1969 and Then Some

by Robert Wintner

  We crossed Northern Italy into the Alps, staying at a youth hostel on the top of a mountain and riding the next day into Munich, where David retained his tact, rising above rancor or regret. “I think you may be one of the best motorcyclists in Europe, but I can’t ride with you anymore. It hurts my back, and it’s scary.”

  I matched his simple honesty with understanding. “I think I’ve had enough too.” I had no plan for shipping the thing back—hadn’t even thought that far, typically of the day and age. Shipping it would cost hundreds more and present another thousand miles from New York to the Midwest, which would have been incredibly cool a few months ago but at that point the idea sagged with fatigue. So who knows? Maybe I was well into transit too.

  We rode to the Neumann Center that operated as a youth hostel around Europe then, and you didn’t have to be Catholic; but it didn’t hurt. Where was Bruno when we needed him? The woman said to come back after three, so we cruised down to Schwabbing, the hip action boulevard of those happening times. Even then the Germans were a goosestep ahead, among the first to embrace post-existential nihilism in a holdover beatnik, chain-smoking, heroin-addled, tattooed radical world on the burnt edge of the hippie world. Schwabbing was lined with action places to drink, dance, eat, smoke, drink more and simply be. The angled parking places along the boulevard were a popular place to sell vehicles adequately hip to appeal to that market. So I angled in and put a sign on my handlebars. For Sale. It felt like treachery.

  Did I really want to do this? But a gregarious voice coming up the promenade interrupted my doubts. “You can’t sell that thing here! I mean of course you can. We are free to do what we want to do. But that motorcycle—it is beautiful, by the way—is British. I would buy it myself, but fucking Britain, excuse me, refuses to join the Common Market. If anybody in Europe buys it, he’ll have to pay a 33% tax. That’s right. I said 33%. How much do you want?”

  “Five hundred dollars.”

  “Hmm. A bit high. Way too high with the tax. You know.” His name was Dolph Dieter Helmann, but we could call him Dolph Dieter. “Oh, fuck, you know. Just call me Dolph. Why do you want to sell such a beautiful moto?”

  “I don’t, really. I need the money.”

  “Ah, yes. The money. Everybody needs it. And I suppose you are very tired of riding it. All the Americans end up here with their flashy motorcycles tired of riding them and willing to sell them very cheap.” Dolph sounded like a set up. David stared at an obvious former Nazi. The Thousand Year Reich had marched up Schwabbing only thirty years ago. Dolph was about mid-thirties, too young, except for the Hitler Youth Corps. David couldn’t help it, as his morbid motivation went to mordantly awkward compulsion. Maybe some things are necessary.

  “Are you a Nazi?” The question sounded aggressive, even hostile and marginally stupid, out of place and time, but the subject lingered beyond place and time. It drifted in the ether like a mist, a sticky one that would not dissipate, a tangible essence in its consequence. And odd as David’s sensibilities were, this was the very same boulevard where thousands upon thousands of Germans had stretched an arm in allegiance and abeyance to der füehrer for world domination forever . . .

  “Nein! No, I was not a Nazi. I was too young. I was only Hitlerjugend. We was kids—ve vas kids—younger than you. It was like camp. We didn’t know what it was. Oh, today they all tell you they didn’t know how terrible—they all say they hid their Jews in the basement. They knew. But we was kids. We didn’t know. You ask these kids around here today about Nazi. They will tell you, Vas? Vas iss los? Nazi? They know nothing about that. What? You think they learn it in school? No. What is to teach, that we made a mistake of character and judgment? No. We are taught that we went to war and we lost, and now it is over. My father was a tank commander, but he wasn’t a Nazi. He was a soldier. In the desert. You know.”

  David stared.

  I pondered Nazis and 33% tax and another eight hundred miles to Amsterdam and another thousand miles to Middle America. That’s when Gary Cooper walked up with his trademark swagger and slow confidence to ask, “How much?”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Venice.”

  Gary had shaggy blond hair and was clearly one of us. Dolph said, “You don’t look Italian.”

  “Venice Beach, man.”

  “Five hundred.”

  He nodded. “I’ll give you five hundred if you can wait.”

  “Wait for what?”

  “Till I get home, man. I got two hundred I can give you now, but I’ll have to save the other three. Shouldn’t take more’n a few months.”

  “This you can do,” Dolph said. “Selling to another American has no tax. Who is to know?”

  “But what about the title and registration?”

  “Doesn’t matter. You sign over the registration in his name so he can cross the border. Then you work out the money with him.”

  “You want to drive it?”

  “Fuck yeah, man.”

  So Gary Cooper, whose name sounded suspiciously like a Venice Beach bid for Phase II stardom in Hollywood and an easy motorcycle hustle, roared up Schwabbing. That he turned around and came back was the big surprise, as I realized when he pulled out that the whole show could have been staged.

  But it was a time of confidences. It was not staged. It was coincidence, or synchronous convergence, similar as two paths crossing in a snowy wood without the snow but with the same faith and trust. Yet again the age embraced the lyric.

  The bigger surprise was the overwhelming relief when Gary Cooper pressed two hundred dollars into my hand with a handshake and a promise to pay the other three hundred in the next few months. We traded addresses and phone numbers, and he was off on my Lightning Rocket. I like to think that that’s how it was in those days, though it may have been only sheer, dumb luck. I was dumb—tired and dumb. And lucky. And maybe it was.

  A bigger surprise came in Gary’s first letter some weeks later, saying that the motorcycle was about the most fun he’d ever had, all four hours of it the next morning, till a car turned in front of him from the wrong lane and he crashed into it broadside and went flying over the top but didn’t get hurt, but the motorcycle looked like a steel pretzel. In the letter was a check for fifty bucks and a continuing pledge to pay the rest as soon as he could.

  That’s the thing about riding every day; if you don’t get creamed in the first week or two, you probably won’t, because you gain the second nature, a certain knowing that they will try to kill you given the chance. Gary was unseasoned, without road wits.

  Meanwhile, back at Schwabbing, Dolph offered to show us a great place to eat and celebrate. We said we’d meet him once we ditched our stuff, but he tagged along. We wondered why but figured it out. Dolph was born too soon. He was one of us, technically too old to trust but he compensated with gregarious charm. He explained that he liked hanging out with American tourists, because they taught him about the world. Back at the Neumann Center at three forty-five, the desk frau said she had no rooms. “You said to come back after three and . . .”

  She pounded the table with her fist. “I said come back exACTly at three! No room for you.”

  Dolph laughed, “Fucking Germans.” Not to worry—he knew a place, though he cautioned: do not ask the man who would rent us the room anything about Nazis. The man greeted Dolph with an emotionless hug. He appeared to be early to mid-sixties and a very apparent colonel. In a bathrobe with no visible clothing under it, smoking a turquoise cigarette with a gold filter in a pearl holder that he held between thumb and forefinger, palm up, he seemed the essence of gentlemanly bestiality. “Are you . . .” He puffed his cigarette, exhaling as he scanned David and me. “. . . a couple?”

  “Yeah. A couple o’ knuckleheads,” I said, quickly giving David a knuckle rub on the head. This behavior indicated removal from manhood—and removal from genteel bestiality; it dashed hopes for nostalgic reminiscence of the Third Reich while ass fucking. Which, when you think about it, was a seaso
ned move on my part.

  We got the key to the room at the top of the stairs with a warning to be quiet and leave the key on the table in the hall.

  Dolph took us to a place for bratwurst and sauerkraut and much beer, again deferring to David’s check list. Dinner was superb. David said, “Gee, it’s a good thing Germans don’t fart.” Dolph laughed, leaned over for an oompa pa and ordered another round, saying we’d have to leave if they started with the polkas, because he couldn’t take anymore polkas.

  The next day David took a bus to Bremen, where he would either book a tour or go alone to Bergen-Belsen, where his grandparents died. I headed to Amsterdam without asking what he would gain by staring at some Godforsaken ruins and ovens. Apparently it would do something for him, something he needed done. We would meet at the American Express office on Dam Square at noon in two days, or at five as a backup to noon.

  We kept the peace by focusing on practical concerns, by discussing logistics for meeting in Amsterdam. Practicality seemed best, given his compulsive search for a physical connection to the horror or the lingering spirit or the lost souls, or all of the above. It remained amorphous and conceptual to me. The camps were a devilish stain on humanity—yes, already a few anti-Semitics were swearing that it never happened, which underscored the importance of proof and remembrance. Oh, it happened, and we’re not so concerned that it might happen again, because it surely will if allowed to happen. The greatest concern now is that those hateful few must bear the shame for eternity.

  Still, David seemed driven by a mordant curiosity somehow meant to flesh out a specific identity. I had mine. It was easy: a skinny young Jew hell-bent for adventure on two wheels. Nazi death camps? Where (the fuck) was that at?

  Nowhere was the obvious answer, and I felt like I’d arrived at last, with or without the two wheels under me. Well, let it be. David was missing the motorcycle gene. I got along fine without wallowing in death camp horror.

  I felt woefully average without the speed, the feeling, the look, the view, the centrifugal and centripetal forces gently opposed with me conducting from the podium. This was the World Youth Symphony Philharmonic—or had been till the music slammed into silence, which was better than a wreck, but left something to be desired. I practically wobbled through those first days of no motorcycle like a sailor freshly landed on terra firma, and so will ice skaters after only an hour at the rink. Coming down off the blades to the shoe-leather express is a grounding experience, a good one in some ways, allaying certain dangers but then removing the great rewards derived from risk.

  On the bright side, optimism prevailed on plenty more hazard where that came from. David and I met again on the fountain steps in Dam Square among many youth gathered to share tales from all corners of Europe and North Africa. Many pipes wisped into a single cloud. We loaded a gram of hash into our pipe and joined the flow, giggling when a cop stepped carefully over our outstretched legs. It wasn’t funny. It was the way things should be, with public servants serving the public.

  We lost ten days in Amsterdam smoking hash subtle enough to assure that it would not impair. That time was not totally lost but lingers in the mists of amazing good fun. Two clubs then specialized in loud music in an auditorium with speakers at varying levels, floor to ceiling all the way around for total penetration of the stoned groove. Mattresses all over the floor let you lie down before you fell down, or you could fall to a softer landing. You could smoke your own hash or buy it there and lie down and roll over, Beethoven.

  Oh, yeah, Chuck Berry sang it a dozen years earlier but emerged from the cloudbank with a downbeat perfectly tuned to what we felt, what we were. The groove honed more perfectly on Creedence, the Stones, Dylan, Big Brother, Moody Blues, Jimi, Janis—you name it. Nobody danced then, except alone when the muse inspired movement. The step of the day was the modified funky chicken, in which the dancer flopped around with no apparent concern—make that deliberate disregard—for conventional rhythm or grace in another compelling demonstration of nonconformity. David and I lay back on our mattress and giggled like hyenas one more time when a buxom chick stood up, stepped over and straddled our legs and danced for us. She wore no panties. We felt trapped, till she turned around for the scenic view and we slid out from under.

  For me it was a time of perspective, looking up at a dimpled ass for a laugh and a goof I can still recall. Looking back was more than a recall of miles, people and places. That summer influenced what we might become. Applying the lessons would take time, but the nonstop nights and days of sheer, raw adventure begged a question: what just happened? I found myself more often alone by choice, rethinking events taken only on the surface in the first go-round.

  Lifetimes are spent seeking unique stimulation, like at depth on the Great Barrier Reef so many decades later, where life in color, effusion and social complexity came on in waves too rich for assimilation in the moment.

  The 60s was like that. Whatever the effect of those times, it rendered a changed fellow, a college kid who’d been around and had something to think about, a work in progress.

  Off the Road Again

  COLLEGE STUDENTS WERE redefined in those days of cultural convolution, division, distraction and practical maneuvering. For decades the stereotype student of higher learning had been a college Joe, either Ivy League landed or State U drunk. Other cultures took a bemused view; Americans seemed odd on many levels, but they did have money, and here they were, wasting four prime years in a classroom poring over books instead of getting a jump on life itself.

  Well, many Ivy Leaguers took the baton of cultural leadership from their parents, often alumni parents. The baton assured greatness in what we hold most dear, which is influence and affluence. State U students were more practical, studying hard sciences or humanities to teach.

  The war of the 60s kept greater numbers of male students in college as a survival option. Campus life became a postponement of war life. It wasn’t real, but the alternative was all too real; it was like Romper Room for pre-adults, a new phase in the developmental process that strove for something other than success. Chronic anxiety characterized the challenge of draft-age males who avoided the jungle war by staying in school. The jungle war waited like a predator in a burrow. The jungle war was required. It waged dutifully, with numbing measurements of success and cold comfort in the enemy’s exponentially greater sacrifice. Body counts came nightly, with every one of our boys worth twenty or forty of the strange men who scurried through tunnels and would not back down, unlike their countrymen on our side. It was a rough time emotionally, given to rough, hateful profiles, like slant-eyed, zipper-headed gooks—that phrase was a send-up on rightwing fervor from the movie Candy, based on Terry Southern’s novel. The cast included Marlon Brando (again; talk about range), Richard Burton, Charles Aznavour, James Coburn, John Huston, Sugar Ray Robinson, Ringo Starr—and Walter Matthau as the military advisor who also summarized the U.S. military view of enemies: “Mexicans. Albanians. They’re all the same.”

  The alternative to the jungle war? Get high, get laid, get a C average, become a college grad. Studies, final exams, essays, pop quizzes and stuff could get tough but added up to a proverbial walk in the park next to the jungle belly crawl, with those pesky swamps, snakes, malaria, booby traps, night patrol, heroine addiction, social diseases unknown to the western world and friendly fire.

  Back in school, a lively social calendar helped suppress the rising tide of anxiety. So the great wide world shrank back to mundane rigors and distraction. One subject resonated, because of a graduate student instructor clinging to ideals in art. Ted Schaeffer at twenty-nine taught beginning narrative and seemed older, verging on old, yet he captured the writer’s life with flair. Ted was married and had a kid and taught to buy time to finish his current book. And he could drink and carouse with us young’uns.

  Creative Writing 404 with Professor Peden, on the other hand, was dry as toast, a humorless exercise in witless rhapsody on the famous people he had known as pr
elude to promoting the pHd and its vast benefits. Or was that the PhD?

  The difference between those who can and those who teach wasn’t new. But the 60s rendered many who thought they could as campus captives. At least an art form helped remove the onus of both worlds, one at war, the other at school. Ted Schaeffer warned us against the PhD. But Professor Peden advised in favor of it: 90% of all National Book Award authors held the PhD. Ted Schaeffer said, “Yeah, and look at the books they write. They’re shit! It’s political. Do you really want to spend your life writing like that?” Ted had a point, and he risked his job assuring that prime years were best spent on adventures to feed our fiction. Fuck a bunch of bookworms.

  Would we get high and laid as frequently in the outside world? We hoped we would and couldn’t really see why we wouldn’t. We felt late in making our way. We felt slighted, not as short-changed as the poor stiffs dying in the mud, but trapped in the egghead bunker. The place was stifling, except for the demonstrations.

  Ah, well. Campus schedules, rigors and requirements were easily ignored. Wearing funny clothes, taking drugs and hanging out with a lovely, lively crowd was a blessed distraction. The jungle war would not go away but loomed nearer, with June graduation hardly nine months away.

  We repress in the short term in order to move ahead, so we can process later with greater method what was repressed earlier by necessity. That was college think for never mind, I got other things to do. The sentiment hadn’t changed from the junior, sophomore or freshmen years, but things changed over many motorcycle miles, adding nuance and a certain mystique. Unique boots helped, and so did two uncommonly cool leather jackets from the Florence flea market. The first was dark leather in a sport cut with lapels, probably a Gestapo model. The second was a flyboy number with a fleece collar, likely salvaged from a downed flyboy, likely one of ours. Oh, the coeds saw, the coeds cooed, the coeds circled.

  Youthful days passed in oblivion. Death was among us, and we rolled the bones with abandon in a world of delusion. The romp seemed urgent, free and necessary, given the rip of the times. The sexual revolution merely responded to the greater struggle. Freedom of the flesh demonstrated other freedoms too, and the kids were eager. Bio-function was common, repeat as necessary—or available.