the image of the globe on it covered in furniture and beanbags, three or four bookshelves stacked with all the Israeli children’s books I’d read as a kid, and, on the final shelf, three huge jars of gummy worms.

The decision had been made. My reasoning was that I was merely picking the jar off the shelf to pacify a nagging filmmaker’s curiosity; I wanted to know whether those were prop gummy worms or the real thing. They were real. I was like a kid on the set of a candy store. Now it was only a matter of eating enough to cause a stomach ache and then rearranging those that were left in such a way that they would still reach the same height they had before on the side of the jar that faced the camera. It was as I was doing that, with three or four gummy worms hanging out of my mouth, that I was caught by Igor, the stage manager. I have no idea what he was doing in the studio at two thirty in the morning. He’d let himself in through the back door and was staring at me with a cigarette in his hand. I had nothing left to do but say “Want a gummy worm?” to which he replied “No.” in his thick Russian accent.

Three weeks later I was fired. My boss hadn't even bothered to tell me I'd lost my job. I suppose he thought I already knew as much. I showed up for my shift in uniform and found another uniformed guard sitting behind the desk. I called my boss from the studio’s phone and he said in his cigarette voice “Oh, yes, our relationship has reached its end.” I wasn’t angry; it was with that final act that the gummy worm stories came together.

I’d lost a week and a job but I’d gained two stories. I couldn’t wait to see what price gummy worms would claim on their third visit. I knew I’d be willing to pay more than ever before, because I had learned my lesson: You get what you pay for. Especially when it comes to those slippery chewy yummy conniving snakes I call true stories.

The true story of he, him and I

2006-07-21T02:50:00.000-04:00

At fourteen I witnessed the complete mental disintegration of a friend of mine. That he was the most likely candidate for such a breakdown did nothing to make it any less fantastic when it happened right before our eyes. Before his mind collapsed he’d been the classic nerd, as exaggerated as a cartoon character with his gangly features, his bloated lips, his speech impediment that turned his ‘ch’s into sprinklers, his thick framed glasses and his porcupine hair, the way he stuffed his shirts into his shorts and his crooked, curvy posture; ass and belly sticking out and away from each other.

I’d never had a bully growing up. He had many bullies, and I was one of them. I never hit him, but I abused him in every other way possible. I remember why I did it, though I can’t excuse it. I pestered him and picked at him because the sight of him put me to shame. His ineptness at life offended me. I was afraid of becoming him and I was afraid I already was him. Years later my friend Roi told me “You really impressed me with your cruelty.” I was his bully and his friend, which probably made it worse because I felt I had the right to poke fingers into his wounds; I only wanted to make him better.

It happened during the summer between the eight and ninth grade. I was the first one to hear from him, and he was already far gone when he called me. He’d phoned to ask about a Stephen King book I’d described to friends a few days earlier. “I want you to tell me what happens in that book again.” He requested in a mysterious voice that should have had me worried but merely annoyed me. The Stephen King story had to do with an old man who stopped sleeping and began to see auras enveloping people. Later on he could make out evil creatures that severed the auras, resulting in their owners’ deaths. I rushed through the plot impatiently and then asked, “Why did you want to know that?”, fully expecting an outburst of geeky awkwardness for an answer.

Instead he replied “Because it’s happening to me.” in a chilling voice. “What? What do you mean?” I frowned.
“I have to go.” He blurted and hung up. When I tried to call back the line was busy, most likely he’d left the phone off the hook.

I was too perplexed to let it go. I called my friends one by one and asked if they’d noticed anything strange about him lately. The first friend said no, the second said no as well. My third call was to Roi. He answered “Yes!” emphatically. “I just talked to him and he sounded so weird!” I was filled with gratitude; I hadn’t imagined it after all. “What’s going on with him?” Roi asked in fascination. “Let’s call him up and invite him to your house.” I told Roi his phone had been busy for the last twenty minutes. “Yeah, ‘cause he was talking to me.” Roi said.
“What did he say?”
“It was so weird… I’m going to call him up now and tell him to come to your place.”
“Ok.”

Roi and I sat in anticipation for half an hour until he showed up. He walked in and decidedly crouched down in the middle of the room in front of us, pressing his ass to his heels. He intertwined his fingers and put them to his lips. “You can have a seat on the couch.” I said, but he shook his head. Roi and I exchanged wide eyed glances. We waited in silence for a few moments. I felt terrified and excited.

“So what’s going on?” Roi broke the silence.
“Hold on.” He spoke slowly. “I think he’s listening.”
“Who’s ‘he’?”
He looked at us and said “He. Him. He.”
“Who’s he?” Roi asked again.
“He can hear and see everything; he’s got an eye in a pyramid and an ear in a cone, but he can’t get me because I know about him now.”
Roi and I exchanged glances again. It was actually happening, and I felt guilty for wanting it to keep going and never stop.
“What are you talking about? Are you alright?”
“I’m fine. I can control my cat without any problems and I think I can control my grandpa too. I have the skills.”
“What do you mean, control your cat?” I asked.
“I can control animals.”
“Do it then.” Roi challenged him. He demanded that he show us his “animal control” over my dog.
“Ok.” He rose to the challenge with utter confidence.

We stepped outside to my street. I let our family’s big German Shepard out and he began idly sniffing away at the neighbor’s hedge and peeing on it in select spots. Our friend walked to the middle of the road and put his pointer fingers to his temples. He closed his eyes and began to shake; it was freakish and creepy. It wasn’t fun any longer. My dog paid no attention to him. Meanwhile his shaking grew more and more violent until it stopped with a start. His eyes popped open, he looked up at the sky and shouted “He’s there! You can’t stop me!”

My heart had skipped a beat. Roi gently laid an arm on his shoulder, and I grabbed my dog by the collar. We stepped back inside. As we walked I heard him say to Roi in a low voice that he couldn’t successfully do these things around me, that I had a “black aura.”
“I heard that.” I said.
“You have a black aura.” He said it again to my face.
“Ok, ok, we’ll go to my place.” Roi said. “He won’t come with us.”
Roi looked at me, he was scared. I had been sufficiently scared myself and was glad to see him go.

A few hours later Roi called me. “What happened at your place?” I asked.
“It was so fucked up… he said he could control the stray cats that hang around in our back yard, so he did the whole thing again, with the shaking, but this time it was way worse, he looked like he was having a seizure, I thought he was going to die. He kept talking about this ‘he’ person or thing. And when some of the cats walked around he started jumping up and down and saying that he just ordered them to do that.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah. And he said some weird shit about you, about how your aura was a sickness and how you contaminated everybody in your way.”
“Asshole.”
“No, I think he’s really lost it. Like really lost it. He’s gone.”
“You think he’s gone?”
“Right now I think he’s gone, yeah.”
“Is he still at your place?”
“No. I probably should have gone with him but he was creeping me out.”
“Yeah.”
“He’s gone.”

The next day my curiosity once again outweighed my fear and I called his house. His mother answered the phone and said “He’s away for the summer, he’s visiting his cousins in Jerusalem.”
“When is he going to be back?” I asked.
“He’s spending the entire summer there.”
“Wow, he didn’t say anything about that. When did he leave?”
“Two weeks ago.”
“I just saw him yesterday.”
“He’s spending the whole summer there.” His mother ignored me. “You’ll see him in September.”

He hadn’t gone to Jerusalem, he’d been admitted to a mental hospital. He didn’t spend the whole summer there either, only three weeks and then he returned. Roi had aggressively rescued the truth from his younger brother; he’d been diagnosed with a chemical imbalance and prescribed powerful drugs. At first it seemed he was his same old self again, socially inept but not insane. He sheepishly admitted he’d not been to see his cousins but let words such as “mental ward” or “psychiatric drugs” remain unspoken. Roi said “Let’s just not talk about it ever again.” He and I were the only ones to have witnessed the summer episode first hand, and neither of us mentioned it again. It was forgotten.

We grew older and all went to the same highschool. I was no longer his bully; I’d grown too old and had become too self centered to pick on anybody but myself. He never lapsed into insanity again, but as the smoke cleared it was apparent that he was a changed person. Before his breakdown he was a true nerd; he’d dedicate weeks to studying for a test and would proclaim “Knowledge is power!”. Afterwards he rarely showed up for classes. His house was on my morning route and occasionally I’d see him standing at the corner before the last bend in the road up to our highschool, his backpack cracking his posture, his body still as a statue. I’d stop by him and say “You on your way to school?” He’d nod. “Come on, I’ll walk with you.”
He’d say “No, it’s ok, you go. I’ll come soon.” And he never showed. Once he proclaimed that he was going to wake up and salvage his education. He asked if he could borrow my history textbook. I never saw the book again.

He rarely came out with us, only once every two or three months provided we were out to a movie or any such activity that wouldn’t require much human interaction. On one of these nights I walked home with him from the bus station and he started scaring me. His words still made sense but the conversation was precarious. He was deeply distressed over the upcoming “beer crisis”, in which a shortage of wheat would cause all the alcoholics of Asia and Africa to invade Europe and the Americas with a fervor that would spare no one. In the quiet stillness of the night his bleak predictions made my skin crawl. We’d reached his house but he was reluctant to go in. I stood and he walked circles around me.
I asked “Do you really think we’re going to have world war three because of beer?”
“It will probably happen by 1999.”
“Shit. You’re depressing me. Don’t talk about this stuff so late at night.”
“I’m sorry. I forget that I’m stronger than most people.”
We’d been talking around it for two years but it was the middle of the night and nothing felt real anymore so I said “Don’t get offended or anything, but are you going to go crazy again?”
“No.”
“Ok.”
I’d tested the waters with that insensitive blurt and he was fine with it, in fact he expected it from me. I owed it to him to go on. “What was it like?” I asked.
“It was horrible. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.” He said. “It was like having someone shove a cold knife into my back and twist it.” That line stuck to my mind, it was far more poetic than our teenage-speak ever got. He briefly touched the small of my back as if escorting a date to make his point about the knife.
“That’s crazy.” I said.
“It won’t happen again.”
I was on the cusp of my long fascination with drugs and its accompanying discontent with sobriety, and I said “You know, people take drugs to go where you went, and you take drugs to come back here and stay here.”
“People shouldn’t do that.” He said.
“Yeah.” I said. “Well, you know, the grass is always greener. I want to go places too, but it’s kind of scary.”
“It’s very scary.”
“But so is staying here, isn’t that what you’re saying?”
“Yes. But it’s scarier there.”
“I’ll take your word for it.” I smiled. He didn’t. I knew I should feel lucky, but knowing it and feeling it were two separate entities, and I never was more acutely aware of how far apart the two were than at that very moment in time.
“So who was ‘he’?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” He said. “I was insane.”
I laughed, and this time he did too.

The truth about missing missiles

2006-07-19T00:58:00.000-04:00

I slept through the first cry of the gulf war of 1991, an odd achievement since my room’s window practically faced the siren. It was obscured only by the water tower, which could block its sight but not its sound. Both were planted next to each other in the sandy back lot of my elementary school five minutes or so away from our house, and both stood out plainly against the sky, high above any other building in our low roof suburban neighborhood.

I might have slept through the war’s first explosion as well if my mother hadn’t shaken me awake. There are very few moments I remember as exactly as I remember her hands on my body and the panic in her breath, and then, as she yanked me out of bed, the explosion, which took terrifying form in my mind. I saw a fat and stubby water tower of a missile pummel bright clouds of hell’s fire through blackness as it headed towards me.

The world shook around us. My mother pushed me and my younger brother into the study, which had been our designated sealed room. The room’s window was duct-taped shut and a wet towel was placed under the crack of the door as instructed by the military spokesperson; this was our protection against chemical warfare, my Israeli generation’s belated version of the 1950’s “Duck and Cover”, except for the fact that this was real, it was really happening. My mother forced the gas mask onto my face and painfully pulled at its rubber chords. Then came the silence and the waiting.

I remember the room through the mask, the jerky head movements unconsciously brought about by the narrowed field of vision, the pungent hospital smell of the black rubber, the grossly amplified sounds of our breathing, and the quiet. We were waiting for our deaths, for our invisible killer to seep in through the cracks in the walls, then through the unavoidable gaps between the mask and our skin and from there into our lungs, and the pain wouldn’t be far behind. I was ten years old and I thought “I don’t want to die”. It wasn’t the first time I’d thought about death, but it was the first time I found myself in the same room with it.

I kept checking my mask’s vacuum by covering its filter and sucking in the air until my mother slapped my hand away from it. Her voice was frighteningly muted through her mask. My nose was itchy and runny but I couldn’t get to it. I felt like crying but beat the sensations away; my father was gone on reserve duty and my mother needed us to be strong. We sat and waited for an eternity. I grew impatient with the fear, I didn’t care about missiles or deadly gasses any more, I wanted to blow my nose and eat some of the dried bananas we had on the desk. I was driving myself crazy with conversations in my mind, torn between simple, immediate urges and the overshadowing fear of death. I exhausted myself to sleep that way, leaning against the wall with snot running down my lips and the clammy skin inside my mask.

When I woke up it was over. I had slept through the second siren, the one that let us know the missile had not been a chemical one. My mother didn’t want to bother my sleep; I had curled up on the floor and seemed peaceful. She’d been able to remove my gas mask and wipe my face without waking me. I was furious at her. I had missed both of the war’s sirens; the one that went up and down to alert us of the missile in the air and the long and steady one that told us we were safe. I had gone through it without going through it. I was still in the dark.

Of course I had heard the siren before. Israel had three sirens a year during the week that preceded the Israeli Independence Day; one for Holocaust Day and two for Memorial Day, during which we stood and paid tribute to the dead, a minute of silence accompanied by a nationwide wail. But up until the war I had always heard these sirens from up close, too close in fact. I had always been at school, counting the seconds in class till the siren went off right outside our windows, its slow, moaning beginnings scaring the breath out of our lungs every time. One of those times we’d engaged in a game of marbles in the sand underneath the siren during recess, and when we returned to the game afterwards we found that several of the marbles that had been left behind had exploded from the siren’s force. It was a scare and a thrill.

The morning after the first scud missile hit Israel was a morning of panic for me. I’d never heard the siren from the distance of our house and I had no idea how loud it would be. Would I be able to hear it? Would it startle me half to death, or would it be more like a faint humming, barely louder than the buzz of the refrigerator? Every little sound made me jump; the bending of a motorcycle’s engine as it zipped by the house or the chirping of a far away bird, they all sounded like a siren for a split second.

Since I had no idea what volume to expect from the siren, I fought for silence throughout the entire day. We had all the radios in the house tuned to the special war station which was dubbed “The Silent Wave”, a station that played absolutely nothing until the event of an attack, so that the radios could be turned up without interfering with our soundscape. I refrained from watching TV but caught a glimpse of the remains of the scud missile on the news. It was not as I’d imagined it; it was skinnier and longer, much longer than it had sounded. A couple of police officers lifted the bent missile and I almost laughed. It looked ridiculous.

The second missile was not as memorable as the first was. In all honesty, I can’t remember it or distinguish it from the attacks that followed over the next month or so. I remember becoming easily adjusted to our new life, enjoying the month-long break from school, nonchalantly expecting a missile every evening and laughing a lot, especially with friends or in front of the television. It was common amongst kids to sneak up behind each other, cover our mouth with our hands and imitate the steady rise of a siren. We also enjoyed imitating the radio’s war codes; which were “Viper Snake, Viper Snake” for an incoming missile, and “Heavy Heatwave, Heavy Heatwave” for the confirmation that the missile head was not chemical.

Israeli comedy shows created memorable gems during the war, a pinnacle of dark Jewish humor. Comedians acted out skits about the incompetent Iraqis and their rickety mobile missile launchers. Another comedian created a recurring fictional character of the Iraqi ambassador to Israel, who offered silly explanations for his country’s aggressions. In these skits the Iraqi soldiers weren’t the enemy, they were lovable buffoons. Saddam, however, remained evil. He was absent from the comedy shows and his face was plastered on toys that were meant to be broken or smashed against a wall. The fortunate fact that his name rhymed with the Hebrew word for ‘stupid’ lent itself to many taunting songs we sang joyfully.

A few weeks into the war my father returned home from reserve duty. He was not acquainted with our new routine, and as a result of his melodramatic reaction to his first missile with us at home I remember one more attack clearly. After the first day of the attacks we’d traded the study for the shelter and we’d become accustomed to a slow and sometimes begrudging march towards it when the siren was heard, but on my father’s first night home he ran and grabbed me and my brother with violence I’d never seen in him before and rushed us to the shelter like inanimate luggage. He practically threw us in there. Before his return we’d been sitting inside the shelter in our gas masks feeling stupid until the word came that all was clear. With our father we had to sit through his rocking back and forth and mumbling “I thought my kids would never see another war.”

As if that was war. Once I’d gotten over my initial brush with death I’d started craving war, real war, not this nightly joke that was going on around us. The fear was gone. The subsequent explosions were not as loud or as frightening as the first had been, they felt distant and remote. The siren wasn’t too loud and it wasn’t too low, it was no more exciting or terrifying than a car alarm down the street was. The threat of chemical warheads on the missiles was potent for the first week, but was lost on a child’s erratic attention span by the second week.

My parents were scared. My mother rarely showed it, but my father had a flare for drama and always let his emotions lead him. He was a large man who cried and laughed with the same lack of shame. We were living in the most dangerous area in Israel during the war, where the majority of missiles fell. We never thought of leaving before my father had come home, but once he was back we were packed and off to the relative safety of friends of the family in Jerusalem within a couple of days. During our second night there a missile fell less than thirty feet away from our home and claimed the single life that was lost due to a direct hit. The war knew many second hand deaths, heart attacks and gas mask malfunctions, but only one man was crushed to death by his shelter’s steel door when the missile hit his house.

I could not believe that I had missed it. The whole war had been for that moment, yet I hadn’t even heard a siren. It was exactly why my father had taken us away from there, and I felt I would never forgive him. I begged to come along the next day to inspect the damage to our house. I was allowed there only after my father had cleaned up all the glass, and so I never got to see any of that either. When I got there all I saw was that most of our roof tiles had been blown away, that none of our windows had any glass in them and that every single window frame was bent up as if it had an erection. Our dog was crying. I overheard my father telling his sister that the dog was covered in glass when he found him and shivering in a panic.

My dog was irreparably traumatized by the war. I stared at him in envy. He’d gotten to be there and witness it all, he’d felt the ground shake and the glass against his fur. I already knew that I wanted to be a storyteller, and as one war was the best thing that could ever happen to me. I would use the expending of other’s ammunition as my own ammunition. All I was left with now was the pale story of missing the missile. Of course, I could always lie, but that wasn’t it. I’d wanted more than a story; I wanted the presence of death, up close and yet still at bay, liked a caged predator at the zoo. I’d felt the fear, now I wanted its rewards.

And it must have been even more than that, because other than the frustration I felt faced with the minor destruction of our windows and doors and the heart wrenching whimpers of our poor dog, I was choking on guilt. I not only deserved to be there as a reward, I deserved it as punishment as well. I was guilty and I was ashamed. Missing a war is a strange and sick weight to carry around, and I would feel it again and again, especially when the missiles returned to Israel’s skies. The horrid headlines fired up a homesickness in me that I could never explain to others. I couldn’t even explain it to myself.

True Lisa stories (part 2 of 4)

2006-07-17T18:10:00.000-04:00

I’d been stopping by her office every day. At first I’d invented excuses for the visits, but soon enough the visits themselves became the excuse. I was there to put a smile on her face. On one of those days she greeted me by saying “I dreamt about you.”
“Oh, really?” I said, and took a piece of candy from the little basket she had on her counter. “So how was I?”
“Well, actually, in the dream I was asking you how I was.”
I smiled, and my lungs popped into my throat. “Oh, really? Cool.”
“Yeah, we were on another trip with our unit, but this time you and I parked this red car away from everybody else. And the car was surrounded by ropes, here, let me show you.” She slowly peeled a post-it note and taped in onto the counter. She drew a crude car from a bird’s-eye view and a pole on each corner with four ropes strung between them tightly, closing the car off like a crime scene. I saw all that in a rectangle within a rectangle. “See, it kind of reminded me of a stable or something.” She went on. “And there was also a horse there. And I asked you how I was, if I’d been alright. I mean, we’d just had sex, yeah?”
I stared into her eyes as she said “had sex”, and my legs froze. I couldn’t have left even if I’d wanted to.
“And you were kind of apathetic, you said ‘yeah, you were alright’ in that voice,” She’d mimicked my tone from her dream. “And I asked you how you preferred it, me on top, me on the bottom, whatever…” She laughed. “It took me so long to get you to actually say I’d been alright.”
She looked at me, expecting me to say something.
I said “That’s not a very realistic dream.” She waited for more. “I mean, I’m not that kind of guy in real life.”
“What do you mean ‘that kind of guy’? A guy who has sex?” She asked.
Of course I hadn’t meant that at all, I’d meant a guy who could be apathetic to a woman who’d just slept with him and was now asking him what he preferred, I was the kind of guy who would tell her she was wonderful if I had the chance and the reason, but I hadn’t and she’d asked that question and it seemed the easiest thing to do at that moment was to answer. “Yeah, exactly, the kind of guy who has sex. I’m not the kind of guy who has sex.”
“Are you a virgin?” She asked with trepidation.
I nodded. I couldn’t believe this was happening, that I was confirming those words within my world of military role play and confiding in Lisa of all people.
“And hold on, you’ve never had a girlfriend?” She asked.
“Nope. I’ve barely even been friends with a girl.”
“You’re going to be twenty years old!” She cried.
“Hey, don’t kill me, ok?” I chuckled nervously.
“But why?” She asked in surprising desperation.
“I don’t know. I’m bad with women.”
“How about a change?” She said. “It’s ok, I like virgins.”
“You like virgins.”
At that moment a couple of soldiers entered her office to exchange their bus tokens, and I practically ran away with barely a smile and a wave of my hand.

I called the one person I knew would answer, my friend Gil, my only friend who had not been drafted to the army. He was sitting at a restaurant on his lunch break when I called, I could hear the chatter and the clinking of forks and knives against plates in the background. I retold Lisa’s dream, careful not to omit any detail, and he said “Are you serious?! A red car? A red car, man?! In dreams red means sex, man!”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure that the part about us having sex means sex too.” I said.
“I’m not so sure about that. Dreams are strange, they don’t always mean what you think they mean. But man, a red car. That means sex.”
“I’m depressed.” I said.
“You’re depressed ‘cause you’re afraid. You’ve got to strive for it. Strive to fuck.” He made me smile. I was happy I’d called him. He took another bite and said “But listen, you gotta remember that it might be nothing. Girls like to flirt, they like to tease, they like to talk. It inflates their egos. So don’t be sure of anything.”

She had dreamt of the two of us having sex, and she had been worried about her pleasing me. We’d been in a red car, and around us there had been horses. On some level, I thought, whether she knew it or not, whether she’d wanted to or not, Lisa was attracted to me. I paced around my room impatiently, and decided to go to sleep. Surely I would dream about her. It was much too early for sleep but I climbed into bed anyway and waited with open eyes. I composed a witty and erotic dialogue for the two of us, Lisa and I. She’d be the teacher and I’d be the student.

For a while there was nothing, and then my phone rang. I didn’t catch the name at first, so the voice repeated itself. I thought it was a wrong number, but no, they were definitely looking for me. It was a young man, a researcher for one of the nation wide Israeli radio stations. He’d gotten my name and number from the Screenwriting School of Tel Aviv, where I had recently started studying. I was the youngest student to ever study there, and a soldier at that. He wanted to know if I’d be willing to be interviewed live over the phone on the radio within the hour. I mumbled uncertainties. He caught on to my apprehension and asked me to stay on the line. A moment later he was replaced by a woman’s voice dipped in honey who said “Come on, what’s the big deal? It’ll be a phone conversation just like the one you and I are having now.”
“This good, huh?” I said bitterly, and she laughed and laughed, just like Lisa.
I agreed.

My interview was set for forty minutes into the future. I was out of bed once again, pacing around my room. I felt like an ice cube slowly melting on a counter in anticipation. Panic fumes blackened the insides of my lungs. Moments ago I had been pleasurably losing myself in a scripted conversation with Lisa and now I was anxiously writing my own lines for the stage I was about to step onto. I turned on my radio.

The show started. The first two interviewees spoke in rich, secure voices. Between interviews the station played bad music, and it was over one of these poor songs that my phone rang. I was instructed to count out loud to five. I was afraid I’d lost my voice in the pacing.

Then she was there. Her voice was the strongest of them all, and mine was squeaky and weak in comparison. She mispronounced my last name multiple times but I was helpless, unable to correct her. I would be named whatever she’d name me. She asked me simple questions and I choked my way through them. A couple of times I apologized and said, “I don’t have the words”. She laughed and said “It’s alright!”, but I could almost see her reprimanding someone after the show. I wished for it to be over, and hoped I wouldn’t vomit on my phone beforehand.

The weekend came. Tal ate a sloppy falafel in front of me and I had no appetite. He heard the stories of my week, Lisa’s dream and the radio interview, and asked “Why’d you do that? The girl comes to you with a dream where she’s asking you how she was, she’s the insecure one, you’ve got the upper hand and you go and lose it.”
“Man, I kind of hoped you’d calm me down.”
“I’m not good at that kind of shit, calming people down.”
“Yeah, well… I’m never going to let anybody interview me ever again.”
“Who wants to interview you?”
“I don’t know. No one.”
“So what are you worried about?”
“Nothing.”

A true story of shit, blood and cum

2006-07-16T18:59:00.000-04:00

My army buddy Daniel is a tightly wound man with perfect fangs that prick on every grin, short stiff hair that would grow into surprisingly brittle curls once he was let out of the army, and a crudely sharpened sense of humor that got me through that time. Daniel was a chauvinist, a racist, a sadist, a misanthropic bastard with a heart of gold.

We’d met as young and battered soldiers, fresh targets for torture, and we ate shit together. Two months my senior on the base, he never allowed me to forget his supposed superiority. As I slowly gained his confidence those two months were kindly overlooked and I became an ally. He printed out his manifesto for me to read; a hilarious piece of evil titled “Danielism” which had, amongst many rules and laws, a separate and mandatory public education system for women on how to please men sexually and socially (starting at the age of six, I believe, since Daniel felt it was better to get ‘em while they were young), government regulated sex quotas for each man to be filled by the women as a matter of the law, free drugs for all, ghettos for old people, ghettos for fat people and social classes determined by beauty, the criteria for which was to be decided by Daniel himself. He had put some serious effort into compiling his manifesto; other than the long list of rules and regulations there were numerous essays on the nature of the ideology itself and one particularly brilliant step-by-step description of a young man’s typical day living under the peaceful “Danielism” regime.

When our guard duties coincided I would find all four walls of my guard booth scribbled with a mantra pointing me out by name and calling me a “semen guzzler” or a “warm semen suckler”, the product of his four hours of boredom beforehand. It was rainy and gray, I was wet and miserable in my winter uniform and laughing in the cold. I occasionally gave him a ride home, and when my car stood at a stoplight he’d say “You know what my fantasy is? To be riding like this in the passenger seat, like right now, to stop at an intersection and stare at the driver in the car to the right, and when the driver looks at me – ‘cause he’s got to look you know – I blow his brains out with a shotgun. I’m just dying to see the expression on his face when he sees the shotgun.”

Another memorable conversation on the drive home started as always with his carnivorous grin. “For fuck’s sake, what’s wrong with you?!” He’d been complaining about a girlfriend who wouldn’t swallow. “Are you fucked up or something? You’ve got a job to do!”
“So you dumped her?” I asked.
“Yeah, we split up after like four months.”
“Just ‘cause she wouldn’t let you cum in her mouth.”
“Nah, we split up ‘cause she had a boyfriend.”
“Ah.”

On his last day on the base, two months before my goodbye, I took him out to eat and he said “I can’t do it, I can’t eat. I’ve got butterflies in my stomach.” He looked at me with shimmering eyes and said “I’m getting out.” He cast an incredible force of pain and bewilderment into that one short sentence. “Hey, I’m going to miss our friendship, warm semen.” He said, genuinely.

We remained friends after the army, but Daniel had changed. He never talked about killing strangers or cumming on faces again, those vital cruelties wilted into sepia nostalgia, and Daniel laughed whenever I mentioned his manifesto and ended it with an old man’s sigh. He had a job and a car and worked hard and slow at getting a degree from the Israeli Open University over the course of six years.

He wouldn’t humiliate me when I'd awkwardly attempt to recreate our old passion of shared hatred. He’d become too much of a nice guy to do that.

The true story of "Plan B"

2006-07-14T04:49:00.000-04:00

For the majority of my life I shied away from debates. Everybody feels the burden of knowing oneself, and amongst the few certainties I had whitened my knuckles holding onto was the realization that I was beyond my worst at debating. I knew that if I stayed on the field for too long I would lose my identity to it. Real debating awoke a petulant yet savage version of me that filled me with shame. I was a writer, not by virtue of having been published or recognized but because I could do nothing else, and as a writer words were supposed to be my home, books my friends and the language my tool. But the words spilled over each other, inhaling books never granted me the desired ability to summon the relevant facts and statistics to support my beliefs and the language remained cold and impartial to my needs. I could never win a debate; I could only lose my pride, my confidence and the right to show my face again.

I was safe in the realm of lightweight opinions, where I could argue the merits of a film, a band or a book and later agree to disagree as easily as scratching my nose. Anything that pertained to life outside of artistic creation was off bounds for me. Yet as hard as I tried to steer clear from it, there was one topic that consistently bullied me into the debating ring, and that was any claim made against Zionism, the state of Israel or the IDF. I’d never understood why that was.

I had never been a Zionist. Having been born into Israel as a reality that enveloped me wherever I turned, the term Zionist was a historical relic to me. Zionism was the great ideological project of creating the Jewish state, and now that the state had been born there was no reason for those of us who’d never known a world without it to deliberate whether we were Zionists or not. It was a moot point.

I had never been much of a patriot either; nothing about it appealed to me. I was Israeli because I’d been born Israeli, and the concept of having pride in that was irrelevant, especially as long as everyone around me was just as Israeli as I was.

Finally, I had never had any love for the army. The IDF robbed me of three years of my life by making me hate myself and my existence throughout every single day I wore its uniform and every other day the uniform wore me from within its hiding place in my closet. The army was a brute and evil machine, a soulless hell. I had no doubts about my harsh feelings towards the army, but it was only a good week or so after I’d found myself in a cruel and emotional argument with my good friend Tal that I looked back in confusion and saw that I'd been shouting passionately in this army’s favor. I had to stop and make sense of myself.

We had all been discharged from the army and were floating around aimlessly along with the majority of our Israeli generation. During most of that first year of civilian life I wrote comic scripts for an underground Israeli comic book by the name of “Plan B” that friends of mine had established. It was a small operation that began with the meager initial investment of three hundred shekels, which had allowed them one hundred zeroxed copies of the first issue. By the third issue they were printing six hundred copies and selling them for ten shekels each, and the money was poured back into the next issue.

It was a time of radiant emptiness for me, and I was ready to romantically embrace any endeavor. We spent a couple of days each week selling our comic magazine at science fiction or comic book conventions, at special events or on the streets of Tel Aviv. “Israeli comic book, in Hebrew!” We cried out. “Come and get your funny comics in the holy language!” We devised many attention grabbing techniques, partly to attract buyers and partly to amuse ourselves. We’d call people out by their clothing, shouting “An Israeli comic book in Hebrew for girls wearing white jeans and a pink shirt with sunglasses and a nose ring!” just as that girl walked by, and we’d be sure not to look at her as we did it. Some would laugh, others would laugh hard enough to buy an issue.

I enjoyed those days on the streets more than any other aspect of “Plan B”. The process of creating the comic anthology was not as romantic as it had promised to be. The idea of comics in Hebrew had pulled me in deep, and I’d written out enough scripts to fill five issues. The artists, on the other hand, preferred to work on their own material despite the fact that none of them were writers or put much thought into their words. When they did bring one of my scripts to life they would do so on their own, without collaborating with me, leaving me displeased with the outcome. They were slowly backing away from everything I’d held dear about our little dream; the stories lost their narrative thread and their language as well, they became surrealistic sequences void of words. I’d imagined short stories drawn out as serious, funny and endearing comics and was willing to live with them being collected under the English title, “Plan B” as long as the content was exclusively Hebrew, but I was losing the fight and making everyone else miserable along the way. My friend Gil, one of the founders of “Plan B”, told me “You’re too aggressive. You’re pushing people too hard.”

Though I was close to giving up on ever changing “Plan B”, I was still as active as I could be. I came out for sales every day during the Israeli annual “Book Week”, which consisted of dozens of bookstands from every publishing house in the country set up in a park for people to browse through. We set up our little table-less stand and sold magazines on the periphery of the event, shouting our lungs out with the same absurd slogans about Hebrew comics for people who hated books, Hebrew comics for people who had just bought books, Hebrew comics for people who liked weeks, Hebrew comics for people with beards and Hebrew comics for pregnant ladies and Hebrew comics for just about everyone.

On the second or third day of the “book week” the creators of another underground comic magazine approached us with an offer: since they had a stand of their own on the other side of the park we could swap some of our issues for theirs and sell issues of both magazines. It was a good idea and I would have agreed to it were it not for the content of their anthology, which was blatantly anti-IDF. While our comic stories were bittersweet tales about the dissuading nothingness of life, theirs were distinctly political and featured bloody panels of Israeli soldiers eating Palestinian body parts with a smile on their face. They were all glee and gore, with plenty of sarcastic, cynical politics at the core. They sickened me.

I told my friends I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t stand and scream my lungs out for a magazine filled with the propaganda of teenage ingrates, who shamelessly mocked fallen Israeli soldiers with their drawings and filled their pages with the call to selfishly avoid the draft. Within moments I was caught up in a highly personal debate with my friend Tal. It was exactly the kind of debate I knew to run away from, but I couldn’t help myself.

We were good friends and we loved each other, and we were at each other’s throats. I was yelling “This isn’t Vietnam and we aren’t in “Hair”, we’re a tiny country surrounded by enemies that want us dead! To ideologically refuse to serve in the army is to believe that none of us should serve in the army, it’s advocating the destruction of the army and the destruction of our lives here!” Tal was having his own debate with me, it had nothing to do with ideology, only with the pain the army had inflicted upon him. He kept violently cutting me off and fabricating my side of the argument. We wound up repeating our sentences to each other; me saying “Do you agree that we need an army? Do you!?” and him saying “If you’re talking this way about the army that means you were able to handle it. But some of us weren’t.” In a way he was saying that I was strong, and yet I felt deeply insulted.

Our shouting match faded away and gave way to a hangover of shame. I apologized, he apologized, we forgot about it. As time went by I had to admit to myself and to my friends that there was no place for me in “Plan B”. It was a gentle departure, and I wasn’t the only one to leave. “The Plan”, as they affectionately called it, had gone through puberty and emerged as something else. It was no longer the Hebrew comic book, probably since it never had been.

I struggled with myself and those awkward tendencies to defend “my country” and “my army” with alarming zealotry. I drifted away from Israel, first to Los Angeles and finally to New York. The move stilted my writing for nearly a year; my American characters were fake, they lacked convincing histories and the English in their mouths was synthetic, the product of watching a language on a screen and reading it in books but never living it. I’d never wanted to write in English but I decided that since I was living out a few years of my life there I might as well cultivate my English language skills. It wouldn’t hurt to have a secondary language to fall back on, a “plan b”.

And that’s when it truly sank in, the real reason that I had been unable to stop myself from jumping into regrettable debates about Israel: I was afraid for my language. I was a writer in search of immortality through words and yet the language I was writing in was a perishable mutation, a language that had been dormant for hundreds of years and would most likely become extinct again once the Israeli experiment succumbed to wars, hate and plain old demographics. I was a dead man walking, writing in a dead man’s tongue.

Whether this apocalyptic vision was accurate or not had no effect on the fear it instilled me with; arguing its probability was about as effective as spouting safety statistics to a man afraid of flying. It scared me, much more than the shame of a failed debate ever could. My personal “plan b” grew stronger the more time I spent in NY and the more English words I made my own, but it would always be just that; Plan B from Israel. I was sad in Hebrew and wrote about it in English. After all the debates were over with, gone and forgotten, I thought: I should have known better.

A true story about salty tea

2006-07-12T01:57:00.000-04:00

I was lost; there is no other, fancier way of putting it. That’s not to say that I haven’t been lost since or couldn’t find myself lost again, but it is as clear to me as anything about my past is clear, that I was ejected from the army after three years like a stray bullet, without a target and without a mind of my own, lost and nothing else. That ‘nothing else’ was as significant as being lost was, and the two elements fed off each other. I only knew one thing; I had to write. And so I wrote every single day. Other than drugs, it was the only thing I did.

My friend Yoni was out of the army as well. One day he bought a plane ticket to India, and that was that. He lay down on one of the boulders on drummer’s shore in Tel Aviv, spread his body out to invite the afternoon sun and said “This is what I’m going to be doing for the next six months.” He looked up and asked “Will you all be in a crisis when I leave?”
“Do you want us to be in a crisis?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “But I want to be missed.”
“There’s no way of knowing if that’ll happen. We might just forget about you. And as for a crisis, well, I’ve been in a crisis for a long long time now.” I was lost, and even though I kept up my habit of daily writing, it could take me nowhere because I already was nowhere.

On our last night with Yoni we asked him, “What do you want to do tonight? You are the prince of the evening.” He said “I never ever want to be the prince of the evening ever.”, and so we sat in his attic and played the last game of chess he’d be playing with any of us for months to come. Our prince’s throat hurt, and since Gil had never been more than a bored observer of our chess games, he volunteered to make him a cup of tea. “I really appreciate this.” Yoni said solemnly when Gil handed him the steaming mug. A few turns later he laughed and said “Gil, you’re the man. You made me tea with salt.”
“What?” Gil asked, surprised. I tasted Yoni’s tea and had to laugh myself. It was so disgusting that I needed a sugary tea to follow it and heal my taste buds, but at the same time I’d loved it. It was salty tea, so exact and preposterous that for a brief moment it woke me from my lull. In my sick state of mind I raced to fit it into a metaphor or force it to give birth to an idea, but of course nothing came.

The next day Yoni was gone, he’d turned from flesh and blood to the occasional email. Two months later his mother called me up to ask for a favor; the family was leaving on a vacation for the holidays and she wondered if Gil and I wouldn’t mind staying in their house to take care of the dog.

Living in Yoni’s empty house for ten days in his absence was a strange experience that required that we maintain a constant state of drug abuse, so constant that by the end of the week our supplies had run dry. We rifled through the kitchen cupboards until we came across some alcohol. We’d been building a resistance to other drugs but the liquor hit us like fourteen-year-olds. Soon enough we were violently smacking our feet against the sidewalks of Yoni's neighborhood in the late hours of the night on our way to the twenty-four-hour store to buy more.
“We’re walking really fast!” We laughed, and pushed on.
Gil said “I wish I had a pen and paper. I’d write some poetry right now.”
“Write it out loud, I’ll remember.” I huffed and puffed. It was hard to speak while drunkenly speed-walking.
“Ok… a leaf on the sidewalk…” he began. “No, wait, cross that out.”
He started ten different poems that way and had me cross them all out in my mind.
Finally he said “It’s a good thing I don’t have a pen and paper here.”

That night, despite being drunk and despite the fact that I was on a strange bed in a stuffy attic that had no air conditioning, I slept like a baby. It was all right for me to stop writing and do nothing at all.

My only true story about Rona

2006-07-05T21:01:00.000-04:00

Between the ages of sixteen and eighteen I was an overactive observer of my own life, constantly alert and waiting to soak up a profound moment or conversation, rush home while repeating it to myself to save it from being forgotten or maligned and then, in the privacy of my room, jot it down in sloppy handwriting on the blank pages of a hardcover sketchbook. My ears were always perked and I did my best to mold the mundane events of my teenage life into taciturn prose that all but plagiarized Raymond Carver. As my short story collection grew so did my far fetched fantasies of publication and the whiz-kid fame my early success would bring. In between bouts of shame and self doubt I actually enjoyed plenty of moments of pride in my writing and a belief in myself that I would never feel again, even though I knew my skills had only improved since. I’d named my collection “eighteen short stories” in false modesty; I was ready to become the next Salinger twice over.

For over a year I’d kept my words to myself. When I was seventeen I slowly began to expose them to my friends, one carefully chosen friend at a time. My first reader was borne out of necessity; I’d typed up all of my stories onto my family’s computer and was itching to hold the printout in my hands, but my house didn’t have a printer. The first few friends who read my stories did so in complete silence. They were not surprised to learn that I’d been writing, and it seemed that everything about my stories was to be expected. I got no reviews, no critiques and no words of praise. If I pressed they’d say it was “cool” that I was writing, and that the stories were “good”.

Those days my oldest friend Roi was deep into his first romantic relationship with a beautiful and serious girl named Rona. We were walking down the street one night when he introduced the idea of her into my life. He said “I met someone. She’s smart. Smarter than I am.” He’d said the latter in great reverence. It was what he’d always looked for; a girl who would humble him.

Rona was a short girl with a monkey mouth and long wavy hair who would think through every sentence twice and speak in formal, schoolteacher Hebrew that was either endearing or infuriating but undeniably unique. Their new relationship had swallowed my friend whole in the way that first loves tended to, but a few months later Rona had turned from the reason Roi was gone to the only thing linking the two of us together. She would call me up for long, random phone conversations about writing and depression and emotional intelligence, sometimes doing so from Roi’s house with sounds of him in the background trying for her attention and pulling at her shirt, which would earn him a motherly scolding from her and a gracious departure on my end.

She said “You’re Roi’s most emotionally intelligent friend.”, but there was such frost in her voice when she said it that I couldn’t take it as a compliment, she’d made it so that I wasn’t free to enjoy it. She said “You came up many times in my conversations with Roi before I met you. I still find myself comparing you to his descriptions.”
“So? Am I living up to your expectation?” I asked.
“Well, yes, of course, you are who you are. But there are discrepancies. You and Roi have a very complex relationship, though, so he might be right about everything only I can’t see it.”
At times when he was running late for a date with her Roi would ask me to pick her up in my mother’s car and entertain her at my house until he’d get there. He didn’t bother telling her it would be me picking her up and not him, and it was all the same to her. “I guess he doesn’t perceive you as a foreign element that would call for an early warning.” She said to me. Those were the kind of sentences she’d construct at sixteen.

I wanted Rona to read my stories; in fact I felt that I needed that of her. I knew better than to go around Roi’s back, I knew that for Rona to read the stories Roi would have to get them first. Were it not for Rona I probably wouldn’t have had him read my writing; it just wasn’t the kind of friendship I had with him. We’d survived for years and would continue to survive because that wasn’t the kind of friendship we had. But I’d met her through him, and in this way she had brought us even closer together. I decided to invite them over and hand the stories to both of them as a couple, as a unit. I would be showing Roi no disrespect that way, and he would probably appreciate my treating the two of them as one.

They never showed up. Roi called me up and apologized in a whisper; Rona had fallen asleep, he’d thought she’d wake up but apparently she was very tired and was out cold… He spoke with extreme caution that almost made me laugh. I said don’t worry about it, it’s no big deal, but he still sounded wet from sadness. “I just know that she really wanted to come over too.” He said.
“It’s ok,” I repeated. “Listen, are you still up?”
“Yeah, but I can’t leave, you know, in case she wakes up…”
“That’s ok, I’ll just drop by for a minute and give you a copy of my stories.”
“Your what?”
“My stories. My short stories.”
“You wrote short stories?” He was the first one who’d expressed any surprise at this news, and by now this was surprising to me.
“You didn’t know?”
“You never said anything, how the hell was I supposed to know? Was I supposed to guess?”
“No, I just thought maybe someone told you.”
“No one said anything about any stories to me.”
“Well. Anyway.”
“Just don’t ring the doorbell. I’ll hear you parking your car.”

Roi’s house was dark as ink when I walked in, and he wouldn’t turn on any lights. He wanted me to leave. He started reading the stories by the crack of light that emanated from his room the moment I handed the stapled booklet over to him, and I chuckled in embarrassment and said “Don’t read them right in front of my face!” He skimmed through the pages and mumbled something about how I had used everybody’s names. I said goodbye, he barely looked up at me from my words.

The next day I had a few friends over for a cookout in my back yard; my parents were away and we had my house to ourselves to play with. We had just started on the steaks when Roi made his way through the thicket of plants covering the path to the back and said “Man, what’s up with those stories of yours? Are you fucked up?”

A nervous tick of a smile froze on my face.
“What? Why?” I asked.
“What’s up with all that depression? You need a fucking shrink, man!”
And with those few words, delivered as a meaningless, offhanded joke, I imploded. All the fantasies I’d woven around my stories were instantaneously replaced by nightmarish, fisheye lens images of ridiculing laughter and pointing fingers. I was stripped naked in my own back yard. I hid it well; no one seemed to notice how I’d fallen silent for the rest of the day.

Roi said “Hey, man, I was only joking, yeah? Don’t pay any attention to me.”, and that was all he had to say about my stories. Another friend asked him about his six month anniversary with Rona, and Roi gladly told them the story. He had had flowers delivered to her mother’s apartment. The flowers had arrived early, and were waiting for them when they got back to her place. “She was sure that I’d forgotten, and she was so emotional, I swear, she nearly cried. She had tears in her eyes.” I was afraid that I had tears in my eyes as well. Roi had poisoned me.

I drove him to Rona’s that evening and then just kept driving until I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I parked the car wherever I was and called him.
I said “You know, you’re a son of a bitch.”
He asked “Why?”, but it wasn’t a surprised question, it was a worried one.
We had a terrible conversation in broken voices. He apologized to no end, he had never meant to say what he’d said and he'd known that the moment he'd said it. He didn’t really think I was fucked up, he promised with a passion. I was in no place to forgive him, if I hadn’t been fucked up before then I had become fucked up then and there. None of it made any sense, but our conversation progressed as if it did, and we spoke as if we understood everything we were saying. I said I’d rather not talk to him for a while, but in fact the moment I said that was the moment I lost all of my anger, towards him and towards myself.

Rona called me to try and bridge the gap in her most perfunctory way. She stated dryly “I don’t know what happened between you two. He won’t tell me and he won’t let me read your stories.” I was too tired to deal with her. Instead, I said “It’s complicated.”
“You’re making it complicated.” She said.
“Didn’t you just say you don’t know what happened?”
“You can’t stuff me and Roi into one body and shut me out with him.”
“You can read the stories if you want to.” I said.
“He won’t let me.”
“Look, I gotta go.”

Roi and I met a few days later, though it felt like years had passed. We had a mutual and unspoken agreement to allow our breakdown conversation to be the end of that story. At some point during the day, Roi said “You know, your stories are good. It was Rona who gave me the key to understanding it. She said I should think about them in relation to the blank page, and to how I would fill that page if I had to. And I realized that what you write is pretty good.”
“Thanks.” I said.
“You guys talk a lot, right?” He asked. “You and Rona.”
“Does that bother you?” I asked.
“What can I do, I can’t tell you not to talk to her.”
“You can tell me if it bothers you.”
“No.”
“No what?”
“No, it doesn’t bother me.”
“So why wouldn’t you let her read my stories?”
“Man, do you know what she’d do to you if she read those stories?” He said. “You don’t even want to know.”
“Yeah I do. What would she do? Why would she even do anything?”
“She’d make you miserable. She’d bug you about it for the rest of your life.”
“Does she bug you about things?”
“Yeah, she says I’m not in control of my life. And that my relationship with my parents is cold and distant.”
“You’re kidding.”
“She says really harsh things, you know? Really harsh things. Like that I don’t know how to be a friend, that I’m going to lose all of my friends. And I never even expect her to apologize, you know? Anything she says is fine, and if she feels like ignoring whatever she just said then that’s the way it is. If I try to tell her that what she says hurts, she starts yelling at me about how I’m trying to censor her and make her watch her mouth around me, and she ties it in to chauvinism…”
“Wow.”
“And she keeps threatening to leave me. She says she’ll leave me because she doesn’t like the fact that I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. And because she doesn’t approve of my relationship with my parents. She’s crazy.”
“That’s fucked up.”
“And she keeps talking about how depressed you are.”
“She does?”
“Yeah.” He said. “Anybody else would have dumped her by now, believe me.”

Eventually my short story collection faded away, and so did Rona. After a miserable breakup, Roi strayed clear of long term relationships and of smart women. “Smart is not as important as you think.” He said. He started smiling a lot, and laughing his contagious laughter more often. He said “I’m collecting stories now.”, and by that he meant that he had become a player, and an extremely romantic one at that. As a soldier he’d picked up many women on the train from Tel Aviv to Haifa. I enjoyed his stories and never said much about them other than the fact that they sounded "cool", and that I was glad he was having a "good time".

I never saw Rona again. Of all the girls and women that have passed through my life, she might be the only one who could pass me by on the street nowadays and go unrecognized. I can’t truly remember what she looked like. It’s a strange thought to admit to, since I’m pretty sure I loved her.

A true story about bees

2006-07-03T02:11:00.000-04:00

The first time I ever laid eyes on a girl’s breasts was during the summer between second and third grade. A year earlier my father had uprooted us from our home in Israel and displaced our lives to Richmond, Virginia, where he took part in a doctor exchange program that one of the local hospitals had initiated with the hospital he’d worked for in Tel Aviv.

Considering that I spent two years of my life in the suburban oval neighborhood of King’s Crossing, I hardly remember a thing about it. My memory retains fragments of fragments, mostly images and spatial relations; the feel of our house, that had more wood and carpeting than I’d ever seen before in Israel, and especially the softness of our carpeted staircase under my bare feet, the maze of pathways between classrooms at Mayberry elementary school, which was dominated by the color red, and the way each classroom shared a coat rack and a bathroom behind the blackboard with the adjacent classroom, the exact rows of identical A-shaped houses with their bushes trimmed into perfect globes, and, for the first time in my life, snow.

Only three memories from those two years of my childhood contain hints of a narrative, and two of them had survived in my mind by aid of physical links to my present; an old audio cassette and a scar across my little brother’s chin. The third memory was of Idit. She was the first friend of the opposite sex that I’d ever had, the daughter of another Israeli doctor who’d come to America as part of the same program, and it was only natural that our families would form a friendship and that she and I, being of the same age, would become inseparable. I can’t remember a time in my life when being in the presence of a female was casual, but with Idit I got as comfortable as I ever would.

She was a beautiful girl, I knew that much instantly. Her eyes were huge and semi transparent, and I’d always been attracted to big eyes. She had a gap between her front teeth that was endearing, and long hair that was always braided like a chala. She had two older brothers and I had one younger brother so at times we ran around as a gang, but mostly it was just me and her, never bored and always finding new projects to fill our time with. The innocence of our friendship was never tainted from the outside; no one ridiculed me for having a girl for a best friend, no one teased us or called her my girlfriend – not even once, and she and I never gave our genders a second thought. We were two seven-year-old kids.

Only that I had given it thought after all. Not a whole lot of thought, nothing resembling the exhaustive, obsessive nature of my adolescent infatuations, no. It wasn’t much more than the simple knowledge that I loved her and that she was mine, but that was enough to elevate her above any other childhood friends I'd had before her. It was a concept that was at peace with itself. It did nothing to change the time we spent together, with one exception.

One hot summer day we were playing with a ball in a back yard, maybe it was my back yard, maybe it was hers, I can’t be sure. I remember a slab of Israeli concrete in the background, an impossible distortion of my memory, since I do know with certainty that this minor event took place during the summer I spent in Richmond, Virginia, a time filled with wood and brick and trees but without any gray concrete. A bee started to buzz around Idit and she yelped in horror. She shut her eyes closed as tightly as she could and screamed. The bee flew away. She opened her eyes, terrified, and asked “Where’d it go? Where’d it go?!” I saw my opportunity and seized it. “It went down your shirt.” I said. "You should take your shirt off."

I stood transfixed as my quickly devised plan worked itself out perfectly. Idit scrambled out of her purple T-shirt and threw it on the ground. She made no attempt to hide her body, she was no more aware of it than I was of mine. I felt no sexual excitement; I had no idea what sexual excitement was, and Idit’s body at that age didn’t have any more breasts than mine did. I stared because I knew I had to, because I had grown to appreciate the preciousness of female nudity long before I’d understood why. It was a sobering moment that lasted no more than five seconds; I knew I was supposed to be feeling something but all I could find within myself was confusion. Idit pleaded, “Where’d it go? Is it still on me? Where’d it go!” Her voice betrayed the strong possibility of tears, and I snapped out of it and said “It’s gone. It flew away.” She opened her eyes, put her shirt back on and said “Thanks.” I was surprised at how much her thanking me stung. I can still feel that sting today.

Coincidentally, that summer I was stung by a bee for the second time in my life, and for the first time it hurt me a lot. My first bee sting had happened at the age of five, on the slide in kindergarten. A friend of mine told me “Hey, you’ve got a bee on your foot.” I’d been stung smack in the middle of the ball of my ankle, right on the bone, and I hadn't even known it. The poor bee was dead and I hadn’t felt a thing. I felt heroic and lost all fear of bees; apparently a bee sting was nothing to worry about. A couple of years later I was stung on the palm of my hand as I tried to grab a bee and squish it to death. I could not believe the pain, it tore me apart, but more than anything I felt cheated. I missed the days of painless bee stings. My fear of bees was renewed and was now more paralyzing than ever before.

The truth about discipline

2006-07-02T17:08:00.000-04:00

My first real attempt at writing a feature length screenplay at the age of twenty one spiraled out of control. I suffered from the flipside of writer’s block; writer’s diarrhea. Following the screenwriting calculation equating a page to a minute of screen time, feature film screenplays commonly vary in length from eighty to one hundred and twenty pages, and mine had reached its one hundred and thirtieth page before the story I was telling had barely even begun. I split my time between churning out more pages and complaining about my tower of Babel project in my journal. I wrote “The description of this screenplay’s writing here in my journal is starting to resemble an unconscious tale of slipping into insanity.”

I was working on the screenplay within the loose framework of a screenwriting workshop offered to alumni of the screenwriting school of Tel Aviv. The official meetings were behind us and we’d all retired to our homes for three months of writing. We kept in touch through hilariously desperate group emails, and on one or two occasions got together without our instructor for the sheer purpose of finding moral support in each other’s writing horror stories. Some people hadn’t made it beyond page fifteen; I was already on page one hundred and fifty. I thought to myself, yes, I am living the dream! The dream is living me and I am living it, I’m writing every day, isolated and excluded from the game of life! An email invitation to another night of screenwriter’s commiseration read “You should come, you’ll probably reach your two hundredth page with no end in sight by tonight and need our encouragement.”

The story’s end snuck up on me during one of those mornings, leaving me at a loss for the rest of the day. My script clocked in at a ridiculous and unwarranted one hundred and ninety two pages. We’d walked each other through the writing process in the workshop, but never really read more than a few pages of each other’s scripts. I never even bothered printing my script out; it was too many pages long, a waste of wood and ink. I tinkered with it for a while, on and off. A year later I even put in the effort of translating the script to English, just to see whether alienating it from myself would provide me with insight or an epiphany. It didn’t. On a hot Saturday afternoon at his sticky Tel Aviv apartment my friend Tal asked me “How did you write one hundred and ninety pages?”
I said, “Time.”

A true story about memory

2006-06-30T15:47:00.000-04:00

After having been twice caught in the surprise net of random drug testing at the gate of my military base, resentfully bracing the plastic cup as another soldier watched me pee, overhearing the crying of the female soldiers in the next stalls for whom peeing into a cup while facing others was far more traumatic, I decided I would remain squeaky clean until the day of my discharge. My freedom was too precious.

And so I became my friends’ designated driver, and the designated straight-man of their pot-head comedy troupe. They say anticipation is half the fun, and in those days it was all the fun. Splitting my time between the grayness of the army and the ridiculous, nearly hallucinatory highs of young and stupid smokers became the dichotomy of my life and sustained itself for a long while. It allowed me to still find beauty around me, even if it was from an outsider’s perspective, in observing my friends with eyes that couldn’t be more different than those of the stiff backed soldier that had observed me peeing.

My friends took some time getting used to the ease with which I slipped into the role of the sole sober one, completely surrounded by stoned people. They found it hard to believe that I wasn’t jealous, bitter or bored. Pot jokes were always wedded to the moment, you had to be there, and even though I was right beside them I couldn’t possibly be there with them. But I was close enough and sufficiently empathic to remember moments vividly, which seemed all the more important since they had taken to forgetting all moments, usually within the moments themselves.

One winter night I drove a few of my friends out to a strip of beach in Tel Aviv known as “Drummer’s Shore” for the drum circles that would spontaneously form on its boulders every Friday morning and afternoon. Yoni had brought along an army buddy of his by the name of Glazer, (pronounced like ‘father’), a frightened guy whose short curly hair had already started peeling back to accentuate his moonlike forehead. The rocks were dark and abandoned at this hour, and the wind from the sea was making it difficult for them to light the bong. All hands were drafted to guard the lighter, while Glazer tried angling the bong away from the wind and wound up spilling the rancid bong water on Gil’s leg. Gil shot up and Glazer apologized ferociously, he apologized and Gil forgave him and this went on for a good while and would have ended in a heartfelt moonlit hug were it not for the fact that we were all freezing and they still weren’t done smoking.

Gil was next to hold the bong, and this time Glazer shot up with a cry; he had dropped his cell-phone into the rocks. Glazer's yelp caused Gil to lose his balance and spill some more bong water, this time staining himself right on his crotch. He shot up as well, pointed both hands to his crotch and cried “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! On my dick! Bong water! I can’t believe it! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” Yoni and Glazer nearly fell off the boulders laughing their shrill stoner laugh. I reminded Glazer of his phone, and his eyes returned to their normal skittish selves. Gil offered to call the lost phone, and Glazer nervously dictated his number.

It was one of those perfect moments; the four of us lying belly down on the rocks at midnight and intently listening for Glazer’s phone to ring, stoners on rocks hearing nothing more than the crashing of the waves and each other’s pot-laden belabored breathing.

By the time we walked back to my car, Glazer had already forgotten about his lost phone and they were all laughing at Gil’s wet crotch once again. Gil sat beside me in the car and aimed all the AC vents at full blast onto his embarrassing stain. “It looks like I peed myself”, he whined. “Like I peed stinky bong water!” I said “Better to pee your pants than to pee in a cup.” Gil didn’t really hear me over the obnoxiously loud whir of the AC, and then his phone rang.

Glazer had found his phone lying on the back seat of my car; he had never brought it out to the rocks and had never lost it in the ocean. He’d had a missed call from a number he didn’t recognize, and he was returning that call. The following conversation proceeded to take place within my parked car:
“Hello, who is this?”
“This is Glazer. Who is this?”
“Who is it?”
“Where are you? It’s so noisy!”
“Wait, who is this?”
“I just had a missed call from you. Who is this?”
“Glazer?”
“Yes. Who is this?”

This would go on for a while before Gil turned around and realized that he had been having a phone conversation with someone seated two feet behind him. Gil, Yoni and I exploded in laughter. Glazer remained confused. He frowned at his phone and muttered “He hung up on me, the bastard.”

The frown couldn’t stick for long. Nothing stuck for long, they were the teflon stoners. I drove them around for a while in search of food, and they rolled my windows down and sang funny songs into the night. The next day I was back on my base, fully dressed in my uniform, and it was as if nothing from the previous night had stuck to me. It was an illusion, and eventually it would be clear that everything had stuck, every single little thing from both worlds.

True Lisa stories (part 1 of 4)

2006-06-28T01:41:00.000-04:00

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.”

A true story about laughter

2006-06-26T01:28:00.000-04:00

My friend Roi from back home in Israel is a pretty man with Indian skin, fine stubble and long eyelashes, whose laugh manages to be the most contagious one I’ve ever encountered despite being one of those silent laughs; he drafts every muscle of his body in on the act but emits no sounds. My friendship with Roi was never the tightest, we’d easily go for months without speaking a word to each other, but it remains my oldest friendship; it began in the first grade and has since withstood twenty years and any of life’s obstacles.

All throughout elementary school and highschool I was decidedly unpopular. Roi, on the other hand, tall, handsome and genuinely interested in the ever popular Israeli youth movements and pre-military activities, found a comfortable place in any social circle. Amongst the more popular crowd I and a few others were known as “Roi’s weird friends”. There was no malice intended in this title, and we were proud and happy to have overheard it. Roi was proud of us as well.

At the age of twelve Roi went through a period of awkwardness and change, and elected to spend the majority of his time with us. We were a haven of late bloomers, a bunch of stumbling preadolescents who never judged. It was during that time that Roi came up with an appropriately weird concept that both he and I found brilliant: we would walk up to classmates during recess and tell them a joke that made no sense, a joke that only bore superficial structural semblance to an actual joke but in reality was nothing but disjointed babble. We would crack up, seemingly uncontrollably, as we told our non-joke and, after the supposed punch-line, we would burst out in aching laughter, which would only intensify at the sight of our audience laughing with us for no reason at all.

The jokes were improvised, and we’d take turns in delivering them, though he had mastered this strange art in a way that I couldn’t have hoped to at age twelve. His laughter was sensational, and he would have kids hugging their rib cages before the joke was half told. Even though the jokes were short and punchy, he would draw them out with his laughter. “A man walks in to a pet shop,” he would start, and already pause at this point, nearly in tears, for a good ten seconds or so. “He says to the owner, do you have any electric guitars?” Another pause, a bigger laugh, side-splitting tear-squeezing contagious laughter, “And the owner says, ‘no, but I have some avocado in the back room!” Wrapping it up, he would have everyone on the floor.

Not that he minded if they didn’t laugh; he actually preferred it. It happened once or twice that a couple of girls barely cracked a smile. They stared at us in earnest confusion as we laughed our asses off, slapped our knees and punched each other on the arm. “I don’t get it.” They’d say.

Roi laughed a lot, more than anyone I knew, but he was also the saddest person I knew growing up. He was almost as sad as I was. That was one of the reasons he was my childhood hero. I occasionally caught glimpses of him as a martyr, and those moments impressed me. Roi turned thirteen six months before I did. On the day of his Bar Mitzvah he said to me “We’re not thirteen. You’re not thirteen.”
I said “I know I’m not thirteen, I’m still twelve.”
“No, no,” He said. “You’re not twelve and you’re not thirteen. You’re at least fifteen. Maybe even sixteen.”
“No I’m not.” I said. “I’m twelve. Maybe even eleven.”
“No. We’re not twelve and we’re not thirteen.”
I was years away from understanding what Roi was talking about, so it’s hard to tell whether he was wrong or right about that one. He was right about the laughter, though, of that I have no doubt.

A true story about cars

2006-06-25T11:51:00.000-04:00

At the age of nineteen my father gleefully insisted on buying me a used car. The fact that I had never asked for a car was a source of great amazement to him, and he’d often wonder about it out loud to my mother’s ears, this was his style, and ask her “What kind of teenager doesn’t want a car? You tell me.” At family dinners he’d look at me and say “You’re so modest. You don’t ask for anything.” But he never meant it as a compliment. He was truly puzzled. Then he decided to make it a chore instead of a gift; getting a car would be a life lesson for me.

It happened that my father’s most profound effects on my life came from these grand gestures, but I’d never realize it at the time. He’d bought me my first stereo system at twelve (“Every boy needs his own stereo system!”), my first and only acoustic guitar at seventeen (“You didn’t ask for it, but I know you want it!”), and my first car; an old and beat up silver Golf that stalled, choked and jumped forwards like a sick man.

I was truly grateful. I was a year into my army service, and trading in the helplessness of sweating in my uniform while waiting on buses for the small but precious measure of control in driving myself home from the base did wonders for my soul. My father helped me pay for the hunk of junk I drove around, but after that I was on my own. It was more than anyone could ask for, yet I remember how miserable and petulant I was on an early morning in July, when I had to give up a free morning from my army base in order to take my car in to the mechanic’s for a tune up.

I remember a silver haired man in his forties wearing brown jeans and a baby blue t-shirt stepping out of a shadow and walking towards my car, his hands filthy and caked in a thick layer of oil, a cell phone pressed between his ear and shoulder as he talked with his chin to his chest and gestured emphatically for me to drive forwards. “What’re you afraid of? Drive!” He stopped me an inch from his body. I was very tired. All I could think of was the injustice of my even being awake.

“So, what have we got here?” he smiled. With his face up he revealed an ugly streak of dirt that stretched from his cheek to his ear. “Ah, you’re the doctor’s kid, right? I recognized you, yeah. How are you?” He extended his arm for a handshake but quickly pulled it back, seeing how dirty it was. “Yeah, well, no problem.” He rubbed his hands together and opened the hood.

I began walking circles around him and the car as he worked. He pulled out the air filter and mumbled worried notes. He smiled again. “Are you sure it’s only a tune up?”
“Yeah.” I said. He was annoying me. “Why? Is there a problem?”
“No, no problem!” He raised black hands in defense. “But believe me, after I’m done it’ll be like a new life for this car.”
“Great.”
Everything around us was ugly. There was no pleasing direction for me to look at and this angered me. I wanted to sleep. This was my day off. The man pulled himself up and disappeared into the garage. He reappeared, rubbed his hands and quickly ducked back in. When he returned he was pushing an old and dingy bicycle.

“Listen,” he said. “I have to go for a minute and get you this filter; I don’t have it here, alright? So I’m leaving the place to you, you can sit in there if you want, it’s nice and cool. Or you can start working on this Peugeot if you want, huh?” He grinned at his own joke. “Alright then?”
“Yeah, alright.”
“Good. And if anyone calls asking for Haim or Ben Zion, you tell them ten minutes, ok?”
I nodded, he hopped on the bike and left. I sighed and spit on the sunny side of the asphalt, curious to see how long it would take the sun to dry it. I kept up my ridiculous patrols around the car, marching a slow army march, rolling my feet heel to toes. I stepped into the garage.

A bulky wooden table was matted with old newspapers, faded pink and turquoise. Behind it was a large chair covered in brown upholstery, which I found was surprisingly comfortable. I sank into it and stared at the bleak south Tel Aviv street. I could see all the passers by, vulnerable in the sun, but they could not stare back into my pitch black darkness. I spotted an antiquated rotary phone, a cream colored model from the seventies that was the size of a kettle, with its handset resting on two black buttons. I picked it up and decided to call my army buddy, Ariel. The numbers I dialed clicked back at me, and he answered instantly.

“Hi.” He said. He sounded uptight. Ariel had always made me laugh.
“Hey.” I said. “What’s up? You know who it is?”
“I know who it is.” He said.” Did you hear what happened?”
“No,” I said. I was discovering that I could lean back in the old chair, making it even more comfortable. I could easily have fallen asleep in that chair. “What happened?”
“Yair is dead.”
I sat up. “What are you talking about?”
“Yesterday, in a car crash.” Ariel said.
“Wait a minute, what Yair, our Yair?”
“Yes.”
“Yair was killed?”
“Their car flipped over near Jerusalem. He wasn’t even the driver.”
“And he’s dead?” I asked. I had to say the word myself, I had to say it again, out loud, because I was seeing a million faces and hearing a million stories and mumbles, cries and shouts and cars at the same time and something just didn’t fit, something was wrong, someone had allowed my distorted imagination to take over and it couldn’t be right, I –
“Yes.” Ariel said. “Listen, I have to –”
“Wait, wait, hold on!” I panicked. “Is there a funeral?”
“Yes. It’s now.”
“Now?!?” I grabbed my head. A funeral was too real.
“Yes, we’re leaving soon. Do you want to come?”
“I… I can’t make it, I, my car…”
“I have to go.” Ariel apologized in a strained voice. “I’ll talk to you, ok?”
I didn’t want him to hang up. My mind was racing. “Does Yoni know?” I asked, and could hear Ariel pause, confused.
“No.” He said at last. “No, I didn’t… You call him.”
“Yeah.” I said.
“Bye.”
He hung up.

He hung up and I hung up. That conversation had lasted less than a minute. There was no one around. There were no eyes on me, no one to test my expression or become alarmed by it, no to ask me why all the blood had drained from my face, why I was suddenly blank like an idiot. There was only me, alone in a garage. Oil spots glistened and my spit dried in the sun and it was the quietest garage in the world, there was no honking to be heard, no shouting, no radios playing the news.

What am I doing? I asked myself silently a few times and then once out loud, but my skinny voice was only making things worse, so I shut up and shut off. I simply stood there. Instead of seeing Yair, which is what I had believed I should be doing, I had the clearest vision of the page in my red phone book on which his name had been confidently marked down, since I knew that one day he would save me.

The man returned, peddling joyfully and whistling. He propped his bike against a wall and emptied the contents of a nylon bag before him. He picked the parts he needed and got to work on my car.
“Listen, you’ll take care of this car after this, right?” He said.
I couldn’t answer. He didn't seem to mind.
“My daughter, this one...” He shook his head as he worked. “She goes out with her girlfriends, last week, yeah? Comes back four in the morning, doesn’t see the parking meter, smashes the whole car. I feel bad for the car, you understand? I feel bad for it.” He talked and talked some more while he worked.

And I tried to remember Yair, because I understood I would never see him again, but nothing came. I could barely hear his voice. I could only conjure up one glossy image, a photograph, the memory of a picture we’d taken in the army when we were youngsters, barely two months into our service and still bearing the white patches on our uniforms marking us part of a military training course. In the picture he stood smiling in a freezing gust of wind in front of one of the ugly structures of the base. His blue and red scarf was wrapped around his neck and its tail waved behind him like a flag. The scarf was far from regulation color but the commanders all loved him and let it slide. He held half a cigarette to his smile with a wavering hand. His lips were swollen and red from the cold and dry air. We’d all laughed at him because he looked as if he was wearing lipstick, and he’d laughed with us and kissed me and wiped the ghost stain of lipstick off of my cheek, but there was no picture of that. In the background I could see myself talking to Yoni, unaware of the camera. My face was hidden under an oversized floppy green army hat, and Yoni was waving his hands in my face with a frown, explaining something to me.

I thought, I should call Yoni. I should tell him, I knew. I was about to turn to the man, to quietly ask for permission to use his phone. He would certainly agree once he heard the grave reason, I knew, but I never said a word. I no longer knew why I thought I needed the phone. I wasn’t sure exactly what I’d talked about with Ariel, or why he’d sounded so stressed, or why the conversation had been so brief and abrupt. The man drained the oil and replaced the filter. He put in new oil and replaced other parts. I gave him my credit card and signed my name without even a glance at the sum. He went back in. I stared at the car, but I can’t say what I saw.

The man came back, put his hands on his waist and said “That’s it. You’re done here.”

True Julie Stories (part 4 of 5)

2006-06-15T01:54:00.000-04:00

My arms tingling, I read on. Julie wrote “I just came out of the shower after getting home after fucking. It is five thirty in the morning here so that you, yes you, are the first to hear that I fucked.” She didn’t write “had sex” or “slept with someone”, she chose to write “fucked”, over and over. She went on to write “I think I might have potential in the field. Yeah, I think I might be known one day as Julie the slut. And when I accept the academy award for best fucking slut bitch of the year, I will thank you over the podium. It’s strange, but that line you wrote to me about hunting and not being afraid of being hunted was what made today’s fuck happen. So thank you, sir, for bringing me this far. Thank you, thank you.”

I had no clue what I’d written to her about hunting or being hunted. I was always delirious as I typed to Israel in that dusty old Los Angeles public library. I was lost, alone, confused. Oren and I rarely ever sat beside each other; we waited our turns and took whatever computer became available. I probably preferred to sit alone. She’d asked if I wanted to hear the details, and I carefully wove in a thirsty request for more between the lines of my reply with the utmost precision.

She delivered all that I could have asked for and more. Her tale was full of teasing. She began by describing her day, a productive day of writing, followed by a meal at a restaurant with her cousins, all of whom were attractive men and the youngest of whom had, according to Julie, grown up to be something beyond attractive, he was “hot as hell”, and he'd looked at her in an exceedingly inappropriate way throughout dinner. “I wish I could say the story ended then and there in the restaurant’s restroom, but no, it wasn’t with him. There’s more.” She wrote. “I got back home after barely eating anything and hungry for sex. I sat at my computer and went online.”

She logged on to an Israeli networking site that was known for being the place to go to for a one-night-stand . She started chatting with a man and immediately came clean: “I’m a virgin and I’m determined to lose my virginity by the end of the night.” She added “But I’m afraid of taking this dangerous step tonight, and meeting someone I don’t know.” The stranger replied “I understand. The decision is yours.”

The man picked her up outside her house at two AM. “He looked good.” She wrote. “Average height, muscular and compact. He didn’t look thirty; he looked twenty three at the most, except for the fact that his hair was all silver. There was something that turned me on about that, and it was the detail I concentrated on the most.” She decided to take her own car and followed his car out to the ocean. He’d asked if they could talk on their cellphones as they drove, and she found that request to be sweet. They parked above the sea and she bent into his car.

They talked for a while, but she wanted him to shut up. His personality, she wrote, “lacked all complexity or awareness. He said I have to give him at least some direction, because he didn’t know what to do with a woman who’d never been touched, ‘a twenty two year old who’s like a sixteen year old’. I thought about it and said ‘if I throw out my gum will you know what to do?’”.

“And then it all started.”

“He said he’d been gentle with me and maybe he really was, but we did it all, everything but anal. There was some shyness on my part but we did it all, and I enjoyed every moment of it. He took the lead, naturally, but whenever I happened to touch him he asked me again and again if I was sure I’d never done this before.”

“He tried to make it as interesting an experience for me as he could, and we did it all, yes, even oral sex on my part, which was actually nice but I had to cut it short because I was gagging. First time and all. I’ll do better next time. I guess my mythological objection to oral sex is out the window then.”

“He kept wanting me to look at him, at his face, but I couldn’t. Even when I was able to look at his cock I still couldn’t look him in the face without closing my eyes and kissing him to change the subject. After an hour and fifteen minutes he came on my breasts. It filled me with a sensation of power. He asked for permission, of course, he asked for permission before he did anything. He was really nice. I never came, and it disappointed me. I surprised myself by telling him that I really wanted to have an orgasm my first time, but I couldn’t concentrate and he kept distracting me with things he thought would help.”

I read this all with my grandmother beside me, complaining about the fact that my computer was tying up her precious phone line. What if there was an emergency and someone was trying to call her up right at that moment? I ignored her.

Julie ended her letter with a proposition rendered painfully yet thankfully meaningless due to the oceans between us: “After I did what I did I thought to myself how easy it was, and how much more pleasant it could have been had it been with someone nicer and not this silver haired simpleton. Someone whose face I could have looked at without feeling ashamed. Then I recalled that I’d had the opportunity. Yes, your mythological proposition came up in my mind again.” I stopped to smile at how easily Julie labeled everything ‘mythological’. And I stopped because I was afraid of what she'd written next. “And I regretted saying no back then, even though I’d wanted to say yes. And not only had I wanted to say yes, it had been something I’d thought of many times when we were in highschool. It had been pure fear and nothing more that had caused me to turn you down.”

“The other night I asked one of my girlfriends, who knows the rough outline of my story with you, if she thinks I’ll have a chance to make up for my mistake. She rolled her eyes at me because making up for my mistake in this case meant fucking again, and she doesn’t believe in fucking for fun, she doesn’t even enjoy it that much herself, she admitted as much to me. She didn’t really answer my question; instead she asked if I used the word ‘fuck’ so much because I enjoyed saying it.”

“So that’s all I have to say about that subject. It’s not that I prefer the hunters, I would have turned them down at the time as well. I made a mistake and I’d like to correct it. Maybe sometime ‘tomorrow’?”

I can’t recall what I wrote in my reply. I can’t even imagine what it might have been. The only thing I know for a fact is that she answered my reply with a letter composed of a few words in two fragmented sentences. She wrote “I don’t understand anything. Never mind.”

And that was the end of our correspondence. We never wrote each other again.

A true story about America

2006-06-14T02:41:00.000-04:00

As a teenager, bouts of loneliness would surely have sent me deep into the world of cyberspace had I owned a computer or been able to connect to the internet. Growing up in Israel in the eighties and nineties was a form of time travel; the generational gap between our newly born country and the world around it entreasured us with a childhood of single-station television, penny bubblegum that unwrapped to reveal a prized sticker and apricot seeds as substitutes for marbles in the sandy back yard of our elementary school, all before Israel caught up with the west and introduced it under the exclamatory heading; “America!”.

During a family vacation to visit relatives in Los Angeles my parents left me to spend a few hours at a comic book store on sunny Melrose, another marvel that hadn’t made it to Israel yet. On a rickety display stand near the store’s entrance, stacked mostly with flyers by young artists in search of work or hopeful bands in search of drummers and bass players, I found a six page newsletter printed on brown paper that immediately caught my attention. It was an international pen-pal newsletter. There were two or three editorials and testimonials on the front page which I skimmed over, and the remaining pages were devoted to a mosaic of classified ads by people seeking to write and be written to. I folded the newsletter over so many times in a nervous rush it had become as thick as a paperback novel. I hid it in my pants and carried it around for the rest of our trip to America.

A week or so later, behind the safely shut door of my room in Israel, I lay on my bed and unfolded the newsletter. I carefully inspected each classified ad in search of the one that would be right for me. I would know it when I saw it. A few things were as clear as truth to me: I would be writing my guts out, giving nothing but reality at its cruelest. I would only be able to write this way to a girl; males were out of the question. She would have to be older than I was, so sixteen at the youngest, but no older than twenty, an age still unimaginably old. I needed to feel drawn to her name; it had to flow out of the word ‘Dear’ in a manner that left no room for doubt. And she had to be from America.

I’d finally found her: Holly from Kansas. She’d been one of the few to add words of physical description to her ad; she was a nineteen-year-old redhead interested in love and the narrative of life. I composed a short, hand-written letter and took great pleasure in every step of the process; in copying her address onto the envelope, in licking the stamp on and the envelope shut, in walking to the nearest drop-off box and in releasing the letter into it. But the most exciting thing by far was finding a letter addressed to me awaiting my fingers on the dining room table as I walked in home from school. It was something I could hold, sense, smell, read and reread; paper and ink that had seen careful care and made their way to me from America.

Holly from Kansas had become infatuated with my writing based on my first short letter, which had been mailed by a teenager all the way in exotic Israel and spelled out in perfect English. Her love only deepened with every confession I sent. She reciprocated with a stream of compliments about how special I was, how mature beyond my years, and then told me about herself. She was dating a thirty-one year old mechanic from her town by the name of Keith, who was treating her well. He was married, but the divorce was only a matter of time. They hadn’t had sex yet, at least not intercourse. “Sex is a very special thing for a woman,” she wrote in her mature, nineteen-year-old wisdom. I didn’t mind the existence of this Keith, in fact I felt I was getting the better end of the deal. He was living out a humdrum existence with Holly in Kansas, knowing nothing of her deepest feelings. Those were reserved for me. After a few letters Holly politely requested that I send her a photograph or two of myself. I chose the most flattering, natural pictures I could find and included them in my next letter to America.

In her response she fawned over me as if I was a puppy, I was “that cute!”. I rummaged through the envelope and found that she’d enclosed a picture of her own. It was one of those small highschool yearbook portraits that had been taken against a blue marble-textured backdrop and featured Holly all made up and smiling, her attention directed unnaturally to the side. My stomach dropped. Her smile was an insecure grimace of sharpened teeth. Her pebble eyes squinted helplessly from within the mounds of flesh that were her face. My Holly from Kansas was big, fat and ugly.

I couldn’t bear the implications of that image, that those beady eyes had been lapping up my impassioned words and that those obese fingers, intertwined just below the photograph’s frame, had been responsible for the delicately cursive writing I’d waited weeks at a time to study. I would ascribe my next actions to a piercing clarity were they not so erratic and frantic. I ran out to make sure that my house was empty, clawed into every letter she’d ever written to me and bunched them all into a ball, then stuffed it in my wastebasket and lit it on fire.

My breath of relief was short lived; my lungs filled with smoke. In my impulsiveness I hadn’t given a moment’s consideration to the fact that I’d stuffed burning papers into a wicker basket. It was aflame. I had to kick it aside to jump out of the room. By the time I’d drowned the flames out the house had filled with thick, smelly smoke, and a dark brown tear-shape had been scorched onto the outside of my door. I did my best to air out the place before my parents returned, and had my door propped uncharacteristically wide open to hide the stain. It was the first and only time in my life that I had ever held my door open to hide something.

When my parents returned they lifted their heads and sniffed the air with furrowed brows. The smoke had cleared but the stench remained, and I heard my father say “The air conditioner is acting up again. We have to get someone to take a look at it.” He came up to my room and said “Don’t turn on the air conditioner for a while, something’s wrong with it. It smells funny.” He took a few steps away, then stepped back and knocked on my open door. “What?” I asked nervously. “They’re coming tomorrow to put in a hardwood floor and new doors for you and your brother’s room. It’s a few days of work, so you’re going to have to be without a door for a few days.”

Normally that would have been horrible news; the idea of spending days with no door to my room made me shudder in nakedness. Instead I felt fantastically lucky. I would wipe the slate clean, erase any evidence of Holly ever having existed and, in a few days, have a new door, one that I would guard with extra care and never allow another American fantasy through it, not if I could help it.

A true black sheep story

2006-06-13T03:31:00.000-04:00

Despite my pale skin and white hair I’d always been my extended family’s black sheep. I was aware of the way they all spoke about me behind my back; I was a source of pleasurable worry, joyous frowns and extremely fulfilling headshakes. I had never brought home a girl, I had voiced my hatred of our country’s beloved army, I had no tangible profession to speak of and so following my discharge I had become a full fledged bum, a hippy with an unkempt beard and long hair who probably (and actually had) smoked pot. As far as my family was concerned, there was no room for lost years in the chronology of one’s lifetime.

I mostly kept my distance from them all. I lived on my very own vampire schedule and shared my time with friends, who accepted me as a charming failure. My father’s sister lived with her husband, their four children, and, since my grandfather had passed away, our grandmother as well, five houses down from ours on the same narrow street. While my father and brother would make the twenty second walk to visit them at least once a week, I only saw them on a handful of occasions a year, mostly seated around a table on a holiday dinner.

On one of my lost days I was surprised to find myself all dressed up, my awkwardly lengthening hair wet from the shower and pulled back like a gangster’s, forced to shake hands and kiss them all hello under a glaring light that was fixed above a video camera documenting the Brit-Mila, the circumcision ceremony, of my cousin’s first born son. I had known that this day was coming, I’d known his wife had given birth eight days earlier, but for some reason I’d imagined it as a modest event to be held at their house with a Rabbi, wine passed around in tiny disposable cups, some crackers with cheese and no big fuss. I wasn’t ready for the glittery ballroom, the showy five course meal and the dancing. I kissed my cousin and said “Mazal Tov”, he replied “Thank you” in a formal tone that pinched me.

My grandmother from down the street walked up to our table during the main course of the meal and said she had to tell me something. She had woken up that morning after dreaming about me. In her dream she and I had gone on a walk through a lush field of green, and she’d called me by my childhood nickname and said “Pick up some lettuce, you like lettuce, bring some lettuce home!” I bent over to pick up the large orbs of lettuce, which were unusually huge and richly green. She urged me, “Take more! Take more!”

My aunt joined us around the table and told me she owned a book that explained dreams. According to the book, the lettuces symbolized money, a lot of it. “You’re going to bring home a lot of money.” My grandmother promised me solemnly. I could tell she honestly believed that was true. I felt utterly disconnected from any of the people surrounding me, and spent the rest of the afternoon daydreaming in the Sheraton City Towers hotel ballroom while the rest of my family danced. I stared in to space, caught up in sweet thoughts about the mass amounts of money I’d rake in and then shower about recklessly onto all my family members, cutting million dollar checks with ease and grace and taking advantage of that moment of insane generosity to tell them all that I loved them, as they danced around me in celebration.

A true story about Gemini

2006-06-12T02:11:00.000-04:00

The Israeli army’s lingo has a habit of appropriating English words and subtly, or not-so-subtly, changing their meaning to fit the distorted vocabulary of a military base. When said in a cutting Hebrew accent the English word becomes something new and refined, with explicit applications and connotations. For example, the word “fuck” is used in basic training exclusively in noun form and means only one thing; a soldier’s mistake, one he will pay for. My basic training nights would end in what was known as a “fuck formation”, where the sergeant would pace around us and read out our accumulated fucks and their corresponding punishments. It was on this night that we each found out if we were headed home on leave or staying behind for our fucks.

Another appropriated English word is “distance”. Distance is used to describe the invisible wall, the unbridgeable gap that separates soldiers from their commanding staff during basic training and the professional courses that sometimes follow. It’s an almost poetic use of the word, packing so much meaning into it that it almost seems new. Military “distance” is a palpable beast, one that could only thrive in a world of ranks sown onto uniforms and teenage power-trips.

The flipside of “distance” was described by the phrase “breaking the distance”. After months of strict adherence to the unwritten rules of distance, wherein commanders treated their soldiers like scum, spoke to them in sharp tones not unlike the ones used to train dogs, had them stand stiff at attention and address them formally at all times, all in order to uphold the clear division between themselves as staff and the soldiers as sub-humans, graduation days offered the chance for mutual relief. Suddenly the charade was done with, the distance shattered and hopefully forgotten by both sides.

The stricter of commanders, those who lived off of belonging to the powerful side of the army equation, never allowed for any respite from their façade and kept up the distance until after the final moments, even as their now-former soldiers were being loaded onto buses to be scattered amongst the many bases. One of my commanders during the six-week professional course that followed my basic training nightmare was immediately recognizable as such a girl.

Her name was Talya. She was a redhead, and even though her features made her freakishly resemble a human skull stripped of its skin I still found her to be beautiful. My professional training course was by far not one of the strictest, and by the third week I had seen every one of our commanders slip up with his or her game-face and reveal the human lurking beneath. In Talya’s case the human beneath was still at a distance, and the difference between the two distances was negligible.

Other than being at distance from everyone, her fellow staff included, Talya seemed to particularly dislike me. She would only gaze at me in contempt, and began every sentence she’d said to me with a scornful sigh. At night I was asked by my bunkmates if Talya and I had had a history on “the outside”, if there was any reason I could think of for why she hated me so much. I had none. All I could do was be extra careful around her.

Finally our day of breaking the distance had come. Our commanders would see us one by one, tables had been set out on the grass in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by the typical ugliness of an army base, and there we would be assigned our posts for the next three years of our life and address our commanders as equals for the first time. I wasn’t the first to sit across Talya, and those who had come back from her table shook their heads with a smile and shared what we all could have guessed; she was no different now than she was before.

That was the last of our concerns, as the fate of our service lay in her and the other commanders’ hands. Some soldiers had high hopes for the most challenging of posts, others wished to be reunited with friends who were already serving here and there. Tears of disappointment and shrieks of joy were heard all around, euphoria mixed with tragedy. All I wanted was to stay as close to home as possible and be free to leave my base at night.

I sat across from Talya in the somewhat dreamlike arrangement of a single table in the middle of a field and pursed my lips in what I hoped was a friendly yet respectful manner. She looked up at me from my paperwork, nothing but businesslike, and opened by saying “Well. We were born on the same day.”
“We were?” I was surprised.
“Yes. Same day, one year apart.” She said dryly.
She was a Gemini too. Not that I’d ever believed in the astrological signs, but still I couldn’t help but wonder how she of all people was a Gemini. Weren’t they, weren’t we, supposed to display an inherent duality to our natures? Why then was she the only commander to maintain distance even after it was no longer called for? Why would she be the only one to refuse to take part in what could be the perfect display of duality? Or was she breaking the distance right then and there, only I wasn’t sensitive enough to pick up on it?
“So where do you want to go?” She caught me off guard. I wasn’t expecting to be asked, simply told.
“Close to home.” I said.
“That’s it?” She was clearly disappointed. “Close to home?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, you got it. You’re going back to the Air Force.”
A weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I let out the air I’d had locked in my chest.
I smiled.
She didn’t.
I got up and left, thinking I might have been in love with her. Or at least a part of me was in love with a part of her. It was hard to be sure, what with all that distance.

A story about True Lies

2006-06-09T18:37:00.000-04:00

As I drove my friend Tal home one smoky night during my lost year, after I’d been discharged from the army, graduated from my screenwriting studies at the judiciously titled “Screenwriting School of Tel Aviv” and then found myself afloat in nothingness, he offered me a job with which I could fill my pointless days: I was to work in a CD store but secretly get paid by a private eye agency, which would be my true employer. I’d be there to keep an open eye on shoplifting customers and, more importantly, spy on shoplifting employees. I’d be an implanted traitor. The salary I’d receive from the private eye agency was set to be double or triple the minimum wage salary one could expect at such a chain. Tal had offered the job to our friend Gil first, seeing as how he was the more critical case between the two of us, having gone for two and a half years without work, but the spy from the agency was unwilling to hire someone who hadn’t completed his military service, and so I, the decorated soldier, was offered the job.

I’d never wanted to work in any kind of store under any capacity, but the shame of unemployment was too oppressive, and I feared it would only worsen if I knew in the back of my mind that I had disregarded such a sensible opportunity.

The man called himself “Aaron the spy.” I called the number Tal had given me and asked the secretary, as instructed, for Aaron the spy. When he answered I said “Aaron the spy? This is in regards to your conversation with Tal?” Aaron the spy spoke in a gruff, slow whisper that had me biting my lower lip to keep from laughing. He said “Let’s just say we’re talking about… a certain… store… somewhere in… Tel Aviv…” he spread out the sentence to add mystery to it. He asked me to email my details over to his agency so that he could run a comprehensive background check on me. That email was my only chore for that week, and I diligently completed it within fifteen minutes.

Later that night my friend Oren was ripped; his eyes bulged red and his dry tongue smacked against the roof of his dehydrated mouth. I said "Get this man a drink of water!" and then slowly explained that it was quite possible I would become a spy the next week. I told him all about Aaron and the CD store, and Oren said “What? I don’t believe you.” I was high myself, and the fact that after years of friendship he would so blatantly state his disbelief in my story blew my mind. “What do you mean, you don’t believe me?!” I cried. “You’ve known me for years, I’ve told you a million stories, and now all of a sudden out of nowhere you just… don’t believe me?!”
“That’s right.” Oren said, and then laughed. “I don’t believe you.”
“You don’t believe me.”
“Nope.”
“What does that even mean, that you don’t believe me?” I asked. “You think I’m lying?”
“No. I just don’t believe you.”
“But I’m not lying.”
“Probably not.”

This momentary lapse of reason was quickly forgotten, but the astringent amazement I’d experienced at that moment stayed with me. Over the next few days my new career in espionage became the running gag amongst my circle of friends. I was brought in to mediate arguments as the authoritative spy, and shared my fictional ramblings of classified knowledge having to do with anything and everything with my drugged-up thirsty audience. I said “Guys, guys, guys, listen to me, ok? I’m a spy, ok, I know what I’m saying here.”

My new job required multiple interviews. The first one was appropriately shady and took place at a hole-in-the-wall bagel place. I’d been told to find a man named David, who’d be waiting for me at “Tzvika’s”, which was neither a restaurant nor an office, it was a small booth where the parking attendant of a nameless lot sat drinking black coffee and cracking sunflower seeds. The kindly Tzvika told me I’d just missed David, and gave me his cellphone number. David said “I can see you. Turn to your left. Now walk a hundred meters in that direction.” He could have just told me to hop into “American Bagels”.

David was a tanned bald fat man who chewed gum like a lazy cow. He ordered himself some lemonade. I wished I was anywhere but there, sitting across from him. He questioned me relentlessly about my criminal past, as if trying to scare some confession out of me. “I thought you were running a background check on me.” I frowned. “Well, yeah, that too.” He answered. “Why don’t you save us the time and tell me what we’re going to find out anyway when we read it?” We ran in those circles for a while until he was satisfied, and then revealed to me that the mystery store was the nearby Tower Records, where I would find the store manage waiting for me. David raised a fat finger and said “Let me warn you, though – the man stutters. Just so you know.”

He didn’t stutter. The store’s miserable employees proved unhelpful, and I had to pace around the maze of CDs and wait out two sappy, saxophone-wailing love songs before I found the manager and another couple of songs before he was free to talk to me. He led me outside, lit a cigarette and confided in me about the recent rash of thefts they suffered from. I nodded in feigned interest. He glanced over my resume and chuckled. “You went to that screenwriting school crap too, huh? I see you just came out of there. I graduated three years ago. There’s no work in that field.”

He led me back to the office and presented me with a bright orange vest that read “Security”. I was taken aback. I had come under the assumption that I was going to be a salesperson just like the others, with the added responsibility (and pay) of keeping tabs on customers and employees. He had begun to fill out my employee information card and was tapping his pen anxiously on the paper, waiting for me to dictate my name and ID. A pale faced girl came in without knocking to complain about the number of cigarette breaks that another girl had been allowed. That interaction struck inexplicable terror in me. When she left I struggled to find my voice and asked; why would you need a private eye agency to find you a security guard whose sole duty was to stand at the door of the store and check bags?

“Everyone working in the store is checked out by those guys,” he said. “It’s just a screening process we have all our employees go through.”
A screening process?, I though to myself. They had obviously done nothing but badger me in a bagel store. It was clear that they ran no background checks. “But aren’t they paying my salary?” I asked.
“Why would they pay your salary?” He looked up at me. He must have seen the fear in my eyes. He said “This paperwork can wait. Do you want to get it done when you start? When do you want to start?”
“Today?” I mumbled. “Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow.” He agreed. “See you then.”

I walked out and never returned to that store.
“Fuck that.” Tal said. “I can’t believe that was the fucking job. I wish I hadn’t told you about it. Another thing that blew up in your face.” A few months of unemployement later I did find work in my field after all; I became the security guard at the front desk of a television studio. Instead of an orange vest I wore a buttoned white shirt with a blue logo on its arms. And all the while I thought, wow, Oren had been right.

A true story about apathy

2006-06-08T21:21:00.001-04:00

My friend Oren from back home in Israel is a short and tightly built Peter Pan boy with a sharp nose and sharp black eyes whose face hadn’t changed or aged one bit since the day I’d met him at fifteen. During a time in our youth when I’d precariously decided to plunge myself into writing a novel of all things, with no outline or goal or lighthouse to guide me, Oren sat in my room wearing the white t-shirt that was a staple of his teenage wardrobe and asked “Still writing?” I said yeah, I was even on to my second chapter.
“Freestyle, huh?” He said, and it sounded so exciting and poetic coming from his lips that I became certain it was not the right word for describing the mumblings I was committing to paper. My adolescent writing was free, true enough; free of criticism and free of thought and free of planning, but there was no style to it.

Oren made himself some coffee, he took it without sugar as a matter of principle, and told me he was sure he’d lost the ability to feel anything. He’d gone numb. He was no longer happy, he said, but he wasn’t unhappy either. He wasn’t depressed, but he wasn’t not depressed either. “I’m indifferent.” He said.
“And that depresses you?” I asked.
“It bums me out a bit, but only a little bit.” He said, and then let out a fast dying staccato laughter. “You see? I’m just a little bummed, nothing serious.”
He summed up his entire life in a melancholic tone; he’d achieved nothing and would most likely never learn how to play a musical instrument. We were both nineteen years old at the time, and so despite my putting forth the best arguments I could articulate to contradict him and cheer him up, deep down inside I’d believed everything he said and then some.

I kept hard at work on my novel, which could be called a novel only by virtue of being too long to be anything else, although a few of my friends dryly noted that it was nothing more than a glorified, prosaic diary. Six months later it was completed and stuffed deep down into a drawer in my childhood room, where it still hides.

True Julie Stories (part 3 of 5)

2006-06-07T19:37:00.000-04:00

The last I’d spoken to Julie was in a phone conversation a few months after her slow-motion car crash. She’d been increasingly irritated with me ever since, and projected such quantities of anger and sadness that I felt I had no choice but to wipe the cowardly smirk off my face and bow out. She’d said “Why do you always have to talk like that? Like something sexual might happen between us, but nothing more? Do you know what kind of effect you have on me? Do you know how many CDs I’ve bought just because you mentioned them? I don’t even like half of them!” My cheeks froze and hung in a smile, and I never called her again.

Three or four years passed before we came in touch again. It happened a couple of weeks before I’d left for Los Angeles that I came across her writing on the internet. I had once posted my short stories on an Israeli literature portal that eventually ballooned into an ugly beast, an inviting canvas for sixteen-year-olds who meddled in angst post-modernism by writing stories that invariably rotated around suicide and an inconsequential, sarcastic conversation with a less-than-overwhelming god character. I’d stripped my profile of all writing and had forgotten about it. As I was about to leave my home in Israel for the first time as an adult I had a strange need to put my things in order; leave nothing behind that I wasn’t proud of. I entered the site for one last sweep to confirm it didn’t accidentally contain any of my writing. I found that in my absence I had been listed as a favorite author of a handful of friends and one woman I’d never heard of, by the name of Gila.

I entered her profile. It read “Gila was born in 1980. Gila is not her real name. Not at all.” My suspicion was validated by reading her stories; they bore a striking resemblance to my own and yet were written in that archaic school-teacher Hebrew that Julie had always prided herself upon. Everything that was right about her stories was equally wrong. I couldn’t resist an anonymous comment, and I couldn’t resist intentionally jeopardizing my anonymity. I received an email from her no more than an hour later, which marked the beginning of a densely worded correspondence.

I hurriedly lied to her in my second letter and wrote that I was already abroad, chasing my dreams in Los Angeles. I didn’t want to hear her voice over the phone again, but didn’t mind the addictive quality of making her my new diary. Two weeks later the lie turned to truth; Oren and I had had a rough landing straight into my grandmother’s dank house on Fairfax, where we both huddled into ourselves. I looked forward to Julie’s letters; writing to her had become a daily reminder of who I was.

Our correspondence quickly breached more personal grounds than anything we’d ever allowed ourselves in our past, especially on her part. I’d opened with a lie and continued with carefully measured out portions of the truth. She embraced the bearing of every intimate detail of herself, which at the time meant constant lamenting over her belated virginity. At the age of twenty two, she was beginning to feel like a freak.

Oren and I spent our time in search of jobs and an apartment. We could do very little from the confines of my grandmother’s house, and would punctuate our days with a walk to the nearest public library, that offered free internet service in half-hour slots. It was on any one of those old computers that I read Julie’s letters, until we found the library roped off one day and read that it was going to be under construction for the next six weeks.
I could not afford being cut off from the world or from Julie for six weeks. I decided to spend some money I did not yet have and buy myself my first laptop.

I brought it back to my grandmother’s kitchen on a Saturday in mid April and hooked it up to the internet using her telephone line. My grandmother, generations removed from ever understanding how crucial the internet lifeline was to us, hovered around me with a frown heavier than usual. She stood right behind me and stared at my screen along with me as I read Julie’s latest email. It opened with the words “There’s no better way of saying it. I fucked a man.” Fortunately, my grandmother, fluent in Polish, Yiddish and English, couldn’t read one word of Hebrew.

Over the course of years I’d kept returning to Julie in moments of horny weakness. I’d put in time and shame and now, half an earth away, I was reaping my unexpected reward. I’d earned this letter.

The truth about dream knowledge

2006-06-06T03:32:00.000-04:00

My dreams have often been potent and overbearing, prone to long lingering and capable of tainting entire days in their melancholy shade. More than once I awoke from a dream with a sense of urgency that could only be resolved through its retelling, usually to the ears of my dream’s subject. One of these dreams took place when I was a teenager, during an afternoon crash-nap I’d taken to make up for lack of sleep in the late hours of the night. I remember the dream’s cold imagery wavering in my eyes and a warm wave splashing up against my insides like tea on an empty stomach.

I called up my friend Oren and said “Listen, I have to tell you this dream I just had.”
“This what you just had?” He asked with his mouth full.
“A dream, I just had the strangest dream about you, just now.”
“You dreamt about me?” I heard him smile faintly.
“No, no, not exactly about you, I mean, it had to do with you. I mean, I thought about you during the dream, since Lea was there.”
“Lea?” He asked, his smile audibly faded away.
“Yeah.”
“You dreamt about Lea? What kind of dream is this? Do I want to hear it?”
“Yeah, yeah, shut up for a second.” I said, and took myself back to the unreal corridors of the world that was still beating and sweating under a fog of lost details and transparent fingers. “Are you listening? Okay. So I’m in what I know is my elementary school, even though it’s nothing like my elementary school, it’s much bigger and nicer, and also scarier, but somehow I just know that it’s my elementary school, you know? I’ve got this dream knowledge about it.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know how that is.” Oren said, both impatient and indifferent.
“Okay. So anyway, I’m walking down one of these long marble hallways, and at the doorway of every classroom I see a group of boys or a group of girls our age, teenagers, and they’re all naked; naked and giggling like there’s some kind of joke going on, like it’s a huge prank and everybody’s in on it.

“The girls look so real, I mean, they’re a very believable naked, not too beautiful, not too ugly, just very real, and they’re all laughing kind of shy-like, they’re all covering their mouths with their hands and they’re looking hot. And the boys all have hard-ons and they’re all holding their dicks in their hands, like they’re waiting for something, I don’t know what, and they’re all laughing like delinquents.

“And I’m standing there, in the middle of this fucking endless hallway with more and more doors and naked girls and boys waiting and laughing, it just keeps going till it’s a tiny dot way off, and I look down and I realize that I have all my clothes on. I am the only person who’s got any clothes on. You get it? Isn’t that absurd? I’m having like the exact opposite of that dream that everyone has, where you go to school and you realize you’re naked. I’m at school and everyone but me is naked!

“So obviuosly I’m feeling great about myself, and really comfortable in my clothes, and then I see there’s a camera hanging around my neck. It’s a real professional camera, with a huge lens and a huge flash. I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing there or what I’m supposed to be taking pictures of, so I just turn around and head for the stairs.”
“And that’s where you meet Lea.” Oren said dryly.
“Yeah!” I exclaimed. “How’d you know?”
“You said Lea was in the dream.” He explained without a trace of arrogance.
“Yeah, alright, but I never said when – never mind, it doesn’t matter.”
“It really doesn’t matter.”
“Yes.” I agreed. His sudden coldness confused me, but I knew that once I’d started I’d have to finish my story no matter what. “Ok. So, anyway, yeah, Lea was standing on the stairs, naked. She looked a little more mature than the other girls, I mean… her face seemed very mature, and so did the way she held herself, she was radiating maturity, but she had the body of a twelve year old, almost no breasts at all, just these two pale circles on her skin… you know? And I know it sounds bad, and I know her body isn’t like that in reality, yeah, but in the dream it was so sexy. I mean I couldn’t take my eyes off of her.

“And when I saw her my head was filled with one thought, my brain was saying ‘Take a picture of her for Oren, take one picture for Oren.’ There was nothing I wanted more in the world than to do that. You know how it is in a dream when you want something so bad, you just fucking need it? It was like that.

“She recognized me immediately. I mean, I don’t know if in reality she knows who I am. Does she know who I am? Does she know I’m your friend?”
“What?”
“Lea, does she know who I am?”
“She knows who you are, yeah.”
“Ok. Anyway in the dream I could tell by her face that she did, that she knew who I was and that she was really happy to see me, she had this look of someone who finally found a familiar face in a sea of strangers. When I walked up to her everybody around her left her, and she smiled and said ‘Isn’t it crazy here?’

“So I tell her I want to take her picture, and right away she’s objecting. Get this, she tells me ‘No, no, no! I always burn in pictures. It’s like taking a picture of the sun.’ Isn’t that beautiful?”
“Yeah.” He said. It would have been better had he said nothing.
“And I’m saying ‘No, I’m a great photographer, really. No one burns in my pictures.’ But she’s arguing, and she really does have this extremely pale white body. But I don’t care, I want this, it’s the most important thing in the world - getting you this picture, so I’m arguing and really fucking insisting, and she’s smiling and saying ‘No thank you, it’s not necessary’.

“I felt like I was going insane. It reached a point where she wanted to get down the stairs and I was blocking her way. She moved to the right and I moved to the right. I told her she couldn’t leave till I took her picture. So she gave me this look… I mean, you’d think she’d be mad but she wasn’t, she just looked… curious, puzzled, then kind of forgiving. She cocked her head at me like a dog. That just went on forever, until I woke up. I have no idea if I got that picture.”

I found myself catching my breath but smiling, as if I’d just run a marathon. “So what do you think?”
“Nothing.”
“Well, don’t you… I mean, don’t you have any ideas of what this could mean?”
“No.” He said.
“Aren’t you, I mean, about Lea…” I was lost. The dream had been told, but my sense of urgency was still there.
“Alright, enough.” He said sharply.
“Enough what?”
“Enough, enough.” He said. “Enough talking about her.”
“What?” I was surprised. “Listen, I didn’t mean, I mean, I didn’t know that you were like, I mean, you talk about her all the time, I –”
“Yeah, alright.” He cut me off, and for the first time there was gentleness in his voice. “Calm down, I’m not mad at you. I just don’t want to talk about Lea anymore. No more talking about her.”
“No more talking about her.” I repeated.
“Yes.”
“Alright.” I sighed. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Say anything else. ”

A true story about friendship

2006-06-05T04:12:00.000-04:00

My friend Tal from back home in Israel is a big man with the widest roundest eyes I’ve ever known, softly freckled cheeks and a thin fuzz of light hair that has always invited the curious touch of female fingers and has never once let them down. During a time in my life hazy from drug use I recorded a wonderfully hallucinatory conversation with Tal.
“I remember the farm.” He mused. Needless to say, Tal had grown up in the city just as I had. He continued with infectious confidence regardless of that fact. “Yes. We’d milk the chickens. We’d milk the chickens and hunt the hunters.”
“Are you serious?!?” I shot up. “Do you realize what it is that you’re telling me here?!?”
“What do you want from me?” He turned calmly in response to my cries. “What did I ever do to you to make you tell me these things?”
“Wait.” I stopped. “What came out when you milked the chickens?”
“Crazy eggs.” He answered. “But they were smashed, since we’d milked them.”
“In the sixties?” I asked.
“The fifties, man.” He answered.
“Wait, so how old are you now?”
“I don’t know.” He said thoughtfully. “We’d have to count.”
I remember emphatically thinking, ‘that is the best answer to that question that I have ever heard in my entire life’. I was overcome with gratitude. Tal looked at me, knew exactly what was running through my mind and smiled.

We then pushed everything aside with marvelous ease and started counting.

A true story about Alaska

2006-06-03T18:23:00.000-04:00

On the morning of my twenty third birthday I copied down the number of a hooker from the back pages of the free “LA weekly” magazine onto a small, torn piece of paper I then stuffed into my pants pocket. I called her in the late afternoon from my parked car. I’d like nothing more than to assure myself beyond a shadow of a doubt that I did so without ever intending to go through with it, but I can’t put such a claim in writing. Water was pouring onto the windshield of the used gold Saturn I'd been driving around the streets of Los Angeles. It was my first birthday away from Israel. It had never rained on my birthday before.

During the first few weeks at my new job I’d foolishly believed that I could tackle California without a car of my own. On one of those frustratingly helpless nights, my only American friend Michael had driven me back to my grandmother’s house in his red truck. After idle but enjoyable conversation about the characters in our office, the industry and, as always, luck, I asked him “How dangerous is it to order a hooker?” He laughed, perhaps because of my clumsy wording. Not yet completely comfortable with English, I was still speaking translated Hebrew.
“It’s not dangerous.” He said. “I guess the only danger is STDs.”
“Yeah, but I’m not talking about the danger of fucking her, I mean the danger of having her over. If she’ll show up with some violent pimp or bodyguard, if she’ll rob me.”
“Yeah, but if you have a hooker over you’re going to fuck her.” He said plainly. “You wouldn’t order a pizza and then just sit around with it. You’re going to fuck her.”
The word ‘fuck’ was violent and wet in our mouths.

I could almost laugh, thinking back to my eyes glazing over the sex ads and picking out one that looked like an obituary and soullessly promised a “nice Jewish girl”. She had an ashtray voice over the phone and managed to speak in lethargic impatience. I knew in an instant that I wasn’t seeking sex, only sadness. I felt obligated to inquire about prices, didn’t even bother to listen and then quickly said “I’m sorry, I can’t afford you.”, which, for some reason, sounded like a bitter, layered joke to my ears. She hung up. I was close to tears in the car, sunken in my shameful state.

I proceeded to sluggishly shrug it off, and declared in a phone conversation to Israel that I’d decided to store away all the pain for at least a few years. Even though I was straining to pack as much petulant hurt into my resolute words as possible, my friend Tal answered cheerily from across the ocean: “That’s great, man. I like your attitude. If in a few years nothing’s changed you can move to Alaska.”

A true story about exposition

2006-06-02T13:57:00.001-04:00

The sidewalks of my childhood street under my childhood house in Israel were being repaved by a sole city worker on a hot summer afternoon back when I was ten or eleven years old. I walked out wearing one of my childhood ice-cream colored t-shirts stuffed into the ridiculous shorts my mother used to buy me and saw a fresh slab of wet concrete at my feet. Thrilled by the opportunity presented to me, I grabbed a stick and started making my mark on the world. All I could think of was to write my name and the day’s date over and over again.

My outburst of history-making was cut short by shouts from down the street. The worker had spotted me from afar and was crying for me to stop. “Why?! Why are doing that!?” He screamed and ran towards me. I jumped up and escaped back into the house.

I couldn’t stay away for long. The thought of that man wiping away my name with his spatula was painful. I had to go see it for myself. I stepped out and there he was, on his knees, erasing my mark just as I’d feared. It was done. He looked up and shook his head at me. This look of contempt was much worse than the yelling. He asked “Why?” again, wearily. I said “It wasn’t me. It was my brother. My twin brother.” Of course we both knew I didn’t have a twin brother. I hadn’t even bothered to change my pastel clothes. I’m not sure why I bothered with that flimsy lie. He shook his head and looked back down.

I felt so incredibly ashamed. The feeling echoed within me for years. That summer afternoon remains one of the few clear memories I have of my childhood, as if it was some sort of traumatic experience and not the negligible, muted little moment that it obviously was. Then again, all guilt aside, this subdued yet poorly handled confrontation does neatly wrap my entire essence into itself: I’ve always wanted, more than anything, to etch my name into the world, and I’ve always been prepared and willing to lie to get there.

A true story about music

2006-06-01T15:24:00.000-04:00

In November of 1998 I was a young soldier torturously surviving the last painful stretch of basic training. Minutes after eleven o’clock on any of those cold desert nights would find us miserably tucked into our sleeping bags, M-16’s resting uncomfortably under our heads so that we would be awakened if they were to be snatched from under us in our sleep. All twenty soldiers around me had fainted away like exploded light bulbs after another eighteen hour day when our commanders stormed in, shouting and banging their rifles against the metal support poles of our tent.

Moments later we were fully dressed in our uniforms and sitting on a concrete slab, cold, tired and more miserable than ever. We were told to wait for a bus. Meanwhile we sank heavily back to sleep in our places, having barely been awake throughout the whole metal-clanging ordeal. Saddam was stirring things up, the Sergeant had barked at us. He knew we had no idea; we’d been disconnected and ripped apart from the world, stripped of access to any media during our sunstroke days and drained of all interest in anything but sleep during the precious little nighttime we had to ourselves. Things are looking dangerous, the Sergeant continued in his condescending shout, and all basic training soldiers are being recruited for extra work.

An hour later we arrived at a huge warehouse and were assigned tasks. We were placed around tables arranged in a factory-like assembly line and began to robotically take apart air filters off of gas masks, replace their batteries, put them back together and pack them up in their brown boxes. For the first couple of hours there was still some talk to be heard amongst us, but the commanders, who paraded angrily between the lines, shut us up.

One by one our commanding staff vanished. They were just as tired and miserable as we were, and with no one to hover about them they gradually sulked off to sleep. By that time there was no need for their intimidating presence over our shoulders; conversation had died out into an eerie silence. We were a factory of automatons, each programmed with the simplest of motions, so mind numbingly repetitive it might even be accomplished in our sleep. I can’t remember what I was doing, was I undoing the screws, was I taking out the batteries and throwing them away, was I putting fresh ones in? I do remember one soldier pleading to trade jobs. He couldn’t find a single friend willing to switch tasks with him, and was finally silenced by a commander. I remember asking myself, why? Was there one step on the assembly line that actually demanded consciousness? Were we all too tired to teach our hands anything new?

And then I blew out like a light bulb face down onto a table scattered with upright screws. They’d been arranged in formation like soldiers. Two of those soldiers would surely have poked my eyes out if a good friend of mine hadn’t caught my head in time. He slapped me awake and then sent me off to a corner of the huge warehouse to sleep. My fellow soldiers had sneakily created a decoy; a few of them were hidden behind brown gas mask boxes they’d stacked ceiling-high in a row parallel to the wall to create the illusion that the warehouse ended there. I welcomed the cold floor and used my hard plastic canteen as a pillow.

Unfortunately, I only got a few minutes of sleep before I was rudely awakened once again by the panicked rustling of soldiers. They dragged me to my feet, out of our sanctuary and into to the smell of cold morning air, where our commanding officer had us all lined up for inspection. I stood stiffly and listened to the officer’s speech, my cheek flat and pink from being pressed up against the plastic canteen, my eyes burning red from being yanked out of deep sleep,

Soldiers are unaccounted for, he yelped. Soldiers are falling asleep! I felt with fearful certainty that his eyes would stop on mine; I knew that everything about my disheveled appearance made it obvious that I was exactly one of those soldiers. He stared at us all with blank eyes and demanded that all those who were sleeping come forward. We were all silent, of course.

Then a frail voice spoke from behind me. I could not turn back to see who it was. Permission to speak sir, the soldier said, and I felt a surge of relief run through my body, knowing that this stupid kid was about to put his army boot in his mouth and take the fall for us all. Permission granted, the officer replied. Sir, the soldier said, why don’t we drive your truck into the warehouse and park it in the middle and turn on the radio?

I could hear every mute response around me in the silence that followed; I heard the rubbery strain of eyes popping out, I heard the grinding of teeth and the biting of lips to hold in laughter, I heard the clenching of toes in boots and the digging of fingernails into flesh, I heard stomach muscles tighten and smiles swallowed. Even the officer himself seemed to be holding back laughter, which he could not allow himself to let out, not in front of fresh basic training soldiers. Eagerly, almost sadistically, we all awaited his response. He paced around us one last time and ordered us back to work.

We sat down and resumed the flow of the assembly line. The brown army truck rolled into the warehouse. The truck’s doors were opened, and the radio was turned on. Music filled the space. It was a fifties and sixties music station. After sleepless days and nights we had finally entered a dream. “Twist and shout!”, the radio sang, “Tell Laura I love her…”, and gas masks traded hands. The sun shone in on us and we were alive. It was the strongest second wind any of us had ever experienced. Every hour on the hour the radio beeped the news, and we heard of the mounting tensions in the gulf, and of soldiers like ourselves who were preparing for any possibility. We imagined ourselves to be heroes, real soldiers and not the scraggy bunch of kids we really were.

A true story about humility

2006-05-31T14:37:00.000-04:00

My friend Gil from back home in Israel is a skinny bearded man with triangle shoulders, honest eyes and a modest smile. When we were much younger, Gil would never talk to me about sex. I would hear of his stories through other friends, but he never spoke a word of them to me. When I asked him about it he said “It was just something I needed to get over with, that’s all.” Another time, as he sat beside me in my car while driving in the middle of the night, he told me “You know, oral sex is not that great. I don’t know why people make such a big deal out of it.”
We were both silent for a handful of moments, and then he burst into an open and inviting laughter, which was rare for Gil to do; his laugh had always been an introverted one, accompanied by signs of a struggle.
He laughed and laughed and finally said “What the fuck am I saying?! Oral sex is not that great? What?!?”

A truly Happy Memorial Day story

2006-05-30T15:57:00.000-04:00

I experienced my first American Memorial Day a few years ago, during the months my friend and I spent in Los Angeles. I was working as a production assistant on a film shoot based up in Valencia, he was working illegally maintaining a website for a couple of Israelis down in the valley. Our LA adventure had turned to labor; we lived from our jobs to the mattresses laid out on our floor and back to our jobs again. On weekends we went grocery shopping. We never met a soul other than our coworkers.

When the three day weekend came upon us, we were desperate for a vacation from what should have been our vacation. We found a cheap hotel room in Vegas and drove out in the morning. It was only on the highway that our Memorial Day excursion turned to a hallucination, as we drove by signs that read “Happy Memorial Day!”

Israel is a country with a rich culture of grief. We live with it nearly every day, and then on two days of the year, Holocaust Day and Memorial Day, we soak ourselves in mourning. Children growing up in Israel are yanked out of their bliss and into the world of death twice a year at least, barring any personal tragedy. Memorial Day is a day of somber ceremonies, soul-wrenching documentaries, sad songs on the radio, white buttoned shirts with stickers bearing the image of red flowers pressed against hearts and, finally, a frightening siren sounding across the entire land to which everyone stands in respect of the fallen. This siren produces the iconic Israeli image of hundreds of cars stopped on a highway with their drivers standing beside them, their hands at their sides and their chins to their chests, thinking of death. The grandiosity is reminiscent of the images Spielberg implements in many of his films, except in this case all eyes are shut and none stare up in awe.

The English language has a word for a child who’s lost his parents, but no word for a parent who’s lost a child. The Hebrew language has one. Words are born out of necessity.

The words “Happy Memorial Day!” flashed by us on a highway leading to Las Vegas and hit me in the gut. My friend and I laughed at their absurdity, shook our heads and commented about how insane that combination would sound in Hebrew, but inside me I was not amused, I was shocked. Those words remain the most evil and decadent oxymoronic phrase I have ever read. I never expected an entire nation as vast as the United States to walk around in forced mourning for a day; the imposed grief had bothered me even as a child in the tiny country of Israel, where death is never more than two degrees of separation away. But to place the word “happy” before “memorial day” showed such irreverence, an utter draining of the meaning of words. It scared me.

On our second night in Vegas we ate at a buffet constructed to look like a Parisian courtyard, complete with fake blue skies on the ceiling. While my friend stepped away to refill his plate, a California-blond woman in her thirties, drunk or crazy or most likely both, started talking to me. She sat alone at a table adjacent to ours. There was a palpable sad quality about her.

She heard that I was working on a film shoot and became excitable. She told me all about her dog; she had been forced to give him away to some millionaire film producer who lived on a hill. I remember her dog had a full name; a first name, a last name and a middle name. I asked her if his last name was the same as hers but she said no, of course not. We aren’t related, she said. She had had to give the dog away to this rich man for some reason she wouldn’t share, but they were going to meet one another on a nearby hill every other weekend, she and the dog. He would run away and find her at their spot; that was their arrangement. Their first meeting was a week away. “I’m so excited to see him!” She lit up. “Think of all the stories he’ll have to tell me, living with that millionaire.”

My friend returned and gave me an excuse to pry myself away from her. We spent the rest of our time in Vegas alone surrounded by the masses that flooded the strip on Memorial Day weekend. That night I deeply regretted leaving that woman, with her crazy story of loneliness. I reprimanded myself that I should have overcome my own character and gleefully taken advantage of her frail insanity. My friend told me “No way. You don’t need that kind of insane woman. You’ve got nothing to regret here.”

A couple of hours later I forgot what she looked like. Just like I’d forgotten what the words “Memorial Day” actually meant. Or the word “happy”, for that matter.

The true story of my soldier's sister (part 1)

2006-05-27T19:34:00.000-04:00

Before and after my soldier’s sister, whenever I first heard of a girl I had not yet met, whenever a feminine name was put afloat in my life by way of stories or ideas or her presumed existence on the other side of an overheard phone conversation, my romantically ill mind could not resist rushing together fantasies about her fast approaching entrance into my life.

Because it was always an entrance; any girl I ever knew had had her entrance. Men materialized in my life after the fact, some stuck, some didn’t, no one really knew where the other came from, but women, they slowed down time and hastened my heartbeat on first appearance as they glowed with possibility. And none glowed brighter than the ones who had previously existed just outside of my frame line, on the periphery of my world, at a point where our eventual meeting was inevitable.

That is, with the exception of my soldier’s sister, who never glowed and never formed into a fantasy before I met her, even though her name hung in the air for years. For months it was not even her name that was thrown about, we had no way of knowing her name as long as her older brother guarded it with his life, and so she was known as my soldier’s sister.

For the majority of my military service I was coerced into acting as a mock commander of three soldiers: a deaf volunteer, a bitter girl and, finally, my soldier. He was my soldier because he wanted to be my soldier, because he sought out a commander in me. We were friends as well, good friends, army friends who ate shit together and could not stop laughing about it ever since because it still hurt so bad, but back then, every time I nearly blissfully forgot that I was his commander, my soldier made sure to remind me that I was in charge.

The other two never took me seriously, probably since I never took myself seriously. I’d never wanted to be a commander. The thought scared me and made me hate myself. My soldier made me his commander because my soldier needed to be my soldier, he couldn’t handle the chaos of the army without being able to assure himself that I, as his commander, would always be around to bear the brunt of those high up above. I was there to tell him what to do, make every decision for him and create a human buffer between him and any officers.

When he arrived at my unit, fresh out of the scarring fascism of basic training, he treated my rank, sergeant, with grave seriousness. He stepped into my office and timidly introduced himself as I toiled away sweating stress over a highly classified computer that I wanted as far away from me as possible. I asked him to wait around, and twenty minutes later my army buddy Daniel, a devilish character with stories of his own for other times, leaned over and informed me with a grin that my soldier was standing at attention in the corner of the room. I couldn’t believe it. No one had ever stood at attention on my behalf.

From that first day on I couldn’t help myself; I had to play practical jokes on my soldier. He was just too serious, too earnest, too fearful. He needed to be shaken up. Some pranks were more elaborate than others, a few succeeded in scaring tears and whimpers out of him before they were over and we were all laughing, but most were not even practical jokes, they were just jokes; simple, childish, fun-poking “boys-will-be-boys” jokes. The day to day despair of being caged in an army base evoked a kindergarten mentality in the best of us. Our favorite joke was my soldier’s sister, simply because it obviously bugged him so much.

Daniel and I had gleaned knowledge of her existence through overheard phone conversations my soldier had had with her. We knew nothing more about her other than her age; she was seventeen years old. That, and my soldier’s instant tomato-face anger, was all it took to turn his sister into an imaginary presence in our military life. Daniel and I would casually ask each other questions like “Whose turn is it with his sister tonight? Is it my turn?”
“I think it’s my turn.”
“Want to go at her together?”
“Yeah, but I want the back.”
“That’s cool, I feel like the front.”
Other times we’d play out fake phone calls with her in her brother’s presence, or compare false sex tales concerning her within his earshot. If my soldier had ignored us, even once, we would have stopped, but he gave us the gratification of cursing and swearing and promising the worst and threatening with a fist fight (but never making good on the threat) every single time.

My soldier’s appearance gave no reason to assume that his younger sister was beautiful. He was a stout, bear-like fellow who had started balding at eighteen but lacked no hair on the rest of his rug body. I never saw her once during the time we served together on the base, and never even paused for a moment to try and imagine what this imaginary presence was actually like.

As it turned out, she was breathtakingly gorgeous. She had her entrance into my life a couple of weeks after my discharge. After years of jokingly sexualizing her, I took one glance at her and knew I had to have her.

And I almost did.

The truth about my hair

2006-05-26T03:00:00.000-04:00

My first grey hairs appeared when I was seventeen. By the age of twenty five I had lost every last brown strand I'd had left. My hair settled into salt and pepper, with stark white wings starting at my ears and flaming towards the back of my head. The strands themselves, whether white or grey, changed to brittle, hay-like, angry hairs that clung to my hands as I shampooed my head or stuck to my pillow while I slept. Soon enough when I looked in the mirror I would see the pinkish pale parts of my forehead that hadn’t seen the light of day since I grew my first golden locks of hair.

My younger brother’s hair flows in strong dark waves down to his neck; he makes a headband of his sunglasses to keep it out of his eyes. My father’s head showed the first signs of grayness well into his fifties, years after his son’s head had lost its color, and even then his aging hair bore the grey with pride like a decoration; it didn’t become brittle or wash away under water. Leafing through our family albums reveals a crude animation of me catching up to my father's age, cosmetically speaking, and then leaving him behind. From a young baby in his arms I grew up to look like the younger brother he never had; my own brother's uncle. Soon enough when I looked at a picture of me and my father I would see two old men. That was set to happen before I turned thirty.

It’s funny what the memory retains. I distinctly remember a conversation my grandmother had with her sister about my uncle, whose hair had withered up as mine did, only that his metamorphosis had occurred around the time he turned forty. I was just a little boy at the time, sitting in another room, eavesdropping. I could hear my grandmother’s sister frown her Polish frown before she said “It’s a shame. He looks like an old man. All the youth gone. It’s a shame.”

This same woman, my grandmother’s sister, who died of cancer a few years ago, had one other sentence that had burned into my mind for no reason I can think of. “You can’t wash your face without washing your hands!” She yelled at me cheerfully once. “Think about it! How are you going to do it? You can’t! You can’t do it!”

I can't. I couldn't do it then and I can't do it now.

A true story with funny parts for entertainment

2006-05-24T13:37:00.000-04:00

During the nothingness that came after the army I spent my time floating heavily. I was lucky enough to spend a few strange nights observing Shmulik’s life before he disappeared from our lives several months later. Shmulik and a few of his outcast friends had dragged sofas and love seats and other furniture along highways with determination reserved for ants and the mentally imbalanced, until they reached an open field in Ramat Pinkas where they arranged everything along imaginary walls in a homey rectangle under the stars and called it “The living room”.

Shmulik would invite us over to his “living room”, where he’d boil tea for us over an improvised bonfire and speak in a gentle voice. The only ready-made thing he brought from home was the brown sugar, everything else was picked from the living room itself. He wrote short stories in a tan brown notebook and when he overcame his shyness he would allow us to leaf through its pages. The tiny and carefully elegant handwriting was a big part of the stories' charm. They were straightforward and unabashed. One story included the line “I rode my car around Tel Aviv and thought to myself, either buy ice cream or pay for sex.”

On one of these nights Shmulik’s friend Moshe came along. Shmulik was slowly slipping into insanity, but Moshe had long ago taken the leap. He sighed and complained about the bible and about our lord who created this world we lived in and this living room we sat in. “I could write the bible better.” Moshe said.
“Try to.” Shmulik smiled kindly.
My bearded friend Gil squirmed in his sofa. He didn’t like religious discussions.
“I’m actually writing a book now.” Moshe said. He pursed his lips and added “I know that my book is going to dwarf the bible.”
“You know the bible is the biggest best-seller of all times.” I said.
Gil flashed me a look, unmistakably saying ‘please don’t encourage him’. I had to.
“Yeah, well, not anymore.” Moshe stated confidently. “I can see us all sitting around my book. And it’s got funny parts too, it’s not all serious. It’s got entertainment.”
“Entertainment is good,” Gil said. “Entertainment sells.”
“Yeah, like, there’s this part in the book about this kid whose parents are junkies, and they hit him all the time,” Moshe started laughing uncontrollably as he spoke, spitting everywhere. “And they’re always hitting him, until they finally kick him out of the house, and then he winds up with this woman who uses him, and she hits him too, she hits him with her flip flops until he’s bleeding, and he falls to the floor and cries because it hurts but he also goes to sleep ‘cause he’s tired.” Moshe exploded with laugher.
That was it, that was the punch line, and Moshe’s eyes glistened from laughing so hard. His chest swelled with pride.

Shmulik smiled and nodded. He was one of the only people I ever knew who felt things stronger than anybody else yet never spoke about it. Gil and I laughed about Moshe in the car for days. We never really laughed about Shmulik, though.

A true story about compatibility

2006-05-23T13:55:00.000-04:00

I once knew a girl named Hadas. I was introduced to her by a friend who believed, for aesthetic reasons, that she and I would fit together not as different puzzle pieces complement each other, but as identical spoons hug. “You two both have no god.” He said to me before I’d met her. He told her those same words. Hadas and I talked about that for years. In our eyes we were nothing alike.

Hadas was one of those people who always knew how to be cruel to her friends but was never punished for it. She never learned her lesson and never once found herself alone. She had yogurt white skin, a baby’s double chin, small black eyes sunken into her face like buttons on a sofa and big round breasts that were the topic of many teenage conversations amongst my friends. They called it “Hadas worship”, as they jokingly ruminated about the placement, shape and size of her nipples. In fact they were deathly sincere and solemn. They wondered if she was still a virgin, and how she would react to the simple request of taking her clothes off so they could see her naked.

I never expected a thing from her. She could disappear for months and then reappear as my best friend in the world. She’d flutter about between social groups, boring every group with pointless anecdotes about her other friends. She told confusing tales in a machinegun pace that left me uneasy. She spouted nervous laughter in between her sentences. She showed up at my door with a bowl full of vodka-soaked chocolate balls that she’d baked herself for my birthday and then eaten half of. Their smell alone was enough to induce vomit. She ate the rest in my room and then drunkenly harassed me. “Come on,” She whined. “Ask me questions the way you always do.”

She told me a dozen more stories about people who had no more than a name, all delivered in the breathless excitement of a child who’s just run home from kindergarten. Then she said “Maybe you should write a movie about them!”
“I can’t write a movie about them. I don’t know them.” I said.
She was taken aback by that. “I tell you about them all the time.” She eyed me suspiciously.
“Yeah, but that’s not enough. I need to be there, hear them, really understand them. I need to be there without really being there.”
“If you want me to I’d be willing to record them.” She said.
“You’d be willing to what?”

Hadas suggested we place a small tape recorder on her body so that she could secretly record hours of her friends’ stoned conversations. I would collect the tapes from her, study them at home and produce a movie about them. I was to intimately write about the people in her life, since she believed herself to be incapable of capturing them and the truth she felt so strongly about. She needed that from me. I was flattered. My arms tingled. For a moment I could picture myself tying the tape recorder to her pale leg, realizing in my fantasy that all she really wanted was this closeness, this intimacy. All she wanted was for me to touch her leg.

But she and I were nothing alike, and we both knew it.

A true story about a small disappointment

2006-05-21T23:36:00.000-04:00

At eighteen I secretly pursued a dream of publishing prose. I had a collection of short stories in mind; twenty one short stories of bittersweet nostalgia written by a teenager. I lived my life with a butterfly net in hand at all times, ever ready to frame reality into what I hoped were poignant compositions. My short stories were snippets of overheard or memorized dialogue punctuated by two or three descriptive paragraphs of silence that were all middle; no beginning and no end.

Nothing ever came of these stories. A few months into my military service I handed my short story collection to an army buddy of mine, who’d promised to keep them to himself. A few days later he cautiously admitted he’d passed them on to a friend of his, but for good reason. This friend, my buddy claimed earnestly, was a genius, plain and simple. He was a nineteen-year-old genius, with the soul of a poet and the mind of a scientist, and he would, in my buddy’s words, “go places”. After reading my stories, my buddy had to know what his genius friend would have to say about them, and he believed that despite my explicit orders I would like to know as well. At least he was sure I would have insisted on hearing his friend’s opinion if I’d known him myself and grasped what a genius he truly was.

“You’re not mad, are you?” he asked worriedly.
“I’m not mad.” I said.
“Good, I’m relieved.”
“So what did your genius friend say?” I asked.
“I don’t know. He didn’t say, he wrote you a letter. I have it here, I should bring it to you.”
Even though I knew nothing about this anonymous genius, the mention of a letter warmed my stomach with pleasant expectation. “What does it say?”
“I don’t know. It’s in a closed envelope, I didn’t open it.”
“Well open it now and read it to me.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Sure you can.”
“I can’t open your mail.”
“You can open my mail if I tell you to open my mail.”
“No, I can’t. You should open it and read it privately.”
“It’s not a love letter. I can handle hearing it over the phone.”
“I can’t read you the letter over the phone.”
“Yes, you can.”
“No, I can’t.”
“Just read me the letter.” I was getting frustrated.
“I’ll just give it to you when I see you.”
“Who the fuck knows when you’ll see me?!” I cried. My buddy and I were no longer serving on the same base, and during the army friends could miss each other for weeks or even months due to mismatched leave dates. “Just read me the fucking letter!”
“I don’t have it.”
“Where is it?”
“I left it at home. I’ll have it next week.”
“Ok.” I sighed. I wasn't sure I believed him, but I knew there was no point in arguing any further. I would have to wait.

I chased my buddy around for nearly two months before I received that letter from his genius friend. He simply would not read it to me over the phone. He finally left it for me at my base on a weekend. I picked it up from the guard at the gate on a Sunday morning.

I couldn’t wait, I ripped the envelope open right there.

Inside was a post-it note that read “Keep writing.”

I'm sure I must have stood there for a moment or two with the note in one hand, the torn envelope in the other.

Then I threw it away and went up to my office on the base. It was a hot summer day, and I was sweating and itching in my uncomfortable starchy uniform. By the time I said “Good Morning” to the first familiar face I came across, I’d completely forgotten about that envelope, though I do remember a lingering feeling of emptiness tugging at me for a day or so, even after I no longer knew why it was there.

I haven’t thought of that letter in years. The other day I felt sadness thick enough to trigger an old memory. I looked back on the memory of that note and laughed. The laughter subsided in my head and I became sad again. With nothing else to do and no letters awaiting me at any gate, I did the only thing I know how to do; I sat down and wrote about it.

A true story about clarity

2006-05-18T16:05:00.000-04:00

My friend Yoni from back home in Israel is a tall blond man with big bare statue-feet who wears glasses and smiles with his gums. Years ago, when I still lived there, Yoni sat beside me in my car as I drove home in the middle of the night and asked me, “Do you have any doubts about your talent?”
“Of course I have doubts.” I said.
“I don’t.” Yoni said. “About your talent, I mean.”
“You’ve never read a word I’ve written.”
“That doesn’t matter.” He said.

True Julie Stories (part 2 of 5)

2006-05-18T01:49:00.000-04:00

A few months had passed since my illicit proposal had inadvertently cheered Julie up. I can’t say how many with any certainty, I wouldn’t want to lie. The dirty water rose once again and I called her.

As before, she never really gave me the opportunity to stammer on in my shameful horniness but instead plunged me straight into her own life, not giving a moment’s thought to my nasty habit of randomly calling her every five to eight months for no apparent reason. If the voice that last greeted me was sniffling back tears, this time it was chuckling in delight. My selfish attraction to distress left me unsure about whether I enjoyed this happy Julie quite as much as I did the sad one.

“You sound happy.” I said dryly.
“My dad bought me a car!” She squealed. “A used car!”
“Well come on over and take me out for a ride.” I said.
“A ride where?” She was confused. Joy rides were not around in the Israel we grew up in.
“Just a ride.”
“Oh. Right now?”
“Why not.” I feigned confidence; secretly hoping she wouldn’t play along. The moment I’d offered the ride I felt weighted down with laziness. The urge that had propelled me to call her was fast fading away.
“Ok, sure!” She said excitedly.

Twenty minutes later she honked under my window. I stepped out in flip flops, my way of convincing my body it would not be gone from the shelter of my house for too long. I sat next to her in the dark blue used Ford her father had bought her and rolled down my window. She drove fearfully slow. I stared at the streets crawling by and fiddled with her radio. I named dozens of CDs she should have had but didn’t. She wore sunglasses and had a mean look about her.

Ten minutes into our pointless journey, as we drove down a narrow street in my hometown, cars ahead of us came to a slow stop that I could tell Julie was oblivious to. I experienced it all as if submerged in a pool of milk. I had enough time to think it through. I had the time to ask myself, should I say something? I had time to glance down at the emergency brake and contemplate yanking it up. Julie realized she was headed straight into a stopped car, and floored the brakes. We screeched down the road for a comically long stretch of time before the crash sounded, surprisingly loud. Then it was quiet.

Julie was in shock. Her eyes shimmered. The driver of the car she’d hit stepped out and stared at the damage. He looked up at her in awe, momentarily rendered beyond anger. Julie, however, was not. I mistakenly feared that she was about to burst into tears that would make me uneasy, but her reaction was the opposite. She leaped out of the car and let out a filthy stream of curses at the other driver, who didn’t take long to snap out of his state and curse back.

I stepped out of the car and stood numbly amongst the glass on the asphalt in my flip flops. I felt like walking home, but remained there surrounded by pieces of car. The crash that had failed to pierce through the milky skin enveloping me had not failed to completely destroy Julie's new used car.

Julie called her father, who arrived twenty minutes later. He was a dark man with a hilarious thick mustache. He made me feel instantly guilty for fantasizing about his daughter’s big, motherly breasts. He took care of the insurance talk with the other driver as Julie huffed and puffed about them. Then he drove me home in his big car.

I’d been gone from my house for about an hour. I had called Julie to quench my horniness, and she’d squelched it dry. I went up to my room, crawled in bed and went to sleep.

A true story about pain, insomnia and love

2006-05-13T01:41:00.000-04:00

My wrist is on fire. Writing through the pain to keep from going insane, I was reminded of another week in my past when physical pain called the shots. I was eighteen, hovering in the limbo between graduating highschool and being drafted to the army. My thoughts were pretty much nowhere. I don’t recall contemplating my immediate future or trying to wrap my head around the chapter of my life that had just ended.

I lived like a vampire, sleeping in until five or six in the evening and opening my window only when I was sure I would find the night outside. My friends and I watched the sun rise every morning and then hobbled off to our beds, content in turning our backs on the world. The emptiness was almost complete, were it not for the fact that I still constantly thought of her; the one girl I had stared at for the entire four years of highschool. Thinking about her and how I’d never see her again was the only thing that had any effect on my stomach.

My mother feared the army much more than I did. Believing, not altogether mistakenly, that I would disappear into it for three years without ever showing my head again, she insisted that I get my life in order before I was gone. The most urgent item on her list was for me to undergo oral surgery and have my wisdom teeth removed, so that they wouldn’t push up through my gums and ruin years of arduous and expensive orthodontic work. Had I known then what the army was about to be like I would have never gone through with the operation; as a soldier there was nothing I wanted more than a reason to take medical leave of my base. I would have gladly volunteered for any procedure, no matter how superfluous. Unfortunately, in my pre-military naïveté and apathy, I lazily went along with my mother’s ideas.

Much as the army would later bring the sky down on me on that first freezing desert night, I only realized what I had gotten into once the doctor was hunched over me and I could see my bloody mouth reflecting all too clearly in his glasses. True to his promise, I felt no pain – only pressure, but that pressure was awfully painful. Once the operation was over I was given a whole mess of painkillers and sent on my miserable way.

Fearing pain as much as I do, I took the pills religiously. I held a bag of frozen broccoli up to my cheeks in a preemptive strike, determined to feel nothing. It worked, I felt fine. By the time I’d fallen asleep that night, I’d allowed myself to feel relieved. The pills worked.

The next morning I awoke to horrible, sharp stomach pains that had me doubling over and falling out of bed. That initial stabbing marked the beginning of six days of constipation, during which I would spasm in pain every five to ten minutes. For nearly a week I barely ate and barely slept. I couldn’t find a moment’s rest for the first three days. By the fourth day the exhaustion was inhuman. My body scrambled for sleep wherever it could find some, and sustained itself on four to eight minute naps between crunches of pain. I went to doctor after doctor. No one knew what was wrong.

As distorted as it sounds, I began to learn how to live with the pain. These “contractions” I was seized with every five minutes became predictable, reliable. The first one hadn’t killed me, neither had the second. However, coupled with a weeklong bout of insomnia, my mind was slowly unraveling. Diving into romantic, storybook insanity, all I could think of was the girl. Highschool was over, and I would probably never see her again.

In the middle of the fifth sleepless night it was perfectly clear to me: I needed to write her a letter. It was the sleep deprivation that made me forget what I already had enough sense to know by then; that letters are always a mistake. I sat down and wrote what I believe and remember to be the most embarrassing and humiliating composition I’d ever stringed together. I don’t know this for a fact; I have no copies of the letter. There was only one copy. It was a love letter, naturally. A shameful, bitter, naked, slightly insane love letter. I believe one of the lines was “I will die regretting never having seen you naked”. I wish I could be sure that that was the worst of it.

If I had been a little luckier, or had been a little more patient, I might have put the letter away in a desk drawer and later on dispensed of it in private humiliation. But I was crazy with insomnia, and with wide vein-colored eyes I counted the minutes between pain and more pain until the sun rose and the post office opened. What should have been a ten minute walk must have taken me forty five minutes. I shuffled along sidewalks like an old man carrying his IV drop down a hospital corridor, repeatedly pausing through the pain. But I made it. I mailed the letter.

When I returned home from the post office my father was waiting for me, wondering where I was. One of the doctors had called him the other night, and later he’d thought of something: was I still taking the painkillers from my oral surgery? Of course I was, I answered. These stomach pains were torturous enough; I didn’t want to add any more pain onto it.

Apparently constipation and stomach spasms were amongst possible side effects to the painkillers I had been taking throughout the whole ordeal, always on time, never once missing a pill. The irony was delicious: My week of pain had been brought on by painkillers.

If I wanted to find additional aesthetic beauty in the nonsensical turns of life, I might point out that a week of stomach pains finally and forcefully removed that girl from my stomach for good.

She never wrote me back. A few years later I saw her again, we even spoke, but she never mentioned the letter, and I wouldn’t dare bring it up. I sat up one night and thought about it. I wondered what I’d really written in that letter, and why she’d simply swallowed it up and ignored it. I asked a friend “Maybe she never got the letter?” My friend, always a realist, said “Did you write her address on it? Did you write your address? Did you get the letter back? No? Then she got it.”

I think that week we both got it.

A true story about typing and spelling

2006-05-10T17:16:00.000-04:00

Nearly two weeks ago I began to suffer from a dull pain emanating from the center of my left wrist. The pain grew over the next few days, as in my stubbornness I continued to work through it. I felt I had a glowing red ball inside my wrist, which occasionally shot out bolts of blue pain up to my elbow or down to my fingertips, leaving them tingling, then numb.

Today I finally went to see a doctor, who told me I have tendonitis as a result of straining my wrist with too much typing and too much guitar playing. She fitted me with a wrist splint, and instructed me to rest my hand for a week or two.
“That’s it, you’re good to go.” She said.
“Can I just ask one thing?” I said. “How do you spell tendonitis?”
She narrowed her eyes at me and said “All right, I’ll tell you how to spell it, but you really do need to stop typing for a while.”

A true first kiss story

2006-05-09T21:07:00.000-04:00

My first kiss took place in a dream; sad, funny and chilling. It was with a girl I knew. She was slightly different but still herself, still recognizable to that alert part of me that was aware I was dreaming and yet continued to relish every moment of it. We were in a shopping mall, a sparkling white marble mall of spoiled richness full of strolling couples holding hands. We were headed towards the underground parking lot, I’d no idea why since I was not yet of driving age.

We walked down a wide unpainted staircase and stopped at a huge metal door with the words “Minus One” painted on it. She turned to me and said “Now I am going to place my finger on your nose.” She pushed my nose gently, and my heart started to beat rapidly.
“Now I’m going to touch your cheeks.” She said. She placed her warm hands on my cheeks.
“Now we’re going to kiss.” She pressed her face to mine. Something clumsy and embarrassing happened then but I was not embarrassed, I trusted her.
“First kiss?” She smiled. “Let’s try it again on the next floor.”
She took my hand and led me down another flight of stairs. The second door was open to the grey cement of the parking lot. We kissed again. It felt better.

As dreams often unravel, I walked through the door and found myself alone in my back yard at night. Tables and chairs were set out in my family’s familiar cookout party-arrangement. My bearded friend Gil stood above the barbecue and waved a piece of cardboard over the small dead bodies of four white rabbits. I walked up to him and said “I just kissed the girl.”
“Really?” He said absentmindedly.
“Yeah.” I said. “You know, it was kind of…” and a pleasant smile came upon my lips as I recalled the moment.
“Yeah, I know exactly what it was like.” He said. “I know exactly what you did.”

True army stories

2006-05-08T17:58:00.000-04:00

My draft date to the army was rescheduled. I heard the news of my earlier draft date in an official message I found on my answering machine on a Tuesday morning in early October, 1998. It was relayed to me in the bored, lifeless voice of a female soldier who informed me I was to be drafted the following Monday, and not in late November as I’d been instructed before. I played the message to my friend Gil, who said “Wow, you must be so depressed. I bet you’re going to cry all day.” I wasn’t depressed. I believed at the time that I was ready and willing to disappear. The idea excited me. I hadn’t spent a moment’s thought on where I was headed, only on what I’d be leaving behind.

One week later I was crouched down in the sand and the heat in front of a lonely payphone, a line of nerve-wracked soldiers behind me. I’d used my one phone call to reach Dekel, the most experienced soldier I knew. He had a seven month lead on me in the army. In my eyes he was a real live survivor of the hellish first months that I feared I would not survive myself. He could hear the cracks in my voice.

“Do you have something to write in?” He asked. “Do you have a pen and paper? It’s important, it’s really important, get yourself a little notepad and a pen, you hear?”

I got my hands on a notebook that had been ripped in half and managed to write a few words in it whenever we had some stolen seconds to ourselves. Over the course of a few days I wrote “The stress is starting to seep into people’s bones. We’re starting to get mad and snap at each other. One guy’s really stressed, he screams whenever someone blocks the one hanging light bulb in our tent. The shower was cold and disgusting. The wound in my leg hurts. Guard duty between three and four AM insures another sleepless night. At night duffel bags around the tent look like people bending over to get ready to leave. I’m washed over with the icy fear that they’ve forgotten to wake me. All the while I never really fall asleep. Then I sleep without dreaming, one bang and I’m- ”

My pen ran out of ink. I etched and scratched the pages of the half-notebook until I gave up. I stuffed it into my uniform’s pocket and held onto it until finally I brought home to my drawer.

This might be the only true army story I have ever told. Other than referring to my military service as hell every once in a while, those scribbled lines are the only miserable piece of prose I’ve ever written about the army. Every other army story I tell, whether it’s silly, romantic, frustrating or infuriating, is always funny. I think that little ripped notebook is the reason why army stories have to be funny.

You should always have something to write in.

A truth

2006-05-05T22:04:00.000-04:00

The greatest feeling in the world is not love, it's freedom. Freedom is an unrivaled euphoria that washes over the body and eclipses all other sensations, past present and future, as it does so.

On the day I was discharged from the army after serving for three years I walked out of the base, stepped into the car, and suddenly - I was home. I’d forgotten to turn on the CD player, I’d forgotten to open my eyes, I’d even forgotten to drive. It had started to rain on my windsheild. My brain registered the first few drops but none of the others that followed. I suppose I could have killed myself in a car crash that day.

A good friend of mine was traveling through India at the time. When I returned home I found an email from him that began with the words “Hi hi happy boy”. I liked that. “Happy boy.”

Of course, in the subject line of the email he had written “YOU ARE FREE NOW - BUT YOU WILL DIE SOON!” The best of friends can always see right through you.

A true Hollywood story

2006-05-05T00:18:00.000-04:00

During the first few months of 2003 I worked in LA as a production assistant on a David Mamet film called “Spartan”. My job consisted mainly of office work during the preproduction phase; answering phones or compiling color-coded copies of the script, a script which made no sense to me at all. Once shooting began I became a driver and was sent out on runs back to back thirteen hours a day, crisscrossing Los Angeles like a maniac, holding a page printed off of mapquest.com to the steering wheel with my thumb and glancing down at it every once in a while, hoping not to crash in to the car in front of me while I read the directions.

A few weeks into the shoot one of the PAs was recruited to act as chauffer for one of the female leads. The actress was reportedly hot, and so one of my fellow PAs and friend Michael campaigned for the position. I gracefully backed out of the race, and Michael happily became her driver for the next ten days. A week later Michael was not as happy. The actress was impossible to talk to, he said, she was dumb as a shoe, and worst of all – she seemed to bathe her entire body in some cream or lotion or soap that reeked of fake peaches. She was stinking up Michael’s beloved truck. He couldn’t handle another day with her, and asked me to take over for at least one trip.

I drove out to her hotel on Sunset Boulevard to pick her up. She’d never met me before, so I leaned on my car and waited for her to come out. She was not my type, but she was definitely many people’s type. When she walked out of the hotel, she asked a random man who was passing by her if he was there to drive her to the set of the film and without blinking the man said “Yes, yes I am. My car’s right over here.” I rushed up to her and introduced myself as her actual driver, mentioning the film’s title and Michael's name. The man walked away and she followed me to my car. Instead of being scared or at least astonished by that stranger’s boldness, she laughed the kind of laugh that left no room for doubt about how stupid she was, and said “Did you see that? He said HE was the driver! How funny is THAT?”

On the road she asked me what my name was. That’s a very special name, she said, and I explained that I was Israeli. “Oh my god!” Her eyes lit up. “Maybe you can help me then! Ok, we’re doing my death scene tonight, where I, like, get shot to death. So like I want to research this, so I know how to do it right. So what’s it like to be shot?”

It took me a moment to realize that she wasn’t asking that rhetorically, she was actually waiting for a response. “Uh… I’ve never been shot.” I said.
“Oh.” She almost seemed disappointed. “Well, do you know anybody in Israel who’s been shot?” “No, I… I don’t. Not personally.”
“Oh.”
“Sorry.”
“No, that’s ok.” She sighed. “I’ve like been trying really hard to research this. I even went to an emergency room and I asked this ER doctor what it’s like to be shot, but he also said he’s never been shot. It’s like I have no luck.”
“Yeah.”

I've carried this secret with me for years: I am an Israeli who's never been shot. And as if that wasn't enough, I never even had the chance to feel a gunshot wound vicariously through the experience of any friends, relatives or even acquaintances of mine. Sometimes when I tell people I'm Israeli I feel like a liar.

And my car smelled like fake peaches for a week.

A true story about winners

2006-05-04T05:12:00.000-04:00

For an entire year after being discharged from the Israeli army I did nothing but smoke pot and write horrible screenplays, and a rambly disjointed piece of prose I believed in my haze to be a novel. To give my life some semblance of structure I joined a screenwriting workshop that was offered at the time to graduates of the Screenwriting School of Tel Aviv, where I had been allowed to study during my last year of military service as a treat for being such an excellent soldier. The workshop consisted of eight women in their thirties and forties, one aging Israeli actor-director in his late fifties who had never achieved any fame, and myself at twenty one.

In the middle of the heat of August of 2002 we met on the rooftop of one of the women’s seaside apartment, Ricky Shulman, to mark the end of the workshop. Meirav brought incredible food that she had cooked for everybody, with white wine and homemade sorbet for desert. I loved them all that night, all eight of the women and the aging man as well. Noga Brayness had her hair up and was gorgeous. Aya Shva was glowing in her eighth month of pregnancy. Ilana Grushka was sexy in my eyes and even touched my hand despite the glaring warning etched in my eyes. Ricky was crude and insolent as always. We laughed and I laughed too, though I was perched as always on the periphery of it all.

The aging actor had just returned from a shoot where he played a bit part that had apparently left him in extremely high spirits. He clinked his wine glass and volunteered himself to make a speech. “I enjoyed every moment with you all,” he said. “I learned a lot from you, and I can say that in my eyes the one thing everybody here has in common is that you are all winners. You are all winners.”

It was all very convincing in the unbearable humidity of the August night, and we all remained reverentially quiet until one woman said “Wow, such silence all of a sudden.” Small chuckles broke out, and Ricky said “Yeah, we’re all asking ourselves, ‘Me too? Am I a winner too?’”. The aging actor just smiled and insisted that we were all going to make it.

As far as I know, none of us have made it yet. I haven’t heard a thing about any of them, and I can only assume they haven’t heard a thing about me. I hadn’t even remembered that night until I came across it in Hebrew in my old handwriting. At the bottom of the page I had written “I regretted everything I hadn’t said.”

True Julie stories (part 1 of 5)

2006-05-03T00:32:00.000-04:00

In highschool I knew a girl named Julie. While it’s a pretty common name in English, not many Israeli girls are named Julie. She was the only one I’d ever heard of. When spoken in a Hebrew jaw with a Hebrew tongue and Hebrew lips, the name Julie sounds dirty and slutty, conjuring up an image of an aging prostitute.

She was big and had motherly breasts. She cut her hair short and spoke aggressively. She would laugh at my jokes in an involuntary manner, and when it was evident that she was fighting it and wishing she wasn’t laughing was when I’d gain the most pleasure out of it. She was by no means pretty and I was not attracted to her, but I was attracted to the idea of her. I was attracted to the idea that she was just ugly enough and just insecure enough to like me.

I flirted with her in classes but that was as far as I could take it under the glaring eyes of all of my highschool friends, who were my entire world at the time. We rarely spoke outside of school and never spent time together, not even once. After graduating she disappeared from my life, but I still thought about her every once in a while, especially when I was feeling lonely or horny.

A few months into the army I was feeling both lonely and horny so strongly I thought I would break. An army friend of mine who came from the north of Israel had an apartment near Tel-Aviv that the army rented for him. On most weekends he’d drive back up north and the place would stay empty. He told me, I can give you the keys and you can have my place any weekend you want, you know, if you need a place for... you know. I didn’t need a place, what I needed was to need a place.

So I called Julie. We hadn’t spoken in months, and I had never been in the habit of calling her in the first place. When I called her she was crying. At first I thought it was just the surprise in her voice coupled with a cold. After a couple of sentences it became clear, she was sniffling and stifling back tears. She cried about her life for five minutes, she hated the army and she hated her body and she hated the future and she hated the present. Her existence was pointless, she cried shamelessly. I felt as lonely as ever, and no longer horny at all.

After the wave of tears subsided she sniffled again and said “What made you call me all of a sudden? Did you want something?”
“Yeah,” I said, and even though I was sick to my stomach, I dove in. “Look, I’ve got this army buddy.”
“What?” She said. “Haven’t you been listening to me at all?”
“Just listen, stop crying.” I said. “He lives up north but he’s got an apartment around here and he’ll give me the keys any time I want over the weekends. So if you want to come over this weekend, you and I can, you know… ‘party’.” I especially regretted the word “party” once it had escaped my lips. I didn’t know myself.
She was silent and then she spoke. “What do you mean by ‘party’?” She asked. At least she’d stopped crying.
“You know, we’ll watch a movie, drink some wine, I’ll go down on you, you’ll go down on me.” Listening to myself talk was like watching a car crash.
“I don’t think so.” She said.
“Why not?”
“Because. I’m not like that.”
“What’s ‘like that’? If that made you ‘like that’ it would make me ‘like that’ too, wouldn’t it? I’m not talking intercourse here, just oral sex, you can still save yourself if that’s what you want to do.”
“That’s too much for me. Putting it in my mouth… it could only be someone I really love.”
“You really think so?” I asked. It was truly awful.
“Yes.”
“And you really think I have an army buddy who has an apartment I can use on the weekends?” She said nothing and then smiled involuntarily; I could hear it over the phone. “No way.” She said in an angry grin.
“Well, it got you to stop crying, didn’t it?” I tried to grin as well. I gritted my teeth.
“You bastard!” She laughed. “Party? Party?!? Oh my god, you bastard, I can’t believe you got me like that! Oh my god I can’t believe I fell for that!” She laughed and laughed, while I felt like vomiting.
“Hold on,” She said. “My mother wants to talk to you.” She put her mother on the line. Her mother said to me “I don’t know what you just said to her but I want to thank you. She’s been crying all day and no one has been able to console her, and now you’ve got her laughing. You’re a magician. Thank you so much.”
“You’re welcome.” I said.

Julie laughed and smiled and felt better. I felt worse than I had in years.

True low stories

2006-05-02T00:26:00.000-04:00

My ego has been punched in the talent more than once. More than punched, it’s been battered and raped. I’ve tried to harness pain like a farmer, transforming shit into fertilizer and growing something good out of it. Writing has been a way of doing that. When propelled from a low to a high it's comforting to believe that the low was a necessary pit stop. Autobiographical writing facilitates the romanticizing of the story-like structure of life.

In January of 2003 a screenplay of mine was making its way towards production in Israel. The producer I'd sent it to was extremely enthusiastic about it, and she'd attached a promising young director to the project. He was a skinny and excitable gay man in his early thirties, fresh out of film school and motivated to prove himself. He made me watch Atom Goyan films and discuss film philosophies while he chain-smoked in my face and occasionally stood on his chair. We'd gone through several drafts of rewrites. I was lost at the time, neither hopeful nor desperate.

In the beginning of a week in mid January I discovered that I'd been fired from my part-time security guard job. My boss hadn't even bothered to tell me I'd lost my job. I showed up for my shift in uniform and found another uniformed guard sitting behind the desk. I called my boss, who told me in his cigarette voice "Oh, yes, our relationship has reached its end." In a way I was relieved.

The next night I spoke to the producer again. She was more confident than ever. "Have you seen the shit on television these days?" She told me. "I have no doubt your script will be picked up. No doubt whatsoever." I knew she was playing games with me, but I believed that the fact that she found it worth her time to butter me up was good enough for me. The next morning she woke me up with a phone call. She said "They said no. And frankly I can't blame them. Your script is sophomoric, it's juvenile. It might be made into something passable, but it'll definitely take a lot of work. Do you want to give it a try?" I mumbled "Sure, sure."

The next day I met with her and her new producing partner, a suave Tel-Aviv character with a shaven head who wore sunglasses indoors. I listened for a couple of hours as they made suggestions that made no sense. I never grew infuriated since deep inside I knew my screenplay was sophomoric and juvenile. I had been hoping to sell it, but realized at that moment that I had never believed in it. I had never believed in me. I had merely believed in a world of randomness and low standards. I smiled and said nothing.

The following evening, a friend of mine showed up a day early from India. He'd been gone for a few months after his army service, and had been extremely reluctant to come back to Israel. I was reluctant to stay as well, being out of a job and out of any prospects I had no reasons to stick around and nothing to look forward to. We walked around my neighborhood that night, he talked about his low and I talked about my low, and within three weeks we were sitting together on a plane headed for LA, without a plan.

If I wanted to paint the trajectory of my life in a clearly defined line, I could say that it was that low that propelled me towards the USA. And I've been here ever since. Now I have to ask myself, where will this new low propel me to next?

A true story of politics and betrayal

2006-04-27T02:29:00.000-04:00

I have always suffered from inexplicably paralyzing stage-fright. It is a total betrayal of the body that I have wracked my swiss-cheesed brain trying to pinpoint its origin. If I have any childhood public-speaking traumas I’ve hidden them well. In fact, the only traumas I can recall are of my body’s collapse, but even those never resulted in public humiliation of any kind. The only truly searing moment of semi-public speaking disaster occurred as I tried to confront my body, which by that point had already established itself as my worst enemy.

Whether I expect it to or not, whether I am particularly nervous in my mind or not, my body never fails to fail me. My mouth dries up and becomes as sticky as glue, my voice wavers, shakes and stutters as my lips emit those embarrassing smacking noises, my stomach churns vomit, my knees feel watery and weak and my head spins the world around me. I do my best to avoid these situations, and while I feel bad for being a victim of my own self, I am mostly relieved to have another hurdle behind me, whether I jumped it, ran under it or into it or just plain dropped out of the race.

The following is a story of a triple betrayal, of how my body, my mind and my teacher all set out to bring me down.

I was seventeen and the year was 1997. Right winged Benjamin Netanyahu was the prime minister of Israel, an electoral outcome that had shocked and depressed many only a few months after the assassination of the left winged Rabin. Under Netanyahu’s government, these same people felt that Israel was on a scary downwards spiral, and at seventeen, innocent and yet immersed in politics, I was one of those people. One morning I read an editorial written by Shimon Peres, the man who had lost the election. Peres clearly laid out all the horrible mistakes that the inexperienced and over confident Netanyahu was making, and the more I read the more infuriated I became.

I got out a piece of paper and summarized the editorial. I added onto it more points from a few other newspaper sources over the course of a week or so, and then I approached my highschool teacher. In spite of my nerve wracking fear of public speaking and in spite of my inferior body I had decided to volunteer to run the next “social hour”, a weekly hour in which the class was handed over to one of the students. Usually the teacher approved the most banal mind-numbingly predictable topics. Otherwise the time was most likely to be used as an hour long live infomercial for some missionary youth movement or other.

My teacher, who was an incredibly bitter bitch, read my little summarized topics for discussion, smiled dryly and said she’d love for me to do this, she was happy that someone was involved and wanted to use the hour for some lively debate. I asked her if she could possibly lead the discussion, so that it would be about the subject at hand and not about putting me on the stand, and she said we’d work it out.

As the hour of the class grew nearer I began showing the early signs of a full blown out panic attack. It seemed strange to me how everyone around me was just acting normally. By the time class started I had been seriously considering getting up and leaving, and was fighting my body with every ounce of strength I had left.

The teacher presented my list of ideas and asked me to come forwards and stand in front of the class. Even though at that moment nothing could be scarier, I robotically went to the board and stood there, shaking with my little piece of paper, my mouth dry and sticky, my body crashing. I began to read in a quivering, child-like voice, and was barely two sentences into it when the class ripped into me, and all hell broke loose.

I should mention that in Israel the political atmosphere at the time was highly combustible. The political issues there were regarded as life or death for the country, and it was rare to find a student lacking political identity. The argument was very bitter and personal, I was attacked not only for the validity of the points I was raising but for having the nerve to use school time to speak ill of the elected prime minister. Some students were yelling at me, others who agreed with me were yelling at them, and a steady stream of students walked out on me in protest. Finally the teacher, who had been sitting against the wall swallowing her evil little smile, got up and stopped the class.

At that point the loudest student, whose slogans and shouts made it seem as if he wished Israel was a dictatorship, turned his attacks on her, and demanded to know how she dared allow me to use class time for my propaganda. Instead of backing me up, the teacher agreed with him, and in front of the students who were left, calmly explained that she had allowed me to carry out my little agenda in order to teach me a lesson.

I had later learned that she was an avid follower of Netanyahu, and that she had actually prepped a few key Netanyahu supporters amongst my classmates as to what I was going to be speaking about. They had no need to listen to me, they knew what I was about to say.

The trauma of that day is not the birth of my paralysis. My body’s automatic shut-down preceded that experience by years. But that day changed me. I’ve never trusted anyone when it comes to politics since, and the chances of me ever debating anything publicly evaporated into non existence. In fact, politics and I parted ways that day. My political views nowadays are as sedated as my thoughts on politics of the 18th century. I've become a person who may watch idiots from the side, but will never try to argue with them.

Or with my body.

I'm not sure if that makes me an idiot too, but it definitely makes my body one.

Old true stories

2006-04-26T22:59:00.000-04:00

A couple of months ago an old Israeli army buddy of mine dropped by unexpectedly from halfway across the world. We drank together, laughed, ate and drank some more, and reminisced about those strange strange days when we were both in uniform playing along with a game neither of us thought very much of. In honor of that week I’m posting two memories, translated with accuracy and love from little crumpled notes in Hebrew. Ever since we first met on an Air Force base years ago he's kept popping in and out of my life in a manner that I can only describe as dependably surprising.

The first memory is of him showing up unexpectedly at my home back in Israel at three thirty in the morning. He'd wanted me to join him for a drive to a nearby city, he was extremely tired and the drive would have been life-threatening without me but never took place anyhow since he passed out on the rigid couch in our living room, slept for half an hour, awoke to have some coffee with me and then went back to sleep. During his second nap I sat on a chair by him as if tending to a sick man and strummed my guitar until I thought he'd fallen asleep. He spoke without opening his eyes and asked me to continue playing so I did, I played to him for ten minutes and he slept. He got up and left with the sun. I think I hadn't seen him for five months before that night, and another year would pass before I saw him again.

The second memory is a short phone conversation scribbled down in January of 2003:
"You've disappeared from my life!" I cried to him jokingly.
He answered "I haven't disappeared from your life; I've just disappeared. I'm in the witness relocation program."
"Where are you?"
"I'm at school."
Ever since the tensions in Iraq had started rising my army buddy, who was an officer and had gone on to serve years after I'd been discharged, was forced to spend the majority of his time on his base, which he called 'school'. It sounded less harrowing that way, I suppose.
"Well, I wanted to tell you the news." I said.
"You've got a girlfriend."
"No. But I appreciate that. No, I'm leaving for LA."
"Cool. I'm leaving school next week, but I'm sticking around the country 'till June."
"Why stick around till June?"
"I don't want to miss the war."
"What?! Why wouldn't you want to miss the war?"
"I don't want there to be a war. But if one happens I don't want to miss it."
"Missing a war is a good thing!"
"Listen, in two weeks I'll be able to explain why I don't want to miss this war."
"Oh, come on, please, explain it now, I want to understand how your brain works."
He started another sentence and our conversation was disconnected. I tried calling him back, but he had no reception.

I never did ask him why he didn't want to miss the war. I'd tried to remember to ask him when he showed up at my Brooklyn apartment, but we never got around to it. Asking him in an email just doesn’t seem right. I’m sure I’ll see him again in a year or two.

A true story

2006-04-25T20:40:00.000-04:00

As an Israeli living in New York, I’d heard my name mispronounced in a variety of ways. One college Spanish teacher would mispronounce my name "urine", no matter how many times I’d corrected her. My name, incidentally, is not pronounced "urine". Ironically enough, though, my dad is a urologist.

Other than calling me urine, my Spanish teacher tended to go off on little tangents. When she taught us how to speak about our favorite actor or musician, she went off on a tangent about how her favorite Latin singer had recently given an interview in which he’d admitted to being into S&M and golden showers.

She’d expected to get a laugh, but no one other than me was laughing. I had to laugh; I mean it's not every day your teacher talks about golden showers. She looked at all the blank faces and said: "What, no one here knows what golden showers are?" She saw me laughing and said "Well, urine does."