27/4/99

The Volvo Bum

    A woman pulls up alongside the parked Volvo and asks the driver if he's vacating the spot.
    "Not until I die," he barks.
    Startled, she drives off, unaware that what he said was quite true.
    It happens often.
    A young man walking past the Volvo does a double take, stares into it disbelievingly, arches his eyebrows and hurries past. Sometimes, people tap on the window to check if the old man hunched in the front seat is dead.
    Shaul Taibe thinks it's a riot. He's the Volvo Bum of Yavne Street in Tel Aviv, utterly outrageous, eccentric but not deranged. He lives on the street -- literally; his worldly possessions are packed into the white stationwagon, filling every inch of space except for the driver's seat. That's where he sleeps.
    The curbside is his address -- Yavne, corner Mazeh; he's lived there since 1977, and, he says, "the next bed I sleep in will be my grave."
    He defies expectations, even if you don't know what to expect. I approached him with some trepidation, and found him hunkered over a newspaper clipping. He rolled down his window. "How's the Canadian dollar today? It's moving, yes?" The clipping he's studying is a chart of foreign currencies, and he has made numerous notations. "The economy must be improving in Canada," he remarks, as if he's two blocks away at the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.
    He hits me for spare change, I give him some, and then he flummoxes me by producing a bank printout. "I have money. Look." And he does: NIS 164,257.55. "In another bank I have $7,000, and I get from National Insurance."
    I still haven't said a word to him yet, but he carries on, stupefying me even further. "I could have had 220,000. The dollar went up 10 percent, 12 percent, I was stupid, I didn't sell in time. Then the dollar went up another 10 percent after Succot. Then, the 190,000 I had, I only got 15,000 instead of another who knows how much. So I only have 164,000."
    Sometimes he gets out of the car, affixes his crutches -- polio has withered his leg -- and stands in the middle of the street, rattling a tin cup.  
    "I know everyone here. People give me their 10 agora coins. Who wants that stuff but me?"
    He looks to be well into his seventies -- his hair, full beard and flowing peyot are white -- but his olive skin is smooth and supple. He says he's 54.
    His eyes are alive, twinkly, good-humored. There's a sense of mischievous fun about him, but he says, "This is a lousy life, really lousy."
    "Allo!" he suddenly hollers at a passerby carrying a loaf of bread. "You got breakfast for me?" He chuckles. The young man grins but walks on. "Hey, ya wanna sleep here for a night, ya wanna see what it's like?"
    The Volvo, he says, is a good car for sitting and sleeping. "This is not my first car. I bought the Cortina for 50,000 lirot in '77. That's five shekels today. The Opel Rekord I got in '82 for 100 shekels. Yeah, 100 shekels -- a million lirot. Nu, that's 100 shekels now. And in '88, the Opel Omega, 36,000. I sold that one for 30. This I got five years ago for 107,000."
    He wants a wife. "I don't think she'll want to live in the car. OK, so we'll get an apartment." He harps on the subject a lot. "I need a woman. Not for sex, y'know, I don't need that. But a man shouldn't be alone. Tell your readers, maybe somebody will come around."
    He's a good catch, he says. "I don't smoke, don't drink, don't do drugs, don't go to prostitutes. There's AIDS now, you know. I'm not fat, I'm clean. A good man. I don't play cards, I don't do Loto, Toto."
    He washes every day, "but not with Palmolive." He takes a bar of blue soap off the dashboard, and urges me to smell it. "Real soap. Twenty shekels, it costs, but it's good for the skin."
    He speaks intelligently, even switching to English at times -- against all those expectations. "I'm not a normal man. Maybe I'm meshuga, but everybody's meshuga."
    And he sings. "I know all the Carlebach songs, I can sing like him, you believe it?" He performs a short medley of tunes, heartily, bouncing energetically on his seat. The Volvo jiggles. "I look like a Shasnik, but I'm not, I'm a Carlebachnik. Ha, ha!"
    Time and again we are interrupted by passing drivers asking directions. Shaul's car always gets that unnerved double-take. He unhinges them further by asking where they're going, and why. This is his neighborhood; he has a right to know.
    Shaul was born in Jerusalem, but he doesn't get back much. "If I bring this car into Jerusalem, one second, boom, they take it away. They're afraid of cars like this."
    He's tolerated, barely, by Tel Aviv's law enforcers. "The police bother me, of course. They say the neighbors complain I'm sleeping in the car. But I'm still here." He gets parking tickets occasionally, but on the other hand, he doesn't pay property tax.
    His memories of growing up in Jerusalem are harsh. "My father took me out of school when I was seven, eight, and put me in the streets. He didn't feed me, he hit me all the time, he was drunk, he made me work hard on this one leg, he never paid me, not one cent -- the opposite, he stole from me."
    He seems stubbornly good-hearted, but he's a victim of unkindness, then and now. He's vulnerable, with his gimpy leg and soft soul. "They slash my tires, they smash my windows -- narkomanim (drug addicts), thugs. They want to steal from me, but when they see all this garbage in the car, they know they won't find any money."
    Except for the few coins he keeps for daily sustenance, it all stays in the bank. His expenses consist almost entirely of bread and halva, gas, soap. Yet he spends his waking hours obsessing about his thousands.
    A driver -- you can tell he's not from around here -- stops and asks if Shaul is pulling out. The Volvo Bum shouts back, as if the man is an idiot for not realizing the obvious.
    "It doesn't move, it's an apartment! It's my home! What, you're going to move a home? If I leave, where am I gonna live?"
    The driver zooms off, shaking his head, and Shaul roars with laughter.