Congenial-speak #28

Small World Limits

Marina is not around much. She floats around Tel Aviv. I see her on the beach playing Matko with some hairy Mediterranean types. The bar sells cheese toastys. The British snacks are melted Swiss and tomato between the toasties. I see her there in the evening when the beer is pouring with toes tapping to Elvis on 8-track. A lot of Brits are working in the hostel and around Israel. They are there, on work visas (or not) indefinitely. They do brick and construction work around town, finding work here that's unavailable in the U.K.

It would be nice to be able to stay at my leisure, to have the balance and physical capacity to be a Jack-Of-All-Trades. I'm not saying I would have stayed and bummed from job to job, meeting people like Marina, seeing new situations, challenging culture. Having the option to do so would be nice. In my story “The Cheeky Lad” from Finding me—and Them: Stories of Assimilation I write about traveling to a remote part of Scotland. The stories in the book show how I've stumbled, learned, gotten ahead, and been burned as a disabled person. When I went to the Egypt in 1989 I went to see my biological mother who was teaching English as a second language. I visited her in Alexandria and saw the lighthouse, one of the “7 wonders of the world.” I went to Siwa, an oasis village near the Libyan border. I came back with a severe case of culture shock and stayed inside at my mother's place nearly agoraphobic. Let's just say that, in my travels to very poor and rarefied Siwa, I had experienced humiliation and suspicion, resentment and ridicule that made getting stopped by the cops in Scotland look like a day at the beach. After days my mother finally got me to venture out again. I ended up in Tel Aviv.

I listen at night to the South Africans who bunk with me. They show me their passport and say how there are limits to where they can go in the world. Because of their government's system of apartheid they are banned from many desirable areas in the world. They have limitations also. I have been given a week's visa in Israel I suspect because of my name, my skin, maybe the way I walk. My other bunk mates are Polish and German. I speak German and am understood. Gunther goes running in the pouring rain, I sit at the bar and wait for the Messianic arrival of Marina. I can't take my mind off the Jersey girl, the fellow American who is good-looking and able to work odd jobs. She, Like the Brits, could find a job easily in Tel Aviv. She could, but tells me she has a gig back in Jersey. She's a woman, and that might be a limiting factor, although I doubt it comes into play much at the blue-collar level. I watch her sitting eating her cheese toasty, sipping at a frosty mug gently, like a liberated woman.

“Going into Jerusalem tomorrow?”

“No, a bunch of us a the hostel walk to the old city of Jaffa. There is kind of an open market their some mornings,” she tells me, all neat and assimilated.

I am the tourist for a day and book an all inclusive deal. I'll see all of Jerusalem, the Knesset, Western Wall, Yad Vashem and all the last places Jesus walked to become Christ. I'm timid, not as adventurous anymore.

“Did you want to come with us?”

“Well. . .oh damn. . .I already paid for the tour. It might be fun. I better go o that,” I say, nerdishly, thinking I'd have her by my side in Jaffa, or at least know her, a fellow American, if I got in too deep. I missed an opportunity for adventure. After being humiliated and shocked, looked at like the town drunk, threatened at gun point, I want to stay safe with an organized tour. The 8-track player is tracking early Beatles now. The Belgian is singing at the top of his lungs. He is on his eighth mug and unphased by inebriates.

Youth often have no permanent home. They're just hostile to the mundane. They were vagrants, living life by the drop. Out of packs their life hides and I gravitate to the mundane out of necessity brought on by difference of others to disability. An assumed insecurity manifests itself in odd, often self-destructive behaviors. It comes at the end of the tunnels, the causeways of bouncers, cops and constables. I envied Marina and the Brits, the South Africans, not so much (although their limitations finally went away). The trip was my last before buckling down and finding a job after graduation. Still, a part of me wanted to extend that learning curve and bum around the promised land. The individual I was demanded some normalcy, a restrained complacency, a admission of chains and tethers and cracked roach infested neighborhoods (see “A Gentler Place” in Finding me—and Them).

When I look back on that trip to the mid-east, long before it became a place I would not dare go, I think of what I learned. I think about what I saw in myself, why I was who I am, who I've become. I think of the Jersey girl and the pith with which one says “small world.” In 1989 I was twenty-four years of age. I had plenty of time to let the juice of the world and or Marina drip down my chin. Now, at the ripe age of fifty-two, I trace the instances, the cosmic progressions, of a few times in my life. Those which left impressions, memories, good and bad, thing I can be proud of and those that produced the basest humility one can endure. I muse on how I'd have emerged from them, the able-bodied me. It's an adroit spector always hovering, covering spaces, saving some faces in the dark recesses of my mind, somewhere, and probably had the best chance of cutting free, seeing the clearest picture of the non-disabled me in Jerusalem. It very well may have been there by my side, my altered-ego, at the Western Wall as I rocked with closed eyes in a cardboard yarmulke they hand out.