My Musings

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Sunday, July 25, 2004

Israel, Part Two: If You Haven't Already Done So, You May Want To Read Part One. Or You May Not, Because It's Really Boring

With ten seats per row in the middle and eight seats per row in the back, plus a special second floor for first class, the El Al plane was the biggest I have ever been on. I got an aisle seat in the right section around row 50, a rather nice seat, but the guy who had the window seat in that section immediately asked me if I wanted to switch and I agreed because I’m a spineless idiot. So I ended up sitting next to a window, trapped, unable visit my friends, pee, or do anything else.

The one thing I could theoretically do was write, but to write I needed a journal, and to get a journal I needed Marina, and to get Marina I needed an aisle seat, which I foolishly lost. Marina was near row 15, and when the seat belt sign went off and I saw that my two seatmates had no intention of getting up, I despaired of ever obtaining the precious journal — with the aisles likely to be crowded by listless passengers and drink-serving stewardesses, and with 35 rows between my seat and hers, getting Marina was impossible. That I’d have to pester the two strangers in my section to get up so that I could get out, and then again later so that I could get back in, only made me want to try even less. But those who know me will tell you that I am not a man who just gives up and quits in the face of adversity and danger. I give up in the face of unpleasantness and mild discomfort, too.

So I gave up, rationalizing my cowardice and laziness with the thought that Marina probably wanted the journal for herself anyway. When the plane reached cruising altitude and the diseased shitpot called New York was safely behind me, I began to write on some pages torn out of one of those free airline magazines. Luckily, the magazine had a few alcohol ads with nice, large, blank backgrounds, which were okay enough to write on, although I still had to maneuver around the bottles. Better than nothing, I supposed, but still fairly depressing, especially when I could have had a journal. If only I hadn’t given up the aisle seat…

Suddenly, to my elated astonishment, I saw Marina fighting her way down the aisle. It was the wrong aisle, of course, and from way the heck over on the wrong side of the plane, I looked longingly at Marina. Finally she saw where I was sitting and we made eye contact; although I, being a guy, can never fully master the female art of communicating via eye contact, I’ve known Marina for a long time and I can figure her eyes out a little sometimes and I believe at that moment her eyes said, “Fuck.” Then she began elbowing her way back up the aisle, and soon disappeared up ahead. A while later she returned down the aisle, the correct aisle this time, and slowly made her way over to my seat.

Marina would later remark, frequently, upon the insufferable ordeals she courageously faced whilst traversing those thirty-five rows. Squeezing past fat stomachs, jumping over drink carts, ducking between legs (at 5’1”, Marina is really short, and short people are good at such things), kicking aside obnoxious bathroom-goers — these are, I imagine, the trials Marina braved so as to render the journal to my grateful arms. Giving up her journal gave me the ability to write and kill a lot of time, and prevented her from doing the same; furthermore, performing this selfless act of kindness cost Marina a great deal of effort and frustration.

I was grateful beyond words. Marina’s noble sacrifice showed me that even though she is incredibly mean, and vicious, and calls me “worthless” and insults me on a quarter-hourly basis, and seemed cheerfully near, on the plane to New York, to vomiting all over the entire expanse of my lap, and told Natalie Lesser, in sixth grade, in horrifying violation of many earnest assurances that she would tell nobody, that I had a crush on said Natalie, in my presence no less — in spite of all these things, I saw then that Marina did in fact possess love and warmth — albeit perhaps in a microscopic quantity buried hidden and rotting in a dank and moldy corner somewhere deep within the scabrous, ashen passages of her charcoal heart — but love and warmth nonetheless.

Yes, I was grateful beyond words, which is why I probably should have taken the journal and kept my mouth shut. Instead I spoke, and with eloquence and brevity tried to express to Marina my undying gratitude for her magnificent deed. This expression of thanks would have been quite magnificent itself, were it not for my sore lacking in both eloquence and brevity, resulting in an incoherent babble that fell deaf to Marina’s annoyed ears because she was at that moment being stampeded by a torrent of mobile irate passengers, about as welcome in the aisle as a ten-pound kidney stone in the urinary tract. Finally I stopped speaking, or maybe Marina just told me to shut up, and then she left, disappearing forever into the sweaty mists of the forward seating section.

Procrastination is one of the most potent forces in the universe, right up there with hydrogen bombs and quasars. I have always been a huge procrastinator when it comes to writing, but I thought that since I was chained up in a window seat for ten hours with nothing to do except write, I would write, especially since I don’t really know what a “quasar” is. Yeah. Amazing, really, how many things, other than writing of course, I found instead to occupy my time: eating, reading, sleeping, trying to sleep, pretending to sleep, pretending to try to sleep, just plain sitting, pretending to just plain sit but actually trying to sleep, and on and on, all the while Marina’s battle-scarred journal sat idle in my seatback pocket smushed next to the headphones and the magazine with the torn-out alcohol ads.

Speaking of eating, I have to say that the El Al dinner was marvelous. A few hours into the flight I developed a frightening hunger and, along with it, the gnawing fear that I would have to consume my entire supply of Nutri-Grain bars. But the dinner was so delicious and so filling that I couldn’t even finish the breakfast the stewardess served several hours later, let alone the Nutri-Grain bars (which by then were no longer bar-like in their composition, due to the forcible compaction process that had long ago turned them into raspberry-scented granola paste inside my backpack). Quite a feat given that airline food is generally about as appetizing as sawdust. For breakfast we had a choice between an omelet and some other thing. Airline omelet sounded like a bad move so I chose the other thing, which I don’t remember what it was except that it was gross and I didn’t eat it.

I was the only person, as far as I later gathered, who thought the flight was too short. When the plane began its descent into Israel, other people sighed with exaltation at the visible end of the miserable, cramped, ten-hour journey, and the visible beginning of an exciting, wonderful, life-changing experience. But not me. I was still scribbling furiously about Irene’s bad experience with the security interview. Not even at the icebreaker yet! I fumed. I might have finished chronicling the events of the day had I not been such a procrastinating lazy bastard, and had I not wasted so much time writing an introductory treatise on automatic bathrooms, which segued nicely into the actual story but was otherwise long and entirely irrelevant and un-noteworthy save for my successful usage of the phrase “handjob soap machine” in a valid sentence.

On Saturday, May 16, I woke up in my bed at home for the last time. Twenty-one hours and a little over eight pages later, I finally took my first step on Israeli soil in the Jerusalem airport. It was beautiful. It was stupendous. It was stupid and boring just like every other airport. The ATM didn’t like my card and wouldn’t give me any money, even though I really wanted money. My bank account seriously had money in it, too — the blasted ATM must have been in cahoots with the evil interrogator lady who didn’t like me. “He’s a bad Jew — let him STARVE!!” I bet that’s the message the interrogator lady sent to the ATM. Luckily I had brought spare cash with me, sixty dollars of which I traded in for a little over two-hundred fifty of the Israeli Shekels. So take THAT, bitch.

The gals and I decided — which is to say, the gals decided — that we should get money first and luggage later. By the time we got the money issue settled, everybody else had already taken their luggage off the conveyor, so there weren’t many suitcases left on the merry-go-round and ours were easy to find. Except for Irene’s. Her suitcase wasn’t there. Perhaps — a chill ran down my spine at the thought — Irene (or should I say “Irene”) was actually indeed a terrorist, and security discovered, in her suitcase, among other things, a nuclear warhead. Then they confiscated the luggage and were about to go arrest Irene, but the warhead blew up and everybody died, along with Irene’s underwear. Upon not seeing her luggage, Irene began to panic, ostensibly because her luggage was gone, but truthfully because her jig was up.

It turned out that Irene was blinder than a blind bat and didn’t realize that the conveyor had stopped moving and that her suitcase was sitting very peacefully by its lonesome self on the other side of the baggage claim.

Suitcases in hand and Shekels in wallet, everybody assembled for some introductory words of welcome and preliminary announcements, which must not have been very important because I don’t remember any of them. The junior coordinators performed a random passport check, the point of which I’m not entirely clear on except that Irene wasn’t chosen for it, a major stroke of luck that ensured her true, thieving terrorist identity would remain unknown. At this time we also met our tour guide, a handsome man in his early fifties named Shabbat. “Shabbat” is also the word for Saturday, the Jewish day of rest, except with the other syllable stressed — so, the guide’s name was SHA-butt whereas the weekly holiday is pronounced sha-ASS, er, excuse me, sha-BUTT. Syllable vagaries aside, Shabbat’s name was very fitting and Jewish, as was the name of the Quest bus’s tour guide: “Israeli.” Surely the Jewishness of our tour guides’ names was a good omen.

.: posted by Boris 5:36 PM

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