Oliver Benjamin
resilience of his cranium.
The boat landed early the next morning in Haifa. A group of us
continued on from there to Jerusalem by bus. Our first reaction to
Israel was one of surprise. Sure, it was a beautiful, fertile strip in the
middle of an enormous, barren desert region, but that wasn’t what
amazed us. Sure, everything was written backwards and in
unreadable Hebrew script, but what we found intriguing, nay, truly
astonishing, was the fact that the most beautiful eighteen-year old
girls we had ever seen in our lives were everywhere, and they were all
dressed in army fatigues, toting lethal Uzi machine guns. It was a
Freudian fantasy extraordinaire. Yippee almost got himself thrown
off the bus when he casually said, “Isn’t it nice to have a big black
phallus in your hands?” to one of the army girls. She started
screaming at him in Hebrew, and many of us thought he was going to
get shot. It was remarkable that Yippee had lived this long with all his
limbs intact, and it occurred to me that it might not be the most
prudent thing in the world to spend too much time with him.
For those first few days away from Charly, I drank every day. It took
every effort I had to keep her out of my mind, and not to break into
tears when I would think about how wonderful our trip had been
together until I flipped out. Interestingly, through my sentimental
anguish, I felt surprisingly strong and unusually free. My life was
now completely amorphous—a blank slate for me to start all over
with. I could be anybody. No one here really knew me, and it didn’t
matter what I said or did: I could always erase the slate again by
moving on. The concept was intoxicating. I started to learn things
about myself at a highly accelerated rate, because every new situation
was entirely new and unusual, free from most of the biases or
crutches I might employ in more familiar environs. For instance, the
first night in the Palace hostel in Jerusalem, I discovered that I was a
total wimp.
Yippee and I were shown to a large room with six other people
staying in it. Introductions and small talk ensued, and I noticed that
one guy had a very odd look about him. He seemed to have a
distorted face and what looked like antennae coming out of the
corners of his eyebrows. I found him difficult to look at, and chose to
kind of ignore him. Nevertheless, we eventually became engaged in
conversation, and I realized that he had a bandaged leg and had
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