melchett mike’s Loss of Innocence: Blighty’s New Years Past

I have missed England these past weeks. It is the only time of year that I do . . . the seemingly interminable build-up to Christmas; the lazy workplace atmosphere beforehand; Christmas Eve in the pub; the great telly, especially the “Christmas Special” comedies (we Brits do it best); the festive season football programme; and for Jews (or good ones, at least), not having had a “kiss under the mistletoe”, the midnight snog on New Year’s Eve.

I came of age (and almost in another way, too, I seem to recall) on that New Year’s Eve, 1983.

I was 16, and never been kissed. My excuse is that I had only ever been in Orthodox primary and secondary (boys) schools, and a religious youth group. I only learned about “the birds and the bees” well after my Bar Mitzvah, over a game of table tennis with my next door neighbor, Graham. I was sure he was winding me up (as he usually did), until I confronted my parents with the revelation. It was a rude awakening from my constant marvelling about the wonder of couples being able to conceive by thinking about it.

And I’d spent considerable time thinking about that first snog (and more, after first setting eyes on Altered Images’ Clare Grogan [right] on Top of the Pops, and then in Gregory’s Girl). But it just never happened. Until that New Year’s Eve.

On the previous New Year’s Eve, 1982, I remember standing transfixed with jealousy, next to my cousin, as his older brother snogged the most desirable girl in our youth group year.

Even that New Year’s Eve started pretty inauspiciously. A party in Hendon, the dull North West London suburb where I grew up.

I am sure I didn’t initiate matters. I wasn’t yet familiar with the “Would you like to go for a walk?” code (was it just mine?) for “May I please stick my tongue down your throat?” Anyway, I would never have had the guts.

But who cares how I got there. What was important was that I was there, walking nervously up Allington Road, NW4 with Ruth . . . stopping . . . and then having one of those “first time” sensations that I wouldn’t have again until the 26th of April 1992 (the day Leeds United won the football league championship for the first time in my adult life).

Ruth, you were more Marilyn Manson than Monroe. And you wore a “train track” brace on your teeth (not a huge turn-on for non-train enthusiasts). But, to this day, I thank you for that moment.

My mate (for argument’s sake let’s call him Danny . . . that’s his name), however, always having to go one (two in this case) better, didn’t allow me to indulge myself – and anybody else who would have listened (most wouldn’t, as they’d been there and done that long before) – in my champagne moment. On the following day, New Year’s Day 1984, he recounted how his filthy (I was dead jealous) fingers had visited the “holy of holies”. He recalls, to this day, how I made him feel like he’d committed a crime (I thought he had). Anyhow, my next challenge was set.

I seem to recall having a rather long barren patch thereafter (the memory of that evening likely kept me going), until the following New Year’s Eve, 1984, when I snogged Samantha. It was at a party in St. John’s Wood. A lot more upmarket. Rather like Samantha, in fact. Definitely more Monroe, this time.

That first week of 1985, in the dusky thickets of Hampstead Heath, Samantha helped me discover how one could have sex (or something that felt like it) fully clothed. And, later that same year, a golden one, I met Caroline, my first “girlfriend”, who taught me an awful lot more.

So, now you can perhaps understand my sentimentality for the English New Year’s Eve. Israel’s “Sylvester” (the fourth century Pope Saint celebrated on the 31st of December, apparently) ain’t quite the same.

Nor does getting a snog these days present quite the same challenge, or excitement. Especially not off a Tel Avivit, but that’s another story (that I’ll get to) . . .

Jonathan (“Jonny”) Isaacson z”l, 1958-1979

Today is the Yahrzeit (Jewish anniversary of death) of my late brother, and only sibling, Jonathan.

“Jonny” (as most people knew him) took his own life at the age of just 21. He would have been 50 last May.

We Jews, on a Yahrzeit, light a 24-hour candle and recite Kaddish (the memorial prayer), but – whilst I observe such traditions – they leave me rather cold. And, with the inexorable passing of time, memories of Jonny – who left us in December 1979 – have, inevitably, become fainter. So, I thought it would be nice to have a permanent e-memorial for him here . . .

Happy days: on Jonny's lap (circa 1968)

My parents adopted Jonny, as a three-week old baby, following eight childless years (I was a ‘mistake’, though thankfully not an unwelcome one, arriving on the scene some nine years later). Naturally, they loved Jonny as their own, and his adoption was never an issue for him – as he used to tell his friends, “My mother is the one who clothed and fed me.”

Jonny was, by all accounts, a lovely child, and – being the first grandchild on my mother’s side of the family – adored by all. Our grandfather, who was loathe to leave his East End menswear business for anything less than a funeral (and, even then, only in the most immediate family), once even took him to New York City on the QE2.

By the time of his Barmitzvah, however, Jonny’s behavior had become rather erratic, and he was soon playing truant from school. He had started taking drugs, and – Jonny being Jonny – not by halves. He, later, even stole a substantial amount of cash from our grandfather, in order to fund a trip (in both senses of the word) to South America.

Even if Jonny had a hereditary predisposition to it, medical research would now strongly indicate that his “schizophrenia” (that was the label given) was triggered by such early teenage consumption. Following a BBC documentary on the subject, while I was back in the UK in 2005, I determined with my then girlfriend that I would attempt to make contact with Jonny’s old school friends, in order to find out more about his life than the little I had managed to glean from my parents (and, likely, more than what they even knew).

Some three days later, in one of those weird twists of fate, I bumped into one of those friends, Ron, who had been living in Israel for nearly thirty years, but was visiting London following the death of his father. We were both moved, having not seen each other since I was a kid, and he related how, following the previous evening’s Shiva (mourning gathering), he and the two others – there were four in their group at Hasmonean Grammar School – had drunk a toast to Jonny.

I attended the Shiva on the following evening, where the three school mates related things about Jonny that I had simply never heard. My parents, having suffered terribly through Jonny’s teenage years, did not, naturally, have wonderful memories of the period. But now, from a thoroughly different perspective, I felt like I had discovered a new brother. Jonny’s charisma was such, they said, that a hush would descend when he spoke or entered a room. And it was apparent that (however foolhardily at the time) they had all looked up to Jonny for experimenting with everything, and to an extent, more than they had dared.

Awareness of drug abuse was very different in the early to mid-Seventies, and my parents, understandably, had no idea how to handle the situation (the only person who did was my then septuagenarian “Polish” grandmother). Another of Jonny’s school clique, Pete, recalls being in our home one Hannuka, and Jonny coming down to the family candle-lighting clutching a large lump of cannabis.

Jonny soon started frequenting a squat in Hampstead, where he became acquainted with Sex Pistols’ bassist Sid Vicious (in October 1978, a friend of Jonny’s who happened to be in New York City rather naively attempted to visit Vicious in his Manhattan police station cell, following his arrest for the murder of girlfriend Nancy Spungen). Having Jonny as my big brother – and being exposed, even as a young child, to the music of, inter alia, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Doors, and The Allman Brothers Band – meant that I could never get into the insipid crap enjoyed by my contemporaries. And I am eternally grateful to Jonny for that.

My parents considered that some time spent in Israel might help Jonny. Ever resourceful, however, he soon found his way to Kibbutz Gezer, which was by all accounts, in the mid-Seventies, precisely the kind of hippie hangout where they did not want him to be.

According to Dave, the other member of the gang of four, “Johnny was clear in his mind that he was following the correct course and wanted people around to share with him what he was experiencing.” With the cash stolen from our grandfather, Jonny offered to buy his pals tickets to Colombia (though this was one step too far for them).

“Jonny chose the destination,” Dave remembers, “by taking a large map of South America, blindfolding himself, and sticking a pin down at random. It landed on a place called Cochabamba in Colombia. Consequently, our adopted squat cat was given that name and Jonny was on a plane out there.”

Pete recollects that, “on arrival in Bogota, Jonny tried to buy drugs off an undercover policeman and, as a result, spent a night in jail and was deported the next day” (though not, Dave adds, before Jonny’s travelling companions had to stump up 500 US Dollars in cash to obtain his release, “which in those days . . .”)

Pete recalls trying to “save” Jonny, at some point following his return from South America, but finding him, by that stage, “too far gone” (they played squash, but Jonny was seemingly oblivious to the ball). Jonny spent his last few years horribly drugged-up (only, this time, legally), in a psychiatric hospital in South London.

It is great to meet Jonny’s old mates – now a carpenter (Ron), architect (Pete), and company administrator (Dave) – for a curry whenever I am back in London, when we reminisce about him lovingly. Jonny clearly was (and his memory still is) very special to them. Jonny, too, obviously liked his friends “real”, and his choices, at so tender an age, prove him to have been extremely perceptive (Dave still goes to watch Hendon Football Club, and – as anyone who has had the misfortune will testify – it doesn’t get much more “real” than that).

I don’t think Jonny would have liked it too much down here in 2008, and – while there should be no romanticising his tragic demise (“Dad,” he asked towards the end, “why am I like this?”), or its probable cause – he, at least, in his short but eventful life, made an indelible mark on the consciousnesses and memories of those close to him. That is more than can be said for most of us.

Jonny, if you are reading this post Up There (where I am sure “it” is all legal), have one for us. God bless.

Sweet sixteens: (from left) David Rosen, Ron Dombey & Jonny (1974)

[If you happened to come across, or knew, Jonny, I would love to hear from you.]

Amir Benayoun: A Society Divided, Even in Music

One doesn’t have to do very much to uncover the deep chasms in Israeli society, as I recently found out when I purchased a new compact disc. It wasn’t a standard purchase, but the purchase by an Ashkenazi Jew (i.e., one of European origins) of a CD by a Sephardi/Mizrachi Jew (i.e., of North African or Middle Eastern descent).

About a month ago, I had fallen asleep during the Champions League highlights (probably another win for Manchester United in the 19th minute of injury time), only to be awoken by a divine voice passionately exclaiming the most powerful of lyrics, in a live studio performance.

Now, good music is good music. Or so you’d think. But when I asked for the new Amir Benayoun CD in the Carmel Market, the following Friday morning, I was met with quizzical looks by the Mizrachi stall owner: “What would you be wanting with that?!”

And the bemusement has come from my ‘side’ too. One friend said that she would rather get out of my car, during a recent trip to Jerusalem, than be subjected to Mizrachi music, which she associates with “everything bad in Israeli society”, and whose proponents, she claims, are a bunch of petty criminals and drug addicts.

Amir Benayoun, I understand, also has his past. But he has found God. And the guy is not just good, in my opinion, but a phenomenon – a cross, if you like, between Shlomo Carlebach and (a thinking man’s) Eyal Golan. Check him out on YouTube. His new album, Omed Ba’sha’ar (“Standing at the Gate”), is simply stunning and the best I have heard in recent years, Israeli or otherwise. It has much of the passion and spirituality of Dylan’s ‘born again’ albums, Slow Train Coming and Saved (and there is no higher praise than that).

And Benayoun is not scared of tackling the issues. The track, Loh Kechol, Loh Lavan (“Not Blue, Nor White” [referring to the colours of the Israeli flag]) criticises, inter alia, the government’s treatment of Holocaust survivors, its indifference to the bombardment from Gaza of Sderot, and dares even do the unthinkable here – criticise assassinated Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, who it brands “an arrogant drunk”.

Neither is Benayoun scared of tackling the music industry. Fed up with being robbed, he has set up a private label to manufacture and distribute his music.

Another friend, whose opinion on all matters cultural I value, admits, with discernible reluctance, that Benayoun is talented. But he has a “problem” with him being, since his ‘conversion’, “too right-wing”.

“If you were not brought up here, you just can’t understand,” my car friend, perhaps somewhat ashamed by her own prejudices, attempts to explain. If it means that I am free of them, then perhaps growing up in Hendon, rather than in Israel, was not altogether a bad thing.