At the end of July the H group was going home. The group had been together for a year, most were from England, some were from Scandinavia. So there we were, for some reason in my room, having a great party. We had a music box, and we had ELO, and Venus And Mars by Wings, and Wings At The Speed Of Sound. I remember not much. I was probably pretty drunk. There was girl named Deena K that I’d had a bit of a crush on. But I was dancing with Dina, who was, if I recall, Danish. And we dancing dancing dancing – all slow dances. And stuff. She invited me back to her room. I squirmed out of it. I can’t imagine why. She wasn’t Broom Hilda or anything.
Next morning I took off with Mike. Mike, who was Irish, had just gotten engaged to Juliet (her real name), who wasn’t. Mike was a wonderful guy. After he got engaged he went a bit off the deep end. He was still a wonderful guy, but now he was a wonderful guy with mental health issues. Still he and I took off, went south. Around noon we were sitting in the Beersheba bus station, eating soup. It was hot like crazy, the weather, not the soup - well, the soup too. But we agreed that eating hot soup cools you right off.
We got off the bus and ended up crossing the length of the Negev, got off at Eilat. It was a heat wave, in a city where heat wave was the permanent condition. It was so hot that street vendors could not sell water. We could barely move. So there we were, sitting on the beach, dressed in t-shirts and shorts, with our feet firmly implanted in the waters of the Gulf of Aquaba. We took turns getting up to buy soft drinks from one of the dozen vendors selling stuff by the beach. Tempo, Queen's, Coke. We’d each gulp down a bottle in 10 seconds. Go get another, Mike’d say. We’ve spent $20 on pop in 30 minutes, he’d say. Who cares I’d say.
We sat on that beach until sunset. We could not move. But I had a phone number on me. A friend of mine from back home was supposedly here. So I find a phone and dial, and there he is. Voila. He came to meet us and took us back to where he was staying. We had showers, I tried to have a cold shower but the water came out hot. We dressed and got whisked to a wedding celebration. There was a feast, champagne. It was crazy, we were beach bums, drinking champagne…
They would not give me a seat, the bastards. The first Friday night, wherever I tried to sit, the seat was “taken.” Hey, this group had been together since September, here it was May, and they had no place for interlopers. It took some doing to force myself among them. But I did it. Not only did I manage to get a seat at their cursed table, but I got myself into the group, not, of course, as an official member, after all I was just a lowly volunteer, but I was in. Lee was my roommate, the guy that sent me the email, and there was Rodney and Nigel, and a girl named Ruthie, and Joanne, Lee’s girlfriend, and Roxanne from Manchester, and a Swedish girl whose face I can still see but whose name escapes me.
I bought this LP that summer in some random record store in Tel Aviv. It's by Chava Alberstein and it's called "HALAILA HU SHIRIM" which literally means "the night is songs" but translates more accurately as "The Night Is Full Of Music." And they used to play that song on the radio so I knew it so I bought the LP.But there was another song, at the end, called Song Of The Sea. And I didn't hear it until after I came home. And there was this place in Tel Aviv, a concourse, It was on Rechov Yaffo, that's Jaffa Road, which is a main street that runs along the Mediterranean. The concourse was actually built over the road, and it was between the Hilton Hotel, which was a fancy high rise, and the Marina Hotel, which was smaller, but fancy with an actual marina (boats) adjacent. And there was this screen that showed TV images. And I'd sit there by myself at night, with the warm breeze of the sea, and I'd go to one of the snack vendors and get coke, and I'd sit at a table, drinking coke, smoking Marlboroughs. And that song always reminded me of that place.
And now I listen, and it reminds me of the memory…
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