The Negev, 1987. The road snakes back and forth along the wall of the giant crater without, it seems, any particular goal in mind. One switchback brings me and my rented Peugeot toward the top of Mitzpe Ramon—which in Hebrew translates to something like “huge fuckin’ hole in the ground.” The next leads me down a steep hill into the belly of the beast—splayed open, gasping and arid. Yet a third gives me an unobstructed view of the rusted-out cars that lie at odd angles at the bottom of the canyon. The Israeli Ministry of Transport hasn’t bothered to install guardrails on this desolate desert road. Or reflectors. Obviously, the Israeli MOT believes that God will provide.
No lights, no guardrails, no people—just an endless expanse of purple-brown rock. This road, this desert seems to go on forever. Nice place, but I wouldn’t want to visit. Occasionally a little puff of sand rises suddenly and swirls like a miniature tornado. Then after a minute it collapses and dies. At least the Sahara, with its great drifting dunes, shape-shifts overnight. There I would wake up with a view that resembled the Great Pyramids, and by happy hour the following evening I’d be staring at the back of an impossibly sexy woman, sprawled languidly on her side, the curve of her lower back smiling at me sweetly, her hips and ass jutting out into the desert. I haven’t been to the Gobi, but in the interest of fairness I’ll have to go. For comparison’s sake.
Every ten kilometers or so, there is a yellow sign. CAMEL CROSSING, it says, in Hebrew and in Arabic and in English. Under a picture of a camel. Every ten kilometers, another sign. But so far, no camel. Just more desert. More nothing.
The friendly woman at the air-conditioned visitors’ center back in Avdat—a ruin on the spice route, which once did very well in the frankincense and myrrh business—told me this drive was not to be missed. I believed her because she spoke English and because the bathrooms in the visitors’ center were clean and because she used a highlighter on the map when she showed me the route. Next time I’m in Avdat, I’ll have to kick her ass.
My rental car and I finally reach the bottom of the crater, and, as if it were possible, it is even less than I expected. I get out of the car to look around and the heat sucks the air out of my lungs. Chalky rocks give off prodigious amounts of dust punctuated by dry, brown beds of dirt out of which sprout sad, withered growth that aspires to be vegetation. Who the fuck would fight over land like this?
The wind is blowing, which should be a relief, but here just means sand. A lot of it. In your eyes. I can’t see shit. But I can hear. It sounds like a shriek, only not human. Then something nudges me. In the crotch.
“What the fuck?”
I take a step back and bump into the car. It keeps coming. I close my eyes against the blowing sand and swat blindly at whatever it is. I pray they don’t have coyotes in Israel. I feel fur and then a warm, wet tongue and then it bites me. Hard.
“FUCK!”
The wind and sand stop blowing and I see my attacker. A goat. And he has backup. Two others flanking him. They are nibbling at desiccated shrubbery but they clearly have his back. I look down at my hand, which is dripping blood. I seriously doubt these goats have been properly vaccinated.
The girl who comes over the rocky hill in the distance makes me forget about the rabies I may have contracted. She almost makes me forget about the desert. Except that she is the desert. She is almost biblical. In a central casting kind of way. Filmy fuchsia cloth winds around her waist and covers her legs like a sarong. The rest of her, including her head and most of her face, is covered in thin black fabric. In one hand she holds a tall, gnarled staff.
Her willowy silhouette standing there, backlit on the top of that hill. I couldn’t have designed the shot better if I’d hired David Lean.
And then come her goats. At least a dozen of them. And my perfect Bedouin princess opens her mouth and makes a noise somewhere between a yodel and a gag and starts knocking the goats in their knees with her staff and they start running straight at me.
She takes her time coming down the hill. From ten feet away I can see her face is as beautiful as the rest of her. Dark-brown skin, huge copper eyes, long eyelashes, full lips, and dark hands with long fingers and pink palms. She walks up to me without hesitation, takes my wounded hand in hers, and gives the guilty goat a nasty whack with her staff. Then she pulls a canteen from underneath the folds of her black scarf and pours a little pool of water onto my wound. The blood washes away and we can see where the goat teeth have punctured my skin. After that, the beautiful Bedouin girl makes a great guttural hacking noise in the back of her throat and launches a giant loogey onto my open wound. She massages it into my hand and I feel slightly light-headed. Until she reaches down and lifts the bottom of her skirt over her knees and halfway up her surprisingly muscular brown thighs, bending her head so she can catch the hem in her teeth and make a rip in the sheer fabric. She tears off a strip of fuchsia and ties it around my slimy, spit-soaked goat wound.
Then she speaks to me quickly in some language that may be Arabic. Or not.
“English,” I say. “Sorry.”
She rolls her eyes, walks around to the passenger side of my car and gets in. I stand there like an idiot until she honks the horn several times. I get in.
Drive, you moron, she gestures.
I pull onto the road slowly and the goats fall into line behind us. I point out the back window, smiling. She rolls her eyes again.
Bedouins are such cynics.
We putter along the main road for a while until, just as we reach another camel crossing sign, the girl grabs the steering wheel and turns us onto a dirt road that eventually disappears under an arch created by two enormous boulders. Not a road you’d find on any map. The goats follow. And, without warning, a camel.
Clearly not the brightest of species, the thing tries to stick its head into my closed window. I see a flash of teeth—uglier, yellower, and more crooked than I would’ve thought possible—and then the window is smeared with camel spit.
I finally understand the need for all the signs.
Obviously, every camel in Israel lives in this Bedouin camp. There must be hundreds of them—grazing in the wadi (which in Hebrew translates to something like “huge fuckin’ patch of dirt”), standing crammed in barbed-wire pens, and wandering freely, crapping at the entrance to sleeping tents and near cooking fires. Goats, on the other hand? My girl seems to have the exclusive. I can’t help wondering, where’s the money in camels? Goats I get. Goat’s milk, goat cheese. But even in this godforsaken place I can’t see camel dairy products flying off the shelves.
I slam on the brakes when one particularly ugly beast steps in front of the car. Through the windshield all I can see are four long, knobby-kneed legs. And the long, slow string of camel saliva that drips from above onto the hood of the car. My girl throws all ninety-nine pounds of herself over the gearshift and leans on the horn, and our roadblock moves off with all the speed of a hermit crab. She speaks to me in that language again and points to an area off to the left, which I assume is the designated parking area. So I park.
I suppose there is a certain Lawrence of Arabia-ness to this Bedouin settlement. If you can ignore the burning piles of garbage, ancient school bus, and swing set sitting on squares of dingy Astroturf held together with duct tape. Naked and half-naked children run around the makeshift playground kicking a soccer ball. Women sit on rugs inside the tents nursing babies and drinking tea. Some weave rugs on huge homemade looms. The yarn has been dyed vivid shades of pink, green, blue, and orange, and I wonder where the hell they found the materials to come up with anything other than brown. Old men smoke water pipes and play some kind of game with dice.
The girl pulls me into one of the bigger tents. Like the others, it is constructed somewhat haphazardly mostly out of the black tent’s original material but reinforced and repaired with whatever works. This one has corrugated aluminum on one side. My shepherdess consults briefly with a woman who’s been winding skeins of wool. She is maybe forty-five and missing a couple of teeth, but not as many as the camel. The woman smiles at me. “So, you want real Bedouin experience?”
I obviously look as confused as I am.
“Real Bedouin experience. Includes tour of camp, tea with real Bedouin family, and camel ride. Sixty shekels.”
I look over at my girl and shake my finger at her. “What’s her name?” I ask.
“This one? She is Neela, my granddaughter.”
“I’m happy to give you the sixty shekels, but could you tell Neela that since it was her goat that bit me, I think the least she can do is invite me to tea herself.”
Neela’s grandmother starts yammering away at her.
“Yeah, yeah. Fine,” Neela says and rolls her eyes.
Other than yelling at me to take off my shoes when I start to enter her dusty tent, Neela says nothing as she prepares our tea. I sit on the rug and watch her, wondering what I have done to piss her off. It is almost as if we are married.
She moves around the tent at hyper speed, stooping, bending, squatting, opening jars and canisters and boxes of exotic-smelling plants, flowers, and spices, tossing them into a big copper kettle. When she’s done, she reaches her hand down her shirt, pulls out a key, and goes marching out of the tent, kettle in hand. I watch her unlock the metal cage around the faucet the Israelis have provided—the only source of water in this village they have forced these people to call home.
Neela boils the tea on one of the smoldering cooking fires, and when I see her head back to the tent, I hurry back to my place on the rug. She pours tea into tall glasses filled with crushed mint leaves and slips the glasses into brass holders. When she walks toward me, I think she is going to hand me a glass of tea—or pour it on me. Instead, she lowers herself into my lap and brings her lips together, gently blowing on the tea to cool it. With her other hand, she reaches up and unwinds the black scarf from her head and then her shoulders until it falls away completely. Underneath she is wearing a thin white tank top. It has a picture of Madonna and the words “Material Girl” written on it.
She is stunning. And younger than I had imagined. However young that was. She takes a sip of the tea, leans forward, and, as she kisses me, lets the hot, sweet tea run into my mouth and follows it with her tongue. I forget hot and dry and thirsty. There is only warm, sweet, wet. The tea has long since been swallowed, so it must be her taste. Or some alchemical combination of the two. Does it matter? The tip of her tongue runs across the roof of my mouth. And then I realize, it does.
Reluctantly, almost painfully, I disengage my mouth from hers just enough so I can use it for speaking. “I wasn’t expecting … I was going to give you the money. You don’t have to …”
“I don’t have to do anything,” she says, the corners of her mouth turning up almost imperceptibly—less a smile than a parenthetical.
She lifts her “Material Girl” tank top over her head and lies back against a pile of rolled-up rugs. I have never seen skin the color of hers. She is cinnamon and cocoa and bittersweet chocolate. And suddenly I am ravenous. Neela reaches her arm out, dips her finger into my tea and then slips it into my mouth. The tea is cooler and even more fragrant than before.
Then she takes the glass from my hand, tilts her head back, and lets a tiny trickle of liquid pour from the glass. The drops land on her exposed throat and run down, pooling in the hollows on either side of her clavicles. I stare mesmerized, watching as the perfect stream runs between her perfect breasts and collects in her belly button before continuing on its course.
“Drink your tea,” she says.
I sit up and my heart is racing. My mouth is dry. The thin cotton mattress on which I’ve been sleeping and the muslin sheet that covers me are cold and damp. I shiver in spite of the stifling heat. At first I can’t remember where I am. Only fragments of a dream. Willa. And a gun. And I am running. Trying to stop something terrible from happening. Running but getting nowhere. I have a pounding headache.
My eyes adjust to the darkness. I remember that I am in Neela’s tent. But Neela is gone. So are my Patek Philippe watch and my wallet. The little snake charmer has been thoughtful enough to leave me my passport. My luggage is in the car, so I put on the same dusty, sweaty clothes I wore yesterday. I tentatively stick my head outside the tent, and though I have no idea what time it is, I can tell by where the sun is in the sky that I have slept through most of the day.
Between the hallucinogenic dreams I had last night and the Rip Van Winkle experience I’m having now, it’s becoming more and more obvious there was more than tea in my tea. As I walk toward my car, I notice that the camp is much quieter. The pickup trucks are gone. The bus is gone. The goats are gone. My car and luggage are gone. There are still children playing on the Astroturf and old men smoking hookahs in a tent. I jog over to the men and feel a lead weight land on my head with each step.
“Neela?” I ask vaguely, stupidly.
A few of the old men turn to me for a moment and then go back to their game of dice
“Neela? My car? Where is my car?” Now I am yelling.
Something registers with one of them. He reaches out his hand and I help him up. He hobbles over to Neela’s tent, disappears behind it, and is gone so long I think he too has deserted me. But then I hear yelling—in Arabic. Or something. And he comes out leading a recalcitrant, fully saddled camel.
“Car,” he says, grinning. “Your car.”
Because Neela is not without a heart. She has left me transportation.
I ride the thing to the nearest camel crossing sign and wait for the next lonely bastard to come through. This, I think, is the real Bedouin experience.
Seduced, screwed, conned, robbed, and left sitting on a camel. Neela would have made a terrific agent—in a non-Bedouin setting. She and I have a lot in common, but to her I am no different from any other rich Jew. Like those rich, entitled Hillcrest Country Club Jews were to me. And, absurd as it may sound, that is a revelation. Because I never saw myself as anything but being on her side. Growing up on the outside. Wanting in.
Beverly Hills, 1961. December was when all the juniors had their preliminary college counseling meetings—the ones where the guidance counselor, Mrs. Di Carlo, told students like Stacy Aronson she should be aiming for, say, Tarzana Junior College rather than Harvard. I was not looking forward to mine.
Nine thirty and already it must have been ninety-five degrees in Di Carlo’s office. Her beige bra straps were sticking out from under her sleeveless lime-green blouse. There were dark half-moons of sweat under her armpits and her short copper curls sat like coiled Slinkies, plastered to her scalp.
Every couple of winters, without warning, a vengeful current of air called the Santa Anas came rushing through the desert, dumped a load of scorching heat on L.A., and took off. For days on end there was just heat. Pure and unrelenting.
“You have a real shot at Stanford, Greyson,” she was saying. “And Yale isn’t out of the question.”
I knew I shouldn’t stare, but I was fascinated by the way the loose, wrinkled flesh under her arm undulated as she fanned herself with the brochure from Mills College. She looked down at my file.
“Your grades are stellar. You’re active in student government. You’ve done a little community service work.” Her finger tapped the manila folder. “You might want to take up a sport, though,” she said. She looked up and studied me. “You’re tall,” she said. “How about basketball?”
I was a lousy athlete. The only varsity team I stood a chance of making was debate. “Yeah, great idea,” I said, getting up to leave. “Well, I’ve got math now, so …”
“Greyson, college admissions committees also tend to be impressed by students who’ve had valuable work experience. If you’d like, I could speak to some of our alumni …”
“Uh, yeah, thanks. I’ll think about it and let you know, okay?”
“Alright, dear,” she said, “but remember, he who hesitates is lost.”
“I’ll remember.”
August Van Gilder was not an alumnus of Beverly High. He was the man who owned the Chevron station at the corner of Robertson and Third. I stood across the street for a while just watching the petroleum fumes hang in the sweltering air around the station as if they were afraid to wander too far from their home. The glare from the sun beating down on the shiny black patches was almost blinding. Cars had been dripping motor oil in the same spots on the same asphalt since 1947 when the station opened.
A woman rushed out of the station’s ladies’ room with a sour look on her face. She held the door open with the tip of one finger and waited impatiently as a little girl wandered out. The woman quickly yanked her finger away. The metal door must have been hot. Then she spit on her finger and wiped it on a handkerchief. Hot and dirty.
The woman pulled the little girl toward a light-blue Eldorado convertible. A man, as pleasant-looking as she was sour-faced, waited in the driver’s seat. A boy—I couldn’t really tell how old—eight, ten, twelve—sat in the back, his face buried in a Green Hornet comic book.
I took a deep breath and choked on the gas fumes. How long had I been standing there? Five minutes? Twenty? A man came out of the ladies’ room carrying a suitcase. He cut across the black asphalt to the city bus stop and sat down on the bench.
Both the male and female patrons who stopped here to use the facilities had to use the ladies’ room. The toilet in the men’s had been clogged for years. Even if the proprietor of the Chevron, Mr. August Van Gilder, made an effort to keep the restroom clean (and quite obviously, it wasn’t a priority), two hundred and fifty people probably used that toilet in the course of one business day. And like the man with the suitcase, probably half those people didn’t even buy any gas.
I’d been one of those freeloading Chevron-toilet-users enough times to know. Not that I went out of my way to relieve myself here. A person only took a leak at the Chevron out of sheer desperation. Mr. Van Gilder must have thought his mechanics had more important things to do than mop up urine and refill the paper towel dispenser all day. But that would be my job now. Probably not what Di Carlo meant by valuable work experience.
I filled my lungs with another airless breath and forced myself to walk toward the body shop. There was no door on the dingy little office inside. A guy in his twenties with an Adam’s apple that made him look like he’d swallowed a hamster stood behind the counter. He was sifting through a little metal box filled with dirty, dog-eared index cards. A rusty old fan was blowing behind him. It wasn’t doing much, just rustling the invoices tacked to the bulletin board next to him. An orange rag covered in grease hung out of the pocket of his mechanic’s jumpsuit. I rested my hands on the counter and noticed how clean my fingernails were.
The guy—Wes, according to his jumpsuit—did not look up. I opened my mouth to speak but Wes held up his hand to stop me. Wes continued to alphabetize. He’d put “Scott, Philip” before “Schwartz, Dave.” I stood there, obediently. I would be lower down the food chain than Wes. Wes, the mechanic with the freakish Adam’s apple who couldn’t alphabetize.
Maybe I’d just tell Wes to go screw himself, I thought. I’d tell August Van Gilder, “Thank you very much but I’ve been elected junior class representative to the Beverly Hills High Student Council. And between that and tutoring those foster kids, Mr. Van Gilder, I’m just not going to have time to pump your goddamn gas and clean your goddamn ladies’ room. You see Mr. Van Gilder, I have a real shot at Stanford. And Yale’s not out of the question.”
Wes finally looked up at me.
“I have an appointment with Mr. Van Gilder,” I said.
My interview went well. Van Gilder hired me on the spot.
I walked around back to the ladies’ room and changed into my jumpsuit.
On the way home, crossing the hot black asphalt at the intersection of Doheny and Olympic, I pretended I was walking across some snow-covered quad. I imagined I was surrounded by Gothic buildings and girls in Fair Isle sweaters.
I didn’t see the Mercedes turn into the crosswalk in front of me. The guy driving didn’t care that I had the right of way. He leaned on his horn, stuck his head out his window and yelled at me, “Stupid little pisher!”
I flipped him off, but it was too late. He was long gone. My fantasy had gone south too. Best-case scenario: I’d get a free ride to UCLA, live at home, and work at the Chevron. Eventually, I guess you got used to the fumes.
New York, 1994. I don’t remember coming back from shock this morning. I know it must have happened. I must have awakened, heavy-headed and confused and no doubt nauseous in the ECT suite. That’s what they call it—a suite. Someone in the hospital’s PR department must have spent quite a while paging through a thesaurus in search of that gem. That euphemism. There are no expensive little soaps in the ECT suite; no minibar stocked with Stoli and Perugina chocolate and six-dollar cans of Coke. I’ve spent a lot of time in hotel suites over the last decade, but not one of them had a bed made up with rubber sheets or came with an in-room defibrillator or a guy in the next bed who thought he was Jesus.
I wonder if I am the only ECT patient who’s noticed. I’ve come to realize lately that if you’re really crazy most people assume you’re also really stupid. They either speak to you in a quiet, slow voice as if speaking to a retarded child or enunciate and yell as if addressing a hard-of-hearing, demented senior. Either way, I resent it. True, I can’t always remember who’s president when they ask me after I wake up in the suite. Or what day it is. Or the name of my doctor. But is that really a fair assessment of my mental acuity? I don’t think so.
I think that when I have the energy I will put a slip of paper into the suggestion box at the nurse’s station. I will suggest they change the word “suite” to “lab” or “chamber” or “electric fun house.” Just to let them know I know.
Somehow I got from there to here. My room, my bed. My head feels dull and thick—like the time I tripped on bad mushrooms in Yemen. Only, then, I awakened next to a naked girl. I can’t tell you who’s president, but I remember every detail of that blow job like it was yesterday.
I lie back on my Styrofoam pillow enjoying the memory, recalling the fine points that might be gone tomorrow. Heat, sweat, scent. I feel myself getting hard and try to locate my dick inside the complicated folds of the hospital gown and the oversized paper pajama bottoms I’m required to wear to ECT. You’d think the scavenger hunt would be enough to lower my flag, but if anything, I’ve gone from half-mast to full. I don’t know, maybe it’s the residual electricity floating through my bloodstream, but ECT always makes me horny. So much so that I’ve taken to hoarding tubes of the good lotion and hiding them in my night table. I have a feeling Milton, the Jamaican orderly in charge of the linen cart, knows what I’m up to. Lately he’s been handing me two or three tubes at a time and winking at me. Milton knows a man has his needs. Even when he’s locked up having his brain lit up like a Christmas tree three times a week.
I have managed to pull the enormous tent-like pants off and toss them onto the floor along with the sheet and blanket and have hiked the hospital gown up onto my chest. I am treating myself to an expert double-fisted hand job.
I am in Yemen, in Thailand, in Santiago. I am remembering—girls with skin the color of coffee, of saffron, of cinnamon. I am remembering how they smelled and tasted and felt as my dick slips and slides up through my left hand and circles down through my right in an endlessly delicious loop.
And then there is a sharp knock at the door, followed, without pause, by the swift banging of the door opening against the opposite wall. And then Milton is backing into my room, pulling a wheelchair.
“Mr. Greyson Todd, please to be meeting Mr. Tyrone Washington, your new roommate,” he says before he turns around. And when he does, turning the chair with him, he is rather stunned by what he finds. The kid in the chair—tall, skinny, black, catatonic with depression—does not even register what’s in front of him. His wet lips and slack jaw hang slightly open. His hands, palms turned up, sit curled in his lap, looking like sick birds. His ECT shunt sticks out of one wrist. And still, I am hard as a goddamn brick.
And having worked fucking hard to get to the exquisitely painful point of eruption, I have no intention of stopping now.
“Milton,” I say through gritted teeth, pumping myself once or twice to show him I will not be intimidated, “a moment if you wouldn’t mind.”
Milton looks from my face to my dick.
He chuckles and slaps the Formica table. “Lord.” Then he whips Tyrone’s chair around. “You got five minutes.”
Later that night, I look over at Tyrone lying in a fetal position—all six feet three inches of him curled into a ball—in the bed next to me. He is nineteen and wears a hospital gown and his basketball sneakers. He is a child.
I can’t sleep and it occurs to me to jerk off again. I wonder if he would notice. I know he wouldn’t say anything. But that is not the point. I don’t want to be rude. There are rules of etiquette, even here.