Joel was from Indiana (you never know what motifs will fill your life – for some reason mine has been salted with Hoosiers). He said he’d studied several martial arts, which could have been true, but I doubted his claim to hold black belts in all of them. He told us he was in Jerusalem on a scholarship, but I later learned that no one outside New York had been awarded any money that year. On the other hand, Joel had irresistible energy in bed (behind me in the morning, around me all the night) and he knew the Old City better than anyone else I met.

His roommate was a very decent boring guy, Mark from Sacramento. In the next room were Vil and Larry, who evolved into the dorm leaders. Vil’s full name was Willem Vilna-Schärf and he said the “Vil” was from “Vilna” and not a Germanic pronunciation of his first syllable. He was red-haired, willowy, and Christlike in gentleness. He said he’d been raised by ultra-orthodox parents until he left home at 16 and ended up in the Village, kind of adopted by Allen Ginsberg. We were all attracted to him, and no one got further than extremely sensuous, under-the-influence hand-to-hand caresses.

Larry was a jovial big slob, a John Belushi type, and he became Laura’s lover. Through her, he shared my hairbrush and even my toothbrush. Through them, I got lice and gingivitis. The kibbutz treated Laura and me for the lice, so aggressively that I began to wear my hair short and then shorter, till I settled on the cut I have today. I took care of the gingivitis myself, with Tetracycline lifted from Mark’s shelf in the dorm bathroom.

For drugs were involved. In addition to the Tetracycline and our plastic wheels of birth control pills, beyond the realm of Midol and aspirin and, in Laura’s case, diuretics, we mined veins of sticky Old City hash and we secured, from someone known to somebody, what was described as laboratory-pure PCP, from Tel Aviv.

Joel told me hash was legal for Arabs but not for anyone else. Israelis would get jailed and we could get deported. So it was risky business, buying hookah hits in the back rooms behind the heavy carpets. Our host could smoke with us and then collect a bounty for fingering us as we left. Even so, we sometimes indulged. Occasionally we chatted with one of the merchants and then joined him in the back room for mint tea or syrupy coffee. I never negotiated it but sometimes Joel or Larry would haggle and converse with the merchant, and that usually resulted in the entrance of a big, minaret-shaped pipe, and our shy greedy hits on hash. It slammed against the base of my throat and triggered a convulsive cough but I didn’t turn it down. We never came close to getting busted, but Joel always made it exciting with his jittery vigilance.

The PCP was a much deeper experience. I wonder what it really was. After I returned to the States I indulged in street PCP once, and it was a whole other drug than what I snorted in the Holy Land. In Ukiah it knocked me out of my head and nearly off my feet. I was there with the band, playing the high school senior prom of all places, and we all tooted it in the coach’s private bathroom, in the boys’ gym, which is where we were told to put our gear. I don’t know how the guys managed to make music on that stuff; when it hit me I had to go outside and hang by my fingers from the chainlink fence just to moor me to the planet.

The white powder in Israel was not the same drug. It was gentle, profound but sweet, a rolling ride like a canter to a wider view. Once Joel and I climbed to the top of the wall of the Old City and lay on our backs on the still-warm Jerusalem stone, gazing at the dotted velvet sky while we absorbed the thick mingled energies of all the people who had been there before us. The walls are cot-wide; our arms fell relaxed to our sides and our fingertips curled perfectly at the edges.

(continued next Tuesday)