Chapter Twenty-Two
“Comes a time to
come to terms with the
meaning of your words.”
“There, can you hear me? Nearly lost you for a second, but… No, he’s not as bad off as I’d suspected. Still, it’s not clear he’s as good as was hoped. What was that?
“Yes…easier if he had an R.F.I.D. chip implanted in his backside! Of course… might have to… intervene…for his own good…
“Indeed…continue to work it…fill you in a bit later…oops, losing you…had better go…(CLICK).”
We intended to cross Chestnut Street with the walk light; that was the plan. But then there happened to be this…impediment. We got stalled at the slanted pedestrian walk by an onyx Nissan Z Ninja GT, with mag/chrome-spokes and vanity California palm license plates reading BLK PWR, blocking our path. Boy toy all the way, only behind the wheel was this buzz-cut middle-aged honky in a white AC/DC t-shirt, French inhaling his Marlboros behind chrome aviator shades.
Brandishing Airborne Ranger decals on his windshield and rear window, he could have been regular army retired, a hard-stripe sergeant type, Gulf War vet on cyclosarin disability, still working out his government issues over a Full Throttle energy drink or two. He seemed all hopped up on Kid Rock, clicking through his Kenwood tuner, red-lining the boombox speakers surround-sounding his twin-bucket cockpit, shaking Cynque’s sleek chrome exterior light fixtures, over twenty feet away. The vet glanced in my direction, then revved twice loudly in sneering salute, bottle scarred and half cocked.
So we backed off a bit more from the curbing when he flipped his stereo scan to replay Savage Nation. I overheard Cynque Lounge’s valet attendants cracking as how the joker had been right-hand turning a deep, ugly groove into this square block of pavement all afternoon—apparently riding out some aging venom and anxiety.
Likely as not he had been stationed at the Presidio somewhere along his strack lifer tour. Stable duty that, but now he was an IED in perpetual motion, as if running and gunning from far uglier flashbacks to places like Basra, Benning or even Fort Bragg. Here, he seemed so out of place and context, cutting us peacenik types off at the pass in a self-styled exploratory sortie. Round and round the Marina—stewing like Gary once had, minus the slight of hand, cruising Chestnut and Lombard the way Eric always did. I too knew the drill well, patrolling the perimeter, Fillmore to Pierce Streets and back again, spinning the radio dial—if only in a much lesser ride. Then as now, that was how guys in our state and stasis rocked…and rolled.
“Again with the phone calls,” I asked, admittedly fishing a bit, having overheard just enough of the phone gab, even through my tin-tin din, slight touch of paranoia creeping in. Heretofore, I had been killing these long minutes looking back on the lofty houses and condos heaped up the Fillmore Hill, gauging just how far we’d come today, how steep the climb back, realizing I hadn’t been down this way in quite a while, still fretting over that smoke up there—not to mention the Hazzerds busking our way.
I had particularly focused on Pacific Heights’ roof lines beyond them—schools and TIC/apartment buildings like a fiscal year bar graph—the billowing gray-black smoke in windblown vicinity of Webster and Laguna Streets. Flashing sirens raced up and across, converging somewhere in between; that prospect hitting me like a concussion grenade. “Can’t get away from the gadgetry, huh? Must have been pretty important…”
“You might say,” Reese Paulen pressed down the call light on his wireless Jabra. He motioned me away from the crosswalk, rather proceeding on this unsunnier side of Chestnut Street. “An old, old friend checking in…”
“About…” As in what the hell were we doing here?!
“Something about bridge burning. Let’s leave it at that, shall we?”
“R-r-right,” I muttered, welcoming the change of course, as I really wasn’t excited about revisiting the scene of the Dame’s third Return any more than necessary. Still, I gazed morbidly upon the telescopic cordons of bay windowed pastel apartment buildings and cheesy two-flats extending out to the woefully familiar Marina shoreline and Belvedere hills beyond.
Along Fillmore’s right side were the red-tiled turrets of those white Spanish-style apartment houses; smack between the convergent rows was a middle lane of parked cars and arching light poles. Even from this overhead trolley wired perspective, I could re-picture the 2 Cervantes casket box of a building fatally genuflecting out into the intersection. Midway between here and there, just beyond that sheeting green canvas doorway canopy, the lady’s place had itself collapsed like a misbaked devil’s food cake. Christ, how could she get trapped in there, that whole dumpy duplex coming down around her that way? “You mean like bridges…and walls?”
“I should hope you are not alluding to Israel’s security barrier,” Paulen said, a Fisherman’s Wharf-bound 30 Stockton bus finally horning Ninja out of the MUNI stop. “You aren’t suggesting Israel has no right to defend itself, are you?”
“No, hey…come on,” I sputtered after him. “No way I…was just thinking about some…music…all in all, just another brick in the wall…”
“Look, Herbert, that is not a wall at all, little more than a neighborly fence…quite possibly a temporary one at that.”
“Sure, of course it is,” I backpedaled further. Yet time’s a wastin’, my head’s still throbbin’, back’s itchin’, and I don’t know what the hell’s goin’ on with doc here. “I mean, you’ve got me all wrong…uh, how about we get off this anyhow?”
“Seriously, we are reasonably educated fellows, Herbert. Isn’t it incumbent upon us to give such vital issues a thorough vetting—rationally, on fairly neutral ground—can’t you see that?”
“Oh, it is, really?” This can’t be happening here like this—yet here we were—with what I expected to be just small talk getting seriouser and seriouser by the upscaling storefront.
“Good god, man, if not us, who?”
“No, if us, for godsakes why?”
The veteran ranger revved his 350-Z in militant defiance, burning through super unleaded at $4.25 per gallon, screeching like a teenage time bomb around the corner onto Fillmore south. Banging Motorhead through his subwoofer, he full throated the Ninja’s HKS Ti stainless flared tailpipes past some underwhelmed out-of-town honeys and the IsoBar Method yogaplex. Their verdict: Sorry loser, no Testarossa, that—but it rattled my pipes all the more.
“Too late to prevaricate, my friend. Next you’ll be backhand impugning the motives of America’s only reliable democratic partner in the Middle East.”
“Hey, who am I to question or judge…I have no skin in the game…” So out of line, out of context: whatever, shake things up a bit more. Not that I was an advocate or anything. Just keepin’ it real…even maddeningly real. So settle down, chump—you can do this…you have to do this.
“Would that it were so, Herbert,” Paulen glimpsed Cynque’s hefty early dinner menu, pointing to the flat-iron steaks and tiger prawns. “Nevertheless, take a number. Everybody and his blogger is jumping on Israel these days…”
“Actually, I don’t have a blog like that.” Just the same, I was once again confronted with this whole Mideast conundrum, even after all this time. Again, with the morbid curiosity, the confliction affliction: Trying to understand the hows and whyfors of this eternal combustion was still like bearing witness to some foreign car wreck from which I couldn’t turn away. “So, what’s that got to do with me personally?”
“You tell me,” he said, as we proceeded along a curt row of single-story storefronts that hadn’t changed much structurally since Depression days, but were gentrifying like crazy today. In turn, we passed a chic plunging dress salon aside a drab, cluttered Italian dry cleaners that had been there forever. “Anyway, it’s all basically bigoted grandstanding. What is the country supposed to do? Israel’s been under siege at least since Chaim Weizmann first lobbied UNSCOP.”
“Huh? Who said it wasn’t,” I groused, guessing he was looking about for the equally ageless next-door magic shop, which had recently pulled a Houdini disappearing act rather than joke around with the practicality of a gargantuan rent raise. “If we are going there anyway, I do wonder why we keep hearing about that temporary security…fence being a solid 25 feet high and rigged with hot-wire electrodes and razor wire—like, 500 miles long…what’s so temporary about that?”
“It’s called containing the explosive West Bank—more precisely, Judea and Samaria,” Paulen looked askance, as we paused at the side of this busy thoroughfare, exchanging information, getting our second wind. “And most of what you’re hearing are typical anti-Israel canards. You don’t buy all that hateful media drek, do you?”
“Me? Hey, no…I’m only trying to wrap my brain around all this for once—I mean, if we are determined to scratch old sores, that is,” I propped myself against a parking meter, thinking up to speed outside this slender little fresh fish grill, hot as an unlocked, blackmarket iPhone, catches of the day being everything from Chipotle Mahi Mahi to barbequed Unagi and Ahi Poke. “Although I must say, I have seen pictures of the teeming camps, famished refugees, Israel controlling everything. And which hateful media exactly?”
“Pick your poison. I can only say, let those Palestinians build a healthy, productive life for themselves in Gaza, like Israelis have done next door,” he said, seeming to inhale the Thai Coconut Shrimp from the nearer of the grill’s sidewalk tables. “But no, instead they insist on fighting amongst themselves and taking aim at Israel from all directions.”
“Sure, but putting up a separation barrier, or whatever you want to call it,” I replied, nothing short of jim-jams setting in. Once again, the confounded complexity—nope, sorry–too, too much to this very day—any wonder I was once again shaking my head, beside myself at the utter hopelessness over there? But if this was the topic at hand, so be it. I was on the clock, hook, and might as well cop to having done some reading on this stuff over the years. “By the way, why do I keep hearing that the U.N. and World Court call the barrier illegal? Isn’t this bringing Israel more trouble than it’s worth? Why not just engage the region and hammer things out fair and square already? It’d be win-win, getting peace and happiness all around—instead of being beside itself with rage. Isn’t that what’s truly in Israel’s self interest?”
“Win what? More radical terrorists on the attack?” Paulen and I sniffed the aromatic commingling of skewered and marinated seafood with a longboard surfer taqueria/pizzeria pouring Island Lager. “You’d think the Israelis are fashioning some glorious gated community for themselves! Look, the country is under constant existential threat in that nightmare of a neighborhood…we’re talking about self-preservation, utter life or death…”
“Granted, but some people are concerned about not just what the barrier is, but where it is. They call it a land grab, right? Or at the very least, one whopper of a spite fence…”
“More along the lines of a despite fence,” he remarked, now angling over toward a local megabank branch, to pull down some walking-around money from its ATM.
“How do you figure?” I followed him, though keeping civil distance as he punched in his PIN and transaction interaction, fixing on colorful Teatro Zinzanni circus banner fluttering on the utility pole above.
“Despite all Israel’s best efforts toward peace and stability, it still has come to this,” he continued, pocketing his cash and paper trail. “At least the separation barrier can give Israeli citizens some semblance of security, protection from all the dangers surrounding them.”
“That sounds like a no-win situation, if you ask me,” I fished my own pockets for a bankroll of any consequence, coming up dry. “I mean, in the long run…”
“Truth of the matter is that fence only goes where the trouble is. Now, there’s been nearly a 90% reduction in terror attacks from the West Bank alone,” Paulen said, leading back into the sidewalk flow, nettled by a burst of gameday cheering from the old Horseshoe sports bar across Chestnut. “Besides, the U.S. is doing the same thing along our Mexico border—without such tangible results, I might add.”
“Yeah, and it looks like we’re paying for it, either way.” I gave ground to a pack of baggy young Mexican day workers who had just finished off some disposal jobs for a new Apple store further up the street. “And swimming against some pretty strong demographic tides—sociologically speaking. Not that that makes it right…or is making things any better.”
“Better for whom?” he halted in the face of a firemist red Mercedes SLK darting ahead of us into the bank’s U-turned drive-up lane. “Sorry, but Israel simply can’t afford to let Tel Aviv end up like Ciudad Juarez or Baghdad.”
“Or like Gaza City…how that’s ending up?” I squnted over my shoulder for some sign of Hap or Hop having turned the corner, witness tampering on their bloody docket.
“Oh, I see, blame it on the Jews,” Paulen sneered, somewhat taken aback by a reckless roadster steering into the drive-up bank lane, then averting from the snidey wave by its likely Larkspur-bound driver. Doc then turned around to the boldface headline of a throwaway city newspaper gone unnoticed heretofore. “There, see? ‘Jew Charged, Mayor Wants Him Out’. It always comes down to the Jews.”
“Actually, that’s about City Supervisor Ed Jew. And I believe the guy’s Chinese,” I pulled a copy from the bright blue freebie newsbox, wrapping it around my Times.
“Hmph, likely story—but who says two differing things can’t be equally true?”
“That what she said?” Had no idea where this came from, or did I?
“Depends on what she you are referring to, now doesn’t it…”
Care for more?
Chapter Twenty-Three. A brush with
idealism sparks rough analogies and the
comparative legacies of disputed lands…