by Nick Frost
The key to a great haul of free wine was simple. Sit near the old people. They never drank much if any and they’d fuck off early. Cool. You tried to stay at your table as long as possible, even while the room was being cleaned around you. Once most of the Israelis had gone you essentially had your pick of about three hundred bottles of shitty Shabbat wine. Time it right, get up and casually stroll out grabbing bottles and sticking them wherever you could. That wine would then either be drunk immediately pre-disco, or stored underground for when the lean time came. (Monday.)
Between the end of Shabbat meal and the disco opening there was a two-hour wait. It was a tricky period. If you went off too soon you’d be so hammered that you wouldn’t make the disco, and it was the only chance to go out in the week. Not good. A couple of times going off too soon meant I even failed to make Shabbat meal, which was a terrible shame. I got so pissed that I fell asleep outside a small warehouse leading up to the dinner hall. I was shaken awake by a furious Vicki who sent me home and banned me from the disco that night. She’d received a couple of complaints from elderly members whom I’d apparently growled at, although that doesn’t sound like something I’d do at all.
For an avid cockroach like myself Fridays were a good opportunity for more foraged treats. The Members Club near the dining hall would allow volunteers in to drink coffee and eat biscuits on the Sabbath. We’d rarely drink coffee; instead, while browsing the English novels on one of the shelves of the small library, I’d be stuffing biscuits or little cakes into my mouth, pockets and sometimes even turn-ups.
Ten minutes before the disco opened we’d trudge up the hill towards the bar. When I first arrived at the kibbutz the disco was in a giant room under the gymnasium. A month or so into my stay the disco was moved into an old bomb shelter under the Members Club. It was much nicer. I must point out that the word ‘nicer’ in this case was relative. It was a big concrete room that had a sound system and stank. We loved it. I had some of the best times at those discos.
The DVF would always post up at the bar for the first hour or so. It felt nice, normal, a bit like home. Sitting at the bar bullshitting with the Israelis, laughing with good mates, drinking tall, cold, draught Goldstar. Even better perhaps it was all free. Free. All free. Ha-ha. Free. The. Beer. Was. Free. And it never ran out. Never! (Well maybe once or twice but you get my point.)
After a while we’d spin our stools around and break ranks to flirt and chat and dance. Dancing was important. Everyone would dance like crazy. House of Pain’s ‘Jump Around’ and ‘The Sign’ by Ace of Base were both favourites. It was totes bacchanalian.
I remember a lot of injuries and mishaps in that place. Beer spilled, skiddy floors, trips, slips. You soldiered on, alcohol-based injuries and not making work because you were pissed or injured or hung-over were not tolerated. My poor friend Theresa, a tall, broad, Irish lunatic of a woman, fell over one night and knocked her two front teeth out. She couldn’t afford to get them fixed so she stayed like that for weeks. This horrified the Israelis.
When the disco was over, it was usually well past three in the morning. There were no sneaky afters or cheeky lock-ins. We’d leave and either I’d break into a factory for ham or stumble back to the common room to eat ketchup on toast and drink vodka, usually with a juice of some kind, although mixing it with water and drinking chocolate was not uncommon. Filth.
Saturday was never without a hangover. It was our day off so that was cool. I once woke up covered in a hundred partially digested cherries. I’d obviously fallen asleep eating cherries and had woken up, honked and gone back to sleep. It looked like a bloodbath. Waking up with the bed and walls covered in red liquid was absolutely terrifying. I believed my kidneys had been removed while I slept. Another time I woke up with my head plastered so close to the wall that I screamed and rolled off the bed thinking I had been struck blind.
It was all high jinks until the DVF discovered the pain of the 95% and things took a more sinister turn. It took us over. We had become a coven of drinkers. It was no longer a big group of us laughing and joking around, it was like we’d stumbled into the darkness. The alcoholic occult. We took the pomp and verve of the shotgun challenge and x’d it by a thousand and crammed it into a Ouija board. It was like Jumanji with crying.
Four of us would sit in one of our rooms. The door would be locked. Tea lights were lit. A small ornate table would be positioned in the centre of the room, on it the official ashtray would be placed.
We’d sit at the cardinal points on the compass, north, south, east and west. The four were usually me and the aforementioned Kiwi Shaun, Pete and Dave. These were my best friends. The term ‘best friend’ is perhaps a strange concept on a kibbutz. People you grew to love, who when their time was up would pack up and leave, move on, go home, go somewhere else. It’s the way it was. I think I got good at being left. You had to really.
But these three were my best friends and I loved being with them. By now my time on kibbutz meant I’d been upgraded to sharing a two-bed with Shaun. We were really close. Many were the times I woke up from a boozy coma to see Shaun humping off on his lovely Danish girlfriend Margritte.
Shaun and I would also, from time to time, have the odd drunken altercation. It would start off as a competition to see who could slap the hardest, or some other lunacy, but it would soon become serious and more often than not we’d have to be separated. The next morning he and I were always thick as thieves again, eating a hangover breakfast and laughing like idiots. It’d confuse people but it was our way and we kind of liked it like that!
The other two players were Pete and Dave, friends from home who had travelled to kibbutz together from Scotland. They were alcoholic fuckheads and total degenerates. Just like me. I loved them and we laughed a lot.
Not one of us ever questioned why we were doing the 95% séance. What possessed us to dabble into the occult? We just did it. It just emerged into existence. It created itself. The first bottle – I say first, it was normally the only bottle – was usually, brought to the table under a veil of lace. A bell would sound and the shroud would be lifted. At this point the cardboard game wheel would be revealed. (Of course there was a game wheel, we were bored and clever.)
I think the wheel and therefore the game was called the ‘Wheel of Destiny’; it’d be retrieved from its dusty sarcophagus and the fun would begin. The only other things allowed on the table were a small chalice (big shot glass) and a two-litre bottle of red death (Coke).
Let me tell you a little more about the Wheel of Destiny. It’s important you know so you can avoid the mistakes we made. Avoid the regret, the tears, the confusion.
The wheel was divided into twelve sections, each home to a ratio. Either 80/20 or 60/40 or 20/80, 90/10, 70/30 and so on. The first number was the amount of 95% in the chalice, the second number the amount of red death. There were also some fun curveballs in there too: one said ‘Don’t Drink’. Why? Why would it say that? Another decreed ‘Everyone Drinks’. That’s better! Some had a small ‘s’ in the corner. These were fun, the ‘s’ stood for ‘shake’. You essentially did a slammer inside your own headbox. You take the drink and shake your head until it felt like your eyes had come out and by that time the liquid had vaporised across the blood/brain barrier and gone into your mind.
I was going to call those nights fun, but I’m not sure fun would be correct. Sure we laughed a lot but it didn’t feel like fun.
That shit was so strong, we’d drink about 250ml each in shot format with a mixer and it would be goodnight Tel Aviv. The night went like this: laughter, laughter, laughter, death. That’s how it went. It turned us into babbling zombies, lunatics. We’d begin at 6 p.m. and by 7.15 p.m. we were absolutely ruined. Complete blackout. People would tell me I’d been mobile, shuffling, spitting but making no sense.
Places I woke up after drinking 95% (all true): up a tree, on a large flat rock, in an empty, pitch-black bomb shelter (it took me an hour to find my way out), lying on the border fence trous
er-less being licked awake by a giant Rottweiler. These and other such shenanigans meant that eventually the use of 95%, much like chemical weapons in wartime, were banned by the DVF. It was too dark, too many people – good people – were hurt. Here endeth the lesson.
***
About a year or so into my first tour I decided that I’d had enough and I wanted to go home. God knows why. I seem to remember a little light pressure from people to stay, to become a member of the kibbutz. That meant either joining the army or getting married to an Israeli girl. The army wasn’t interested in a drunken Catholic, albeit lapsed. And in terms of Israeli women, they were very hard to woo, you had to be in it for the long haul, the ones I knew on kibbutz anyway. No, I was strictly a Friday night Euro-banger at this juncture.
I packed my stuff, Vicki arranged for me to get a lift down to Tel Aviv and I went. The only thing I remember from the flight was the smoking. It was the last time I ever saw smoking on a plane. It’s so weird to think, and I say this as a smoker sadly, that at one point in the not so distant past one could smoke in a plane, with kids there too, or on the tube, on buses, in restaurants for godsakes – as if the notion that a small, low wall separating the smoking from the non-smoking sections made a blind bit of difference to where the smoke would float!
***
In fourteen months on kibbutz and with the help of very little food, tons of exercise and ball-breaking labour I had gone from nineteen stone to eleven! This was a big shock to my parents who were waiting for me at the airport. I stood straight in front of my mum and she didn’t recognise me. She craned her neck looking for her chubby little soldier. Eventually she realised this tanned, thin, shaven-headed kibbutznik standing before her was me.
‘What have they done to you?’ she sobbed.
She grabbed me and hugged me so hard. Dad got involved at one point too and I think we all had a little cry. It was really nice to see them.
I’d almost completely forgotten about 214 Ray Lodge Road. It was a real shock to be back there. I felt that big, wet, black blanket drape itself around my shoulders almost instantly. I say home. It was a house and my parents lived in it. I just couldn’t be there.
After being away for so long and blooming, breathing, changing, growing, I’d half expected it to have happened to everyone here at home too. This was not the case. It was exactly the same. Nothing had changed. Nothing. I had to leave. I took my passport, the one with the stamp in it that said I couldn’t come back to Israel. (I was arrested at the airport for overstaying my visa by eleven months and effectively deported.) I wasn’t going to let this stop me. I tore my passport up, went to Petty France and reapplied for a new one. Cunning twat.
I have an odd relationship with passports. (I wonder if these words have ever been written before?) Years later Simon and I made an arrangement to spend five days writing in Helsinki. We wrote nothing by the way. I love the film by Jim Jarmusch, Night on Earth. The Helsinki vignette always fascinated me, it made me want to go there. So we did. The promise of snow was too much for me and Peggy to bear. We love snow. We were very excited.
Two days before we leave I try and find my passport. I can’t. I look everywhere. It’s gone. Lost. Balls. My personality is such that losing things is bad for me, it unsettles me, makes me feel disappointed with my brain. I don’t want a glitch in my matrix. I turn my place upside down looking for that fucking document. After a while I call Simon, tell him regretfully we’d have to cancel. He was furious.
I think the problem was we’d built up such a picture of this winter wonderland over the previous couple of weeks that to have it snatched away like this was too much to bear. He was so cross. I hung up saying, ‘Leave it with me.’ I couldn’t let my little soldier down. I remember I had an old passport in an envelope in a box in the shed. After rooting around I find the thing. It’s musty, out of date, cancelled and also cut in half. Clean through. Two pieces. Oh. As I sit at my desk I feel like Donald Pleasance in The Great Escape, headlamp blazing, scalpel and a roll of clear Scotch tape in hand. It took me almost three hours but I’d surgically taped that thing back together. We were going to Helsinki!
This was pre 9/11 so security was pretty lax, but still I was shitting a brick. If I had a kilo of squidgy-black taped to my calf I couldn’t have felt any guiltier. Cut a long story short, we got there, just. Being poor at the time, our cheap tickets meant we had to trans-ship via Amsterdam so this meant three sets of checkpoints; they looked at the passport, looked at me and waved me through. Fucking hell. So illegal. In Finland it didn’t snow once. We drank about 700 Lapin Kultas, laughed a lot and had brandy for breakfast – it was cold, so well deserved and purely medicinal, we believed.
Once again I said goodbye to M and D, took a train to Gatwick and flew back to Israel. I’d spoken to Israeli friends on kibbutz and they were happy to have me back. There’d been a change of administration in the weeks since I’d been gone. Vicki had left her post and a lady called Yael Arnin had taken over. She was tiny, beautiful in a Dana Scully kind of way and most formidable. I loved her and thanks to my cheekiness we got on well. She was really good to me.
Even though I’d only been gone a month the turnover of the volunteers was such that I hardly knew any of them. No matter, they knew me, I was still a Master Sergeant in the DVF and that meant something. I get back to work, keep my head down, drink, flirt, laugh, make new friends and don’t think about the future. I loved the day in day out of kibbutz life, same thing week after week. Four-forty a.m. alarm goes off, teeth brushed, work, lunch, swim, sleep, dinner, drink, sleep, four-forty a.m. alarm goes off.
Friday was Shabbat meal and the disco, this you know about. Wednesday we were allowed to use the shop. On Tuesday Yael opened her office. We’d get a hundred fags a week and five aerogrammes, which I never used; I’d stockpile mine and use them to trade for extra ciggies with some of the Danish girls, many of whom were avid letter writers.
I’d drop my dirty laundry off in the office and it’d be returned on Thursday all folded up in a little canvas bag, clean but essentially smelling of nothing. These were the routines I lived my life by and I liked it. I could do it with my eyes closed. I need routine. Even now, I’m shit if I don’t have a routine, really bad.
My twentieth birthday was approaching and my mum called to ask me what I’d like. A few people had planned a trip to Tiberias and I really wanted to go. I told Mum about the plan and she assured me that she’d sort it. Great!
Money, generally, was never an issue on kibbutz because no one had any. You didn’t need it. It was only when you wanted to venture outside that you ever needed to think about cash. On kibbutz, we had something called funny money, essentially coloured squares of paper assigned a value by the inclusion of a number on one side.
Tiberias is on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, deep in the heart of Jesus country. I liked it there, great food, and amazing falafel. Outside the city’s central bus station there was a long row of lovely falafel stands, colourful, beautiful; with giant bowls of salad, chopped vegetables, beans, pulses and the smell of chickpea patties frying in golden oil. Yumfuckingyum.
A couple of days before my birthday a parcel arrived from home, I eagerly tore into it. This is going to be good, weekend away here I come! Out of the package tumbled forty Benson and Hedges (Result!) and a fiver. Five pounds. Five. A fucking fiver. Sorry to sound ungrateful, I know they didn’t have a pot to piss in but still. Why assure me? I didn’t feel assured. I laugh a bit, confused, look back into the parcel, empty. Oh. Gutted. I laugh when I think about it now but I was definitely crestfallen.
I had unconsciously prepared for this kind of eventuality. I’d scrimped and saved up bits here and there and just had enough to get to Tiberias and back. The fiver actually came in handy for a few beers once I’d exchanged it so I was happy enough.
A bunch of us bussed it down to Safad and then hitched from there to Tiberias. We grabbed supplies of fresh pitta, cans of tuna, cheese, ham, vodka etc. and heade
d north around the top end of the Sea of Galilee. It was a long way and very hot but it was my birthday and we were in high spirits.
By the time we arrived at the campsite it was late afternoon. It wasn’t strictly a campsite, it was a beach dotted with lifeguard towers, and if you could find one that was hippie-free you could sleep on it. Which is exactly what we did. We laid out the sleeping bags and had a little picnic on the beach; we drank a little and swam in the Sea of Galilee. It was pretty magical. I felt free and happy. We stood in silence in the black, tideless water and watched the sun go down.
Later we lay around in our nest eating crisps and, taking long swigs of lemon vodka, we chatted and laughed. At one point I have a vague memory of one of the boys deciding it would be a good idea to piss all over us. The lemon vodka was beginning to darken the mood, I needed to be alone and so I wanderstumble off.
I sit on the beach, hearing europop drift across the sea from Tiberias, campfires up and down the beach fill the air with smoke, I hear the noise of a guitar, girls giggling, the soothing ‘AchAch’ of ancient Hebrew.
At some point I make the stupid decision to wade out into the Sea of Galilee. It starts off innocently enough as a little paddle, then I witness myself wading and then marching out further and further. There comes a point when I can barely touch the bottom. What a fucking stupid thing to do. So drunk I can hardly see, neck deep in the unknown.
Two things happen to me at this point, one is a realisation, the other is a physical incarnation of my deepest primal fear. The realisation is remembering how terrified I am by deep, unpredictable water. The sea hates a coward and in the sea I am most definitely a coward. I’m not a good swimmer and the notion of currents unseen, of tidal ebb and flow, makes me afraid – I’m just not good in the sea. It’s a primal environment and far too much for my imagination to cope with.
On holibobs I’ll happily wade and I’ll even have a little snorkel in the warm, clear Med, lovely. But I’m not in the warm, clear Med. I’m here, on my own, three hundred feet from shore in the pitch-black Galilee. This is not a good place to be. I blink and instantly become sober enough to understand the predicament I’m in. Breathe.