“Wait!” He turned to me, still ready with the umbrella. “That’s all you own.”

He relaxed again almost instantly said “Y’know, you’re right”, and laughed maniacally, which was normal. Michelle still looked stunned.

Our car was gone, and with it everything that Matt and Michelle had brought with them to Israel. We were standing in the cold, pissing rain, just after dark, on the now deserted avenue in East Jerusalem just outside the walls of the Old City. In an alleyway a garbage can lit with a fire of trash illuminated shadowy figures. There had been street lights once, but the Intifada had made them as much of a historical memory as the Roman aqueduct, I guess because they were Israeli street lights, or maybe because they interfered with the major industry of the West Bank – stealing Israeli cars.

The three of us walked it again without any real hope, up to the market where West Jerusalem begins, where we should have parked. We walked down the street for the third time. The car stayed not there.

“My mother told me this was a mistake,” she said.

Well, that’s my death sentence, I thought.

Wandering in the Desert

The elevator had taken five minutes and already I was pounding the button, trying to remain calm. I was late, and with a hazy frustration and bewilderment that came from a lack of sleep and giving up smoking. I’d been out of America too long. Israel was not as foreign to me as some of the places I had been in the last year – virtually everyone spoke at least some English – but it was just different enough to gradually make me fray at the edges. It wasn’t any one thing. It was a steady drumbeat of minor irritations.

I looked over the balcony to the lobby 11 floors below. People were milling around the glass elevators talking and holding the doors. I noted the lack of ashtrays, potted plants, and other easily dropped objects on my floor and my grudging respect for the hotel staff rose a notch. The sun rising over the West Bank hills illuminated the orange dust collecting on the 13 stories of the hotel’s glass atrium. I hit the button again. The light blinked on the down arrow to show another elevator passing my floor too full to take another passenger. I hit the button again.

The elevator arrived, packed with Israelis smoking under the no smoking sign. I stood in a crowd of people talking all around me, loud, shushing and hunfing and hawking in Hebrew at the top of their lungs, interrupting each other and pushing even though we couldn’t go anywhere. The elevator stopped at the first floor and I was ejected by the crowd, pushing it’s way out. I wanted to go one more floor down so I got back in. The elevator immediately started going up. Cursing, I pushed the button repeatedly like it was just a minor mistake in pronunciation. The elevator continued its ascent as I laughed bitterly.

Just another day in the Holy Land. I’d been in Israel for close to three weeks, this following a week in Poland. After two years of travelling all over the world as a consultant, I had finally met my worst client. I describe Israelis as being the kind of people who’d try to change the engine on your car while you’re going full throttle down the highway. Yossi Raz was the man who gave me that impression. Israelis talk as if the sheer need to survive when surrounded by enemies has made them smarter and more resourceful that everyone else (by which they mean Americans) which I would give them, but they think they are smarter even than that, which can be their downfall.

Me and Yossi had just mixed it up the day before, and if he had any urge to pull the plug on this situation that would have been just fine with me.

Usually being patient is my specialty. Our company’s philosophy was that the truth was like a beautiful but impractical garment which we custom tailored to you. Methodology was an art, not a science; a beautiful collaboration between their momentary whims and our vast inexperience. I came to this job directly from an improv comedy troup, which turned out to be the perfect background – I was able to make spurious logic out of any random collection of facts. Since the product we created was designed to give advice to marketing people, it was more important that it be sexy than it be right. And it was sexy – name a buzzword from the computer industry, circa 1997, and it could be tacked onto Neurolocator. The Neuro part came from Neural nets, which we didn’t really use, because fuzzylocator, as in the fuzzy logic which we did use, sounds bad. The locator part was the digital mapping. Later Neurolocator morphed into a dot com, then died. In other words, we were a high-tech medicine show, a kind of unfaithful guide to the mysterious interior of the new markets that gas companies were aching to exploit. Our clients were usually just slightly more clueless about their market than we were. In this case, we had a distinct disadvantage in that our clients were Israelis and Israel is the size of New Jersey soaking wet.

Usually, when the client screwed everything up I took it in stride. We needed researchers to go to and survey 400 gas stations on our map. Yossi decided actually paying a market research company to do this was too expensive, so instead he hired temps and told me to train them. I told him get 30, figuring half would drop out almost immediately. Instead he got 10, and sure enough five of them dropped out by day two, and then he increased the area we were trying to cover by 200 stations. The survey we were trying to do was translated by the man himself from English, and I found out while training the researchers that we were asking things like how far it was to the gas house from the patio. Another asked, “Where is the oil can? ExcelIent, Bad, Fair or Nice.” I wanted to correct it, but it had already been printed.

There is a gesture that Yossi made often  - pick up a pinch of salt with all of your fingers, then turn this over, and shake it at someone as if you’re saying give me a minute. Yossi would do this whenever I brought up reality.

Usually if we had a minor logistical issue – say when the Israeli helping me had problems at home, problems with his son that made him disappear for hours at a time without warning, leaving me with probably the only Israelis who don’t speak English, trying to teach them how to survey gas stations - I could work around it. Usually when a project was doubled, than tripled in size after it was already in progress, I’d take it as normal operating procedure.

Mike called and had a little conference call with Yossi and the president of Dor Energy. I got called up to the office and was on the phone with them while they were standing in the next room, watching me. Mike knows how to deal with these things. Mike is to his employees the way that I am to clients, and on the phone it only takes him three sentences to diagnose my problem and figure out what it is that Tim needs. Tim needs his girlfriend. Mike’s never heard of my girlfriend before, but he’s heard that tone of voice in other guys in the field. The tone of voice means, She wants him to come home. Why is he going on to another country? For another week? That tone of voice means that Mike is going to lose this guy, who somehow has been spinning the clients. Well we’ll just send her out there. Tim has been out too long. And we’ll send another body out to take over, now that the project is rolling along. Then Tim, we’ll send you off to Dubai, to Rio, to England. Maybe all three. Mike is a pal. He’s done stroking me and thinks he’s fixed me and clicks off.

Today Matt and Michelle arrive from New York. I get one day to brief Matt, three days with Michelle at the Pyramids, and then I’m good as new. Well Mike doesn’t know it but I won’t be good as new, and I have no intention of trudging on to 2 other continents, 3 more countries. But thanks Mike, I will take the vacation. This will do just fine.

Michelle and I have been together off and on for three months. I met her while she was with her husband, and we had an affair – then I broke it off because I couldn’t do the affair thing. Then to my surprise she ended it with her husband, and now we’re finally on our first real date. Yeah. This will work.

I am beginning to cool off. It’s been bad here, but now I think I can make it through. Things are going to be OK!

I tore down the road to Ben Gurion Airport. A parking spot appeared right in front of my car, and I strode into the terminal, uncharacteristically early. I waited for them – for her – by the metal railing that separated the emerging arrivals from the crowd. The greeting area didn’t have a direct view of the doors they would be coming through, so I moved closer around the railing into the one spot where I’d be able to see her as she came through the doors. Half an hour went by. I put down my paper so she wouldn’t see me reading when she came out, so I’d be looking right at her. It had been rough on the phone for the last two weeks, as my business trip got longer and longer, but she sounded happy when I booked her tickets. Half of the people waiting for the flight had met who they came for, kissed and hugged and started making up for lost time, and still she had not arrived. What could be going wrong? Did they miss the flight somehow? Was it customs?

We haven’t been having an easy time. I know that her breakup is bringing on more stress than she is showing, maybe more than she knows. I feel uncertain about us, that maybe since she has never been alone before in her adult life she could be making it work with me because she needs someone – anyone. I haven’t had anything real in two years, and I am crazy about her. I am willing to change everything for her. I can’t believe that her marriage is over, it is more than I dared to hope for. What she needs is someone who will be around and I am willing to change all of my plans to be that person. My dreamed of adventure cycling to California is something I can surrender, even though it has been my dream for years. I can make her feel secure. I know that I’ve learned this lesson in the past – some compromise is necessary, but not the things that are core to who you are. But maybe I need to grow up. This feeling has been shaken in the last week by her getting angry at me for not being home yet.

She walked out the door with Matt, carrying her bags and jet lagged but still looking like my dreams. I kissed her, and after a second she broke it off. Not exactly the kind of reunion I was hoping for. “Hi Matt”, I said. Matt wearily grunted “hey.” She dropped her heavier bag on my outstretched arm – I took them both.

“Everything ok?” I ask. First mistake. Their bleary eyes lit up excitedly with the warm glow of the child on Christmas morning who really got coal. They both started talking at the same time  -

“We were interrogated by El Al for about an hour and a fucking half in New York,” says Matt - 

“First who are you going to see?” says Michelle

“What is your business in Israel?“

“Why is he there?“

“What nationality are you?”

“What nationality are you?”

“Why isn’t he travelling with you?”

“What were you doing in Saudi Arabia?”

“What were you doing in Jamaica?”

“Where is your family from?”

“Who is this other man travelling with you?”

“Where is the bomb? Like, there is one, we just need to find it.”

“Who are you really sleeping with?”

El Al begins its onboard service with an interrogation designed to determine whether you’re a terrorist. This might just be me, but I’d guess that by this time the genuine terrorists have figured out the basic questions and come on board with an air tight alibi, dressed in a suit, with letters and business cards made up for their non-existent business partner. As for the poor passengers, what ends up happening is the El Al people grill you looking for loose ends in your story to the point where they ask you a question you don’t have a ready answer for, and then they harp on that loose end til you wish you had a bomb, so you could set it off there and then. Maybe that’s the point of the screening process – blow up the airport, not the El Al jet.

None of us had been aware of this. Mike, who had arranged this middle eastern goat fuck, could have mentioned it, but it wasn’t quite his style to volunteer helpful information, what with being in the market research business. So they had shown up to the airport expecting to check in and go onboard. They did not have any documentation about what we were doing in Israel – Matt had only been told he was leaving 2 days earlier as per our company’s standard operating procedure, and he figured he’d find out as we went along. Michelle knew even less since she figured Matt knew it all and I would meet them. El Al wanted to know why they were travelling together if Michelle didn’t work for us, and how she knew Matt. They also wanted to know why Matt’s passport had Arabic all over it – stickers, visas, and so on from when he lived with his ex-pat parents in Saudi Arabia. It couldn’t help that Matt’s last name was Doenitz – as in Admiral Doenitz, briefly head of the Third Reich in the 24 hours between Hitler’s suicide and Germany’s surrender – and yes, they are distantly related (though Matt spent his early childhood in Oklahoma.) Did I mention that Michelle is still married yet her maiden name is on her passport? No one would pick us to blow a plane, we were a fucking madcap buddy movie.

So this experience began the romantic adventure that I had planned for Michelle. I learned a valuable lesson from this experience, which is that when a woman comes to visit you anything that goes wrong along the way is your fault. Of course, a few things later would be my fault.

Given that the two of them are jetlagged and have just been worked over by Air Mossad, what could be better than a little sightseeing? I suggested that we go to Jerusalem to see the Old City. My “reasoning” was that Michelle and I were supposed to leave the next night, and this would be her only chance to see it. I visited there on Saturday, and it had brought me back to myself. The Dome of the Rock is the heart of the city, the site of the original Temple has a feeling of hallowed ground even though I do not believe in any of the three religions that call it holy. The Dome is small in comparison with other holy places, perhaps only 50 feet tall at the center. The outside of the dome is covered in gold, it’s octagonal base is made up of walls covered in blue tile inlaid with geometric designs and gold arabic lettering. It stands in a plaza, the only truly open area in the old city, so that when you leave the shadowy twisting streets the dome suddenly seems huge in the stark white marble expanse.  When you enter, the noise and harsh sunlight outside are replaced by the close dark feeling that you got as a child when you hid in a closet among some coats. There it is a delicate interweaving of all different colored patterns, on the pillars, in the plush Persian carpeting, in the ceiling designs. The Dome absorbs sounds, leaving you only with the different colors of light and shadow. Due to Islamic law, there are no images of humans in the stained glass, but the incredible complexity of the designs enfolds you. The center is a railing around the living rock of the mount. An opening in the rock descends to a small cave beneath it, the floor covered with soft padding carpets and three altars in the corners of the room. This is where the Muslims say Mohammed ascended to Heaven on his Night Journey. This is where the Christians say Christ gave the sermon on the Mount. This is where the Jews say Abraham was to sacrifice his son.

To paraphrase David Byrne, well, how did we get here? Most of us are pretty familiar with the connection between Judaism and Christianity, but many people don’t realize that Islam is actually a member of the family. Rednecks in deerhunters see people with towels on their heads burning an American flag and think that they should learn about Jesus. Must of them do not realize that Jesus is actually a prophet in Islam. (Though he is not God – a point in which they actually agree with the words of the Big Guy himself, in every book except St. Mark) The gospels are pretty much taken whole by Islam, the same way that the Old Testament is still considered usable by the Bible thumpers, and just like the Christians they say all of that stuff is good and true except where our later edition supercedes it. Islam also has open minded provisions that basically say to kill the Jews and Christians last (after the idolators and pagans – India watch out.)

The story from the Islamic corner was that they arrived in town in the eighth century, and found this spot abandoned and covered with garbage (antiquites, religious artifact, human images and the like.) They cleaned it up a little and created something for all of the peoples of the book (the Islama-judeo-christians). Now the muslims who built this place knew geometry and algebra before the Europeans fine tuned the fork, so it makes you wonder why they left corner four open. They believe that Moses, Jesus and Mohammed were all true prophets, but Mohammed was the last one; this seems like an obvious omission. I still wonder about this. Could they be waiting for the Mormons?

There is a fourth religion in the area, by the way; the Bahai, who believe that maybe there was one more prophet. Roughly, Bahai is to Islam as Quaker is to Christian (I said roughly, so please, no Bahai hate mail, though it would be amusing to see what that looks like.) The Bahai are nice people who believe in uniting the world, and making their children make a conscious choice about their religion at an age where they are smart enough to make an informed decision. Of course, they fled persecution in Iran for the safety of Israel. But they were too smart to get involved in this real estate war, and sought out digs in Haifa up the coast. I walked out stunned and transported away from my miserable job and all of my problems.

We were halfway there already since the airport is inland between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. We drove there along the old road through the mountains. As we rose and crossed the pass into the valley that lies before the walls of Jerusalem, suddenly there was snow everywhere. Jerusalem looks every bit of the shining city on the hill, terraces running down them towards the valleys. I describe to them the streets of the old city, the Dome of the Rock, the Wailing Wall, the Holy Sepulchre. We park on Sultan Suleiman, just past the Damascus Gate. We’re 100 feet from a Police station. We pop the trunk and throw everything inside it. A slight twinge runs through me. In New York, this is violating The Rules – leaving something valuable in a trunk. In fact, leaving everything that Matt and Michelle brought with them in the trunk. Not taking a single thing of value with us. People can see us doing it. But we’re on a main road, in front of a bank, there are police here. The car has a cutoff switch. We’re only going to be an hour.

We enter the walls of the Old City through what is called the Flower Gate. It enters into the living part of the town, the Arab town that still lives in the East Jerusalem half of the Old City. We walk through narrow winding alleys towards the holy sites of the city, the streets covered in places by old stone archways. We wander down one of the streets off of the main entrance, past tea shops and cafes, and into a less populated area where the stone houses all run together and every door opens into the middle of the street. The cobbled road is not more than 10 feet wide, with occasional steps that make it impassible even to the adventurous drivers of Israel. It starts to rain, a nearly frozen rain, and we hurry for the shelter of the covered streets of the Western side.

“Ok, this is where I got lost the last time...” I say, trying to divine a direction.

I’ve been lost on five continents and by this time I was not fazed by it, especially when I’d been lost in the same area before and found my way out. Besides, I say to myself, the Old City is tiny, and I can see the towers of the churches in the Armenian quarter, so I know generally where we’re headed. Matt, for his part, grew up in Saudi Arabia and Switzerland. Once, during the Gulf War, he was supposed to travel from his school in Switzerland to meet his parents in Cairo – they were coming from Saudi Arabia.  They couldn’t get out – so he went on a little vacation of his own in Cairo for two weeks.

Michelle, on the other hand, has been to visit her family in Jamaica and that’s about it. She was beginning to look ill at ease.

An urchin walking by says something to Matt, then throws a snowball at him. Matt turns, outraged at this unprovoked assault, and shouts something like “Khiss-a-mukh!”

The little would-be mujahedeen pales and runs, screaming something to the neighborhood.

“What was that?”

“Fuck your mother in Arabic.”

“Arabic?” Michelle asks. Michelle is wondering who the hell we are. We travel to Panama, and Cambodia, and Poland for work. And now Matt speaks Arabic.

“Y’know, maybe we shouldn’t have come this way,” I say, trying to remember if any of this area looks familiar from when they used to have news footage of the Intifada.

We hurry through the maze of tiny houses, down the stone walkways which are all made of steps going up and down. I spot something I recognize from the last time I was lost. I guide us into a street that is almost entirely closed from the sky by awnings of shops that hawk everything from religious items to groceries to televisions. The people around us are now largely tourists, and we begin to relax a bit. We cut of down another street to the Via Dolorosa. I’m not sure how religious Michelle is – she’s mentioned going to Catholic school. I don’t give a damn about any of the religions here but I am very into the history. I figure she might like to see it.

A Palestinian man tried to show us around. “I show you the places Jesus goes.”

“We don’t have any money,” I said, doing my best NYC no eye contact and walk right past your non-existence.

“No, no, I do this for free, because you are a visitor here.”

“They just got off the plane. They have not changed their checks yet.”

“Muslim, Jews, Christians, we are all brothers here.”

“I did not bring any money with me. I mean it.”

“I do this for free.” He walks in the direction we were headed anyway and points out the third station of the cross (a doorway to what is now, of course, a church.)

“Really man, you are not going to get a shekel from us.” I loved saying that.

“You have credit card.”

“No. In the car.”

He stood a moment in contemplation. “If you want guide, I be here.”

“Thanks. We’ll keep that in mind.”

We turned around and walked back out of the narrow street, nearly getting run down in the process. Most of Jerusalem’s streets are impassable to cars because of steps; they’re all about 10 feet wide, but only the steps stop the Israelis and Arabs. The Via Dolorosa did not have steps and as a result someone would chance it every now and again. If they met another car coming towards them they would literally have to reverse a block, and though in theory it was one way I saw this happen. The Via Dolorosa is really just a big alleyway, most amazing because of its complete ordinariness.

“This doorway here marks the fourth station,” I said pointing to where the road turned and narrowed. A Palestinian walked by trying to sell, or maybe rent, a cross – actual size, made of wood – to the Christian faithful for them to carry on the Stations of the Cross, the points that mark Christ’s journey to crucifixion.  There is something in one of the gospels to the faithful saying more or less “raise your cross and follow me”, but only a real fanatic would think that is meant to be taken literally. If you wanted to make a million dollars in Jerusalem you could do worse than market to fanatics.

In pointing this out to Michelle I expected at least some interest, but not a flicker. I was wondering how someone could come to Israel and have no interest in any of this. As any of the women who are reading this are no doubt thinking idiot, she went there for you. I knew this, and I knew she had just gotten off an airplane, but I was thinking we may never have a chance to be here together again. Maybe I should have been thinking we might not have a change to be together again, period.

Naturally, the Dome of the Rock was closed. We missed it by half an hour. We came back to one of the main streets, hang back, cut around and enter the Wailing Wall. The passageways to these two holy places run to the same place, the muslim passage is above the jewish one. So after we came back around we were coming into the Wailing Wall and we come to a checkpoint. The guard spotted us as Americans immediately. In English he said “Leave your gun here.”
 “I don’t have a gun!”

“Or a bomb!” said Matt under his breath, cackling with his hand in front of his goatee.

“Shut up!” I hissed.

The guard looked at us quizzically and then waved us through the metal detector.

We entered through a tunnel into the broad plaza that leads to the Wailing Wall. Big wall. 20 or 30 feet tall. Some lichen like growth on it and that’s about it. Looks like every other wall along the highway coming into the town.

“That’s it?” Michelle said. “Can we go now?”

I wanted to take some pictures, which Michelle made a lot of noise about because her mother taught her that one of the basic rules of having an affair is no photos or souvenirs (again, the fact that she learned affair etiquette from her mother may have deterred a lesser man, but I’m an idiot.) This attracted the attention of the guards who threatened to take away my camera because no photography is allowed at the Wailing Wall. As we left we had one more thing to argue about.

So two adulterers and a potential terrorist walk into a cathedral, and the terrorist says….

We headed down to the Christian Quarter where the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is. We stopped in a bakery to grab some food, and Matt and I split a roll with zatar on it. This spice is one of my favorite things in middle eastern food, and I was going through a phase where I couldn’t get enough of it. Michelle smelled it and got a danish. This cathedral is interesting because of its multiple personality disorder. It is a huge dome and cathedral over a tiny ancient Greek church that houses the burial place of Christ. The cathedral itself burned to the ground at the beginning of the 19^th century, while Europe was busy fighting Napoleon. So when it came time to rebuild, the Catholic church got a say in things equal to the attention and money it was able to give to the cause – it competes for space with the Syrian Copts, the Egyptian Copts, the Greek Orthodox and the Russian Orthodox for holy airtime. There is actually an altar at one of the last stations of the cross that is left half Orthodox, right half Catholic. Every time you walk down a corridor it changes styles. You look up under one of the domes, and instead of a fresco you have a Big Brother like Jesus looking straight down at you. A little Orthodox touch there. Matt and I went into the mini church that the cathedral was built around, but Michelle has no interest at all. I thought she might by this point have decided to have a good time, but once she made up her mind, she was good at sticking to it. This immense disparity in our capacity to handle the unknown was something that never came up in New York; now it was everywhere.

Outside there was a Palestinian man selling Fuji film umbrellas, and we bought two because the weather had finally made up its mind and it was now raining hard. We scrambled down the cobblestones to the nearest exit through the city walls, which left us outside in West Jerusalem. We walked around the walls of the city for half a mile in the rain, Michelle growing more sullen with every sodden step. As we finally turned down onto Sultan Suleiman, I noticed that the street that had been lined with cars and jammed with traffic was now completely empty. Completely. Including our car.

We walked up and down the street aimlessly. We had definitely lost the car, I thought, but they wanted to keep looking further down the road. Finally, out of fear that we were going to lost more than the car, I said “ok, let’s find the police.” Remembering the police station being right down the street from where our car had been I spotted two Israeli policemen with very big guns standing on the front steps of the police station, under an overhang, smoking cigarettes that indicated where they were in the darkness. So much for three to a match, I thought. We walked up to them and they stared at us.

“Do you speak English?”

“Sure, why not?” I have heard many people say this in Israel, and usually I find it funny, but coming from the law in this god-infested town I was not happy.

“Our car has just been stolen.”

The police greeted our bad news with an amazing stoicism, not betraying any of the grief that this must be causing them. “Of course,” one of them said, giving a long shrug while lighting another cigarette. “Where did you park it, here?”

“Yes.”

He smiled to the other policeman and said something in Hebrew, gesturing to us as he looked at him.

“What should we do now?” I asked, hoping to include the police in my ‘we’.

“You should go downtown and report the car stolen.”

“Right. How?”

Michelle started crying. This is a wonderful power that women have that cuts through a lot of preliminaries. If she wasn’t crying for real I would have been thinking what a great idea.

They talked a bit in Hebrew and he took a long, languid drag on his cigarette, and then dropped it in a puddle and turned around and opened the door behind him. “Come with me.”

We went upstairs, past an empty first floor shop (being below the police was probably not a popular spot in this neighborhood) and they made a call, and a van arrived downstairs and we got into it. One of the two police got in the van with us. As we shook off the rain, he spoke for a minute with the guys up front, and started laughing. He turned to us, looking at Michelle and said “So… are the three of you together?”

Michelle glared at me and said nothing as she looked back down at her hands in her lap. The rest of the ride to the downtown station was uneventful – they advised us to declare anything we could think of, because it was very unlikely that we would see any of our stuff again.

The interview about the car included a discussion of the cut-off switch, which the police had a good laugh over, and we reported the car missing to Avis, and they gave us a copy of the report, we thought, for our insurance.

While sitting in the station, Matt and I started thinking about what to do next. Luckily, Michelle had kept her passport on her. Unluckily, Matt had not. Michelle and I still were hoping to leave for Egypt the next day, which meant we had 24 hours to reestablish his identity, get him a car so he could work, buy Michelle new clothes, and get new tickets. We were stuck in Jerusalem. As it happened, a friend of Matt’s who I also knew from NYC was working at the Hilton in Jerusalem, so that became our next stop. Delilah greeted us, and asked Matt what was wrong, and he started laughing and related his arrival, which took most of her break time. She called us a cab to get us back to Avis at BenGurion airport. We went back, and by the time we arrived Avis had already recovered the car, minus all of our stuff. Eventually, they rented us another car, after lecturing us about how we had agreed not to go into the West Bank. Finally I lost it.

“Honey, as far as we knew, that whole goddamn place is your undivided capital, now and forever, so we didn’t go into the West Bank. And we parked in front of the police station.”

They also didn’t want to let me rent a car for Matt, and they wanted to see his passport… once the arguing started, each of the three of us brought our own talents to the battle, as well as the uglier sides of our personalities. Michelle was looking for a supervisor, Matt was insulting their level of service, and I was comparing Israel unfavorably to Cambodia. In Israel it turns out to not be such a bad way to get what you want, actually. We wound up with a  slightly nicer car and got out.

Now we were off to Netanya, which meant after we got to the outskirts of Tel Aviv, we turned north and headed up the coast 30 miles. This was the actual location of Dor Energy, in a hotel built by Russian gangsters on a cliff. Supposedly one of the patriot missiles had glanced a Scud during the Gulf War and it had cruised up the coast and exploded into the Mediterranean here. It was a terrible hotel, and set apart from the town about half a mile, in area of desert brush drawn up into lots that presumably was about to be developed.

We parted in the lobby, and agreed to be up early the next day.

“Who’s Keren?” I look at the message slip Michelle is holding from yesterday. The front desk thoughtfully slipped it under my door. Ah, Keren. Keren is my ex-girlfriend from the summer before last. It’s over, most of the time. Except for the time we hooked up when she was in New York in November. She lives south of Tel Aviv. I had always promised to surprise her by showing up in Israel and calling her – one of those things you say in a long distance relationship that never really happen – usually. The other night, when me and Michelle had just been fighting because she called me at 3am and wanted me to act thrilled, then made me feel bad because I still wasn’t home, then mentioned hanging out with an ex-lover who happens to be her head hunter, I called Keren. Keren was surprised. Some part of me was thinking I’m going to make it with her. But she mentioned to me when I first called that she had a boyfriend. Part of me is still angry. I feel safe enough that nothing can happen, but I am also getting a chance to betray Michelle in a way, just by being around Keren. I hop in the car and drive to Rach’l Lezzion, past Lod Ramla, to Nes Zionna getting lost at every turn but gradually working my way closer to her town. I stop at a Dor gas station and call her, and she comes to get me. I follow her in my car, it’s transmission dying randomly as we go, I nearly lose her in the hills on a dark one lane road. We stop at her place.

In the end, here we are sitting in her room, her roomates gone. The moment of truth. Why am I here? I could have dropped her at the door, but I came in. I could have given her a peck at the door to her room and gone. We’re sitting on her bed. She takes off her shoes. “Uh… Keren – I’ve got to go back to my hotel room – I’ve got someone waiting for me back home.”

Surprise, then anger flash across her face. After a minute she says “I just broke up with my boyfriend today – did you think I was going to sleep with you?”

Actually, yes, because that’s what happened the last two times we were in the same country.

“No, no, I’m sorry, I misunderstood. It was good seeing you again.” I left without having even kissed her. Like Jimmy Carter, I had lust in my heart. And in Catholicism or a relationship with Michelle, that’s enough to send you to hell. To get back to the present, Keren called me, and Michelle got the message. How ironic – to get in trouble for something I really didn’t do. None of the evidence points in my favor.

Part II

I got off the plane from Dubai and Matt met me at the gate.

“Heeey! How’s things?”

“Oh... it’s passach. Get ready… the food sucks.”

“McDonald’s?”  For when you’ve gotten past wanting things that are exotic and you’re just looking for something you can get down.

“Matzohburgers, man, even they can’t get past this one. They’re trying to turn matzoh into pizza…”

“Welcome to the mysterious abandoned city of Matzoh Pizza…”

At this point in the journey, since we haven’t found any companionship I figure it’s time for some real drugs.

Our first attempt was on a Friday at Xray, a little café on Dieffendorf. Unfortunately we were stood up by the owner, and were forced to go out clubbing merely drunk. We got to Allenby 58 and paid 40 shekels to get in. The music was good, the people beautiful. The drugs left something to be desired. Speeded up and lonely is not a great way to be. I had the urge to do it again and have something take care of those nasty emotions for me.

The next day we went down to Xray and our friend was there with two tablets that had roses on them, “from Amsterdam,” he said. We waited until the relatively early club hour of 11 and dropped them along with a few Maccabee’s and away we went. It was a 20 minute walk to the club, so we figured we be flying just after we got past the line and inside. We got to the door and there was no line – our luck was continuing. As we went up to the counter and paid we began to realize why. The only thing that could ruin the evening had just happened to us – Bad Music.

I want to be different, Part of the Different Crowd

For those of you who have never partaken of ecstasy, there are a few things you should know about it. Technically it’s a mix of hallucinogen and amphetamine – meaning you’re tripping your balls off really quickly, and you tend to want to do something about it. People tend to be very blissed out – nothing’s a problem, people are usually pretty abnormally friendly when they take it. Usually they want to either have sex or dance or just rub up against a wall – unlike the normal hardup state however, if sex is not going to happen that’s ok. Because dancing is just as good. Above all, if you never liked techno music before you quickly begin to. For some reason, it’s perfect. And once you start listening to it while you’re flying, even if you aren’t dancing, you realize you need that beat.

Of course, it’s just as treacherous a ride as any other heavy drug, and if you get on the bad side of it you’re in for a long bad night. The beat we were receiving at 400,000 watts of shit. I realized that we had wandered into the angst ridden Russian kids party. No one was over 18. No one was dancing together. Everyone looked a little gothic – an uncommon look in Israel, because unlike America young Israelis have plenty to be genuinely angst ridden about and consequently don’t want to waste any time being more depressed than they have to be when they go out. These kids were all pale, no one was looking at each other – everyone looked like they were there to suffer in personal isolation, even the groups of people who had obviously come together. I guess for them, had the music been any good it would have been a disappointment to them. But why were the Americans made to suffer? The band up on stage, also Russian speaking, seemed to have found a way to mix rap, industrial, and punk together in such a way that even someone who could normally get into any one of those styles couldn’t hack what they were doing. I always thought that since I actually like music that is not at all melodic whatever my kids started listening to in 15 years would have to be annoying in a totally different direction, like elevator music. I was wrong. I had to go.

The cavernous open floor of Allenby 58 is teeming with surly Russian children. We don’t belong here. Even Israelis don’t really belong here – these Russian kids are outcasts, and the last thing they want is someone slumming through their party. The Russians are about one fifth of Israel now, and get all of the shit that immigrant groups get everywhere. Seemingly reasonable people have no problem complaining about them and no guilt about racism – after all, everyone loves the Ethiopian immigrants these days in Israel, and the Russians are loud and brassy (not at all like the rest of the Israelis.)

The music is what I’d call industrial, but Matt says it’s a new offshoot of techno called Progressive – what ever it is, this band will never be troubled by too much success. The atmosphere isn’t even reaching angry – it’s pure angst for he kiddies, reinforcing the “no one has ever been where I am now, no one understands” for a crowd of a thousand or so look alikes, who are all in the same place.

“Shit. I don’t know what went wrong. This place was great last night.” Matt speaks with a Swiss accent, touched by Saudi Arabia, but he’ll try to tell you when you meet him that he’s from Oklahoma.

“Maybe we can deal with this,” I say while not believing it. Lots of little goths in army surplus or miserable looking boys in rock t-shirts.

“I don’t know man, this might be a little too much. And look at all of them – they’re all so teeny tiny. Is it hitting you yet?”

“No.” I’m beginning to think that the connection ripped us off but Matt is feeling it he says.

“Let’s get out of here.”

“Where to?” I’m sipping a 10 Shekel bottle of spring water from the Golan. Same ripoff worldwide at there clubs, but on E it’s your juice… and so is good music, and we need to find some or we’ve wasted a night and ourselves for the next day for nothing.

“I think someone mentioned the Lemon.”

“Do you know where it is?”

“Nah but I think the cab drivers have to know, eh?”

Exiting onto the street, we look for a cab. Tel Aviv is like New York in an interesting way – everyone speaks at least passable English except for the cabbies. Finally negotiations yield one who thinks he knows it  - “It’s in Jaffa?”

“Could be,” I say. “Let’s go.”

We drive for 20 minutes, down to Jaffa, the old part of town that was once Arab. As an Israeli explained to me, they all voluntarily left en mass one day during the war in ‘48. A small building in the middle of industrial nowhere, there is a crowd outside of the kind you only find at a club. People pressing to the front to get picked out, people further away debating whether it’s time to give up and go elsewhere, and the occasional person on one of the lists cutting right through the crowd and inside the bellrope and into the pounding interior. Matt and I get up to the rope. We’ve been lucky lately, especially for two guys without any women. Not this time.

“Invitation only,” the bouncer says.

I want to appeal to him, explain our situation, we won’t cause any trouble we just need some good music, I know you’ve been there… but the man tells us to move to the side, there are people coming through.

“Fuck. Now what? Can you call Delilah?” Delilah is a friend of Matt’s from New York. She just moved back here about 2 months ago, and she has friends – i.e., people who know her family – just about everywhere. They own Toyota Israel and offered to build her a hotel if she’d leave being the concierge of the Plaza in New York and come home. She’s back, but instead decided to work in the Hilton in Jerusalem.

Matt tries the cell phone. “It’s off. She’s probably working in Jerusalem right now.”

“Great.”

“No man, she can’t help us.”

“It’s ok.”

“It’s kicking in, isn’t it?”

I want to go up to the wall of the building and lie against it and at least soak up some vibrations. That would be an exciting evening. (“So then I decided to lean against a building for a few hours until it wore off.”) It’s time to go somewhere else, and get there quickly. The bouncers and others in the crowd are starting to look at us strangely, and I’m starting to do that swaying trippy e-dance here in the street.

“Well. Let’s get the fuck out of here before we get stranded.” You can’t be too far away from anything in Tel Aviv, but the last thing we need is an hour’s walk right now.

Walking back to the corner I spot a cab about to split and hail it. We pile in.

“You guys.” It’s the same cabdriver.

“Yeah. Back to Allenby.”

“Where?”

“Where we started.”

The guys working the door at Allenby 58 let us back in. The band is still playing but the crowd is thinning. Back to the bar on the side, and another bottle of water.

“It’s not fair.”

“Yah, that was pretty fucked up back there.”

“I hate this place.”

“Me too.” We laugh.

“I mean, the 50^th fucking anniversary of the country… they had 50 fucking years, and this is the best they could do? They knew we were coming…”

The rest of the evening continues like this. Gradually it gets better as the band goes off and they start playing better music. The crowd is pretty thin, but it’s a different one. Too bad the E is not really doing the job. I’m still at the bar most of the time. But I can’t go back to the hotel room – as the Pulp song says “I can’t go home and go to bed/because it hasn’t worn off yet/and now it’s morning”

Finally, around 6am, comes a voice in English – “GO HOME.”

“I want to,” I answer to Matt, “But they keep sending me to more fucking countries!" Then I realize that the booming voice is not Matt's. "Hey – was that for us?” We look around and notice that there are about 20 people left. None of them are Americans.

“Let’s go.”

“Yep.”

We spent the next hour drinking beers from Matt’s hotel room stash and listening to a techno disc from a Jerusalem club distorting and squealing at max volume on the tinny speakers of my Toshiba laptop until we gave up in disgust. I put on a Pulp cd, which while it was not techno music, had some funny songs about being high on E – to wit:

            Oh look at you

            You’re looking so confused

            Just what did you lose?

            It’s just your mind...

You can’t go home and go to bed

            Because it hasn’t worn off yet

            And now it’s morning...

            And you want to call you mother

and say “Mother, I can never come home again

Because I seem to have lost an essential part of my brain

Somewhere in a field in Hampshire”

I was exhausted, burned out, just plain fried – but still not able to go to sleep. Once the music had outlived its amusement value we decided to wander the two blocks down to the beach. As we planted ourselves on two plastic chairs abandoned 50 feet from the surf, we watched the day go from gray to dawn to an electric, unreal clarity of daylight, as people walked their dogs down the beach. After babbling for two hours, we decided to head back because Matt thought he could now sleep. I was under no such illusions. Mine had taken a while longer to kick in and was still keeping me going strong.

I got undressed, into bed, shivered in the slight chill of the morning that was really the drug withdrawing and sucking away all of my seratonin with it, leaving me a wretched, exhausted shell – but still very awake. No matter how far I tried to twist under the thin coverlet, the cold and light followed me, driving away any possibility of sleep. Finally, I gave up and got a book. I had just finished it when I got a call.

“Hey.”

“Hair. Whizzoup?”

“Want to go to the Dead Sea?”

“What…” The Dead Sea. Other side of the country. Hot. Sandy. Brackish water. “Fuck no!” I said more out of reflex than anything else. It was noon. My choices were to lay in bed all day sleeping when I finally could, and then watch lousy TV all night, or bite the bullet and try to make it through the day to nightfall and then go to bed early. “Ahhh… sure. You drive.”

After stuffing down some drywall pastries at the hotel café, we headed down to the car. We were parked in a subbasement of the hotel, a parking garage thrown in as an afterthought when Tel Aviv started getting too crowded to park, jammed in along with the storage area and garbage dumpsters. It had lines painted on the concrete for three cars but somehow there were always at least five there, and it was a delicate series of maneuvers around the concrete poles to get out. Matt reversed into a steel cage around the storage area – only tapping it but it felt like a major collision given the state of my head – and we zipped up the garage ramp into the sunlight. It was like the wrath of a jealous God even through my sunglasses.

I decided to start enjoying feeling wretched, getting into my misery. We got on route 1, out past the airport, going 120 kph, and up into the hills around Jerusalem. One of the problems with us doing a digital map of the country is that we got the idea that we knew where we were going, but of course we only knew some bits of the map, but we’d never really been to any of these places.

“Fucking Jerusalem, eh man?”

“Yeah, brings back memories. Back when I had a girlfriend. And you had luggage.”

We navigated around the suburbs, accidentally swinging north into a few security checkpoints. “Ram Allah? Where the fuck are we?”

Realize we’re lost – the army guys there aren’t too happy to see us swinging around right as we’re getting there.

“We’re trying to go to the Dead Sea.”

After getting directions, we find ourselves in Palestinian Authority territory as we approach the road north to Jericho. The road is two lanes, winding sharply through the mountains. The road runs a thousand feet above the valley floor, with no barrier on the outside of the curve. The trucks on the road are having a hard time, slowing everything else down. We’re behind eight cars, who are in turn behind a dump truck, and Matt swings out into the other side of the road and floors it, almost making it past when we see on oncoming car one curve away. He tries to get back in, but the drivers are carefully holding ranks so he ends up slamming on the brakes until everyone passes us and cutting back to the other side just as the oncoming car gets there.

I’ve been jamming my foot on the imaginary passenger’s brake pedal so hard I thought I was going to drive my foot through the floor and stop us by dragging the asphalt.

Matt is laughing maniacally.

“Matt.”

“Hey, it’s ok, eh, I learned to drive in Switzerland.”

“Matt.”

“You know, the problem with most people drunk driving is they didn’t learn to drive while drinking.”

“Matt. You did not learn to drive while on Ecstasy.” I thought about it for a second. “Did you?”

“Alright, alright.”

“Getting me killed is a privilege I’m reserving for myself. Take it easy.”

We get to the Dead Sea in one piece – Matt exercising caution, passing the cars only three or four at a time. The mountains open up and the Sea lies below us, 10 miles wide, 40 long, the mountains of Jordan dimly visible on the other side.

Realizing that these spas are going to involve getting in the water, and remembering being at the Great Salt Lake in Utah – almost the same thing, but not quite as salty – and remembering walking in half a mile to get up to my waist, getting bitten by sand flies… well, we took a good long look. There were also hot mud treatments. But after ecstasy wears off in the desert it’s almost the same sensation, except you can’t pull yourself out, so that would have been redundant. Now what, I wondered. I looked at the map.

“Hey man, Masada is just south of here.”

“What’s Masada?”

My knowledge of the place came mostly from an NBC miniseries the Israelis put out with Peter O’Toole in it, must have been around 1978 for the 30^th anniversary of Israel. It told the story of the Jews rebelling against Rome, around 70 AD. They took over this impregnable cliff top fortress, built originally by none other than Biblical supervillain Herod. They did this by walking in while the gate was open and killing everyone – this would have been like the Millennium Falcon sneaking into the Death Star and taking over – you can’t make this shit up.

The Jews launched a rebellion, and took the country back from the Roman puppet government. Freedom lasted about as long as it took for the legions to hop on a trireme. Then the Romans came back in force, landing at Caesarea, and drove the Jews back here. The remains of this war are all over Israel, and they are the reason that Jerusalem itself is so transformed from its ancient layout. The Romans leveled the Jewish temple, which is what the Wailing Wall comes from, and put in a new street plan and a set of temples to their gods.

Their final stand was back where they’d started, at Masada. 1000 men, women and children on top of the cliff for three years. The Romans used slaves to build a ramp up the side – an earth ramp 4000 feet tall, so they could bring up siege machines. When everything looked hopeless, their leader, a man who had lead the divinely inspired rebellion, asked God for guidance. The advice from the Lord was this - they chose “10 strong men” who cut everyone’s throats, torched the place, and then killed themselves – one strong man of the 10 killing the other 9 and then committing Hebrew sepukku himself. That’ll show ‘em.

“So it’s kinda like Israel’s Alamo, eh?”

“More like Waco,” I said as we drove into the parking lot, “but let’s not mention that.” The end of the miniseries was some Israeli general explaining, to an Iwo Jima–esque raising of the Israeli flag over the ruins, why the Israelis could never let their guard down or for that matter ever consider giving the West Bank back.

Two days later, I picked up a copy of the Economist – an English news magazine, and it had the cover story – and I am not making this up - “Masada or Waco?” I laughed. Here I was thinking I was just a cynical wiseass, but it turns out that indeed the people who took over Masada were not even the Zealots (as if that name wasn’t bad enough) but a far more psycho group called the Sciarii, who killed more of their fellow Jews than Romans. So it really was Waco. Matt asked me if I’d seen it before we went, and I said no, just the parallel was pretty obvious. The Economist had written the story because the 50^th anniversary was two weeks away, and it was about the identity crisis that Israel was going through. The story was about Israeli historians protesting this view of the history of the place, and after digging around to prove that the people there were freedom fighters, not religious fanatics, ended up finding out that the group that made it’s last stand at Masada was actually a cult that was more famous for assassinating other Jewish groups than for attacking the Romans.

We took a cable car up to the top. There were other tourists there. There were also several classes of kids, about third or fourth grade, learning about what it meant to be Israeli. Get them indoctrinated young - God wants you to go to Lebanon.

We wandered around the ruins for a bit in the heat, dehydrated and dazed. The place is truly impregnable – sheer cliffs on all sides, and before the cable car was built the only way to get up was a stepped path called the Serpent Road which winds back and forth across the side that faces the Dead Sea, with loose rocks everywhere that can easily be turned into a landslide. On top was a complete Roman town, with tremendous cisterns, one of them which we went into was at least 100 feet tall x 200 x 70 feet. This was how they managed to make it a few years. Matt and I crawled around the cliff edges, took in the baths and the old palace. Every now and then we heard the warning about the final cable car being at 4:30. Around 4:20, we said “screw it, we’ll walk down.” So at 5:30, we started down the Serpent Road.

Halfway down I got the sooper-genius idea to kick a rock over the edge of the road, which set off a small landslide across three or four switchbacks of the road we were on, making me very happy that we were among the last to leave and there was no one below us. Upon reaching the bottom, we saw something in the distance – a vision, a mirage – a concession stand, with a small cloud of flies. The reason for the bugs was the guy behind the counter was fresh squeezing orange juice, and dumping the orange rinds in an open barrel. But we were happy to have it. It was then we realized that the man behind the counter was Arab, and probably Palestinian.

We piled into the car, and headed out of the gate. On our way out, we stopped to pick up some hitchhikers. Very altruistic of us, right? They hopped in the back, an English guy and a Dutch girl (who made it really clear that she was not from Amsterdam, but Utrecht.) The English guy said “You two must have thought we were some kind of desert hallucination.”

Matt and I looked at each other and burst out laughing.