A Horse Walks Into a Bar: A Beautifully Dark Tale
This book is set in a little pub in modern day Israel. A stand up comedian walks onto a stage in what seems to be just another show. The audience is waiting for a series of laughs from this little Jewish man in high heeled boots, but what they receive is not what they expected in their wildest dreams. In a slowly building tempest-like story, the comedian unfurls the demons of his childhood by taking the audience through the tale of his first funeral.
The comedian is about 14 years old when he goes to one of the army training camps that almost every child in Israel was subject to. A few days into it and a sergeant comes up to him and drags him away from the group of students. All she tells him is that he must see the commander, and they need to get him to a funeral by 4 pm the very same day. Conveniently, these seemingly tough army men cannot get themselves to sit down and talk to this little lonely bullied boy. However, they keep referring to him as “the orphan kid”. Confused and shocked, the boy cannot get himself to ask the question nagging him — Who has died?
In the agonizing hours that followed as he made his journey in a truck, the boy runs through memories that he has with both parents. His mother was his emotional support, and he was hers. His father taught him how to survive in a world where he was mocked and beaten by anyone he knew. His father brought in the food for the day, his mother held them together. Who was it? Who could it be? As the images and memories kept sifting through his mind, his wretched human heart starts hoping for one of them to be alive. He doesn't know when had he made the choice, but at some point he did.
What follows is guilt, devastation, and horror at his actions, which only worsen when he finally gets to the funeral and sees the body for himself. How can a child choose one parent and hope for one to be alive over another? What sort of twisted person is able to make this choice?
However, on an afterthought, doesn't his thought process seem almost natural… seem almost human? Don’t we all have similar demons hiding within us and aren't we all too busy covering them up? As you travel with the narrative, you end up realizing that the little boy was not wretched. Your mind ends up justifying his thought process in a rational, matter-of-fact manner that ends up leaving you shocked at the abomination. You get in touch with a much more hidden inner self, to the extent that you’re almost driven into self loathing… and from all of this chaos, you grow to accept human nature in its most primitive form. You grow to accept the difficult choices that you must make at some point, to feel guilty for them, and to finally learn to live with them. Because that's what we know how to do best — to survive, even if the enemy is within.
As the comedian pours his heart out, some of the audience jeers at him, some of the audience walks out, and some stays to watch this man demolish himself on stage. In all of this, one man sits perplexed and struck. The comedian was an old, almost forgotten friend, who had specifically and insistently invited this man to the show. All that the comedian had asked of him was to “just see me, and tell me what do you see.” Why was this man here? What does he see? At the end of the book… do you see what he possibly did?
