by Kluge, P. F.
“Boys,” he said to Cleve and Billy. “I’d like to speak to my brother.” Then came what sounded like an insult. “About business.”
Cleve and Billy looked at each other and laughed. They got up, but they took their time about it, stretching and yawning.
“Well, Billy,” said Cleve, “I guess that’s alright with us, isn’t it. The man wants to speak to his brother …”
“Yessir. About business”
“It’s better than alright. These business talks cost money.” They walked slowly away and I wished that I were walking with them.
“You shouldn’t …”
“Alright,” Heinz said. “I’m sorry. Can we talk?”
“I can listen,” I said, making room on the bench. He’d been out all night, it looked like. He hadn’t shaved and his clothes were wrinkled. There was beer in his sweat: you could smell it, on a hot day like this.
“No song and dance for you,” he said. “You saw what happened. They robbed him.”
I nodded. That was undeniable.
“But all they took from Max was his title. For the fight, he was paid. In full. For me, it was different. They reached right in my pocket. So …”
He smiled at me. He shrugged. We were still brothers. We both knew what was coming. And that, turned it around, Heinz would give me everything he had. We also knew that such a turn-around would never happen because he was who he was and I was different.
“How much?” I asked.
“How much do you have?” he asked. Fifty dollars, I said. That was everything. I walked with him towards Otto’s building. He waited across the street, in the park, while I got the money. He nodded, gave me a longer look than usual. No thanks, no promise to repay, nothing like that. Then I watched him walk away. And so, from across 110th, did Otto Hofer. He was, as I have already told, a stern man. He went out of his way to counter the immigrant notion that America was a wonderland, the streets were paved with gold, everyone got rich. He rarely spoke to me, only watched me work. But now he signaled for me to stay a while.
“How much?” he asked.
“Everything. Fifty.”
“Fifty.” He was impressed. “You save. But now it’s gone.” He puffed his cigar. He always wore a suit out of doors, always with a vest. He had that old world dignity. “Now you start all over again. Are you sorry, what you just did?”
“No,” I said after thinking about it. I was sorry what had happened. I missed my money. But I wasn’t sorry about giving it to Heinz. And I was a little proud that I said as much to Otto, who maybe expected a different answer.
“And,” he continued, “if he came to you again, your brother, after the next Max Schmeling fight and if he asked for money again, would you give again?”
I glanced into the park where my brother had gone. I thumbed through my collection of moments in America. Heinz and Otto at the pier. Schmeling on the swing in New Jersey. Two national anthems.
“Well?” he pressed. Not like a lawyer presses, more like someone who was offering you another drink.
“No,” I answered. And that was that. He patted my shoulder and padded up the street to buy his afternoon paper, the Journal-American.
Now it’s fifty years later and I’m in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, sitting out after supper-for-one, liver and onions I cooked myself, watching cars full of Little Leaguers go up the street, an hour to go before Wheel of Fortune comes on and what I’m realizing is that June night in 1932 was a milestone for me. I think about that night. Even though I was there, it’s like a newsreel I’m watching, black and white, historical, the men with cigars and hats, the women with lipstick and furs and stockings with a seam up the back. Everybody looks like actors in a movie. I mull over what became of them all in the time between now and then. Just consider the mayors sitting down at ringside. And Bruno Richard Hauptmann—he was there that night, a carpenter in the cheap seats—as we later learned. Mayor Walker wound up an exiled playboy, Mayor Hague went to prison, Mayor Cermak got shot in Miami while he was with Roosevelt, and some say he took a bullet meant for Roosevelt, others say, hell no, it was meant for Cermak. That poor Hauptmann got framed and fried for the Lindbergh kidnapping; lucky for Max Schmeling he wasn’t in the neighborhood that night or they’d have nailed him too. A strange country, America. It keeps coming back to me. Getting stranger all the time and me a stranger in it. Watching tv almost any night has become an act of treason because, in my heart, I was rooting for the Vietnamese, the outsiders, the underdogs, the way I pulled for Max Schmeling. I rooted for those Cubans who got steamrollered on Grenada. And during the Olympics … well, that’s the worst of all. Here you had the whole world coming to Los Angeles, coming to our country, and night after night, whether it’s javelin throwing or wrestling, gymnastics or whatever, the camera pans row after row of those blonde cocky people, finger in the air, booing foreigners far from home, booing officials, chanting “We’re number one, we’re number one,” and “USA! USA!” And don’t take my word for it, watch the films, read the books, and I swear you’ll find the crowd at the 1936 Olympics, the Hitler Olympics in Berlin, had better manners than those golden-haired super-fans in sunny California.
This used to be a neighborhood, out here. I don’t want to make too much of that—we didn’t loan money and we didn’t swap bed partners—but each morning the women had coffee together and sometimes in the winter, when the snow plows didn’t come, we shoveled the streets ourselves. Summer nights we sat out and listened to the Dodgers on the radio and when the first television came—a ten-inch Dumont with a magnifying glass that stood in front—we all watched Uncle Miltie. Not a commune, not a kibbutz. A neighborhood. I’m the last one left. My new neighbors, I hardly know; that’s close enough. People who say we’ve got to teach the Japs a lesson one more time and me, I ask what the lesson would be and they can’t tell me. People who say they can’t believe all the brave men who died in Vietnam and me, I ask them which brave men they mean, the Americans or those others. They can’t believe men die for nothing. I tell them it happens all the time. Take it from a German.
Well, nobody beats the clock. But we try. We try to leave something of ourselves behind. A tree, a garden, a house with memories, a bird feeding station. Or you have a son. Mom and I believed in him, the way parents do, the way poor people do, the way immigrants do. Add it up, it’s a triple whammy, a whole lot of believing. Our golden boy, our college material, our first generation German-American scholarship winner. It wasn’t just Mom and me. We all believed it, the whole bunch of us. Our kids were our religion, our nod in the general direction of eternity. Maybe there’s no way they could have lived up to all the hopes we had for them. There were some hits and misses, that’s for sure. Heini Strasser’s daughter ended up a research scientist at Rockefeller, working on cancer. Lorenz Schroeder’s Teddy who they spent thousands of dollars on, sending him from school to school, lives in a trailer in Maine and when they went to visit, he weighed three hundred pounds and they didn’t stay for supper, the place wasn’t clean. Hits and misses, breathers and breeders, in-betweeners. Disappointments, kind of. You pick up things, reading in between the lines of Christmas letters. “Our Pete is still with Maytag. He got married again. This one seems like a nice girl.” Sometimes, they’re bragging and brave for the record, their kid owns a boat, real busy, travels around a lot on business. And never calls. Sometimes the prides-and-joys visit once a year, maybe, and the failures show up every weekend messing around in the refrigerator. So what’s the moral of the story? You tell me. I have a son. I come back to him, again and again, to the fellow who calls himself George Griffin. The well-known travel writer.
PART TWO
I.
FAREWAY PLACES, BACKYARD ADVENTURES
by George Griffin
IT’S ODD, HOW COUNTRIES BEGIN. IN A BOAT ON THE Mekong, wide and turbid, right at the tip of the legendary Golden Triangle, I see the first and last of three countries. Behind me, in Thailand, sun glints off gold-leafed pagodas. H
awkers’ stalls line the river’s edge, smoke from cooking fires drifts upward into lazy, spiceladen air. Upstream, forbidden Burma begins in a field of reeds and cat-tails, beyond which stands a wall of mountains, green-gray and formidable, reserving judgment on a world that wants to visit. Much nearer—I could wade ashore in a minute—Laos is a bunch of kids sliding down a red-clay riverbank, splashing towards us, waving cheerfully, then pulling away at the last minute. Off to one side a woman, topless, a sarong wrapped around her middle, washes slowly in muddy water. Across closed borders, our eyes meet …
Bangkok, 1984. Welcome to my world. Bangkok as seen from a penthouse suite, high, roomy and free, Bangkok at dusk, with the neon twinkle kindling down below, the nightly magic that turned one of the world’s ugliest sprawls into a festering wonderland of food and sex. There I sat roughing out my column, just in from a day in the field, turning life into art. Or trying to.
I liked the opening riff—“it’s odd, how countries begin” —but after that it was not more than competent: sun glinting on Buddhist temples. Your first temple was spectacular, the first one stopped your heart: the gold leaf, the inlaid porcelain, saffron-robed monks—always outnumbered by tourists— and then the big man himself, seated, reclining, reposing. After that, they were franchises. So, for that matter, was the Golden Triangle, complete with a golden arch, not unlike McDonald’s so many million served. Narco-tourists posed for pictures with a quartet of mountain tribe kids, aboriginally attired, embroidered and beaded. “Take picture, ten baht, okay, take picture, ten baht, okay” they pleaded. Then there was the “turbid” Mekong: a word right out of Somerset Maugham. Whenever a Maugham character sat on a colonial porch, reading a months-old news paper underneath a fan, a dusky mistress out back, a neurotic wife due on the next boat, he’d glance out at an invariably turbid river: thick, opaque, filled with sediment. The river hadn’t changed. The reading public had. Delete turbid. That business with the topless woman wouldn’t last either. It would take too long to explain that she wasn’t welcoming, she wasn’t voluptuous, she wasn’t interested. But in a world of ready welcome, I welcomed indifference. I liked people who didn’t smile at strangers, countries that had nothing to sell. There weren’t many left. Close shop for a while, throw around that magic word forbidden and watch the lines form.
A bus trip to the infamous Golden Triangle, three countries in view at once, then, a boat ride on the fabled Mekong, after that, a visit to five, count ’em, five primitive hill tribes: believe it or not, I had been virtuous that day, gathering ingredients, cooking my column from scratch. Sometimes I decided to lose myself in the tourist crowd, slip in among those slow-moving gaggles who wore name tags, rallied around flags, laughed at guides’ jokes, and obediently went shopping, wherever they were told. One temple, one shop, that was the pattern, one stop for culture, one for souvenirs. And I sat in a van, watching a tour guide earn his pay, chasing a family of Indians who disappeared down a knick-knack alley, hustling after a Singaporean who knelt down to look at a pile of gems, some Germans posing with mountain kids, a couple of Aussies drawn toward a Carlsberg sign. The money pouches the tourists wore in front, dangling below their navels, looked like jockstraps, stuffed with bills. Back on the road, a little later, the van couldn’t handle hills and air-conditioning at the same time. Cold air leaked an inch out of overhead nozzles, then retreated. Passengers grew torpid and indifferent. If someone had the nerve to suggest it, we’d have voted to bag the hill tribes. Half of us were sleeping, missing a whole range of mountains, jagged, unclimbable slopes. In Thailand, most mountains had long since been stripped; bamboo grew where hardwoods once stood. Replanted trees grew in straight lines, staying where they’d been put, like hair transplants I remembered on Senator Proxmire. Here and there, you could see traces of the original forest, though, a glorious tangle, trees like ship masts, trailing vines, leaves and flowers all around, but only on unprofitable slopes, in hard to get at places, like hairs around a wart, too risky to shave. Twenty minutes ago, the guide had informed us that they grew two crops of rice per year around here. Any questions. No? Then he zoned out. I studied our human cargo: heads tilted back, eyes closed, mouths open, no pretense of interest in the land we passed through. Tourists. After fifteen years, I still wondered what to make of them. Early on, I’d been excited that they were there for me, that I had an audience which my agent put in “the low millions.” Sometimes he stressed the millions, sometimes he emphasized the low. It was the real estate business writ large. What realtors in yellow jackets said about houses, I said about vacations: a good starter trip, needs TLC, dates from colonial times, river frontage, don’t curb appraise, won’t last long. After that, after friendship, after cynicism, there was something else, a Miss Lonely hearts kind of feeling, compassion for people who went so tamely, so gamely into a world that greeted them with uniform cynicism. Now, when the driver honked at a three wheeler crossing in front of us, I saw tourist eyes fight open, then close. After lunch they were finished, photographers without cameras, cameras out of film. Only so many pictures in a roll, only so much insight in a day.
The van turned off the highway. The guide revived, the needle fell back in groove. We learned that with government encouragement and international aid, hill tribes had been induced to abandon their border-crossing poppy-growing ways and move to permanent settlements, in reach of schools, clinics and tourists. I guessed what was coming and it wasn’t going to be pretty. Aborigineland. We came to the end of the road and what looked like a yard sale on the edge of a pit mine: baked brown dirt, dusty leaves, rickety huts. Sunken-chested, cataract-clouded old men shuffled between stalls. Old women, all knees and cheekbones, waved us on, as if towards communion: this is my culture, broken for you. Babies crawled along in the dust trafficking with dogs bound for the cook pots, dogs so red-skinned, pocked and mangy that they looked half-cooked already. My companions gamely exited and wandered up the road, 200 lb. men and 180 lb. women, picking over hats and belts and shawls and quilts, hard-bargaining a tribe of starving locals while the Chinese guide pattered about “these people.” And I leaned against the window, struck by the dead-end sadness of it all. I guess what got me was the idea that anyone who was watching me watch the tourists would include me in the scene, as much a part of it as the tour guide and the driver. The travel writer. There he sits, like a playwright, watching his work being performed. George Griffin, proprietor of Faraway Places, Backyard Adventures. The whole world’s his stage, you’d better believe it.
Returning to Bangkok, I confined myself to the Dusit Thani, with television and room service, early swims, late breakfasts and no apologies to anybody. I worked on my column, getting the tone right, turning jadedness into savvy, familiarity into geniality and despair—stark shuddering despair—into enlightenment. What I accomplished, I thought, was an account of a world-worth-visiting. If that took perjury, it was alright with me. Lying, when you came right down to it, was a heroic act: you faced up to the difference between what was and wasn’t. You met the world as it was, on its own terms, and then you did the best you could. But now, after a Thai meal, an Irish coffee, a Cuban cigar, life was fine. Once more I resembled the man whose photograph perched atop my column, shrewd but approachable, good company. Hey, you from Jersey? I’m from Jersey too! And it was in Bangkok, right there, right then that Jersey found me. The envelope marked “CONFIDENTIAL,” it came from my agent, a pile of recent columns and a second envelope with handwriting I knew. A crucial moment. Looking back I picture myself as an oncologist, holding a chest x-ray against a wall of neon lights, frowning at some shadowy inoperable mass. A letter from my father. From a return address I once called home. That would be New Jersey.
Well, I said to myself, he’s still alive. So it can’t be that kind of bad news. Or maybe it was. It might be a letter he’d written a while ago, when he sensed the end coming, leaving instructions and—no doubt—postage on the table beside his deathbed. That was his kind of stunt. He’d die, knowing he had the last
word. I was nervous when I opened the envelope. DON’T WORRY ABOUT ANSWERING THIS ONE, SON. YOU’RE OFF THE HOOK. I’M DEAD. SO LONG.
It was a printed notice. Dear Classmate, it began, but someone had crossed out the classmate and scribbled in: George! My high school class—1964—was organizing its twentieth reunion, scheduled for three months ahead, in November. I scanned the names of the reunion committee. Dan Cerruti, Sandy Parks Cowan, Emil Russo, Warren Flieger, Vivian Amadeo Torres. We’d gone to a big regional high school, four hundred seniors from five New Jersey towns that ranged from upper-class suburban estates parked along the ridges of the Watchung Mountains to aging factory-refinery towns in the flatlands outside of Newark and Perth Amboy. Kitty Scarpato Jackson, Leslie Levin Baum. The girls had all dusted off their maiden names, as if pleading to be pictured as they used to be, before they met the guy they’d be standing next to. Beckoning from out of the past; hey, remember me? And that, it turned out, was the gist of my father’s message as well.
George—
I’m okay. These high school people called to find out where you were. I told them I only know what I read in the papers—and I don’t believe much of that—but I would try to get this to you. George, it’s none of my business but I think it’s nice that your old friends remember you. Come on out, why don’t you? You can stay with me. Also, George, there’s some things we need to talk about that can’t wait much longer. Call me back when you get back from doing whatever it is you are doing wherever it is you do it. Come visit me and see about the reunion. That way, you can kill one bird with two stones.
Your Pop
