Oliver Benjamin
are only for paying customers!”
To add emphasis, he drained a beer can and crushed it, the
excess running down his cheeks and onto his shirt. His penis was still
hanging out. No one seemed to think it was very funny, but then
again, no one ever seemed to think Lenny was very funny. I laughed
hysterically, and Lenny looked over at me and smiled. I realized that
he was not mad at me for screwing around with Greta, and that
pleased me.
At home, my friends were different than this. Probably, they were all
crushed under the same burden that I was. Most of the time, we’d sit
around and joke about how none of us really liked our jobs, how our
lives were pretty devoid of meaning, and how nothing was really very
exciting. Those feelings became all the more terrible when we
realized that this was only the beginning of the treadmill, and things
could only go down from there. Most of these cheery get-togethers
included an abundance of alcohol, with which, like a bunch of old
men, we would drink to the youth that we let slip away from under
our noses. Yet we were still all only in our early twenties. We
reasoned, between shots of the hard stuff, that there had to be more
to life than spending years working for a large, impersonal company
and starting a loving family, especially when statistics suggested that
we would probably be laid off from those companies and divorced
from those loving families by the time we hit middle age.
We searched for answers in the bottom of endless beer mugs. To
let off steam, we would make sport out of insulting each other and
ourselves, calling it camaraderie. Never under any circumstances
would we admit how afraid we were.
But it wasn’t the people that were different on the kibbutz,
necessarily. It was the environment. Some kind of magic existed here
in the dynamic unknown that never made it past customs. Here in
the abyss there was love and freedom and adventure and infinity,
while the treadmill at home carried with it only the constant,
unreachable promise of those very things. Nothing but carrots on
sticks and the armies who chased them, generating electricity not for
themselves but for something or someone entirely unknown. Here,
on the beach in Israel, the electricity was ours to wield, its wild
potential made visible in the kinesis of our dance.
I walked over to Greta and gave her a squeeze. We all sat
together and drank more and smoked cigarettes and talked. We
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