Chapter Forty-Three
“The more you dig
into something, the more
it can pin you down.”
“Yah, buncha pussies over der…”
“Better than those rag arms any day…”
“Your moma…”
What more, indeed—old scores were being settled, dating all the way back to Merkle’s boner a century ago, bitter ancient rivalries renewed. A pair of fogeys, retired night-shifty dropouts, munched on the meaty proceeds from a free hot dog cart, courtesy of some mortgage-peddling savings and loan. They sat chewing over the sad state of Bay Area sports today: Two too many teams, with nobody left to hit one out to Mt. Davis and Three-Bag Alley. Still, they were also listening to the Giants’ game on a transistor radio, sporting their disrespective color gear: orange and black, Oaktown’s green and gold.
“Your fuckin’ A’s—sinkin’ in that toilet bowl over there—can’t give their damn tickets away…”
“Hah! Like with your Gnats stinkin’ up their glitzy theme park…”
Reese Paulen and I were only privy to this foulmouthed clash because I had tripped over an unruly shoelace as we set out on the Bay Trail. Stopping at their wood slat bench’s end to hike a leg and retie my grungy country hikers, I landed right between the lines of the gamey ball dudes’ trash talking over their scratchy little radio, while Paulen impatiently gazed out at the wavy shoreline vistas.
The waiting line had grown for gratis foot-long and chili dogs, crowding this scenic promenade deck, which was already jammed with aerobic types warming up, cooling down, stretching tendons and muscle groups, working out all the kinks and cramping. They strutted, prowled, squat-thrusted, vaulted—pilated, planked and four-point spread-eagled about the concrete concourse, energized by the Bay view—the Marin Headlands, passing sailboats, clanging masts and rigging, this whole beau monde St. Francis Yacht Club milieu. That grub line now way too long, we instead braced for a stronger headwind, Doc nudging me to turn toward the Crissy trail, setting sights on a bridge to everywhere that greenly mattered—whitecaps whipping up, sand commencing to blow with conviction.
We resolved to move out along the gravel trail, leaving the balky ball hawks to ride their proverbial pine. Same time we again picked up on a tricky ground game of our own, mainly by re-turning an A-to-B-to-C triple play—basically tossing around roster moves for any Mideast peace game plan.
“B?” I asked, by now beyond hungering for a shorter hot dog line-up, particularly since the whole poppy seeded, variable-rate home loan promotion seemed on the verge of bottoming out.
“No, A.”
“So, A and C then…”
“No C. Only A.”
“Then what about B?”
“They’re all in on A, but partially B…although that presence could very well be augmented, goat by goat.”
“What…goat? And any of C?” More broadly, it was time for some clarification…areas of definition. I was still trying to decipher designated areas as per the 1995 Oslo Accords—that calico schematic divvying up the West Bank like so—and how that informed and colored where we stood today. Whereby scattered Area A cantons were under full Palestinian security and control; more numerous B patches shared security control with encroaching Israelis, and vast C swaths were under full Israeli control. Hence, the constant fission creep throughout erstwhile Judea-Samaria, Jerusalem testily aside.
“Further carve up Israeli lands?” Doc insisted, casting aside caprine tropes, pushing trailward. “Not one blessed inch of C!”
“Guess Ehud Olmert will see about that…” I tailed him with all due unease.
“God forbid, that crooked PM would probably try to throw Hebron into his desperate peace plan giveaway.”
“Yeah—so what if he did?” Regaing my sea legs, I spotted the frank wagon shutting down, dog depleted, cola dry, line fizzling in guttoral growls and scowls. With that, I had to turn from the sailed subprime ship to my forced march westward and befogging onshore gales, Paulen leading the way.
“Hebron, Herbert, Hebron, Tomb of the Patriarchs, integral part of the Kingdom of Judah, artifacts dating back to Eighth Century BCE. Don’t even think about it!”
“But Ibrahimi Mosque, the Kiryat Arba settlement—I’ve read about that other long history of unrest and massacres. Besides, Israel is just coming out of its second Saturn Returmoil on top of it.”
Not that we weren’t momentarily distracted by a distant oceanic liquid symphony washing over from the horn-like acoustic sculpture of the Marina Harbor’s Wave Organ, gurgling and rumbling out at spit’s end, past the Golden Gate Yacht Club and heaped marble and granite ruins of old architecture and cemetery stones luffing clear over this way, even against a stiffening onshore wind.
“Hmph, seriously,” Doc pressed ahead. “Be that as it may, I recall it was Marzel who said, ‘if you believe Jews should not live in Hebron, you are an anti-Semite’.”
“Really, he actually said that? When…” I recoiled, sidling up to him nonetheless, hand to glove, trying to catch his draft as we angled further into foot traffic—that old highway tactic, remember? Nuzzling up to those 18-wheelers, slipping into the curl of headwind friction, easier on the gas gauge until you hit a patch of black ice…much like right here and now.
“When is not the point. It was Marzel’s enduring reverence, his biblical passion.”
Then again we soon got waylayed, hemmed in behind a ruddy trail mix of slow-mo’s and fast forwards intercutting either way along the San Francisco Peninsula’s uppermost shoreline, right about where the Bay and all its beauty came to town. Gravel crinkled beneath our feet as we pressed westward, windblown sand giving up an eyeful, a gritty taste of the granules. This beach sand had long drifted against low mesh fencing that bordered both trailsides, restraining the National Park Service’s conceptually landscaped berms, mounds and ever-shifing dunes—albeit to dubious effect in these daily afternoon gales.
“So, where does that leave Olmert’s plan,” I deflected. “I mean Mideast experts call it the most extensive offer ever made by an Israeli prime minister to Abbas or any Palestinian leader, for that matter. What if he really does manage to proceed along those lines?”
“More like what if he doesn’t?” Doc stopped cold. “Look, the Palestinians never fail to stall and stifle any chance of reaching a peace agreement with Israel. They’ve rejected Israeli two-state offerings in 1937, ’47, 2000 and 2001—from Shukeiri to Arafat and Abu Mazen on down. Why would Olmert’s grand plan meet a different response?”
“Because those plans always required their accepting the legitimacy of a Jewish State—evidently one hard reality for them to swallow, right? Maybe standpoints change, but all the while Israel has been pretty content to administer Six-Day War-gained territories like the West Bank through inexorable IDF military occupation.”
“Strictly adhering to the Geneva Convention, Herbert. This, as Hamas maintains Israel will only exist until Islam obliterates it—even though many Palestinians have willingly sold their land to Israelis all along—risking death at the hands of their very own corrupt PA, I might add. Those slants never change.”
You just had to ask the young mother struggling to push a buggy through such a soft spot out here on the trail, her terrible two year-old grabbing a handful off the sand pile, figuring it some kind of Capt’n Crunch cereal as her mommy swatted it away. Breezing around her was a comparatively chillin’ parade of similar day strollers. Everybody was otherwise so laissez-faire casual, hugging incessantly, more me-phemisms than you-phemisms in the air, affecting a healthy semi-stoned collective consciousness, while we more impoliticly batted these prickly Mideast matters around.
“Well what goes then?,” I muttered, somewhat shaken by a starter gunshot back by the yacht club, a fleet of forty-footers tacking toward the first mark. “Land for peace, land or peace? West Bank or Gaza, West Bank or Judea and Samaria, Temple Mount or Nobel Sanctuary, Ehud or Bibi, surge or scourge, share or despair?”
“Too soon to tell,” Paulen sighed, as he glanced off to the sparkling Bay. “All I know is, whatever the likely outcome, you know whom will be catching the heat.”
“No, who?” My concentration was further rattled by the loud snap of a Kevlar sail in full crank and release. The leading boat in a race of Lasers jibed away from the shore toward the channel buoys, in the early leg of a city front course—the flapping if its mainsheet, clang of its rigging reminiscent of ghostly long-gone Marina nights.
“Whom do you think?” Paulen cuffed my shoulder. “The State of Israel, of course.”
“Wow, that’s quite a leap—how so?”
“Lord you can see it already, can’t you?”
“Uh, not so sure what…” I evaded, looking past him to a Crissy Field parking lot chock with dusting over, late-model Lux-UVs and assorted status wagons—alarm clocked, fuel efficient, enviro-friendly, GPS coordinated, comfortably climate controlled. This, while my corpus callosum was beginning to twist and bake like a sportsbar pretzel. I clamped by elbow firmly down on my newspaper and letter, lest the wind blow them away.
“Puleeze, there’s no denying the snubs, the whispers, the chilling stares—for it’s Israel’s fault again, it’s always Israel’s fault, no matter what…”
“Aww, come on, Doc—that’s really going over the top, isn’t it?”
“What is over the top, as you put it, are the protests and BDS movement,” Paulen scowled, “the apartheid and genocide nonsense and other vitriol pervading campuses left and right…”
About then I got clipped from the blind side by a finely toned young runner blowing past us on the port side. More specifically, by the MP3 player strapped to her muscular bicep—better that than getting whacked by the water bottle she was squeezing like a spring gripper in her other swinging, energy braceleted forearm. An aerodynamic blur of jet black, form-fitting tank and shorts; just like that, she was outbound and history, as though neither Doc nor I were ever there.
“That’s only student and activist types tackling some complex and controversial Middle East issues, right? Making statements, taking stands—a healthy meeting or mixing of minds? Besides, you must admit the Palestinians do have some beefs these days…like a cast-led blockade.”
“Cite me your source on that, Herbert, according to whom or what? Furthermore, there’s hardly anything healthful about singling out and harassing Jewish-Americans in the process, or blocking students from classes, physically threatening pro-Israel individuals—even knocking off their yarmulkas for Godsake!”
Just the same, I opted to side-eye that runner’s cadenced gait while the crowd flow zipped closed in her wake—even longed to jog in behind her, to follow, break away from this grating confab and soar. But then there was my old Foosball injury, on top of two scarred, wobbly knees. So no idolic Indiana Jonsing here, no such matinee escapade.
“But that’s pretty isolated stuff, now isn’t it? Marginal radicals, by and large—what’s the big deal, or the point of getting borderline paranoid over it?”
“Oy, because such incidents keep spreading, Herbert, with colleges and universities being egregiously slow to act, to protect their Jewish students’ right to safely pursue an education.” Paulen replied, peripherally fixated on the runner’s Asics himself, rather more bowing to her stern.
“Right to do what, tamp protests down, ban on-campus political activities? What about freedom of speech, Doc—the free exchange of ideas and all?” Yet deep down I conceded that nobody fully bought into that A-One anymore, assuming everybody around here was getting hungrier like me, more wary—fixin’ to hunker down and hang on, come what may—concession is as compromise does. Maximum in, minimum out—compensating with so little compensation. Admittedly, I myself could have managed, to bend the rules some about then.
“Granted, perhaps it’s all academic, unless such free speech borders on, or transmutes into hate speech.”
“Yeah, well who decides that?” Squinting to keep track of Jenny Jet and her Asics was like straining to follow the contrails of a Lufthansa 747 on its daily winding route over the Golden Gate—en route to Frankfurt or Berlin—not above wishing I was aboard. Ah, Baden-Baden, ahhh, Heidelberg Sundays, rusting swastikas on Mannheim Kaserne barracks banisters: I’d once seen all that firsthand: close-quarter drills, billeted dress-right-dress; Rommel’s phallic Tower neutered, Third Reich be damned. So what did that make me today? But I swiftly lost sight of all that as the sky swallowed Lufthanza’s blue and yellow-tailed jumbo jet up east of Vallejo.
“To paraphrase Supreme Court Justice, Potter Stewart on pornography: civilized people know it when we hear it. At any rate, we also know where that ‘blame Israel’ nonsense ultimately leads,” Paulen zeroed in, as he cinched tighter the strap on his shoulder bag. Moments later, he was handed some ‘God Loves You’ pamphlets by a blissful pair of wayward Jehovah’s Witness-like endroids who had apparently split off, in the biblical sense, from that pro-life, Armageddon flock.“Now don’t we?”
“Huh…don’t ask me, I don’t know…” God, spare me any Jehovah peddled neurotheology; got no more bandwidth for postulates, prayers and meditation trances. For the thalamic misconnections to the frontal cortex…as if spectrum imaging radiating through any god module ecstasy…clear as a ring of my cranial dogger bell. Anyway, why does Doc keep pressing me like this? Hell, why must I keep prompting him like that?
“Then more to the point, might I suggest you could benefit from some post-grad schooling and sensitivity training?” Whereby he handed me the Mormonic brochures.
“Whoa, I wasn’t blaming all of Israel, like I wasn’t questioning its history or anything,” I said, regrouping, recalibrating–reloaded for the for the homing stretch—spindling and mutilating the tracts into a wiry trash bin, albeit missing the mark. “Just questioning some of its recent…claims and expansions, at least for the country’s own sake.”
“Oh, well,” Doc jeered, “is that all?”
The crackle of waffle soles, of knobby bicycle tires brushing by, further tailspun me back to ground zero—crushed stone shifting underfoot as we eased aside, nearer a low, long concrete breakwall noticeably caked with seagull guano and minibike-sized skid marks. Soon greeting me was the frown of a park ranger who had just grabbed that paper wad with his with his extension gripper, jamming it into his trash baggy before the wind could carry it any further inland, clearly bugged as he was by my birdbrained littering ways.
For it turned out, beyond all the sauntering daydreamers, the blathering poets, the roaming sketch artists—pocket-vested birdwatchers tripped over the scrub brush, 16-x binoculars glued to their furled, bushy eyebrows instead of windblown trash. As it happened, this Bay Trail was a high-speed flyway for geese and duck hawks pushing against the western windfall or gliding like California Condors back home.
“Hey, really, how’s that saying go? I sometimes know what I know and don’t know,” I added, ruefully deflecting my gaze out toward the distant Golden Gate Bridge. Yep, digress for time: Cubbies, Pale Hose, Millennium Park, Magnificent Mile nothing—no bridges like that in Chicago—even though it took a Chicagoan to build the Golden Gater itself. Yet Robert Strauss did have to come out here to so innovate, didn’t he? Sure as hell did… “But I don’t otherwise know what I know and don’t know all the time…like that…”
A massive Chevron tanker crudely steamed in under the bridge toward Richmond refineries, airhorning a swarm of weekend watercraft out of its channel lane, if not harm’s way. Scenic Red & White ferry boats bobbed over the burgeoning whitecaps, slipping around both sides of the fuel ship in opposing lanes—at least as far as I could see. Because sand was blurring my vision by now, spackling eye sockets, nostrils and earholes to either side.
So I settled on the white walls and Spanish red rooftops of the sprawling Presidio Army post turned civil park off to our left, the imposing new LucasDigital complex, more than a half-dozen fortress factory buildings outputting movies, video, games, special effects with Star Wars intensity yet Skywalker calm. Streaming before the Lucasplex were the glistening windshields and rear windows of vehicles along Doyle Drive, coming from or climbing up to the Gate Bridge, now in and out of a thickening fog bank mounding over the final Highway 101 curve and toll booths way out ahead of us.
“Come now, ignorance in no legal defense, Herbert,” Paulen replied, shaking me off with a little more admonishment to boot. “Surely you know better than that.”
“Wwelll, on second thought…” Nevertheless here we be; whispers of free-range anxiety began seeping in for real. But what was up with these big, bizarro-looking globes just ahead? “Hey, green lines, red lines—outside-in, inside-out and all that—really, it’s all generally above my pay grade. I’m just seeking out some, you know, third-party solutions. You know, trying to see the other side, from both sides…because they just aren’t talking over there. Isn’t that…allowed or…”
“What other side—there is no other side there, only suicide!”
“Again, little harsh, wouldn’t you say,” I exhaled—thinking bingo…thanks, Doc, for finally showing your own explosive side…
“So is that neighborhood over there. But how typical of you to dither—as night follows day, Herbert, as night follows day,” Doc tossed back his salty, wind-blown hair. “Just be advised we may be delving into the world’s oldest hatred going forward—older than the infamous Elders drek itself…”
I could but bow to the inevitable, like a pinch-hitting rookie bracing for some serious chin music with the game on the line…
Care for more?
Chapter Forty-Four. A conversation stopper
continues to be a controversy starter,
as they take that third rail further
out, hot on the scenic trail…