Drunken Angel (9781936740062) (46 page)

Finally, it came down to suicide. I decided, calmly, that I could not endure a single day more of such anguish. Calmly, en route home from a 12-step meeting, knew that I would simply climb to the roof of my building that evening and jump off. Smiled at the thought. Felt no fear at all, just relief. One knows when one has reached the absolute limits of endurance: I had reached mine.

I paused on the sidewalk, closed my eyes. Listened to the night.

My last on earth.

A single thought entered my suicidal mind. Flew about my skull like a silver sprite. Touched my crippled brain with a lovely wand. The Shekinah. “What if,” she whispered, ever so softly, “you somehow managed to survive this ordeal? Think of the great strength of experience you'll have to share with others. Think of how much service you can bring. Survive, so that you can pass it on, so that others may live. By saving them, you can save yourself.”

I stood on the dark, empty street and laughed aloud. Called out to the sky: “Don't I even get to kill myself in peace?” And the quiet voice of the Shekinah whispered: “You tried to do that for twenty-two years. Now you have only the right to live as best and meaningfully as you can.”

By the time I reached my door, all thought of death was gone.

I would see Pia now and then, in the corridors, the street. I made the request that she move. Explained that I'd resided in the building all these years, the only stable home I'd ever known, rent-controlled, and would she consider changing residences?

To my amazement, she agreed.

 

Shortly after, I began to meet, all in a row, one recovering alcoholic man after another who was broken-hearted over a blonde, owned a gun, and struggled desperately against an overpowering urge to put the barrel in his mouth. In time, I worked the steps with some of these, befriended others, and tried to set an example based on my experience. I reminded them that years ten to twelve in recovery were for some reason a period notorious for sober suicides, but somehow we'd been spared.

Grateful, we formed a little coterie that we called the “Guns and Blondes Club.” Now and then, drove cars to a local firing range, where we discharged weapons at paper silhouettes rather than ourselves. Afterward, over lunch, we recalled our survival of what each of us agreed was the worst pain we had ever endured sober: withdrawal from sex and love addiction.

IN 2002 IT SEEMED AS IF EACH TIME I WENT ONLINE to scan for news, another bus bombing had taken place in Israel's major cities, Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, or at a bus stop near an army base or in a café. The Internet was filled with photographs of the decimated hulks of destroyed buses. I found on one website a sequence that displayed a bus, its roof blown off and inside a tangle of metal, Israeli passengers slumped in their seats, eyes closed, with chalky faces snuffed by the concussive blast. Not all the seats were filled, though the bus would have been packed tight, as Israeli buses are—the missing passengers blown to pieces or hurled with the roof in a hundred directions, a head impaled on a lamppost, a hand lying in the road.

The frequency of the attacks took a toll on my nerves. Tried to call Isadora, but Esther refused to let us speak to her or even to provide details of how she was. By the time summer came, I was distraught.

I asked my Higher Power what to do.

And one day, during meditation, came a calm whispery voice: Go to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, offer prayers there.

I set about making arrangements with an editor at the
San Francisco Chronicle
to obtain a letter from the paper appointing me as a correspondent and requesting of the Israeli government foreign press credentials. This would give me a free hand to enter trouble zones and hot spots from which the bombings emanated—and perhaps generate articles, for I intended not only to see Isadora but to say something about the human cost of these murderous attacks.

 

On arriving in Jerusalem my first act was to attend a 12-step meeting that evening. Many of the same faces who had welcomed me during my last visit welcomed me now. Warm outstretched hands shook mine all around. Isadora was asked after: they remembered. I explained my purpose in coming. Their faces saddened.

“You will find the city much changed since you've last been here,” one said.

“How so?”

“You'll see.”

Being among them gave me the sense that I belonged, reminded me that before all things I am an alcoholic and the bottle but a symptom of a deeper underlying malaise, which, in my case—having sought and tried innumerable remedies and panaceas, from psychotherapy to sex, ambition to physical exertion—was answerable in the final analysis only by a spiritual solution. As my friend Si, an old-timer, would say: “The solution is simple. The solution is spiritual. And the solution has nothing to do with the problem.”

Strange to realize here, in the seat of three world religions, that even religion could not suffice to answer the need within me.

As I walked that evening through Jerusalem, I thought of what a strange path mine had been—a Jew who found his best approach
to YHWH or the Shekinah through nonsecular prayers such as the Serenity Prayer or through the diligent practice of Zen meditation, a persistent mindfulness; who had reached new visions of his role in Jewish life and the world at large through helping drunks, only some of whom, a mere handful, were Jews, who might come from every conceivable background and belief system and included desperate former criminals, fallen neo-Nazis, motorcycle gang members, ex-gangbangers, reformed stickup men, and muggers. Anyone who reached a hand out asking for help with drinking, I must freely help. Only together could we survive and transcend a fatal and incurable disease. I needed them as much as they me.

But the 12 steps cannot save the world, only drunks and addicts. For the steps to work, one must be in serious pain and ready, at all costs, to change.

In the morning, I rose early and went down to Ben Yehuda Street, a busy main thoroughfare of shops situated between King George Street and Jaffa Road. The cafés here were sure to be overflowing with all manner of Jerusalemites, crowding into cafés for their early-morning coffee and strudel.

Instead, I found deserted streets and empty shops with aproned storekeepers standing in the doorways looking forlorn, and in front of the cafés stood plastic bubble tents with posted armed guards who frisked you and inspected your ID before granting entrance. Up and down the street cruised border guard jeeps and a new type of antiterrorism motorcycle cop like something from a futuristic graphic novel: pistols holstered at their chests, wearing black bubble helmets that obscured their faces as they cruised slowly, scanning every nook, each set of eyes, prepared at a moment's reflex to dart off after suspects and bombs.

I got frisked and admitted to a favorite café spot, only to find
it completely deserted, with only a single pair of elderly women gabbing over transparent glasses of steaming hot tea.

When I sat at a table nearby they turned heavily rouged faces to me and said: “You are a tourist?”

“No. I'm an Israeli American from San Francisco, visiting.”

“But still, you are visiting?”

“Yes, I'm here to do some journalism work and to see my daughter.”

“Where lives the daughter?”

“In Ashdod.”

“But still, you've come from outside Israel. Do you see what's going on here?”

“I'm beginning to.”

The waiter came. I ordered a Turkish coffee, or “mud coffee,” as we used to call it in the army. It has caffeine enough to keep one going for days with little sleep, which soldiers often must do.

“Young man, you should be very proud of yourself to come now when you do. There's no tourism. People are afraid. We beg the world's Jews to come but they stay away. It's never been so bad.”

“I didn't feel I have a choice. For one thing, I have a daughter here. For another, Israel is my center of gravity. I don't want to live in a world without Israel.”

 

In Beit Agron, the Government Press Office had the pitched grimness of a command bunker at the height of a siege. I didn't like the new government spokesman even a little. He exuded a feeling of shrillness and incompetence. Nonetheless, I presented my Israeli and American passports, the letter from the
Chronicle
, and while these were examined and my application for a press credential processed, I recalled the trysts with Anna and Edna, the crazy days of shuttling around with a sidearm and officer tags. They made for good stories,
no more. But alcohol had linked them to a fatal and progressive descent into hell.

A harried young woman sat me in front of one of those camera ID-making machines, shot my face, and issued me a press card. It showed me as a correspondent for the
Chronicle
and listed me as an Israeli citizen. I was now free to go out and get myself killed any way I pleased.

I then sat with a spokeswoman. “I want to write something about the war that no one talks about, no one sees,” I said.

She thought. Then reached for a desk drawer and pulled a file. “I have something. As a matter of principle, I offer it to each reporter. They all say no. They want to see soldiers, guns. They don't want to see what's inside. Deeper. The uncomfortable place.”

“What have you got?”

She put the file before me. “Two mothers. Their teenage daughters, fifteen, best friends, blown up together by a Hamas suicide bomber in a downtown Jerusalem pizzeria. There have been a few minor stories but no one has told the whole story, as it should be told. No one has let these women really speak. Too painful. What do you think?”

There was no question that to go and, if nothing else, just sit and listen to these ignored women, their grief, was what my Higher Power intended for me.

“I'll do it.”

Astonished and pleased, the spokeswoman said: “You're the first not to push it away with a face.” Then added: “The odds against your paper running this are high.”

“Worth a try,” I said, taking the file. I rose. We shook hands.

“Will they talk to me?”

“I'll call to let them know you'll be in touch.”

The two mothers agreed to see me. They lived in an ugly white housing complex in an area regarded by some as disputed territory: a bus ride of several minutes from the center of town, where the girls had been blown up.

The two mothers lived just doors apart. The first, Frimet Roth, an American Jew from Queens, had immigrated to Israel, changed denomination to Orthodox, and married. The house was filled with children, scruffy little boys with earlocks and yarmulkes and jam-stained mouths. Little girls in long-sleeved dresses shuffled around, fingers hooked in their cherubic mouths, dragging dolls along the ground. Frimet sent them outdoors to play, sat me down. The place was as gloomy as a cave, disheveled, filled with unsorted laundry, toys—a typical motherhood battleground. It was not a cold gloom, though, more like a warm ovarian cave in which we sat at a big wooden table covered with alphabet blocks, notepads, dreidels, coloring books, crayons. She pushed these to the side, made space for our tea and elbows. Set down a plate of hard-looking homemade cookies dusted with confectioners' sugar.

“I'd like to show you something,” she said.

“Of course. Do you mind the tape recorder?”

“No. Go ahead.”

She returned with a stack of photo albums. Placed a photo before me. “This is them.”

“Your daughter's on the left?”

She nodded. “Malki. And the other, of course, is Michal. Both fifteen.”

They appeared like so many girlfriends of that age, complementary—Malki, the fair-haired dreamer, Michal more down to earth. Each smiling brightly, as if dazzled by all the promise they embodied.