Scratching the Horizon

by Izzy Paskowitz

  Just before we left for this second trip to Israel, my dad had been working in Los Angeles, and he’d managed to save a lot of money. The reason I remember this is because we’d had a great Christmas that year. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention we also celebrated Christmas. We kissed the tarmac when we landed at the airport in Israel, we sang the Shema and lit the candles on Friday nights, and we also celebrated Christmas. We were a tough bunch to figure, but that year Santa came up huge for the Paskowitzes. That year we each got our own Schwinn bicycles, the ones with the big banana seats and the high bars, and we actually shipped a few of them over to Israel, so the oldest of us could get around. I was ten years old by this point, so the idea was I’d be able to ride with my older brothers all over the place.

  One of my father’s ideas for this trip was to have his oldest son become bar mitzvah. David had just turned thirteen, and my father let it be known that it was a great big deal for him to take this sacred rite of passage in Israel. And it was, I guess. Kind of, sort of. Didn’t mean a whole lot to any of us in any kind of religious way, other than my father, but we could see that it meant a lot to him, so this was reason enough to go through the motions. Don’t think David had any idea what he was doing or saying when he chanted his prayers and read from the Torah, but I remember thinking the whole thing was pretty cool. Looking back, I have to believe the ceremony made David one of the first kids in modern Jewish history to get a bike for Christmas and to have a bar mitzvah in Israel in the same year.

  Once again, my father shipped everything over in our Dodge conversion van. Bikes, boards, clothes, cooking supplies … he even snuck a .22-caliber revolver into the door panel, just in case. (He later said there was also a rifle stowed in there, just in double case, but I never saw any rifle.) He didn’t tell any of us what he was doing, especially my mother; if she knew he was trying to smuggle in a gun, just after the Yom Kippur War, she’d have had a fit.

  Once there, he found work as a lifeguard, through some pals he’d made back in the 1950s, so there was some money coming in, and there was food, too. He had it set up so he could get us fed at this little shack on the beach. Wasn’t the kind of healthy food he insisted on feeding us back home, but it was free, so it kind of evened out. That’s another thing you need to know about my father in order to understand how we lived; he had his ideals, but he also had his price. If he could find a way to live by principle, that’s the way he’d go, but if he could find a shortcut he’d be all over that, too.

  Turned out there was a big need for lifeguards on this one beach, because the wind used to kick up and you’d get these dangerous undertows. There were some waves, and on some days the surfing was halfway decent, but the undertows were a real and constant problem. That’s how it is on some beaches; you can’t surf for shit, but the riptides can drag you down, down, down. Every year, a bunch of people would drown, so the Israelis were happy to have a guy like my father on the lifeguard tower. He knew his stuff, and the folks who ran the beach knew that he knew his stuff, so they treated us pretty well.

  We stayed on a beautiful stretch of beach, in our small pop-top camper van. Actually, there wasn’t enough room for all of us in the van, so we set up a tent on the beach for the oldest kids; my mother and father stayed in the van with the little ones. There was a guard assigned to watch over us at night, because there was still a lot of tension among the Israelis and the Egyptians and the Syrians, but we kids tended not to notice any of that stuff. We lived in our own little world.

  After a while, my mother set up a small cooktop in the van, which she used to prepare our meals; best she could, she’d match what she made for us back in the states; there’d be seven-grain gruel for breakfast, healthy breads, boiled chicken … the same damn menu, the same small portions. We’d usually eat as a family, on a small picnic-type table they’d set up on the beach; wasn’t room for all of us around the table, either, but the little kids would sit on the big kids’ laps, or some of us would sit on the ground, or maybe we’d eat in shifts.

  As always, Juliette was a great good sport, only too happy to step in and make my dad’s crazy schemes a reality. It’s kind of remarkable, looking back, but she was completely devoted to my father, and absolutely and wholeheartedly willing to throw in with him on whatever he had in mind. His hopes and dreams became hers—although I don’t recall it ever working the other way around. I mean, it’s not like they piled us all into the camper and had us driving around to the world’s great opera houses. Mom wasn’t any kind of passionate or die-hard surfer; she’d grab a board from time to time and do a decent enough job of it in the water, but it’s not like she lived and breathed surfing. And she certainly wasn’t a Jew—but there we were, halfway around the world, trying on the one piece of our family history she couldn’t exactly share.

  Like I said, kind of remarkable.

  Our days in Israel ran together and the time fairly flew. I remember walking the bluffs above the beach with my brothers and coming across a bunch of ancient artifacts. At least we thought they were ancient artifacts. For all I know, they were just artifacts. Just stuff. Anyway, from the bluffs you could see the archeology of the seawalls, and the elevated aqueducts. You could see the comings and goings of the locals. The place just reeked of history, and at the same time the country was very current, very contemporary. Every once in a while, we’d meet up with a group of Israeli kids about our age—maybe brothers, maybe not—and they’d show us around. Weren’t too many other kids bouncing around during the week, so we mostly found our own distractions.

  The beach was packed on the weekends, but during the week we had the place to ourselves. We got in the habit of looking for money and other valuables the weekenders might have left behind. The winds would blow the top layer of sand over whatever people might have lost or dropped, so we’d sift through the sands looking for shekels, which in those days were actually liroth. Didn’t much matter to us what you called them. Money was money. We’d find a shitload of coins, and we ended up spending them on ice cream. In those days, on this one beach, there was a guy who walked up and down with a dry-ice cooler, selling ice cream. He was like the Pied Piper of the beach, the way all the little kids would follow him around. He sold this banana-chocolate thing that was so crazy good we’d scarf those suckers back until we ran out of coins. Man, I can still taste it. The chocolate was incredible, and the frozen banana underneath just popped with this delicious flavor—crazy good. I’d sit with my older brothers on the beach, and we’d be like pigs in shit, inhaling these great treats, which came with the additional benefit of going completely against the strict dietary laws of our parents.

  We were regular little rebels, and this was our rebellion.

  On weekends, when the beach was crowded, we’d zig and zag among the blankets and chairs, past people playing matkot, a beach tennis game that’s so wildly popular you’d think it was the Israeli national sport. We’d help ourselves to whatever people were stupid enough to leave behind on their beach blankets when they went into the water—sandwiches, half-empty sodas, chips. Mostly, we’d pinch cigarette butts and finish them off, so despite my father’s best efforts and strict code we were like any other group of no-good, surf bum teenagers you might have found on the beaches of California, except that we weren’t exactly teenagers (other than David, the bar mitzvah boy) and we were a long, long way from California. We only had to make sure before heading back to our campsite that we jumped into the water to wash off the cigarette stink, so our folks didn’t notice.

  (We might have been rebels, but we weren’t stupid; my father would have kicked the living shit out of us if he caught us smoking.)

  We didn’t surf much. Some, but not much. We didn’t have enough boards to go around, so we couldn’t all go at once, and in those days we liked to move around in a pack, especially us older kids. Also, the waves weren’t so hot. On some days they were decent, but on most days they were small, sucky, nothing special. Mostly, we swam, and splashed around, and ran up into
the hills above the beach looking for cactus apples. That was another great treat, not quite up there with the banana-chocolate but way closer to my parents’ ideas on what we should be eating. The locals would put cactus apples on ice, so that’s what we did. And they were good. Not crazy good, just pretty good.

  One day, we were all on the beach, some of us swimming, some of us surfing, some of us just laying around. I was out in the water—way out in the water, actually—and I heard a sick, scary scream. Back home, you’d hear somebody cry out like that, it usually meant they’d been bitten by a stinger or a jellyfish. This was just around the time of Jaws—the book, not the movie—so people were afraid of sharks, although I don’t think there were too many sharks in the Mediterranean. Anyway, I heard this scream, and my first thought was to get the hell out of the water. I swam back to shore, together with a couple brothers, and when we got there we saw little Salvador being attacked by a German shepherd in the shallows. It was horrible, terrifying. David got to him first. Poor Sal was being rag-dolled by this beast. The dog had him by the thigh, and David kind of pounced on the dog and tried to force his mouth open.

  The whole time, there was a group of Israeli soldiers on the beach, and they were ridiculously slow to react. We’d been all the way out past the break and we were just a bunch of stupid kids, but we managed to get to Sal before they did. Don’t know what the fuck those soldiers were doing, but eventually they got to Sal and helped to free his leg from the dog’s mouth. There was blood everywhere. The dog had bitten all the way down through the muscle. Poor Sal was screaming and screaming his little head off, and the rest of us were screaming and screaming our little heads off, and it was just a mad, frantic scene. Someone ran to get my father, who raced Sal off to the hospital. He was just about four years old at the time, ended up with about a hundred stitches, and a rabies shot, and they had to put the dog down, and we were all so deeply traumatized, to have to see little Salvador getting mauled like that by this big, big dog. To this day, I’m still afraid of dogs, and it goes back to this day on the beach. And Sal’s still got some pretty gnarly scars on his thigh.

  He also got a nickname out of the deal—Sigmund. For a while, that’s what we all called him (Sig, Siggy, Sigmund), although all these years later I’m not exactly sure why it came up on the back of this accident. It had something to do with a crappy Saturday morning kids show that ran at the time, called Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, but we didn’t watch that many crappy Saturday morning kids shows, especially in Israel. It also had something to do with the fact that Salvador had a big, big mouth and he was always putting all kinds of shit into it. His fist, a sick amount of food … whatever. Guess maybe he was screaming so much, his mouth opened so damn wide, it reminded us of those bigmouthed puppets from those H. R. Pufnstuf–type shows. Anyway, the name stuck; Salvador still answers to it, from time to time, and whenever it comes up we’re all taken back to that terrible scene on the beach.

  * * *

  There was another hairy moment from our second trip to Israel that also shook us up pretty good. This one involved my father’s .22-caliber revolver. (Hey, you didn’t think I’d mention that my father had smuggled a gun into the country if I wasn’t planning to come back to it, did you?) It also involved a kind of moral dilemma that put some of my father’s free spirit–type values to the test.

  We were on a deserted road, middle of nowhere. Doesn’t exactly narrow it down or pinpoint our location, but stay with me. It was my father’s day off, and we came upon a hitchhiker by the side of the road. Hitchhikers were fairly common back in California and all across the United States, but you didn’t see too many in the Israeli desert. My father was in the habit of picking them up, wherever we traveled, so he pulled over and offered the guy a ride. Soon as he did, he regretted it. He didn’t like the look of this guy. Something about him was off. Not right. He might have been a soldier; with our luck, he might have been an Arab soldier. Up close, inside the van, the man looked haggard, like he was in distress. I don’t think he spoke any English, and the few words he managed to say sounded like they were in Arabic; our Hebrew was lousy, but we could usually figure out the basics, only with this guy there was no good way to communicate.

  Very quickly, my father decided he didn’t trust this Arab-looking hitchhiker who may or may not have been a soldier, but at the same time he couldn’t bring himself to kick him back to the curb and leave him to fend for himself in the middle of nowhere. My father wanted to do the right thing, although I don’t think he had even the first clue what “the right thing” might have been, in this case. Also, he didn’t want to put his family in danger, so he hit upon a half-baked, half-assed solution. He reached for his revolver and motioned for the guy to lie down on his belly in the back of the van. It ran so completely counter to how things usually went in our family—which usually had nothing to do with being held at gunpoint. I almost didn’t recognize my father underneath this bizarre act. Yeah, it was a defensive move, but Doc was the one with the weapon, which he then handed to David, his deputy, and told him to keep it pointed at the hitchhiker, who of course wasn’t too happy about this latest turn. Either he was a good guy facing down a patch of bad luck, being held at gunpoint on the floor of a van by a bunch of brown-skinned beach urchins, or he was a bad guy who’d met his match. He could have been unhinged, this guy. He could have been violent. He could have been drunk or stoned.

  Anyway, he was pissed. And the rest of us were completely freaking out. It was a small van to begin with, and now there was this full-grown, disheveled-looking, possibly crazy, possibly Arab soldier lying flat on his belly. We were all huddled against the walls of the van, trying to put as much room between us and this big, unfolding drama as the confines of the cab would allow. It was such a weird, tense moment, and the whole time my father just kept driving. Don’t know what the hell he was thinking. Don’t know where the hell he was going. Just know that he kept looking back—one eye on the road, one eye on our prisoner—making sure we were all okay.

  The hitchhiker was probably wondering why the hell he’d gotten into this van, with these crazy people, these bag-of-bones boys.

  It was a winding, bumpy road, and every time we’d hit a pothole or a twist or turn the guy would move or shake, and whenever he did my father would shout, “Sit down! Stay down!” That was all anybody said, once the guy was facedown on the floor. He might have mumbled a few words in protest, but after my father had him lying the way he wanted nobody talked. Just my father, every couple miles, shouting, “Sit down! Stay down!” Or, turning to David, saying, “Tell him to keep down! Tell him not to move!”

  None of us can remember if David actually had his hand on the trigger or if he was just holding on to the handle, but he was doing his best to keep this guy still and to appear at least somewhat calm and in control. Inside, he must have been thinking, Oh shit! Oh shit! Oh shit! But on the outside he was a regular thirteen-year-old badass.

  For a half hour, we rode in this way, and it felt to me like the longest fucking half hour of my life. I wondered where the hell my father was going, what was taking so long, how this standoff would end, why Dad hadn’t just opened the door and kicked the guy out if he was so worried about him. It made no sense, but there it was.

  Finally, we came to the outskirts of the next town and my father let the guy out. Grabbed him by the back of his shirt and pushed him to the street without a word. And that was that, except the whole exchange left me feeling uncertain, uneasy. We were all a little uncertain, uneasy—even my father. We drove on in silence for a while after that. We were all too stunned to speak, and as we drove I tried to understand what had just happened, what my father’d just put us through. At ten years old, I tried to understand it—and now, almost forty years later, I’m still working on it.

  Best I can figure is my father was caught between his nature and his instincts. He wanted to do right by this guy, to help him out with a ride, but his gut told him to be careful about it. You have to real
ize, my father was always giving people rides back home in California. It was the most natural thing in the world to him. He’d pull up at a red light and notice some bum on the corner and jump out of the car to see if the guy needed anything; we’d be in the middle of the intersection, and the light would be green, and he’d be chasing the guy down with a twenty. But this was a whole other part of the world; this was essentially a war zone; this was a place where tourists like us couldn’t always tell the good guys from the bad guys. And what this meant, for my father, was that his worldview was now on tilt. Whatever he needed, my father was always willing to touch up someone else, so they could share with him. Even if they had no interest in sharing, he’d bring them around. The flip side of that was that whatever he had my father was always willing to share. That was just his way, which I guess explains why he pulled over to give this nut job Israeli a lift in the first place, even though it doesn’t explain why my father continued to give him that lift when the guy appeared to be bad news.

  Maybe Doc wanted to put his best self on display for us kids, to model caring, compassionate behavior, even when the guy on the receiving end of his care and compassion looked like he wanted to do us dirt. Even if my father’s idea of “care” meant he had to hold the guy at gunpoint in order to do him a solid. Or maybe my father was just stubbornly determined to do what he thought was the right thing, to not abandon this guy in the desert, whether or not it made sense to pick him up and give him a ride. Because, hey, we were in Israel. Just a bunch of scruffy, vagabonding Mexican-American Jews, roaming the beaches of our ancestral homeland, connecting to the people in what ways we could.