The electric mosque : Chapter 6 : ...condemns the trap but not himself : Kiryat Shmona 2006

The dog looks at my plastic bag, she knows there is something in there. She steps up to it and sniffs it, steps back looks to the wind moving the branches of the cedar trees, looks back at me and walks twoard the movement, past the wall of someone’s abandoned home. The air is dead, hot and heavy. The mosquitos will be brutal tonight, funny how they didn’t have any bug repellant at the store.

The general store, here in Metula, seems to be more thrown together from random concreate slabs and a few sheets of glass. It could be any bodega from 145st, bare floors, dust, aluminum stained shelves, and the low lit floresecent lights. Far from the register are asian and phillipino noodles, lychee nuts, fish sauce, and canned fish parts. Close to the register are sunglasses, wine, and chewing gum. In the back there is bread, hummus, baba ganush, and foul, which is in my plastic bag. This is my breakfast, somthing has to be. The owner has wild and expansive red hair, broad shouldered, hairy chested in his late fifties. He smiles and hands me the bag.

The hotel room has a terrace, of about two cubic meters, with plastic chairs stacked on it, under a layer of dirt. In fact there are more chairs present than the terrace could ever accomodate, which is very generous of them. The view from it, at the horizon are hills and smoke, but at hand surrounding me are air-conditioning units.

Sit on the edge of the bed, the sweat filled, white sheet strewn, bed. The airconditioner was off last night, but the sweat  wasn’t from the heat. It was those damn dreams again. Stop thinking, eat breakfast and watch some TV.

Rough edged teeth of where the bread was torn. The long lines left in the salads after the hand dtrags the pita through them. Hummus is a great breakfast, the body seems to absorb it effortlessly, and sits well on the stomach for hours. 

TV news sits on the stomach like a 200lbs gorilla with gas. The press is running scared. Everyone is very upset with Hez(bollah), they are condemning them in the strongest terms. Hez doesn't give a fuck.  Worse, it is now clear the IAF and the IDF response has destroyed the cedar revolution.

Soon it is time for work. God what a shitty job this is. What a shameful shitty job. Me, an electric plumber, assisting the flow of digital shit, making sure it gets pumped into the post-modern sewer that was once called western civilization. It is morning in New York now, people are waking up, fire up the TV and open up the shit spout to help choke down their post toasties. Open wide America.

Good morning this is the news

The Anchorman drops his pants, squats over a holographic glass table and out of his ass rushes a massive stream of liquid shit into the waiting mouths of prized demographic groups. Zion, your suffering is our amusement. 

We are the news. We have no information on why they are fighting, other than they hate each other. The TV set is Alice’s looking glass. Step through and see the topsy turvy world.

Stay calm; Jack if you weren’t plugging in the machines somebody else would. Shut up spear-carrier, wash your ass in the bidet, brush the hummus from off your teeth, but not in that order. Get dressed.

Black linen pants which fit loose and come down in wide lines over Doc Martins, these with the red linen nehru shirt. It would look good if it wasn’t for the boots, but still better than everyone else at FAT. 

 Step into the hallway.

White walls, sun drenched halls, vacation paradise, empty. The whole motel is taken up by TV crews, so everyone is either sleeping or working. Yet the whole neutron bomb thing here, the cleaned carpet with cubed repeating pattern to hide dirt the closed doors, the cleaned windows. Last man on earth, or last man in the Galilee.

The last man would be the FAT assistant beuro chief, Chuckles. Give him a call, make sure it is all ok, find out how to get to work. It’s on FAT’s dime, fuck is there anyone else to call? Later call this guys first. 

The phone, black small, cheap and Nokia. It’s funny to see these blackberrys everyone is pounding at now, twice the size with half the reception.Banging with their fingers constantly.

The guy isn’t answering, probably choking on his own vomit.

The road outside the hotel, straight black road, to the left it runs down to Israel, and in the other it goes to Lebanon, or it did once, when the border was open. When the South Lebanese Army guaranteed safe workers to come and harvest kiwis, oranges, eggplants and tomatos. When the SLA would round up the unwanted elements and kill them or torture them. When the SLA would take the wives of unwanted elements and rape them in a archipelago of prisions, to veiled Red Cross condemnations and IDF silence. Memories are long here, be careful who your friends are.

In front of a house sits a small plastic slide for a child, not more that half a meter high. The slide is yellow, the ladder, with only two rungs, is red. In the space between the ladder’s top rung and the slide, a spider spins a web. Does it hope to catch a child in its web?

Arachne, tapestry weaver, Anansi story teller, hairy scary little spider walk weaving round your web? What story did you catch in there? Draw out in white silk slowly, the face of a child, the eyes wide open, the mouth convulsed in a scream, currents of blood roll down the cheeks, who’s side is she on? Injured, dying and dead children have to choose sides too, cchanges the flavor of the tears. 

A fly strikes the web, spiders don’t catch stories, they catch flies. Who catches stories? Enow, nuf said, turn off the ray gun and get to work.

Before me modern hotels, white, buildings modern on one side and on the other are Arab stone houses. There are still so many here. My motel’s reception is one of them, walk under the vine covered trellis to see the reception desk to the right, after the little brochures in Hebrew and English.

The place has a north California wood feel to it. Rustic, with a painting of Rabin in military fatigues and a tank rolling over a hill. Rollin’ into Lebanon, should have put a beer in his hand,  it would make a great beer commercial. Yet another tragic consequence of the Rabin assassination.

To the left is a large screen TV, with divans and chairs placed around it, in some idealized 1950s den. In place of dad sitting smoking his pipe, is one pissed off twenty year old Israeli watching the news. You can tell he’s Israeli because he is: watching the news in Hebrew; he's dressed in counterfeit baby blue Adidas athletic shorts (two stripes instead of three are always the giveaway), and a white nylon polo shirt; is thin with the lines of his face cleanly cut; and he looks really pissed off to the point of constipation. Also he has a gun strapped to his side.

(gun!)

That motherfucker  is wearing a motherfucking side arm. Jesus, what the fuck is this shit? Madonna, its a fucking 9mm, big black dick gun. Now he’s looking at me like he’s gonna fucking shoot me. Excuse me but do you speak English?

He makes that hand gesture. No, not that gesture, a different hand gesture. The one in Italian that means: come on or are you fucking nuts but in Israel means wait. Soliders use it all the time, please be a solider guy, please have some fucking training with that fucking cannon you are watching TV with.

He leaves the room, goes out a door, maybe he’s going up to the roof to wait for Nashralla. Fucking cowboy bullshit, Hez comes over the hills, wrapped in green, waving symatars and AK47s, singing verses from the Qur'an, and what is between me and death: a jackass in gymshorts. We are so fucking boned.

Calm down, look at the travel brochures. Water slides in Tiberius, Holy Lands, Wildlife Tours, Sexagenarian orgies in the Finger of the Galilee, go into the Golan and kill something; maybe an Arab or Druze, mount him on the fucking wall. Shoot him with your 9mm.

Relax Ulysses, it’s not like he pulled the gun, he just has it strapped on to the side of his fucking jogging shorts, Jesus. while he’s watching TV news, while he's taking a piss, probably while he’s fucking his girl. Nah no way, you can’t be that pissed and be gettin laid. Ok while he's jerking off.

Stay out of the sun Ulysses, don’t get a tan, don’t carry any suspicious holy books, it may set him off. He’ll mount your bald fucking head on the wall next to the water color of Rabin. Best beer commercial ever. Fucking tragedy.

Beyond boned, gonna get my ass shot off by redneck Israelis. What will they say at the funeral: Jack Ulysses, shot by a paranoid dickhead who was the powder blue line between Israel and Arab chaos; Jack Ulysses: loser. Remember funeral is just fun with four extra letters.

A white haired lady emerge from the door the cowboy dissapeared through. She is unarmed, short but fit, dressed in simple work slacks, and a green button up shirt. She smiles with slightly yellow teeth.

-Hello do you need somthing, she says.

Yes, hello, my room is 69, part of the FAT TV crew.

-Oh FAT, what a wonderful channel, a shame we can’t see it in Israel.

A crying shame at that, the evangelical Christians are delight to watch. Now getting from the motel to the live position, have they worked anything thing out with you guys, like cab service?

-TAXI! Oh not a problem at all, just you wait here and make yourself comfortable, she says.

Make myself comfortable?

No problem, the entire Galilee has fled, leaving only Asian slaves, animals, and journalists but a taxi is no problem. There is a different kind of taxi driver in the middle east. Be he Jew, Muslim, Cristian, Samaritan, Druze, Bahai, or Hare Krishna; he will drive you anywhere. The whore of Babylon could be shooting fireballs out of her cunt while riding a seven headed monster (insert seven amusing yet politically relevant or teen idol heads here). Your cabbie would just ask if you wanted to be dropped off on the right or left side of the whore. Who needs infrastructure when you have a man desperate for cash with a shitty car. 

He’ll be outside, it will be a Mercedes Benz, an old one, grey with some rust by the right rear wheel. There will be cigarette smoke billowing from the car, as if the exhaust pipe fed directly into the cabin.

Drive down highway 90, down about 8 kilometers, first down the hill, then past hills full of of trees turning brown under the white bone bleaching drying sun. See Kiryat Shmona in the distance, a ghost town mirage with the sun boiled air dancing above the concrete, beneath that dusty, unforgiving blue sky. Pull up to the complex and the driver will ask you for money, thirty NIS, not so bad really, about ten dollars US. Not having many NIS tell the cabbie to wait and walk into the studio and find Chuckles in his makeshift office. And he will freak the fuck out.

-What the fuck are you doing! Why are you taking a cab!

Well my shift starts around now.

-You should have called me!

You didn’t answer.

Chuckles panics, pulls out his blackberry, dials down through numbers, starts pointing wildly at the screen:

 -Is that you?

No.

His jaw drops and he dials wildly again:

-How about that one?

Nope.

-Who the fuck are you Ulysses?! Is this you?

Not that one, mine’s the one beneath it.

-FUCK! What is wrong with this fucking phone! Why aren’t my calls coming through! Listen we have a car service, we need to take the service!

Want to pass me the number of the...

-NO! Let me call the service, it is up to me to do this.

Chuckles stood surrounded by bills for bottles of wine, beer, gourmet roasts, rented light kits, fifteen laptop computers, a satellite uplink kit in Haifa, a make up artist, rental cars, a flat screen tv, a dinette set, a washer dryer, a four post bed, three russian whores, seven swans a-swiming, a children’s party clown and one Shetland pony. One bill clenched between his fingers, in the other hand his black berry and, from the look on his face, clenched in his ass was the terror of having to pay all these bills.

You just seem real busy guy, look lend me the NIS and it will end up on my expenses.

-Ok,  wait... you will give me the money back befor you put it on you expense account, right?

Yea, right, of course

He reaches into his pocket in panic, finding it empty he storms out of the room screaming:

-Benji lend me thirty shekels!

There is only one war in Television news, that between the people in the field and the accountants back at the mothership. It is a war that people in the field loose every time. 

Tonight all of the pictures are coming from Lebanon, because that is where all the destruction is. From a snuff film perspective, Hez has been a big let down. 

Back in Washington DC, there are a bunch of right wing pundits with their pants down around their ankles, trying to tug one off to this war, standing above Ann Coulter who’s lying on the floor in a rubber cat suit rolling around on agency photos of dead children,  begging to be covered in cum. These "men", much like this war, aren't delivering and these patriots are just floppy. So they just piss on Anne, and she laps it up. That's the Friday night social back at the Heritage Foundation.

FAT’s ratings are down. And now the accountants in New York were looking at the remote operations, and how much they were spending.

The budget problem is this. Israel is the winning side of the war, where we can purchase every luxury for the corespondents who come here. No bottle of wine to expensive, no taste too rarefied and all to acknowledge the discomfort of the talent being away from their homes. And here, on the winning side, we are producing no good pictures.

Over there, on the losing side, Lebanon is under blockade. The staff  costs are miniscule in a combat zone. All you can pay for is a hotel room, food, booze, and money to bribe your security people with so they don’t kill you. Then you pray you don't get bombed. So for a quarter of the price, you are getting twice the fear and  all the good pictures. Oh those lucky Lebanese!

The only pictures we have are of the funeral of the men who died in the helicopter collision. Polly Ann comes back with the pictures of it, she runs her hands through her brown hair, as her bug eyes twitch, and her skin quivers:

-It was the strangest thing ever. You think when you show up to a funeral, you want to hang back, give the people some space, but no, not here. The crowd, the family pushed us up to the front. Up to the center of of the burial, we were right by the casket, look we have the footage of them lowering in the coffin, the parents in tears, the anger. The people were desperate for us to film it, demanded that we film it. It was like when the accident happend last night, the camera man was telling me how the police just let him into the middle of it all. Usually cops want you to keep back, but not here. It is like they need it to be recordered. Oh and the anger today, just pure rage, no one can figure out why two heliocopters that weren’t under fire, why they would crash together. That is why the whole thing around if they were Apaches or Cobras.

Polly an what do you mean?

-Well if they were Apaches, well the IAF has had other problems with Apaches, maybe there is a serious problem with them here, something in the environment, or something in how the IAF uses them in operations. If they were Cobras, well the IAF used Cobras for years, they are really a part of the military here. So if two Cobras crash together, then there is a real crisis in how these guys were trained.

Is that going to be in the piece.

-Piece, the isn’t any piece. All the news is in Lebanon. The piece has been cut. Later though we might have a piece on the high tech planes the IAF are using in the bombing missions, they are really cool.

The sun crawls cross the sky, muted by dust.

The sun retreats behind the ridge, turns the sky blood red as the artillery blasts intensify. With terrific speed the blood drains out of the sky leaving the blue black night, and the burning traces of artillery. It is pointless sitting inside, the mosquitoes have already taken hold, and buzz in our ears. Trying to tell us stories perhaps.

The crew sits and watches the stars and the artillery. The white lines disappearing in the sky, Sean says they aren’t tracers, that they are the casings off the artillery shells. The sky is full of white disappearing lines. Here we sit, on flight cases, underneath the stars, the FAT correspondent for the affiliates, jeez what is her fucking name again?  a cameraman who had been a pro athlete, he’d come in from LA. Semus, who keeps quoting Ren and Stimpy but no one knows why. Sean who kept telling Semus to shut up. And the distant thunder of artillery.

Sean could care less about the war, for him it is like the weather. In news we go in the middle of hurricanes to report stories, hurricanes kill people. Of course men in suits don’t call for hurricanes, fund hurricanes, get paid billions of dollars to supply wind to hurricanes and tell people that hurricanes are necessary. Still Sean’s apathy is rational, understandable and preferable to the ignorance of the others. They are the nicest people in the news, FAT people. All the other networks are almost entirely staffed by assholes, engulfed in hierarchy and class warfare.

FAT truly does reflect suburban America, in a way that the others don’t. People really are much nicer, and more interested in teamwork and getting the job done. They are amazingly friendly, unless you open your idiot mouth. Say what you think and the chill sets in, so keep your mouth shut.

To these people, this war is a vicious attack on a peaceful country by those fucking Muslims. There is zero awareness that there was no peace treaty in 2000 and that these countries never stopped being at war. Zero awareness of the rage and the reasons for the rage.

The sports pro cameraman glares at me:

-Are you taking Hez's side?

Fuck no, but this is not being handled in the correct manner.

Be a good techie, you make sure the machines work, and keep your mouth shut. If you want that money, that is why you are here. Like a spider, waiting for flies in the web, if it shakes too much you won’t get your food.

Sean leaves and night passes. We do a few hits for the affiliates, and the sun rises. We are in the dark hour of American news. Just reruns in the twenty four hour news cycle. We are giddy and laughing with exhaustion.

Benji, one of our young fixers, ex-commando, shows up in his car to take us back to the motel. He catches a lot of shit, because he is an Arab Jew, his family was from Eygpt. He complains how he gets stopped all the time, soldiers asking for his ID card. He shows thme his military id card that shows he was special operations. A short mass of muscles, with a finely trimmed goatee, he looks, dresses and acts like a young Arab.

Seeing the laughter and the fun everyone is having he says he wants to show us some things. Benji drives us for a bit, through the country, to the top of a hill, and there is a massive artillery piece. Out of the windshield, it’s mass of post industrial steel sits upon a brown hill, with the deep blue sky of the early morning. We watch the men pay tribute to Moloch, load it, fire it and feel it shock the air around us, as the wave hits our skin.

Then he drives a bit further, we turn round a bend, past some houses and pull up befor a simple gate, and there is a whole town just a kilometer in front of us. A big town with apartments, streets, a city bigger than Metula.

Benji smiles and says:

-This is it, this is the Good Gate. The Arabs call it Fatima’s Gate. That’s Lebanon over there, it’s right there.

Fatima, wronged daughter of Muhammad, she had her inheritance stolen from her, eternal weeping widow.

Benji leans back and says:

-No problems for years here, the Arabs would just walk through the gate and work in our fields. Never any trouble makers. Then we pulled out and Nashrallah took over and now look. Oh shit.

Benji sees in his rear view mirror men in cars. The cars are SUVs, the men are all wearing tee shirts, all wearing sunglasses, though the sun is barely risen. They are standing there with there arms crossed, their enormous muscular crossed arms.

Benji jumps out of the car, walks back, there is some discussion, and he jumps back in the car:

-We need to not be here now, and we should never come back.

And we take the ten minuet drive back to our Motel in Metula in silence. Benji lets us out of the car and drives off. We can smell breakfast being cooked at the Motel, breakfast for dinner, or is it our bedtime snack. Whatever it is, hunger battles with exhaustion, and hunger wins. We walk in and there is Chuckles, freshly scrubbed, coffee in hand and elated to see us. Keep your mouth shut, don’t blow this.

Hot table sliver trays: hot yellow scrambled eggs, hard boiled eggs, piles of multi-grain cereals and muesli. No bacon or sausage but there is grey-green cold fish which every American avoids. There are several types of black bread and there is jam. There is Orange Juice, there is tea and there is coffee. There are trays laden with bowls and the clinking of silverware. The sun crawls up through the window behind us illuminating a spider web in a tree outside.

Seamus shoves forkful after forkful of egg into his mouth, trying to reach the critical mass of collapse. Our darling of the affiliate service has some toast and jam. Sport has a full tray, clearly he is hungr.  Sport has caught the bug and he wants to work here in Israel more. Chuckles loves him back:

-There’s plenty of work here, we would love to bring you out.

-What kills me is how you can build a country like this while always being under attack, says Sport.

-What is amazing to me is how you can live under all this stress, says the Affiliate darling.

Chuckles becomes whimsical and sad:

-The stress is unbearable, every day you just wait for the next tragedy. All we want is peace here, to be able to live without fear, to live free. But they won’t let us. You know we all have to serve in the military in the reserves. Once they placed me at a checkpoint outside of Nablus and we received a call to be on high alert for a homicide bomber. We didn’t know how it was coming, as a belt pack or in a car, all we knew was that it might come. Such stress, such fear, such hate, everyone that sees you there hates you, and one maybe trying to kill you. Or worse, my daughters. It just hurts so much.

Hear it Jack? Across the table were the utterings of horrible, terrible, oh how sad, float about, as your white fingers put down the fork and let the blood back into them.

Was it Hawara?

Chuckle's eyes open wide and lock on you like an Apache targeting system. He lowers his coffee from his mouth and says:

-What?

Was it Hawara? Was it the Hawara checkpoint you were working at?

There is silence at the table, there are the sounds of the people coming in to get there breakfast, the clinking of forks against plates, a cacophony of chaotic sounds become deafening around us under Chuckles rage gorged stare, as everyone else at the table is lost in confusion as to why. But we two, we know what goes down at Hawara. Chuckles' knuckles turn as white as his coffee mug.

Should have kept your mouth shut Ulysses. Jack, you are so fucking boned.

Special Notice : WARNING!

The herewith contained writing may be so fine, so smooth, and so hot, that it may be harmful to ya head. So slick, lucid and explosive you should wear goggles and a condom. So hot and rough that reading it could be considered a form of self mutilation.

She smiles and turns toward the industrial, white painted walls. She leans forward, lifts her mini skirt over the most amazing ass you have ever scene. She rests her hands against the wall and narrows her eyes:\

-Self mutilation is such a bore. Some times you need a helping hand, maybe you might just Want One. And it can be delightful in teams. 

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