The Master of Disaster
THE SUMMER OF 1968. Norman Hiller and Kurt Meinecke, both dreamers, and me caught sticky between them, the jam in the sandwich. Norman was the flashy type, the guy who collected followers, collected them the way he did baseball cards and Superman comic books. I was seventeen the summer he collected Meinecke, old enough to have said something, to have warned my mild and innocent friend, but I didn’t.
Kurt Meinecke and I had one more year of high school left, we were going back to the books in September. Norman Hiller, in a manner of speaking, was already done. In June of that year Principal Koslowski had handed him the grade-ten diploma he hadn’t earned on the promise that Hiller would never again darken the classrooms and corridors of R.J. Plumber High. Which made Norman Hiller the Seventh Wonder of the World. Nobody but Norman would have dared to make such a larcenous proposal to old Cougar Koslowski. What’s more, he drove the bargain through. Whenever any one of us asked him what he intended to do now, all he said was, “I got some irons in the fire. I’m waiting on developments.”
Of the two of them, Norman and Kurt, Norman had the more remarkable imagination. The movies were partly responsible. Norman was always crazy about the movies. Our town had just one theatre, the Empire, and Hiller was always in it. Sometimes he would see the same movie, three, four, even five times. In the theatre he kept strictly to himself, was always alone. If any of us tried to sit with him, he’d tell us to piss off, he didn’t need anybody yapping and yammering next to him, ruining the show. Twenty years after the fact I can still see him slouching down the aisle to his seat floppy-limbed, a tall boy with huge feet and hands and long, restless fingers constantly twitching in his pockets; a narrow, nervous face with hot, black eyes, which turned lukewarm and bored whenever the conversation slid off into anything he wasn’t interested in, which meant practically everything except money, sports, and the movies. It was that look which made people, teachers in particular, think he was stupid. They never stopped to consider why, if he was so stupid, he was always managing to get the better of them.
There was a ritual he performed at the movies. Before draping his gangly legs over the seat in front of him, he loosened his laces so his feet could breathe. Next his baseball cap came off and was hung on the toe of one of his shoes. The cap coming off was like the Pope making a public appearance in shorts. The Empire was the only place anybody ever saw Norman Hiller without his baseball cap on his head; he even wore it in school. Every teacher who had tried to threaten him out from underneath it had failed. The baseball cap was non-negotiable. The only reason it came off was because it interfered with Norman’s line of sight to the big screen. It says something about his self-possession when you remember the year was 1968, and, despite The Beatles and everything they meant, eighteen-year-old Norman Hiller could still wear a baseball cap winter and summer without risk of being laughed at.
When the screen lit up, retrieving the faces of the waiting audience from that fleeting, profound moment of darkness before the projector began to whir, Hiller was utterly changed. The scurry abandoned his eyes and the fidget was wiped from his face, leaving it pale, smooth, and shining.
What were Hiller’s favourite movies? He had a list of them. Norman was famous for his lists. “Okay,” he’d propose, “name me the Top Policemen in the NHL, one to ten.” Or rank the National League third basemen. It only followed that he had an All Time Greatest Movies list. By summer 1968 this list included The Magnificent Seven, The Guns of Navarone, The Dirty Dozen, The Devil’s Brigade, and, in his opinion, the world’s ultimo primo flick, Cool Hand Luke. These were the films from which Hiller absorbed the arts of scripting and direction which put Murph and Dooey and Hop Jump and Deke and me under his spell, a cast of misfits who could be persuaded to identify themselves with the screwballs who populated the movies Hiller loved. We were all reborn in Norman’s imagination. He turned Dooey, an edgy little shoplifter, into James Garner. What was Garner famous for in The Great Escape? Scrounging. He could rustle up whatever you required, even in a Nazi prison camp. Norman constructed Dooey into a legend in Dooey’s own mind, until he became the consummate booster, the guy who could steal anything. “Fucking Dooey,” Norman would say, “nothing the guy can’t lift. Dooey could steal Christ off the cross and not disturb the nails. Couldn’t you, Dooey? Fucking right. Because he’s the best. Dooey is it.”
If Cool Hand Luke gained undying fame just by swallowing forty hard boiled eggs, then wasn’t glory in the cards for Hop Jump Benyuk? Because Hop Jump could stuff a whole baseball in his mouth. Encouraged by Norman, he even started carrying one around in his jacket pocket so he was always equipped to perform. “He ought to be on television,” Hiller would exclaim. “How many guys can do what he can do? One in a hundred million? I doubt it. Maybe, just maybe – outside chance – one in two hundred million. The guy ought to be on Ed Sullivan.”
And me, Bernie Beman, who was I? In the movies Norman admired I would have been the brain gone bad, the one the criminals nicknamed The Professor. Just possibly I was Donald Pleasance in The Great Escape, bird-watcher, egghead, forger. However, Norman was always a little bit uncertain of my dependability, my loyalty to the regime. He never forgot, or forgave me putting Lawrence of Arabia on my All Time Greatest Movies list.
“What!” he had cried, in open-mouthed disbelief. “A seven-hour movie about a bunch of camel-fucking Arabs?”
“Yes,” I said, aware of Dooey, Murph, Deke, Hop Jump, all the other geeks, snorting their derision, already feeling the chill of exclusion.
“The only reason they had an intermission in that show was to go around and wake up everybody from the first half so’s they didn’t get bedsores. There something the matter with you, Beman?”
I didn’t say. What was the matter with me was that I found it easier to identify myself with a tormented Peter O’Toole than a chiselled, brass-balled Charles Bronson or Clint Walker.
I pointed out Lawrence of Arabia had won a lot of Oscars.
“You ever think that those rug-riders didn’t rig the Oscars?” said Norman. “Use your head. Those fucking Arabs are so rich their Lincoln, their Cadillac gets a full ashtray they walk away from it, buy a new one. I read that somewhere. They shit quarters and wipe their asses with ten-dollar bills. You think they couldn’t buy themselves as many Oscars as they want? Even for such a loser as that?”
“There’s no point in even talking to you, Hiller.”
“No point in talking to me? No point in talking to you, Beman. No point in talking to you.” Which is what happened. Norman put the word out and nobody did talk to me. I was shunned, given the silent treatment for a month and a half before I managed to weasel my way back into Norman’s good graces.
I was as susceptible to Hiller’s manipulations as any of the others. When he was feeling magnanimous towards me, he made flattering predictions about my future as a lawyer (his choice of profession for me), extolled the notorious Beman vocabulary. With me as a lawyer, Hiller’s clan would be untouchable, beyond the reach of the law. “How’d you like to be a lawyer and come up against a gunfighter like Beman there? Slinging those high words of his at you, words you hadn’t even heard of? Fuck, the English teachers don’t even know what Beman is talking about half the time when he starts firing off those yard-long words full of syllables. No shit, Beman reads the dictionary for fun. Don’t you, Beman?”
“Yes.” I couldn’t help myself, I relished basking in the glare of Hiller’s temporary spotlight, too. Just like Dooey or Hop Jump.
“Say one of your high words, Bernardo, my man.”
“What?”
“Say one of those words no normal human being knows what they mean.”
“Like what?”
“Come on, come on. A word, Beman. Give us one of those words of yours.”
“Bastinado.”
Hiller looking challengingly from Dooey to Murph to Hop Jump. “What’s it mean? That word?”
Shrugs and sheepish grins.
/> “What’d I say? How you going to beat that man in court? How you going to argue against a guy when you don’t even know what the fuck he’s saying? Impossible.”
Whatever I withheld from Hiller, whatever would have been unspeakable in the company of the others (like an affection for Lawrence of Arabia) was confided to Kurt Meinecke. Kurt and I had been friends since elementary school. What he listened to were secret, laughable ambitions. To be a journalist and report a war. To be drunk and cynical in a great city. To speak foreign languages like a native. With a patient, bewildered look on his face he heard me out nights as we tramped the dull, empty streets after the pool room shut, on the prowl until our knees ached, hoping against all previous experience that something exciting would happen and we would be there to witness it. But the only thing that ever happened was that a police cruiser would stop and the officers tell us it was three o’clock in the morning, get the hell home you two.
Kurt was possessed but he didn’t look the way possessed people ought to, the way Norman Hiller did. Norman fit the bill because he was an exposed wire, sparking, jerking, snapping, hot with current. Kurt was the furthest thing from that. He was big and slow and solid. He walked like a man hip-deep in molasses, wading upstream against the flow of the current. But he was possessed.
Whenever I shut up long enough to give him an opening, he would jump in with something like, “I think I’ll take up golf.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I think I’m suited to golf. All you need is hand-eye coordination and concentration. Concentration is my strong point.”
“Sure it is.”
“If I practised real hard I should do good. I got what it takes.”
“Right.”
Hopeless.
For as long as I’d known him, Kurt Meinecke had been in search of his game, the one that would prove what he knew deep down inside – that he was an extraordinary athlete. He was a Meinecke, which meant that he had the bloodlines of a champion. His father and all his uncles had been locally celebrated athletes, renowned hockey players and baseball players and players of every other game that idle, foolish men will play. It was even said that his Uncle Rudy Meinecke would have made the NHL if he hadn’t caught his right hand in a power take-off which chewed four of his fingers off.
Kurt was a different story. It wasn’t so much that he was bad at sports, only appallingly average. Yet his consistent failure to shine on the fields of glory did nothing to shake his bedrock, imperturbable self-confidence that he was destined for greatness. He always spoke of this as a given and obvious. And he tried everything, a hundred schemes to locate and free the springs of his talent. His batting problems would be solved if he switched from batting right-handed to left-handed. They weren’t. He’d be a much better hockey player if he moved from forward to defence. He wasn’t. A typical conversation with Kurt Meinecke might run something like this.
“It’s too bad we don’t play lacrosse around here. That’d be the game for me, you can get a running start and really pop somebody in lacrosse. That’s my problem at football, from the down position I can’t work up a good head of steam to pop anybody. I’m the kind of guy needs a head of steam to be effective.”
There were times when this serene absence of self-doubt worked on my nerves terribly, festered until I believed there was no help for it, I was going to tell him. Of course, I never did. Truly sweet and gentle souls never get told what the rest of us do. Kurt Meinecke was so incorrigibly innocent that whenever I rehearsed the cynicism and world-weariness I intended to adopt when I was loosed upon the great cities of the world, he would smile uncomfortably, duck his head, and waddle along just a little bit more quickly in that goofy, toes-turned-out walk he had, as if seeking to put distance between himself and the nasty things being said.
Norman and Kurt weren’t strangers, our town was too small for that, but they never had much to do with one another. Hiller wasn’t interested in collecting the likes of Meinecke, someone who, on the surface, was as dull as ditch water and twice as murky. But then one afternoon Norman sensed a possibility, leaned over, peered into the ditch and saw all the way down, clear to the bottom. I was there when it happened.
Kurt and I were planted on a bench in the pool room. Meinecke was droning on and I was pretending to be preoccupied with a couple of senior citizens shooting a game of blue ball so I didn’t have to wax too enthusiastic about Kurt’s next adventure in the wide world of sports. That’s when Norman Hiller slouched over to pay us a visit, jabbing his thumb in the direction of the pool table and delivering a typical sample of Hiller wit. “You know why they call it blue ball, eh? Because that’s what the old farts who play it got dangling between their legs.” Having delivered this line, he dropped down on the bench beside us and started to beaver a toothpick for all he was worth.
I laughed, but Hiller’s sally only caused Kurt to blink a couple of owlish, solemn blinks before resuming his monologue. “I was thinking I’d go out for the wrestling team this year,” he said. “I ought to be a pretty decent wrestler. I mean I got real strong fingers” – he held them up and flexed them under my nose – “and they say strong fingers are a must. I think I ought to make an okay wrestler.”
I didn’t say anything. Hiller did. He always had an opinion when it came to sports. “You don’t want to wrestle,” he said. “Wrestling is a homo sport, guys dry humping each other all over a mat. There are more queers in wrestling than there are in figure skating. Little known fact. You want to take up the personal combat line – go into boxing, Meinecke.”
“Boxing?” I said. There was no boxing club in our town, nor any boxers that I knew of.
“Yeah, well, look at him,” said Norman turning to me. “Look at the fucking neck on him. The guy’s got a fucking neck like a tree trunk. Neck like that – works like shock absorbers on a car. You hit a guy with a neck like that, no way you could knock him out.”
I cast Kurt a sidelong glance. I could see he was listening intently. Hiller could see it too.
“Neck and hands,” continued Norman confidently. “That’s what makes a fighter. Kurt here has the neck but does he have the hands? That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. Let’s have a peek at the mitts, Meinecke.”
Kurt showed the mitts, self-consciously displaying them on his knees where they lay immense, red, chapped, ugly. Norman prodded the knuckles with his index finger. “Look at them knuckles, Beman!” he urged. “Like fucking ball-bearings. These are lethal weapons we’re looking at. Stand back! Stand back!” he shouted theatrically, recoiling in mock alarm. “You don’t want those exploding in your face!”
Apparently Kurt had it all, neck and hands. To hear Hiller talk we were in the presence of greatness. And greatness believed it. Norman shifted position on the bench and slipped his arm around Meinecke’s shoulders. “Ducks were made for water,” he said. “And you were made for the ring, Meinecke. You are a natural raw talent just waiting to be developed.”
“But how? How do I get developed?”
“You got to have like a manager, a trainer. Somebody to get the best out of you.”
“But who?” said Meinecke. “Who’s a trainer around here?”
I knew. Before answering, Norman leaned a little closer.
The Meinecke training camp’s headquarters was established at Deke’s. Deke’s daddy had disappeared about the time Deke turned fourteen, three years before, and the mattress which Deke’s Mom had drunkenly set on fire while smoking in bed, and which his father had hauled smouldering through the house to heave into the backyard, was still there, a map of interesting stains dominated by the charred, blackened crater whose flames Mr. Deke had extinguished with the garden hose that fateful day. Shortly after this incident Mr. Deke had taken off for parts unknown and Mrs. Deke, down in the dumps and remorseful over the turn her life had taken, fell prey to Jehovah’s Witnesses and converted. Despite all these momentous changes, nobody got around to hauling the offending mattress off to the nuisance grou
nds and three years later it still lay where it had fallen. Which was convenient for Dooey, Hop Jump, Murph, and the rest of us because it provided a spot to loll about on while watching Hiller put Kurt through his paces. There amid the yellow grass, the run-over tricycle with the sow thistle growing up through the spokes of a twisted wheel, the greasy patch of lawn which Mr. Deke had killed by draining the oil from his car onto it every change, there amid all the other symptoms of neglect – scattered gaskets, a picket pulled from the sagging fence by Deke’s brothers and sisters, a lid from a paint can, shards of vinyl from a broken record, a torn plastic diaper, a discarded hot plate whose two rusted elements seemed to regard the scene with blood-shot, whirling eyes – the training of Kurt Meinecke went on in a blistering July heat wave.
Meinecke jumping rope in the hottest stretch of the afternoon, Hiller roaring abuse and ridicule at him. “Knees higher! Get them knees up! No pain, no gain! I still see titty bouncing there! Bouncing boobies, Meinecke! Shame! No fighter of mine goes into the ring looking like he needs a brassiere! Knees up!”
Road work was even more brutal. Hiller conned Kurt into allowing himself to be tied to the bumper of Murph’s reservation beater Chev with twenty feet of rope. The car was then driven at exactly six miles an hour down two miles of deserted country road with Kurt flailing along behind in the dust. If Meinecke didn’t keep up he’d be dragged. When I protested, Norman said that it was the only way to get Meinecke to put out, he was such a lazy fuck. Anyway, boxing was survival of the fittest.
“But what if he trips and falls?” I asked.
“He’s got no business tripping,” said Norman.
Things As They Are? Page 6
