Ari said the hard part wasn’t smuggling himself into Egypt, the hard part was getting to the US. After a few weeks living on what little money he had in Cairo he called his anti-Zionist cousins in Oakland who bought him a plane ticket, and after he was securely on the ground across the ocean, they called his parents back in Haifa and told them where he was. “I’m sure they were relieved,” he said, “But I haven’t talked to them since I left.” It was the summer of 2009, unusually hot in my Mission District apartment in San Francisco, made worse by the fact that we kept all the windows closed out of drug-addled paranoia. At 2 pm on a Saturday we were finally awake, sweating, walking around in our underwear, and restless before getting high.
Ari’s family moved to Haifa from southern California in the late 80s. He went through school in Israel and joined the Israeli Defense Force after graduation. He stayed in and came up through the ranks. By December 2008 when Operation Cast Lead was launched, he was in the special forces and invaded on the ground in Gaza. He went from house to house with his unit destroying anything they thought signified Hamas. A few weeks after it was all over Ari left his station early in the morning on foot and didn’t return.
“I was a good killer,” Ari told me as he cooked an injectable formula out of powdered heroin and water, heating it with a lighter. It wasn’t common for us to get high at my apartment. I did everything to hide my daily habit from my roommate, and I actually thought I was succeeding. Ari and I used more frequently at his place in SOMA, or with other junkies in The Tenderloin. But since my roommate was away for the weekend we went out and bought all the heroin we could afford, neglected any kind of food, and locked the door behind us in anticipation of a two-day drug-binge-staycation.
I met Ari at a Lower Haight rooftop party filled with far lefties, queers, artists, a few stray programmers, and hipsters (the trust fund babies who bought the booze). I was recently broken-hearted because my girlfriend ditched me for someone who didn’t have to get high every day. Worse, I was self-righteous and thought she couldn’t empathize with my suffering having never known addiction herself (I know, I was terrible). I told anyone who would listen that she had lied and cheated, and that she was the perpetrator in this scenario. Nevermind my drug habit or my constant, subtle manipulations that kept it going. People stopped listening to my lamentations just around when Ari showed up. His righteous anger out-paced mine in both intensity and frequency of eruption. When he was drunk he would hit the wall with his fist if provoked, swimming in the red hot pool of rage that simmered just below the surface. We collided into each other like two pieces of strong wood made of the same element, breaking everything apart when we tried to move forward, and finding a reassuring comfort with our bodies tangled together in a strong dope haze.
That weekend in the summer, Ari and I lay in bed together for hours listening to bad electronic trance music while injecting each other with more dope when we came down. Putting a needle in someone’s vein can be an intimate act. He would hold on to me with one hand, steadying himself somewhat, and carefully look for and coax out a vein that could take another hit. I did the same for him, preferring the small but sturdy blue veins that ran down the back of his neck, scruffing his hair a little when I was done, sometimes kissing the top of his head. Or I would collapse behind him, wrapping my arms around his waist as I felt his body relax into the release of non-being.
Operation Cast Lead and his desertion ran like a river between the two of us. Ari struggled in sleep against invisible terror, his arms and legs thrashing into my back. He was paranoid of the SFPD and feared arrest. He cried in the shower. He refused to answer questions, but sometimes when he was feeling good he would tell stories, like the one that came right after him bragging about what a good killer he was. It’s a story I have trouble thinking about now. He described strewn body parts and night raids, and death that fell like a fine rain.
A few years later when I had cleaned up and was no longer in touch with Ari, I worked with combat veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan. They introduced me to the ubiquitous, “No shit,” story. It goes something like this: “So there I was [insert situation of nearly certain injury or death]. No shit.” The “no shit” is a reassurance of truthfulness that reveals the exaggeration often implicit in the retelling of combat stories. “We don’t mean to lie,” a candid Marine veteran of the 2003 Iraq invasion told me while playing chess and drinking coffee, “It just sort of happens.”
Telling stories can help us reconcile what is broken or unresolved inside us, perhaps most of all when we fail the test of truthfulness. We are experimenting with pieces of ourselves we think should be integrated into our being but which feel, nonetheless, like intruders. When Ari told me about killing Gaza residents in scores, of intimidating women and caring little for children who got in the way, I took it at face value and let it rattle me. I wondered who he was, and how the bravado so cheaply on display could co-exist with sobs I heard coming from the shower. Neither were placatory, that was all they had in common.
In the fall a very close friend who had moved to Los Angeles visited me in San Francisco and was horrified by what he found. My nails had broken off and my hair frayed at the ends. I was wearing clothes that hung from my body. When I’m clean, my body communicates, “I can bear healthy children” with wide hips and an hourglass shape. When I‘ve been using for months, it looks like the shadow of a real woman. Dark circles marked my eyes, and although I plastered a smile on my face, my friend wouldn’t buy it. He pulled a suitcase from my closet, threw clothes and shoes inside, and lead me to his car. I could have resisted what was essentially a kidnapping but I didn’t. I drove with him south through the Central Valley, smelling garlic and olives. I dozed in and out of sleep, and when we arrived at his condo in Silver Lake he opened the door for me and looked me in the eyes, “I’m fucking pissed off at you, but you’re going to get better.”
“I need to tell Ari where I went,” I told him. He sighed audibly, hunching his muscular shoulders and said, “If you have to.”
Ari didn’t pick up when I called. I left him a tearful voicemail, questioning my decision to leave San Francisco, if even temporarily. I wanted to feel his lanky body breathing slowly next to mine. I wanted to go to him in the shower when he cried, put my arms around him, and hold him until he stopped. Although I was ambivalent about getting clean and was saying we would be back together soon, what it really was was goodbye.
I never heard from Ari again. Emails and text messages went unanswered when I tried to reach out. Months later, someone told me that he was working for a moving company. I wondered if his body, made thin and unsteady from drug use, was strong again. I wondered if he quit heroin. I wondered sometimes if given the chance, would he go back to Israel?
I found out that he did. In 2011 I ran into one of his cousins at an Oakland Farmers Market who told me Ari had moved to Tel Aviv where he lived with other IDF dissenters after agreeing to serve three months in prison for his desertion. He was struggling to stay clean, he was drinking a lot, but he was working and was alive. I relaxed into thoughts of him smiling in sunglasses and walking on the beach with people who understood him. He was lighter in my imagination, almost free. These were just stories I told myself.
In 2012 his cousin found my phone number and called on a Tuesday evening. Ari had overdosed that weekend on a park bench. His friends left him to die alone in the middle of the night. I slid to the ground, feeling a wave of shock run through my body, and the surge of adrenaline that followed. After she hung up I threw my phone across the room and sobbed into my knees.
Scientists who study human behavior say that people who are lost walk in circles. Whether in the city or the wilderness, if you don’t know where you are going you will wind up where you started. The philosopher Nietzsche said something similar, although he said it is true of everyone, lost or not. All things return again, they reoccur eternally. It is not reincarnation, that optimistic idea that progress can be had, but rather a recognition that the forces of life that rule the creation and destruction of individuals and societies are all that exist. They exist and always will. We can make our peace with them, or we can fight them. In the moment I discovered he died, I knew I had loved Ari and that he had kept me alive until I chose to live differently with my inner pull towards nothingness. We skidded the edges of death together until I walked away. He died, I lived. It always was and always will be.
It is the summer of 2014 and I am in Stockholm, Sweden, visiting friends from long before I met Ari, long before I touched heroin, and long before I knew any real loss. Kajsa, a striking blonde (as they all are) and I are walking from one island in this city of islands to another, and I insist to her that we can reach a third island by way of a bridge that is just out of sight. She tells me we can’t, but humors me politely. It’s her way. We link arms and walk on a gravel path, passing fishing vessels tethered for the night, and pleasure boats replete with potted flowers and wooden tables ready for late night dinner parties. The northerly sun falls in the sky, and sinks slowly behind the buildings of central Stockholm as we arrive where we started.
“Told you so,” Kajsa teases me and laughs. Unafraid of walking, we take a sure path to our destination over a bridge we have already crossed, and down streets we know well.
Kajsa places a hand on my hip and says, “Skinny.” What she doesn’t know is that I am only two months clean from a heroin relapse, and am all of five days sober. I chain smoke cigarettes and feed off strong coffee with heavy cream. I haven’t told my friend in Los Angeles, and have in fact, never told Kajsa about my drug use at all. My physical size is smaller from not eating, and I am sure that my inner calm from being in a country I love and miss is the only thing that makes me look presentable. I smile at her, seeing in her face the reflection of a teenage girl she once knew, who is both me and not me as we walk. In the last few months I have returned to heroin, to Sweden, to sobriety, and to my simple love for people who have known me. I imagine Ari, wherever he might be, walking down a path he knows well next to someone he loves. I imagine that someone is me.
To find more essays from What Weekly go here, and read Violet McLean’s essay about the banking crackdown on sex workers here.
