I_n your story in this week’s issue, “One Gram Short,” a man hesitates to ask a woman he likes to a movie, because he feels that it implies too much desire or commitment. Instead, he thinks, he will invite her to smoke a joint. Do you agree with him that pot-smoking is more casual than moviegoing?_
The first time I smoked pot was in a friend’s apartment. There was a girl there whom I really, really liked, and she handed me the joint she was smoking. I’d been offered joints a few times before and I’d always passed, but with that girl it was different. I was not thinking at all about the pot and its effect, just about the opportunity to have her fingers touch mine when she passed me the joint. Her fingertips felt dry and cold in a nice way, and I almost fumbled the joint. I took my first puff thinking about the fact that she had a boyfriend, and that this was as close as I would ever get to being with her. And still, even from more than twenty-five years’ distance, I remember that moment as a very romantic one.
There is something very intimate about smoking pot with someone—the fact that both of you put the same joint in your mouth and smoke something that will make you feel less in control. This is topped by the fact that you are sharing a secret, something illegal, which makes the smoking a de-facto declaration that you trust each other.
Except for sex, there aren’t many secrets that adults can share with strangers, and this can sometimes make a pot moment a very special one. In my life, I have often said no to a joint because I didn’t want to share that intimacy with the person who offered it to me. I think that what the protagonist in this story is really seeking is that kind of intimacy, and I guess that, by the end of the story, he will find a way to ask for it without a smoke.
Because your hero feels awkward asking Shikma out, he gets himself caught up in a far more awkward situation. Is this story a comedy of errors?
There is some inauthentic and misplaced aura to almost everything that happens in the story. It is about a guy who wants to smoke a joint with a girl not because he wants to get high but because he is too stressed to tell her that he likes her. And it is about two guys who shout at a defendant in a courtroom not because they are enraged by his deeds but because they believe that it will get them some pot. Throughout the story, there is a sense of awkwardness: people who exchange small talk as a ritual and with no real interest in the answers they’ll get to their questions, people with a physical closeness that doesn’t derive from any emotional one. The wish to reach an authentic moment is, for me, the engine of the story.
The court case in the story is an especially fraught one, because it involves an Arab hit-and-run driver and a Jewish child. Have you seen similar cases in Israel? Would they make news?
Yes, this kind of case is common, and, as in the story, you sometimes feel that the people who are commenting on these cases in a very impassioned way are talking less about the cases themselves or even about their racial phobias than about something else: their take on humanity, their lack of optimism, an anger or a fear that they cannot control and that is totally detached from the subject at hand. Many of these politically loaded cases seem, at times, like vehicles for people’s random emotions to hitchhike on.
In your climactic scene, you have Avri call the Arab driver a “terrorist.” Avri denies that there’s anything political or racist about the term, explaining, “The settlers also have terrorists.” Is his claim defensible?
There is an old Israeli joke about an Israeli-Palestinian who finishes his law studies and goes to ask for a job at a big Tel Aviv-based law firm. One of the senior partners takes him to a huge, beautiful office and tells him that it’s his new office, then hands him the keys to a Porsche and tells him that it’s his new car. “You’re kidding!” the Israeli-Palestinian says, surprised. “I am,” the senior partner says. “But you started it.”
In a better world, this joke wouldn’t be funny. But, in a country full of so much suspicion, which quickly translates into racial tension and violence, it is, if in a very bitter way. The same goes for Avri’s argument: in a reality that is less xenophobic and tense than the one we have in Israel, his claim would be completely defensible. But in the Israel we live in today it is nothing short of ridiculous.
In the course of working on the story, you said that it was important to you that Avri embody Israeli racism. Is Avri’s behavior surprising in any way, or more or less predictable?
I wouldn’t define Avri’s behavior as typically Israeli but, rather, as opportunistically human. Avri makes his racist remarks while being totally focussed on doing whatever it takes to get his plastic goodie bag full of pot. In a sense, Avri is no more than a litmus test, and his cries in the courtroom are a simple exploitation of an existing zeitgeist. As he explicitly says in the story, when you live in a country where smoking a joint is illegal but shouting at an Arab in court is normative, you just go with the flow.
The style of the story is deceptively light and fast-paced. The final message, it seems to me, is that it’s impossible to do anything in Israel—even ask out a pretty waitress—without politics entering into it. Do you think that’s true?
I read it in a different way. For me, it is a story about a guy who yearns for an authentic moment and hopes to reach it with the help of pot, but in the end (accidentally) reaches it with the help of a black eye instead.
In the U.S., we’re not used to thinking of recreational pot-smoking as dependent on Al Qaeda activity or on strife in Syria. Is Israeli pot all imported, not homegrown?
The pot situation in Israel is very much connected to the region’s geopolitical changes. Traditionally, most of the pot was imported from neighboring countries, and whenever a war was being fought it had an immediate effect on the market. So, in our region, even the most detached pot-headed hipsters find themselves unable to escape the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
