Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See (10 page)

I finally understand the need for all the signs.

Obviously, every camel in Israel lives in this Bedouin camp. There must be hundreds of them—grazing in the wadi (which in Hebrew translates to something like “huge fuckin’ patch of dirt”), standing crammed in barbed-wire pens, and wandering freely, crapping at the entrance to sleeping tents and near cooking fires. Goats, on the other hand? My girl seems to have the exclusive. I can’t help wondering, where’s the money in camels? Goats I get. Goat’s milk, goat cheese. But even in this godforsaken place I can’t see camel dairy products flying off the shelves.

I slam on the brakes when one particularly ugly beast steps in front of the car. Through the windshield all I can see are four long, knobby-kneed legs. And the long, slow string of camel saliva that drips from above onto the hood of the car. My girl throws all ninety-nine pounds of herself over the gearshift and leans on the horn, and our roadblock moves off with all the speed of a hermit crab. She speaks to me in that language again and points to an area off to the left, which I assume is the designated parking area. So I park.

I suppose there is a certain
Lawrence of Arabia
-ness to this Bedouin settlement. If you can ignore the burning piles of garbage, ancient school bus, and swing set sitting on squares of dingy Astroturf held together with duct tape. Naked and half-naked children run around the makeshift playground kicking a soccer ball. Women sit on rugs inside the tents nursing babies and drinking tea. Some weave rugs on huge homemade looms. The yarn has been dyed vivid shades of pink, green, blue, and orange, and I wonder where the hell they found the materials to come up with anything other than brown. Old men smoke water pipes and play some kind of game with dice.

The girl pulls me into one of the bigger tents. Like the others, it is constructed somewhat haphazardly mostly out of the black tent’s original material but reinforced and repaired with whatever works. This one has corrugated aluminum on one side. My shepherdess consults briefly with a woman who’s been winding skeins of wool. She is maybe forty-five and missing a couple of teeth, but not as many as the camel. The woman smiles at me. “So, you want real Bedouin experience?”

I obviously look as confused as I am.

“Real Bedouin experience. Includes tour of camp, tea with real Bedouin family, and camel ride. Sixty shekels.”

I look over at my girl and shake my finger at her. “What’s her name?” I ask.

“This one? She is Neela, my granddaughter.”

“I’m happy to give you the sixty shekels, but could you tell Neela that since it was her goat that bit me, I think the least she can do is invite me to tea herself.”

Neela’s grandmother starts yammering away at her.

“Yeah, yeah. Fine,” Neela says and rolls her eyes.

Other than yelling at me to take off my shoes when I start to enter her dusty tent, Neela says nothing as she prepares our tea. I sit on the rug and watch her, wondering what I have done to piss her off. It is almost as if we are married.

She moves around the tent at hyper speed, stooping, bending, squatting, opening jars and canisters and boxes of exotic-smelling plants, flowers, and spices, tossing them into a big copper kettle. When she’s done, she reaches her hand down her shirt, pulls out a key, and goes marching out of the tent, kettle in hand. I watch her unlock the metal cage around the faucet the Israelis have provided—the only source of water in this village they have forced these people to call home.

Neela boils the tea on one of the smoldering cooking fires, and when I see her head back to the tent, I hurry back to my place on the rug. She pours tea into tall glasses filled with crushed mint leaves and slips the glasses into brass holders. When she walks toward me, I think she is going to hand me a glass of tea—or pour it on me. Instead, she lowers herself into my lap and brings her lips together, gently blowing on the tea to cool it. With her other hand, she reaches up and unwinds the black scarf from her head and then her shoulders until it falls away completely. Underneath she is wearing a thin white tank top. It has a picture of Madonna and the words “Material Girl” written on it.

She is stunning. And younger than I had imagined. However young that was. She takes a sip of the tea, leans forward, and, as she kisses me, lets the hot, sweet tea run into my mouth and follows it with her tongue. I forget hot and dry and thirsty. There is only warm, sweet, wet. The tea has long since been swallowed, so it must be her taste. Or some alchemical combination of the two. Does it matter? The tip of her tongue runs across the roof of my mouth. And then I realize, it does.

Reluctantly, almost painfully, I disengage my mouth from hers just enough so I can use it for speaking. “I wasn’t expecting … I was going to give you the money. You don’t have to …”

“I don’t
have
to do anything,” she says, the corners of her mouth turning up almost imperceptibly—less a smile than a parenthetical.

She lifts her “Material Girl” tank top over her head and lies back against a pile of rolled-up rugs. I have never seen skin the color of hers. She is cinnamon and cocoa and bittersweet chocolate. And suddenly I am ravenous. Neela reaches her arm out, dips her finger into my tea and then slips it into my mouth. The tea is cooler and even more fragrant than before.

Then she takes the glass from my hand, tilts her head back, and lets a tiny trickle of liquid pour from the glass. The drops land on her exposed throat and run down, pooling in the hollows on either side of her clavicles. I stare mesmerized, watching as the perfect stream runs between her perfect breasts and collects in her belly button before continuing on its course.

“Drink your tea,” she says.

I sit up and my heart is racing. My mouth is dry. The thin cotton mattress on which I’ve been sleeping and the muslin sheet that covers me are cold and damp. I shiver in spite of the stifling heat. At first I can’t remember where I am. Only fragments of a dream. Willa. And a gun. And I am running. Trying to stop something terrible from happening. Running but getting nowhere. I have a pounding headache.

My eyes adjust to the darkness. I remember that I am in Neela’s tent. But Neela is gone. So are my Patek Philippe watch and my wallet. The little snake charmer has been thoughtful enough to leave me my passport. My luggage is in the car, so I put on the same dusty, sweaty clothes I wore yesterday. I tentatively stick my head outside the tent, and though I have no idea what time it is, I can tell by where the sun is in the sky that I have slept through most of the day.

Between the hallucinogenic dreams I had last night and the Rip Van Winkle experience I’m having now, it’s becoming more and more obvious there was more than tea in my tea. As I walk toward my car, I notice that the camp is much quieter. The pickup trucks are gone. The bus is gone. The goats are gone. My car and luggage are gone. There are still children playing on the Astroturf and old men smoking hookahs in a tent. I jog over to the men and feel a lead weight land on my head with each step.

“Neela?” I ask vaguely, stupidly.

A few of the old men turn to me for a moment and then go back to their game of dice

“Neela? My car? Where is my car?” Now I am yelling.

Something registers with one of them. He reaches out his hand and I help him up. He hobbles over to Neela’s tent, disappears behind it, and is gone so long I think he too has deserted me. But then I hear yelling—in Arabic. Or something. And he comes out leading a recalcitrant, fully saddled camel.

“Car,” he says, grinning. “Your car.”

Because Neela is not without a heart. She has left me transportation.

I ride the thing to the nearest camel crossing sign and wait for the next lonely bastard to come through. This, I think, is the real Bedouin experience.

Seduced, screwed, conned, robbed, and left sitting on a camel. Neela would have made a terrific agent—in a non-Bedouin setting. She and I have a lot in common, but to her I am no different from any other rich Jew. Like those rich, entitled Hillcrest Country Club Jews were to me. And, absurd as it may sound, that is a revelation. Because I never saw myself as anything but being on her side. Growing up on the outside. Wanting in.

Beverly Hills, 1961
. December was when all the juniors had their preliminary college counseling meetings—the ones where the guidance counselor, Mrs. Di Carlo, told students like Stacy Aronson she should be aiming for, say, Tarzana Junior College rather than Harvard. I was not looking forward to mine.

Nine thirty and already it must have been ninety-five degrees in Di Carlo’s office. Her beige bra straps were sticking out from under her sleeveless lime-green blouse. There were dark half-moons of sweat under her armpits and her short copper curls sat like coiled Slinkies, plastered to her scalp.

Every couple of winters, without warning, a vengeful current of air called the Santa Anas came rushing through the desert, dumped a load of scorching heat on L.A., and took off. For days on end there was just heat. Pure and unrelenting.

“You have a real shot at Stanford, Greyson,” she was saying. “And Yale isn’t out of the question.”

I knew I shouldn’t stare, but I was fascinated by the way the loose, wrinkled flesh under her arm undulated as she fanned herself with the brochure from Mills College. She looked down at my file.

“Your grades are stellar. You’re active in student government. You’ve done a little community service work.” Her finger tapped the manila folder. “You might want to take up a sport, though,” she said. She looked up and studied me. “You’re tall,” she said. “How about basketball?”

I was a lousy athlete. The only varsity team I stood a chance of making was debate. “Yeah, great idea,” I said, getting up to leave. “Well, I’ve got math now, so …”

“Greyson, college admissions committees also tend to be impressed by students who’ve had valuable work experience. If you’d like, I could speak to some of our alumni …”

“Uh, yeah, thanks. I’ll think about it and let you know, okay?”

“Alright, dear,” she said, “but remember, he who hesitates is lost.”

“I’ll remember.”

August Van Gilder was not an alumnus of Beverly High. He was the man who owned the Chevron station at the corner of Robertson and Third. I stood across the street for a while just watching the petroleum fumes hang in the sweltering air around the station as if they were afraid to wander too far from their home. The glare from the sun beating down on the shiny black patches was almost blinding. Cars had been dripping motor oil in the same spots on the same asphalt since 1947 when the station opened.

A woman rushed out of the station’s ladies’ room with a sour look on her face. She held the door open with the tip of one finger and waited impatiently as a little girl wandered out. The woman quickly yanked her finger away. The metal door must have been hot. Then she spit on her finger and wiped it on a handkerchief. Hot and dirty.

The woman pulled the little girl toward a light-blue Eldorado convertible. A man, as pleasant-looking as she was sour-faced, waited in the driver’s seat. A boy—I couldn’t really tell how old—eight, ten, twelve—sat in the back, his face buried in a Green Hornet comic book.

I took a deep breath and choked on the gas fumes. How long had I been standing there? Five minutes? Twenty? A man came out of the ladies’ room carrying a suitcase. He cut across the black asphalt to the city bus stop and sat down on the bench.

Both the male and female patrons who stopped here to use the facilities had to use the ladies’ room. The toilet in the men’s had been clogged for years. Even if the proprietor of the Chevron, Mr. August Van Gilder, made an effort to keep the restroom clean (and quite obviously, it wasn’t a priority), two hundred and fifty people probably used that toilet in the course of one business day. And like the man with the suitcase, probably half those people didn’t even buy any gas.

I’d been one of those freeloading Chevron-toilet-users enough times to know. Not that I went out of my way to relieve myself here. A person only took a leak at the Chevron out of sheer desperation. Mr. Van Gilder must have thought his mechanics had more important things to do than mop up urine and refill the paper towel dispenser all day. But that would be my job now. Probably not what Di Carlo meant by valuable work experience.

I filled my lungs with another airless breath and forced myself to walk toward the body shop. There was no door on the dingy little office inside. A guy in his twenties with an Adam’s apple that made him look like he’d swallowed a hamster stood behind the counter. He was sifting through a little metal box filled with dirty, dog-eared index cards. A rusty old fan was blowing behind him. It wasn’t doing much, just rustling the invoices tacked to the bulletin board next to him. An orange rag covered in grease hung out of the pocket of his mechanic’s jumpsuit. I rested my hands on the counter and noticed how clean my fingernails were.

The guy—Wes, according to his jumpsuit—did not look up. I opened my mouth to speak but Wes held up his hand to stop me. Wes continued to alphabetize. He’d put “Scott, Philip” before “Schwartz, Dave.” I stood there, obediently. I would be lower down the food chain than Wes. Wes, the mechanic with the freakish Adam’s apple who couldn’t alphabetize.

Maybe I’d just tell Wes to go screw himself, I thought. I’d tell August Van Gilder, “Thank you very much but I’ve been elected junior class representative to the Beverly Hills High Student Council. And between that and tutoring those foster kids, Mr. Van Gilder, I’m just not going to have time to pump your goddamn gas and clean your goddamn ladies’ room. You see Mr. Van Gilder, I have a real shot at Stanford. And Yale’s not out of the question.”

Wes finally looked up at me.

“I have an appointment with Mr. Van Gilder,” I said.

My interview went well. Van Gilder hired me on the spot.

I walked around back to the ladies’ room and changed into my jumpsuit.

On the way home, crossing the hot black asphalt at the intersection of Doheny and Olympic, I pretended I was walking across some snow-covered quad. I imagined I was surrounded by Gothic buildings and girls in Fair Isle sweaters.