How I Accidentally Started the Sixties
Page 22
The number of cups of food I’d picked was arbitrary. The trick was to eat only what this new, strictly-measured diet allowed. And to keep myself from going crazy, I allowed myself to eat whatever I wanted in whatever amounts I wanted on Saturday nights. Which meant oodles of extra dessert. But only one night a week. I’d have called this escape valve pigging out, but this was Israel and pigs are not kosher.
It took months of fighting my desire to snack whenever something vaguely edible floated within fingering distance. It took months of self-discipline, but when you force yourself to do something long enough, it slowly switches from a difficult imposition to habit. And once habit takes over, you’re home free. Habit is automatic. Yes, you still need discipline. But habit does the heavy lifting. Within two weeks of the time that I strapped the new diet rigidly in place, something remarkable happened. I lost twenty-eight pounds. Yes, in two weeks.
Alas, that was a bit much. I was proud as hell of gaining control over my eating. I exulted in the sense of control that probably intoxicates every anorexic. But my immune system went on strike. And that was ominous.
When you walk through farm fields and orchards every day in shorts, you sustain a damage that’s repaired so quickly that you never know it’s there. There’s a reason that blades of grass are called “blades.” They cut. Specifically, they cut your skin. So why don’t you notice that supposedly innocent plants are attacking you with green sushi knives? Your immune system is so swift that by the time you get home at night the nicks and slashes are gone, healed, returned to normal. But lose nearly nineteen percent of your body mass in fourteen days, and your immune system may stage a shutdown. So an invisible grass-cut in my shin turned into an infection that went up to my groin. What’s worse, I looked like a walking skeleton. And every Jew has seen walking skeletons with most of their remaining body mass packed into their noses—in pictures of German concentration camp victims.
The kibbutzniks were afraid that they would lose me at any second. And not in the way they would soon prefer—by tossing me out of their midst. In fact, they might be left with a hard to explain corpse on their hands. A corpse from an American city that had unwisely named itself after a curly-haired ungulate—Buffalo. Alive I was only an irritant. Dead I’d be bad publicity. So they shot me up with Vitamin B12 every day. But inwardly, I was gloating over what I’d done.
This would be a lesson in the importance of infrastructure of habit. Despite the opinions of Rimbaud and the Zen Buddhists, your infrastructure of habit is not just an escape. It’s one of the most important tools you have. Build a habit, force yourself to maintain it, and eventually it will take over and maintain you.
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The victory of the diet would later play a role in my love life. But in Israel, I had no love life. Or almost none. As you’ve just seen.
After eleven months, the kibbutzniks noticed that I seemed to have become a semi-permanent growth on their plantation. Something like kudzu. Or mold in a jam jar. They found me a useful device for ordering gangs of foreigners around, since it saved them from having to use their creaky English, and I could successfully swim through their floods of uvulal syllables and spit their meaning out to the auslanders in the language of Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov—English. They also put me in charge of crews of Israeli teenagers. While the kids spoke Hebrew fluently, I talked like a five-year-old. It was humiliating.
But I learned a lesson. Humans can escape capitalism. They can enter a social structure where everyone shares everything in common. They can eat together in a common dining hall. They can have their clothes washed in a communal laundry. In fact, if they’re bored with brain work, they can take a year off and herd goats. Or they can be Israel’s ambassador to Switzerland for five years, then come back and wait on tables. And they can delight in this proletarian freedom.
What’s more, they can have their offspring raised on a kiddie mini-kibbutz by communal care givers. Smart ones. Deeply caring ones. They can get together with their kids every afternoon when they leave work and spend four hours playing without ever having to nag their offspring to clean up their rooms and without having to shop for food or cook dinner. They can live without pecking orders and inequality. The whole thing produces remarkably healthy, vibrant, creative, intelligent teenagers. But does it get rid of vanity, greed, competitiveness, and a tad of nastiness? Not on your life. That’s why the kids raised on the kibbutz all moved to the big cities. Life in a socialist paradise was dull. In moderate amounts, vanity, competitiveness, and nastiness make life interesting.
But before we totally dismiss the kibbutz as a remaker of human nature, let me make one peculiar admission: owning everything in common does shake things up a bit. Take the annual election for key administrative positions in the kibbutz: the secretary who was the effective president of the 600-person community, the assistant secretary, and the treasurer. In America, ambitious men and women would lobby, conspire, spread nasty rumors, and recruit followers for months to achieve these power positions, these perches of prestige. Not on the kibbutz.
It was annual election time. We were all told to show up at the communal dining hall at 8:00 p.m., an hour after dinner. Why? The kibbutz was about to elect its officers. At the head of the room was a long table with the existing officers, the incumbents, and with one more person—the head of the nominating committee. He was the star of the evening. After a few opening words from the president, the head of the plucking-the-lucky committee stood to announce the fortunate kibbutzniks who had won the political lottery, the folks that he and his committee recommended as candidates for the top positions. The nominations tsar began by revealing his committee’s pick for president, or as the kibbutzniks called it, the head of the secretariat. The lucky man was the former ambassador to Switzerland, the one who was exulting in his freedom to wait on tables and be out of the pressure-cooker atmosphere of international affairs. This guy, roughly five foot seven, wiry, suntanned, and in his fifties, stood to make his election speech. It was one of the longest, saddest tales of woe you’ve ever heard. His responsibilities in Switzerland had crushed him. He now had a list of illnesses longer than this book. So did his wife. And his seventeen-year-old daughter, after five years in the jet set, was having hellish difficulties adapting to life down on the farm. No matter how collective that farm may have been.
I knew the daughter. We’d taken a bus ride into Haifa together. She was gorgeous. But she was also deeply troubled. Part of it was the fact that we’re all troubled at the age of twelve to twenty-eight. But she had it worse than most. She’d grown up for five years in an aristocracy, a worldwide elite, and an outrageously wealthy elite at that. Her parents may have loved going proletarian. But the return to Israel yanked her away from her dearest friends, from the city of her teen years, from Europe, and from nearly every handhold she’d ever known. It made finding herself and her way in life almost impossible.
What kind of sadist was the head of the nomination committee, I wondered. Of all the people to pick as mazkir—head of the secretariat, the president—this was the one man for whom the job would produce the most outrageous suffering. Then the head of the nominating committee named nominee number two—the person his committee had picked for vice president. When he let the cat out of the bag, the mouse out of the toaster, and the name out of his mouth, candidate number two was given a chance to speak. Yes, it was clear that the nominating head was, indeed, a man who would have made a truly superior torture master. Nominee number two spieled forth a long, sad, pain-riven tale of woe that wrung your heart, as if it were a supersatured swatch of terrycloth with which you’d been trying to towel down a killer whale. No way should this poor soul have been saddled with such a responsibility. He was the last man in the Middle East to burden with anything more than caring for cows. Then the election committee head announced executive position number three. Strangely, the third nominee had a tale of woe that would have stunned even Jerry Springer.
Not that ambition and the desire to climb had been extinguished. Far from it. Our kibbutz had produced a popular music group that worked extremely hard to win a national song contest and to get on the country’s leading radio station. The leader of the pop group had also invented a device for spraying insecticide on apple trees without breaking the trees’ branches, a gizmo that had won a national prize. And a few members of our kibbutz worked very hard to rise in the national political party that the kibbutz was part of. What’s more, as you know, one had worked hard enough to become the nation’s ambassador to the land of hidden bank accounts, laundered cash, starched and ironed pennies, and cuckoo clocks. So the social structure of the kibbutz had not killed ambition. But when it came to the kibbutz’s internal politics, oi vey.
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Meanwhile, the poor folks who had successfully been saddled with executive positions were worried. By now I’d been on the kibbutz eleven months. They were concerned that I might become some sort of hangnail on the body politic. So the head of the secretariat called me into his office, a room I’d never seen before, and said I’d have to make up my mind: either I should apply to become a permanent kibbutznik or I should move on.
Reluctantly, I abandoned the isolation of life in a communal society of which I wasn’t a part and traveled to a city in which I had no place: Haifa. Haifa was wonderful. Lonely, but wonderful. The Russian woman from whom I rented a room rapidly seemed to grow fond of me. It must have been a temporary lapse of taste. I mean, she wasn’t just your normal nobody. Her son was an admiral who ran the Israeli Naval operations in the Gulf of Aqaba, which meant he commanded two rowboats and a rubber raft. And her daughter was gorgeous. Said gorgeous daughter accepted me as a brother. Frankly, I’d have preferred some more romantic mode of inclusion. But, still, I felt isolated and forlorn. Like one proton stuck in the middle of a cold and empty cosmos.
Besides, I didn’t want to sponge off my father. So I went to the Technion, Israel’s version of MIT, to find a job, figuring that the bulletin boards would be plastered with openings for intellectuals anxious to wield a mop in a falafel parlor. Among the maze-like corridors of the famed institution of learning, I got lost—one of my specialties. If it had been Greece, I’d probably have been mangled by a minotaur, and you wouldn’t be forced to read this book. But it was Israel. So instead I wandered aimlessly like the Jews in their forty-year march across the desert. Until I spotted a disheveled-looking Jewish munchkin. The shuffling elder appeared to be a janitor, just the kind of guy who’d be able to point me to the nearest bulletin board.
I walked across the corridor and asked the linoleum-hygiene expert for instructions. The wizened soul in rumpled pants and an open-collared, rumpled shirt, gestured for me to follow. So I trudged obediently around corners and down endless hallways until we finally came to a door that was labeled “Dean of the Technion.” Why a bulletin board would be located in the dean’s office was beyond me, but I dutifully dogged my Virgil’s footsteps, afraid that otherwise I’d get lost in the third ring of a Yiddish purgatory. The rumpled senior citizen shuffled into the anteroom, a room commanded by two massive desks, the desks of the two secretaries of the dean of the Technion. Instead of stopping respectfully and announcing himself to the secretaries, my guide walked into the forbidden zone between the desks. And the secretaries seemed unsurprised by this act of effrontery. Beyond the space between desks was yet another door, a door with a frosted glass window, a door that appeared to lead to an inner sanctum. My disheveled janitorial Sherpa grasped the knob, opened it, and ushered me in. Then he marched around an aircraft-carrier sized desk, sunk into the rather large office chair on its other side, the power side, and gestured me to plonk my hiney down on a subordinate seat. I finally guessed that my guide was not a cleaning specialist. He was the dean.
The casually rumpled Generalissimo of higher education quizzed me for fifteen minutes. What was I looking for again? I told him I wanted a job. Unfortunately, I said this in a style not normally heard on the Israeli streets. After all, I’d been memorizing dictionary definitions like a lunatic, so I spoke with the syntax of a reference book. The little man settled back in his thrift-store throne, gave me a penetrating gaze, then pronounced his verdict. “A boy like you shouldn’t be working,” he said, “a boy like you should be in school.” So without asking my opinion, he picked up the phone and called a friend, the dean of the University of Haifa, which happened to be about four blocks away. “I have a boy here who speaks brilliant, erudite Hebrew,” the head of the Technion said. “I want you to take him as a student.” Then he wrote out a name and address, handed it to me, and sent me off to become a scholar.
By 2:00 p.m., I was sitting in class taking notes. My first course was the history of the Jews in Europe during the Middle Ages, in which I discovered that my progenitors on the Continent had not enjoyed a happy time. They’d been stripped of their earthly possessions and tossed out of every nation, principality, kingdom, and republic the Continent had ever invented. The greedy found them a useful target. If you wanted an extra house, a pile of gold, slightly used clothes, or even small change, you could always expel—or merely pogrom—a herd of Jews.
I continued going to school, reading every Israeli newspaper I could manage (plus a few from France and England), and spending my evenings attending performances of live theater, which were very big in Haifa at the time. Let me tell you, you have never experienced culture shock until you’ve seen a George Bernard Shaw play translated into Hebrew with a Jewish actress portraying a Salvation Army woman who stands on a soap box and declaims, not in the language of the King James Bible, but in the original syllables used by Moses. It brings up images of that Jolly Green Giant of a God who stomped at dawn through the Valley of Jezreel, the valley of your kibbutz. And that is the very opposite of what Shaw intended. But there was another lesson in the Israeli experience. And it would come from, of all things, pain. It would come from depression.
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The more isolated from people I became, the worse I felt. The worse I felt, the harder it was to behave in a way that folks would find attractive. My sense of humor, my ability to hold a casual conversation, my capacity to even look half-way appealing ebbed away. I remembered vividly what it had been like to walk the residential streets of Jerusalem on Friday nights, the eve of the Sabbath. I had trekked on a sidewalk of cold stone, past cold stone houses with small windows. Inside, families were gathered, singing songs and whooping it up (in a religious sort of way), emanating joy as they celebrated the arrival of the Queen of the Sabbath. They were warmly, buoyantly, loudly together, embraced by a group. Meanwhile, I ambled alone over the cobblestones, through empty side-streets, with the dusk deepening into a chilly gloom. I was friendless, isolated, and throbbing with interior pain. Within my cranium was an interior torture chamber.
One phrase from that favorite poet of Jews and Israelis everywhere, Jesus of Nazareth, kept going through my brain—”to he who hath it shall be given, from he who hath not even what he hath shall be taken away.”
It was a pretty grim idea, but there I was, living proof. And the old Nazarene carpenter hadn’t been the only one to notice it. Remember that old blues song “Nobody Loves You When You’re Down and Out”?
Once I lived the life of a millionaire,
Spent all my money, I just did not care.
Took all my friends out for a good time,
Bought bootleg whiskey, champagne and wine.
Then I began to fall so low,
Lost all my good friends, I did not have nowhere to go.
Once I get my hands on a dollar again,
I’m gonna hang on to it till that eagle grins.
‘Cause no, no, nobody knows you
When you’re down and out.
In your pocket, not one penny,
And as for friends, you don’t have any.
When you finally get back up on your feet again,
Everybody wants to be your old long-lost friend.
Said it’s mighty strange, without a doubt,
Nobody knows you when you’re down and out.
When you’ve got nothing everybody flees from your presence, but when you’ve got oodles, they all come crowding back to offer you even more. What a way to run a cosmos. Didn’t God ever hear of justice? What was the sense to this anyway? In the far distant future, that would become one of the central mysteries I would solve in five books starting with The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, not to mention in my Grand Unified Theory of Everything in the Universe Including the Human Soul. But that lunatic theory is another fifty books. Consider yourself fortunate that it’s not this one.
Being he-who-hath-not 86,400 seconds a day would prove a bit more than a physically healthy twenty-year-old could bear. It would produce 86,400 points of internal agony. A day. Multiply that by thirteen months, thirteen months of isolation in a foreign land with no friends. That’s a hefty, whomping quantity of agony.
One night, I went to see a movie, David and Lisa, about two kids more or less my age in a mental institution. Something inside of me snapped. I left the theater with the feeling that mental asylums were heaven. After all, the people in them, if you could believe the movie, spoke English…and had friends. So I commenced to have a full-scale nervous breakdown. I felt that my body was turning to water. My limbs were trickles of liquid. My head was dissolving. You could have used me to make a few gallons of Tang. Or Kool Aid.