The Brooklyn labor ghetto at night smells like rum smoked chicken, like muscle cars and also like marijuana and or just a rotting refuse; the aura blown up into the heavens by the heating exhaust steams.
ADONAEV
On my 32nd birthday, everyone assumes I will soon die in the Syrian Civil War. So, my birthday is actually very well attended and unfolds with lots of cocaine, alcohol, and dancing over four venues well into the next day’s dawn. Everyone toasts to everything! Often to me! Often to whatever they warble! I wake up with Martina in Harlem.
It was by far the single largest birthday I have ever had and seems as though I had many friends and allies. But a year later, if I survived the war, none of these people would care or be around when needed. They had lives occupied with varying struggles that left no room for human solidarity. These friends are always there to drink my food and eat my wine, to hear about adventures but not really ever get involved for the most part. Having no real culture of my own, at some point I adopted elements of Trinidadian and Russian cultures, both which place tremendous value and veneration on the birthday ritual. I would even go so far to say that West Indians and Post Soviets treat the birthday as a sort of celebratory holiday, trumped only by weddings, funerals and for Trinidadian Carnivals. I had this feeling on my 33rd birthday, that very few people knew or cared if I was alive inside. Did not know how to react to my intention to head off to Syria. I had the feeling for my family any day in January could do, and that preparing a meal like any other meal, with a cake, was adequate. Now, were I a homeless drug addict, or a person of exceptionally low social and moral character, perhaps I should feel tremendous gratitude that I have a family, that I am being given some food and also a cake. I am a very ungrateful wretched person. However, my birthday is on the 30th not the 23rd, and to me it is offensive and borderline insulting that my family would sort of ambush me with a birthday eight days early largely based on my brother’s flight plans. Because that is exactly what happened, it was a Potemkin birthday for the sake of my brother who I had not seen in 2 years. As for most others, without social media I’m sure few really knew when it was. And so with the world’s smallest violin in my hand I undertook to spend it completely alone, or partially alone since both Alan and Martina had discovered it and in their own ways cultures and obligations understood the importance of a birthday ritual. Without any real plan the guest list ballooned to over fifty people. None of which approved of my upcoming travel plans. Martina was the first person to ever publish my writing, while perhaps a poem or short story or two had appeared in varying poorly circulated underground presses, this was not any more auspicious, but I was certainly more widely read. Martina is a Bulgarian journalist and real estate agent now. I see her once a year. There was nothing going on here except sympathy. Just before I drove back to my Brooklyn safe house at 5 am dawn, I was doing some coke off her inner leg.
Sometimes late at night from a safe house in the borough of Brooklyn Sebastian Adonaev will read from one of his manuscripts and post it to the internet, for whoever might be listening. Really no one was listening, maybe Polina, depending on what time of night. These were futile, desperate calls for attention. For validation. For reaction. Since, in the United States the cause of anti-capitalism was for the most part soundly defeated many decades in the past. The man had some relative sympathy, but not exactly a sympathizer base which he might have cultivated more effectively over the years. Which might have resulted in a short little burst of terrorism, truncated of course by the all-pervasive American security state. What held him back were all the repeated hospitalizations, which came nearly every year. Invalidating his mind and probably also his message. This never seemed to deviate from a meme of communism and human rights, but by the age of 33, he had only a few people willing to listen to even just 1 minute of his message. His few friends left take him in small smei-annual doses.
Sebastian Adonaev reads:
“Sometimes, old friend, I cry from my own weakness.” I bash my Jew face against various mirrors around town angered by my own lack of force, lack of seed, and lack of ability to carry my band more truly into glorious and successful battle. I beat my frail fists on concrete walls which always win! I ask my God why it entrusted me with anything at all. For I am so small and so unable it seems to be a good fighter, an adequate lover, or a good leader, or a good son, or a good husband to Adelina, a good much of anything. I started the game with such a strong position but have not leveraged that to advance my people and cause, even protect those I loved the most!
Then I remember my actual role, not the role my mad ego ascribes. I am but one single partial partisan. One isolated man with such true friends.
I am commanding, a funny word “commanding”, more appropriate term coordinating for can one even give orders to a volunteer? A force that numbers at any given time no more than ten to maybe twenty women and men. And no God nor man nor foreign government gave us marching orders; well at times a Russian woman gave me some directions, but only when at most desperate and bleak junctures, I had no counsel to turn to. But I brought almost all this chaos upon my house unaided! But this is hardly a wide conspiracy. But looking into my own soul I am not doing this for God or man, I am not simply avenging my losses, nor am I simply working off a duty to act. No, no; I am self-propelled and highly lucky. I am doing this because my eyes see fire. I am doing this because I have seen the view from the top of the Mountain, I have seen the killing fields too.
“I have a great empathy with my kind. I wish good to triumph over callous and well-planned evil!”
And the responsibilities that impressed me by the old leadership, they were small bits. And I say to myself that if our little band with no weapons and no training and no funding and the protection provided us only by our passports and various skin tones could do so much! Still, we did accomplish a range of small things in the Americas and beyond. We took over buildings, organized demonstrations, built unions, and operated a substantial underground press. If we could build youth brigades and lay cells across four continents; if we could operate clandestine supply chains, raise tens of thousands in equipment and supplies, conduct hundreds of underground political trainings, infiltrate major city civil service organizations, if we could smuggle activists and trainers into distant countries uninvited and opposed by the government. If we could do all of this with no outside support and do it with keeping all our partisans out of long-term prison and have only buried three men in seventeen years of war under questionable circumstances. Well perhaps we are all still young and the war shows no sign of being over. Perhaps we have a small latent talent for freedom fighting and if not killed or imprisoned could with a little guidance grow more professional.
And we have not killed one single person in seventeen years, in fact we have with our own hands saved the lives of thousands and counting.
“I’ve always said he has a fucking ton of potential! For good, for self or for evil, wherever his own heart sends him,” Goldy once declared.
So, really as was explained to me then in 2012 before the uprising in Brooklyn by my confidant Goldy Andreavna; I could either surrender, collaborate or be utterly destroyed. But as she gauged my nature was highly American, she guessed correctly I would never tolerate a life of collaboration, so thus death or some impossible victory were the only moves coming.
“I have been imprisoned twenty times.” My brothers and sisters have never allowed them to take me for long. Each time they have chained me to beds, administered electricity, loaded me with drugs, asked millions of stupid questions to attempt to make me alter my perspective, denounce my own logic. I have observed members of the band lose their very homes and their livelihoods and their freedom and their health. I have seen men thrown through Plexiglas glass windows. We have been held in cages and tortured. The deaths of Mcgaffey, Becker and Black were all sudden, violent, and unexplained. I remember little Paul behind bars, I remember harassment and humiliation of Comrade Vik, I remember how much was sacrificed vainly in the name of this struggle. This struggle which absorbs my beingness as though it were the love of a woman, but I am a zealot. I am not good at anything but this. I am in love with my entire people and I have resolved that it would be better to be killed, to lose my privileges of skin and class, than to live in a world where a tiny vile few make the lives of the many, the lives of all I know and love a wretched grinding torture. Truly a half-life.
“I cry sometimes, no longer in the presence of any others.” Goldy mocked me so each time I failed to be a man. I cry because the horror is so vast and the injustice so great. And I have but ten to twenty partisans, several with wives and children. I worry that I am not going to be able to shoulder this struggle, that I lead my closest to sedition and doom. I worry I do not have the moral fortitude, the calm patience of humble leadership, the organizational skills, the funds we will need, the weapons, the uniforms, the petrol, the Planes, the will. For I am a man, and I am seduced sometimes by wanting a good life, wanting to walk away. This is not your fight, she said, “no one asked you to struggle!”!
“Friends, they torture me once a year.” They tell me I have an unstable mind. They drag me away repeatedly. I am grateful for such friends as you, who refuse to accept surrender. Who knows that we can win the war! I wanted to tell you all, see what we do with just ten women and men. You have that many fighters too. Here we all are at the top of the mountain, assembled in the ghettos encircling the Isle of Man.
“I loved her so much. Maybe only one or two of you know what I am talking about. They took from me the only thing a man should care about.”
“I’m thankful for the resistance.” I am thankful for our little Otriad in Brooklyn. For the cells in Chicago, Philly, Baltimore, and DC. The underground in Moldova, Cambodia, Haiti and occupied Israel. I am grateful to Commander Saint Reed in Mosul, and Commander Bonhomie in Port Au Prince. Inspired deeply by the teachings of Solomon and DeBuitléirs. I love my family and my wife; I hope this is the year we go pro. She is a million miles away, but she can hear me. She can see me. She liked me better before I found Communism, liked me better before I rediscovered my religion. She even liked my used suits better than the battered blue uniform I wear now.
I raise glass to the East, for somewhere out there I hope she is waiting for me, waiting for us to win. I raise my glass, I look my men and women in the eyes when I toast, Long live the resistance, God protect the bloodline of the prophets and the Meshiaak84and the Mahdi. God keeps us moving along the straight path, not the path of those who are cowards, or those who have been lost and led astray.”
For those of you who are joining us from home, for those listening from the trenches, from the fields or from the big house, or as servants in the towers.
A trucker with a heart of gold clings to his worst memories to not fully lose his mind in pity and drink. He is paid to move some cargo from point A to point B, but it is a lonely and meaningless life. As though he is working to pay for moving himself as meaningless cargo.
HEVAL JILO
“Shipping out from Boston any day now,” I tell myself. I tell myself the pain will be over soon. I tell myself I’m just an ordinary New England Joe. You can call me Micky because it’s my born name.
I have a pretty gruff face. A New England working class disposition. I think it made a lot of the younger volunteers think I had some kind of training I didn’t have. Just a little bit of running and my knees would start to hurt. But they all ask me if I was in the military, even though I never ever was. Very few of the YPG volunteers have any useful training, besides from the leftists. They are self-trained to see things, imagine things that are probably not even there.
On my chest I am wearing a picture of my ex-girlfriend, about the size of a baseball card. That’s perfectly normal, right? But more on that later down the line.
I watched it on the news for several years before the cumulative effect took over me. By the time I was being struck by Turkish air force and artillery vollies, running through trenches and tunnels in Afrin Canton, called by the Hevals as Jilo Boston, well I used to drive a UPS truck. That was all the training for this I had. After that I installed solar panels. I had no other serious qualifications that made me ready for the war. Even a bit of light running makes my knees hurt.
Explains Heval Jilo from Boston: “I mean it’s really Mikey Mike or Michael, but they named me Heval Jilo from Boston.”
Now, strangely it seemed that in the Academy Hevals Zinar and Jansher, the two principal instructors and commanders of Western internationalists ended up sending people with no ideology to occupy Raqqa and those they somewhat ideologically trusted to fight in still raging battles near Deir Ez-Zor. But that wasn’t a hard fast rule.
They liked, but didn’t seem to trust me, well any of us. Some of the leftists like Kawa and Shoresh tried to buddy up to Cancer. Some of the military guys like Heval Ciya tried to buddy up to Zinar, but really, they didn’t seem to have favorites. We all looked good on our martyr posters and in death could bring the Kurdish cause to the front pages of our national papers.
I’m cynical about Zinar and Cancer, they were of course there just to figure out how to use us effectively as so-called ‘revolutionary militants.’ Most of the Academy, which lasted about six weeks, was all rhetoric and talk. I might have fired my AK, maybe 15 rounds worth. I held up well I think given my age! I hadn’t intended to join the Y.P.G. in the beginning, I tried to enlist in Sinjar first with the Y.B.S.83, but they had put a freeze on international volunteers for whatever reason. Eventually the P.K.K. smuggled me, a loud British Gypsy and a French aristocrat lawyer from Makumr Camps into Syria.
Around my neck is a picture of my ex-girlfriend. I’m sure it sends a more portrait of my mental health to the few who see it, but I don’t have to explain shit to anyone. I don’t want to say anymore, so I won’t. My name is to be Jilo Boston, or that’s what they plan to call me in Kurdistan. I enlisted via proton mail in a formation called the Y.B.S. and received permission to make the crossing.
I don’t have any formal military experience, though some people ask me about it, say I have that look. I’ve been watching the Islamic State terrorize the world on TV for about three years. After a while, I just came to accept that I would go be a part of it. Contribute in my little way. As several hundred had done before me and probably will do after.
My last job was to install solar panels on rooftops. My previous job before that was as a UPS truck driver. It is obvious I was lonely and felt that doing something heroic, even if I got killed, was tangible and important. I was supposed to fly to Slemani and then get smuggled over to the Shengal. The YBS were at that time fighting in Raqqa city. I had to close out my life part by part. There was no fear in my body, only excitement. No longer would I be an observer. This was going to be the highest stakes thing I ever did; I could only fantasize that someone would tell the woman on my chest I fell fighting heroically.
I can’t say that was all the motivation or even half. I cared of course that she knew about my contributions, should I end up making them. What did I feel like? Like shit. Like I did not have such an interesting or amazing life and that if I did this with honor, died or not I’d have some kind of redemption. What to say more? I do not know if I am not the one drafting this book. I will just say that I want my ex to be proud of me for what I tried to do, even if it was just to get blown up being somewhere I shouldn’t be in the Middle East. In the desperate trenches of Afrin, he would be known by my Kurdish name Jilo Boston. Man, we barely got out alive. I look back at it sometimes and I get this sad empty feeling like all these fucking people gave their lives for absolutely nothing. Because in the end, we did not really defeat I.S.I.S., we didn’t replace Assad, we did not stabilize Iraq or the oil, we did not curb Türkiye, we did not build so-called democracy, and everyone got killed for almost nothing.
They say the first stage of constructing a believable fictitious identity is to focus on one banal old job, knowing its most minute components inside out. Have one sad story, your sort of guarded reason to be and one good reason to not talk a lot. Primarily, do not tell stories about places you have never been to.
At the “House of Yes” pansexual Cabaret on a New Years Eve there is glitter fucking everywhere.
In an underground afterhours party, there is a young Peruvian girl with great big tits and a tramp stamp dancing on my face. Happy new year to me. Or to somebody with a better-looking life. Sure, better than any house of no! We ended up getting a room at the Standard Hotel. I fuck her as hard as I can for as long as I can, for as long as she will let me.
SEBASITAN ADONAEV
“NEWYORKGRAD- the “city that never sleeps”/ the Big Apple. What a city? What makes it such a hot commodity to be here? It can get as flashy, as artsy, as chic, or as truly ghetto, working-poor miserable as you want, or you let it. You can get anything here, they say. It can all be bought, sold, found, or obtained somewhere in all five boroughs of the ity for a price. And you and your sanity is the motherfucking price.
“IF YOU CAN’T MAKE IT HERE YOU CAN HOPEFULLY MAKE IT SOMEWHERE ELSE!”
“But nothing is ever real, or real enough for someone allegedly from here. It is a gathering point for people who have abandoned their old people. It’s a petting zoo for an Empire filled with hookers and administered by the cream of the Jews.”
Sebastian Adonaev “the paramedic adventurer,” watches over the Brooklyn Ghetto at night. Smoking a Newport from the rooftop. Recording his angry thoughts in a leather-bound journal. As is typical in my own fashion, I worked on a holiday that to me is a pagan aberration. Clearly, 2017 is not the actual year. Not at all. In the “Russian culture” which I have in some form absorbed into my own amalgamated creed, what you do and who you surround yourself on New Years Eve, is a sample of the year to come. This is like many Russian idioms, up “variable interpretation”. Variance in interpretation. The good old “cultural context.” Especially as Old Russian New Year is probably a couple weeks away, still in the future.
ADONAEV
I am playing a civilian and a transport paramedic in the age of near constant war. A serf, just a working class serf with no proerty, in the latest version of New-New-York-Fucking-City. Or NEWYORKGRAD; depends on if you know about “the occupation” or not. It depends on what papers you subscribe to. It depends on what languages you speak and what reality you sign up for.
My comrade Danny Hertz has a crazy looking hippy beard.
He throws me some nightlife work over the years. He offers me $250 for a 10-hour gig at the “House of Yes,” the artsy hipster performing arts multi-space. So, I take it, just like I did in 2016. The shortlist of the New Years variables. I came off from my real ambulance job. I slept 6 hours and had dinner with my aging parents. I took a cab to the House Of Yes. I made some new single-serving work friends. As usual got on well with security and took care of two intoxicated women, both who invited me into the cab I placed them in. Then a guy went briefly unconscious, I induced vomiting and cleaned him up, leaving him with the doctor’s friends. When the ball finally dropped, my two ambulance partners, Alisha and Jose, wished me well. lia the lawyer invited me for coffee in the New Year. Polina Mazaeva left me a voicemail. No one tried to kiss me. But that was way after midnight. And of course, I had a long conversation about not a lot with a gangster from East New York named Cyrus. I ran into my old volunteer and ffriend Jon Denby, who fought with us in Haiti, and eventually, Danny Hetz came at 9am to relieve me, as the party was to carry on until 6pm.
There is this Peruvian Italian chick who keep buying me drinks and making out with me. With enormous breasts, dancing near me, while I made sure the intoxicated people sleeping were dead. And I felt a kind of savage carnal lust, very different from that which I felt in a while. And I saw her look at me a,nd I knew she’d let me draw her something, but I didn’t do or say shit. And not new years or sleep deprivation or run changes all that. And the bartender offered me a drink, but I don’t let batti-man I don’t know give me drinks, no, it didn’t matter he was gay. I just didn’t really need or want a drink. Smoked some cigarettes, ate a complimentary egg and cheese. Texted Polina happy New Years and took the train home not an Uber. Like a worker. Because fundamentally, I have been a hard worker for a while. And fundamentally, I like trains. But not as much as I like to fuck that Italian with big tits like a savage.
I feel like 2016 was a year of incredible unmitigated defeat, near death and only partial recovery. So that would mean 2017 has the potential to be-anything. Since Russian idioms are about mind games and superstition, not about fate or destiny. But no matter how much I would like to say I’ve developed some real self-interest. It may be a year to stack cash and stabilize what’s left of sympathetic base and fee friends. A part of me wants to blow coke off her tits and ravish her in a way that my girlfriend can’t manage. The reality is that I must maintain my honor and my courage, my course. It is my destiny to be a guerrilla, not a reckless debauch. Not a scoundrel. Not a normal serf. I will use my time this year to be healthy enough to resume the fight, when I am ready to sustain it.
***
A few weeks before Sebastian Adonaev left New York for Cuba, then Russia, then Turkey, then Iraq for Rojava he gave a firebrand speech in front of nearly 40,000 people sometime in early April on Time Square at a large liberal solidarity pageant called “TODAY WE ARE ALL MUSLIMS”. His speech was just a 5-minute radical little foot note in an overall group hug of liberalism. Under five minutes in duration, its message to remember how all immigrants were treated when they arrived here was coupled with an extollation for the resistance to defend Muslim lives in America. This ‘resistance’ that the spoke of us was nebulous here in the U.S.A. Mostly it amounted to loud anti-Trump pageants. Freedom of speech is, almost, still without any limits.
He imagined while speaking that his on again off again, sometimes hot mostly cold muse, a debutante of Midtown, Russian courtesan ex-flame Goldy was watching it from the crowd, but that was improbable that she was. The speech called for the defense of Muslims amid the international genocide being perpetrated against them. It called on immigrants and descendants of immigrants to mount collective defense. My family came to watch, it was the very last thing they were ever proud of. Better to say it so others can do it, it seemed to be the family ethic.
His kid cousin Alexis came to watch him speak. She was into it, but also a bit chicken shit and American mentally at the end of the day. Also, something of a hipster. Not a bad kid, just high levels of probably not gonna make it in New York. But maybe she could still make it somewhere else? Eventually later when the art didn’t pay the bills, she turned to sex work.
After a fancy dinner, which was once a week normal for his upper middle class household, lots of bottles of white wine later; perhaps three, still in the dark blue rebel uniform of a G.C.C. a “staff medical officer”, he headed off to the fancy night club Le Bain on the roof of the Standard Hotel with Benny, his younger brother, Benny’s fiancé Nessa-Vanessa and little hipster cousin Alexis. They all rediscover old friend uncle Vodka, they all get fucking lit. In the glamour and chaos of the night, Sebastian Adonaev is to meet his future lawyer. Buxom and brilliant Ms. Chanie Chanel Rossi. His future lawyer.
Remembers Sebastian,
Out of my left eyes I saw an extremely attractive blonde in big glasses looking elegant and upper class but well intentioned. I saw her surrounded by tall dark and handsome men, wondering if she was an escort. Wondered what she charged. You see I’m not about that life because I can’t afford it sure, but not about that life because it’s so fucking degrading to all the women walking it. The woman who introduced herself as Chanel was happy and pleasant and gave me an email address and number to send her some of my work. My paintings.
It was all very businesslike, like a transaction. But she was filled with good happy energy, and I was about to fly off and possibly die for this cause! If necessary. Not ideally. Ideally, I’d come back and get the girl. Like in an American movie.
Remembers Chanel:
I think he wants to put me on my back for a very long time. I think I would be open-minded to it, except that I do truly love my boyfriend Mr. Charlie. So therefore, it actually barely doesn’t cross my mind. Charlie and I are made for each other, which is why I must be so careful with this older man writing to me. But if his cock was between my legs, even if Charlie finds a single letter; then I get off my master plan, which is Harvard and Law and a perfect husband. Charlie is actually nearly perfect, and we’ve been together seven years.
It’s safe to say I find Sebastian Adonaev more than a little attractive. And that has to do with what he is, a paramedic, and what he says he will do which is much more than regular people. Which is to say volunteer in Syria. Sebastian recounts:
If I told you that I was not hoping to have a lot of sex with this buxom stylish young woman, I would be a great big fucking liar. But it was all highly innocent talk. She admired my work and my lifestyle, and I admired her convictions. Her words you could say had pure and undiminished optimism.
Her body, I could spend days on, in one or many settings. But the opportunity would never present itself. In my culture you can marry women half your age plus seven, but it was not about that. She had a man. That never came to be an option for us as lovers, as she was very devoted to her boyfriend Mr. Charlie, a bit of a possessive psychopath if you ask me. He would later find the innocent letters and flip out. I suppose he was right that I would go to bed with his girlfriend, anyone might, if given the opportunity. As the story goes, he just left her in an airport and turned around.
But they were always off and on for as long as she ever wrote to me about magic and positive energy and hopeful living. He got her pregnant and abandoned her. She had an abortion; he took her back. That was her miserable lot, Charlie. But Sebastian neither passed judgement nor respected things without rings on fingers.
I never got the opportunity because of her morals and of course logistics, I met her about two weeks before deployment. She was up in Harvard, and I was down in Brooklyn. But she made quite an impression, he notes:
Let’s talk about Chanel Chantal Rossi, shall we. She’s a blonde bourgeoisie from the Caribbean Island of St. Martin. I met her only briefly, perhaps under a minute in a fancy supper club in the city. It was just long enough for me to take her information and strike up a correspondence based on her hippy views and happy optimism. I made her a rather beautiful sketch; she mailed me a book called ‘Mindfulness on the Go’ and we wrote to each other periodically throughout the war. Actually, she never got any of my letters until about half a year after I returned because the Special Forces were running a really special pony express from the front to her apartment near Harvard in Boston. By that time her boyfriend Charlie had found the letters and didn’t think very well of them at all. Really in the end Ms. Chanie, without engaging in a single infidelity, unleashed an incredible insecurity and rage. But at that stage, there was only light magic and enchanted optimism. She was delighted with the painting. She mailed him some candles and a small book called Mindfulness on the Go.
To Comrade Sebastian Adonaev,
I apologize for not responding sooner. As you can imagine, I was quickly drowned in work once I got back. Your letter touched my soul in so many ways. First, your awareness and choice of words and how you articulate them together, are mesmerizing. You are a truly gifted artist with strong depth.
The journey you are about to embark on is one of great respect and inspiration. I know you will touch many lives, however slight, but most likely grand as you have done so far, and I am sure of that. Without knowing you in a material physical aspect (as in only speaking with you for a brief 30 seconds), you have already impacted my life, which I will never forget.
With that being said, I would love to be your pen pal and hear all about the moments you experience. I have so much respect for you, people like you are those who make a difference in our world for the greater good. Even if it is to put a smile on a stranger’s face.
Send me your address. We will be hand-writing letters to each other very soon.
Yours truly,
Chanel
+++
Dear Ms. Chanie,
Such is the hard work of studying law, and surely it will be daunting, but you will persevere. Your words are quite kind and make me feel quite appreciated. It is a very complex task ahead and it makes me glad you will allow such correspondence. Although after 12 April I will be abroad more a year or more and with often an unreliable postal system, we can alternate pen and email as you see fit, and of the letters you send to the address below can be pony expressed or scanned and sent. Any art I make out there, same route. Cuba and Russia will be short, wonderful extremes before I get into Iraq in late May and soon after North Syria; a place called Rojava.
I make drawings, and paintings, I make long rhyming poems and I’ve written some novels, but I suppose it just makes me incredibly happy to have a chance to put my mind before a stranger and see yours as you reveal it. As said, the idea of you was strange magic, but I long to know the actual you as well and make you the subject of my art. It will also be surely relieving to sometimes hear of Boston, and your woes of scholarship, and your loves and losses and all. I thrive on the attention of strangers and can only be well informed via their impartial critiques. But, as stated, you were fascinating to me.
Best wishes, Happy International Women’s Day! I look forward to our next exchange.
+++
Dearest Sebastian,
Words cannot describe the appreciation I feel. I’ve always felt as if I was maybe underestimated by my looks and at times may be overestimated in this judgmental society we live in. Everything is based on how you look and not what you offer as a human.
Yet,
You made me feel like although that does come into play, you made me feel much more than that with eyes beyond the physicality of objects of this world with your attention to detail. It is not the mere creation of technique, but what it intends to portray with the story it wants to tell.
I am so thankful to the universe for that day, in so many ways, and one being our casual, brief and meaningful kindle.
Funny story; my overprotective brother thought I was giving you my phone number & got a little mad. I explained to him and told him it was okay; he trusts my judgment. And to be honest… it was your old-school way of a notepad and pen that really played well with my instinct. I am an old soul too.
I love candles, how did you know? I cannot wait and look forward to hearing about your future endeavors. You will be receiving something from me by early next week :) Again, Thank you!
“Yulia is dead,” Kreminizer wrote to me. Michael Kreminzer had done more to train me as a paramedic than anyone else. A horrible feeling, feeling someone strong buckling, being in the shadow of their dark feelings.
“She and I never had that great art and writing collabo moment we always talked about.”
“And now you never will. She died on Tuesday.”
She was one of the very few that had ever read deeply into any of my books. Kreminizer was one of the men who trained me as a Paramedic. Now his woman was dead from a cancer.
I was in Al-Brooklyn, U.A.S. The heart of a party and the very soul of New-York-Grad; “the big apple”. The “city that never sleeps” or “slept and now sleeps no more”. In a clear and well-furnished safe house abutting the J-M-Z line. I never want to go above $800.00 for a room at a safe house. Okay, I’ll rephrase that. $800.00 is the cap my budget can allow such a room. I always pay cash; I never sign anything. I always put down one month in advance. The people I must live with are all just as shady as I am. In terms of a safe house, what you’re basically trying to establish is secrecy and staging. You can’t have anyone in the security apparatus know where it is of course, you need it to be hiding in plain sight.
“Don’t bring your lovers to the safe house. Bring them to a fucking hotel,” is what Brit the German lesbian comrade always tells me.
There are a ton of women in my life, but they all do different very things, chemically electrically speaking. Without them, I would perhaps not have as much supporting strength to carry my beleaguered little projects out into the world in the face of great risk, there would also not be as much love or hope in me. Or as Kurds like to say, “Motivation.”
Broadly, I could say there are women I fuck and who I don’t fuck, love and who I don’t feel that much at all, but there is a lot more to it than that distinction. Friends with benefits competing with lovers who are impossible to win, buttressed by ex-girlfriends who still want to help the cause. I learned about Jinology in Kurdistan, but I’m not sure if it all stuck.
The “Science of Women” (Jinology) cannot be taught in two days and much of what it has to say is just a radical take on feminism. For instance, that for every position of power should be co-chairs; a male and a female running the show together. Women are not special, or complicated. In many ways they are just the same as men. I like listening to them more though, I appreciate the near constant feminine presence in my life. I take their advice and also their leadership.
Jineology—derived from the Kurdish word “jin” meaning woman, and “logos” meaning science—is a revolutionary concept born from the Kurdish women’s movement and shaped by the imprisoned thinker Abdullah Öcalan. At its core, it holds that the liberation of society is impossible without the liberation of women. In fact, it goes further: it sees the systematic subjugation of women as the first and deepest form of oppression—one that laid the groundwork for class domination, ecological destruction, and authoritarian state power. To confront this foundational injustice, Jineology proposes not only a critique but a new science altogether—one that reclaims knowledge, identity, and power from the ruins of patriarchy. Unlike many Western feminist theories, which Jineology respects but often views as too individualistic or bound to liberalism, this science of women seeks a collective, historical, and grounded approach. It emerges from the lived experiences of Kurdish women resisting war, colonialism, and male domination. It is not an academic discourse but a lived practice. In the villages, in the mountains, in the war zones, women gather to study, reflect, and lead. They do not just read about history—they rewrite it. Jineology teaches that before kings and borders, there were matriarchal societies; before property and state, there was communal life centered around women, the life-givers and caretakers of the earth.
This knowledge, long buried under the weight of conquest and empire, is being unearthed and revived. Jineology looks to the ancient goddesses of Mesopotamia, to Neolithic communities, to myth and oral tradition. It challenges the idea that science must be male, mechanical, and detached. Instead, it offers a science rooted in ethics, ecology, and freedom. A science that sees not control, but relationship. In this view, every system—whether economic, political, or social—must be measured by how it treats women. The revolution begins with the dignity of the grandmother, the autonomy of the daughter, the choices of the mother.
In the liberated zones of Rojava in northeastern Syria, Jineology is more than theory. It is curriculum. Every woman fighter of the YPJ learns it. Every commune discusses it. In the “Mala Jin”—the women’s houses where community disputes are resolved and education is shared—Jineology is the heartbeat of decision-making. It teaches that power is to be shared, not hoarded. That every leadership role must be held by one man and one woman. That self-defense is not only against bullets, but against the domination of mind and spirit. In refugee camps, in front-line towns, in classrooms lit by solar panels and hope, this science becomes not an abstraction, but a way of life.
To those who take up arms or pens in its name, Jineology is both shield and song. It says that women are not just half the sky—they are the foundation beneath it. For internationalist volunteers like Anna Campbell, who left the safety of Britain to fight and die alongside Kurdish women in Afrin, Jineology was not only an idea—it was her compass. It answered the question of what it meant to be free. Not just free from tyranny, but free to reimagine everything: justice, history, love. A revolution led by women, not as tokens, but as origin, principle, and future.
They all want something different, though, but the same. And it’s all built on the foundation of friendship, like any healthy relationship. The way they pity me is different. Very few admire me, well they do but the pity instinct is a greater driver of their behavior. Or the way my work inspires them.
Goldy Andreavna is no longer answering my calls or returning my letters. She had had enough. It sure is cold. And the worst parts of me just want to die. Life is thankless, and I am aware that it is also very cruel to most of my human people. That all makes me want to fight, but I’m sure I’ll just make myself into a new statistic. The train rattles by on the above ground track next to the room I’m renting. It doesn’t sound like the ocean at all. It sounds like living in poverty next to plenty. I worked 80 hours this week. I still can’t manage to sleep.
“A hero or a hooligan, well that part’s never clear.” I would have them put that Mighty Mighty Bosstones lyric on my tombstone if I believed they would ever find my body or figure out how to make me die. I lean towards Hooligan in depicting myself, “lower your flighty expectations”. I will not live up to your expectations for me and my agency, me and my powers. I am an easily broken man running from capitalist modernity into dreams, poems and the world beyond American reach.
It was the icy cold night of Purim in the Hebrew year 5777. Super fucking Futuristic. The full moon was huge, and it was brick as shit, it was Friday, everyone was drunk. But that had nothing to do with their silly drunk festival called Purim. The coldness goes right through his sheets, through his comforter, the space heater doesn’t start up right away. It’s a fire trap in here with all the subdivided dry walls. But it’s brick, as the brothers say, no matter how many layers I put over him. That means harshly cold in the Ebony peasant vernacular. He knew that were I so inclined there would be multiple places to fete and masquerade tonight, but I was conserving my finances. Hoarding up my comfortable sleeps on his big Queen-sized mattress made in Brooklyn that he’d lashed now three times to the roof of my civic and trafficked about the borough. Moving rooms in safe houses. Working everyday towards my next operation. Nothing is given to you in the movement. You have to earn or take initiative. That can appear attractive to women, sometimes, for a bit. But he’s basically broke as well as broken.
The safe house isn’t so bad. It has high ceilings. The train is obnoxious, and the neighborhood used to be a war zone. It’s still dirty. There are still robberies every day. But the rent was a square $800, which was reasonable. Things were gentrifying here in the Bed Stuy-Bushwhack area. Still looked and felt like the ghetto Adonaev worked the 37 Bravo unit in. It still looked like the dark place Rahula died in.
That was our first “American Martyr”, shot himself twice in the head. But now there were white hipsters and cafes. It was a cute place except for a couple little things. Like the no drinking rule which annoyed me and the German intelligence officer slash painter greatly.
Her name was Brit Tully, and we did time together in the camps a few years back. She never admitted to being such, but this is what my associate Alan Medved told Adon, and he knew about such things. Brit was a metal worker, glass worker and an introvert. Her square job was retail in a fancy SoHo denim outlet. We co-habited the domicile, a medium spacious loft on the third floor of Broadway across from the J & M above ground rail line and, I can’t say any more precisely where; I can’t tell you; it’s a safe house. It was Brit Tully in the small middle room, with my room to the right and Handler Hicks to the left. A fucking nut. We had all these hippy rules none of us followed and we both kind of hated him, he was a shifty fuck.
The man who set up this little shop was none other than the infamous small-time publisher and writer Handler Hicks, who for a lesser intellectual was wild eyed.
And somewhat muscular and vigorous looking from being straight edge, being Zen and believing that “God is Good!” He is a total nut who fixates on 9/11 conspiracy theories and has all the tendencies of being a junky off junk. His little boy, when custody allowed as always there every other weekend, looked feeble. Looking malnourished and unhappy to be there, yet chipper. Handler is an endless passive aggressive pain in the ass, but Brit and Sebastian Adonaev need a house for a cash and paper trail, and you get what you pay for in this city.
The handler took me in when the safe house just before it got too hot. Right before I skipped town to Baltimore to get my assignment from the local committee. A safe house falls apart for two main reasons; too much traffic or drama among spies. This place Brooklyn is infested these days with whores, with criminal scum, with sedition and with spies. It’s a good staging area for working in the city with no papers.
Natasha Salzano, which was just her passport name was a cold cunt. Natalia Chicherova, which was her name in Russia, had fled almost overnight back to Russian Federation and left me and poor confused student Tanya Drozdova, basically squatting a lovely grand place on Eastern Parkway with the rent supposedly 8,000 plus dollars in arrears. I made off with a fancy mirror and my gear in almost the dead of night.
A couple things about a good safe house, it’s hard to find. And frankly the Russians have too many rules and idiosyncrasies. Like if you live with a woman and you keep leaving the seat up, or water on the floor after you shower; a good fucking or not fucking or two, some talk it out and you can be socialized. In a safe house, whoever is on the lease is the boss.
Natasha’s whole thing was always “touching her stuff” which was all over the place, but even a slight movement of the cutting board, or moving the walk in storage closet around; she’d flip. She was tall and bleached, she was stern. She claimed she had gotten a master’s in international communications, but who knew. She left Tanya and I with a flat where the rent hadn’t been paid in months, the landlord was threatening to evict us; and she took off back to Russia. There was Mongol in her, I could sense it, and she never smiled but the now defunct safe house on Church & Eastern Parkway was quite luxurious for my tastes. She had basically turned the entire living room into my room and with it came really, nice stuff which incrementally she sold, and the Mirror well I guess I stole. Her last words in an email were, “calm the fuck down you’re acting like a stupid fucking American! Everything’s gonna be fine!”
I didn’t pay her last month’s rent because Tanya said she’d just rob it and leave us high and dry anyway. But if one day I bump into her in Russian and she has a tough guy kill me over $735, well, that’s life. I’d kill someone over no less than 5,000 and depend on what they’d done to deserve it.
Comrade roommate-sublessor Handler Hicks had written and gotten published two books on 9/11 Truth and was maybe the figurehead of that rabble band of conspiracy theorists and anti-Semites. Anti-Zionists, excuse me. His first book was that the government did it, the second was that the Saudis were in on it too and after a recent trip to Iran, well his third book is about the Zionist angle, which I’m sure will go over great here and get rave reviews. I guess he didn’t get the memo that the best way to be hated in America by everyone was to keep talking about 911 conspiracy theories. I know for sure I read that memo in 2001. Moving on, it got so damn suddenly cold. It had been jeans and t-shirt weather in March. It had been the most limp, listless winter ever, or maybe I was still traumatized by the two-year winter of Boston and the Blizzard of 2010. I had invested in a long heavy Soviet grey coat, and layers of thermal underwear as well as an Ushanka. The big furry hat everyone knows and loves. Fucking around with the contents of my desk I find some letters from Adelina Blazenaya, a lover long gone. She called me some time a year ago on the road to Washington D.C.
And really, I never heard from her again. Like someone with a better, more giving dick inside her or maybe her conscience ordered her not speak with ever me. I have three love letters she wrote me and I carry them around in the black leather party envelope I was issued in Haiti. I try quite hard to break that silence of hers. To get friendship or something more or less than that. No dice ever. Legally speaking, I’ve left her 33% of this new shell company if I’m killed in the coming deployment.
I’m rambling about nothing useful. My existential first world concerns my laptop; I’m comparing gear I need to procure. Bags, boots, and devices. I’ll expropriate them with a fabricated credit card. About 2,000 worth of kit. Maybe I’ll even get a new laptop. If anyone manages to rob me on the road from Havana to Qamishli, well it would be a damn good haul.
Comrade Handler is out first every night. He sometimes reads in the living room; we wait it out in our rooms. Brit and I are almost pure night creatures. Once I was fired from my slave job about three weeks ago, I immediately reverted to my preferred biological clock. I’d been waking up at 445 am all summer and fall to drive to the ambulance base in the Rockaways. Now I’d wake up at 1 to 2pm and go to bed at 5am to 6am. I just like working at night, less witnesses? I’m sitting at the big, long wooden table Handler built. It’s shoddy work like the bunk beds he builds. He’s a carpenter by trade, like my man Jesus was. But he’s chicken shit. This safe house is ok. Even if we can’t drink here. I think Brit does heroin in her room or at the very least smokes dope on the roof, she’s great though. Never emotional and always objective, she’s going back to Berlin soon, her casework never comes up and isn’t polite conversation.
We were imprisoned in a detention facility in 2013. Now the year is 2016. She had handed me her email address on a green paper with a Walt Whitman quote, something about nothing. Well anyway many years later, like six months ago I found it and when Handler subdivided the loft into three rooms I social engineered her in, but she was my second choice. I’d really wanted to live with my friend Erin Moore who is dark humored and funny and can cook her ass off. But frankly Handler sketched her out too much. The subdivide room was also not such a steal ever for $600 USD, and maybe a little firetrap hazardous.
I plan to drug Handlers and burn him still alive in his home the night after I leave the states. That’s not because he gets under my skin. It’s because he is working for the Iranians and that’s what Brit and I were paid to do. Burn him alive. Weird fantasies of murder still pop in and out of my head from time to time, but I’m a medical man in the emergency Pre-hospital health field.
The thing about a safe house is that you don’t tell anyone where it is, you don’t have your name on it, you pay cash and don’t sign anything, and everyone in it is a superhero in their own mind. And you don’t pick up a blonde bimbo hipster in a bar and bring her back there to savagely fuck her in every hole in her body with a belt around her neck. How do I say that again, the people living in a safe house are shady fucking gypsies? The people living in safe houses, like me, have something to perhaps hide? Or for people just too unstable in credit and finances to sign a lease. It could be a few factors.
Brit is supposedly “German intelligence”. Handler is a well-known brilliant crack pot being paid by the Iranians to enlarge the American propaganda base of Press TV. Also, the undisputed leader of a 16-year effort to uncover 9/11 Truth. Most things seemed to tick back to that. His father is a famous IMF economist. He single handedly helped push an unauthorized biography on George W. Bush to market via his printing house, and then that man “killed himself” and that seemed to weigh on Handler, and behind the hippy Zen retreats, the walls of books that he had in fact read, he was always reading, or pretending to be reading behind the chirpy banter was a killer. An Iranian propaganda asset. And I was going to dope him up with benzo sedatives and literally cook him alive.
I say that still having shared Rosh Hashanah with him, that means Hebrew New Years; and we cooked for each other the cuisine of vegetarian poverty goulash, and yes once he threatened to throw me out, and yes like Natasha he was a total tyrant, but I played several times with his dorky little scientist son, the fucker was so precocious. I don’t mean to talk so much shit; I’m working on it. I’m in shit talking recovery!
I am not a great person all of the time. I fucked that little hipster like a Ukrainian by the hour. Her face to the wooden floor and my cock up her ass. For something a lot like rape, she took it seven or eight times before I murdered Handlers and jumped country after Passover. Though those acts were perhaps not connected at all, in my mind they sort of connected to my own depravity.
Comrade Handler Hicks is a left-wing zealot; I respect him only for that. Shows some morale compass anyway. And about ten years my senior was in many ways what I worried a failed version of myself might look like complete with child and broken marriage. Fuck, I just did it again. I like him, he likes me, and he’s really not a bad guy in fact, he’s a lesser hero of this story I’m about to tell. But I will admit that I didn’t mind the idea of killing him. He was annoying and also human trash. Because the truth is Iran doesn’t have any shortage of agents in this city, and his theories on 9/11 aren’t that well received anywhere. And he’s big faggot dork; so why did a two-person hit team get sent to eventually cook him?
“Well, that’s because loose lips sink ships and traitors get put in the ground.”
I am one to think every other high-powered person living in the darkness is mental, a whore, a killer or a spy. It’s mostly true. It’s baseless. God only knows what they whisper about me back in the station or worse, the home office. They probably just say I’m crazy. But I am a paramedic, and it took me a while to reconcile that; helping and saving sometimes, murdering and torturing other times. But a man’s got-to-do what a man’s got to do.
So, this small plane is gonna take off from an airstrip on the south coast of Brooklyn near Queens Border and it’s gonna fly me low down the coast to Cuba. And pretty much I’m gonna sit on a beach and meditate with rum and pussy after a meeting with Cuban intelligence about my training system and how it works.
Then I’m gonna fly back to Brooklyn and trade tropical white linen clothes for Spring in Russia clothes and I’m gonna fly to Finland then Moscow and check into the hotel Metropole to meet my “new attaché” and confidant Ms. Polina Mazaeva, who I’ve never met but have corresponded with for about six months and seen naked many times, more on that later. Thanks to the internet. And she will take me by the trains to Nizhny Novgorod, check me into a hotel with an Irish Pub, a Sushi restaurant and Strip Club, all a New Yorker really needs, and we’re gonna be working on a few things. Getting some paperwork and concepts in order before I fly to Erbil, Iraq then infiltrate Syria to reach the Rojava Revolution sometime in the fall. But before I leave my city for a while, perhaps forever. Handler Hicks will die! If not by my hand, then his own. He’s a black hole or vile negative sucking energy.
Polina is a cozy, coy little red head doll. Died of course. She’s overly attentive to my interests and reads my work which is flattering since, honestly most Russian women take all my money and suck on my dick, try to rearrange my wardrobe and ride me for housing and good meals. That’s cheap, but no off. Polina is looking at editing my shortest book, which means she’s manipulating me for someone. She has a little kid, she lives in the fifth biggest Russian city Nizhny Novgorod, looks provincial and bleak. I’ve never been to the Russian Federation. It will not be hostile; well, it might be a little. It’s better when I don’t talk because vaguely, I look like them. That is what people say.
A translation of a book about Haiti into Russian, a collaboration called ‘Endless Walk’ which you are now reading; and how we can pose as a family with her seven-year-old son Yazan and secure work visas for Dubai, in the heart of the United Arab Emirates. And then, we fall in love. Or I’ll use her, and she’ll use me, and when it stops working, we can part as nothing.
But mostly my heart is cold, but I still know how to talk soothingly to a woman and I am governed by both the Code of the Haitian Gentleman, Hebrew tribal law and the desire to be a good communist; so whatever happens between is of course, or course based on consent and mutual admiration for the work of the other. She is a talented singer, a painter and really too much of an artist for Russia’s third to fifth biggest city. She should be in Moscow, London or New York; her son has her pinned down though and wages are low in Russia. She makes her pittances as a graphic designer. They pay her jackbumsquat, which is my gibberish for fucking less than nothing. She lives with her kid, her brother and her parents in what looks worse than an American housing project.
I’m looking forward to May Day in the Capital and Victory Day in Nizhny, which according to my research survived the Mongol horde invasions nicely, combatively speaking. Those savage fucking Mongols.
Then I’ll load into a plane at GOJ Nizhny, fly to Istanbul, then provided I am not arrested and detained, head into Iraqi Kurdistan as we like to call it; Erbil City. And wait for Demhat al-Jabari, my colleague and fellow card-carrying D/U associate, to arrive a week later so we get to Sulaymaniyah, contact the resistance and be smuggled into Syrian Kurdistan, over the border into the Rojava Federation. It’s very exciting to me anyway, I’ve wanted to see all these places for years, but for two years I’ve been an ambulance slave. My operational budget is a lot leaner than last time; I am trying to get a good price for my car, but all the prices have sucked; I did too much damage to it using it like an ambulance. $2650 is the best price so far for a no-frills 2009 Honda Civic with paramedic plates and 58,000 miles, which Brit says is low, like I only drive in circles in this dark city rat race, with a two-year little exile in Boston.
“I’ve been to Russia in a past life or been Russian in a past life either one”, which I hope to see again in my present and future. I spend most of my time in the Russian quarter on the Brooklyn coast. I like everything about them. I can go deep or very, very shallow on it. I have read several dozen pieces of Russian literature and deeply admire the effort of the Soviet Union. I was blowing the coke off a Bulgarian lady friend’s tit the morning after my 33rd birthday. I liked it a lot, but it felt also disgusting and cheap, and I couldn’t bring myself to fuck her, so I paid and left. I guess Comrade Malcolm Veshanti, one of our comrades who stayed up all night with us, I can’t confirm but I think she passed out there at the Harlem brothel, woke up and fucked her.
So there I was making a procurement list and seeing how I could raise a little cash here and there without breaking too many laws, and safe house, the high ceilings with pipes running across was so quiet only the pitter patter of my keyboard, and, Handler was asleep since 11:43pm and Brit was out not long after and I just felt compelled to get my inventory logs sorted, my deployment budge square, file the logs; transcribe some poems I found in a little notebook to Adelina, send them to her, no response. Svetlana, her confidant messaged me on the book face that she did wish me luck, I pretended Adelina was there with her watching me type.
Sveta says she had a man now and was surely happy. I hope she’s happy and motherfucker isn’t twice her age. It might seem like I have all these lovers laying around, or like I’m a cold confused whore mongering whatever I am; but no. That’s not true. Generally, I have a free life partner, she bares me and the movement for a year or two, and she tries to save or fix or improve me; get me out of the movement and into medical school; then ultimately breaks it off when I do some time. I’ve spent 2 ½ years of my life inside camps cells and involuntary detention.
I’m not a cheat; I don’t beat women up except when they like that in bed. Which seems like a lot, leading me to question my own sweetness. I paid for everything. I dress well, I’m smart and an artist. I’m a decorated hero paramedic. I’ve written 8 books. I’m just a little bit crazy. And I’m a communist. And I do think those things are fine in Russian Federation, no cause for alarm like here. I did bring not one but two pairs of handcuffs to put Polina in, which is kinky but also tasteless and savage.
Tonight, just after midnight the man who helped the most to train me as a paramedic Mikhail Kreminizer messages me. His wife, maybe just his longtime girlfriend, has just died, will be cremated in the morning. That’s the way poor people do it. Burying people isn’t cost effective. It can cost over forty grand.
You must understand this man is a tank. A big Russian (really Lithuanian) Israeli storm trooper who used to torture people, Palestinians specifically. May or may not be a Mason, definitely some kind of strange Q-ANON enthusiast. has killed men with his bare hands and now operates an ambulance in midtown Manhattan. Trying to save his own soul which he barely believes in? Not for money. No one gets saved on ambulances. It’s all a profiteering machine of mythology and greed.
After the secret police broke up our attempt to hold the 9th Congress of the Association & Union in North Brooklyn, after they raped my Polina Mazaeva and tortured me for 5 weeks until the underground could force my ransom; after we bombed the five Strip clubs on Victory Day, after we kidnapped the Satmar Rabbi, well I was too hot for a lot of people in 2016 and Michael had to distance himself from me and withdraw his orbit of protection, which was as vast as he is tall.
“Yulia is dead,” Kreminizer has just written to me. A horrible feeling, feeling someone who is very strong buckle, being in the shadow of their horrible feeling.
“She and I never had that great art and writing collabo moment we always talked about.”
“And you never will. She died on Tuesday.”
“Fuck. I’m so sorry.”
“Ain Davar.”
“No, that’s horrible. I’m so sorry Michael. I know how much you loved her.”
“Yup. I just came from New Jersey. She will get cremated tomorrow.”
“I remember it was two summers ago. Yulia and I were on the phone, and I was so manic, and we were talking about her illustrating my book.”
“Well. That won’t happen.”
“Not in this life, no.”
“Agree.”
“In the world to come maybe she will be willing. I’m so sorry.”
“I’m going to get some rest. Good night, buddy.”
I hate it when he calls me “buddy”, but his main chick is dead.
“Good night.”
“I’m leaving the States on April 12th for Adelina’s birthday. I’m sure you prefer to suffer in silence, but if you want to hang out. I’ll drive out your way. She loved you so much.”
“We will see how I feel in the morning. Where are you going this time?” he asks me.
“Cuba. Then Russia. Iraq and then Syria. I’ll leave the night after Passover.”
“Be careful. You were just lucky the last few times. Those are all more dangerous places than Haiti.”
“Yeah. But I’ve got more men and training now. A good team. A real fine outfit.”
“Only reason you’re still alive.”
“I’ll try and get to see you more than the one-year usual. I do not only feel your pain, but I know it like I know my own mask of a face.”
He doesn’t reply because he doesn’t have to pretend to be strong, but I felt a small cry in me, this man had patiently precept-ed and apprenticed into paramedicine, my secondary trade, but first love trade; he had shown me how to put IVs in the dark with feel, while in a moving vehicle at high speeds, he’d talked me through heart blocks, and my own blocked heart over Goldy, and always treated me like an Israeli, not an American even though I’m really from here, wink. He taught me how to interrogate traffickers with the EKG monitor, how to start or stop the human heart, he was patient with me, he didn’t have to take that time I was on the blacklist I’d never be allowed on a good truck, a 911 truck again.
I feel this great knot of sadness because Michael Kreminizer suddenly has nothing to live for and does not fear g-d or devils; his self-destruction is frankly inevitable.
You must always be ready for suicide watch dealing with our kind, dealing with high energy people, empaths, bipolar ones, bonobos, whatever. We feel too much and frankly get a little self-destructive which is why so many join the service and why so many die off the job where no one can see it happen. Michael is a hard man. And he killed so many people he had to stay working to balance it out, but I know, I know he loved her, loves her so much. And this could be one thing. I have to stop. Stop, the archangel won’t die tonight or tomorrow, and you haven’t even seen him in a year? Two years? Three years? Four years? Stupid time, like a lot of people he said he’d be my reference, but worried about me. And didn’t have time for the hootenanny I got into. He called me Chechen once, because he could read into me and see many of my past lives. I felt so sad, like I had not been sad in so long and I thought about Adelina. What would I do if she took me back and we made a life and then died?
Suicide rates are actual low in Israel. And I was allegedly born in Trinidad and Michael was born in Lithuania, USSR, but we’re both Ivory. We’re both paramedics. We’re both parapsychologists. We’re both a lot past crazy. We both love Russian women. He’s the size of a killer robot made of steel from the future, but this could kill him. If anything could, this could.
“One by one having fun tonight, if she only knew what I did for life, it’s an endless walk of dreams versus nightmare.”
“Don’t leave me alone,” the dancehall song says.
Late at night, I join Comrade Brit on the roof for a smoke. We were sure looking off the safe house roof, the city visible 5 miles out, the evil stack house of Woodhull hospital within rocket range and the tallest city project on Myrtle Ave, the sniper nest in days to come, we were sure it was jeans and t-shirt day, because Brit Tully and I were wearing jeans and t-shirt, well I was. Brit almost always wore black and on top a black overcoat which had seen its prime some time ago, like my ideals. We were smoking some of her American Spirit dark greens and I hadn’t slept in 24 hours. It was really nice out for mid-March; it had never gotten cold in December, January or even February.
“They are conserving the weather machine for when it matters,” Brit said, and I agreed.
She was so dark, introverted, and cynical, as well as a lesbian. We only went out together a handful of times, but we smoked on the roof together a lot and both hated the passive aggressive Handler. Brit would always say she’d leave for a lover in German, soon, I always said I’d leave for revolution in Syria, any day now. We were both suffering in the Brooklyn ghetto, in the loft of Handler Hicks the conspiracy theorist and Iranian puppet man. Who we had just been paid to rub out of circulation. But you can’t just kill a man and get away with it in the United States. You must be realistic about that. We weren’t really gonna light him on fire, nobody really paid us to kill him and neither of us were really intelligence agents. We were all just living in relative poverty of conscience and slight material poverty deep in the Brooklyn labor ghetto, where you lived paycheck to paycheck. Where your collar is blue shade.
“It was all just a transit point to death or possible greatness. But a pointless death is more likely to come first and make the second proposition meaningless. What use is greatness when you cannot see the results of it?”
“You sure make a lot of dumb American movie like inner monologues when you smoke,” says Brit the German spy.
In grim Birmingham, U.K. sometime in late of 2016, two British Hevals meet in a bleak coffee shop with no phones to say hello, goodbye, and hash out some final details for their upcoming deployment into Rojava.
“My government name is not relevant to you, Hevalin, as they say.” Havalin is the plural of Hevals, my man and multiple friends. Says Heval Erdal, a cheeky British Jew of left-wing leanings with many Kurdish friends. He sits with his old friend Ana Montgomery Campbell from Lewes, U.K. who later died a Martyr in the defense of Afrin Canton. The British pipeline begins in Birmingham. Actually, hundreds of ISIS Islamists had been recruited from Birmingham. Literally many hundreds.
“You may call me by my Kurdish guerrilla name, “Heval Erdal”. I’m lanky and have a highly disarming grin, so say the ladies. I’m just having a kid, which is to say a laugh; the ladies don’t say anything like that. I’m British clearly, but also a cheeky part Jew. It’s not a very well thought out part to be honest. Don’t practice any of it. I became active in the Kurdish movement protesting Turkish arms deals and attending cultural events at the centers. My working-class British city had literally hundreds of Jihadists who took off for the Middle East and joined Daesh. Fuck all mate, hundreds! They took wee kids and wives with them. They thought it was the end of times. Well, it had end of times properties, I’ll give it that.” So, I was always a ‘wee activist’ with politics of the progressive kind, but I love them Kurds man! They’re so awesome. Humble, principled mountain people. Leftists. Warriors. Love um! Sometime in August of 2016 I made up my mind to travel to Kurdistan and join up with the People’s Protection Units; the famous and glorious Y.P.G.71.
So, I worked a bit more than usual. I saved up about 2,000 quid and there I had a chance to ask the right questions about who to contact, literally just an email address called YPG REVOLUTION, and I answered a bunch of questions for them. Then I was approved to go. It didn’t take nearly as long as lots of chaps complained. Britain has the second largest contribution of foreign fighters to Y.P.G./Y.P.J. right after Turkish leftists.
But life happens, you have a girlfriend you can’t bring, and you have an apartment you can’t just leave. You also have a bit of fear in you. No one wants to die! Unless you’re one of these Jihadist tossers. You make various excuses. Well not me, I don’t worry about dying. I had a pretty boring apartment. My job was bullocks. We all have bollocksy jobs, so it made it easier to leave mine and go, knowing how much I hated my current situation in what Kurds call Capitalist Modernity. Also, there were brave Hevals who went in earlier, when things were more desperate and asymmetrical.
I had become friendly with Heval Helen Qerechow, whose British name was Ana Campbell via the various protests and Kurdish events. She was far more ideological than I was. She was what we called later a ‘true believer’, a highly committed young revolutionary. Me, I just wanted to kill Daesh, and the Turkish fascists. I wasn’t stupid to the politics mind you, but I was more of the fighterly mind set. I had set myself on a warpath. I grew up working class and I would die working class, and revolution would never come home to the U.K., but if I could contribute well to the Y.P.G. and aid the Kurdish resistance then I would feel like I was a man of my word. All these years yelling about arms deals and Turkish coups all didn’t ever do much, but it was how you made friends with Hevals and aspiring Hevals. Heval in Kurdish means comrade/friend. It’s what movement people call each other affectionately and ideologically.
They had met just one weekend before herself deployment to Syria. I went out with Ana, and we talked a little bit about what we were risking and why we were risking it. She went in to Rojava about five months before me. This was maybe on the eve of.
“I’m all in the game mate, I’m just all about it. As an anarchist and as a human, this is the real deal as I see it,” Ana declared.
“I mean eye to eye my sis, I agree,” I tells her.
“I mean as a woman and as an activist this seems so big, so important, how could we ever just go on and ignore this and act like we have and validity to our own fight?” Ana always talked in big questions, rhetorical like ones for circular thinking.
“I mean are you scared?” she asks me, “I’m not scared at all.”
“No, not scared to die. Maybe scared to be tortured or maimed, but all part of a revolution I guess,” I reply.
“You must be brave. Everyone is watching us. The Kurds and the vultures, you know they want to make up stories about why we went out there, going out there to die in a foreign war, a Kurdish war! It’s our war, it’s the last stand for idealism.”
“It’s pathetic so few leftists are going, have gone,” I say.
“No, it’s up to us to be an example of trustworthy European leftists and what we can contribute. Everything must be about possibility not fear!”
“You’re a shining star,” I tell her.
“Serok Apo72 says that Women’s leadership is what saved the P.K.K. in Qandil and has saved the Rojava revolution.”
“Well surely it has,” I just agree with her now because I’m not ever one to argue with her on either Feminism or what Serok Apo said. She’s very ideological and I am not, so it’s easy to avoid contentious bickering.
“I’m so happy we’re both finally going,” she says.
“Yeah, good times,” I reply.
“We probably won’t see each other that often. The Y.P.J.73 has its own separate structures. How do you feel about that? I think I prefer the old way when we were all together.”
“I think I read they need to be able to tell the conservative Kurdish village fathers their daughters aren’t getting banged out in the P.K.K., and also because Kurdish Women’s Movement wants their own self-governing spaces.”
“Yeah, both. But anyway, we will meet up for tea and have long fireside talks about ideology like you love so much,” she smiles.
So, I was scheduled to begin the Academy in Qerechow74 in August of 2017. I had booked a direct flight to Erbil from Heathrow. Ana was in the class before me for the Y.P.J.; Women’s Protection Units, the co-gendered women’s structure. We had both been arrested several times scuffling with the Turkish security service at this demo or that. Never had any challenging times either of us. Well, why should we have? We were fighting for Kurdish Freedom, for peoples’ freedom; against fascists and Islamic terrorists, the kind that lived in Birmingham and migrated to Syria with their families for the war.
Now my motives were pure, but they were not purely ideological. Apo did not make me do it! I just felt that Daesh was a heinous evil. I felt the Turks to be true aggressors. And I wanted to avenge the fact that so many people from my city had headed over to the enemy. An enemy which throws homos off roof tops. Kidnaps and sex enslave young women. Commits genocide! And until Operation Inherent Resolve75 I.S.I.S. was gradually taking over the entire Middle East into their “Caliphate”.
“So, I packed my bag and joined the international volunteers!” About five months later Anya went down to Rojava to join the Y.P.J. The proud, inglorious 500 or 600 so who ended up with the Y.P.G. and its various affiliated structures. The embarrassingly low turnout compared to the well over 40,000 Jihadists who turned out to join I.S.I.S. is a matter of leftist defeat, human cowardice, ineptitude of Kurdish propaganda, and the psychological barriers of joining a violent shit show that no one is clearly ever going to win. Her last words before she left England were the same last words, she said to me before she was blown apart on the Afrin Front. The phrase has a couple of meanings to the Hevals. “Onwards to invincible victory,” or “Victory is certain ”, or in Kurmanji, “Serkaften!”
To which I replied “Serchevan76.” On the eyes!
Within the next year Heval Errdal’s entire family would be arrested in the United Kingdom and charged with aiding terrorists financially and Anna Campbell would be dead, martyred in a Turkish airstrike.
➢ “Sometimes I think we have to get out of this place!”𝀓
The motherland calls,
And now we’re using a code.
The silence of touch, the science of mode,
The science of making one’s morals align.
With the cold things done-for-dollars, in the absence of ethics,
Or the g-d head the divine𝀓
Oh, the things I might do! Oh, things that you do.
An animal’s logic of rough-handled thrusting,
Subsumes the illogic, or basic desire to woe or to woo.
“If I get on my back for an hour ortwo”,
I see your face.
Security, obscurity, can you lick something magic?
“Man, how many times did you die in disgrace?”
Frail little humans, trying to see a plot through,
black breaded blue black sky where every single star is a blessing,
A promise of pity,
“I didn’t ask what you’ve done lately,
So I probably only muse partly, rip off your dress, and we forget second-guessing.
on the things you still have to do.
a breathtaking ode to the half-naked goddess that’s you.
The thrusting of my logic dare outpace.
In the lack of a life we had picked out in earnest,
Hinting the the hilt of a gentleman’s saber? You hand in my face?
➢ the back-breaking ease of the thing we call labor,
The belt on the neck of the thing we call grace.
Abhorrent! On whose horse did you rode?
Morse code on my back, your fingers play piano.
Let the skill of your ill masquerading, let it lighten the load.
Let the lust that men drown in make it a new home,
Make the world implode. Make a world where it’s up to a partner to lighten a load.
We both have nostalgia for things that ignite,
A lust for a new kind of rule?
A list of words for the way that the body can gyrate,
and mix to a perfect soundtrack of the sage house abide or abode.
“Man, pretty cool.”
and then all things can explode.
Explode into opportune living of life spent in terror,
Life spent lacking free life, like the fairy tale ritual error.
The first time.
It was always still the very best time, the first time,
So close to your body,
A Look in the mirror of the look in your eyes.
In rented safe house attics suited for stealing, the petty theft of posture passion and wiggle thrust rhyme, silhouettes forming fantastic formations of fondle,
Pausing the clock for a sensual mime.
Physically speaking,
It was something divine.
But the next second time,
“We spoke candidly about the feelings on not having feelings, and escapading in Europe, and the subtle sublime,”
What a terrible habit, paying on the record,
Transferring rebels to camps or rubies for illicit moments of the financial district down climb.
Wasting the very last moments,
“Wasting one’s absolute time.”
For in arrest, for is your work working off the world of stress,
A test of the blessed, a test of the rest of the lifestyle, the bondage?
The work of the night and the work of the question, the imagined, the partially guessed. for the guess of an intention to blow or to be or to bless!
To lay even one more hand on your most amble chest.
I close my eyes, and we kiss harder than the press will later confess.
I sought out your confidence, I seek out your most costly attention, I believe you think in Russian, but that’s a soft guess.
I seek out something between total lust and a loyal affection,
I seek out writhing inside you and placing a kiss on every speck of your being,
What and how much am I after?
I don’t ask you to fully undress.
My love is something absurd, the uses of my love are anyone’s guess.
I ask you to weigh.
Do I have the talent and useful out lie of skills to back up all of the ludicrous things I might say?
Will all of the laughter outlay?
All the past hardships and tears?
It doesn’t matter the plot points that set out the setting,
I want to use (and to know) and be used near on next to your body for years!
Not just mere hours, in a state of total erotic orgasmic undress.
Speaking of evil and speaking of stress, please use me for fucking,
Please use me for parts.
Or for evil Jew medical legalish arts.
Floor boards are now creaking,
Shall we try and proceed under such flagrant duress!
Rustling now in the attic,
Erotica is what one is perhaps seeking;
Also, are you waiting? Chandelier spills of
For the end to come,
In a visitation, we commit petty crime.
In downtime,
Surround sound to fondle around time.
in up time, in emotional downtime.
In the placement of dispondant downtime,
You stroke the shaft of midnight off the layers of lime.
You lay me down, my face into a hole like a waterboard, I’m dripping.
You lay me down, your reflection an erotic silhouette of starlight,
Lip service for a hardcore lash or lock of further lipping.
Dasha, can you trust me yet?
Have we made love in other lives?
Dasha, can you ever fully trust me, get you happy, get you fully unhinged in upset?
A tall tale of too much turmoil, a rare form of Amerkanski.
You are well armed with your curvatures, your lips tight.
A lusty lap dance for a lingering servitude,
I’ve been to your safe house in Midtown.
Your goddess naked, curving silhouette is etched in my mind at night,
At first sight.
I want to render you completely naked,
And work very my sex on your very soul, lie where you lie.
A ride or a grip; or die for a try, par to the part of the whole,
with the ink of my pen, or the typing of sonnets that preferably never will get old,
and preferably never quite die.
Make you call out for me,
like I call out for you,
in the bellowing evilish New York dusk twilight.
I want to kiss your lips forever, or just for the rest of right now, can we try,
I have a half of a plan and I will show you how, how the last of us cry,
for as many hours as it is possible to imagine them entertaining me.
I want to roughly take you,
There were sneaking, creaking footsteps toward the rented safehouse,
There were mechanical noises in the dark sky above,
But perhaps in reality, just make noble love.
My hands as they grip your hips,
My tongue, when it lashes out, sips of fortuitous trips down the small of your spine,
And the arch of your back when you moan out for me.
Make you drip, you make me drip, you make me melt, you make me sip,
On the very most waters of want, on the lustiest thirst, on the thrown.
On the edge of reality’s grip.
I can’t do this whole night of class war alone,
I can’t write you too well from an ambulance late at night,
from the glow of making us less smart phones.
I can’t make love when your body is still something to buy or to own.
Are words purely worthless?
Is their weight to a promise. Is there weight to a stone?
Are we still having fun?
I want you to think of me kindly when we are all done.
I want your lips on my lips, I want your hips on my hips, I want my whole flesh inside you, writhing naked right back to where the romance begun.
When the traps are reset, and the web is unspun.
Where do I know your naked body from?
Where do I imagine this whole tryst can go?
Do you think of me ever when my existence is gone?
Take you hard on a floor roughly, or a gentle, long kiss good night in a hotel bed, can you want me like a lover and still profit from a John?
Русский (рифмованный) перевод
«Иногда я думаю: нужно бежать отовсюду!» — Зовёт нас родная земля, Мы пишем шифром, в немом переулке у чуда, Где такт прикосновений заменяет слова.
Наука того, как мораль подчиняют расчёту, Холодным делам “за доллар”, без духа, без Бога в нутре. Что я бы сделал? Что делаешь ты в поворотах? Животная логика тел, уступающая логике тьме.
«Если лягу на час-другой» — вижу снова твой лик. Безопасность, туманность — лижешь магический штрих. «Сколько раз ты погибал позорно, до криков и рвот?» Хрупкие люди ловят сюжет, Чёрный хлеб, чёрный небосвод, Где каждая звезда — благословенье, Обет жалости, «Не спрашивала я, что ты делал вчера — Мне хватает лишь жеста, Рву твоё платье — и нет больше бегства, Есть только тела, и их высота, и последняя нежность».
Полунагую богиню продумывает мой стих, Дыханием споря с твоей красотой. Мы жили бы лучше — но путь был другой, нас увёл… Твой жест — будто эфес от сабли был поднят над мной.
Тяжёлое и лёгкое, то что зовётся “трудом”, Ремень на шее “грации”, Где потеряно всё. На ком твой конь взлетал галопом? Твой Морзе на моей спине — Ты играешь, как рояль в темноте.
Пусть ложь твоих масок хоть как-то снижает саван заботы, Пусть страсть, где мужчины тонут, Станет домом в сердечной пустоте.
Мы оба скучаем по искрам, что жгли до зари, По страсти, что строит законы и миры. По словам, что описывают танец тела, По музыке мудрых стен, что хранят ордена и тайны квартиры.
«Чёрт, круто же было». И всё может взорваться — Взрывом удачи, Жизни, где страх — и любовь, и попытки восстать.
Первый раз — Всегда лучший, Так близко к тебе — словно зеркало глаз. В мансарде секретной, где время крадут, Где позы, касанья — изгибы страстей, Где тени сплетают узор из тел, Где вздох — это музыка, Пауза — сонм нежных ролей.
Второй раз мы говорили честно О том, как не чувствуем чувств, О Европе, её авантюрном искусстве, О тонком, почти бестелесном «вдруг».
О, ужасная привычка платить, Переводить бунтарей и рубины За тайные встречи на дне делового квартала.
Тратили последние вдохи, «Тратили время — финальный товар».
Арест ли спасает? Работа ли держит нас в мире, где боли — товар? Ночные вопросы, оковы, догадки, Где благословляешь удар.
Положить бы ладонь На грудь твою — в пламени странных начал. Я закрываю глаза — и мы целуемся так, Как газеты потом не напишут.
Я искал твою уверенность, Прошу твоего дорогого внимания, Мне кажется — думаешь ты по-русски, Но это лишь нежное предположение.
Мне нужно меж похотью и верностью Узнать твой предел и твоё доверие, Обнять каждую точку тела, Не требуя даже раздеться.
Моя любовь абсурдна, Её смысл — загадка и жест.
Скажи, есть ли талант Удержать все нелепые фразы, что скажу я всерьёз? Перекроет ли смех Все прошлые слёзы и боль? Неважны сюжетные трещины — Я хочу быть с тобой Годы, а не часы, В оргазмическом, бешеном, нежном, Беспамятном наголо-снятом тепле.
Говоря о зле и о стрессе — Пользуйся мной, Пользуйся частями, Пользуйся “еврейской медициной и правом”, На полу скрипят доски — Но мы продолжаем.
В мансарде шуршат тени, Ищут эротики, Ждут конца, Как визита небесной беды.
В паузах — преступленья малы, В минуты простоя — Ласка, В часы разлада — Тоска по ударам судьбы.
Ты кладёшь меня вниз лицом, Как на водную пытку, — Струится пот. Ты кладёшь меня под свет звезды, И губы твои творят Служение боли и ласке сверх меры.
Даша, Ты мне доверяешь? Мы любили друг друга в иных мирах? Даша — Сможешь когда-нибудь верить, Сбывать мои страхи, Безумие вытравлять?
Ты — тень небесной работы, Американский мой миф и бред. И армия линий твоего силуэта В ночи гремит.
Я был в тайном убежище твоём, Где тело твоё — как статуя яркого тлена, Где я хотел снять с тебя всё — И душой, и рукой, И стихом, где ни строчка не стареет, Где слово не умирает порой.
Хочу, чтоб ты стонала так, Как я стону по тебе В злорадно-чудовищный сумрак Нью-Йорка.
Хочу целовать тебя вечно — Или хотя бы до утра. Есть план — и я покажу, Как плакать вдвоём, Как тянуть наслаждение часами, Как разгораться в безумных играх.
Хочу взять тебя грубо, Но в ту ночь Казалось — вокруг механический шорох, И шаги по лестнице, И звёзды гудят. Но на самом деле — Это была любовь.
Мои руки на бёдрах, Мой язык вдоль твоей спины — И мир тает, И таешь ты.
Я не выдержу этот классовый бой в одиночку, Не напишу тебя с “скорой помощи”, Где свет смартфонов гасит нас в ночь. Не могу любить, Когда тело — товар, Когда любовь покупают за наличный вздох.
Есть ли вес у слова? Вес у камня? Всё ли нам в шутку? Я хочу, чтобы ты вспоминала меня Добро — когда всё кончится вдруг.
Хочу твои губы на губах, Твои бёдра на бёдрах, И тело твоё вокруг — Как начало романа.
Когда ловушки сброшены, Когда сети порваны — Откуда мне знакомо твоё нагие формы? Куда ведёт эта связь? Думаешь обо мне, Когда я исчезну?
Взять тебя жёстко на полу Или нежно — Ждать рассвет. Быть любовником Или стать для тебя Очередным, кому платят за след.
A small place like this takes on fierce intensity. A pressure cooker of ethnic strife baked in varying religious modes. I have not seen the sun in over a week. I work from 9ish at night until close to 3 in the morning, chill by the beach, and then go back to Mughrabi to sleep. I’d walk past the Opera Towers, about a mile north on the tiyeled until I got to Mike’s Blues Bar. I’d shoot the shit with everyone’s favorite Russian-who-wanted-to-be-American Svetlana, drink a beer, eat a burger, pass out a shit ton of flyers to Americans and trash containers, then go back and have Alex buy me a shot while Canadian Dave the manager told me about being a sniper in the IDF. Turned out he and Maya, whom he also called Emma, were old lovers or something for a fleeting time. I really liked the guy. Once he took me to the roof of his building, a great crib on Ben Yehuda Street, and taught me about sniping with a broom. To exhale and then to fire. To always change positions quickly after firing. To wait for hours to get the most bang for your exposure. He told me that sniping is like ancient times when you must remember the face of each woman or man you kill. I told him I wanted to be a sniper in the army, and he just figured the army I meant was the IDF. Lessons were scheduled for once a week, but they only happened two more times.
I co-write a short manifesto with Maya and Avinadav an,d they turn it into Hebrew and Arabic. I didn’t trust any of my Russians to look at it and did not know any Arabs to trust either. We set up a timetable for me to set up cells in Haifa, Be’er Sheva, and Jerusalem. I spent about three days in each city recruiting. I was to attempt to be back at the Deep on Thursday to check in. Maya would set up a ‘unit’ in Tel Aviv and Avinadav would be the money and logistics man.
The Organization, as we soon took to calling the thing, was founded in Tel Aviv in late July of 2001. ‘A group without a name was formed to launch a movement without a color’ as our line went. The initial objective of our group was the resolution of the conflict between Israel and Palestine. It was believed that through the creation of a united front among the peoples of the region, a solution could be achieved that might serve as a springboard for a worldwide revolution against American hegemony and the cultural mentality it perpetuates. The principle on which this group was founded was that ‘we are in fact not an organization, but rather individuals becoming organized’ another line from our playbook. The Organization was to serve as a network through which quite different people could unite under common revolutionary goals. Our goals were to be better defined in a soon-to-be-written 10 Point Program for the Revolution in Israel and Palestine.
I was taking notes from Che Guevara’s manual on guerilla warfare and Mao’s Little Red Book. I was mixing it with populist Israeli rhetoric and Marxist overtones. We didn’t say proletariat. We just said we fought for the rights of the working class. I was getting my training on the fly. So were Maya and Avinadav. The Maya revealed no ideological leanings other than progressive feminism. She seemed left without needing to declare it. She was Spanish by passport and Canadian in upbringing, but she’d been in HaEretz a year and a half. As a club promoter she had half the basic skill set of a revolutionary anyway, the gift of random gab. She took the role of support and advice and begrudgingly accepted a title on our cabinet. She urged me to hammer out a ten-point program before she tried to recruit anyone she knew.
Andrew Manasseh Butler, aka “Andrew the Hustler”, whom no one seemed to call Avinadav except for me, not even Maya who quite a few men called Emma, told me one night over dinner that Maya and I could be the activists, but he had ‘keep the focus on the mission.’
Avinadav and I would talk all night. He lived in a sprawling penthouse near the outer highways and skyscraper towers of the Azrieli center at the edge of Ramat Gan. It was really near the Tel Aviv Light Rail Depot, so I’d crash with him once and awhile at his ‘House of the Rising Sun’ as Emma called it. There were always people crashing on the couches, on the floors and anywhere they could. There was a White rapper from the American hip-hop group Cyprus Hill who had been drafted to play for Maccabi Tel Aviv and then fucked it up somehow. Nice guy, but a huge show boater and big talker. One night he and I picked up these two Ashkenaz cuties and he claimed he was rapping at GSPOT, this huge hip-hop club and could get us all comped. I closed the stand and the four of us walked our asses north to the Sheraton and beyond, only for him to disappear into the club and ditch us outside.
I talked big too, but I prided myself on delivering what I promised with broads and bullets both. This guy was living on Avinadav’s couch indefinitely. Disrael, the partner at The Deep with the ice in his ear, which he declared ‘It’s a cubit diamond from the land of Zirconium, was the only other rent payer besides Yashara, Avindav’s Yemenite special lady who looked Dominican more than Arab or Jewish. At any given time, there could be between four to seven ‘community relatives’ who’d gotten exiled from Demona for this or that and were living with Avinadav until something came along, or they got forgiven.
“We are all in ‘back against the sea or a head to the wall country,’ some of us more than others. So when the honorable Prophet Ben-Ami led seventy-odd Black brothers and sisters in 1969 from Chi-Town’s Southside across Africa to build the Hebrew Israelite Community in the badlands of Southern Israel and then when your father gets into a fight with the Prophet over annulling a marriage and your whole clan gets tossed out of the community, but you and your brethren don’t have Israeli or American passports, well fuck the dumb shit, where we gonna go?”
“How many of you are there?”
“A couple thousand now. Not one is a citizen here. Ethiopians, they at least begrudgingly call them Jews. We do not even get offered real citizenship. If we the field Negroes, then you got some idea why it’s ‘Waleed and the Lethal Leisure Suite’ time for the Palestinians. It never comes down too hard on more than one demographic group at a time. The others make believe it won’t happen to them. Besides you Ashkenaz, everybody is shut out of something.”
“Just like in the States.”
“A microcosm of all the stupid suffering that the wretched of the earth are subject to because they refuse to fight back. I want you to dig inside, Zach. I want you to look into your soul and know that our struggle is doomed to fail like the thousands of other risings before ours if you can’t honestly see the soul you have is of the same worth as the one Hashem gave the Arabs and the Christians, the pagans, communists and atheists like Emma Solomon.”
“I thought she was agnostic like everybody else.”
“Nope. She just plays one on TV to get more answers out of you.”
“Ah. Answers about what?”
“To judge if we can trust you, a near total stranger, with our lives.”
“I’m not asking for that kind of trust. I’m asking for help printing propaganda, obtaining safe houses, and recruiting partners. What do my religious inclinations have to do with the mission?”
“What’s the mission then, Zachariah?”
“Empower the Israeli and Palestinian people to win a class war against the American backed proxy government of this country.”
“Which would take a miracle.”
“You’re not saying…”
“Who’s Mike Washington?”
“How did you….?”
“Emma says you ask him questions in your sleep. Lucky you.”
“It’s not like that.”
“I know it’s not like that. The girl’s a goddess, heavenly just to lie beside. But back to Mr. Washington.”
“I have an imaginary friend who’s a sort of fire walking paramedic with a handgun, something concocted in my head since I was 13 to shoot all the monsters when I sleep.”
“Gets um all doesn’t he? Shoots straight, never misses, reliable? Brotherly maybe?”
“Something like that.”
“You believe in your dreams, Zachariah?”
“I’d say they confuse more than guide me.”
“You don’t have a guide in the waking life to translate for you what It’s telling you.”
“Who? Mike Washington?”
“Mr. Washington is just a messenger. Your name in Hebrew means ‘G-d Remembers’ incidentally. You ought to toy with the notion of our meeting not being an accident but in fact providence. You ought to meditate on why you’re in the land so young and so early.”
“One should be careful in presuming their dreams have any more meaning than necessary.”
“Be as careful as you want. Emma and I are careful as hell. The road to Zion is paved in shit that can get you killed. And there are so, so many things worse than death in the world today. It makes hell quite superfluous to have a world like this.”
“I agree. Your allusions make me want a cigarette. I think I’m in love with Maya by the way.”
“With Maya or Emma?”
“Same person.”
“Are Sebastian and Zachariah the same person?”
“Emma told you my real name?”
“Yeah, but I learned it again going through your pockets when you slept over last time. We must ensure everybody is who they say they are. Got me?”
“Zachariah’s me trying to live up to the expectations of Mr. Washington.”
“Complicated. Sounds like programming. Being that you haven’t fucked her, but you guys have rolled up like kittens and cuddled three times in the past week on some pretext. You are in love with Emma. What is it to you to hold that girl?”
“It is to remind myself I’m a good man whenever I’ve been tested. Otherwise, she would not want me near her.”
“That’s part of it. What else you feel?”
“That I remember what love felt like the first and only time I felt it in my life.”
“Whatcha gonna do about it?”
“Why so you can tell her?”
“Information only flows one way around here.”
“Nothing at all. I can fall in love and have family in the world to come. I make a better fighter than a lover anyway even though I try and kid myself otherwise. I’ll tell her how I feel before I cross over to the other side.”
“That’s reassuring to hear. It’s not romantic or right, or fair because you very well might give her the love, she needs to restore her black heart. But I need two lieutenants who can be objective about what we have to do. You want to seize one of the most important spiritual hot zones of the planet there are some time-honored ideas about infrastructure and discipline you would do well to embrace.”
“Yeah. Go on.”
“The bottle makes you play the fool. The smokes make you sick and will kill you before their bullets do, and a revolutionary gets only one love, his people. Regulate your vices as soon as you are able.”
“You want me to quit smoking and drinking?”
“And stop being promiscuous.”
“You and Emma are gonna do that?”
“Of course not. Everyone gets to be a hypocrite except for you.”
“Why the fuck is that?”
“Because you’re gonna be a mouthpiece for something massive. If you’re willing to have a message, get you crucified, don’t let some run of the mill garden variety sin degrade your credibility.”
“You keep alluding to me on some God tip, but we don’t know if God wants any of this. You’re saying you think Hashem got me all the way to the Promised Land to help you and Emma form and lead a revolutionary army?”
“If I have to dignify that with a response, it is really gonna take eleven more years.”
“Eleven more years?”
“People think 2012 is when the world ‘ends.”
“The world doesn’t ever end.”
“If the masses were such great political scientists and theologians, we probably wouldn’t have left the gardens to begin with.”
“Why 2012?”
“It’s the Mayan calendar thing. It’s in the collective conscious.”
“You were quick to help me, Avinadav. Why is that?”
“Every community gets a few prophets right before tumultuous times. All the holy books say so.”
“I wouldn’t be so fast to construe dreams with prophesy.”
“I get dreams too. And so does Emma. So does everyone, but only some people get dreams that give um ideas about what Hashem has put them here to do. I believe in the things you say Zachariah; and your soul is eons older than your years of life. Let’s just hope Hashem sends some reinforcements because this plan of ours will not go unnoticed for very long.”
***
So, we built the thing, cobbled it together based on the various books we’d read and life experiences we’d had. The Organization, whom the Israelis called Ha Irgun, was structured to be a constantly evolving effort based upon an ongoing dialogue between Avinadav and me with Emma making corrections. It was the amalgamation of our three quite different viewpoints. Our goal was for the Organization to be composed of autonomous cells throughout the Middle East engaging in political work, community support, business and military operations, and whatever else proved logistically expedient to our ends. We had all done a bit of research on all this before we met. Avinadav made himself Chairman and Minister of Finance. Maya was appointed Defense Minister. I was elected to serve as the Minister of Operations handling logistics and recruiting. We set up a 12-person Cabinet that would command hundreds of 3 to 5-person cells in different communities across the country loosely organized around the Ten Point Program, under the leadership of the Cabinet. Maya and I authored the first statement that we would print glossy club flyers with a grey fist.
We selected the color grey as our standard because it was no color at all, but many shades of understanding and identity. We called our manifesto-in-progress the Little Grey Book. It began simply:
“The Organization will not stop fighting until all people on this Earth are free.”
“Go big or go home.” We argue about the name for a whole night then figured “what’s in a name?” We all had a couple of names, so why not the group? “We were organizing. It was an organization.” The word for that in Hebrew was Ha Irgun, which sounded officious enough to me and had been the street name for one of the original Israeli independence groups. So, we ran off stacks of these little grey cards with a black fist and a little call to arms.
The Crusaders called this place Outremer. Between 1095 and 1250 there were eight major crusades and dozens of lesser ones. Somewhere in between, Constantinople was sacked by the Christians. A territory twice the size of the current state of Israel was carved out brutally, then crumbled apart in a Jihad of attrition.
Incidentally, they say Abraham settled here from Iran. Joseph dreamed here. Moses evacuated his entire people here from out of Egypt to here. The Phoenicians launched a trade empire from here. Jesus was born here. Died here, maybe came back. Rome occupied and fought three wars here. Mohammed spent the night here. The Turks occupied it for 500 years and the British for 50. The Levant is the crossroads of the old world. A place of miracles. A place of Canaanites and Philistines, of real and imagined Israelites. Judeans, Samarians, Palestinians, Israelis. Sand people, desert people, people of trade, scrolls, war and identities inscribed in the blaze. Identities, pluralistic identities that are stiff necked, fanatical, and zealous.
This place is furnace those forges religions. It cooks the brain and browns the body. It puts G-d’s words in the minds of believers. It bakes belief. It festers fervor. The Levant and Mesopotamia have been the homeland of every major world prophet besides Buddha and the mouthpieces of the Hindus.
If Hashem, if Allah, if the Godhead, if the singular divine, or perhaps the pagan Gods, the Hindu Gods, the lesser prophets and the spirits; may guide and speak to the world of man; here, they speak far louder. Here they etch the word of G-d on the tongues of men; then unleashes the into inglorious combat.
It is getting about as hot as I am told it gets out here. The place is violent pressure cooker for prophets and ultra-violence. Bet Ashanti was keeping food in my belly and providing me a cot near a fan. If things went missing at least they did not go missing with a knife to my throat. My CD player, my belt, and some loose shekels all seemed to disappear down a black hole of faceless theft. My inner Jewish accountant said the meals and cot were worth it and to ride it out a few more weeks. It was just so fucking hot outside.
Those weeks in July of 2001 were a loud bang killer on all. There were more bus bombings, more mass shootings, more reprisals, and more death on the public transit. The Europeans were condemning the Israelis because they kept taking out little kids in their not that smart bomb attacks. Americans condemned “the terrorists” while doing nothing more than keeping the money spigot flowing. That blank check on aid, well it goes to more guns, tanks, and rockets used on the Palestinians.
I hustle my art seven days a week in front of the Opera Towers. A mall slash condominium complex on the sea. On the tiyeled and against the beaches. On the boardwalk. I was selling my art faster than I could restock by redrawing it to be fair, though not selling it for very much. I was turning out sketches on demand. It was hotter and hotter by day and the Zachariah show was going strong. Then, every other day, something blew up somewhere. Usually there was rock throwing, and ball bearing vest blasts, there were tanks in the streets there was death and occupation, but not in Tel Aviv for the most part. The whole country is a small place, as said, like New Jersey, like two hours across and eight up and down, and each day, death in the blazing heat, the iron heel of occupation versus the defense of the nation. Two very palpable narratives, under pressure, then a bang. A protest and a bellow in a megaphone in Arabic or Hebrew, in Russian. A bang, a ratatatatatat. Maybe from the outside it all looks like fitna. Like occupation. Like a holy war. On the ground, a pressure cooker.
I made a day trip to Pardes Hanna to bring Anya some flowers against my better judgment. She is a dead ringer for Izzy Vitz’s part Lithuanian part Japanese ex Jackie Niche back in New York, but with bigger tits. She wasn’t just a leisure agent. She was also an emergency medical technician for the Sheroot Leumi, which was a sort of do-community-service-from-home-to-stay-out-of-the-army jump off for females and the patriotic religious.
This was hardly a leap into monogamy. What in the world does a seventeen-year-old know about that. We’re little animals. She didn’t seem to want more of me than I could give. Anya didn’t speak enough English to get deep about it, but she’d bat her eyes and ask me to take her to New York one day soon. This giving her flowers thing was a madhouse idea after a month of dirty drunk sex. Some nights we sat on the boardwalk with piles of stacked beach chairs. Whenever I was up her way, we promptly fucked all over her ever-absent mommy’s house. Made love rather, if I had not been doing so much vodka drinking.
I haven’t kissed a girl sober in a very long time. Not Daphne Collins or the other one in England, not Hadas and certainly rarely ever Anya. In less than a week she fell for me. So, I feigned some lovemaking, some ‘slow fucking’ as Izzy once had called it. I came three times that first night. On her breasts and in her mouth and in a condom. I moaned ‘suck my dick’ and some dirty-talk language getting head in the big steel bathtub. The girl lay with me in the dark at her mother’s small apartment in Pardes Hana and she begged me to take her to New York once her time in the national services was completed. She showed me a pistol and a ton of ammunition her ex had stolen for her.
She has great breasts. Which is very important. I’m socialized like that I suppose. And if I am the American pretending to be an Israeli, she was certainly doing a bang-up job working to not be from here. She had come here from Karaganda by way of Tashkent in 1990. Often, she practiced reducing her accent to nothing with the TV and mail order accent-reduction tapes. She wasn’t Russian but wanted to model there. She was cute enough, but she didn’t have the starvation frame. She is a curvy little former Soviet. In America, you’d call her a ‘Russian.’ Here too, maybe, but she was half Kazakh, half Uzbek. Unlikely any part Jew.
I told Bet Ashanti’s madam that I was meeting an uncle in Haifa for the weekend. I hitchhiked up to Pardes Hana to get with Anya instead. She had quite a few boyfriends bopping around to stare me down, but that didn’t stop us from kissing and fucking all night and whispering things about running off country. We filled her ashtray with three packs of butts, and I got so caught up in the moment that I failed to see how quick this girly had taken to me. She is my comfort girl, and I am her golden ticket out of this military colony should I ever choose to leave. Under pressure, like everything else.
***
I meet people quickly and develop intense relationships in my line of work. If it really works at all. It’s a sad little hustle. Maybe on a busy Saturday night I can make 200 shekels; that’s barely $50 US. It’s called hustling art on the street in a foreign war-torn colony.
You take an intelligent person, and they see this big art stand with pictures filled up with Commie imagery, carnal orgiastic renditions, biblical allegories, and current events. You break into some topic a picture you like alludes to, only to meet a young kid who defies every idea you have about Americans. That sort of explains how I was getting down.
I took a whole lot more numbers than I called. Numbers to get fed, to get fucked, to finish a good conversation, and even offers to take the Zachariah Artstein show on the road to quaint and quieter inner country locals like in Ashdod, Acho, and well healed Herzliyya. The American Jewish colony, in the colony. There were also young kids my own age that wanted me to paint murals in their bedrooms and rap in English for their friends.
“What are you doing here man! No one wants to be here. Everyone wants to live in New York!”
I never did as well sell as when I worked the tiyeled. It was July 4th and the masses were out in force. Bands played salsa music on small bandstands set up on the boardwalk. Street hustlers worked on games of Three Card Monty. Teenage girls looking for a quick summer buck sold all sorts of glowing toys to small children passing by as little boys hustled couples with flowers and Polaroid pictures. There was a whole culture of street hustlers that worked the tiyeled. I was one of them. I had been in Tel Aviv about a month since leaving the Ein Dor kibbutz and moving to Bet Ashanti, home for runaway teens. I sold my art every night. Five shekels here, twenty shekels there. It was just enough to eke out a desperately thin existence on ice cold Mayim, crunchy falafel, Zaatar cakes, and Noblisse cigarettes.
My new business partner, the half Russian boy named Ditri Massoud, would watch the stand as I worked the crowd. I mingled in and out of the great crowds shouting in Hebrew,
“Bo tista-clu al omanute sha-li!” or “Come look at my art!”
Ditri is twice my size and had lived in the desert town of Be’er Sheva. He had borrowed the equivalent of nearly a thousand dollars from the local Romanian mob to finance and stock his stall in the market. The enterprise had been less than successful, and he had fled to Tel Aviv to avoid the consequences of owing dangerous people too much money. It is a very, very small country so they’d catch him eventually. He didn’t speak English so that our communication in my garbled Hebrew was limited, to say the least. His English was limited to “Yes,” “No” and “You are friend of Ditri”.
Ditri owns two pairs of clothing. He slept in the sand under one of the many beach pergolas. He was barred from Bet Ashanti for a reason that was never really explained to me. Greek mentioned that he was violent and crazy. Ditri was a bulky kid with curly blond hair and Mongoloid features. He was very loyal. Whenever someone tried to steal from our collection plate as the gangs of arsim often did, Ditri would chase then down and clobber them something awful. Maybe he is really violent, but it all works to my advantage.
During the heat of the day, we share a bottle of Coke-A-Cola and watch the waves crash gently on the beach. We spaced out slightly because of the heat exhaustion. I don’t know if I would call Ditri my friend per se, for I know precious little about him, but he serves nicely in our new symbiotic relationship as street hustlers.
My best customers are the American and English tourists vacationing in Israel for the summer. That’s because ‘the ZA show’ works best when your English is good. Most of them stay in Jerusalem, hyped up on some propaganda-induced spiritual experience. Jerusalem is the brainwashing capital of the world as far as I am concerned. I haven’t even stepped foot in it since I’d arrived back in the country. Secular Jews visiting for a week always run into some Dos or Hasid who will give them a crash course in the workings of the Old Testament and get them hooked.
The religious Jews, the Dosim and Hasidim, are on the national dole. These two groups are more offensive than the other groups of religious Jews because of their penchant for rock throwing and religious rioting. They neither pay taxes nor serve in the IDF. Most importantly, they never buy art. They don’t even stop to look. It’s good they don’t look because the Tetranomogram, the ‘Yod Hei Vav Hei’ gets incorporated quite bit and they flip shit over that.
Israelis do not have any true or actual need for a thing like pity, or street art.
It’s not that they don’t like art, but they really need some persuading to buy it from a street vendor. To make a living from a street stand, one must know how to work the crowds, create a market, and deliver a desirable product. This country has little time for charity cases, which is what I get perceived as most of the time.
My best sales pitch is to young girls who are fascinated with the American expatriate who loves a country no one seems to want to live in. Maybe that is a misinterpretation on my part. It just seems that each Israeli I talk to dreams of living in New York. While many people stop to examine our goods, the bulk of our money comes from the tourists and from the regulars. A regular is someone who lives or works by the tiyeled and will drop money anytime they see us out. To survive in this game, you need your regulars.
Ms. Svetlana Tchaadaev is perfect example of a regular. She’s an American-educated Russian trust-fund baby, which is just a code word for her daddy being a Russian mobster-robber baron. Ms. Tchaadaev carries on romantic flings with the artists and bohemians of the Tel Aviv subculture. Despite the fact that she is independently wealthy, she works as a flyer girl for Mike’s Blues Bar just up the beach. I’d been doing the same thing for Mike’s the night the Pasha club blew up.
Ms. Svetlana normally shares her beers and meals with me and always buys a picture. We try to steal yellow beach chairs from the lock up on Jerusalem Beach before they are chained together for the night. She sits with me and helps me in the hustle. She is shady as hell. Ditri never seems to like her. She always tries to get me to sell her my passport.
There are other far less problematic regulars, like curly, blonde-haired Ethiopian Lina, who even though she was born in village without running water or electricity seems more Americanized and hipper in fashion and sensibility then most Ashkenazi Israelis. Abby and Rachel are the ‘two birds’ from Golder’s Green, students of Rabbi Akiva Tatz. They bring young men from Jerusalem to meet with me to spar on issues of Talmud and religion. These are the people that keep Ditri and me in water, meal money and smokes. I am the sale-man, and he is the strongman. It is like any Russian business except in ours the salesman gets to call the shots.
Although I consider myself a Resistance Artist, the truth is I am barely making ends meet. On a terrific evening, generally a Friday or Saturday, I might bring in close to 200 shekels, the equivalent of fifty dollars. The money I save is earmarked to take my girl Anya out to dinner when she comes into the city to visit me. You might say I am becoming like a normal person. Bit by bit by bit, less like street trash. Anything left over is earmarked toward pens, sketchpads, vodka, ice-cold mayiim and some more cheap Noblisse cigarettes.
It is necessary to keep yourself looking presentable when you hustle. You can’t have the buyers think that you are begging for the money. It is important to communicate that you are a skilled artisan, a poor and hungry skilled artisan, but nonetheless incredibly talented. When I feel humorous, I compare my art to Van Gogh and Picasso when they traded paintings for food. I convince my customers they are making a serious investment and that one day these sketches I make will be worth a small fortune on the art market when I cut off my ear for a woman or go out against fascism in a hail of bullets.
My art stock consists of three types: political cartoons, dream-based consignment pieces, and commissions. “Give me any idea you have an I’ll draw it in 5 minutes.”
My favorite works are the political cartoons surrealistically drawn with black Uniball pens on 8 ½ by 11 papers. Normally they start with a cartoon version of myself blowing away the ‘pigs and capitalist traitors of the Iron heel.’ Then with that image somewhere in the page I drop in any number of red flag hammer and sickles, bare-naked women engaged in carnality or war or both. Then with a slightly finer pen, normally a Uniball Fine Point, I stencil in the message of the day, which could be anything really, but is normally anti-war, anti-state, anti-religious and Israeli issue themed. Finally, I write bold needlessly proactive messages. The phrases are always in English, but sometimes in a, shall we say artistic, rendition of the phrases in Hebrew, Russian, or Arabic.
There is little color in any of my work and the sketches take on a variety of subjects, but generally they were quite dark and violent in their depictions of Israeli or American social ills. Lots of ‘Join or Die’ type themes with the 14 big Israeli ethnic groups. If color does get used its either black or red Sharpie fill-ins, highlighter color-ins of people’s eyes, or gold etched inlay on edges to simulate shadow.
The lowest I go on these pieces is 20 Shek a pop, although Ditri made a bunch of Photostat copies one day from my archive sketch book, and I loosely colored a few in. These we sell for just 10 Shek, or a comparable offered price, because frankly, a photocopy costs Ditri only 10 Agarot to bang off.
My dream-based work is all in pencil on thicker matte paper far larger in size. These sketches are from the vivid dreams I used to have about Mike Washington and the Pale City. The gun battles against the screaming Zombie hordes, the underground railroad, the flying machines, the redheaded girl, the Old Man and his game. All of these take at least a day to render. Since traffic is so slow during daylight, I fashion most of these pieces then.
These sell almost right away for 100 Sheks or more. I can crack out the political stuff on demand, but these take longer as I have to remember them. Most of the customers fixate on the controversial statements of the political work. It takes a while, an hour even of conversation before a customer turns their attention to the dream pieces. If it was a good conversation and the offer price exceeds 100, I never haggle hard over the sale. It’s all just small talk.
What were all these so-called good conversations about? Well, I guess they were kind of about philosophy, or politics, or theology, or vibes, because what I knew about any of those things. Maybe they were also about art and making art, in a sense about freedom. About so much carnage in such a small place. About Judaism, maybe the heat and pressure were speaking for me a lot of the time.
It would have been impossible to be talking that summer with all that Intifada going on unless we were also speaking about the future of Jews and Palestinians.
I don’t think whatever I learned, I didn’t then bounce off someone else later in the day. I think maybe all the cigarettes, all the heat, all the violence was bearing down on us. I felt that maybe they all said things to me in English, they wouldn’t say to others in Hebrew, Arabic, or Russian. I was the perfect outsider. A young, skinny vagabond totally out of place, yet, with the passport of the empire. From the economic capital of the world. Speaking in Amerkanski. Speaking in tongues. Speaking behind art, so none of it was real enough to fear entrapment, but it was so novel, it could be harbored, it could be trusted. These perfect strangers went to bed with me, they put me on their couches, they brought me to their villages and military outposts. They invited me into their homes. Perhaps, because I am not threatening. Perhaps, because I am like a lion cub, you just don’t feel alarmed. The Resistance Art stand circulates all over, and with these little talks, these little one night all night conversations; I develop a primitive analysis of the nation I seek to be a part of. Then, I repeat the analysis back to more strangers. I sell a few more sketches, I sleep around. I move from place to place, with Tel Aviv as my base. Sleeping and eating in what is little more than a youth shelter. When they cry, I cry, when they smile, I smile, I smile and laugh along with all these different strangers. And the pressure builds, the heat builds, the pressure and heat and make 5,000 years of imagined identity speak though me: and I end up saying, we have more in common with the Arabs than the Americans. We have more in common with the Persians than the British. We are not colonists; we are from here. We are not Europeans; we are from these lands. If we continue to war with the Palestinians, we war with our selves. This place is a dangerous war colony, based on how it was designed. How it mutated with American money and ideas. Our solution is to be confederated with the Arabs and Persians; our only salvation as a people can come by an identity, a consciousness that is rooted in our Middle Eastern Judean soul. Reject that soul, we are a war base for the empire. We are only serving New Rome. I sometimes I talked about other things, well maybe often I made small talk. I do not speak Hebrew and Arabic, or Russian. I try and speak from my soul. I try and reflect on the enormity of my people’s history; we cannot win the war we are fighting; we war with our own people. The Palestinians are our people. You cannot win a war against yourself.
I make and sell Art, and it’s the way I sustain these kinds of conversations.
I have other artists work too. The twenty odd pieces always on display are generally half mine and half consigned stock, other things give me to try and sell. The consigned pieces are from a variety of young Israeli artists who admire my tenacity at salesmanship and are curious to see what prices their work might fetch on the open market in Israel. They were generous enough to let me keep 30% of the sale, for they could see I was destitute. Most of them go to art school in Haifa and my trade inspires them of the future they hope for in Williamsburg and DUMBO once their Sheroot Lummi commitments are finished. Just under half my earnings come from selling the Israeli’s their own children’s art. By the end of June, I was representing over twelve Israeli artists, one Ethiopian, three Arabs, two Russians, three Mizrahi, two Ashkenazim, and one dos, the derogatory word for the religious now added to my vernacular.
Commissions are where my living truly comes from. Most of the time it is a goods-for-services swap situation. I paint a small mural for a haircut or charcoal portrait for a bath when I am hitchhiking about Galilee. I am just ‘eking out a very base existence, but Bet Ashanti put a roof over my head and two meals a day in my belly.
The staff there thinks that I work as an overnight busboy; otherwise, I’d have to be in by midnight. Because the other kids are such freeloaders, they appreciate my working and let me slide. My entire cycle has been reversed. It’s too hot to do anything during the day and I can’t stand the sun anyway.
I sleep on the bottom bunk in one of the two boy’s rooms along with about twelve other kids. Most of them don’t speak too much English. Those that do hold day jobs and I rarely see them.
Bet Ashanti is a place for runaways, misfits and ghetto trash. It has been associated with a series of scandals over the years involving, but not limited to accusations of drug dealing on behalf of the residents, accusations of child molestation on behalf of the residents, high rates of Army desertion on behalf of the residents upon reaching age 18, and it had recently been in the papers when its owner and founder was accused of raping a 17 year-old female resident. That most of the boys are in street gangs, that no one goes to school, and that the mayor of Tel Aviv was under some public pressure to shut the operation down, nothing seemed any worse here than say, sleeping on a street while hungry.
As far as I can tell there are a lot of rules, but only three that truly matter. The first is no substance abuse, at least not on the premises. No drugs or drinking anywhere near Bet Ashanti. But these kids are all drug addicts and smoke hash all day on the beach. The second rule is-no fighting. No one is allowed to fight anywhere near the Shanti House. But that’s also a stupid rule for kids who are members of street gangs and all manner of shady shit. I watched the Greek break some guy’s jaw in a prizefight he took me to a day ago. The last rule is-no stealing. People are not allowed to take stuff belonging to Bet Ashanti or the kids that live there. One would think these rules sort of go without saying, but in fact there is seldom a time when these kids aren’t doing drugs, fighting, and stealing.
By evening I had only seen a few of my regulars. Greek, the Russian kid from Bet Ashanti had dropped by to show me his new girlfriend. Svetlana had passed by on a flyer run. There were other familiar faces, but no regulars. It is very cool for an evening in mid-July. Business has been good, and the collection pot is up to about 90 shekels. I had made an additional 100 shekels yesterday that I hadn’t gotten to blow yet on one of my girls and the still water. The colorful paper notes were tucked neatly in my billfold. New Israeli shekels, the good old ‘N-I-S’ currency looks like fucking monopoly money to me.
***
The evening is coming to a near close, as far as any so-called “working” is concerned. The bands have stopped playing and the crowd has thinned out to a trickle. Drunken revelers are dancing in the moonlight. There is a fight going on across the street. As it nears 2 am, I begin to consider closing the shop. I have close to 150 shekels in my pocket, a small comparative fortune. I stand up to stretch. My hands are sore from the non-stop drawing I had been doing all evening. I pop my knuckles and light up a Noblisse. This is perhaps my thirtieth stoag of the day. I tend to smoke I great deal when I am on the job. Placing the crumpled green packet into the cargo pocket of my ripped and baggy khakis, I palm Ditri a fifty note for his troubles.
“Thank you, Ze-Hariah,” said Ditri, for to him this was a great deal of money.
“You are friend of Ditri.”
“Take it easy, big guy.”
The big oaf gives me a hearty pat on the pack that almost knocks me flat on my face.
“Ditri now to sleeping,” he says. I had to hand it to him. His English is improving, as is my Hebrew. I was starting to understand phrases and bits of conversation and could get my point across if I had to. Most Israelis learned English in high school and could hold a conversation. It was the Arabs and the Russians who refused to learn English. There were exceptions but few that I encountered could understand what I was saying. Ditri bargained for me in Russian, but Arabic was lost on both of us, which is odd him being half Bedouin. I had recently considered doing the sign in Arabic and Russian to broaden my clientele but kept forgetting to ask someone to translate it. Ditri was virtually illiterate and could neither read nor write in Hebrew or Russian.
Svetlana could do it for me in Russian, but she despised anything that revealed her actual and not imagined heritage. She would feign ignorance to not speak or write her native tongue. She had invited me for late night drinks at the Blues Bar and I had made enough money to easily cover my expenses for the week, cigarettes, vodka, and more art supplies.
I am quite proud of myself for making so much money and decided to celebrate at the Blues Bar over a pint of Maccabi, which isn’t as good as the piss water Gold Star and can’t hold a candle to a Stella, but I guess I want to be down with the tribe. It is close to 3 in the morning. Ditri has found some corner to fall asleep in. I am just putting some last touches on a large pencil sketch.
I make a final count of my money and start packing up the pieces into my bag. I start with the 8 ½ by 11’s, peeling the tape off the back that hold them to the enormous tabletop I use as a display board. I have neatly inserted three of the pieces into my binder when I hear a voice behind me.
“So, what exactly are you selling these people?” Her voice sounds like old Brooklynese.
“I make and sell Art,” I respond without looking up, “the finest street art in Tel Aviv if not the entire Western World. Except for maybe Barcelona where the street art is well, fucking good also.”
I turn around to face her and lord, is she beautiful with long flowing brown hair and a smile to disarm any man. I catch her chest like a second later, but that smile caught me off guard for a minute, because I just don’t really look at that in a girl ever.
She is just a little shorter than me and looks like a natural hustler. She looks elegant and she can hold her shit down hard like a killer. Like a stripper putting herself through law school, things aren’t always what you degrade them to be.
“It is pretty good, kiddo. You’re wasting time being in Tel Aviv, but you knew that of course.”
“I was about to close! You’re lucky you caught me. I wouldn’t want a girl like you going home without a piece of Resistance Art.”
“I bet, you say cheesy shit like that to girls all night and they throw their phone numbers at you because the color of your passport is dark blue.”
“Actually, I leave for Cairo in the morning, and this might be your last chance to buy one.”
“Right. Cause it’s not like you’re here every single night of the week,” she responds smugly, “and incidentally the Taba border crossing with Egypt is closed at the moment because they found four tunnels across Rafah, they were carting rockets in through.”
I laughed with her for a second. At each other and ourselves. “You’re just really, really absolutely charming miss what can I call you?”
“Maya. You may call me Maya Soriya Rose.”
“Is Rosen short for Rosen?”
“It’s just Rose.”
“Zachariah Artstein, is what I call myself.”
She looks dead at me and smirks, “I don’t think that’s your real name at all.”
“I don’t think you really told me yours.”
A pause between us.
“What’s in name? Buy some fucking art,” I laugh.
“How much for that one?”
She points to a pencil sketch of 40 rebels holding the walls of Jerusalem with swords and rifles and spears against a massive army of the undead. At the center of the drawing stands a bloodied fighter waving a grey banner as he empties his pistol into swine depicted police forces attacking the rebels within the city.
“That one’s called ‘The Tragic Little Hero’s Last Stand at the Golden Gates’.”
“You made that name up just now on the spot.”
“No, I swear I put a lot of thought into naming them because of how, truly deep they really all are.”
“No, you just made that name up now. I mean it’s good. I’ve seen your work before, but I never got a chance to get close enough to look and talk to you about it.”
“Yeah, the crowds are getting bigger and bigger these days.”
“Crowds? I was referring to your seemingly constant flirtation with mindless frekhot.”
“Flirtation? I just want them to feed me and fuck me.”
“If you were just a little prettier, I’d swear I met a long-lost brother,” she laughs.
“Quite. It’s a smallish tribe though. I’ll tell you what, you tell me your real name and I’ll give you the piece for any price you declare.
“My real name eh, for a discount? I thought you were a businessman, Zach.”
“I’m in the business of telling people things they only thought they’d get to hear in movies and romantic novels.”
“Where does the resistance come in?” she says noticing my sign.
“I’m resisting starvation.”
“So, what you’re selling is communist-propaganda-meets-an-elaborate-pick-up-line?”
“Yeah, that sums it up if you wish to cheapen and devalue nearly everything, I believe into a sound bite.”
“I see you have this speech carefully worked out.”
“Maya, you don’t spy on me, do you?”
“Someone as ravishing as me gets spied upon but does not spy on people herself. I’m just acutely honed at deductive reasoning.”
“So, you’re a psychic detective moonlighting as a stripper, eh?”
“Maybe I’m just a law student moonlighting as psychic detective who likes to take my clothing off.”
“Yeah, so what’s your real name, Maya Rose?”
“A better question is what you’re really doing in Tel Aviv. You know, when you’re not being a hipster.”
“Darling, I’m glad you asked. I think that there is no such thing as the devil, but if there were, and the devil was the head of a large, militarized state, his greatest trick would be making people believe they had something other than themselves to blame for the evils of the world. The wool pulled over our eyes and iron heel upon our necks are kept there by our belief that we shouldn’t do anything; that the fault lies with some huge and powerful other and not in our own lack of will.”
“Spoken like someone with soft, soft American hands. I don’t know what any of that means. Give me something more definitive, Zachariah, ‘cause I’ve heard this shpiel before. It’s 3 am and you’ve got only a couple minutes to make this sale.”
“One need not make the masses aware, nor arm them nor give them doctrines on dreams that do not feed their children. The working people who have long been taught to hate and kill each other over skin tones, invisible friends, and flag patterns don’t need to feel unity beyond the communities in which they live. But if these could see such a stand and a story demonstrated for their children’s children to remember and repeat; then they would have that one crucial thing the workers republic will be founded on.”
“Controlling the means of production?”
“No. The new republic is a thing to be founded on autonomy and hope.”
“I assume this is where you hope to make your little stand.”
“Here’s what I know. Give these Palestinians a little land. Re-absorb the Palestinian Diaspora into a combined Jewish-Arab nation andseparate our shul from our state. No Rabbis and Imams allowed in Knesset. Accept that being America’s whore is far worse than failing to retain the ‘Jewish character’ of this nation. Since the Palestinians are a political football, the other Arab states use to keep us weak and the other Arab states hate the Palestinians anyway, a Pal-Isra solution makes sense since all Christians basically hate Jews So in a nutshell, I’m here ready for the revolution.”
“First off, my Zachariah, you’re damn well divorced from the political reality of the world in which you live. But that I can dig. Israel can barely support those living here now. There isn’t enough land and there isn’t enough water.”
“Propaganda dear.”
“Second, this is the JEWISH homeland. We can’t just turn it into another secular country ‘cause we’d lose the one place Jews can turn to escape persecution.”
“Rhetoric.”
“Third, what makes you think these people actually want to share the land in the first place?”
“Because in the end they’ll realize that it’s better to live side by side than to keep killing each other’s children in a turf war no one cares about but your average New York Times reader.”
“It’s been over sixty years of war, and no one seems to have learnt that lesson yet.”
“This can’t go on for much longer.”
“I beg to differ. We can kill each other indefinitely. The US will never turn off the gun spigot and the Palestinians can hold their asymmetric war another couple hundred years unless the Israelis do something to make them look like Germans, which they won’t.”
“My Kazakhi girlfriend advocates gassing them all at camps in the Negev.”
“Says something about your tastes in women.”
“Listen, I came to Israel to start a new life. I believe that in the end there’s got to be some way to make peace in this land. If I didn’t believe that then I would have to leave.
“There are other reasons to be here like fast girls, nice beaches and a good hustle. How can you be so naive about the world and live in Israel, the most divided nation on the planet? Not exactly the best place to demonstrate peace and tolerance. If ya’ had not noticed, we live in a state of constant and unending war.”
“Where better for me to be? In America people don’t understand the concept of fighting for an ideal. They’re fat with the glut of their own apathy.”
“Fair enough, but enough people want war in Israel to make this conflict go on for decades more. There’s never been any actual peace in this country. It has been a big non-stop war for the last sixty odd years. We’re sitting on the wall of a war field, a vast experimental powder keg upon which our kind gather half their number.”
“And one day it’ll explode.”
“Explode? Maybe you do not watch the news, but it explodes nearly every day.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I’m not sure I do.”
“Before there can be peace, there needs to be a conflict big enough to show these people why they shouldn’t fight indefinitely. Most Israeli kids don’t want to dress in a uniform and impose curfews and checkpoints on the Palestinians. I find it real hard to believe that every Palestinian wants to be a brick thrower or a shahiid. Everyone wants peace, but all the leaders can think of is how to get a bigger piece.”
“The Jews never went out and deliberately murdered civilians.”
“Except in the case of Baruch Kappel Goldstein, Sabra and Shatilla. OR Deir Yassin! Suicide bombing is counter-productive to the Palestinian cause, but it’s the only method they feel that works. They have ten thousand rocks for every Merkava Tank we have. For every ten thousand trained soldiers in the Tsvah they have one young person willing to blow themselves up as a martyr.”
“And you want to give in to them. You want to hand then the keys to the temple and expect them to let us live here.”
“I didn’t say we give the land away. I said, we share it because it’s not fully anymore ours than it is theirs.”
“Ha. Priceless American idealism. I agree with you, Zachariah in my heart and principles, believe me I do. I just don’t see a possibility of hope for these people.”
“We are these people.”
At that moment she looked at me and smiled again like when I first saw her. There was a moment of silence as we stared at each other anticipating each other’s response. She reached into her pocket and took out a purple NIS fifty note.
“I don’t know if you’ve completely sold me, but here are some props for having the right ideals. The real name’s Emma but don’t call me that in front of other people when and if we hang out again.”
I removed the piece from the display board. I handed it to her and her eyes ran the gamut of its details.
“I know I’m giving you far less than it might be worth.”
“Throw your number in and I’ll pretend I’m not disappointed.”
I rolled it up and handed it to her. She smiles and hands me a business card and writes a cell phone number on the back of it. I look over the card Emma called Maya Rose handed me which looks like a club flyer, laminated small blue and white. It said in English: -THE DEEP-.
“What’s The Deep?”
“It’s a nightclub. Drop by on a Thursday and we’ll make sure to sort it out.”
“Sort what out?”
“If we are working for the same side of the problem and the cause. It was nice to meet you, Mr. Adonaev.”
What a lady. How did she know me by my government name?
***
I have a three-day rule when I get a girl’s number. It’s from the movie Swingers. You can’t seem eager. So, there went Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. I sold every piece I had that weekend. I hung out in a café in Yaffo with Anya all day Tuesday and called Emma that night. She told me she was running around promoting at a ton of parties and could not give me any attention. She said it was best for me just to come to the Deep alone on Thursday at about midnight-thirty. Then she could hang out with me all night.
I had made plans to move out of Bet Ashanti. I wanted to see more of the country, and the terms of the bread and a bed were constraining logistically. And I was tired of the war of attrition going on to keep my property from being stolen. So, I said good-bye to Gilead and the Greek and packed up all my gear and left. I moved into a room at the Mughrabi Hostel on Allenby Street five blocks from the Opera Towers. I rented a cot for 33 NIS sheks a night, which was manageable.
I closed early that Thursday night so I could make it to the club at some reasonable hour. For me closing early was closing any time before 11. No one even hits the clubs until around midnight in Israel. In New York you’ve done three bars already by this time. I suppose it’s the heat that keeps the nightlife hard, cool and strictly nocturnal.
The Deep is in the heart of Tel Aviv near the monolithic white tower of the Ministry of the Interior. It was an underground hotspot nestled on a dark side street. It was known for its wild queer after hours parties but was now run and operated by Black Israelites. Emma worked as a promoter and a partner. For every 25 people she brought to the club, her boss Andrew put five hundred shekels in her pocket. Apparently, Miss Maya was the top promoter. She was able to bring in roughly 125 people every Thursday. As I arrived at the entrance, a well-dressed Israeli Ashkenazi stood at the door with the guest list. A group of drunken Russian frekhot was trying to get into the club free of charge. They argued in Hebrew, as I waited behind them to get in. The street was empty besides the girls, the gatekeeper and me. A Black male with a diamond earring in his left ear emerged from behind the red curtain. At first, I assumed he was Ethiopian, until I heard him talk.
“WHAT the hell are these trifling bitches goin’ on about now?”
It was the first time I had heard a trace of an Ebonics accent in over a year.
“Excuse me,” I interject.
“Can I help you, cracka?” says a young black thug with the enormous diamond earring from the land of Zirconium.
I hadn’t heard that since New York.
“I’m looking for Maya Rose, she said I was on the list.”
Like a fabulous ghetto St. Peter this Middle Eastern gangster looks at his list scornfully. He shakes his head looking tired. And then Maya emerged from behind the curtain.
“Dizzy, this one’s with me,” she says to him and takes my hand. Past the black velvet rope we go down into a catacomb below the streets into a place that was once a blast shelter. The cavernous basement is packed wall to wall with Israelis who are black and brown. This bunker is dimly lit with red lights and strobes flashing to the beat of the music. There are huge black couches against the walls and white swings installed at the edge of the dance floor. The DJ is spinning Old School American Hip-Hop music.
I take a seat at the bar with the young woman allegedly named Maya Rose. Other than her I’m the only alleged Caucasian in the place.
“What are you drinking?” she asks me.
“Gold Star.”
She waves down and whispers something to the bartender. I try to pass her some NIS shekel ten spot coins, but she looks at me like I’m crazy.
“Beers on Andrew,” she says.
“Andrew is the guy who runs this place?”
“Indeed.”
“An American?”
“Israelite. Andrew, and half the other people who work for this club are Black Israelites from a little city in the Negev named Demona where they keep the nuclear weapons.”
“You mean the Ethiopian Jews.”
“No, there’s an enormous difference between an Ethiopian and a Black Israelite. One’s humble and from Africa and one will call you a cracker and has a nasty jump shot.”
“Where did they come from?”
“Chicago mostly. That was about forty years ago. There’s maybe a couple thousand of them
living in Israel now. Some like Andrew have neither Israeli nor American citizenship. The state of Israel still doesn’t believe they are in any senses actually the Jews.’
“State of Israel doesn’t believe a lot of people are Jews.”
“It deports them whenever it can. Andrew built up the Deep’s rep for the past year or so as a haven for Israeli Blacks who want to rock out. Ethiopians don’t have too many of their own places and I’m sure you’ve seen what happens when a Black guy dances with a White or Russian girl.”
We drink and dance a bit more and I call her Maya in front of couple dozen ‘Black Israelites’ I get introduced to. She introduces me to everyone as Zachariah. I was thrilled to see something like this here. I’d seen some racist shit in the past few weeks of Tel Aviv nightlife.
I finally get introduced to “Andrew the Hustler”, the man behind this little operation who introduces himself as Avinadav. In a manic little rant about names while rolling up a spliff, he tells me ‘Everyone calls him Andrew, but he’s been thinking, dreaming really, that it’s better to use his ‘Hebrew name’ and not his ‘Babylon slave name.’ He is related to a good many people here. He is the big brother who came to the big city and made good for the rest of them. He comes across as generous, maybe to a fault.
It was really after hours now, like 5 am, when very few people can be coherent; when Maya and Andrew called Avinadav, and this Jamaican Rasta guy Bradshaw and I are hanging out in the courtyard across from the club as Andrew rolls up another spliff. It was the first time I’d seen weed being smoked in Israel.
“I mean, I’m not saying that a Black guy can’t go to the GSPOT or the GAT RAMON or any other jump off rave psyche trance party. It happens; it does. BUT, if they wanna kick game to some Ashkenazi or Russia sister then its problems nine of ten. I mean shit, this Eretz isn’t South Africa or Southside bad, I mean it’s not legislated. I’m just sayin’ all my girlfriends not from the community in Demona are Yemeni girls. They know about being Black before the Ethiopians and us got here in the 70’s. Shit, they think of themselves as Black. I think of um like Puerto Rican actually. I mean the Black man will always be everybody’s favorite nigger. But the Palestinians are givin’ us a run. I mean racism ain’t shit next to holy war. I want chu’ to know I’m not fucked up and high and I’m just wired a bit ‘cause I couldn’t sleep last night. I mean I talk, talk, talk but I feel like you got some shit to say kid.”
Both Andrew and Maya call me kid or kiddo, but neither is much older than me. Maya is 18 and Andrew is 26.
“There’s hate based on race and a hate based on religion, but those are just pretexts for political leaders to consolidate powers. Likud and Avodah and the governing coalition can play ball for years by keeping everybody divided. I mean the Russians, Yemenis and Ethiopians all live in the same shit neighborhoods and go to same run-down hospitals, but they can’t wait to fight each other over any stupid thing. The Palestinian Christians, Palestinians in Gaza, Palestinians in the West Bank and the so-called ‘Arab Israelis’ are not even different peoples, and they can’t even work together on the uprising. Bedouins and Druze are Arabs but have more in common with the coalition government than with each other. For a nation of eight million there’s quite a bit of disunity.”
“We unified over beatin’ back the other Arab states. Even Palestinians true hate the other Arabs. The Jordanians butchered um in ’71. The Lebanese butchered um in ’83, and any person with a brain knows they aren’t gonna give the Palestinians a country once the Jews get ‘driven into the sea’. Egypt would take the Negev and the Coast until Ashkelon. Jordan would take the West Bank to the Sea, and Syria would swallow up what was left. Like a football those Palestinians get thrown around to be a thorn in our side. Fools.”
“Nu, you consider yourself an Israelite then?” I ask him.
“Even if they don’t consider me one. I mean I ain’t even got US citizenship. I grew up in Demona. I was born in Demona and I ain’t even got a valid todat zeeoot. I’m a resident alien. Don’t even get me started on our troubles. It was worse before. The state has at least somewhat accepted we ain’t goin back to America.”
The brother with the diamond earring and black suit whose name I didn’t catch joined us. He was one of Andrew’s partners and also a cousin. He’d called me cracka when I arrived. They looked alike, same build and complexion. His name was Disrael, Dizzy for short. Andrew kept with these manic, politico-spiritual rants and his cousin looked tired and wanted to cash out. The Jamaican; Ian Bradshaw and Maya barely said a word. They just listened. I guess she was sizing things up. Andrew was both articulate and wildly knowledgeable about theology and political science. Maya never got drunk even though she never stopped drinking.
By sunrise Andrew, Maya, and I are having breakfast at dawn in an outdoor café on lower Allenby Street.
“So, are you a change maker then? That’s a damn good thing ‘cause I’m a change maker too. Something has to give or break because it can’t be like this much longer. To fathom one day one of us bringing a kid up in this balagan. Unthinkable. I mean the three of us, we ain’t gonna see change. We’ll see some fight, see a lot of death, but nothin’ we can believe in. But you gotta lay a foundation for the future generations, gotta give your kids something better to reach from if they weren’t born that tall.”
Andrew chuckles, “But really now, both of you need to try and call me Avinadav even if the others won’t.”
I nod and light one of Emma’s cigarettes. Did I call her Maya in front of ‘Avinidav’ even when he called her Emma? Like me she responded quickly enough to both.
“So, what brought you back to Israel, Maya?” I asked her.
“I’m not sure really. People are obsessed with this notion that God has the power to dole out property rights,” says Maya, “but I’m mostly hear for the beaches and nightlife.
“Sure-as a pillar of salt once was a woman, God willed this land to us,” interjects Avinadav, “If you ask some Israelis, they’ll tell you that God promised us this land. Ask a Muslim they’ll say they’ve always been here, and it is Allah’s will that they remain. Christians want to take the whole planet anyway. Muslims too, but pay attention, God gave us this stretch to be for the Hebrews.”
“Hebrews?” I ask.
“The title of our twelve tribes taken collectively.”
“You mean the Jews?” questions Maya.
“That’s not the proper way we’re called,” he retorts.
“I don’t get it. It’s semantics. Jews, Israelites, Hebrews. What’s the difference?” she says.
“When the tribes came back from exile in Babylon there were only three tribes left, Judah, Levi and Benjamin. The rest were lost in Babylon, which means they intermarried, got inter-raped, converted or never came back. Judah, which is also the tribe that Yeshua the messiah and King David come from, rose to prominence. Levi was the priestly tribe and Benjamin, they all had red hair and now they look Ethiopian. When the Romans fought the Hebrews around 60 CE in the Bar Kokhba Revolt and wiped out twelve Roman legions, the Romans knew these weren’t a people to fuck around with. Judah was the largest tribe so when Masada and later Betar finally fell and the raping and second temple burning and Diaspora all began, they derogatorily called our proud Hebrew people the ‘Yahuds’ or Jews. It was like nigger, a slur imposed in bondage. Now think about the etymology. ‘ISH,” is kind of like. “ChildISH”, kind of like a child. “JewISH”, kind of like a JEW. I’m a Hebrew. You two are Hebrew. Not only is Jewish a watered-downdegrading title, but it also implies that we are all from the tribe of Yehuda. But we could be from Gad, or Manasseh, or Ephraim or Asher or any of ‘um. It’s like the Nigerians. WHERE THE FUCK DID, THEY GET THAT NAME FROM, I WONDER? The damn ever-colonizing Europeans. The Romans gave us that name. But it is not our true name.”
“I don’t really care whose land G-d says it is as long as the violence eventually stops,” cuts in Maya.
“Do you still believe in a G-d, Maya?” Avinadav asks her point blank.
“Every other Friday, I reconsider the matter.”
“Pardon my candor, but what has G-d done lately for us?” I mutter.
“That’s a loaded question if I ever heard one,” she says.
“Yeah, but let’s answer it anyway,” Avinadav says.
“Well Zachariah, I suppose not a whole lot. But if there is a G-d, who are we to interpret Its actions?” Maya puts in.
“Its?” I ask.
“Hey, if you guys wanna rename whole religious ethnic groups, I feel free to de-masculinize the almighty.”
“That’s fine, fuck the dumb shit” smiles Avinadav.
“Look, to me G-d isn’t like a be-all-end-all safety net. You don’t get blessed by just believing in him, It. You must trust Hashem works through the actions of good people more than miracles,” Maya responds.
“AND surely there will be more miracles coming!” declares Avinadav banging on the table.
“I’m not ruling out the existence of a G-d. All I’m saying is that maybe It’s given up on us,” says Maya.
“How do you figure?” Avinadav demands again attracting the attention of other people in the café more for being Black and loud than for just being loud.
“What if G-d decided humanity just wasn’t worth all the grief we cause. What if it looks at us as a failed experiment and stopped devoting time to divine interventions and the like?” Maya says.
“I’m with that opinion,” I say, “I don’t find it so hard to believe.”
“So, you think G-d has just bailed on us?” Avinadav asks us.
“Yep,” she smirks.
“Don’t blaspheme and sound ridiculous at the same time,” Avinadav mumbles in a grin.
“Well let’s not hold our breath on that one. I’m just doing my part working on that miracle in case God holds out.”
“What kind of miracle, kid?” Avinadav asks.
“The miracle of a revolution done right.”
“I like that. The kid’s articulate and totally insane,” Avinadav weighs in.
“I like that about Zach, too,” she says.
“Most people do I bet. Do you ever wonder the purpose of it all, Maya?” Avinadav asks.
“The purpose of what?”
“The purpose of G-d sending this kid our way?”
“Guys, I’m really not that much younger than either of you.”
“It’s totally random. He just wants to nail me,” she smiles, “There’s no purpose, Andrew.”
“Avinadav.”
“Sorry.”
“Guys, I’m sitting right here.”
“If there is no purpose and there’s no greater meaning to it all, it is pointless to be alive. I mean the things he says are the things this country needs to hear right now,” Avinadav says to Maya.
“He’s just young and you believe in Hashem too aggressively. I’m a cynic, from Spain by way of Montreal. I like watching you two talk though.”
“Cynics are fallen idealists frustrated with the failure of their original ideals,” I interject.
“Excuse me?” she utters, “I would like to say I still believe in the potential for a better world, but lately I’ve begun to doubt whether humans would actually tolerate a better world.”
“Our kind is pretty fucked,” Avinadav reflects openly.
“Only mostly fucked. There’s always a potential for change making,” I say.
“I’m not discounting the fact that there are a few good people out there, but certainly not the majority. And few like less than a dozen in the country that would join what you are talking about. Most people just want to go about their lives and not have to think big thoughts about brave new worlds and the governing factors behind the human nature and if God taps people to participate in history or a higher plan. You’re making demands that never get answered, Zach. Sure, people come up with relatively comprehensible concepts explaining certain things about our existence, but even Socrates was working in the shadows of a cave,” Maya responds.
“What’s your point?” I ask.
“It’s hard to keep the attention of the masses. There is something wrong with the world, but the good people, the rebels you hope to find aren’t interested in employing the right tactics for change,” Maya continues.
“What tactics would you employ?” Avinadav asks me.
“The most radical ones I could find,” I retort.
“Such as?”
“You know, something that tells the people that the rebels aren’t fucking around. Like kidnapping the representative or majority shareholder of the McDonald’s corporation in Israel and blowing his brains out on national television.”
They stared at me for a second, then at each other and then they went on.
“Spoken like a true fucking zealot,” Avinadav states.
“And what the fuck would that accomplish,” she asks me.
“It would tell Israelis we won’t eat the processed-treif shit America sends us to chow on,” Avinadav chimes in coldly. Maya takes off her glasses and gives us both a ‘you’re both talking like terrorists’ look as she lights another cigarette.
“And then for your second little miracle?” she says under her breath.
“We’d take the old city of Jerusalem with a few hundred fighters then proceed to blow up the Kotel, Dome of the Rock, and Church of the Holy Sepulcher so nobody had any misconceptions about how unholy this war was gonna get,” I say coldly.
“That one I like more,” Maya says, “And for a grand finale Jesus could back with a fleet of gold-plated tanks to relieve your hunted and abandoned fighters?”
“We’d retreat into the Negev, then deeper into Sinai to regroup, unite with the million Bedouin in the desert and capture the major southern cities with the aid of Iran. Then via a coordinated general strike and massive defection within the army, we’d take the central districts and cut the country in half before closing in on the capital.”
“Ah, well Mr. Hubert, what would you do about the Palestinians and other Arab states that would love to hit us while we fight amongst ourselves,” she chuckles, “Aided by the Islamic Republic of Iran, of course.”
“Who’s Mr. Hubert? I’m quite insulated from Western pop cultural references,” says Avinadav glibly.
“She’s mocking me again. He wrote Dune.”
“Dune?” he shrugs.
“Islamic Star Wars,” she says, “He’s American after all..”
“Oh. Missed that entirely,” he responds, “Go on.”
“Well, it wouldn’t work unless Palestinians were involved from the beginning within the rebel leadership. We’d have to smash Fatah and their Al ’Aksa Martyrs Brigade because they’re secular, corrupt puppets. We’d have to eliminate Islamic Jihad because they’re too fundamentalist or at least drive them into merging with Hamas.”
They are both staring at me speechless.
“Our obvious ally the socialist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine would help us hem in Hamas. Hamas, who will soon emerge as the premiere representative of the Palestinian Intifada will have to be brought to the bargaining table by pressure from a revitalized Popular Front and their patron, the Islamic Republic of Iran. Hamas, ironically enough, will be our closest ally, the only Palestinian player to fully mobilize their people for this endgame.
“When we ‘smash’ the IDF, Knesset, and American interests, of course,” utters Maya.
“As I said, after the south and the Sinai are in the hands of the rebels, much of the IDF will desert to the confederated rebels after the general strike. The Knesset and their American supporters will order the IDF to end the strike, which will seal the fate of the Jewish State, America’s 51st.
“How the hell could you even dream of allying with Hamas! They want to kill us all.” Maya scoffs
“Because they’re led by Muslim fundamentalists, which means they won’t be co-opted by the secular Arab dictatorships that are American proxies. They hate the leaders of Iraq, Egypt, Syria, and the Emirates more than they hate the Israelis,” Avinadav cuts in.
“And that’s sort of my point. “You want to unite a lot of people who are fundamentalists about what they believe,” I say.
“Then like magic, and a lot of miracle magic is involved in your plan, these groups fall in line into a leadership council, then a governing body called Pal’Israel?” Maya scowls in disbelief.
“Well, it would be ‘Pal’Isra’ if you wanted to be more unified in the national title,” states Avinadav, “but everyone knows that’s just called Zion anyway. That will never fly with the Arabs though, calling it Zion I mean.”
“Then it will be called the Confederation of the Middle East,” Avinadav declares.
“What’s in a name?” Maya smirks, “When we have such wild imaginations and so much unused magic.”
“Well, anyway whatever you build on the Hebrew side you gotta build in Gaza and the West Bank as well as anywhere with large Palestinian and Jewish Diasporas like New York, Baghdad, Paris, Dearborn and Tehran. When the revolution comes it will begin with direct action, proceed to a general strike, a revolt in the defense forces and then a rapid move to realign the new nation with Iran, China, and Latin America.”
“So, like Beirut in 82?” she says.
“More like Tehran in ‘79 but replace Shi’a fundamentalism with populist nationalism founded in human rights and democracy.”
“I think it’s sexy when he says violent radical shit, don’t you?” Maya says to Avinadav.
“Real sexy,” Avinadav says.
Andrew the Hustler is thinking hard watching a younger whiter version of himself talk dangerously. Maya has put back on her huge black sunglasses and is sipping on her coffee while smoking a Marlboro menthol cigarette. A waiter brings out a large platter of hardboiled eggs, a pitcher of orange juice, another of Turkish coffee and something sort of like hash browns and Israeli salad, which is diced cucumbers, tomatoes, and onions. We’d all be eating from the same plate.
“What’s the plan then, boys? You’ve fallen in love. I can see it in your eyes,” Maya says to us.
“Well then, Zachariah. You got some big crazy fucking ideas. G-d sent you to us. That I know. I got the means! She has got the will when she’s willing. We can talk all morning but fuck the dumb shit, as I like to say. What you playin’ with here?”
I am smoking deeply from one of Emma’s Marlboros. Just like London, ain’t no Newport pleasure in the Holy Land.
“I’ve been dreaming for a long time about making a stand, about a small group of people showing the world that we need not live our lives like slaves lashed to a rolling engine of war. This I know in my heart. If we can rally the wretched of this broken land behind a banner of unity, then a land of tears and blood will yield the milk and honey promised.”
“Bottom line. What’s step?” Avinadav asks.
“I don’t follow.”
“What’s the first course of action that might involve us and what’s your final objective?” she asks.
“I need unrestricted access to the Deep for meetings and storage of equipment. I need multiple safe houses around the country to recruit from. And your help designing and translating a basic manifesto into Hebrew, Russian, and Palestinian Arabic.”
“You can have meetings in the club, just do not run up the bar. We can get your places to stay in every major city as long as it’s short term,” says Andrew.
“But what do you want long-term, Zachariah? What are we conspiring to do? I want you to say it a simple sentence so we three can digest the severity of what we plan to set in motion.”
“Say it once and never again ‘til it’s all made real,” Andrew says.
I smother my cigarette butt in the cheap grey plastic ash tray.
“Our aim is to overthrow the government of Israel. Then liberate the entire Middle East from its Oligarchy.”
“Why stop there,” Maya smiles.
“Right on. I’m in,” Avinadav says his eyes never blinking.
“Well, somebody’s gonna have to make sure women don’t get cut out as usual when the freedom starts getting handed out,” Emma grins darkly, “I hope you got some good magic, kid.”
“Or someone’s on our side that’s proactive with the miracles,” I say. But what Maya is thinking, is that that then was the very morning they all signed up to be killed.
I found a free place to live after three days in Tel Aviv. I was selling art, as I do when money and options run out. A lanky and dark- complexioned Ashkenazi and a jacked-up Russian with spiked hair approached me. Their names were Gilead and the Greek respectively. The Russian kid called the Greek understood more than he could communicate so he let Gilead do the talking. Gilead seemed something of a slimy ass to me. They were both aimless street kids. Gilead told me there was place called Bet Ashanti where I could get three meals and a bed for free just by being homeless and underage. They said it was clean and relatively safe. I was sold.
I accompanied them all the way down past the Dolphinarium and the drummers of the Tiki Beach beyond the Dan Hotel to the crossroads of Tel Aviv and Yaffo into a neighborhood named Florentine. At least the Bet Ashanti was clean. It looked like an urban kibbutz behind the Dan Hotel across from a rundown parking lot. There were twin wooden bunkhouses, and a huge wooden porch cluttered with twenty boys and girls about my age on wooden tables and chairs. The rec room had computers and couches and a pregnant 15-year-old Yemeni. There was something about it that was very Mary Poppins, but it was more like the Lord of the Flies. The older battle-axe of a woman who was on duty looked like she had punched a few of these kids out. My new housemates were sizing up what I had to steal even before I put my bag down. Most of them introduced themselves, but I can’t ever catch names when I meet more than ten new people at a time.
It just so happened to be sundown on Friday. We gathered around a huge table in the rec room to eat a Shabbos dinner, light some candles and sing the little familiar prayers. There were forty kids in all. The girls had their own apartment up the street. They gave me a locker without a lock and bottom bunk in a large room full of kids that stayed in and out ofthe jungle. Greek told me to hold down anything I had of value. I was one of only two or three Ashkenazim in the lot. They told me not to do any drugs and to come home by midnight. They say I can stay here until I get on my feet.
I stay in many questionable places moving about the country. Which is only eight hours tall and 2-hours wide. I sleep in the kind of hotel rooms that you pay for by the hour and where small roaches creep up the bathroom walls out cracks in the ceiling and floor. Grunts through paper-thin walls, and bed boards banging like a carnal metronome. Sometimes I’d sleep on Jerusalem Beach under one of the many wooden pergolas built on the sands. Occasionally I’d get offered a couch in a female or gay man’s never-seemed-to-be-air-conditioned apartment. I’d always wake up in my own sweat feeling hungover stinking of cheap vodka when I was lucky with a broad whose name ended with an ‘A.’ Later on, in memories, I just associate Tel Aviv with being out all night. The place I’m at tonight is swinging. This happens when my morals are loose. “All teenagers morals are loose.”
I’d split a bottle of vodka with a client or two and sit on the beach recounting my yarn of exile. We’d palaver on the boardwalk over a twenty-shekel bottle of still water chased with cola or cherry juice about how I came to this place and what was across the sea in that city they all seemed so eager to run toward. That was missionary work. I had worked on this tale so many times that it came out like a sermon. My congregants always spent more to purchase a picture after the homily was delivered than they would have before. They’d often give me a number to get fed or get fucked or have a placed to sleep for the night that was not sand or pavement.
The small peace I had seen through observing Shabbos with the Golder’s Green Jews was drowned in the even greater peace of drinking, fucking, smoking and fighting. I was back to the lifestyle I led prior to my internment in the series of hospitals and the Family School. The rapes and the robberies were gone, but in all other ways it was come-on-in-and-sin. I smoked opium and hash. I drank vodka alone and with my art spectacle congregation. My Russian compatriots yearned for New York Americana, and I delivered it. I was a symbol of the city they hoped every night that they might still get to grow up in. So, their girls swallowed my cock and fucked me even when I could not speak a word of their language. Anya spoke a sort of broken half-English. Everything was in the future tense and every sentence included a couple of Russian words, a couple of Hebrew ones and the curse word blyat, which means bitch-fuck-shit-cunt. These street Russians use it like a comma.
Anya does not live in Tel Aviv. She lives in Pardes Hanna on the road to Haifa. She is down here on the tiyeled more than I am for her work. She never says what kind of work. One of the many Dimitri’s tells me she is a ‘medical agent.’ These Russians roll deep, like twenty people whose names I’m not expected to keep track of. Mostly they sit on the boardwalk getting drunk all weekend. The Russians post up where I sell across from the Opera Towers so now, I’m part of the gang.
The only time I recall paying for a hotel by the hour was when I banged out Anya in a roach motel with no extra sheets. We’d drunk so much still water that it was hard to stand. We fucked frantically. I clenched her burgundy, blonde hair as I sucked on her C-plus tits thrust after thrust. The night she attempted to tell me about how Ariel Sharon started the second Intifada, I realized it would be nice to take her to dinner. Or at least have a picnic with a scenic view. Some figs and cheap white wine. Some crackers and some cheese. I don’t really want these girls to think I’m some dark fuck that has no romance in him.
Everyone likes an artist, and I know I am playing a part in all these young girls’ escapist fantasies. I’m that hero of the night who’s gonna whisper it’s all gonna get better one day after I tell them a good story. Never mind my art, it’s all in the epic sincerity of my various yarns. I give these girls something to believe in. I give them some hope that life is like a mission and not just a journey in the darkness. I mean some girls fuck me just because I’m from New York, but I’d like to think that Anya could understand every fourteenth word I say. Then I can be a kid again and do the cute courtship type stuff, write her a poem or something. It washes over me and recedes just as fast. My emotions would be wasted on her. It would add a sense of development to a relationship that has been taken as far as it can or should be.
“As night falls over Beirut, the city takes on a different persona, one marked by the deep haunting echoes of its turbulent past. For beneath the veneer of beauty and new trapping of prosperity lie the scars of decades of war, a reminder of the fragility of peace. The newly built and now mostly empty skyscrapers rise right next to the bullet pocked derelicts of the civil conflict.”
In the dimly lit alleyways of the city’s forgotten southern neighborhoods, the ghosts of war linger, their presence palpable in the crumbling facades of bombed-out buildings and bullet-riddled walls not yet reclaimed or dragged piece by piece away. Here, amidst the rubble and debris, life struggles to endure, a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. The main southern districts, the so-called Suburbs; are dominated by Hezbollah. They function in an adjacent, but different space and frequency. Yellow flags and posters of bearded clerics demarcate the southern Shi’a zones from the Sunni West and Christian East. The names of these districts are called the Dahieh, or Al Dahiya. They are some of the most densely populated areas of Lebanon.The Dahiya Doctrine is the explicit Israeli military strategy to maximize destruction of civilian infrastructure when at war in Lebanon. Going west to east though Al Dahiya the districts are Jnah, Gobeiry, Bourj el-Barajneh, Haret Hreik, Chiyah, and Hadath.
In the heart of downtown Beirut, once the epicenter of the city’s vibrant nightlife, the scars of war are hidden beneath a veneer of modernity. Here, sleek skyscrapers rise from the ashes of destruction, their glass facades reflecting the glittering lights of luxury boutiques and trendy cafes. But beneath the surface lies a city still grappling with the wounds of its past, a city divided along sectarian lines, where the specter of violence looms large. Here, in the shadows of towering skyscrapers, communities remain fractured and distrustful, their wounds slow to heal.
And yet, amidst the rubble and ruins, there is a glimmer of hope, a belief that Beirut can rise from the ashes and reclaim its rightful place as the “Paris of the Middle East”. Or at least “the Switzerland”. For despite the scars of war, the spirit of Beirut endures, a beacon of resilience and defiance in a troubled region. The graffiti on all the walls give encouragements; “We are the miracles” some reads. As the night stretches on and the city partially sleeps, the haunting echoes of war fade into the darkness, replaced by the promise of a new dawn. And in the heart of Beirut, amidst the chaos and contradictions, life goes on, a testament to the indomitable spirit of a city that refuses to be defined by its past.
***
ADONAEV
I walk south into Badero navigating toward the high-rise silhouette of the Smallville Hotel. A city block sized blue glass monolith where the good part of town begins to become the working man’s part of town. Wider streets, less abandoned baby skyscrapers. More low-lying brutalist architecture.
Let me tell you about my Comrade Anya Soledad Druze and my old slow burning flame Ms. Yelizaveta Alexandrovna Kotlyarova. These are two fierce, but highly sentimental Slavic women I used to know, as they say. Who are both as it happens, now living in Beirut. Or, they were here just before the 2014 chaos, and they disappeared from plane sight during the Isis War. Remains a mystery to solve how far underground Anya Druze went. Yelizaveta, however, might be a hostage somewhere. Or some leftover stuffed property. Not one hint of sentimentality! Without a hint of sentimentality he must proceed, for the Jew, was not to be distracted by women or ghosts of women. Bashir says both are still in Beirut, so both should be brought into the great game plan, that will soon be revealed with fire.
“That lady can shoot straight and fly a whole ass helicopter,” says Bashir, “go look her up and bring her back on the otriad.”
“The Isis War58” was between 2014 and 2018, when everyone, and I mean almost everyone59, put aside their differences to kill every single person in the vile manifestation called “the Islamic State of the Levant and Sham”. Never in recent history had such a grouping come out of nowhere, won battles so miraculously, and then proceeded to make enemies out of just about anyone on earth. Anyone and everyone. Well besides from the Mongols. These were Sunni Mongols; blood thirsty and insatiable. No one on the outside can really grasp the terror they have caused. How close they might have been to bringing back the Caliphate. Now, in 2024, the Isis, called by Arabs Daesh are a threat largely vanquished but in 2014 they credibly threatened to lay siege to both Baghdad and Damascus, and were on the deadly march in every direction. As if fulfilling a Qur’anic prophecy. 40,000 plus foreign Sunni fighters showed up to fight in the Jihad. They seemed unstoppable until everyone united to stop them.
Anya is a Polish convert to Sunni, really Sufi Islam and she rides motorcycles and can pilot a military or civilian helicopter in all weather conditions. She was married to a sniveling Columbian professor type who used to cheat on her all the time, and he neglected both her sexual and spiritual needs. He even, mostly ineffectually, hit her just once, which was enough.She broke his faggot nose. She later fled her flailing marriage, quit her municipal job, and ended up with the White Helmets60 during the Syrian Civil War. At least that’s the part of the story she told him about. Had she managed to fight for Rojava I’m sure her whole life would be different. The parts of the war she was in changed her. She was there when Aleppo was barrel bombed and leveled by the regime.
“You can probably find a lead for Anya at the Smallville Hotel,” Bashir said. So that something drew me to the roof bar of the Smallville Hotel in Badero, but the bar itself is closed tonight. Just looking inside somewhere, I think I have been. The night rain batters the glass on the roof deck. Anya is not here.
ADONAEV
This hotel doesn’t seem to have a helipad, but I’ve seen her land on it. I’ve seen a lot of things that might not be real at all. This isn’t my very first rodeo in Beirut, but every trip seems like riding an unbroken horse. Every experience seems fourth dimensional.
Wait, no, hold on. I’ve never been here before. Getting my footing on something very familiar though this time. As if in another life, another reality I’m a virtual Beirut regular.
Anya would not be amused by such fourth dimensional thinking.
Yelizaveta is Eastern Ukrainian, also a part Jew. She did a study abroad at American University Beirut, she got taken hostage, carried off to some badland compound Der Ez Zor, and was possibly gang raped or something even more horrible. Kept in a cold dark cage. At least that’s what Marty had told him. Well, he certainly hoped not, but it was a real possibility out here. That’s probably par for the Isis course, to be honest with any non-Arab, non-Sunni woman laid hands on back then. They were known to slit throats, cut off heads, burn people alive, and take sex slaves. During “the Isis Wars’ ‘, a lot of terrible things happened to mostly innocent people in the name of Allah.
“She is a Marine Biologist by training. She still probably hates me very much for asking her to come teach me out here. What were we teaching them? That is what got her captured anyway. Some part of that is tragedy, some part is the truth.”
I am not drinking tonight, but this is probably all still in my head. Yelizabeth isn’t in Beirut. She was never here or there at all? Or she is out there in the rainy dark ready to shoot me in the head with a rifle. Whose memories are these and how did they come into my head?
CONCIERGE
My sir, the bar is closed.
ADONAEV
My understanding, my “overstanding: from the deck of this hotel roof bar is that she is out there somewhere in the south of the city. Hiding out in a neighborhood called Chiya. This is a lawless impoverished place in the Shi’a-controlled zone. I know she is cunning and has a rifle.
Why do I feel like I have been to this Hotel Bar before? I can’t stand it! Why does everything feel like Deja vu? Looking out the Smallville Hotel roof bar, although it is closed, I blagged my way in as a money-flushed foreigner. As this is an “International Hotel” in Badero, which is in the Christian part, the southmost still mostly Christian district of east Beirut. The night is cool and raining hard then calmly. I wonder if I’m looking in the right direction, which is South. I smoke a Ceder, indoors of course. The concierge just looks highly impatient. The bar is closed. I wonder if she can shoot me in the heart with her rifle from her vantage point. I imagine the faceless man laughing at me inside. I investigate the bright soviet style housing blocks. The bar on top of the Smallville is very well stocked for the NGO workers and diplomatic staff having a day off.
CONCIERGE
My new esteemed friend, the bar is still closed. You must at this time return to your room.
ADONAEV
Yelizaveta is out there! I can feel her putting her rifle on me. Ready to blow my head off or just maim me? She is that good a sniper. That I know. I remember when we came here together for the first time in the 1980s, even though I had never been here before. And we were both born in the 80’s.
“So how could you have been here in the 1980’s,” says Bashir in his head, “you’re not so old.”
Madness is taking hold of a fragile, often un-Kosher mind! Why did I rent three separate rooms, at three different hotels? Seems either subversive or just wasteful. He has a room at Biophilia, a Room here, and a room at the Royal Tulip Tower. Are you laying a trap or are you falling into one?No! I have been to this hotel roof bar before; with her. I have seen Anya land a helicopter here. Which is no small thing. Get your head screwed on straight. Says the inner dialogue.
CONCIERGE
My sir, the bar is still very much closed.
Rain beats on the windows. I scan the sky for a chopper that isn’t coming. I look out for a rifle burst that never fires. I see the faceless man laughing at me in silence. Smoking a cigarette and mocking me also in his silence. Hating my presence with all his very being. Waiting for me to fail miserably and die for nothing. Or step lively and then blow my fucking brains out. Or become something very dangerous in a pop-off blue purple smoke.
As told by Heval Goldy. Some parts have been blacked out by the state censor.
A begrudging Russian sympathizer to our cause now held in a small, electrified cage in Midtown West. A gated community for the ultra, ultra-rich. A place called Hudson Yard. They call her “Goldy the very expensive goldfish.” Of course that is not her real name at all. Her name at the agency is Sussudio. Her real name in Russian, it means “rich soon”.
“All of the buildings appear to be very, shall we say, forever. Permanent. Almost invulnerable, blyat. These elegant high towers of blue and black, glass and steel, towers built in defiance of gravity and common sense. Like mega sculpture, like a love song to the invisible hero called American Capitalismo. You look down at all the city, even all Downtown and Midtown and imagine all the utter debauchery other people are having at your expense. Well anyway I have my name on my own little cage here. So, I too can say “I have made it in New York City.” “So maybe I’ve made it here in America!” In the background, a saxophone cacophony erupts! There are more brothels than bars and coffee shops in all Newyorkgrad, but the quality and the pricing vary markedly. Sex work is hard work. It may not be the world’s oldest profession as they say blyat, but it is the oldest trusted way to get information from one’s enemies.
She states in letter:
“I live in a tall residential tower complex in Western Midtown in a costly new development named the Hudson Yards. Right in the very heart of success. A tower complex built in recent years above the train yards of west 34th street. I work my sweet ass off to keep that apartment rent free. The game I am playing with this chubby Indian Brahman venture capitalist roommate, is eating off his plate without him imagining he’s becoming my patron. Drain the clock, not his cockas they say. But really, he annoyingly proposes marriage as often as my Sergei had. And the others. And the other. I am waiting for a Russian Jewish doctor. He will love me again. I know it. The stars say as much. As for Sebastian. I think he’s calling himself Kawa now.” We all have all kinds of names.
“He mostly writes to me. I mostly do not write back to him very often,” I would later tell the FBI, or the CIA, or the Police Dept. and the Department of Homeland Security or whoever else I was being forced to talk to. But I, of course blyat, I do write him back, I’m his muse. He creates well, though most of it is chaos. Much of it very much misses the mark, as it were. I once remarked to Oleg the Bear, a common friend of ours;
“A relationship with Comrade Adonaev is like a roller coaster.Extremes of ups and downs, drama and thrills. But like all such thrill machines. You can tolerate it only in increments; you must step off and stay off. Sometimes for many years.”
My blonde hair is convincingly dyed from light brown. I told Sebastian that once and he said I was beautiful either way but should try brown hair like him. I don’t actually hate him, though he has cost me time. I just prefer not to have him around, thinking he can save me, heal me, change my life. No working woman ever needs that shit. Get me to higher ground on his terms. I told him go to law school and stop fucking helping the Kurds. I just don’t like giving him hope that we have a future of any kind. I’ve always been adamant about that. Sometimes against my better judgment, I’ve kissed him, and those kisses gave him way too much hope. He in fact wrote me over 100+ poems of Russian theme and a door stopping nearly 800-page novel. Which is kind of about me, but also about terrorism being justified. Or so my friend Alana interpreted. That he can save his money up somehow, get it together in the brain, and “save me”, he just can’t. I’m a kept woman now. That comes with a price tag and comes with responsibilities. Like sex on demand. I’ve told him that, but I’ve told him many also not so true things so maybe he can’t put it all together. He thinks it’s love. It’s maybe some kind of fucking weird 18th-19th century muse lust love, blyat, but it’s really a product of his mental illness, not my encouragement. His writing is prolific. To be fair. Some of his paintings are very unique. Overall, he is impressive as an American, just not the horse I need to bet on right now. He’s not patron or paperwork marriage material, as he is always nearly broken, or often fully broke.
But like it or not an artist gets only one truly great muse, and I am his. Russians, we are known for our loyalty and being indomitable. Putin says we also make the best whores. Well anyway, I know what I came for when I arrived in Newyorkgrad lost lonely and lethal at age 19, and I am a full-grown asset, a woman with expensive tastes. Not that into long board walk walks and art making and picnics with stupid couscous and over spiced chicken blyat with no value. The long, I mean Russian long book and paintings he has made for me do not help my mom immigrate to the U.S.A. Or get me a euro passport, for that matter, now that it is looking like my special marriage hasn’t resulted in anything useful for papers.
“Let me roll up my sleeves and my skirt, a little! Look at me in the eyes!I have all my teeth to bite. So sexy and educated and multilingual. What a catch to catch if you can. I am a wild debutante, elusive and amazing. I am a graceful fighter of course, forced to pour men off shots in a tavern downtown.”
“Zdrastvistia! The purpose of my sponsor is to buy and sell luxury carrots. Also, a flying carpet to get you home after all the bullshit we will make you sit through telling Russian American tales. Also, to warn you about Chechens and to distribute out a phone number where slaves with abused lives can get J 1, S 1 or go to college. There is so little time for singing and poems. We will try and pour you things called Vodka, but it’s not Vodka. To us it’s like water for wound care.”
“Good and bad men went to war and women also went to war, and Americans and Russians watched out of the corner of the newspaper or on the telescreen. And of course, we both supplied the arsenals and the airstrikes to our proxies. But ultimately it was a faraway spectacle happening far from both empires. At least until Ukraine.”
“The papers called them “the New Chechens” because when the war kept going, people came back trained in G-d-only-knows how much carnage capability. The war I’m referring to is the Syrian Civil War/ the Revolution in Rojava which was a phantom menace to all. But it was more a dark dream based on improbable odds. Chechens are in fact a very real jihadist menace that fought us to the last bullet in Mosul, Raqqa and Deir-A-Zor. They brought their whole families into their fun little Jihad. These re-moniquored “Chechens” aren’t like them. They were secular and young, and mostly on the Kurdish or Shi’a side, or the Peshmerga. They all left our families at home. There were plenty of war path teams and factions, mine/ ours was the most moral, but lived in a state of total delusion. They were following a pudgy faced aging man in Turkish solitary confinement. We thought breaking rocks was a useful form of soliloquy.”
My latest “patron” is in his mind a Brahman, which is something pretty fucking fancy in India. He’s a tech guy but looks and acts more like a Wall Street guy. He’s just too fucking rough on me. It has a lot in common with rape in my own home. He goes deep up my ass too often. He is pulling my hair and slamming me against the bar. He punches me in the head as hard as he can. He gets what he pays for. He slams me for about five minutes until he cums. Like Quisling and snorting pig. I am the star of a very private show! Recently, “I fell down some stairs”. He paid for surgery. I don’t remember things like I used to.
Sebastian wrote to me the other night to go down memory lane and formally tell me he is off for Syria soon. Well, this is the end of him finally. I do not feel that bad, or much of anything. He wants to end it like this anyway. He is living up to his expectation to die a martyr, that is up to him. In my mind, somewhere, is the understanding that if I had given him more rope, he could have hung himself here, but who doesn’t like a motherfucking show. Am I right. My patron climbs off me eventually. Eventually, they all must.
A lot of meat to him, I will need to stretch it out. Jon isn’t just a John; he’s unfortunately often my roommate too. He’s the one paying me to live somewhere nice with him. A Brahmin. They do what they want. Including fuck my asshole on a Tuesday afternoon. Am I fucking to not pay my rent? Yes, that’s exactly what I’m doing. I wish I had something better, someone better to do but I don’t. The Russian doctor, well he said I was “a little too high maintenance.” Sergei flipped his shit when he found a pile of Sebastian’s letters. Poor form on my part, perhaps, too sentimental. No, I will just say lazy.
I have not seen Comrade Sebastian Adonaev since the end of the summer. The time when we gave it another sad go, the poetry making for some light kissing. The hopeless romanticism in him. Well anyway he’s the exact same man and I’m the same old gal. He’s still broke and still just a shiftless adventurer, romanticizing the Chornay. He once wrote an 800-page book for me, yet I’ve only read the first couple chapters. He wrote me over 100 poems, but they all sound about the same. Words rhyming about love, hate sex and devastation in Angliski. He painted and framed a painting in Brighton and bought a gold frame for it. It’s still up. I was dating a doctor, but he left me, as I said. I was dating a corporate lawyer, but it was never so serious. My original patron cut me off over my first Adonaev affair. Now I’m fucking the so-called roommate to cut down on my business here expenses. Well anyway “my roommate” has a big Indian style Xanny Kama sutra cock. He manages some tech finance derivatives schemes in L.A., which could be anything. I must disassociate a lot. What was I saying, that’s right, something about my mother getting her paper. Something about the mark.
Later, in around a year when I am arrested by the secret police and they demand that I tell them about what Sebastian was doing in Syria, honestly, I didn’t even know that much. I wasn’t that interested or directly invested in it. He is climbing a mountain, to prove to himself to win me, that sounds like a good take. He periodically would send me all these highly miserable looking, often bloody war photos, but I didn’t want to see any of them. He would beg to be allowed to see me. But in reality, I wanted very little nothing to do with him. I live my own life. It’s mostly mine. I chose it and made all the bad decisions! Later, I’d sometimes message his WhatsApp and tell him to ‘Come home now please’ ‘before you die’. But I didn’t mean come home to me. He will probably survive the war. He has strong luck. He is tough in his own strange way. Incredibly lucky. The roommate, comrade Brahmin patron, he likes to choke me. I need a new living situation. Or should I just pay cash, every hole, is too many holes. I’m working on a possible new patron with a place by the beach in Miami. I wasn’t raised stupid, or lacking morales. So how have I gotten stuck here in this loop? I should move to Miami, where it’s warmer. I remember thinking only a little bit about his strange Syria objective.
What I failed to see, through Sasho, our old boss and roof explained it to me, was that he was going to Syria to impress me. How ludicrous, nothing could be further from impressive to me. He was going to live, I was sure. But to-do-what with himself? Live to be a mentally broken person that I could never imagine how to heal. From Miami, when I get there, it will all take the form of a brightly colored dream.
We had some fun but also some very messy history Sebastian Adonaev and I, blyat, but I think going to this evil little war was the stupidest thing he ever did, far worse than the exploits in Haiti, worse than loving me. It was hard on me anyway. I will certainly not be meeting him at the airport, should he survive the war. I am tougher than he, but it’s still not nice to make a person watch unwillingly your attempt at self-murder. Functionally speaking that man is dead to me. I must insulate myself from mad men seeking high publicized means for suicide. The man just wants to die in a meaningful way, but that doesn’t help my situation at all! Yet, I still have all his letters, I still have the two published books about me. I still have the gold framed multi-color pornograph on the wall. When the secret police dragged me in to find out where Sebastian went, I told them:
“He is probably still in Havana…”
“He’s definitely not in Havana, toots.”
“Don’t fucking call me toots, blyat.”
They then did pretty nasty stuff to me, just to punish him, maybe. Or maybe just because I don’t have any actual papers? Or maybe because degrading a Russian blonde is as American now as apple pie. They eventually bent me over and just took turns fucking me on the interrogation table. Good times. It’s really not that “free” a country. Once the surface gets scratched enough. Eventually, my Brahman patron bails me out, somehow. He lectures me about “pussy footing around with terrorists that don’t have my best interests at heart.”
“Well, where is that motherfucker? Where is your useless Jew Chechen now?” My patron asks me.
“He is climbing up Holy Mountain, blyat. In his mind anyway. Thinking of me the whole entire time.”
“But low and behold here you still are.Locked in a fishbowl with no passport. With one to help you besides me and your Serge,” the patron replies, “And like a goldfish, I can do whatever I want, and you will not remember it 8 seconds later. He punches me in the face and rapes me on the table.
“Dumb bitches always thinking things are free,” he says. But nothing in Russia or America is free. Old Russian saying, “The only free cheese is in a mouse trap.” Which is infact an actual Old Russian saying.
Friday arrives and I catch the last bus out of Afula before sundown and head south down the coast. Sundown on Friday is when they shut everything down, everything except parts of Tel Aviv. I need eye candy and attractions. I need to sell some art because I am completely out of cash. It was a two-hour trip to get from Afula to the Boardwalk.That night far out pacing any records set in London. The tiyeled is packed. The strip is lit up brightly. I feel good about getting back to this city. I moved through the crowd impressed with how quickly I’d made my first 200 shekels. This equivalent of nearly $50 is a chump change except on a kibbutz. Tel Aviv is geared to be one of the most expensive cities on earth. Thats from putting the Western incredible and implausible up on beach sand in under 90 years on the shores next to old Port Yafo. It’s also because Israel is a very small place and this is where wealth and decadence are concentrated.
I can smell the perfume of the beautiful painted Russian frehhote. Many of the young Russian men had bleached their hair like Eminem. A salsa band was playing, and an Argentinean Jewish woman was dancing and singing through a Madonna mike surrounded by a crowd of onlookers. Everyone was clapping to the beat. A group of Arab Israelis was hawking watches, lighters and bootleg L & M smokes from a foldout table. Some rough-edged Romanian hustlers and their friends were taking money off stupid, shit-brained cocky American Yeshiva boys in games of three-card Monty. On the beach I saw the flash of fire poi whirling in the night. The Opera Towers looked huge. I could see a security guard patting down Yemenite Jews because they look Arab while he let the paler Ashkenazim in without any trouble at all.
Canadian Dave who is the bartender over at Mike’s Blues Bar gives me a bunch of flyers to hand out. They take up half the space in my bag. He gives me fifty sheks and a hamburger with French fries to hand them all out. I got this gig through a girl I drew on the tiyeled a week ago.There are several big parties tonight. I offload flyers to anyone who will take them at drop spots along the way to the Dolphinarium. The Dolphinarium beach-bar-restaurant complex, which houses a mega club called Pacha. Builtnear the Dan Hotel where the boardwalk hits the Turkish Fort at Yafo, Jaffa, the old Arab port that was here before the Zionists did all this building. No one I give flyers to will go to Mike’s because it’s an Americanized tourist jump-off right next to the American embassy.
It’s 10:40 pm. I make my way to Abulafia for a couple of mini pizzas. Abulafia is a 24-hour bakery that sells mini pizzas and pita soaked in olive oil with zaatar, a green fragrant spice that tastes like Palestinian oregano. The place has non-stop business especially around sunrise when it gets swarmed with club goers on the way home. That is when the fights break out between the Russians and Arabs or the Russians and the Ethiopians. It’s always the Russians and someone else. The owners of Abulafia seem to have a lot of sons and nephews named Muhammad. They do good business. One of them tells me they live in Yafo, the Old City, the Arab Quarter. It was the Arab port of long, long ago. The Yafo-Tel Aviv border is near the Dolphinarium and near a huge Ottoman prison that now apparently houses a sex club called the Dungeon.
***
A man disguised as Orthodox Jew in a cab is approaching the Dolphinarium. He is wearing a club suit and carrying a guitar case that covers a payload of ball bearings and nails. He thinks nervously,
‘It is too heavy. They will notice me as soon as I step out of the cab. This vest and jacket are making me sweat.’
He looks out the window. The driver seems nervous. The man doesn’t say much. This is not a situation for small talk. He looks at his watch. It’s 22:53. He observes people strolling on the tiyeled as the cab speeds by.The cab passes the Sheraton Hotel. The man wonders if one day all this will be returned to his people. He wonders when these Jews will be driven back to Hell. It’s 22:57. He takes a deep breath and tries to come to terms with the fact that he will be dead within this hour.
***
Roman is standing outside the Pasha Club in the parking lot talking to his friends. He thinks, ‘Fuck this place. Fuck this place big time.’
Roman is of regular build and is wearing a tight black T-shirt and FOXX jeans. His shoes are polished. There is gel in his hair. He speaks in thickly accented Hebrew. He mixes in Russian words. When he gets angry, he stops speaking Hebrew altogether. He never goes anywhere without his cell phone, which seems to never stop ringing. All his friends are from the Ukraine. They are racially Slavic and technically Jewish, which is to say that they have a Jewish grandparent. This doesn’t change the fact that they go to the Orthodox Church.
This is his third time at the Pasha Club. He wouldn’t normally go to this venue, but the girl his friend has fucking dragged them along. Her friends are Russian origin, and they act like whores when they drink like most Russian girls he knows. One of them is Georgian. Her family is using Israel as a halfway point between the former Soviet Union and the US. Like most of the olim Hadashim from that part of the world, they have no intention of staying here too long. Roman hopes his family get their U.S. visas soon because the Arabs are going crazy and he’s about to get drafted into the IDF.
The line is always too long. The Dan Hotel is across the street. Its plaza is large and white. He’s never stayed there, but he imagines it’s rather decent. When he gets to America, he’ll stay in a hotel like that. Or maybe even own one if he works hard.
***
I remember the basic joy of walking in the damp sand by the water with no shoes. Zachariah and Sebastian equate this with happy childhood memories so it’s pleasing to see the body they now share.
I finally break free from the crowd as I get to the end of Jerusalem Beach. I deliberately walk on the sand even if it means no people take flyers. I can see Yaffo in the distance. Compared to Tel Aviv it is ominous and lower key. I’m wearing my khaki pants with the tan button-down work shirt that says Mike on the left breast and has a Drop Kick Murphy patch sewn on the right. I pass out most of the flyers for Mike’s Blues Bar to groups of arsim and frehhote. They ask me questions in Hebrew or Russian, but I hardly speak either language well enough to know what they are asking me. I reach into my pocket and pull out a crumpled pack of Noblisse cigarettes. There are only three left.
***
The waves are crashing against the seawall levy. The rocks extend out into the water, and you can walk along them toward the end, which is as good a place as any to smoke hash. The levy is on the seaside of the Dolphinarium. This section of the Beach is called Tiki Beach. During the day people play Congo drums, and an outdoor café serves overpriced beverages with a scenic view. There is a private club next to the Pasha and a barbed wire fence prevents people from climbing from the levy into its outdoor section. House music is blaring from Pasha.
Slightly removed from the chaos, Ze’ev and his friends smoke a joint of tobacco mixed with hash. Ze’ev knows he’s a scumbag. The girl he and his friends had been gang-raping in his car had been left slumped against the rocks down by the water. They had pissed all over her before they left her. They’d slipped her a ‘knock out’ in the last club.
***
The man in the lethal club suit is approaching Target B in the cab. He had three targets to pick from. He had rejected the other two as unsuitable. He thinks, ‘I have never been to this part of the city before.’ He removes his wristwatch and places it into an envelope in the front seat. The envelope already contained his wedding ring, his wallet, and other petty personal effects. The only thing that remains is a small snapshot of his son and roughly 2 pounds of military grade plastic explosives. He begins a silent prayer, ‘My G-d is merciful, and all good things come of it. I will be your sword, my people’s sword against the Zionist dogs who killed my son and stole my land. Amen.’
***
I finally arrived at the Dolphinarium with no flyers to hinder my game and my two-step. Long lines had formed to get into the club. Its clientele are mostly underage Russian immigrants. Dave doesn’t need or want this demographic at his bar but fuck Dave. What’s twelve dollars and a beer. Absolutely nothing. I should just dump the damn flyers in a trashcan and rattle off some tourist spots I magically hit up. There are arsim everywhere. The word is sort of like the Bridge and Tunnel Crowd of Israel. A little meaner actually.They are dressed pretty much the same. Tight t-shirts, jeans, hair gel. They all reflect the same mannerisms and mentality. They always give me shit everywhere I go in the country while I’m selling art. My style is way too different for them. When they want me to draw something, it’s always crude and they never pay. They might sit and watch me draw and then wander off like crack heads with ADD. They are the club guys of the Middle East, the socio-economic equivalent to a mix of Jersey Guidos and ghetto Blacks coming to Manhattan clubs with a hard-on and a roofy. They love the ultra-violence. Most of them aren’t from Tel Aviv. They just come here for the clubs and the tiyeled. Packs of them will follow groups of girls around propositioning them until a rejection or a hook up or rape. They take Ecstasy. They are offensive to everyone. They frequent bad clubs and get into fights. Not unlike the Jersey Guidos, they thrill me. Racially they tend to be non-Ashkenazi, Romanians, Russians, and the Yemenites who live in Israel’s smaller, rougher cities like Bat Yam, Rehovot, Peta Tikvah, and Pardes Hana. I watch young, stupid people try to get laid after they wait on a long line for a high-priced bottle of poison. The Russian immigrant girls look blazing.They are really loving this whole free market thing and are waiting eagerly to get visas for the US or Canada. In the meantime, they’re made up as hell even when they are only going to the store for laundry detergent.
I see my friend of three weeks, Roman, talking to former Soviet girls. The Israelis are curvier and less made-up. I walk over to give him a pound and he introduces me to several of the girls whose names all end in ‘a.’ They, of course, don’t speak any English. They are maybe Russian but could be from Kazakhstan because they look a little Asian. I have no idea what they are trying to say to me. Roman’s English isn’t too hot either. We mostly communicate through gestures and the occasional sentence or two in Hebrew. He is excited to have ‘an American friend.’ Like most of the Russians I’ve met, I have only the most basic knowledge of who Roman is as a person. I’ve known him for less than three weeks. He was the first person I met in Israel and when I’m in Tel Aviv he always quickly visits to get his lady friends to buy sketches off me. Then we party in broken Hebanglish.
***
Ze’ev wonders what that American asshole is doing here. He remembered how the guy looked at the girl he was with last week when he met them for the first time at his stupid hobo art stand. Ze’ev thinks he dresses like a hobo. I should tell my friend not to let that American hobo into the club. Nobody looked at his girls like that. Ze’ev wasn’t some little punk lookout anymore. He was moving pills and would soon get a piece of Jerusalem beach to milk or bleed. Ze’ev knows everyone worthwhile in the Tel Aviv club scene. It’s all he’s been doing for the past four years. He gets comped at most of the low-end joints and a few of the mid-end. He’s still too young for the real hot spots. He does not like the niggers so most of the hip-hop venues are out. All the bouncers know he deals and that he’s affiliated so he gets in quick if the spot is Russian. He wonders why those girls are flirting with the hobo. It’s because he’s American and they want to get to America by using him. It’s the only explanation. His pictures are stupid and communist.
***
The human time bomb steps out of a black cab. As he surveys the scene, he thinks, ‘I’m so close I can smell them. These Israeli girls smell like whores. It’s the scent of my enemy. They all look so young. I don’t see any soldiers. My lieutenant gave me orders, ‘Take from them their young as they do to us.’ In a few years they’ll all be in the army killing my people anyway. One of those girls is giving me a funny look. They know I’m an Arab and I’m wearing a suit that’s too bulky.’
Quick thoughts race through his head. He thinks about his son. He thought about his people. He thought about the land that they stole from his people. Someone points at him as he edges near the line. He tugs the ripcord at his sleeve. “Salwa, I rejoin you,” he whispers to his long dead wife, “Palestine will be redeemed!”
***
I’m chatting up one of the Russian girls when I realized I was out of cigarettes. I told the girl to hold on for a second. I asked Roman if he had one. He told me that he did not. Everyone smokes, but I really want a Noblisse. They all have L&Ms or worse. I didn’t want to stop talking to the Kazak girl, so I asked Roman if I could toss him some loot to buy me a pack. He didn’t pick up the phrase ‘toss him some loot.’ He looked at me like I was crazy. I look at my watch. 11:31pm. I hopped the barrier and was about to cross into the parking lot. I don’t even know if the kiosk is open across the street. I look back to see if the girl is still. . . PEGUA!
***
Ze’ev is telling his friend about ‘some chick that gave him head on the beach.’ That chick is a 16-year-old that he and three friends raped. She is lying unconscious face down in the sand by the water. He tells them he came all over her PEGUA!
What the fuck was that he wonders. It came from the street by the club entrance. Of course, he knows what it is. This is Israel after all.
***
Roman is on his cell phone when he dies. It’s hot as hell here, even in the night. He looks up and sees a quick bright flash before he blows apart.
PEGUA!
***
I’m on my knees half deaf. I hear a terrible ringing in my head, but I can’t hear anything else. There are tiny droplets of blood all over me, but I don’t think any of its mine. Dozens of people are screaming, slouched on the ground. Some of them don’t look like much more than bloody bundles of tattered flesh. There’s blood on the ground and there’s blood in my hair. I don’t really know what to do. I am slumped down facing what was once the outside of a popular nightclub. I reach into my pocket to pull out a smoke and I realize it is the fucking cigarettes that just saved my life. My first suicide bombing. Saved by a fucking pack of cigarettes. There are a lot of dead bodies less than twenty feet away from me. I see the lights of the paramedic trucks and hear the sirens through the cluttered tunnel of my inner ear. I see people trying to pick themselves up and help the wounded. I’ve never seen so much real blood. Not in real life anyway. Everything I thought I knew about anything was ripped to shreds in a fiery burst of nails, ball bearings, and sharp things flying. Violence looks so cool until you meet him in person. Then he just looks like the Angel of Death.
I try to stand up. I can’t. I am a coward in the face of it all. A part of me is thinking: So that is what a suicide bombing looks like. And another part of me realizes: Holy fuck! I just got all blown up. And another part of me, the part that has my undivided attention, is asking where the fuck our god was tonight!? Twenty-one victims are dead. Most of the dead were teenage girls from the former Soviet Union.
WALTER SEBASTIAN ADLER 