I ride the school bus down Maple Ridge Road, but I’m really still in O’Hare, alone, watching passengers board airplanes bound for India and New Zealand. If I leave enough of myself in O’Hare, I’ll continue traveling, watching islands rise and gathering phenomena without names or explanations. I won’t become a teenager after all. I’ll put my life on pause and remain a preadolescent for centuries.
We wait for Spiritual Discussion with our best posture and T-shirts tucked into our shorts. There’s an intense heat wave, and Nurse Kaufman wanders gravel and pine needle trails with a canteen of Shabbat grape juice. The senior counselors are equipped with army issue binoculars. They’re on fainting-watch.
When the Santa Anas blow and it’s 103 degrees, malpractice and reckless endangerment law suits take precedence. What if a camper passed out and received a head trauma with IQ implications? Or a fracture with dental involvement? What about a visible facial impairment resistant to corrective plastic surgery?
We form a circle beside a plaque indicating Citrus Hill with an arrow. Our practice rabbi, Just-call-me-Jeff, asks for opening comments. His forehead and cheeks are stained reddish, as if he’s dotted with birthmarks or branded. It’s iodine from the Health Center.
I begin counting pebbles and clumps of unnaturally rusty pine needles that remind me of old nails in a barn after a rainy season. Or the bellies of green snakes my dad finds under rocks in our creek. But these pine needles seem to be crawling.
Jeff leans into a Eucalyptus trunk. He has 3 band-aids on his wrist and iodine stains on his hand. I’m sure it’s the residue of a suicide attempt. No one makes eye contact. No one responds. Then Scotty Stoloff, who is lounging on the cement hard pine needle throttled grass as if he’s really comfortable says, “I have a problem with the commandments thing.”
“A problem?” Jeff repeats.
“Yeah. If you look up the word ‘commandment’ as I have,” Scotty produces a sheet of notebook paper from his pocket, “you’ll notice words attached to ‘commandment’ include to tyrannize, oppress, dominant, inhibit and restrain. That’s unconstitutional.”
Scotty Stoloff’s black hair is streaked with green and copper dye. His eyes are green, too. I stop counting pebbles and consider South Pacific lagoons, angel and clown fish, groupers, and lemon sharks. And swarms of miniature blue and yellow fish I snorkeled through in Bora Bora, parting schools of darting filaments with my fingers.
I feel like I’m back in O’Hare where seasons do not exist and all rules are suspended. I’m back in a region where codified laws, black ice and tornadoes don’t exit. I press the pause button on my life and everything stops.
“Also the thou shalt not steal part. The dude in Les Miserables? 20 years in jail for stealing bread?” Scotty offers from his deceptive lounging position. His body is tense and alert.
“I see,” Jeff says. He rubs his eyeglasses on his shirt, presumably to clarify his perspective. “Interesting point, Scott.”
Our next round of Spiritual Discussion will be improvisational, Rabbi-just-call-me-Jeff says. He’ll ask a specific question and we’ll answer, one by one, going around the circle. Everyone will be called upon and, yes, a response is mandatory.
I’m sitting in the accidental middle with my ribs and shoulders bruised, and my thighs sacs of yellowing scabs. Scotty is in his one-elbow faux meditation position on the far left. If Rabbi Jeff proceeds clockwise, Scotty will have the last word.
“Imagine you’re going to another planet,” Jeff begins. “And you can only take three things with you. What would these three things be?”
Tiffany Gottlieb, who is slated to appreciate Italian opera and not get lost in Milan, says she’ll take her family, her cat and her Walkman. Tiffany hates her older brother, Max. He has brain cancer. His head is shaved and black magic marker arrows indicate radiation sites. He is the city being bombed. And Tiffany Gottlieb wouldn’t take him, with his bandages, catheter, IV tubes, monitoring devices and emergency oxygen tanks anywhere. He’s terminal, a condition even worse than peripheral.
Brooke Bernstein’s right hand fingernails are garnet; her left are iridescent blue. I assume this refers to her double language choices of Greek and Japanese. Her unmatched hands spread out like a fan on the thighs of her denim shorts. She’s taking both her families since her parents are divorced, her dog Justice, and her diabetes medications.
Brooke Bernstein doesn’t have diabetes and she doesn’t have a dog. She loathes her new stepfather. He’s in the Russian mafia and slaps her mother on the face and pushes her against walls. Brooke keeps missing soccer practice and may be dropped from the team.
“The desperation of old women,” Brooke revealed, summarizing her family catastrophe during a flashlight share and bond session. Obviously, it’s her mother’s fault.
Bruce Tuckerman, in Moshe Dayan, says he’ll take the family Benz, in case there are roads on the other planet. He notes the importance of transportation historically, particularly the Erie Canal linking New York and Chicago, making Buffalo the 3rd largest city in the country. Barges are underrated, Bruce reminds us, reciting highlights from his history-of-taming America final report. We’ve all written this report, of course, and share his affection for barges. Then Bruce says he’ll take a suitcase of seeds to start agriculture, and the family videos, so they can remember how things should be. Agriculture and personal history can fit in the trunk.
Everyone is taking their families, pets and Torah. Chelsea Horowitz is packing the classic pre-war Oxford dictionary, and the collected works of Freud in the original German. She has a duty to preserve their ambiguities and contradictions. She’s also taking a sub-zero down sleeping bag and flashlight. That’s at least 5 items, rather than 3, but no one notices. Then it’s my turn.
“I’ll take O’Hare Airport,” I hear myself say. Each of its four separate syllables sounds strange and hangs in the hot-chalk lemony air. I offer only 1 item instead of 3. I can justify my 1 by the monumental amount of cement and engineering involved. By pounds alone, O’Hare should count for 3. Then I realize no one is listening. The Goldberg twins are asleep. Nurse Kaufman passes with a basket of damp hand towels. She takes pulses and gives out band-aids. Then we come to Scotty.
Scotty Stoloff’s had nearly an hour to prepare his improvisational response. I hold my breath and my mouth fills with yellow air that’s thick and vaguely citrus sweet. I can’t see his green eyes because he wears aviator sunglasses. He has a gold hoop earring in his left earlobe and his nose is pierced with a gold stud shaped like a miniature bullet.
In the flickering sunlight between Eucalyptus trees, his hair is streaked with bronze and red feathers. On a vision quest, he would find his guide as a hawk or golden eagle.
“I’d take a kilo of cocaine, a Tec-9 with a sling of clips, and a Cray super computer.” Scotty informs us, removing his sunglasses. He glances at the circle of half-asleep liars with generous indifference. There’s no calculation in his green eyes or strain at the edges, no contempt or hostility.
Scotty inhabits an alternative region. We’re remote and marginal to him. It’s a kibbutz, not a four-star hotel. Nobody gets life support here.
I’m a 13-year-old without a declared foreign language and 37 infected mosquito bites who lost her face in O’Hare. It occurs to me that Scotty Stoloff may not come back to Camp Hillel next summer.
The dinner bell rings and Spiritual Discussion is over. Rabbi just-call-me-Jeff and Dr. White have to rethink the format. During dinner, there’s a rumor bunks Golda Meir and Shimon Peres are not participating effectively.