29/3/99

Gat reactions

    Matityahu wouldn't remember, but he once sold some parsley to my sister Vicky.
    It wasn't parsley. It was gat.
    Blessedly naive, Vicky went home, put a chicken in a pot, filled it with water, and threw in the parsley. Well, that's what she thought it was.
    She served it to her three children, ranging in age from six to three. She served it to her husband. They've had two children since then.
    Not that you can credit Vicky's souped-up soup for what transpired family-wise, but gat has, y'know, an effect on people.
    "Bah! That only happens to the young ones," Matityahu says. "It makes 'the little thing' big," he adds with a comradely leer.
    Eliyahu is selecting a bunch of the greens from Matityahu's plastic basket. "Rabbi Kadourie does gat, he's 107 years old, and I guarantee you he's not chewing gat to you-know-what." He adds hastily, "That's not to say he couldn't."
    First thing in the morning, Matityahu trudges to the Petah Tikva bus station, sets down his baskets, and waits. He doesn't holler, like in the shuk, to lure passersby; a customer he doesn't know probably doesn't know what he's buying.
    The five men hanging out with Matityahu are his clients, his cronies, his pals. The bus station is not a way-station, it's their destination. They come here to shoot the breeze, pick a bundle or two, and maybe snicker at the occasional naif who thinks she's buying parsley.
    They're all Sephardi, older men with kipot, some with peyot, indulging in their casual pleasures: shmoozing with the hevre, passing the time, then heading for home with the day's harvest: Matityahu's gat.
    Later in the day, others will come by, hand over 10 or 20 shekels for a bundle, and hurry off to catch a bus. "All kinds of people, Ashkenazi, young, old. Even women. Y'know what it does for a woman, eh? It, like, opens 'em. But sure, I sell to them, why not?"
    Eliyahu chortles gravelly. "The young ones. It's cheaper than Viagra."
    Matityahu tears off a few leaves to give me a sample. I protest, pointing out it's only 7:30 in the morning. They humor me, or humiliate me, I'm not sure which. I pop it in, chew it, the hevre waits for my reaction, and when I scrunch my face and spit it out, they roar with laughter. "Someone like you should stick to mint leaves," says Zion, who goes through two bundles a day, at a cost of 40 shekels.
    Eliyahu takes pity on the silly journalist, and explains what it's all about. "You have to understand, we don't do this for sex. We don't need this for sex. For older people, gat has a different effect. It's like drugs.
    "We do it, because we learn Torah, and gat makes us, I dunno, smarter: we can learn longer, our eyes and brains are wide open. We don't feel sleepy."
    Matityahu says the stuff keeps him stimulated, alive. "I don't need to sleep. I sleep once a week, on Shabbat. Gat keeps me going.
    "You drive? Drivers chew gat, because it keeps them awake. But you, you're too young, it might have the wrong effect."
    If Dan bus drivers buy the stuff, Matityahu's in the right place. All around the square meter of pavement that is his headquarters, buses roar past. Smelly, noisy, unsightly buses, arriving, departing, idling, and in the middle of it all, Matityahu and his baskets filled with the only greenery in sight.
    In this bleak sector of one of Israel's ugliest cities, locals come to awaken their senses.