But knew in the pit of my being that she would not reverse course, must proceed with her plan, driven by a personal code I didn’t have, a sense of what was right to do. Told myself that I was to her but a piece, a part, not central, not the radiant core that she was to me. Without her, I was nothing inside and the world was only kiosks, parked cars, passing groups of laughing friends in sport clothes and dresses, smelling of aftershave and perfume, strangers immersed in their own unknowable trips. And what was all that to me? Nothing! What was Israel, what was the whole world, to me? One big fat death trip. A hamster wheel flying a flag. And the more I thought about it, the more disconnected from reality I became. Where was beauty, depth, intelligence, discussion, I wondered. I wanted Dostoyevsky! Van Gogh! Kerouac! Pollock! Tolstoy! Meaning! She wanted to sort through deeds of ownership, study columns of assets. I wanted pleasure and celebration, impudent rejoicing, heartless joy! Yes, as war raged and others perished ignobly in fire and shrapnel, guts spilled out and crying for their mothers, as those who returned to the soul-killing lairs of sidewalk terrorism strapped on their garbage-disposal apparatus, let Anna and me burrow deep into each other, extract pleasure by the bucket, and laugh wickedly, wolfishly, at the stupidity of life! And let us depart gracefully, slipping out the door of Israel, away from the whole giant ignominious world stew of woe, and go find ourselves a Dionysian island of nudity and privacy, sun, sand, and each other’s lips.
But the Old City only tilted a little more, like an ocean liner sliding, with all its passengers aboard, down into bottomless ink-black depths.
31
FOR SEVERAL MORE MONTHS I REMAINED IN Jerusalem, drinking, eating codeine, sleeping with Anna, furious, fighting and accusing, unable to get over the initial shock of her decision to ease away from Itamar rather than make a clear, clean break. She was spending most nights with him. The pain for me was insupportable, but I feared to let her go. And the combined sense of rejection and offended pride made me vicious.
Our fights were bad. She wept and pleaded; I sneered and spat. She begged me to see that she was true, that she had filed for divorce and was slowly, carefully sorting out their joint interests, that it was now more or less but a minor matter of settling the finances. She didn’t even sleep in the same bed with him anymore. He stayed on the sofa. She swore to this.
But for me, it still wasn’t enough. I needed her around to cling to all the time. Couldn’t stand to be alone, to drink alone with myself on those nights she stayed with him. And I was drinking all the time now.
“We don’t need finances,” I raged, standing with a bottle clasped in my fist. “We only need each other.” I could as well have been speaking about the bottle. “But you’re ruining everything. You don’t even know how much or how badly. EVERYTHING is going to HELL! You’ve destroyed my TRUST! Betrayed my LOVE! You’re STILL with him!! So, yeah, I still love you, but I don’t TRUST you!”
“Precious one, I’m leaving him. You’ll have me for the rest of your life. He only needs me now, while we split apart, which is so painful for him. I’m just trying to be decent. I love him as a good friend. I owe it. We built that house together. We have all the same friends.”
“Friends!” I laughed. “Some friends!”
With the exception of David Twersky, the writer and editor, Roy Isacowitz, the playwright and financial columnist, and Robert Rosenberg, a reporter, a majority if not all of the “friends” I had made as a result of the museum melted away once they learned that not only had Anna left Itamar and I had dumped Edna but the museum program was as good as doomed.
I was widely denounced as a renegade and homewrecker, a drunken loner, an outlander who had invaded Jerusalem’s cultural scene with commendable ingenuity but quickly showed his true colors. I was the vulgar, shallow American. Those who had hated me all along resented their exclusion from the museum programs, vigorously campaigned to besmirch my name. Others who envied my rapid rise applauded my decline. As the rumor mills raged and the war up north continued, I obtained a divorce from Edna. The three presiding rabbis were the very same who had divorced me from Tsofnat. One of them, an ancient graybeard, winced on seeing me and said: “You again?”
In a desperate bid for sanity I broke with Anna and left Jerusalem; moved into the home of a man named Yeheschel Ben-Hur who had once been incarcerated in a British Mandate prison, sentenced to hang, for an attack on an Arab bus that had left a boy dead.
Like me, he was a dour loner whom others steered clear of. I sat in the empty lower portion of his white frame house, sulking and drinking behind drawn shades, dropping codeine to fend off severe paranoid delusions, auditory hallucinations, but the codeine only multiplied them. Lost track of day and night, couldn’t differentiate anymore. Finally, a call-up came from the army. I reported for yet one more tour of duty in Gaza.
Rode down in a reservist’s bus, detoxing from months of drinking and drugging. My nerves, having grown centipede legs, crawled over walls and onto ceilings. I grew convinced that the members of my unit were out to kill me. More than once, put the barrel of my rifle in my mouth but hadn’t the guts to pull the trigger. Would sit like that, at a remove from the others, in the desert dark, a hunched shape with a long protrusion extending from his mouth to the ground, a self-executing mosquito. Once, after an operation in which we razed the home of the family of a young man in his twenties who had thrown a grenade at commuters in the Central Bus Station, I experienced a mental break from reality so complete that the soldiers serving with me asked what I was on.
“What is it? Pot? Hash? Coke? C’mon, Kaufman. Share the wealth!”
But I hadn’t taken anything, though I badly needed to. Simply put, I was losing my mind.
After my service, I announced to Anna by telephone that I was leaving the country, returning to New York after almost seven years away in Israel. She said she would follow. Do what you like, I told her. I didn’t really care anymore. She was still living with him.
At the airport, tearful, she saw me off. I recall how, as she stood at the foot of the last escalator before the “Passengers Only” zone, mournfully watching me ascend, the low-hanging support beam slowly erased her, head to foot, until she was completely gone.
On the airplane I expelled a relieved breath. The whole nightmare of Gaza, my shattered social and professional life in Jerusalem, was behind me for good. Could now finally sit and nurse a civilized tumbler of watered-down airline scotch as I watched Israel fade behind a wall of unreal snowy white clouds, and when the tumbler was empty, lift two fingers and have a pretty attendant in a flight uniform bring another and then another—and pretend to myself that I did not love a woman or a country that I had waited my whole life to find, only to desert.
BOOK FIVE
32
GOOD FRIENDS OF ANNA, THE ISRAELI PAINTER Natan Nuchi and his wife, Smardar, daughter of the Hebrew-language novelist Aaron Megged and stepdaughter of the Abstraction Expressionist historian Dore Ashton, had obtained for me a small apartment on 5th Street, off First Avenue, in the East Village, just a few blocks from their home on 3rd Street. Their understanding was that I would feather this nest in anticipation of Anna’s arrival. I did nothing to discourage this illusion.
They lived in the Wyoming Building, in a loft owned by Ellen Stewart, legendary founder of La MaMa, the avant-garde theater. Composer Philip Glass lived just down the street and Jean-Michel Basquiat painted close by. It was a heady time to be in the East Village.
Almost the entire district was on tenant strike, and I found that I didn’t have to pay rent at all. Meant to be held in escrow, the rents had all been spent on parties. The entire neighborhood was rental outlaws living in arrears.
My experience working in both the Israel Museum and on kibbutz fishponds led an employment agency to find me suitable for work in the Department of Ichthyology at the Museum of Natural History, where my official title was “Scientific Secretary,” Grade I, a civil service job with good pay and handsome benefits that required ver
y little of me. Either I typed up scientific papers or tagged big muddy barrels of fish dredged from the Hudson as part of environmental impact statements.
To perform these tasks I kept a bottle stashed away in the leather satchel that I brought to work each day. Also quickly fell in with visual artists and taxidermists from the museum’s exhibition department upstairs on the fifth floor—a hard-drinking bunch of unru-lies who staggered back to work each afternoon after lunch, shirts unbuttoned to the waist and blind drunk after orgiastic two-hour lunches in the local bistro during which they threw up all over themselves and sometimes tangled—jeering and incoherent—with other outraged customers. In effect, the city paid us to get blasted. Since we were all unionized, we often charged overtime for this invaluable service.
For a week or two, things went fine. But memories of Anna lurked just beneath the surface. I still wanted her, still felt her in my core. My skin missed hers. And the nightmares of Gaza returned to me at night. Cracks began to show in my facade that not even a London Fog raincoat could camouflage.
It began on a weekend as I rode the subways. A girl with a pale face spoke to me on the platform. Couldn’t tell what she was after, yet I seemed unable to disengage. She had me spellbound, locked in. Like some phantom figure born of guilt and repressed longing for Anna. Said that she needed help, would I go with her to a transient hotel to speak to the management on her behalf, stop them from throwing her out.
Inexplicably, almost helplessly, I went—unable to refuse. My heart beat fiercely in panic. Felt a pulse-racing shriek gather in my skull. In a trembling voice I attempted to ask questions: Where were we going? What is the problem? But she only looked solemnly at my trembling hands and said mournfully: “Soon we’ll be there.” She was beautiful but like an arisen corpse, her skin tone blue-white. We exited the subway at West 34th Street, hurried along to a strange-looking building that did not seem like a hotel, more a low-rent warren of office spaces leased to shadowy enterprises. I said, “I don’t think I should be here,” but she said, “You are very kind, very generous to help me.” And witlessly, I followed along behind her though every nerve in my body begged me to stop. Finally, we came to a door with the name of a company stenciled on the opaque glass window. She knocked. A voice asked who it was. She said: “Me.”
As the door opened, I turned and ran down the long institutional green corridor, to a flight of stairs, which I bounded down three steps at a time, and burst onto the street—it was April, very hot. Looked around in wild-eyed terror. Felt a stare burn my back and stumbled a few steps forward. A female voice snapped: “Move it, slowpoke!” Belonged to a woman in a business suit transporting a luggage carrier. Quickly, I began to walk downtown, glancing back to see if anyone followed. Stopped at a newsstand to buy cigarettes and as the vendor made change realized that he belonged to a PLO hit squad that had been sent from Gaza all the way to America to assassinate me. Tried to appear calm as he counted out change, which I shoveled into my hand and thrust into my pocket. Walked away rapidly, tears welling in my eyes, white-hot panic spreading throughout my chest and abdomen and a nonstop sequence of horrifying scenes of abduction and blindfolding, torture and humiliation, flipped through my brain.
Now grasped that everything about me was known to my foes. Where I lived, worked, who my friends were. Clearly, the girl was a terrorist operative. Ducked into an alley, cringed, forehead pressed to a brick wall, muttering: “Oh, my God, Elohim, Yahweh, oh my Lord, I am without a gun. I beg you, please, save me from this fearsome fate.”
But, no go. Lifted my face, even more terrified. Realized that I was utterly alone, unarmed, without a single person in the world to tell about this, anyone who could help—a veteran of a foreign army with no veterans administration on hand to assist.
Walked ever farther downtown, to more familiar environs, to calm down. At a bar on Second Avenue, stopped in, resigned, waiting for hands to lay hold, drag me to a van. Ordered endless rounds of boilermakers, then cut out to a liquor store, bought a fifth of Cutty Sark, and staggered on, the fear still full-blown yet muffled now. Paused to tilt the bottle back for long pulls, swayed, and stumbled on, the fear shrinking into a grisly puppet play, a hallucinated farce in which I saw myself before my torturers, blottoed and ridiculous, bound dangling from ropes, jeering and spitting into their faces. How ridiculous you are, I shrieked, to want to kill someone who has known only suffering his entire life, only lovelessness. Why in the world would you want to kill, of all people, the world’s loneliest man? A failed writer? Someone who couldn’t keep the woman of his dreams even when she threw herself at him. Who went to pieces serving the Jewish state? A broken man who had left the United States in flight from the long history of his defeats. So, my torturer, what sort of agenda is it that must build on the debris of one so ruined?
But there was no answer from anywhere, though the sense of conspiring threat was all-pervasive, imbued the very air and fading light. As dusk fell I found a doorway to curl up in and mercifully blacked out.
33
THE AFTERSHOCK OF SUCH AN ATTACK LASTED days, and the attacks occurred ever more frequently. Physically exhausted, emotionally drained, I took frequent leaves from work, infuriating my superiors at the museum, scientists who wanted as little as possible to do with administrative worries. Now and then, I was called onto the carpet, warned. Contrite, I promised to do better. Days later, paranoid, delusional, and too afraid to leave the flat, again I called in sick.
Ran out my sick days but didn’t care. Had no rent to pay, few necessities besides booze, cigarettes, and, now and then, food. By my hobo calculations, were I fired, I’d still collect enough unemployment to keep me in hay for a good while more. Either way, stay or go, I couldn’t lose.
Now and then, I resolved to stop drinking; recognized its cruel effect on my life. For a day or two would succeed either to ingest no booze at all or just a few beers. Whereupon the global conspiracy plot against me resumed with redoubled ferocity. In the eyes of a co-worker, or some stranger’s expression, or a question from a waiter about a menu choice or simply how the light fell across a room at a particular hour, irradiating a dust ball with corpse-blue death ray energy, again the plot against me would unfold, force me to take actions for relief which, though prompted by dread, only seemed to amplify it.
A passerby’s glance would put me into evasion mode, though what exactly I sought to elude was never clear. Plots seemed to unfold in subtle hints that triggered in my head, chest, and abdomen anguished shrieking signals of alarm during which—for survival’s sake—I must pretend to be unsuspecting, at ease, for any word or action or expression on my part, hinting at knowledge of the plot, would assure its success. So long as I played the game flawlessly, I would not die just yet. Trapped on a high wire over a volcano, I had to stroll as nonchalantly as a Sunday pedestrian out for a pleasant promenade. This, of course, was excruciating. Sometimes it occurred to me that the effort to appear sane, normal, while in the thick of such a horrible psychic state was the very torture that I sought to elude. But I would quickly lose the thread, plunge right back into my thin-ice dance over the mental lake of fire.
The only remedy I knew was to drink and then drink some more. Sometimes lay in bed fortressed as in childhood by surrounding walls of books. But now, along with Hemingway, Kerouac, Hubert Selby, there was VSOP and Gallo port and cartons of Camel cigarettes. Shades drawn, clock turned to the wall, telephone unhooked, I read my way forward, sailing on a fantasy barge of slow words downriver past black night terrors, until Thursday became Friday, turned into Saturday, and by Sunday, having drunk whatever lay at hand, I blacked out and awoke again into shuddering incomprehension and drank yet more to ward off the inevitable crushing hangover—an army of vengeance poised to attack.
Lay there, covers over head, drunk yet somehow not, the liquor’s effect disappointing, flat. No matter how much I drank I seemed only to bloat and my sickness deepened, but the warm comfort that I sought for, the panic anesthetic, just wa
sn’t there.
Had no other recourse, then, aware of none: experiment with different brands and combinations, drink yet more. That only worsened my condition. I sought return to a warm wet womb where I was loved and protected. (If only it could be! If only I could crawl from these clothes, this skin, return to my origins, even just for a bit, get some bearings, see where I had made the wrong turn, and then relaunch, navigate my life by correct coordinates.)
But it was not in the cards. My arms and legs ached, flesh leaden, swollen, listless, lifeless. Smelled bad. Didn’t know, or want to, what time it was. There was nothing to this world, just cracked walls, unswept rooms, multiplying mirrors, and this great groaning sadness of a failed life that occupied my marrow like an alien being.
Anna called. Said she loved me. The room tilting. She had filed for divorce. Something crawling my way, shadows. Her affairs in order, she was coming. Was I glad?
She did not know that she had called into a green-glowing bunker sandbagged with hand-grenade hallucinations. Anything that could lift the siege was welcome.
“Come” is all I could manage to croak.
One week later, Anna, my incarnated soul mate, slender and with cream-colored skin and red hair tied in a pony tail and intelligent eyes that by turns burned with creative fire and twinkled with erotic mischief, walked toward me down the passenger ramp at Kennedy, and all I could think of was escape through the bottle.
Drunken Angel (9781936740062) Page 10