My dream begins as soon as I disembark. I am in an airport where I have never been before and all the people I see—passengers, stewardesses, ticket sellers, porters, pilots, taxi drivers—are Jews. Is that so unlike the dreams that your dreaming patients recount? Is that so unlike the kind of experience one has while asleep? But awake, who ever heard of such a thing? The writing on the walls is Jewish—Jewish graffiti! The flag is Jewish. The faces are the faces you see on Chancellor Avenue! The faces of my neighbors, my uncles, my teachers, the parents of my boyhood friends. Faces like my own face! only moving before a backdrop of white wall and blazing sun and spikey tropical foliage. And it ain’t Miami Beach, either. No, the faces of Eastern Europe, but only a stone’s throw from Africa! In their short pants the men remind me of the head counselors at the Jewish summer camps I worked at during college vacations—only this isn’t summer camp, either. It’s home! These aren’t Newark high school teachers off for two months with a clipboard and a whistle in the Hopatcong mountains of New Jersey. These are (there’s no other word!) the natives. Returned! This is where it all began! Just been away on a long vacation, that’s all! Hey, here we’re the WASPs! My taxi passes through a big square surrounded by sidewalk cafés such as one might see in Paris or Rome. Only the cafés are crowded with Jews. The taxi overtakes a bus. I look inside its windows. More Jews. Including the driver. Including the policemen up ahead directing traffic! At the hotel I ask the clerk for a room. He has a thin mustache and speaks English as though he were Ronald Colman. Yet he is Jewish too.
And now the drama thickens:
It is after midnight. Earlier in the evening. the promenade beside the sea was a gay and lively crush of Jews—Jews eating ices, Jews drinking soda pop, Jews conversing, laughing, walking together arm-in-arm. But now as I start back to my hotel, I find myself virtually alone. At the end of the promenade, which I must pass beyond to reach my hotel, I see five youths smoking cigarettes and talking. Jewish youths, of course. As I approach them, it becomes clear to me that they have been anticipating my arrival. One of them steps forward and addresses me in English. “What time is it?” I look at my watch and realize that they are not going to permit me to pass. They are going to assault me! But how can that be? If they are Jewish and I am Jewish, what motive can there be for them to do me any harm?
I must tell them that they are making a mistake. Surely they do not really want to treat me as a gang of anti-Semites would. “Pardon me,” I say, and edge my body between them, wearing a stern expression on my pale face. One of them calls, “Mister, what time—?” where-upon I quicken my pace and continue rapidly to the hotel, unable to understand why they should have wished to frighten me so, when we are all Jews.
Hardly defies interpretation, wouldn’t you say?
In my room I quickly remove my trousers and shorts and under a reading lamp examine my penis. I find the organ to be unblemished and without any apparent signs of disease, and yet I am not relieved. It may be that in certain cases (perhaps those that are actually most severe) there is never any outward manifestation of infection. Rather, the debilitating effects take place within the body, unseen and unchecked, until at last the progress of the disorder is irreversible, and the patient is doomed. In the morning I am awakened by the noise from beyond my window. It is just seven o’clock, yet when I look outside I see the beach already swarming with people. It is a startling sight at such an early hour, particularly as the day is Saturday and I was anticipating a sabbath mood of piety and solemnity to pervade the city. But the crowd of Jews—yet again!—is gay. I examine my member in the strong morning light and am—yet again—overcome with apprehension to discover that it appears to be in a perfectly healthy condition.
I leave my room to go and splash in the sea with the happy Jews. I bathe where the crowd is most dense. I amplaying in a sea full of Jews! Frolicking, gamboling Jews! Look at their Jewish limbs moving through the Jewish water! Look at the Jewish children laughing, acting as if they own the place . . . Which they do! And the lifeguard, yet another Jew! Up and down the beach, so far as I can see, Jews—and more pouring in throughout the beautiful morning, as from a cornucopia. I stretch out on the beach, I close my eyes. Overhead I hear an engine: no fear, a Jewish plane. Under me the sand is warm: Jewish sand. I buy a Jewish ice cream from a Jewish vendor. “Isn’t this something?” I say to myself. “A Jewish country!” But the idea is more easily expressed than understood; I cannot really grasp hold of it. Alex in Wonderland.
In the afternoon I befriend a young woman with green eyes and tawny skin who is a lieutenant in the Jewish Army. The Lieutenant takes me at night to a bar in the harbor area. The customers, she says, are mostly longshoremen. Jewish longshoremen? Yes. I laugh, and she asks me what’s so funny. I am excited by her small, voluptuous figure nipped at the middle by the wide webbing of her khaki belt. But what a determined humorless self-possessed little thing! I don’t know if she would allow me to order for her even if I spoke the language. “Which do you like better?” she asks me, after each of us has downed a bottle of Jewish beer, “tractors, or bulldozers, or tanks?” I laugh again.
I ask her back to my hotel. In the room we struggle, we kiss, we begin to undress, and promptly I lose my erection. “See,” says The Lieutenant, as though confirmed now in her suspicion, “you don’t like me. Not at all.” “Yes, oh yes,” I answer, “since I saw you in the sea, I do, I do, you are sleek as a little seal—” but then, in my shame, baffled and undone by my detumescence, I burst out—“but I may have a disease, you see. It wouldn’t be fair.” “Do you think that is funny too?” she hisses, and angrily puts her uniform back on and leaves.
Dreams? If only they had been! But I don’t need dreams, Doctor, that’s why I hardly have them—because I have this life instead. With me it all happens in broad daylight! The disproportionate and the melodramatic, this is my daily bread! The coincidences of dreams, the symbols, the terrifyingly laughable situations, the oddly ominous banalities, the accidents and humiliations, the bizarrely appropriate strokes of luck or misfortune that other people experience with their eyes shut, I get with mine open! Who else do you know whose mother actually threatened him with the dreaded knife? Who else was so lucky as to have the threat of castration so straight-forwardly put by his momma? Who else, on top of this mother, had a testicle that wouldn’t descend? A nut that had to be coaxed and coddled, persuaded, drugged! to get it to come down and live in the scrotum like a man! Who else do you know broke a leg chasing shikses? Or came in his eye first time out? Or found a real live monkey right in the streets of New York, a girl with a passion for The Banana? Doctor, maybe other patients dream—with me,everything happens. I have a life without latent content. The dream thing happens! Doctor: I couldn’t get it up in the State of Israel! How’s that for symbolism, bubi? Let’s see somebody beat that, for acting-out! Could not maintain an erection in The Promised Land! At least not when I needed it, not when I wanted it, not when there was something more desirable than my own hand to stick it into. But, as it turns out, you can’t stick tapioca pudding into anything. Tapioca pudding I am offering this girl. Wet sponge cake! A thimbleful of something melted. And all the while that self-assured little lieutenant, so proudly flying those Israeli tits, prepared to be mounted by some tank commander!