What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding (26 page)

He was exhausting in lots of other ways, too. We had all gone to Mammoth to ski and snowboard earlier in the year, and Astrid, an expert skier who normally hit the slopes as the lifts opened, spent half the day tagging after her boyfriend as he fussed with several sets of rented equipment, constantly dissatisfied and trading things in, wanting a new jacket, different boots, sassier goggles … She finally snapped when the man who had gone skiing hundreds of times took his ski ticket and the wire wicket you use to attach it to your jacket, and held them out to her like a child, pouting:

“Will you do it?”

Even though they were polar opposites, she loved him, and Skyped from Israel with the man who
kept telling her
he was nowhere near even wanting to move in together, let alone get married or have kids, like she was ready to do.
Which was what he had been telling her for almost two years.
She vacillated between making excuses for him, declaring
she was ready to end it, and, way too often, calling herself “unlovable.” Astrid was a lawyer, and an über-tough broad for a tiny ex-gymnast, so all of this always came in the form of “jokes,” but it was wearing on her. She was thirty-five, beautiful, smart, well-traveled, successful, and acutely aware that her romantic history comprised a long list of less-than-worthy men who had all eventually left.

Getting on a plane was her medicine, too.

Astrid and I rented a car and started driving through the desert, past camels and Bedouin encampments, through the West Bank and the “illegal” settlements. (Not everyone calls them “illegal,” obviously. There are a million things in Israel that have two or more politically charged names, like the “Security” wall that is also called the “Separation” wall.
Depends who you ask.
) We put on lip gloss before we got to every military checkpoint, which were all packed with young, fit, tanned soldiers. Man, does olive green look great with a Sephardic complexion. We took pictures of every highway exit sign, in awe at the places we were passing: Bethlehem! Nazareth! Sodom!
and
Gomorrah! Places so merged with myth that they had to be mythical, and yet there they were, filled with life and liquor stores, churches and mosques and temples and sewers. There are still sheep in THE “shepherd’s field,” but there is also a “Stars and Bucks” Palestinian Starbucks rip-off across the street. There is a tattoo parlor next to the Church of the Nativity, which houses THE manger.

We went to the Dead Sea, which is
way
more fun than you think it’s going to be, and also way uglier. The floating is so great I actually fell asleep for a twenty-minute
nap while lying on my back in that viscous water. But the aesthetics of the Dead Sea are kind of a drag. It turns out that the region is sort of a tiny Vegas for Russians with skin conditions, since the Russian health care system apparently pays for them to come soak in the healing waters for weeks at a time. Most of the hotel employees of the ugly high-rises around the Dead Sea don’t even speak Hebrew or English, just Russian, because there is such a parade of large, white, eczema-ridden Eastern Bloc tourists. They cover their generally large bodies in black mud, and bake in the hundred-degree sun next to the saltiest sea on earth, usually smoking cigarettes. Remember the scene at Posto Nove in Brazil? The Dead Sea is the polar opposite of Posto Nove.

After beach day with the itchy Russians, we drove all the way to the bottom of Israel, where we had some of the best snorkeling of my life in the clear turquoise sea that is oddly called Red, and met up for a couple of hours on the sand with Avi, the blue-eyed Israeli I met years before in Patagonia. Since I had last seen him he had been all over the world, even living in New York City for a year selling Ahava Dead Sea products at one of those carts in the malls that are always manned by aggressive Israeli salesmen asking if you want to try some lotion. We all swam with the rainbow-hewed fish in the azure water, and then he gave us a ride to the border, waving good-bye while we walked through the razor-wired no-man’s-land to Jordan.

We would spend three days in Jordan, because we wanted to see Petra. You know Petra, it’s the pink stone ruins in
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
They’ve been called half as old as time, and we joked that we were a quarter.

We walked and rode horses and finally camels through miles of hot, pink stone canyon walls that were somehow carved into the columned, ornately decorated facade of a glorious ancient city. Bedouins—nomadic, desert-dwelling tribesmen—still live in some of the caves in Petra, and many more of them have opened cafés and shops, or offer camel, donkey, and horse rides. At the end of the road, we stopped for a cold tea and met some Bedouin guys in a small café inside a cave in front of one of the temples. There was one extremely sexy man in black eyeliner who wore all white and lay on a carpet talking on his cell phone. He turned out to be a son of a Bedouin chief, and his father had eighteen kids and two wives. Sexy dude was number sixteen or seventeen from wife number two.

We chatted with him and his friends, who all wanted to make sure we understood that the Bedouins were the
last free men.
They could lie where they liked and move when they wanted, freed from “homes” and “possessions” to
just be men.

“So, where did you sleep last night?” I asked the chief’s son.

He pointed with his cell phone over a hill, where there was a small town of concrete houses, with satellite dishes on top. “My mom’s house.”

These last free men with satellite dishes had lots of stories they wanted to tell. Like one about their cousin, who is now living with an Italian woman he met when she was here visiting Petra,
just like us.
When their cousin and the Italian woman met he was eighteen and she was fifty, and now they are married, and living in her house in Italy.

“It was just true love,” the teenager’s cousins all told us, with straight faces.

“Okay, so if we’re still single at fifty, we’ll just come back here and get one too,” Astrid said to me.

The Bedouin boys did not like our dismissive jokes about true love. They wanted to know if we had seen the book that is for sale in many, many cave shops in Petra. It’s called
I Married a Bedouin
, and is a memoir by a Kiwi nurse who came to Petra in the seventies, met a hot Bedouin boy in black eyeliner, converted to Islam, bore him many sons as one of many wives, and never left. It is
very, very
important to the men of Petra that you know this story.

“Why not sleep under the stars tonight with us?” they suggested. “We will make you a real Bedouin meal, and sleep in the nature way. And if we are feeling the feeling, then we will do that, if not, we will only sleep.”

While pretty tempting to sleep in the nature way with the steamy young man in white, especially once we learned that camel’s milk is also known in these parts as “Bedouin Viagra,” it ultimately seemed like a bad idea. (Fine, I would have done it. But Astrid had a headache and even I was not going to head into the desert for the night alone with a tribe of camel’s-milk-fueled Bedouins.) We did manage to convince our Bedouin prince to hike up his skirt and help
us climb way up the rocks alongside the three-story temple for a normally off-limits walk on top of the dome that was supposed to be Bedouin-only. The hot desert wind felt great, and the view of it blowing around the prince’s skirts as he walked on top of the dome was stupendous.

It was almost good enough to make you feel the feeling.

I am not a religious person, but I believe Jerusalem is the most important place on the planet. You don’t have to be a believer to be moved when you stand on that ground, every single stone bled over, and watch people from three major religions and every country in the world file in by the busload every minute of every day to the place they believe was chosen by God. The city buzzes with the energy that is poured into it. I had about a hundred conversations with a variety of people about who should lay claim to Jerusalem, but my time in the city made me absolutely certain of what I think: Jerusalem belongs to the world. Not to the Israelis, not to the Palestinians. Just as the Vatican is not a part of Italy, that place should not be part of any state.

And … commence death threats.

Anyway, I had one of the most interesting twenty-four hours of my life in Jerusalem. Here was the plan: Sasha had an Israeli tour-guide cousin named Omri who was going to take us on a tour of the city. Omri was a worldly, secular child of Holocaust orphans who had met on a kibbutz as teenagers, after the war. He spent half of his year taking Israelis on tours around the world, and the other
half taking foreigners around Israel. He also believed in a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. So it was with that perspective that we would get the history of Jerusalem. After a day with him, we would go to a Friday Shabbat dinner with a Hasidic Orthodox family who were related to a Californian friend, and who lived in the Jewish Quarter in the Old City. Then on Saturday, when the entire city is closed down for the Sabbath, we would join my childhood friend and his Argentine-diplomat boyfriend for brunch with some gay and lesbian European diplomats who worked for their countries on Palestinian humanitarian-aid projects.

So, basically, we were spending twenty-four hours hearing just about every perspective.
Depends who you ask
, right? And so we asked everyone. The best part, though, is that they all answered. Israel and I were a real match, conversationally speaking. Israelis have no patience for niceties or bullshit or small talk. They love direct questions and will always give you direct answers. They thrive on the probing and the personal, and delight in finding ways to laugh at things that are heavy and dark. Which is my specialty. You’ll never find better conversation than you’ll find in Israel. It made me want to move there.

Omri started our day by taking us to the top of the Mount of Olives for a view of the entire Old City. The Mount is covered in groups of singing Christians as well as thousands of graves, because it abuts the gate through which the Messiah is supposed to walk when he returns (or shows up for the first time, depending who you ask). So everyone wants to be buried near the spot where they
will all be brought back to life. Jesus walked over this hill and through that important gate every day to preach inside the city during the last week of his life, which is one of the reasons for the whole son-of-God thing.

Omri took us up to the Mount of Olives to start the day for a reason: he wanted to give us the history of the city, and that history was totally tied to the geography that we could see from the top of this important hill.

“Do you see that low point, down there, with the trees?” Omri said, pointing.

We did.

“That’s a natural spring. That’s why the first people settled here, for the water. Next, they built their temple. In Roman times, they built temples on the highest place above the water source.”

We could see that the Temple Mount is indeed the highest place above the water source.

“So, it was the most important place in town. So then Abraham went there to almost slay his son. So then Mohammed flew there overnight from Mecca on his way up to heaven. So now the Jewish temple must be built there or else no Messiah and so on and so on,” Omri finished up.

All that fighting, all because of geography.

The city of Jerusalem has a law that all buildings must be made of the creamy, gorgeous Jerusalem stones that were used to build the ancient city, so the entire city is white and turns colors with the sunrise and sunset. The one building that is not white is in the middle of it all—the blue and gold mosque on the Temple Mount. Despite this being the most contentious building in the world, it
looks fantastic surrounded by all of that Israeli stone. It’s my opinion that if the two sides could just focus on the pleasing aesthetic their two cultures have produced in this city, as well as their mutual love of hummus, we could solve this thing.

We continued into the city, making way for pilgrims walking the stations of the cross with an actual cross on their backs, posing for pictures in front of Arab shops under the weight of their crucifixes. We got Omri’s viewpoint of the events of the city. He told us amazing stories, like one about a ladder that was left on the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which stands on the spot where Jesus was crucified. Every sect of Christians shares ownership of this church, and they fight amongst each other over who gets to sweep which step as viciously as the Jews fight the Muslims. A Muslim family down the road is the keeper of the keys to the front door of the holiest church in Christendom, because none of the Christians can stomach any of the
other
Christians having it. The story goes that a ladder was once left on top of the church, and no sect would take responsibility for leaving it there. And so the ladder stayed on top of the church for
sixty years.

Jerusalem did not discourage my belief that religion makes people crazy.

I loved that day. I always say that I need to travel to keep from dying of boredom from my own internal monologue. I think that, generally, most of us have a total of about twenty thoughts. And we just scroll through those thoughts, over and over again, in varying order, all day every day. Maybe your twenty are much more interesting
than this, but mine include: “I should call my mom.” “Am I any good at my job?” “Why do I still get neck acne?” “Why don’t I either call my mom or not call my mom but stop wasting energy on feeling guilty if I don’t call her?” Et cetera.

Now, if I don’t leave town,
that’s it.
Those are my thoughts. That’s what I’ve got to keep me warm at night. And good Yahweh does that get boring.

When you travel you’re forced to have new thoughts. “Is this alley safe?” “Is this the right bus?” “Was this meat ever a house pet?” It doesn’t even matter what the new thoughts are, it feels so good to just have some variety. And it’s a reboot for your brain. I can feel the neurons making new connections again with new problems to solve, clawing their way back to their nimbler, younger days. Even the process of learning about Israel, let alone my day in Jerusalem, woke up my thought patterns again better than anywhere I’ve ever been. I love that place for that.