Mr Mix told me that my behaviour was understandable in the circumstances. Once he, too, had had a sweetheart whom he had last seen ‘loungin’ with her legs wide apart in the back seat of Paul the Pimp’s Doozie.’
I said, with mild astonishment, that my fiancée was scarcely the sort of girl to be found in such circumstances. Believing herself abandoned, Esmé had clearly turned to someone else for help.
The man owned a car. He was obviously rich. Somehow I would find out who he was and track him down. Suitable explanations would be made, I would be reunited with Esmé and all would return to normal.
‘His name’s Graham Meulemkaumpf the Third and that car was taking him across town to Grand Central.’
‘The station?’ I was aghast.
‘That’s her. This guy’s based in Chicago. He’s in cattle.’
‘A cowboy! My angel with a cowboy?’ What other horrors were in store for me? Even when Jacob Mix explained how the guard had told him that Meulemkaumpf owned the Rolls Royce and was one of the richest men in the Midwest, I could not rid myself of that terrible image.
Not two seconds upon the American shore and my sweetheart had been abducted by a buckaroo! It was everything a European most fears when he sees his relatives take ship for the United States. How could such a thing happen to me, who had worked so hard for his new country, who had identified himself entirely with its most idealistic causes? (God was testing me, but then in the arrogance of my youth, I did not understand that.) Me he perdido.
Unable to pursue the car, I determined to discover the address of its owner. First, however, I would need funds. I told Mr Mix to accompany me to the Western Union office at Pennsylvania Station. ‘What are you going to pay with, colonel?’ he asked me. ‘Red gold?’ Anxious to save breath to make the run over to Seventh Avenue as rapid as possible, I did not answer, but I had already determined that I would cable collect asking Mucker Hever to wire me a couple of hundred dollars. The busy traffic of downtown New York City was meat and drink to me, I breathed it as another might inhale the wild movements of the pine forest, but that morning, dazed by all my disasters, I was helplessly gripped by a nightmare. I do not recall how we reached the Western Union office and pushed through the smart glass doors to join the waiting line.
No doubt again I have Mr Mix to thank. Did ever a man deserve such noble loyalty?
As my turn arrived I produced a business card which had not received too much of a soaking and handed it to a Neanderthal clerk who eyed us with considerable distaste and asked us to wait at one side. Ah, how easily we fall when we lack access to a simple suit of well-cut clothes!
When he returned, his first question, almost inevitably, was ‘How do I know this is you?’ Patiently I explained that my servant and myself were set upon in the railroad yards of Wilmington, Delaware and robbed of everything. By use of our wits we had arrived at our destination, only to be thwarted by an officious know-nothing who had managed successfully to separate me from my betrothed. ‘Even now she is disappearing into the clouds of the upper elevated in some outlaw’s coupé!’ I was an inventor employed by Hever of Los Angeles. The card proved that much. I searched through the pockets of my waistcoat and trousers for proof of identity but could find only a half-ticket issued by Western Aviation Services. ‘Call the police in Wilmington. They know me. They arrested the pilot of this plane. I was travelling on it. There was some question of bootleg liquor.’
‘Nothing to do with Mr Petersen,’ said Jacob Mix from behind me.
‘I was innocent, of course.’ I realised as I spoke that if Mr Mix had been with me, he would have had to have ridden on the top wing. I tried to play down this unnecessary piece of confusion. ‘Had it not been for the fortunate arrival of my valet here, I should be dead in the freight yards by now. Simply cable to Mr Hever and ask him a question. He knows me.’
‘And who’ll pay for the cable?’ the anthropoid wished to know. Meanwhile others behind us, all with urgent business, were calling out for us to move on. At this, quite justifiably, I lost my temper. I raised my voice, I must admit. I began to curse the clerk and the company and all its customers. I always find myself speaking a mixture of Russian and Yiddish on such occasions, perhaps because I learned bad language first in Odessa, amongst the polygenetic young criminals of the Slobodka drinking dens where I had enjoyed my salad days. I had not learned then what I later learned of the perfidy and cunning of the Jew. I knew only his charming side in those days. I have always said that I was born without prejudice. What people choose to call prejudice is simply the very opposite. It is common experience. I mean no harm to any individual of any race. I am a man of infinite tolerance and sensitivity to the feelings of others. How could I not be? I have been in their position. I know what it is to have a mind and a heart yet to be treated as a beast. I am lucky enough to have brains and talent and good looks. These things have saved me from at least a permanent life of despair and poverty. Not all are so fortunate and it is our duty to care for them. But this does not mean setting them on pedestals or promoting them over better-qualified people! Society is a compact between millions of individuals. Lines have to be drawn somewhere. This is what they understand in South Africa.
At some point in my argument with those jacks-in-office Jacob Mix had disappeared. I could not have blamed him for making himself scarce. If they were prepared to humiliate a white man as badly as they humiliated me, there is no telling where he might not have finished; perhaps at the end of a rope. My faith in the decency of human nature was badly threatened by that terrible experience. I found myself outside the Western Union office in the company of two policemen warning me that if I made a further nuisance of myself I would be thrown into jail as a vagrant. I set off back towards the docks with the vague idea of picking up Esmé’s trail at the ships’ offices. A few moments later I was joined by Jacob Mix who grinned at me and, as casually as if we were passing acquaintances on the street, enquired where I was going. When I told him, he shook his head. ‘Why waste time? Her train’s just about to leave for Chicago.’ He had telephoned Meulemkaumpfs New York number and learned that the millionaire had already boarded the 20th Century Limited. The Pullman was due to leave within minutes. I remember my dash up the Avenue of the Americas as a blur. Mr Mix followed, panting. The cops, he said, were still on our tail. At last I ran into the sunbeams and shadows of the station, was sighted by the two policemen, sprinted towards the 20th Century’s wrought-iron boarding gates to be caught between this barrier and the cops in time to hear the confident gasps of the mighty silver locomotive as she began her journey West. He perdido mi rosa! He perdido mi hija.
‘Esmé!’ I was sure she would hear me somehow through the voices of the departing travellers, the squeal of the pistons and the clatter of the metal. ‘Esmé!’
A loud commotion from the other side of the station, a sudden yell from a stall-holder, made the policemen hesitate. I saw Mr Mix signalling to me from the far exit and I dashed towards him. How ironical, I reflected, that I, Colonel Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski, late of the Don Cossacks, perhaps the last scion of an old and aristocratic Russian line, should find as his only friend in New York a humble darkie. I knew a little humility myself at that moment. God speaks to us in strange ways, sometimes, and sends us help in even stranger guises. If nothing else, this is what I have learned over the years.
‘How are we to get to Chicago, Mr Mix?’
‘There’s only one way I know,’ ironically responded my dusky comrade.
So, in Jacob Mix’s company, I plunged again into that seedy wilderness, that unmapped land of despair and hopelessness which is home to the railroad bum. Three nights later, as we neared Chicago, with my beard and my chills, a nose that would not stop running and no means of finding a little cocaine to take away the worst of the symptoms, I was not to be recognised as the gifted teenage genius whose final dissertation in Petersburg had brought an entire college to its feet applauding my precocious and sophisticated vision of an Earth
ly Paradise which, with a little sense and good will, could so easily have been made a reality. Instead, what is this? I have become a gendzl again. Gey vays . . . ? Es dir oys s’harts. Es dir oys s’harts, Esmé. That meshuggeneh hint!
I am back in the cattle car!
* * * *
THREE
HOW RICHLY IS CONFORMITY and mediocrity rewarded! I am reconciled now, but as a youth I was constantly shocked by examples of that truism. Reduced to nothing, I was again forced to rely on my wits. I am not ashamed of this. I have nothing to hide. This does not mean I never valued my privacy. Dame Gossip makes such capital of a few sensational speculations! Who can afford to offer her so much as a thimbleful more material? Only once, after we had reached Chicago and learned from a newspaper that, irony of ironies, Meulemkaumpf, and doubtless my darling, had already left for Los Angeles, did Jacob Mix ask what I considered to be an impertinent question about my fiancée. I was forced to silence him immediately. I was in no doubt that Esmé had prevailed upon Mr Meulemkaumpf to escort her to California, trying to find me at the address I had given her before she took ship. This irony did not outweigh the urgency of the situation. I had to get to her as soon as possible. What would they tell her? That they had last heard of me being arrested for bootlegging and that my bits and pieces had been discovered amongst the effects of a few vagrants? She might think me dead, run over by a freight train as I desperately sought to reach New York. What would she do in her grief? The thought was horrifying. I was reminded of what my other Esmé had done. Lost, believing herself betrayed, she had become the whore of anarchists too depraved to dignify by the noble name of Cossack. She had been fucked so many times, she said, she had calluses on her cunt. She had become the plaything of my worst enemies. I could not force from my mind the picture of my sweet child innocently seduced by the evil words of some neo-Klansman, the kind who had already sworn to be revenged on me. What sweeter revenge is there than to rape the victim’s most treasured possession? I already knew much of human evil. I had seen virtually every aspect of it, especially during the war against the Bolsheviks. I did not think my sanity would stand another experience of that kind.
Some of this I confided to Mr Mix, who seemed to suggest that the chances of a situation recurring so exactly were remote. ‘Because a brick once dropped on your head don’t mean you’re the kind of man who has bricks drop on his head.’ I must admit I found his simple wisdom calming, and perhaps my liking for the negro was based on the man’s peculiar ability to help me regain my reason when, as many highly-strung creative people find, I temporarily lost control of myself.
Further attempts to telephone Mucker Hever collect or else to borrow the fare for Los Angeles failed miserably and we were arrested. Those few days in jail are not the worst I have spent. At least there was adequate food and no beatings. But of course I was hard put to quell my panic. I spent a day in the infirmary but the doctors there were unsympathetic. They determined I was merely suffering drug-withdrawal symptoms. At this foul lie, I did not help my own case by shouting my outrage and trying to strike the orderly who conveyed the quacks’ ridiculous diagnosis. They would not accept that my release might well be a matter of life and death. Of all places, California was where Esmé most needed protecting. Like any city which has attained the status of a myth, Hollywood was full of predators ready to pick up all unconsidered trifles, human or financial. Thousands of young girls were sacrificed each day to a dream of Fame.
With Mr Mix’s help I began to make some sort of fresh plan. On the morning of our release, we headed directly for the highway. Eventually, in the company of three lambs’ carcasses and a somewhat introspective ewe, we got all the way to Valparaiso, Indiana and the railroad yards. After sunset we climbed into a west-bound box-car, closing the doors with all the emotion of returning home. Our long journey begun, there was little to do but talk. Jacob Mix was fascinated by all I had to tell him and frequently exclaimed that I was the best education he had ever had, but all was not one-sided. Mr Mix was a skilful modern dancer - foxtrot, Charleston, even tango were all familiar to him, picked up either from an earlier mentor, a down-and-out music-hall performer who had learned his trade with Cohan, or books and films. He had seen The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse twelve times. Many a night we would step carefully to the rhythm of the swaying freight car while he instructed me in the steps of the waltz, the polka and the cakewalk. Then somewhere in Kansas one evening we found an empty grain truck. Sweet-smelling as it was, and with enough grain still remaining to make us both comfortable, the truck carried us eventually to Hannibal, Missouri, where an attempt to kill us by pouring new grain onto our sleeping bodies barely failed. We found ourselves promptly jailed, this time in separate ‘tanks’ while we served our profitless time and were released. After we had begged unsuccessfully for food at the back door of Huck Finn’s Original Catfish House we fled and were separated. I became familiar with the Mississippi river in Memphis, Tennessee, where I worked as a slave-labourer for a month on a ‘chain-gang’ building up the levee after the flood. By that time I had lost all my ambition and a good deal of my identity and was merely grateful that none of my old acquaintances passed by and recognised me. I had left Memphis under something of a cloud, in Major Sinclair’s airship, and was now especially glad I had given the name of Paxton to the arresting policeman. My guess was that Boss Crump, undisputed ruler of Memphis, would think nothing of ordering the death of a man he regarded as his arch-enemy. I prayed daily that he would never know I was at that moment working on the river wall not half a mile from Mud Island, but my time passed without event and, released, I had lost all contact with Mr Mix. I heard from another bum that he had headed for New Orleans, but my own destination remained Los Angeles.
Occasionally I raised enough money to visit a movie. They were all that remained of my lost reality. I watched that other Gish, Dorothy, in The Beautiful City, a wonderful tale of racial misunderstanding and reconciliation with William Powell and Richard Barthelmass as the Italian, and it reminded me of my ideals, my own faith in humanity. Mostly however I could not afford the first-run, full-orchestra, theatres and went to houses where Ken Maynard or Hoot Gibson were the biggest attractions and Colonel Tim Holt’s adventures were considered too ‘up-market’. This was where I saw Tom Mix and observed how he represented all that was noblest in the Anglo-Saxon race. He truly was a Knight of the Prairies! Now at last I understood the value and influence of the modern kinema. Griffith remained my ideal - I watched, borne away from all my misery for two hours, while Lillian and Dorothy Gish performed the harrowing story of Orphans of the Storm, and Broken Blossoms had me in tears in an old Kansas City mission hall lined with painful pews, where I saw it three times, my own hardships seeming as nothing to the tragedy of ‘The Chink and the Child’ so marvellously played by Richard Barthelmass and Lillian Gish. I went to see her the other day in a horror film by the fat actor, Laughton. She was the only redeeming feature in the whole thing. We all have to compromise occasionally. I did not blame her. My own compromises were many through the summer of 1924.
I got a lift as far as Silverado. By now the September nights grew chill and my yearning for Esmé had become a constant familiar ache. Like the hunger, thirst and sleeplessness it was familiar enough so that I was no longer always conscious of it. I am used to hardship. I have survived many kinds. It has helped me to encourage in myself a kind of mental hibernation. I put my brain to sleep, save for those functions absolutely necessary for day-to-day living. Anyone who met me in those days would have considered me merely another young bum. I was superficially no more nor less coherent and wretched than any of the other derelicts in the 20s who spread in increasing numbers across the North American continent. But there too I did not become a Musselman. Unacknowledged, I kept that little secret spark alive. My spirit remained my own.
What was the point of making a tararum about it? Some things are best forgotten or, if not forgotten, not spoken of. Some things only bring back trouble.
A person must survive as best they can. Nobody blames them. Certainly one has a duty to others, but how can one help others if one has not helped oneself? You see, this is what they refuse to make allowances for. It is the socialists who force me to silence on the matter.
Red tsu der vant. I am not ashamed. Are we to rely upon the word of some worthless hasidim? Some stemwinder? What happened in Sonora was never proved. It was a beautiful town. I was against the idea but the others were committed. The fence was black iron and the shrubs were cedar. That is what I remembered. That is what I told them. Neat little lawns rolled where once forty-niners had brawled in their own vomit. Northern California was never a lucky place for me. Even my bargain with William Randolph Hearst’s agents in the matter of the Thomas Ince affair emanated from the Southern half of the State although I am sworn to remain discreet on all matters involving the Hearst family so in honour say no more. I would only add that I had become desperate to have my old life restored and was no more than a tool in the matter having no moral involvement. That was on November 20, 1924. I had a full pardon and an assurance of work, should I ever require ‘an honest job’, at Cosmopolitan Studios.
Jerusalem Commands - [Between the Wars 03] Page 5
