Oliver Benjamin
looking into the eyes of the women going the other way, but when I
had to do this with another male, I became visibly uncomfortable and
couldn’t keep from giggling. After a certain point, I felt as if the joke
had been pounded into the ground and furthermore was becoming
extremely embarrassed by the whole shenanigan, so I prepared
myself to leave. There was a goofy looking dude coming my way, and
I decided that he would be the last of my I-Ching singing partners. He
grabbed my hands and I looked up awkwardly into his face, which
was covered by a mess of unruly pale hair. Initially, there was an odd
grin behind the mop, which quickly changed into a gape and then a
straight line. We both stopped singing. I violently yanked the hair out
of his face to uncover a gleaming forehead dotted with perspiration.
More significantly, it was also dotted with an impressive collection of
small scars.
“If I’d have known you looked this good in a dress, I’d a never
left!” he said, and before I could gather my wits enough to reply,
pulled me out the side door.
CHAPTER 26
“Yip…!”
He cut me off with a finger to his lips. “Whatever you do, Jake,
don’t call me by that name. Call me by my sannyasi name, which is
Rambutan, okay?”
I nodded. “Is it really you?”
“Of course.”
“So what the fuck happened to you?”
He motioned for me to follow him, and as we headed out of the
Omniraja compound he explained.
“Well, I guess I was pretty shattered that night we partied on the
beach. A little too much so to go swimming in the ocean, as it turned
out, because I managed to pass out and drift quite a way out to sea.
Anyways, I woke up on the shores of a nearby Israeli military base,
with these paranoid soldiers pointing guns at my head. They thought
I was some kind of a spy. It didn’t help that I was drunk out of me
mind, and fought with every fucker that tried to handcuff me. My
forehead is quite a weapon, let me tell you,” he said, rapping his
knuckles against his dented cranium. “They interrogated me for
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