Tour

Hamm's beer and trying to transverse across the walk-bridge that night to my home on the island, and kept falling half-way over the railing. I shimmied and climbed onto the porch roof, and went into my room by the window, maybe two AM. The beer drinking became a regular Saturday night thing for several years. I think my favorite thing about it was standing in toilets peeing, and talking to myself maybe a mirror even, saying I don't give a F**k - over and over. And then I-didn't. What a great feeling, because all my sober-time apparently I-did, which was the problem what.

It was a little park somewhere near my hotel, not very big, rectangular, dirt, kids structured play accouterments here and there, with kids and mothers on the benches, and me smoking cigarettes and drinking wine. I had not seen actually, that many winos in parks. I would buy a bottle of wine, sit on a bench and sip and suck and talk to myself out-loud. That was the thing, what it was all about. It was the only legitimate way, out-loud-talk, except for loony tune. Take your choice of drunk or loony tune, sometimes called the Village Idiot. I didn't know how to play loony; so I had no choice. Talk to drink and drink to talk. Be emphatic. Wave my arms around. Nobody seemed bothered. Nobody said anything, but probably strange looks. What are you doing there?

The woman at the corner market where I bought the wine, her in her sixties, still good-looking, took a lovely to me, and we were flirting. I told her stories, and I had many already even at my young age there, and it was the first time for me, flirted with an elderly woman. I didn't think I-could; somehow it was out of the question. Of even more fluster-me, was her husband came out of the back and was jealous; he must have been about seventy, and gave me a hard-time, and she said, "Don't pay any attention to him. He is jealous." I didn't think old people got jealous. I didn't think they were like me or my younger anybody. I was shocked. And I liked her, and he didn't like-me. Wine was new to me, I preferred beer, and so I went and got drunk, and ranted and raved. Maybe I had read a bunch of Beatnik books and was imitating Jack Kerouac or somebody from a Russian novel, and now I was there.

My assessment of Israel was, if you are going to come in, where people already live and take over, you are going to have give a lot back, to make it all Kosher, but I couldn't see it. Same as in the US. The good and bad side of town, like the black and white, rich and poor; but here it was Jews and Arabs. I said it wouldn't work, just from what I saw and heard at the time. The same two-class system. Anyway I decided to head home, and took a ferry from Haifa to Athens, or "Never on Sunday", Piraeus. I don't remember. It was there I would pick up my army Overseas Discharge Program, return airline ticket home, from someone there.

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