journey to ashdod

If you are planning to leave Eilat, you should get your bus ticket from the ticket counter in advance. During peak season, three days in advance. In my case, I only waited one hour for the next bus.
But I didn’t push my way through the line craftily enough, and I was the last one on. It was a 3-hr+ ride on the floor of the bus. There was an extra seat up front near the driver, and a black-haired, dark-skinned lady occupied it, joking for most of the ride with the driver. I sat beside her on the floor, and when an old Phillipino woman got on mid-ride, she took my place, and I crunched myself into the center aisle.
So when we pulled up to the station in Beersheva, I jumped off the bus and ran away. As soon as I entered the shared taxi (sherut) I would take home, the last one of the night, I remembered that I had left my backpack behind on the bus. “Fuck!” I yelled, just in case I hadn’t announced myself as an American. The sherut driver said he would wait for me, and I ran out to look for any sign of the bus.
No sign. But I discovered the black-haired, dark-skinned woman buying a coffee in the bus station. I related my dilemma, and asked if she knew the bus driver personally. She said he was a friend of her friend, and my mind now functioning on Israeli speed, I asked her to take my number, and call me with the number of the bus driver. I had to catch my sherut.
When she called, I was on the sherut, hot corn in one hand, trying to take down the phone number with the other. She spoke so fast I couldn’t get a thing. The boy across the aisle offered to translate.* He gave me the number for the bus company, and told me that when he forgot his bag, he found it later. When we came to talking, I learned that he was studying to be a chef in Eilat, and home on a three-day vacation.
Just as I was patting myself on the back for writing the number of my Israeli cell phone on my backpack, the phone rang. It was the driver. Speaking at a mile-a-minute, he gave me the number of the Central Bus Station in Ashdod, and said the bag was waiting there. “Yesh!” I sighed. (In Hebrew this literally means “there it is” but it also bears a resemblance to “Yes!” said with a lisp, so it’s still funny when I hear it).
The next day at the Ma’agalim School, I asked my friend Zahava if she would call and inquire about the bag. She did, and told me it was being held by the guard at the mall, adjacent to the Beersheva Central Bus Station, where I had originally forgotten it.
Without thinking twice, I trekked during a my long lunch break to Beersheva, to try to retrieve the bag. Well, neither the guard nor the lost and found at the mall knew anything about it, and the guy in charge of the bus station’s lost and found only works two days/week, and this was not one of his days.
When I got home, it occurred to me that Zahava had called the Ashdod Central Bus Station, and she had confused it with Beersheva’s, since both are adjacent to malls. I reprimanded myself for idiocy, and departed for Ashdod, a shipping city on the Mediterranean, south of Tel Aviv.
When I made it there, the ticket-seller closed his window and took me up to the drivers’ lounge. I looked around at the diversity of men--thin and fat, hair covered by kepot and frosted tips, men drinking black coffee and men drinking Nescafé. But they all wanted to know my story, and they crowded around to come to my aid.

“Why did you forget it?” one asked.
“I guess I’m a little crazy,” I responded.
“Not crazy, just confused.” he comforted me.

This, I thought, is the ultimate volunteer placement. There could be no greater service to the Jewish people than to teach Israeli bus drivers English. They would be able to communicate more easily with new immigrants and tourists, it would increase ridership and help decrease air pollution, and increase tourism to Israel in general. I could think of no better place for people like me to become immersed in Israeli culture than the bus drivers’ lounge. It could really use a female presence to freshen it up. A fabulous new aspiration.
Anyway, Avi, the bus driver who had driven me from Eilat to Beersheva, was perchance in the lounge at the time, and he told me he’d take me to where the bag was being held. I was expecting him to walk me around the building. He unlocked the bus and we stepped inside. He asked,

“Do you have some time?”
“Well, yes, I think so,” I answered.
“I just have to pick up some people.”

Before I could surmise what this actually meant, we had begun a one-and-one-half hour circuit. A complimentary city tour for a visitor to Ashdod like myself.
Finally he drove to the old bus depot, and there at the entrance my bag was waiting. I jumped out and grabbed it, and Avi asked if I wanted a drink. I asked for a water, the default drink that I hope allows the buyer to see that he’s only satisfying my primal survival need to quench my thirst and nothing more.
“I’ll take you back to the Central Bus Station, but I first have to pick up some girls from school.”
“Alright,” I said. He was doing me a favor and I had little choice.

We swung by a Haredi Girls’ School, and about two-thousand small girls in their long navy skirts and blue Oxford shirts filled the bus. A particularly brash one, aged about nine, with a long caramel-colored ponytail hanging down her back asked if she could sit next to me.
“Of course.”
“Are you the bus driver’s wife?” she asked, as, from their perspective, this was the only probable reason I would have been alone on the bus with him.
I related my story, and she practiced her knowledge of English and Spanish on me, while she directed the bus driver where to turn.
“Driver, left! Driver right at the light!” It’s a peculiar thing that I’ve never traveled anywhere else where it’s customary to address the driver as “Driver”. I guess everywhere else I’ve been people have addressed him as “Excuse me.”
The school had sent two adults with the girls, but both had exited at the first stop. The sun had just emerged from behind a cloud, and the bus had suddenly transformed into a jungle. Students were pouncing on each other, slithering down the middle aisle, swinging from safety handles like they were on a tire playground, walking around, carrying smaller girls, and standing so close to the doors before exiting that it’s a wonder their fingers didn’t get clipped.
The bus driver had already asked me how often I went to Eilat, and said that next time he would invite me, and I could stay with him at his hotel. As he was at least twenty years my senior, I couldn’t quite figure out if he was joking or not. But he had indeed gone out of his way to help me, so I was planning only to give him the wrong phone number, not to reprimand him or spill anything on him.
Then, just before the last group of girls were planning to get off, we passed the Central Bus Station, and I asked if he could briefly stop, and I made a tactful and timely escape.
800 meters down the road, the beach awaited. So much for the Lost and Found.

*Ask me sometime about a story I wrote in second grade, in which the protagonist saves the lives of her family by having secretly learned how to speak German. Ask also about my theory of foreshadowing reality, developed c. age 12.

**ars or arsim is a pejorative term that describes Sephardic males who wear tight clothing, bleach the tips of their black hair, wear heavy silver and gold jewelry, and ridiculous, pimp-worthy sunglasses year-round. It also denotes the pushy, come-on behavior affiliated with such fashion, found in all Mediterranean cultures.