“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked Tom, screaming over the noise of the planes landing and taking off everywhere nearby. “We just risked our lives to get you to Turkey and you haven’t even seen it yet and you wanna get back in a plane?”
“That’s just it,” answered Tom, his eyes clear, bright, and focused. “During that flight, I realized my home is up there in the sky. Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly. The prehistoric ancestors of turkeys flew, it’s in my DNA, and when I was up there I felt it in my wishbone. Up there is where I belong. I am a man with no country but the wild blue yonder. The sky is my home.” And with that he bounded through the plane’s open door. Shalom and I had no choice but to follow him.
Tom bopped into the cockpit, strapped on a headset, and started flicking buttons and running down checklists.
“You sure you know how to do this?” Shalom asked.
“Birds fly. That’s what they do. What am I?”
“You’re kind of a bird, I guess,” answered Shalom.
“’Nuff said,” replied the bird, and slammed the cockpit door in our faces. The next we heard from Tom, it was over the PA system, and even though we were the only ones on the plane, he addressed the cabin as if it were a full boat.
“Uh, this is your captain speaking, looks like we are one or two on the runway here, so, ladies and gentlemen, please put up your tray tables and adjust your seats to the upright position. Flight attendants, prepare for takeoff.”
There were no flight attendants. As Shalom buckled in, he turned to me and only half-joked, “Nice knowin’ ya.”
“Birds fly. That’s what they do.”
The plane was taxiing down the runway, and I don’t think we’d been cleared for takeoff at all, because a couple of planes seemed to speed up to get out of our way. Seemed like we were on the ground so long that Tom was going to drive us to wherever he was taking us. As we gained speed, I noticed a fence beyond which I could see nothing but the blue Sea of Marmara and a watery grave beckoning. I closed my eyes and braced for impact. I had done all I could. I’d had a dream and I’d chased it and almost chased it down. I was pretty okay with this being the end. Shalom, not so much. He was lobbing every Yiddish curse he knew in the direction of the cockpit. “You meshuggener putz! You should get trichinosis and die! Of all the ferkakta birdbrained schemes, you lousy schmendrick—” And he stopped, but only because I think he ran out of Yiddish vocabulary.
We went crashing through the fence and over an embankment, nose-diving out toward the water. Three of my stomachs jumped into my throat. I closed my eyes again as water sprayed the windows and, and, and … nothing. We tilted up. We were clear and making our way up, up, and away.
After we’d climbed a few thousand feet and my stomachs had settled down, Tom came on the PA system again. “Well, folks, sorry about the ascent back there, just a little mix-up with the tower.”
“You’re a madman! You schmuck!” yelled Shalom.
“We’d like to offer you a free drink to apologize for the inconvenience of the takeoff. We are on our way up to our cruising altitude of thirty thousand feet. Predicting a pretty smooth flight, but please keep your seat belts on while in your seat in case of unexpected pig flatulence, I mean big turbulence…”
“I’m gonna kill you!” screamed Shalom.
“It’s about two hours’ flight time, so sit back, enjoy, we’ll have you at Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport in no time.”
Shalom stopped in mid-rant when he heard “Israel,” and he couldn’t suppress a smile. He looked out the window as if he could see it already. “Israel,” he said, caressing the ancient syllables as if they themselves had godly power.
“Is-ra-el,” he whispered.
And then he snapped out of it and yelled, “I’m still gonna punch you in the gizzard, you schlimazel!”
38
TODAY’S IN-FLIGHT ENTERTAINMENT
Tom’s learning curve was steep. He was right, flying was in his bones. Within twenty minutes, he was handling that plane like a seasoned pilot. The rest of the flight passed without incident. After about an hour and a half, Tom came on the PA again. “Folks, this is your captain speaking. Because of the heightened security restrictions at Ben Gurion Airport, I’m gonna take us in at a low angle, try to get in under the radar, so don’t be alarmed if we almost clip some trees on the way in. We know you have a lot of options when choosing an air carrier, so we thank you for flying Air Turkey and hope you have a safe journey whatever your eventual destination. Flight attendants, prepare for landing.”
As we descended, Shalom looked out his window at Israel rising quickly to meet us with the same rapture that Tom had beheld Turkey. Soon we were barely higher than the buildings. It was scary, but the land also felt so close, just within our grasp. Shalom was davening all the way down and said he had a tingly feeling in his “schpilkes.”
The moment the wheels touched tarmac, he announced, “The promised land!”
39
A PIG IN THE PROMISED LAND
Tom made a quick, rough landing and yelled for us to hurry out of the plane. Since we had flown in unscheduled and low on a private craft, it would be only a matter of minutes before we were discovered. We hustled out and just sneaked through a hole in a fence around the perimeter of the runway. We could see the outskirts of Tel Aviv in the distance, and Tom dialed up Google Maps to figure out which way to Jerusalem.
It was going to be quite a pilgrimage from Ben Gurion Airport to Jerusalem, but in a matter of hours, plodding through some dicey neighborhoods and then into the hot, shrubby desert, we had come to an area that had been partitioned by a nasty-looking wall of ugly, gray, graffiti-strewn cement and razor wire. There were spray-painted pleas for change and mercy in Arabic and Hebrew, even English; there was a portrait of Che Guevara in black spray paint and nearby a yellow portrait of Bugs Bunny. Every so often there was a forbidding-looking tower manned by faceless men in full riot gear. It seems this part of this country was split in two—on one side those who believed the name of their god was YHWH (can I buy a vowel?), and on the other those who believed God’s name was Allah. Jews and Muslims. And also Christians. Jews, Muslims, and Christians all with Jerusalem in their hearts. It would be beautiful if it weren’t so contentious. They all claimed to worship the same god, they all claimed this was the Holy Land, but other than that could find very little lasting peaceful common ground.
“It seems this part of this country was split in two.”
In Israel, the Jews had the upper hand, but they were the minority in the Middle East, surrounded by sea, desert, and a people historically hostile to them. Tom, in his therapeutic German accent, suggested they always “felt like David in ze David und Goliath story, a boy against a giant, their slingshot now a nuclear veapon.” The entire region, he said, has a “siege complex” and “Cain und Abel issues.” Shalom flipped Tom the bird. “Don’t get me started, Sigmund Fraud.”
The Israelis built this giant wall to keep Palestinian Arabs out of disputed lands they were claiming for themselves. It reminded me of the fences back on the farm that were meant to keep us animals in our place. There is something in man that loves a wall, but what wall menders and fence builders do not get is that when they fence something out, they are also fencing themselves in. Not one but two prisons are made by one wall. Maybe the prison on the fence builders’ side is a little larger, a little nicer, but it’s only a matter of scale. China had a Great Wall that kept their enemies out, but also isolated the Chinese within. And that isolation weakened and doomed the empire. There was a wall in Berlin. That did not end well. For the wall, that is. There is a fence on the U.S.–Mexican border, and that’s not making anybody happy either.
Personally, I didn’t understand. To me, they all looked like people, all part of one desert herd, and to cows, all people look alike anyway. We bovines have a saying you folks might adopt—“Some black, some white, some black and white, some roan, all cows.” At some point, we cam
e upon a break in the wall of just a few feet and we absentmindedly, unknowingly slipped through into Palestinian territory.
A few hours after this—or was it days, I can’t remember—we found ourselves wandering in a desert. The terrain wasn’t fully barren, there was some green—shrub and wildflower. It looked like someone had taken a desert and decided to build a garden, but then got distracted shortly after beginning and walked away, the original Eden maybe. It felt oddly forsaken, this part of the earth that was so hotly contested, and it was difficult for me to believe this is where the Ur-cow stood so many generations ago. I breathed in the dry, difficult air and imagined these were the smells inhaled by our First Father and First Mother. It must have been a hard life with so little to eat and drink. It was a powerful private moment for me. It was also f-ing hot and I was quite thirsty. I asked Tom where we were and what did the map on the phone say.
“Last I checked, we were near the Sharafat mountains. Uh-oh. Seems I got some good news and I got some bad news,” Tom said. “The bad news is: the battery is dead. No map. Hey, don’t blame me, it’s a design flaw as far as I’m concerned. They say the 6G is gonna address that shit.”
“What’s the good news?” I asked.
“There is no good news. It’s just I’ve always wanted to say ‘I’ve got some good news and some bad news.’”
“Mission accomplished, dumbbell. It’s ’cause you wasted half the damn battery playing Angry Birds, you idiot.”
“Birds against pigs, broham. Best. Game. Ever,” Tom said.
Shalom was hot, tired, thirsty, and as pissed as a wild boar. “We’re gonna schlep around in the desert forever, you birdbrain,” he moaned. “I would kill for a seltzer. You’re like a damn tsuris trap. And don’t call me broham.”
Wander we did, in what could have been circles for all we knew, keeping shy of the armed border guards, and looking for another crack in the wall where maybe we could squeeze through and get to Jerusalem. It sure was a helluva lot easier to go from Israel to Palestine than Palestine to Israel. Shalom was still stewing, lost in his own bubbly water thoughts and egg cream dreams, when a stone landed a few feet away from him. We looked up and saw what I took to be some Arab children about thirty yards away from us, yelling taunts in our general direction, but specifically at the pig.
“It’s ’cause I’m Jewish,” Shalom explained.
“No,” Tom said, “it’s ’cause you’re a pig. Muslims revile pigs too.”
Shalom raised up and yelled back at the kids, “Have a BLT, suckers!”
“Do you really think it helps to fight hatred with hatred?” I asked him.
“I’m not fighting hatred with hatred, I’m fighting hatred with ignorance—it’s a fine distinction. This is how it’s done in this part of the world, each side plays their part like actors,” he pontificated, and he went back to cursing the kids out in his porcine Yiddish.
Now the initial group of two or three boys was joined by about ten others, and what had been the occasional pebble tossed our way became a full-on fusillade of all sorts of desert projectiles. As Shalom again turned to make his religious stand, a rock bounced off his shoulder. “If I back down here,” he argued, “it’s like dominoes, they’ll just keep coming, and where will it end? Not until they’ve murdered every last one of us.”
I said, “That’s totally illogical. And you’re gonna get us all killed!” Tom deftly blocked a rock speeding for his head, unfortunately using the limb that was holding the phone. The glass shattered. No more upgrade, no more battery, and no more phone.
Shalom held his beloved Torah above his head and waved it like a flag at the boys, trying to get their goat. A big stone crashed into the nail bed of the hoof holding his Torah, and Shalom dropped it on the sand, cradling his bleeding hoof. Fresh blood dripped on the old book. I snuck behind Shalom and gave him a swift kick with my hind legs to get him moving.
“My Torah!” he yelled.
“It’s only a book,” I snorted in reply.
Just then a big gob of viscous spit shimmied through the air and landed on my head with an audible plop. I looked up to see a camel staring at me. I’d only seen one in the encyclopedia, but I knew it was a camel, and I was relieved when he spoke to me in a standard animal Esperanto I could understand.
“What kind of whacky dromedary are you?” he asked. “Where is your hump, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“I’m a cow from America,” I said.
“I’m kidding. I know you’re a cow. Cows originated here along with the first civilizations. I’ve been all around the world myself. I used to model in the States, had a big cigarette campaign, my own brand named after me, even had a day, Wednesday, named for me—perhaps you’ve heard of hump day? But they let me go when I got too old.” He looked like he might cry, and spat again. “Sorry, nasty habit, I’m gonna quit.”
A rock landed at his feet. “Name’s Joseph, but you can call me Joe, Joe Camel. But you probably knew that on account of my fame and such, the modeling.” He whipped on a pair of sunglasses. “Recognize me now?” He struck a pose, lit up a cigarette, and acted as if he were looking at a watch. “I call this: ‘Oh Yes, I Have the Time.’ Not bad, right? Where you wanna get to?” he asked in between a seemingly endless array of modeling freeze frames that he struck with the precision of an Olympic gymnast. He froze with one leg bent in the air. “This one’s called ‘Hoofin’ It, ’97.’”
“Jerusalem.”
“Ah,” he sighed. “Well, you’re on the wrong side of the fence; first you gotta get to and through Ramallah.” And he struck a pose where he seemed to be laughing at some joke no one else heard. “I call this one ‘The World Is My Oyster’ or ‘The Clooney.’”
“Joe, I think that’s a killer pose, and I’d like to see some more, but do you think you could first help us get to a safer place where you can vogue, where rocks maybe aren’t raining down on our heads?”
“Follow me!” he spat, and trotted off nearly as fast as a horse.
40
ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL
Joe the camel led us deeper into the desert to his secret place in the wall where the stone had crumbled away slightly and the razor wire fallen down enough for us to squeeze through to Israel’s territory. There were no guards in sight, and just like that, we were back on the Israeli side of the West Bank wall. There would be no more fence between us and Jerusalem. As we kept walking, the villages got nicer and nicer, and the irrigated desert got greener and greener.
“Where you headed?” asked Joe.
“Wailing Wall,” Shalom said.
“Ah, tourists,” sighed Joe. I didn’t know much about camels, but I could tell this one was depressed, his hump seemed deflated. “I never go into the city proper anymore. I hated it when they used to mob me ’cause I was famous, now I hate it more when they don’t mob me ’cause I’m not famous anymore. I’m afraid you’re on your own.” He sat down dejectedly. “These days I just wander the desert so I don’t have to deal with the public. Such is the life of a has-been.”
I glanced around. Nothing looked familiar. We were lost without a phone, and I was desperately afraid we might wander again into a dangerous area.
“We’re never gonna find Jerusalem,” moaned Shalom.
“Did you guys see the guy they got to replace me?” the camel asked. “He’s got nothing. No charisma. No spit. All he’s got is youth.”
Tom stared at the camel and then exclaimed, “Aha!” He elbowed me aside with his wing, whispering, “Father issues.” He sat down next to the camel.
“You zay you used to advertise for ze cigarettes, ya? Ze Promethean phallic zymbol, ya?” asked Tom, once again sporting a ridiculous German accent.
“Advertise? No, man, I was the whole deal. I was the ‘it’ camel.”
“I zee,” said Tom. “Allow me to offer you ze paradigm shift.”
“Ze what?”
“Ze shift. From ze model to ze role model. You zold cigarette and you did zis better
than anyone, but you know what, ze cigarettes are kaput for your health and kaput for the environment, and you are actually doing ze right thing by not agzepting ze blood money of ze tobacco companies anymore.”
(Just got a call from my editor. She says, “There goes another possible sponsor and here comes another possible lawsuit. This is not what I mean by ‘product placement.’” She cracks me up.)
“Wait a minute,” Joe said. “So you’re saying that being good at something bad is bad, and when you stop being good at the bad thing, that’s good?”
Tom nodded sagely. “In layman’s terms, perhaps ya. It makes no moral sense to miss your former A-list lifestyle. You made ze righteous rejection of ze military-industrial-entertainment gomplex. You used to be ze big part of ze problem, now you are ze small part of ze zolution.”
“I’m part of the zolution!” The camel rose to his feet and I could visibly see his hump straightening, as if it were being inflated by an invisible bicycle pump. “Thank you for the … what did you call it?”
“Ze paradigm shift. That’ll be one hundred fifty clams. We made good headway today, but I think you should probably come back three times a week for the next thirty years or so…”
I cut Tom off. “Joe, I know you don’t like the fans anymore, but do you think you could be part of our solution and point us in the direction of Jerusalem?”
Joe paused, took a deep breath. “My fans will have to accept the new me. Everybody loves a reinvention. Everyone loves a comeback. I will not only point you, I will escort you.”
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