Lo Ozev Et Ha'ir Avoor Af Echad
"Your Uncle Morris and Aunt Sarah died within two hours of each other yesterday."
"Jesus. Way to go."
"They were married for seventy years. She didn't want to leave him to anyone else's care. He was 98, she was 96. They told her he died, and she died two hours later."
"Yeah."
"You know, you can call your uncle when he's passing a kidney stone. Lior told you about it a week ago."
"No he didn't. I just heard about it on your message."
"Well, you could call every once in a while. I'm sick of hearing your answering machine."
"I was in my fucking shrink's office, I couldn't pick up."
"If you called every so often, you'd know."
"Fuck you, asshole. I wouldn't be at the shrink's twice a week if I could do that."
"Yeah? I was in the shrink's office twice a week and I remembered to call."
"Fuck you, shitbag. Enjoy my answering machine. Maybe if I was raised right I'd know how to call when I'm supposed to,"
"Don't blame us."
"Go suck it." Click.
Typical conversation with my dad.
A few weeks earlier, before I went back on Wellbutrin and Prozac, he was yelling at me for not calling him when he had his first bout of chest pain, and I was yelling at him for being a fat fucker who never took care of himself even though he knew his dad dropped at age 64 (which he's at) of the same shit.
The next day, I finally went and filled my scripts. My first scripts as a civilian. I paid for 'em. Fucking expensive, too. I barely had money to cover it.
Nearly every day now, I get asked, "why aren't you married already?"
"I dunno," I usually answer. But the truth is so fucking simple: my relationship is way too important to fuck up with something like marriage.
But it goes deeper than that. If I marry, then Jennifer becomes family. And, on some plane, it pulls me closer to my family, it pulls me in line, it continues the tradition that's been put on me since as far back as I could remember, that I'm the end of the family line. Five thousand years of tradition, down the drain, kid, unless you do your piece. It scares the shit out of me.
It's weird, talking about the Judaic tradition, because I don't even see atonement as asking for forgiveness for doing wrong; if I ever got a good lesson from Dad, it was to use that day of atonement to remember and make sure that you don't do those things, never that you need to ask some higher power for forgiveness.
And it's weird, that I've been feeling ever more like a traditionalist, not that I ever doubted I was, but seriously indulging it. Or at the very least, trying to explore a little bit harder where the fuck I came from, and to figure out why I avoid it so desperately. I've been downloading all this Israeli music. I don't know where the fuck this is coming from. I despise Israeli music, or at least I did, until a few days ago. Fucking derivative, fucking bullshit, I always thought. It is, no doubt about it, but for the longest time, saying that was just my cover for the fact that I couldn't even form a single objective opinion about it, I hated it so badly.
Maybe because music was the first thing as an adult that separated me from my folks, discovering music, getting into shit like the Stooges and Creedence and Public Enemy and whatnot, shit I'd never heard at home, even shit like the Rolling Stones. I'd had almost no music in my house, certainly almost no musical education beyond the fucking shit I could pick up from the one FM top 40 station in my piece of shit hometown. And that stuff, well, let's just say (circa 1983-1993) was not exactly one to grow on.
But now, I'm downloading and filling my Ipod with Israeli music, and not just the hits I remember, but album cuts, even that one Yehuda Poliker fucking album of faux-Greek music that my parents had in the minivan for as far as I can remember and that I had to hear about a zillion times. And Mashina, the tape I got from one of my Israeli friends, at my only birthday party in Israel, when I was in second grade. That tape is still excellent. It's also one of the few Israeli albums that, despite the fact that they sound EXACTLY like Madness (to the point where they also had a song called "Night TRAIN to Cairo" instead of "Night Boat to Cairo") they sing about not giving a shit, and not growing up, and hating life, and just wanting to jerk off and do coke, and being fucking crazy, obviously things I still relate to.
For the first time today, I sat down and talked about what my experience with Israel was.
And why, do you ask?
Because for every night, for the last few weeks, I've dreamt that I was killing.
Yep. Every night, either with a gun, or a baseball bat, or a shovel, I've been killing people, in my dreams. And it's not been a frightening or even alien experience. I've felt safe, and secure, when I was killing, safe that I had bullets in my gun (the same H+K .45 semiauto I actually own). Last night, as my dreams tend to be particularly unsubtle in their overt wish-fulfillment, I dreamt that I took a giant shit on my mother's table, in Israel. Not just any shit, like a five-minute shit, the kind of shit an elephant would drop. Then I entered a war, and the other people had guns, and I had a bat, and I killed them, cracked their fucking skulls open.
But today, I started thinking about who these people were, 'cause I didn't remember hating them, in my dream. Some were nondescript, but a lot of them weren't from anytime recently, or even past high school; they were all people from elementary school, or kindergarten, or middle school, or junior high, and they were all people from Israel.
And I'd wake up, and I'd feel refreshed, and I'd feel happy, and I'd nearly always wake before the alarm. And then I'd try to remember if I'd been killing in last night's dream, and yeah, I was.
It's funny, the shit that you grow up with, and you don't even think it's fucked up when you're growing up, or you're a kid who's just worried about his Mom and Dad possibly getting divorced and you don't say anything, you just adapt. My mom used to yank me out of school in May, school in the United States, and take me to Israel, and put me in school there, for the last month of school. And she'd keep me there until the end of September, and then I'd go back to the U.S., and do the whole school year here, until I got yanked again and put back in school for the last month, like I was a regular student who just happened to be absent for the eight months in the middle of the year.
And every summer, I'd make some friends, though it was really hard, and really uphill, because, like, I wasn't there most of the year, and everyone knew that invariably I'd wind up leaving around September, but I made some friendships anyway, some real ones, some good ones.
My best friend, from second grade, he was an Israeli in that he was a bruising asshole outside, but inside, he had heart, you know? I was all quivery shy heart, as a kid, and we were an unlikely pair, but we knew we were good for each other. Every so often, as I was yanked back and forth, we'd meet up, and figure out that we were about in the same place growing up, if we allowed ourselves to be honest, something that got a little easier as adolescence passed by.
His father left his mother and married the girl from next door, who'd acted as the nanny. His mom swallowed a bunch of Valium and walked into the ocean. He wound up going to military academy, as early as he could manage, at age 13. I think I did, too.
I used to be terrified, in Israel. I became phobic about insects, in Israel. We lived in a house surrounded by thornfields, and I used to dread the sun going down, and the many crickets and cockroaches and centipedes and scorpions singing as loud as the disco that was on the beach, in the inky dark, crawling around, in my room, under my bed. I dreaded turning on the light in the bathroom at night, lest a bug had crawled out of the sink or the bathtub. I dreaded going to school the next day. I dreaded having to read Hebrew. I dreaded having friends I would lose, I dreaded my mother egging me to make friends and to not just hide in my room after school, reading books in English about World War II and airplanes.
I remember, now, and I haven't been. I lost my virginity in Israel, with a girl that I was with only because I knew I was leaving, but she was really nice and smart and hot and boy, was I an asshole. I went back to the United States and didn't even write her a word for a year. I fucking hate myself. I fucking couldn't write or call. I couldn't even wrap my head around being that much of an asshole, I just couldn't do it.
I found some friends, in high school. They were mostly girls. Not the prettiest girls in class, but each one really, really fucking good people, and tight. They cared about me, and they always welcomed me back and let me know I was missed when I left. One of them, her mom, she became my homeroom teacher. Her little brother would tag along with our group and be a pest. Eventually, he became my best friend in Israel, probably my best friend in the world for a good many years. When my mom told me I'd "sold my soul to the devil" by going to USUHS and joining the military, without hesitation he told me I could stay at his house. For the whole fucking summer. His family were so fucking good to me. They were just fucking good, you know? I even went out with his cousin, who despite the fact that we were totally, totally wrong for each other, we still can't help but care about each other. She's married, and I hope she's okay.
He took care of me when I came to Israel from England, so lovesick and depressed and hopeless that I felt like I was walking through jelly, and that each day lasted about a thousand years.
Three years ago, the mom, my homeroom teacher, my mother for all intents and purposes when I needed one, got diagnosed with breast cancer. It was bad. She fought the fucking cancer for three years. Maybe it was more?
Not once, did I call.
Then she died.
And I still couldn't fucking call. Couldn't call one of my best fucking friends in the world, the one that took care of me, and tell him I'm sorry that his mom, who I fucking loved, died. I fucking hate myself, but I just couldn't.
I was thinking of trying to maybe reestablish some communication with my mom, this Mother's Day. I was thinking, maybe, I can send some flowers. Or a Pajama-gram, like I hear about on Howard Stern, that sounds easy enough.
I woke up on Sunday, and took my dogs to the park, and rode a bike, then came home, and fell asleep at six, woke up at twelve, fucked around til four, fell asleep again, woke up, took the dogs to the park, and went to work.
"What did you do for Mother's Day?", asked my first patient.
I'd totally fucking forgotten the thing. Like I'd forgotten my sister's birthday. Like I'd forgotten to call everyone.
"Nothing." I told her. The look she gave me was somewhere around the look you'd give someone who, for no reason, chainsawed a puppy in half. "I'm the worst son there ever was."
Every summer, my mom sent us to summer camp, in Israel. It's funny, because we weren't really encouraged or (I think) allowed to join any clubs or sports in the U.S., but in Israel we were sent away for, like, four weeks. I think it was like the first sleepaway camp there ever was in Israel, too.
This was the summer I was 13, too. Not really that old, honestly. And Israeli kids, well, if you ever wonder how Israeli adults become such assholes, it's because Israeli kids are huge assholes, more than you can probably imagine. At that summer camp, two of my friends were sent home for pissing on some (even quieter) kid's face while he slept. Everyone was comparing the size of their dick, and checking to see who was sprouting hairs, and who could fuck a girl first.
(After I finally fucked a girl, I found out that no one else was.)
I called my mom, I don't even remember it being that much. Just called her and told her, I guess, that the place was kind of wretched and scary, it was the first summer of the Intifada, I remember, too, and all I could remember was bugs, and girls I didn't know how to talk to, and assholes. It sucked, and I was miserable, but just trying to go with it, trying to get into it, not knowing if anyone would ever love me or fuck me, and my brother didn't like me hanging around with his friends, in his age group.
But I guess I must have called too much, because she told me that I didn't have to call her every day. I was so mortified to think that she was just tolerating me, and that I was bothering her, that, uh... I never did call, ever again.
"Jesus. Way to go."
"They were married for seventy years. She didn't want to leave him to anyone else's care. He was 98, she was 96. They told her he died, and she died two hours later."
"Yeah."
"You know, you can call your uncle when he's passing a kidney stone. Lior told you about it a week ago."
"No he didn't. I just heard about it on your message."
"Well, you could call every once in a while. I'm sick of hearing your answering machine."
"I was in my fucking shrink's office, I couldn't pick up."
"If you called every so often, you'd know."
"Fuck you, asshole. I wouldn't be at the shrink's twice a week if I could do that."
"Yeah? I was in the shrink's office twice a week and I remembered to call."
"Fuck you, shitbag. Enjoy my answering machine. Maybe if I was raised right I'd know how to call when I'm supposed to,"
"Don't blame us."
"Go suck it." Click.
Typical conversation with my dad.
A few weeks earlier, before I went back on Wellbutrin and Prozac, he was yelling at me for not calling him when he had his first bout of chest pain, and I was yelling at him for being a fat fucker who never took care of himself even though he knew his dad dropped at age 64 (which he's at) of the same shit.
The next day, I finally went and filled my scripts. My first scripts as a civilian. I paid for 'em. Fucking expensive, too. I barely had money to cover it.
Nearly every day now, I get asked, "why aren't you married already?"
"I dunno," I usually answer. But the truth is so fucking simple: my relationship is way too important to fuck up with something like marriage.
But it goes deeper than that. If I marry, then Jennifer becomes family. And, on some plane, it pulls me closer to my family, it pulls me in line, it continues the tradition that's been put on me since as far back as I could remember, that I'm the end of the family line. Five thousand years of tradition, down the drain, kid, unless you do your piece. It scares the shit out of me.
It's weird, talking about the Judaic tradition, because I don't even see atonement as asking for forgiveness for doing wrong; if I ever got a good lesson from Dad, it was to use that day of atonement to remember and make sure that you don't do those things, never that you need to ask some higher power for forgiveness.
And it's weird, that I've been feeling ever more like a traditionalist, not that I ever doubted I was, but seriously indulging it. Or at the very least, trying to explore a little bit harder where the fuck I came from, and to figure out why I avoid it so desperately. I've been downloading all this Israeli music. I don't know where the fuck this is coming from. I despise Israeli music, or at least I did, until a few days ago. Fucking derivative, fucking bullshit, I always thought. It is, no doubt about it, but for the longest time, saying that was just my cover for the fact that I couldn't even form a single objective opinion about it, I hated it so badly.
Maybe because music was the first thing as an adult that separated me from my folks, discovering music, getting into shit like the Stooges and Creedence and Public Enemy and whatnot, shit I'd never heard at home, even shit like the Rolling Stones. I'd had almost no music in my house, certainly almost no musical education beyond the fucking shit I could pick up from the one FM top 40 station in my piece of shit hometown. And that stuff, well, let's just say (circa 1983-1993) was not exactly one to grow on.
But now, I'm downloading and filling my Ipod with Israeli music, and not just the hits I remember, but album cuts, even that one Yehuda Poliker fucking album of faux-Greek music that my parents had in the minivan for as far as I can remember and that I had to hear about a zillion times. And Mashina, the tape I got from one of my Israeli friends, at my only birthday party in Israel, when I was in second grade. That tape is still excellent. It's also one of the few Israeli albums that, despite the fact that they sound EXACTLY like Madness (to the point where they also had a song called "Night TRAIN to Cairo" instead of "Night Boat to Cairo") they sing about not giving a shit, and not growing up, and hating life, and just wanting to jerk off and do coke, and being fucking crazy, obviously things I still relate to.
For the first time today, I sat down and talked about what my experience with Israel was.
And why, do you ask?
Because for every night, for the last few weeks, I've dreamt that I was killing.
Yep. Every night, either with a gun, or a baseball bat, or a shovel, I've been killing people, in my dreams. And it's not been a frightening or even alien experience. I've felt safe, and secure, when I was killing, safe that I had bullets in my gun (the same H+K .45 semiauto I actually own). Last night, as my dreams tend to be particularly unsubtle in their overt wish-fulfillment, I dreamt that I took a giant shit on my mother's table, in Israel. Not just any shit, like a five-minute shit, the kind of shit an elephant would drop. Then I entered a war, and the other people had guns, and I had a bat, and I killed them, cracked their fucking skulls open.
But today, I started thinking about who these people were, 'cause I didn't remember hating them, in my dream. Some were nondescript, but a lot of them weren't from anytime recently, or even past high school; they were all people from elementary school, or kindergarten, or middle school, or junior high, and they were all people from Israel.
And I'd wake up, and I'd feel refreshed, and I'd feel happy, and I'd nearly always wake before the alarm. And then I'd try to remember if I'd been killing in last night's dream, and yeah, I was.
It's funny, the shit that you grow up with, and you don't even think it's fucked up when you're growing up, or you're a kid who's just worried about his Mom and Dad possibly getting divorced and you don't say anything, you just adapt. My mom used to yank me out of school in May, school in the United States, and take me to Israel, and put me in school there, for the last month of school. And she'd keep me there until the end of September, and then I'd go back to the U.S., and do the whole school year here, until I got yanked again and put back in school for the last month, like I was a regular student who just happened to be absent for the eight months in the middle of the year.
And every summer, I'd make some friends, though it was really hard, and really uphill, because, like, I wasn't there most of the year, and everyone knew that invariably I'd wind up leaving around September, but I made some friendships anyway, some real ones, some good ones.
My best friend, from second grade, he was an Israeli in that he was a bruising asshole outside, but inside, he had heart, you know? I was all quivery shy heart, as a kid, and we were an unlikely pair, but we knew we were good for each other. Every so often, as I was yanked back and forth, we'd meet up, and figure out that we were about in the same place growing up, if we allowed ourselves to be honest, something that got a little easier as adolescence passed by.
His father left his mother and married the girl from next door, who'd acted as the nanny. His mom swallowed a bunch of Valium and walked into the ocean. He wound up going to military academy, as early as he could manage, at age 13. I think I did, too.
I used to be terrified, in Israel. I became phobic about insects, in Israel. We lived in a house surrounded by thornfields, and I used to dread the sun going down, and the many crickets and cockroaches and centipedes and scorpions singing as loud as the disco that was on the beach, in the inky dark, crawling around, in my room, under my bed. I dreaded turning on the light in the bathroom at night, lest a bug had crawled out of the sink or the bathtub. I dreaded going to school the next day. I dreaded having to read Hebrew. I dreaded having friends I would lose, I dreaded my mother egging me to make friends and to not just hide in my room after school, reading books in English about World War II and airplanes.
I remember, now, and I haven't been. I lost my virginity in Israel, with a girl that I was with only because I knew I was leaving, but she was really nice and smart and hot and boy, was I an asshole. I went back to the United States and didn't even write her a word for a year. I fucking hate myself. I fucking couldn't write or call. I couldn't even wrap my head around being that much of an asshole, I just couldn't do it.
I found some friends, in high school. They were mostly girls. Not the prettiest girls in class, but each one really, really fucking good people, and tight. They cared about me, and they always welcomed me back and let me know I was missed when I left. One of them, her mom, she became my homeroom teacher. Her little brother would tag along with our group and be a pest. Eventually, he became my best friend in Israel, probably my best friend in the world for a good many years. When my mom told me I'd "sold my soul to the devil" by going to USUHS and joining the military, without hesitation he told me I could stay at his house. For the whole fucking summer. His family were so fucking good to me. They were just fucking good, you know? I even went out with his cousin, who despite the fact that we were totally, totally wrong for each other, we still can't help but care about each other. She's married, and I hope she's okay.
He took care of me when I came to Israel from England, so lovesick and depressed and hopeless that I felt like I was walking through jelly, and that each day lasted about a thousand years.
Three years ago, the mom, my homeroom teacher, my mother for all intents and purposes when I needed one, got diagnosed with breast cancer. It was bad. She fought the fucking cancer for three years. Maybe it was more?
Not once, did I call.
Then she died.
And I still couldn't fucking call. Couldn't call one of my best fucking friends in the world, the one that took care of me, and tell him I'm sorry that his mom, who I fucking loved, died. I fucking hate myself, but I just couldn't.
I was thinking of trying to maybe reestablish some communication with my mom, this Mother's Day. I was thinking, maybe, I can send some flowers. Or a Pajama-gram, like I hear about on Howard Stern, that sounds easy enough.
I woke up on Sunday, and took my dogs to the park, and rode a bike, then came home, and fell asleep at six, woke up at twelve, fucked around til four, fell asleep again, woke up, took the dogs to the park, and went to work.
"What did you do for Mother's Day?", asked my first patient.
I'd totally fucking forgotten the thing. Like I'd forgotten my sister's birthday. Like I'd forgotten to call everyone.
"Nothing." I told her. The look she gave me was somewhere around the look you'd give someone who, for no reason, chainsawed a puppy in half. "I'm the worst son there ever was."
Every summer, my mom sent us to summer camp, in Israel. It's funny, because we weren't really encouraged or (I think) allowed to join any clubs or sports in the U.S., but in Israel we were sent away for, like, four weeks. I think it was like the first sleepaway camp there ever was in Israel, too.
This was the summer I was 13, too. Not really that old, honestly. And Israeli kids, well, if you ever wonder how Israeli adults become such assholes, it's because Israeli kids are huge assholes, more than you can probably imagine. At that summer camp, two of my friends were sent home for pissing on some (even quieter) kid's face while he slept. Everyone was comparing the size of their dick, and checking to see who was sprouting hairs, and who could fuck a girl first.
(After I finally fucked a girl, I found out that no one else was.)
I called my mom, I don't even remember it being that much. Just called her and told her, I guess, that the place was kind of wretched and scary, it was the first summer of the Intifada, I remember, too, and all I could remember was bugs, and girls I didn't know how to talk to, and assholes. It sucked, and I was miserable, but just trying to go with it, trying to get into it, not knowing if anyone would ever love me or fuck me, and my brother didn't like me hanging around with his friends, in his age group.
But I guess I must have called too much, because she told me that I didn't have to call her every day. I was so mortified to think that she was just tolerating me, and that I was bothering her, that, uh... I never did call, ever again.