S C E N E (XXXIX) 

TEL AVIV, STATE OF ISRAEL, -2001 ce-  

***  

The country is physically small, but you can unleash yourself into all kinds of misadventure and ambush upon your senses; like a pin ball machine rigged to God. By bus the entire nation is eight hours tall or two hours wide; the Gaza Strip, sealed behind high walls and mine fields is 5x the size of the Isle of Mann. With under 2 million Palestinians living there it is also the most densely populated place on earth. 

I was about ready to take to the roads and to the townships on my mission in the last week of July. 6,000 of our postcard-sized flyers were stacked up in boxes in the back room of The Deep labeled ‘New Years 2012 Party’. Avinadav had a cousin who was now apparently hip to these happenings. I got nods of approval from lots of young Black Israelites I didn’t know. They might not have known the score, but they knew the big man ‘Andrew’ and I were up to something. I was always around the club, but never drinking, never dancing, not really laying down game. I went over plans and notes and made suggestions about operations. The general staff of the little Cabinet soon included his cousin Dizrael ‘Dizzy’ as “Communications Minister”, the Jamaican Claude as “Education Minister” and Svetlana the Russian debutante, ‘can’t stand being from Russia’ as a financier. Svetlana had only been convinced by Maya because she wasn’t very fond of Blacks and looked at me like I was sort of a loud, radical younger sibling. But one night over drinks Maya convinced her to crack the trust fund if she was convinced nothing violent was going on. Svetlana had paid for all the ‘New Years’ flyers.    

I was working as a day laborer unloading furniture and textiles from Southeast Asia toiling to raise money for a cell phone, a ‘decent’ hot weather suit and a black-market handgun. I toiled in a warehouse near Hertzolia Petoach. I made some sub-slavish wage to haul and sort tons of cheap imports with a handful of Arab workers. Ditri came along with me. We walked away each day with close to 400 sheks. 100 American for ten hours of work wasn’t so bad. I got a lot of odd slave work out of the Mughrabi Hostel. I’d post up in the lobby around 6 am and guys would come to collect workers for menial one-day labor jobs usually paying about 400 shekels for the day. It was more lucrative than art selling, especially on a weekday. It wasn’t always hauling. Sometimes it was scrubbing stoves or repainting housing projects or odd gardening job. I scrubbed shit and vomit out of the party hall bathrooms after the party went on too long. I was doing thankless horrible work that wouldn’t put money in the bank but could feed me and get me a few nicer things for my time here. I had become a Mexican wetback, but a Pancho Villa kind of fucking Mexican. I had become what I was supposed to be.  

I bought a tough black and grey messenger bag for the road, a black leather planner, a white linen suit, and a grey poncho from a Georgian retail store in the Florentine neighborhood.   

I was always meeting new people. I needed new ears for yarns and new women for carnal company. I also needed new friends and new brothers and new parents. I adopted older brothers because I don’t have one. Sometimes someone saw something in me they had to save. Like I’ve lost my way and shouldn’t be selling pictures in foreign boulevards. Normally this took the form of either an older woman or a homosexual.  The homos invited me for sleepovers, but they liked feeding me too, while giving me advice. Gay Avi wants me to be an event planner and the English girls from Golder’s Green tell me to get married and move to Jerusalem to train as a rabbi. The correlation of the two is beyond me.  

I guess Brent Avery wants to save me from the ghetto because he is in Israel converting young boys to Christianity. It was not pervy if it came across like that. Brent was not just saving souls for Evangelical Bible-belters. It was more interesting and subversive than that.  

The night I met him I was hooting and hammering, trying to find people to recruit for the Organization. This group of faggy white dudes comes up to me and asks me about a picture with a guy in a beret crucified with a red hammer and sickle tattoo on his bicep. I tell them Jesus was a communist. They were having one of those very Christian conversations with me full of polite contempt and always ready to drop a fucking gospel passage. But I am trained to play that game and the whole thing soon turned into a communist versus Christian debate as a crowd gathered. It was like this was Hyde Park Speaker’s Corner on the Mediterranean.  

There were five of them. I know one was named Paul, and one was named Che, who I asked if he was an Argentinean. He didn’t get it. There were two other White boys not really talking and a chaperone. The chaperone was named Brent Avery. He listened more than he talked. I argued with his minions for an hour. I know the gospel well from being locked up in the Family School. But our debate was for the spectators, not each other.  At 1 am this client Brent Avery bought me some pizza at Abulafiah and we didn’t talk about religion, but about “what I was doing in Israel?” 

“Making people pictures and reckless adventurism as it arises,” I tell him. “With a bit of drinking and a lot of smoking.”  

For a preacher he wasn’t all that preachy. He didn’t have that annoying habit of putting each segment of the conversation in the context of his creed’s texts. I think he didn’t even drop the name of the J-man. He asked simple questions attempting to elicit God-only-knows-what. He let me talk a great deal about communism. He had me go into detail about tons of things I hadn’t thought out so well. The phrases didn’t seem to alarm him. I’d say ‘death to bourgeoisie scum and their spies’ and he’d just scratch his beard neither judgmentally nor in any way in agreement. It was like two wild alien creatures asking small questions as if they had never been around each other’s kind before. 

To him I was a sort of hardened city-boy radical or just some lost street urchin with a Biblical moniker. He was a shit-kicker preaching gospel talk in the wrong fucking country as far I was concerned. I rambled about class war hoping to jostle him, but the guy just went on asking questions letting me smoke my face off. Over a couple hours at a café, I told him about the Family School, about my lengthy perditions, about exile in London and the struggle unfolding in Tel Aviv. He had this very good sense of punctuation. He knew when he should hold his tongue. He knew I would get up and leave if he started his fucking sentence with, ‘In the second book of Timothy.’  

When it was all said and done and my long political diatribe expounded, I didn’t feel like I had said anything at all. He had let me go on all night with this tale of tragic misadventure.  As dawn brakes, I felt my confidence begin to run dry. As the mission yarn wore thinner, I saw for the first time the great, great error I had made. He didn’t need to do anything but let me talk to expose myself.  

In that moment I had a realization! There had been no reconciliation between my warring parts. I had in no way reconciled whether I could complete this mission without the very intervention of a G-d. I had an even harder time accepting the use of miracles in a class war. I had the hardest time still believing, as it seemed Avinadav did, that I was some mouthpiece for the dreams of epic, divine things to come. The fat man named Brent Avery was remarkably good in his mission because of his commitment to patient tenacity. He, the expert recruiter that he was, was not concerned with the quantity of converts but only with the perfect training of more recruiters. If he saw in me a potential convert, a lost soul, a broken sinner, he did not reveal this. As the sun rose, he said simply: “Your eyes betray you, son. You are not convinced you will win.”    

“What then would you have me do? Pray for more answers?” 

“It would be in your interest to consult your maker as He will provide the necessary covenant for this battle, your intent on waging. The things you speak of calmly, many men and women have been slaughtered to avoid the coming of. It is time, Zachariah, to find your G-d in the wilderness.” 

After breakfast we went to a bookstore. My head is spinning in the way it does when I do not sleep. Before he leaves me to do the things I am now too aware that I must do, he buys me a hardcover book that it was high time I read. There are many books in one divided between two traditions. I purchased another book to take with me to make sure I had the whole wild trilogy, the bloody three book set; at the ever ready.