by Rob Spillman
And then—bam!—James would jump up onto the fountain. He was an inch from my head, the wood sagging down toward my scalp as he jigged and squawked above me. How sturdy is this plywood? I would wonder as I switched on the penlight. Following the bouncing notes, there came the chorus, and then—cue the dancing fish to join in the joy of the ogre fooled and of true love triumphing. I’d wave the stick back and forth in tempo and hear the audience laughing. Relief. I could hear them, but I wished I could see them. I wished that they could all see me. They were all laughing at my fake fish. I wondered what they’d say if they knew it was me in there, a twelve-year-old kid waving a stick in the dark.
26
“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”
—Lewis Carroll
Soundtrack: Jefferson Airplane, “White Rabbit,” 1967
SOMEONE WAS CALLING my name from the bottom of a well. I didn’t recognize the voice, nor the dark, dirty hardwood I was sleeping on. I sat up, head throbbing. The acrid smell of burning tires lingered. So it wasn’t a dream that we had been awakened in the early morning by the smack of a Molotov cocktail and the screams and taunts of street-fighting skinheads and anarchists brawling their way up Dunckerstrasse.
I wound the evening back farther, to paying Ringo fifteen marks for a month’s rent, then hiking ten blocks to where we had left Dusty, finding the flat in the dark and in our drunken state, then hauling our duffel bags up four flights. My memory loop skipped backward, to the CV and the incredible information dump we had received: about how in the year before the government’s collapse the New Forum had bravely and publically pushed for reforms, about the closing of the obsolete Eastern factories and the East’s looming unemployment crisis. But the dozen or more people also told us about how they loved and created amidst the confines of such thorough and systemic repression, how they found or made space for themselves. Jesus, did I envy them. And, as I held my head, I cringed as I thought about how much I wanted them to like me. I wanted everyone I met to be my best friend. The dancer, what was her name? The one who had told me that Pina Bausch was her church.
I looked over at Elissa, hoping she wouldn’t see my shame, but she was asleep, peacefully so, curled in the fetal position atop a towel. She had seen my naked need when I was talking to Liesl, who was standing uncomfortably and arousingly close as she told me about her theatre’s agitprop productions. I’d nodded earnestly but was fantasizing about living with her and Elissa as a revolutionary threesome. And then I’d started in about my own time onstage and how much I wanted to get back to performing, about the immediacy of the experience and how you can reach right into the audience with your words and feelings. I had looked over at Elissa, who had heard this bullshit, and she gave me a quizzical, amused look before turning back to her own conversation.
“Rob!” the voice called out again, from the courtyard.
I pulled myself up, hoping for another chance. I can do better. Be better. Be myself, I thought as I shuffled over to one of three giant Western-facing windows with massive gray granite ledges, something else I hadn’t noticed the night before.
“Ringo?”
“Hello, Rob,” Ringo said with a wave.
“Morning?” I said.
“Come, let’s get furniture.”
Right. I guess he wasn’t joking. “We’ll be right down,” I yelled.
Hank and Elissa stirred, barely, Hank clutching a ball of jeans like it was a life jacket.
“He better damn well be bringing us coffee,” Elissa said, but after a little cojoling I managed to get her and Hank downstairs.
“How far?” I asked Ringo.
“One or two blocks. You will see.”
“Coffee?” Elissa pleaded from the backseat.
“Yes, yes, we can get that,” Ringo said.
“All this broken glass,” I said as I drove around a smoldering Trabant.
“The autonomen, the anarchist squatters,” Ringo said, “from the fights with the skinheads.”
“We heard them early this morning,” I said. “Ralf warned us about the skinheads. Where do they come from?”
“North of the city where the old factories have shut down. They come in simply to mix it up with the anarchists. The Nazis have no jobs, so this is what they do instead. And our police have deserted because they do not get paid. The riot soldiers are paid, and they will crush anyone they find on the streets.”
“Really?” Hank interjected, giving me the “you’re an asshat” look.
“Yes, yes. The Western authorities cannot cross the border until reunification in October. Our riot soldiers are the only order. And they are a hard order.”
Elissa and Hank’s collective glare burned the back of my neck. How stupid had I been to march through those soldiers. We could have had our heads smashed in. We could have all vanished. No one knew we were in the East.
“Stop!” Ringo ordered.
“What?”
“There,” Ringo said, pointing at a spread of furniture across the street.
Hank was already out of the car. I parked and we were right behind him. “Damn. Look at that inlay,” Hank said, examining a set of ornately carved dark wood dining-room chairs set around a matching table. The chairs were placed as if someone expected us to join them, but there wasn’t another soul on the street. Elissa waved me over to a half dozen open cardboard boxes.
“Check these out,” she said, holding up a handful of red textbooks.
Next to the box was a hulking black tube radio with faded names along the dials—Dresden, Prague, Warsaw, Leningrad.
“Gagarin,” Hank said, holding up a framed picture of the famous cosmonaut. “What are we going to do with all this?”
“Look at these textbooks and maps from the fifties and sixties,” Elissa said.
“Elissa! You’ve got to come here,” Hank ordered, holding up an enameled hairbrush set with combs.
“Dibs!” Elissa called out.
“Negatory. I saw them first,” Hank said.
“No, not the things,” Elissa said. “The story. I got dibs on the story.” Soon she was spinning scenarios about whom these brushes had belonged to.
“Is okay?” Ringo asked.
“We’ve hit the mother lode,” I told Ringo.
“Okay. This is okay. But every block is like this,” Ringo said. “You will see. My countrymen are putting all things of the old order out by the curb.”
27
“When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.”
—Ansel Adams
Soundtrack: The Clash, “Lost in the Supermarket,” 1979
MY SECOND YEAR IN BALTIMORE was much like the first—forgettable. I lived in my fifth house in five years, but there was some continuity: I stayed in the same city and the same school for the first time since I was eight. At the beginning of the school year my mother and David had moved, from David’s small Hampden row house to a bigger, nicer row house in Charles Village, a mile and a socioeconomic class away. It was a fixer-upper, and I helped strip the dozens of layers of wallpaper, peeling down through years and years of previous owners’ tastes. Though it was a step up in class, it was still well below the suburban mansions most of my classmates lived in. I took the city bus to school, where I camouflaged myself to appear like any other preppy Baltimore eighth-grader.
After I’d spent another school year blending in and counting the minutes until summer escape, my father and I headed west to the mountains, where my father had been hired as co-director for the operas at the Aspen Music Festival. It was just in time: I’m sure I would have gotten into serious trouble as a teenager in Chautauqua. My father’s green Hornet, more rust than iron, had finally fallen apart, and he replaced it with an equally hideous orange Pacer, which looked like a glass
casserole dish and handled like one as well. The summer of ’78 we started a ritual that would continue for the next nine years: The minute my last class ended, my father would pick me up and we would drive across the country, each year taking a different route, around a different theme. One year it was how many Major League Baseball games we could fit into ten days, which meant Baltimore to Cincinnati to Chicago (Cubs) to Milwaukee to Chicago (White Sox) to St. Louis to San Francisco to L.A. Another year it was national parks—Yellowstone, Glacier, Yosemite, Bryce, and Zion. Another year it was the World’s Fair in New Orleans. And as I became more serious about running, my father planned the routes so that I could run twice a day.
Inside the car, hours could pass silently, my father Buddha-like as the West flowed by. He was absorbing it all, refreshing his soul for his art. Everything in his life was pointed toward his art. These two weeks in the car were his downtime for the year, a restorative break so that he could once again give everything to his music. How I envied this calm, this focus, this purpose to being.
I loved the long, close hours with my father, stopping at Stuckey’s restaurants for pecan shakes, the windy miles ticking off, windows down, my right arm reddening in the sun, the country flattening, the horizon expanding into nothingness. And then, past Goodland, Kansas, and the Colorado border, the watch for Mount Evans began. We would stare straight ahead, due west, to where the clouds looked like mountains, and then, when Route 70 bent northwest near Limon, the white-tipped peak would begin to take shape through the haze, solidifying with each westward mile, and soon thereafter the entire front range materialized, the gateway to my new jagged playground.
On our way we always stopped for a few days in Kentucky. When he first told me that we were going to Aspen, my father said, “And we’ll need to check in on home.” What, head back to Rochester? I thought, but then realized that he meant his first home, to see his brother, parents, niece, and nephews. I had spent time with them sporadically, mainly at Christmas, but now we were locking into a summer-visit ritual, starting with the segue from rural western Maryland into hilly West Virginia, and then along Kentucky’s rolling roads and white fences running through the bluegrass, past the grand horse farms outside of Lexington, to Paris and my uncle’s flower farm, the greenhouses filled with multicolored carnations visible from the road.
As we drove up the long driveway, I felt like we were entering a negative time warp and that my blood was slowing down. In Paris, the pace was glacial. My three cousins, my aunt Tula, and my uncle Don did everything deliberately—not slowly, but with a determined earnestness. My uncle, thirteen years older than my father, was a career army man, and now that he was retired, the flower business supplemented his pension.
When he was seventeen he had lied about his age in order to enter the army. This was in 1940. He would become a platoon leader under Patton and march, on foot, from Normandy to Berlin, through the bloody Battle of the Bulge. He earned a Purple Heart and Medal of Valor for leading his men out of a booby-trapped village. Uncle Don had brought a Brownie camera with him, and when his unit liberated a concentration camp, he was pressed into service as an official photographer. His grim photos were used at the Nuremberg trials and were now locked in a trunk in his basement. He never spoke about the war, not even to his children. When I was little, he would speak to me in German, describing various German cities and the countryside he had seen, but nothing about the war.
My aunt Tula matched his calm and quiet with her loud Irish dervish, spinning through the kitchen as she barked orders about the multiple dishes she was always preparing. “What ya got for me, sweetie?” she would patiently ask when I came in. She had a simple rule—if you picked it, she’d cook it. So if I went out and picked a bushel of strawberries, she’d make ice cream and pie. “Thank you so much for picking those berries,” she would say, pausing amidst the chaos to make sure that I felt at home, even though I was essentially making more work for her.
That night, my father and I riffed on any and all commercials, twisting them and jousting with each other over who could come up with the best wordplay—“What do you mean, I’m soaking in it?” Even as a spastic, hormonal teenager, I could tell by the blank stares that our riffing on Madge and Palmolive was coming off as glib and superior. Yet I couldn’t stop, hoping to impress my family. But my father could—after I repeated the “soaking in it” joke, my father gave me a slight nod, as if to say, “Enough,” then turned to his brother and asked, “Whatever happened to Lou?” Where did he get that slight southern accent? I wondered, before hearing his brother’s matching lilt in response.
I was now on an island, stranded, but during a long and awkward Love Boat intermission, my cousin Chuck threw me a lifeline and took me up to his room to show off his huge collection of rock records. “Check this new one out,” Chuck said, and handed me the jacket of Bob Seger’s album Night Moves as he put the vinyl on the turntable. “I really admire Seger’s work.” I tried to focus on the music—plodding, earnest—but was hung up by Chuck’s use of the word “work.” I’d never heard the word associated with rock ’n’ roll or any other kind of popular entertainment. You mean this is “work,” as in it takes craft and artistic intent and passion like classical music? You mean this isn’t cynically tossed off?
I had grown up with pop music being tolerated at best. Back in Baltimore I had joined the Columbia Record Club. I picked safe choices—The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, Jim Croce, Roberta Flack. But for my first choice for my record of the month—the self-titled debut album by Kansas—I thought I was being daring. I snuck it up to my room and played it at the lowest possible volume on my Tandy all-in-one eight-track/record player, terrified that my mother might hear it.
“Work” implied that you didn’t need to go to music school or art school. It also implied that non-turtleneck-wearing intellectuals and non-blue-hairs could seriously appreciate this “work.” I know it sounds ridiculous now, but at the time I existed in such a rarefied world that hearing my cousin pair “Bob Seger” and “work” unlocked future possibilities for me. Or at least pointed me toward the doorway to possibilities.
After the initial day’s awkwardness, I slowed down, and that second afternoon, after stuffing myself with my aunt’s strawberry-rhubarb pie, I had the sudden romantic notion that I wanted to live on the farm, that I could live with my Kentucky family and be identified with a real, singular place. Besides, I liked them—they were funny and kind and smart. The men were unabashedly masculine, sincere, sure of themselves, unlike the more entertaining but sometimes bitchy men who were in my father’s orbit. I could get used to the unhurried, serious life. But the next day I came around to the reality that despite the blood ties, and my aunt’s grace, I never felt that I was truly a part of the family. And even if I lived with them for twenty years, I doubt that I would have ever truly fit in, or let myself fit in. This was my father’s place and his people. He had chosen to leave, but he could choose to return, I imagined. For me, this would never be my place. These would never be my people.
This was reinforced when we went to see my grandparents, who lived twenty minutes away in Lexington, in a small, dreary, clapboard house that had none of the warmth of my uncle’s farmhouse. As my grandmother opened the door, I was hit with the smell of mothballs and liniment oil. I had been around many older, active musicians—including the legendary Madame Mauz in Berlin, blind and unsteady and in her eighties, but still teaching voice to the best young singers, who flocked to her—but my grandparents weren’t like Mauz or the other older people who lived their art until the day they died. My grandparents were ancient to me from as far back as I could remember them, and acted as if they were on call for a visit from death. My grandfather was a small, frail man who spoke so infrequently it was startling to hear his soft, southern tenor. And if you had met my grandmother, you’d know why—she was judgmental and mean, her worldview narrowed to only a handful of acceptable possibilities.
/> “So, you’ve come from the farm?” she asked me with a little sneer. “Your cousin Diana make you any of that ’sperimental cooking? Like that awful Quick Lorraine?”
I glanced toward my father, who stepped in. “We’ve had a nice time out there, Mother.”
“Couldn’t pay me enough to go out there,” my grandmother said. “All them niggers on the way just as soon slit your throat as let you pass.” My jaw must have been on the floor as my father gave me a complicit nod, as if to say, “Yup, your grandmother is a stone-cold racist.”
We’d barely arrived when my grandmother said, “Let’s go visit Tom”—my uncle Tom, the charismatic ladies’ man, her beloved middle son. My father had told me that growing up, Tom had wanted to be like all the men in the family—a combat vet. Tom had enlisted in the army during the Korean War and sent home spectacular letters about his theater of action, with detailed, vivid accounts of heroism amidst horrific battles.
Only he’d never made it out of Washington State, where he was stationed. He had sent the letters to a friend stationed in Korea, who then mailed the letters, complete with war stamps, back to the U.S. My grandmother never knew. After the war, Tom ran a small canning company in Louisville, and somehow quickly parlayed this into being the president of a large export-import business in New York City, with a Gatsbyesque mansion on Long Island. His brothers would later find out that the company was a mob front. Always looking for a better angle, Tom skimmed off the top.
When he was caught, he was given the Roman option—kill himself or subject his wife and two sons to the greater horror of watching him get gunned down. He took the first option, locking himself in his garage and letting his BMW run until he was blue and dead. My father and my uncle Don told my grandmother that Tom died of a sudden brain tumor. At his grave, my grandmother wept over her “one true good son.”
