Roman [3:50p,12/27/2012]: Yo! What time ur going today?
Me [3:59p,12/27/2012]: Yoyo, maybe 7?
Roman [3:59p,12/27/2012]: Yap
My hand quivered over my mouse. Milky brown coffee residue lined my porcelain cup, and sugar crystals were splayed over the saucer. Too many coffees. I tried to concentrate on my work but my hand kept drifting back to my phone, and my eyes to the clock. Just a couple more tasks...
I raced out of work as soon as I could, ran after the bus and just barely caught it, and, after gathering my climbing gear, rolled my bike out of my flat within minutes. Halfway to the climbing gym, I felt my pants buzzing. Jeremy was calling me.
“Hey, I’m here already,” he said.
“I’ll be there in three minutes,” I replied, huffing.
“Okay--I’m waiting outside.”
I squeezed the phone back into my pocket and pedaled the rest of the way there. And--there was Jeremy, dressed in what could have been breakdancing attire, a baby-sized yellow pack on his back, and his goateed face breaking into a broad grin. We hugged. Electronic music pumped out of the climbing gym in an overwhelming volume.
“Whoa it’s loud!” I yelled.
“Yea, they’ve been playing around with the volume since I got here!” He yelled back.
“Come on!”
Escorting Jeremy into a climbing gym is like bringing a child into a cookie factory. But tonight the gym’s owner was throwing a party, so aside from the live DJ making the place whomp, there were also a gazillion people. We wove through the crowds. Jeremy’s pupils dilated at the first sight of climbing holds. The moment reminded me of a long time ago, back when Jeremy and I used to visit playgrounds and climbing walls and muck about trying to climb everything in sight. We were just kids then. We grew up together in Raleigh, North Carolina, and a big part of our childhood involved sleeping over at friends’ houses and making up breakdance moves or climbing on trees or over fences or trying amateur parkour. I stuck with climbing while Jeremy merely continued to dabble in everything, his natural talents sufficient to keep him happily lazy.
Pretty soon though we were hopping around the climbing gym just like kids again. Jeremy had his smartphone out and was taking photos and videos, in between traversing the wall on big jugs. I was doing some warmup dynos. “Do that move again,” he said to me at one point, breathing hard and holding the camera up. I tried jumping to a blunt grey sloper, slipped off, and rolled onto my back on the mat. Just as I stood up I felt a large hand grasp my shoulder, and when I turned around there was Roman, tall and hunched and wearing a crooked grin and a grey hooded jacket, his hair as disheveled as ever.
“Romansky!” I shouted. “C’mon, I’ve got to introduce you. This is my friend Jeremy I grew up with…”
Everyone showed up over the next hour. There was Dana, red hair knotted tightly to her head and eyebrow ring gleaming as she wrinkled her brows and narrowed her eyes and struck an aggressive pose, and then broke it up with a huge smile and bear hugged me. Iv, insouciant as ever, sauntered in slapping five and saying what’s up to half the people he passed. He saw me and Roman and dropped his head and chuckled. His dark bangs curled down over his eyes. Then he opened his long arms wide and hugged each of us. Marina moseyed in and, seeing us, gave a little body wiggle and laughed. When Moriel and Claire showed up, Claire butted me out of the way and hugged Jeremy. “You must be Jeremy. It’s so nice to finally meet you!” Moriel and I shrugged and went for the beer. Pretty soon Jeremy was cracking jokes with everyone and telling stories about our youth. I felt a little warmth inside. It was rare to be able to share a night like this with such an old friend, and to have it all in such a good spirit. He and my Tel Aviv crew were already getting along swimmingly.
We all climbed for a few hours but beer eventually took precedence, and the mood went from athletic to party. The energy in the place rose along with the music, and the lights dropped. Finally, the inside of the gym evolved into a club scene. By then I was out in the back with most of my friends, licking my fingers clean of hamburger juice and chomping potato chips.
“I don’t want to push anything, but there’s a whole bunch of ladies in there dancing, and that isn’t going to last forever…” Jeremy said. I nodded at him. The two of us hopped up and joined the mixed hiphop and trance groove, and within minutes, all of our friends had joined in as well. And then, as if some signal had spontaneously struck inside of everyone’s skull, it seemed that the whole party burst at once onto the dancefloor. I thought back over some of the more outrageous moments from our little community, and I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised to see all of these folks busting a move--
--not, at least, considering our trips down to Timna, which included a whole carnival of colorfully garbed characters descending upon a red desert setting for Purim, spending our days exploring sandstone blocks and our evenings bouldering by headlamp in full costume, and eating the delicious all-Israeli dutch-oven stew called poike. Not to mention the Israeli bouldering competition, and my friends’ devious and wildly successful scheme to get everyone, guys and girls, dressed up in 80’s style spandex--
--I looked about me again, feeling the bass whump. There was Jeremy doing the robot, as pneumatic as a collection of steam pistons; and next to him Iv, doing his best to teach me the shuffle, his big arms and long body flailing about like comedy props; and there was Claire, thrusting and thumping, her look saying “This is my dancefloor,” just before she broke into a sheepish grin; not to mention Ayelet pulling out some of her old Electro-party dance moves; and finally Valerie and Rony and others, faces lit up with laughter, and their bodies a blur.
The dancing eventually died down and then ended, and we all hung out and chattered and played acro yoga games for a while. Finally, Jeremy was off, with a hug and a promise to meet up back in Raleigh. “We haven’t partied like that since… well, ever,” he said. The rest of us dispersed soon after in various directions.
But the weekend was only just started.
Roman [1:47p,12/28/2012]: Shall I get a crate of beer?
Me [1:49p,12/28/2012]: This is IV. Beer!!!
The next evening, I found myself swooshing off with the same crew towards the outdoor climbing area Ein Fara for the annual Israeli climbing festival, Festipus. We arrived just in time to grab dinner. There was a chill in the air that hovered just outside of our down jackets, but the mood was festive, with people all about the campground playing guitars, talking, laughing, and sharing stories and jokes.
Within a few minutes my friends had all frozen in place in a circle, exhaled breaths curling up into mist, the only motion an occasional arm swiping down towards a stray hand. We were playing ninja, a game in which we take turns trying to slap each other’s hands with minimal extraneous movement, with two slapped hands meaning you’re out.
We had played this game with increasing vigor on each climbing trip that we’d taken over the last year, and by now, it had taken on a nearly archetypal significance. Iv was here on the ground crawling between someone’s legs, there sliding back to back with an enemy, and finally was stretched wide in the center of the circle, arms tauntingly close to the other players, posture deliberate and exaggerated. Yonat, sweet looking but with a catlike ferocity, moved in brief spurts which always ended in loud cries from victims and winces from onlookers. Dana kept a low profile but now and again pulled a zinger out of her puffy jacket sleeve. And then there was little Rony, as silent and deadly as a possum. Our fun caught on and a couple of traveling Americans, as well as a bunch of Israelis, joined in with us. At one point we had fifteen people in the circle and a number of onlookers cheering. Ninja shifted to zoo, to charades and to cowboys and princesses, and other pantomime games. We were almost unable to breathe through our laughter.
The next day dawned cold, and after wiping sleep from our eyes, we all got down to the serious business of rockclimbing. Crisp winter air kept the wall just cool enough for good friction. Iv and I climbed a few steep and pumpy routes in between breaks to drink coffee and greet friends from different areas of Israel. The day swept in and then out and, before we knew it, we were stopping in a small Arab village for a hummus on the way back to Tel Aviv.
Because Roman was driving, we had to go into the sweets shop across the street after our hummus to eat Knafeh, an arab treat consisting of sweet goat cheese and a gooey orange rose-flavored syrup-soaked straw-noodle topping, sprinkled with pistachios. “It’s not Yefet street, but it’s really good--you must eat this one,” he said. We tried three varieties, each one of them sweeter and more delectable than the last, and followed them with Turkish coffees. Five minutes later I was dead asleep in the back of the car.
I woke up when we dropped off our first passenger, Ayelet. I waved weakly at her. Next was Iv. I was awake enough then to get out of the car, and we slapped five and both said simultaneously “New years” and grinned. Next was Marina, who was leaving the next morning on a month-long trip in Mexico. Roman and I hugged her goodbye and wished her safe travels. And finally it was just me and Roman in the car, both wearing lazy smiles. We drove in silence for a few minutes.
It was only seven o'clock, but my body was wracked from a weekend of nonstop action and rockclimbing, and from barely sleeping. But I couldn’t have thought of a better way in which to have spent it. There was something special here, now, with this group of people. Kind of a resonance.
Roman nodded, feeling the same mood. And then he said: “Don’t worry man, this isn’t it. There will be more of these.”
I took a deep breath and felt the hum of the engine. I knew it was true, and I knew that it wasn’t. But there’s nothing to do but to grasp on to these moments as they’re happening. After all, they each but occur once.
We slapped five and I got out of the car. I grabbed my pack, shut the door and waved. I watched Roman pull out of the spot and drive off. And I went up to my flat, exhausted and happy. Just in need of a little sleep before the next big adventure.
