ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS
The drugs come into Israel from Lebanon — marijuana, hashish, heroin — most of the supply originating in Afghanistan, though some of it in Iraq or Turkey or in Lebanon itself. As a go-between, Hezbollah takes its cut and uses the money in its ongoing terror campaign against Israel. Once the drugs cross the border into the Golan Heights, they are funneled through a network of Israeli crime families where ultimately there is an invisible bridge between Arab and Jew. I saw some of the Jewish side growing up. Their earliest forerunners started in the black market in the first years after Independence, when food and everyday staples were scarce — bread, milk, cigarettes. In a nation of immigrants, they were war profiteers who later branched out into other illegal businesses. I used to be fascinated by the secret money kept hidden in its envelope beneath my father’s cash register. I used to be fascinated by the unfriendly boys who came each week to collect it. I was attracted and not repulsed. Everything I’ve learned since has taught me how false this romance is, but the romance still exists. Frequently it seems that the romance steers the world.
QED
At the Flamingo Hotel and Casino, there’s a plaque commemorating Bugsy Siegel, whose “original” structure, as the text describes it, stood from December 26, 1946, until December 14, 1993.
Of course we know this is a myth — we know the hotel was Billy Wilkerson’s idea, that the Flamingo was stolen from him. Of course it doesn’t matter that we know this. It’s a fact that has no traction, in a place that has no memory.
THIEF
My son Eliav’s new girlfriend lives in a room with two folding chairs, some bedding on the floor, a naked sink jutting out of the wall, its porcelain surface rusted almost black in spots. When she answers the door, she wears a faded nightgown and a pair of old track shoes, a kerchief on her head. I offer to take her to a café but she says no, she can’t leave, what if he comes back? I realize she’s more concerned for my son’s safety than for hers. He has taken her money and disappeared, but he still has this power over her. The dark, bruised shadows that surround her eyes are not bruises but something more like a symptom of their shared illness.
I look for causes. For example, I sent him to a university in the United States. Before that, he traveled in Asia for a year. Before that, he served thirty-six months in the intelligence division of the IDF. But it was only after he came back to Tel Aviv from all this that he disappeared.
VCR
I need to work on new poems but I can’t find anything that holds my attention. It’s 2004 and the fighting is general now — suicide bombings and rocket attacks on Israel, targeted assassinations and armored raids on Gaza and the West Bank. Operation Rainbow, Operation Days of Penitence — dead children, dead civilians, dead soldiers, dead terrorists. I can’t lie, I have nothing new to say about it. Perhaps that’s what my son is saying. I eat a dinner of bread, cucumbers, tomatoes, lime, some salt whose individual grains are so coarse I can taste them. A glass of Goldstar beer, some music. I listen to the music while I do the dishes and it mitigates my dread and the fact that I’m alone. At night, I watch gangster movies—The Godfather, The Godfather, Part II, Goodfellas, Scarface. They somehow calm me, soothe me. I can’t explain it.
INHERITANCE
With no one to pay his bills, and with only his disability pension, Buddy Lansky was evicted from Arch Creek [a convalescent home]. His belongings — one battered suitcase, a few plastic bags of clothing, and an old television set — were packed up, and he was transported to a broken-down corner of North Miami that was noted for its tattoo parlors and for the thick wire mesh on storefront windows….
“The basic trouble,” he said, looking calmly at his grubby and depressing surroundings, “is that I have lived too long.”
— Robert Lacey, Little Man: Meyer Lansky and
the Gangster Life
MOTEL, 1979
Divorced, alone, Buddy Lansky was forty-nine, destined for a convalescent home called Arch Creek from which he would be evicted, but for now still here at the motel. When he woke up, the sunlight moved like pale, almost invisible clouds behind the pulled blind and he knew without looking at the clock that it was not even seven yet. He liked to sleep with the TV on, the sound turned off, sometimes not only at night but throughout the day and it was for this reason that he sometimes woke too early, like now, because he’d slept too much in the daytime. It would be at least two hours before his helper, Booker, came to undress him, the bathtub running, Booker taking the diaper off, not talking, spreading the two white towels on the bed and turning Buddy over with a low all right, Buddy’s naked body exposed like a baby’s, legs like spindled sticks, the cold air-conditioned air between his thighs. On TV there would be a game show, or there would be Dick Butkus and Bubba Smith playing golf, and Booker wouldn’t seem to notice or even hear it, and sometimes the incongruity of it would make Buddy giggle nervously, and that made Booker even more silent, made it easier for Booker to say later that it would be more money next week, not just the seventy but seventy-five. The motel was all the way up in North Miami Beach near Sunny Isles, a half hour from Booker’s uncle’s house in Overtown, and if he couldn’t borrow his uncle’s car then it was at least an hour and a half by a combination of buses. They had met here at the motel, a run-down place of fake tiki roofs and rampant banana trees fronting the traffic, Booker a porter, Buddy working the switchboard there for years, until a few weeks ago when he’d begun losing the sensation in his fingers.
He lay flat in bed feeling damp, unable to move his arm for now, waiting for it to come back when he got the circulation going. With just one arm, he had trouble adjusting the twisted neck of his pajama shirt, and his breathing tightened, the perspiration rising on his face. The room smelled like cigarettes — all the rooms smelled like cigarettes and lemon disinfectant. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep again, but his mind kept wisecracking along. You got so bored with your despondency. The boredom somehow called for further abasement, as if abasement could release you from the fear. He let himself urinate into the diaper and felt it spread over his testicles and down his legs. He was a boy, his ex-wife Annette would always tell him. The gambling, the prostitutes — somehow even these mistakes remained the mistakes of a boy. He tried to go back to sleep. Then he struggled to hoist himself into the chair that Booker had left by the bed last night. He fisted his hands on either side of his hips and pressed hard down into the bed and made an effort to swivel his legs around, but he started sweating again, suddenly very hot the moment he realized he wasn’t going to do it, his brow tense, the sweat running down his face, down his neck. It was really very funny if you thought about it for even a minute. The wheelchair had a little lever you pressed to make it move forward, make it move back, but now he couldn’t even do that, now the ridiculous stillness had spread farther out — arms and legs drifting free of the brain, the tide seeping up, always so slowly that you thought it might have stopped, but it never stopped, it had a patient sense of humor. You went from being unable to walk to being unable to move practically at all. They should wheel him off a bridge. Wheel him out of an airplane. He liked the cartoon image of himself laughing his embarrassed laugh as Booker wheeled him off the roof of the motel, the hysterical yodel of his scream, then Crash! Bang! Whop! He lay there daydreaming about it, then waiting for Booker to arrive, then waiting for The Price Is Right to start. Fifty dollars a day — that was what he was going to have to ask his father for. Not just seventy or seventy-five a week, but fifty a day. Three hundred and fifty a week. Eighteen thousand a year. That was the going rate for a full-time medical aide who could feed you and clothe you and bathe you when you could no longer do these things yourself.