Chapter Forty-Four
More sensitive stuff…
“Boring down to the
nitty gritty can be upsetting.
to your appetite, upending
to your sang-froid, too.”
“Carrot lips…”
“Hey, pea eyes!”
“Corny teeth…”
The Bay Trail had hardened some as we followed along a concrete break wall—knee-high to the squirrelly, rubber-limbed junior skateboarders bouncing their plastic wheels off its top and sides. Not that we hadn’t noticed these globes thus far, just hadn’t given them a second glance, what with the sandblasts and overall visual saturation out here. Still, it was hard to miss them, something on the order of high-country hay balls, encrusted with colorful environmental/global warming messages and themes, appearing to line the length of the trail to either side, dotting the Crissy landscape like anteGoogluvian map tacks, laced together like ecological rosary beads.
So we had noted the first few in passing, but call it cursory reviewal: A black and blue planet with color swatched DNA bands, the red hot and yellow Corporate Volunteerism ball with its stenciled happy faces and platitudes, a snowy glacial Polar Bear globe melting into avant pop isobar red and advancing blue—all atop iron pipe pedestals and round, prominently captioned concrete bases. Although that was before we hit upon ‘Foodie for Thought’.
“Tomato cheeks…”
“Potato ears!!!” 
“Funny looking…lettuce head!”
“That’s enough, children—moving on…”
While it sounded as if some innocent child’s play had devolved into ugly name calling, they were just telling it like it was. That is, a scrum of primary schoolkids over from the Exploratorium had encircled ‘lettuce head’, sculpted in a harvest of fruits and veggies—tastefully organic, unmodified and pesticide free—yet about as appetizing as plaster-of-Paris legumes could be.
Still, the kids were all over the EcoGlobes, a student teacher busily slapping their little mitts away from Foodie’s broccoli eyebrows, his avocado muttonchops and rutabaga jowls. Losing battle that it was, she quickly shooed them back along the cement barrier, toward a yellow school van waiting on the entry-grove parking lot’s innermost row, ‘lettuce head’ winking a pea-pod eye, flashing his corncob smile through it all.
“This an elective?” I asked, eyeing my wristwatch, working up more of a hunger, even so.
“Consider it mandatory,” Reese Paulen insisted, sizing up the colorful, cartoonish sphere as if it were Boulder mall’s quirkiness squared. “It’s for your own good…”
“No way I can skip class? Or just sort of audit…”
“Negative, Herbert, it’s high time for a little Cliff’s Notes history of the eternal infamy…”
“Why so, why me?” Wondering as how he kept creeding and screeding about this stuff.
“Because I detect a pattern here,” Doc replied, who had to be wondering why I kept so arbitrarily heeding. “Trust me, I have my…attributions…”
A free-range wiener dog lifted his stubby leg against Mr. Foodie’s base, while his bun-brown litter mate similarly honored a graphically gridded, gray-green Malthusian Overpopulation planet across the trail, barely missing the ‘Do Not Touch’ tag attached to each EcoGlobe base. Their middle-aged mother-master, stuffed in a rouge red pantsuit and thick pink shades, sternly called for her precious Dachshunds, yanking down on her wide-brim straw sunhat with a sly, slightly mischievous grin.
Either way, crowd flows wound around her as the pair of two foot-long pooches scurried to her side. Back on our right, that low concrete barrier brought us to a geothermal e-blast—a molten globe mapping red-hot water spots and parched yellow continents, a steamy model of tappable deep earth sustainability—then to a bit wider stretch of promenade where people apparently could or couldn’t care less.
“What attributions? What does that even mean,” I gasped, my growling stomach having no appetite for many more of these guessing games. “Anything to do with your phone calls?”
“They’re beside the Point, Herbert. Instead allow me to count the ways and means. And you best pay attention, as there may be an exam on this later on…”
“Okay, but what are we really talking about here?” No matter: if we were really doing this, I needed to stoke him and stroke him at the same time—threading the needles, splitting some hairs, pushing some buttons. Let’s see where he goes with it and how hard…and where or whether to push back.“Besides, I’m hungry, so where do we begin? Just make it so a lay lamoid like me can understand okay?”
“As if you didn’t know. That’s like asking where does human hatred begin…” Doc said, seemingly accommodating as could be under the circumstances. “But why crave mere junk food, when you can hang on a bit longer and dig the wonders abounding Liverpool Lil’s? Come now, guide me along here a bit further, so I can more fully enlighten you on the nuances of the world’s oldest hatred. Ah, yes, last I recall, this stretch was little more than a grown-over, swampy runway…”
“Yeah, swamp,” I sulked that if I couldn’t hang with him out here, how could I rope him in when and where? ”By all means, show the ropes, hanging on your every word…so when then?”
“A little forbearance is in order here, Herbert. You see, equally important are the wheres and hows—uppermost being the whats.”
I looked out upon east Crissy Beach for any signs of naked expression or aggression, back bending purposefully into the wind. What instead caught my eye was that red Saturn airship once again, now hovering over the Golden Gate Bridge, as though on ringing reconnaissance. I reflected on how far I’d coasted through my Return II year comparatively unscathed. Just a matter of weeks to go, if only I could have run out the clock in peace, rather than taking a knee, sweating it out on a fool’s errand such as this. You betcha, take a deep breath…mantra, mantra: Saturn Turmoil Rings In Peace—helping you get through this, Saturn Turmoil Rings In Peace. STRIPpppp…
“Alright then, for starters, is it called Anti-Semitism or antisemitism? According to some sort of scale, or…”
“Yes, well that is but a matter of semantics, although denoting something odious either way.”
“R-r-right, but simple question—what actually makes it so different from the social minefield about every other ethnic group has encountered over time? I mean the Holocaust excepted and all?”
“Hmph, Excepted? Make that embodied! Just the same, I will ignore your asinine proviso for sake of discussion, while explicating the sheer depth and duration of the virulence at hand. Namely the seeing of Jews as Anti-Christ, alien culture, ever the outgroup,” Paulen said. “The whole nagging crypto-xenophobic subtext that burgeons from many-headed monsters, never really going away for long.”
Spinning out in our direction was a high-pumping mountain biker who had hit a soft bog on his way back from Tennessee Valley, nearly tossing his Clif Bar in velocitized rage. No harm, no foul, he sputtered at us, righting his blue Cannondale Synapse, saddling back up in full stride. These sand pillows drifted through barrier breaks, heaping into the promenade like freeway grain spills, product of East Crissy Beach’s northward pitch, of daily winds blowing relentlessly through the Golden Gate, sweeping everything in away from the Bay.
Kids frolicked, retrievers and setters chased wooden sticks in and out of the shallow surf along this narrow, turgid beachfront, retreating to parental calls as sneaky channel waves rose in the wake of a passing outbound freighter. I instead tracked the graceful ascent of a Firenze-bound Alitalia jumbo jet over the bridge and East Bay hills, until a Latino tyke raced past us atop the breakwall’s slab tops, hurdling over some sun-bathing stiffs napping supine in his way. Nothing was to come between him and the old hombre in feathered sombrero pushing a bell-chimed ice cream wagon some three concrete slab lengths up ahead. Was getting so I could have chased right after the goodie wagon for a little fudge sundae, preferably good and hot.
“No, hey, I wasn’t trying to…” I pulled back, suddenly hearing sirens racing out Marina Boulevard, apparently headed westward toward the Golden Gate Bridge. “Yeah, well—I wouldn’t know about that…”
“Hah! I suspect you know precisely what I mean!”
“Anti-Christ, alien culture, ever the outgroup,” Paulen said. “The whole nagging crypto-xenophobic subtext that burgeons from many-headed monsters, never really going away for long.”
“Yeah, well—I wouldn’t know about that either…”
“You wouldn’t, now would you,” he momentarily tracked the following Virgin jet’s red tail and engine cowlings, gaining altitude, similarly due east over the Berkeley Hills. “However I suspect you know precisely what I mean.”
“And what does that mean?” I countered, off-guard all the more. Really—globes, rings—out here again. And what do I get for my trouble—after coming this far, after making such undivided…progress? A movable sermon, that’s what—a roaming diss-inquisition. Then came my mental seiche wave: thinking in and out, back and forth, sound him out, pin it down, thread the needle, drop the pins and needles, walk the line, jack him up, slip him up, hit the mark, track it down, work the spin, spin some wheels, ring him up, pull back, bring it, write it off —all those rah-rah clichés. But dammit, bring the heat, go for broke, push back, pay it off with compound interest, quick and dirty, remember? Wherever it’d lead from here… Confusion, conflict: now if only I could change the subject, get off this thorny topic altogether, stop sticking my head in such quicksand. Yah, you wish…so just refocus: “Still, why Anti-Semitism, instead of, like, anti-Jewish or something?”
“Moot point, when what I mean is sometimes ugly anti-Semitism stares you head on,” Doc gazed out more intently upon the bikinied beachscape. “Other times it entails a little unearthing. Then again, sometimes we even hide the hate and bigotry from ourselves. Be that as it may, as to your question, we should hark back even long before Biblical times. But the term itself apparently was coined by a German journalist in 1879.”
“Wait, why the hell by a German writer, of all people?”
A slight widening of the Bay Trail delivered us unto perhaps the promenade’s friskier, more frenetic, fanatical stretch. Most noteworthy about Crissy Beach, besides being so utterly wind blown, was its positioning relative to the sun—that is, largely facing away from it. Such wrong shore positioning made for a hardier, heartier bunch, and prompted a good bit of turn and burn—counter-broiling, lying down attitudinally away from the bay, more or less spitting into the wind. Not that it mattered much to the giggly halter-topped girlfriends tapping away at their cell phones on double-layered blankets, totally rubbing it in.
They were under the watchful eyes of gym-ripped buds pulling fresh pop-tops from nearby coolers, gawking with a glow on as the chicks slathered more sunscreen into each other’s well-developed base coats, seductive as roomies in a soft-porn short. Or the frat rats running in place just ahead of us, taking in the smokin’ hotties tugging at their tanks and camis, the strapless young barebacks, halfway to the Raelian Movement—the converging, intersecting tan lines of this two-piece bikini scene. So noted…
“Because Germany, Europe at large, has been a hothouse of Jewish antipathy for ages,” Doc sighed. “And I sorely acknowledge that as an apostate from my father’s Franco-Italian side.”
“So that makes you, like anti-European now, or…”
“Of course not, Herbert. Noting only that the Continent and Tzarist Russia were where the scourge of Anti-Semitism took definite root. Where all the bigoted traits and tropes emerged.”
“What traits and …tropes?”
Over there, hulky muscle heads rocked boot camp pushups against the concrete barrier slabs, spankin’ it hard core. And no, these hunks weren’t fixing one jot on the shapeless Euros beached about in thongy briefs and mankini slingshots as though this were the bright white strands of Antibes or Nice.
Even less appealing than the Speedoed Euros were the recent retirees, likely fat on government pensions, expressing their pent-up freedom on wobbly comfort bikes, wide-wall pot boilers and muffin tops hanging out over their beltlines, far better off keeping their shirts on, Gynecomastia-wise, for everyone involved. Dancing around one patently grotesque lard ass gasping past us on his front-basket Schwinn, was this black leotarded downtown New York ex-pat wired up to his headphones, fairy jogging, prancing about to re-issue show tunes like some 42nd Street Balanchine, Cunningham or Cage. Not my speed; though Paulen was furtively checking the broader East Crissy fleshfest out the corner of his eye.
“You know, the cartoony hook noses and jutting chins—stereotypical depictions of sniveling, shifty, greedy, untrustworthy parasites and worse…”
“Sort of like Shylock or Uncle Leo?” I dodged a windblown rush of oncoming runners and day trippers.
“Very funny, Herbert, is that your level of enlightenment?” Doc snapped, noting the fog bank drifting in toward Fort Point and the bridge. “Anyway, the whole Shakespearean shyster smear was product of draconian legal codes that essentially barred Jews from just about any business and professional pursuits, save money lending.”
“So where did their lending capital come from in the first place—just curious…”
Then there were those shoreside sedentary types clearly underwhelmed by the East Beach’s upward nubility altogether—unimpressed with these throngs for thongs, and their leash-reeled pugilistic dogs. Proceeding along a cross-trail row of dedicated concrete and wood slat benches, we variously spotted bundled up old duffs dodging the gull guano, picking at take-out deli trays, hissy fitting at these other people, near and far—pigeon feeders versus pigeon kickers—fussing over all this vital young life passing them by. Spurned romantics and other long-lost souls sat staring blankly out on the bay and TiBelvedere hills—boat spotting at best, casing the Gate Bridge deck at despondently worst. Further down, gossipy widow gal pals in fur-trimmed olive/raisin and cocoa quilted vests respectively stroked their Pomeranians and spooned over an upcoming season of Michael Tilson Thomas, while keeping discreet tabs on the stripped-down buffcakes still knocking out sets and reps.
Most intriguing to me was that winsome lotus blossom in a comparatively modest ruby tunic, seated serenely at bench’s end, contemplating an overhead V-squadron of sea-bound pelicans amid heightening beachfront commotion, probably I-Pod budded to the likes of Marcome, Sarah Brightman or some low-flame Fiery Furnace. Doc seemingly looked upon her as a doe strayed from the herd. Although I was more partial to gazelles.
“Hmph, your impertinence aside, our raison d’etre here is this unremitting historical enmity and persecution,” Paulen snapped to. “Which is why the Jewish people don’t demonstrably celebrate their holidays, so much as feel relief for having survived another annum to this day.”
“You mean like the Menorahs and dreidels,” I nodded, “don’t ask me how I know that…”
“Don’t have to,” he winked, adjusting his earpiece. “Just believe you me, there’ve always been heaps of such hateful manure to spread around…”
“That so? Who else has been doing the Euro dirty-work?”
“Puleeze, Anti-Semitism stems back much farther than that. Try millennia, 5,000 years of such hatred and persecution, starting biblically with Iron Age Israelites splitting from the Canaanites, bound for the Kingdom of Judah in the Southern Levant. Judaism evolved by the late 6th Century BCE, migrating about the Mediterranean region during the Hellenistic Period.”
“Whoa, this by choice or force?” We stepped around a dog sitter dutifully scooping up one of his terrier mix’s mid-trail leavings.
“Let’s say by divine providence, but which only led to Egyptian bondage in 1446-1250 BC, and an Exodus that instead found them eventually banished from Jerusalem into Babylonian Captivity, freed only through the benevolence of Persia’s Cyrus the Great, King Ahasuerus and heroics of orphan Hadassah. Through her rebel cousin, Mordecai, she married that very aka King Xerxes about 479 BCE,” Doc lectured, with a goodly measure of pride. “Hence she became Queen Esther, secretly Jewish and thwarting grand vizier Haman’s plot to eradicate all Persian Jews in c. 474 BCE by discreetly forewarning her sympatico husband at a massive banquet—himself nearly assassinated but for Mordecai’s earlier intervention.”
“R-r-right, like Exodus—saw the flick once,” I said, going along to get along, this being the ‘get’ to get. “But is the Biblical Book of Esther story historical fact or spiritual Hebrew fiction, like some scholars say.”
Yet so much for calm. Calm was definitely overrated, especially when there were these mounting, gnarly knots to brave: Rock on, sur-fsup! Damn straight, sure as shit, this here was headwind, headbanger territory, dude. In the rub of an irritated eye, Crissy Beach was all about board games. We stopped in our tracks as a Body Gloved wind surfer lugged his bowed Neil Pryde sail across the promenade, wrestling with its clear Rafjet in a sudden gust, bound and determined for the shoreline.
Raggin’ him was a lunatic fringe gang of SOMA skate rats slammin’ hard ollies and kickflips up and down off the concrete barrier. These self-medicating boomerang kids sported emblazoned Huf or Hawk t-shirts and Benny Gold mesh trucker caps, stompin’ atop decal plastered samurai decks in slip-on Vans Skink Skates with day-glo racing stripes, otherwise spinning their raw trucks and DarkStar hollow core wheels.
“That is mere hearsay, if not heresy—but you wouldn’t want to bring it up at a Purim table anyway. Not that her heroism deterred the Roman Empire from eventually sacking the Jews’ First Temple in Jerusalem, then blaming them for Christ’s Crucifixion, though it actually came at Roman hands. So the empire’s Titus destroyed their Second Temple in 70 AD in kind, precipitating the Jewish Diaspora.”
“Sort of a divide-and-conquer assault, I guess. So where to go from there?” We picked up our pace slightly to better get with the flow of joggers, hikers and cranky bike riders.
“Diffusing largely along Euro Ashkenazim, Iberian Sephardim and largely North African Mizrahim lines. But primarily to Europe, and into the Dark Ages before long—the Roman Empire’s demise leading to medieval lords blaming Jews for spreading the Bubonic Plague by contaminating public drinking water…when it could very well have been seismically caused.”
“By washing their hands in and of it,” I read somewhere, “accused of rats in their haystacks?”
Just a little turf talk among mouth-breathing adrenaline fiends, but pushing the juvies’ buttons more were a cabal of older streetboarders sucking down, passing around malt Joose and shark bite, Levasoled cocaine and no-brand smokes—scarred and lumpy, heavy into black Judas Priest sweatshirts and Bennies, cut off so as to brandish full-tatt forearms, cobra calves down to their scuffed spider-web Quake sneakers. Worship, they might have, at the calloused feet of Bullet Biniak and the Dogtown Z-Boys, before ripping their own tidal pool.
These megadeath Mephedrone M-Cat rappers and their tweaker girlfriends seemed a rougher, scruffier, dead-ender strain, crankin’ war-torn Cheta/Destructo long decks on 60mm Krooked speedemon wheels, reeking of smeared curb cream and bearing lube. Waterfront skaters by day, dealing bogus medical pot cards; warehouse squatters and car torchers/arsonists once the sun went down. These horrorcore freaks were old enough to know a whole lot better, too grip taped and alienated to give a good goddamn. Grab your board and go sidewalk surfing, nail that trick, hustle the ’hoods—goin’ total rogue—rattle chrome link keychains at red-ass scenes such as these. Living was cheap, life was even cheaper—just stay a halfpipe ahead of the badge.
“Pure feudal falderal! Regardless, Jews were subsequently targeted in the Crusades, Roman historian, Tacitus calling them ‘a wicked, hated race by the gods. At any rate, the rootstocks of European Anti-Semitism had been sown.”
“Might say in spades, huh?” By now, clock ticking, I got to thinking maybe a little passive aggression could help flesh out his more prickly side.
Yeah, well, pucker up, punks…no snot-nose X Games here. True, these kiteboard hydrofoiler bros looked to be the bigger dawgs, as evidenced by the packs and racks stacked on rigs all over this end of East Crissy’s parking lot. Serious business: Thule and Yakima sky/rocket boxes on most every roof and trunk lid; road and mountain bikes racked atop S.U.V.s and crossovers muddied from live action up and down the coast.Battered longboards were propped upright against Tundra pick-ups, sail frames drained against the grillwork of H3s and X-Terras. Reef Sandals and baggy boardshorts dried out across the front hoods of cubish Scions and Elements; wetsuits airing out on a misplaced Vanagon, tri-finned surfboards silver thermal bagged on the roofs of Wranglers and other woody would-bes. Outfitted to the gills, loaded for bare—big-boy action here, sport, no room for any kid’s stuff or kooks, so quarter spin on this…
“Then again, Rome wasn’t fulfilled in a day,” Paulen added. “The Vatican kept striving to ‘enlighten’ Jews, while fascistic Italians blamed them for killing a young Christian boy, Simon of Trent, and using his blood in cult rituals, and baking matzos. Jewish leaders were banished, burned at the stake—the Blood Libel embodied, although that had textually emerged back in 1140s England. Then Pope Pius XVII kissed off Hitler’s atrocities through WWII; even today, Pope Ratzinger, a former Nazi, pontificates at Jerusalem’s Western Wall.”
“Uh, in all fairness, didn’t Pope Benedict V bless a Jewish homeland in 1917?”
“Pro forma, historically apocryphal,” Doc countered. “More archtypically Christian were Spain’s forced conversos and expulsion during the Inquisition and Catholic reunification in the 1400s.”
“So what did your father have to say about that—like, to your mother?”
The promenade narrowed some again at its western edge, where a slight leftward leaning curve turned it back into Bay Trail mode. The gravel jag occasioned further pause just when it looked as if we might gain a deboarding pass from this subculture clash. Instead, we got scissor pinced some between an outgoing biaxial Kona Cruiser board with its Ezzy Zephyr sail and an incoming Screamer board with salt-soaked Goya Guru sheet going gung-ho.
For this promenade dogleg happened to be a pipeline to some of the most righteous currents this side of Hood River rats. So ultra-fanatical sailboarders wrestled their X-Rides across our path with ‘don’t make waves, make way’ glares as the plowed into new surf generated in the wake of an Oakland bound Hapag-Lloyd container ship.
“Hmph, he was too busy toasting his French connection, notwithstanding the 19th Century Republic’s history of spreading ‘purity’ flyers casting Jews as deceitful criminals poisoning France and puppet masters pulling strings,, threatening world peace. Later falsely accusing Alfred Dreyfus of treason in 1894, with forged documents, no less.”
“Eventually exonerated by 1906, wasn’t he—became a hero in his own right?” My view shifted toward a particularly eco-green Enviro-globe at will—spotting something vaguely familiar in the technique.
“Touché, Herbert. But by then Anti-Semitism across the Continent had metastasized, from Poland to Portugal. In many respects ground zeroing in Germany, of course—particularly in the wake of WWI. All the Hitlerian rants on ‘peoples radios’, Kristallnacht, blaming Jewish finance ‘vermin’ for punishing Versailles peace treaties. This, after lefty Karl Marx had answered the ‘Jewish Question’ as merely a ‘cult of currency’—not to mention at a time when Jewry were the most accomplished, prosperous and secure ethnic group in Germany. The resulting Shoah horror speaks for itself…”
“I’m aware—family ties, my uncle died liberating one of the camps, and I was eventually over there myself,” I regathered defensively, avoiding any mention of my army affinity for 1970’s Allemagne. “All the way to Nazi kasernen and Rommel’s tower…” Whoa, Fuhrershock: swastikas still on a former hospital’s bannisters— suddenly, all this inflating and conflating was deflating me something fierce. Crossover distress signals shot up and down my spinal cord, stirring an inflammatory stew—medulla south to the dorsal horn. as in, where did that leave me now?
Just-beached rigs sun dried in parking lot aprons to our left, while a band of fresh, extremophile boarders locked down their carbon masts and U-joint baseplates, tightened footstraps, cinched up loop-’n’-go tailpieces and Sonic waist harness lines before catching wind, carving waves out toward mid bay. With Paulen fielding another quick but evidently anxious phone call, turning to whisper into the wind, I slid over near the breakwall, out of swarm’s way, stopped cold by the test pattern color dynamics of it all. Each free-force deck, Spectra film sail was an in-your-grill expression of radical solidarity—imaginatively graphic, brilliantly bizarre—where HGH and A.D.D. met Wii and CGI by way of THC, PCP and LSD.
The Robby Naishniks atop them blew swiftly past a twaddling of pesky paddleboarders with their frumpy, wrinkled bulldogs hanging loose on back, boogying about aimlessly, harmlessly in shallower surf. Curiously, the gonzo boarders braved 50-degree waters in primarily darker tones. Even though younger hot-shots sported citrus-paneled half-skins or tagged and baggy Quicksilver/Kelly Slater boardshorts, 
mesh low-tops and lycra Ballslappers, tilting into shoreside winds—freestylin’ loops and spins, bumps and jumps along the way. It made me wish I was out there with them about now, wind in my boardsails, the bridge as an unfettered backdrop.
“Is that so? why am I not surprised,” Paulen said, as though exploratory crosscutting my Aryanic jib. “Well, even Brazil and Argentina were collaborating on the Nazi atrocities and aftermath. However I say no country wears the royal crown of Anti-Semitism as does Great Britain—for undermining Jewish aspirations since 12th Century massacres and expulsions of 1650—its duplicitous 1939 White Paper stifling Jewish immigration and nation building, British lords recently partying around in Nazi drag…”
“On that, the Irish would concur,” I paltered. “Even though Brits did wear the white hats in WWII, didn’t they?”
“So did the Soviets, Herbert, but that’s not to expunge Imperial Russia’s record of virulent Anti-Semitism either—its Pale of Settlement pogroms and 1903 fabrication, ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ conspiracy plot for global domination. It’s all of a piece now, isn’t it…”
Further offshore even harder core were riding their sideways aqua glides, hoisting their skinny-short mast extensions, cutting the rippers, balls out into the ships’ channel for some high-wind planing, a round of tight-radius turnies and jibes amid 15-20 knot blasts. These maniac paragliders tended to wear black graphite wetsuits, head to foot: full Billabong barehoods, Rip Curl rashguards, down to ankle seals and round-toe boots to shield every malady from nail fungus to severe surf toe.
Out there, they dodged and darted between freighters and regattas alike—in gusts strong enough to shear marine-grade locking collars and pretzel their triple-clamp alloy booms—with the upper body mass to stay coursing with their clearsails and pull it off. Far beyond the killer wakame kelp, jumping the shark where the sea otters and lions roamed, even hairier and stone Evel were the galeblazing kiteboarders, boatracing in from the Gate clear through to Alcatraz Island.
Tethered to humongous inflatable crescent-shaped finned batwings bobbing and weaving 50-100-feet overhead, they hydroplaned, pulled slingshot touch-and-go’s atop bay flooding waves—death-wish daring-dos in the face of barge-hauling tugboats and 980-foot cargo ships, for nothing other than rushes or grins. Stroke, stroke—like, totally rad, dude…what with the fog now beginning to pile in with gusto, fresh from devouring Ocean Beach, the Sunset and Richmond Districts, block by block.
“Resulting in Jews casting their lot across the Pond, right?”
“Correct, except those waters were a bit murkier than they anticipated…”
“So was there the hope of escaping Christianity’s darkness into some new Judeo light, or what?”
“In a manner of speaking,” Doc waxed. “You see, Jews first landed in New Amsterdam around 1654. Though initially graced by the likes of George Washington, they have since withstood the Revolution, Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant’s and other anti-Jewish resistance all along. Conversely, writer Mordecai Noah called for an ‘Ararat Project’ to plant a Jewish homeland colony in Arkansas around 1825, but to little avail. By the way, did you know that your ‘Kike’ moniker derived from Ellis Island entry at the turn of the century? Whereby Jewish arrivals signed their entry forms with Kikel circles rather than Christian crosses?”
“Uh, I had no idea there either,” I hedged, ‘Irish need not apply’ admonitions popping like pub corn to mind. “I just thought it was a suburban juvie locker room jab at my being a frugal Scot piker on my father’s side. I mean there really were no Jewish kids to speak of in my ’burb’s high school.”
“Well somebody in your little clique was acquainted with the smear,” Paulen huffed, looking further out the trail toward a cluster of former military outbuildings, zipping up his sweater vest against the chill. “In any case, 20th Century America wasn’t proving to be much more hospitable to Jewish immigrants. Witness the ghastly Atlanta, Georgia lynching of an innocent Leo Frank at merely 29…”
“Isolated injustice, like in strange and bitter fruit hanging from a poplar tree?” I replied, dismayed at how far we’d strayed out this way, in dubious space and time. Getting to be desperate time, so maybe what was needed here was a bit more rope-a-trope, pushing some other buttons, with a little whistling while I worked at finding what really set him off without unseemly stepping on his tour de force. C’mon, draw him out, without penning me in—that is, if he didn’t unearth me first…
Otherwise, I was personalIy, somewhat nettled by all the adrenaline jonesing and neoprene, the prospect of wet-suited stokers flashing me the full finger glove—increasingly apprehensive, much like some jokers get flustered by black skin and clowns. Spotting one boarder in a quantum jammer pausing before us to hack up a wet loogie, then shooting double nostril snot rockets, it shook me back to coastside Pacifica, to Eric and those Jaguar junkheaps, and that ‘Fuckin’ Middle Finger of Fate’ brainchild of his. He must have been living on Maui or some Montana ranch spread by now, last-laughing me off his dodgy trail. Still, Doc and I pressed doggedly ahead, foggier destination unclear.
“Isolated injustice?! Was Lucky Lindy a one-off? Joe Kennedy, Patricia Highsmith, Ezra Pound—untold America Firsters,” he plained, fiddling with his earpiece. “Detroit’s Father Coughlin and his nationwide radio harangues over FDR’s ‘Jew Deal’; Henry Ford his Dearborn Independent’s virulent newspaper articles on the troubling ‘International Jew’? My God, some 20,000 anti-semites gathered in Madison Square Garden with the German-America Bund on the brink of Shoah time in 1939. While the S.S. St. Louis passenger ship with 937 Jewish refugees was met with cold shoulders from Cuban, U.S. and Canadian ports of call—forced back to Europe and their Holocaust deaths!”
“B-b-but the Jewish people did fare better after the war, didn’t they?” I back-foot replied. “Like in the 1950s—relative safe haven here, more shtetles, synagogues, successful enterprises and the media: Bess Myerson, Jack Benny, Dinah Shore, Barbra Streisand. Borsch Belt to Broadway to Burbank—widely building the most powerful Jewish community in the world, right?”
“You mean Miss Jewmerica? Alas anti-Semitic resistance shadowed back in before long. From Gentlemen’s Agreements to persecuting the Rosenbergs—then the Red-scared HVAC and Joe McCarthy blacklisting mainly Jewish Hollywood over purported commie leanings. And such ‘good will’ began creaking altogether after the Six-Day and Yom Kippur Wars…”
“But they were militarily attacked in the first place over there both times, weren’t they? Newfound might making right overnight—Hava Nagilas and utopian kibbutzim just the same?”
“In any event, the seesawing scourge of Anti-Semitism has long been the product of Jews being written off as ‘the other’, stateless outsiders tolerated as useful, then villainized as evil, dual-flag puppeteers and war profiteers. Wandering Jews being a truculent, genetically inferior white race—wrongly punished for taunting Christ as he was led to crucifixion. So much cumulative fragility, insecurity, a sens de autre—every generation and regime rising to deter and destroy them. Unfortunately that hatred has such scurrilous legs and impact.”
“On the other hand, wouldn’t you say that postwar Yalta and the UN did help facilitate the State of Israel in 1948?”
“Ah, yes, Eretz Yisrael—back in the Holy Land homeland, at too long last, at that…”
Care for more?
Chapter Forty-Five. The farther out they go, the
deeper they delve, issues getting touchier, exchanges
testier by range and definition, on a global scale…