We were done. We were done with the churches, the memorials, the places that we visited that were supposed to make us feel spiritual or sad or remorseful or reflective, the places that had bombarded us with the guilt and burden that modern religion had felt the need to impose, in the name of the very man who had come to release such burdens. We had had our fill of sacraments, customs (Hats on in Jewish landmarks! Hats off in Christian landmarks! How dare you wear shorts in The Nazareth Cathedral when you stopped by only randomly, coming by here on your way to Tiberius!), and had even had our fill of Arab barkers – like Amir, who wasn’t at all hesitant to point out that his name means “price” Prince! in English – who seemed to befriend us all along King David Street and at Jaffa Plaza, and force upon us his cheap Palestinian wares imported into this country and sold to us, his American friends! at special prices. This city had drained us. We woke up at close to midnight, on the nights that we were in and not out on the abandoned streets of Mount Zion purchasing the last of the day’s baklava or scrounging inside the stone streets for a Jerusalem-esque Circle K for cigarettes or an open nargilla cafe in the Arab Quarter, to the prayer chants chanted loudly, on speakers, through the empty Old City streets – Islamic prayer chants that added a sense of beautiful reality to the city at day but brought annoyance in the late of night, annoyance that went on and on and on until you realized that no one could ever live in this city, the Holy City, and be free of this all. An atheist approach to life was not an option here. We finally fell asleep when the chants subsided but were awoken at six each morning, in our dormitory full of those living a life that Americans would not understand, awakened each morning by the bells of The Greek Orthodox Church on the other side of King David Street in the Christian Quarter, and these bells were supposed to bring peace, peace! but brought nothing but annoyance, just as the cleaning man did a mere two hours later when he announced to me and the other hostelers to awake to vacate the building, three stories above the marketplaces, for the daily cleaning. But the returns of each of us later in the afternoon, after hours spent doing what one does when bumming around Jerusalem with no real rhyme or reason or responsibility or plan – just the city at their feet for their fucking observing and taking and own personal interpretations of this and that and Jesus Christ – we wandered at what exactly it was they cleaned. Oh the smell, the smell daily as we would walk in on the third story of the city – this city not really divided in stories but rather continuous layers upon layers of stairs and pathways and narrow stone passages from the days of King Herod, all wrapped in barbed wire – we would walk in the lobby, buzzed in and viewed through security cameras, and into the pristine lobby that was marble and Christian Muslim greetings of glaring suspicion at us – the Americans – we’d walk back out onto the third-story patio and pass the glass awnings of the marketplace below and past the white young Jewish boys in Academy-style dress on one rooftop on their way from the yeshuva and olive-skinned Muslim boys playing hacky-sack and comparing pick-pocketing stories on the other rooftop, and past the views, looking down and across at Mount of Olives and the now oh-so-common, don’t-really-care views of Dome of the Rock and Temple Mount, past the lockers, down another outside hallway with gardens and mosquitoes and the fucking bats – and into the bathrooms at one door by the men’s dormitories to be assaulted by the fucking smell, the same kind of smell you think that a group of Generation X backpackers would bring to this city. We washed and slept and kept naps, and then, Daniel and I, oh so tired, we would make the pilgrimage down the Via Delorosa, daily, not to walk where Christ walked or to pray at the Stations of the Cross, no, but to go to Mike’s Place, and talk with the fat man who now employs cheap Palestinian labor from across the border at Bethlehem, and who runs private Internet booths, and we would come here and leave the world outside, leave the city, and return to this bastardly-implanted American cubicle-ville plucked down here amongst the relics of old, and check our MySpace accounts. Daniel would check on messages from his girlfriend in Amsterdam, and I my boyfriend, my new-found love in Mesa, and our days in this Holy City would become brighter when we received communication from either, and we would take those heart-felt messages and continue on, until one night we could not stand the sanctity of the city anymore, and forced ourselves to walk four miles beyond the city walls – four miles from dorms at Temple Mount and then to our right along more barbed wire and then down the L-shaped stairs cracking with age and the wooden doors of the residences who have seen many born and die within and then turn right down the streets of the bazaar and up more and down more stone steps, these ones polished with use, and then past the plaza and the Citadel and King David’s Tower and out the city gates, past the soldiers with guns who snickered at our singular command of language (they knew so many, and we knew so less!) and then down more steps to become flush with the old moat now filled in with modern concrete except where left to ripen with green and then past the bombed-out buildings on the right and through the triangular plaza and past the shops of New Jerusalem and the post office and the radio store and the coffee shop where we all ate French toast that one morning with the thickest maple syrup I’ve ever had in my life and then past the hookah shops and the goth clubs where the young and sexy European backpacking elite would mingle and dance and forgo the use of condoms and then down onto Ben Yehuda Street and then into Zoli’s Pub and drink – just fucking drink – with the soldiers who would soon die in Lebanon, and we would cheer and toast as we watched Tel Aviv basketball, then continue conversation into the late-hours of modern-day Israeli culture while Guns ‘n Roses blasted in the background, and we remained happy, only because they have not yet heard our stories, and we could tell them again. And in the middle of this all and the culture that seemed to suffocate us as constant clots of discoveries fall upon us, we could again be heard, and rise above the noise of the oldest city on earth, and just be fucking heard.
