by Rob Spillman
15
“Security is a false God. Begin to make sacrifices to it and you are lost.”
—Paul Bowles
Soundtrack: Peter, Paul and Mary, “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” 1967
MY CLASSMATES—army, business, and diplomatic kids—were mostly from fixed places: Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles. They considered themselves Americans, and more specifically, residents of wherever they were from, and wore uniforms of local sporting teams as outward pledges of allegiance. Even though my parents were U.S. citizens, I considered myself a Berliner. I planned to apply for dual citizenship when I turned eighteen. If I lived anywhere in Germany but Berlin I’d have to serve two years of compulsory military service in the West German army.
At the time, this sounded glamorous. I come from a long line of U.S. Army veterans. My uncle had been a foot soldier under Patton in World War II, had landed at Normandy and then marched on Berlin; my grandfather (on my father’s side) had been on the front lines in France during World War I; his father had fought for the Union in Kentucky and Missouri during the Civil War; and, generations before that there were soldiers all the way back to a “Spelman” from Normandy who invaded England in 1066, under the command of William the Conqueror.
A Berliner for certain. A possible soldier. Those were two categories I could live with. This certainty vanished in the spring of 1973, when my father left me for a few days in the care of a female singer who clearly had never had to attend to a child before. She talked loudly to me as if I were a slow three-year-old and mostly let me entertain myself while she read tabloids, and then dragged me from cheap restaurant to cheap restaurant for all the rotisserie chicken I could eat. My father flew to Rochester, New York, to interview at his alma mater, the Eastman School of Music. Rochester was only two or three hours from Chautauqua, New York, where we had been spending our summers, my father teaching at the music festival while I got to be in the operas as an extra or as part of the kids’ chorus. He returned with news that he had been hired as a teacher and that we would be heading to Chautauqua in a few weeks for the summer, as usual, but that after that we wouldn’t be coming back to Berlin, but would instead be moving to Rochester.
I don’t remember my father selling me on leaving Berlin. All I heard was that he was leaving and that I was going with him. I didn’t care where. I was somewhat fearful about going to an American public school, but I knew where my loyalty lay: It was with my father. I could imagine that Eastman would be as exciting and as full of passionate, strange musicians as Berlin. My father was part of the artistic tribe that knows no geographical loyalties. The tribe goes where the art is, and that’s what I would do as well. As long as I was with my father, I was home.
What he did tell me was that it would be good for me to be closer to my mother, which didn’t seem that big of a deal to me. I liked the long solo flights to see my mother during prolonged school holidays. Pan Am, TWA, Icelandic, Laker, Lufthansa. From these solo trips I have a shoebox full of playing cards. Fawning stewardesses would give me wing pins and airline-embossed packs of cards. They taught me how to play rummy, canasta, an infinite variety of solitaires. My classmates would ask me if it was scary flying alone, and I would never admit to the terror of being pinned with an “Unaccompanied Minor” sign and traveling with strangers, trusting them to deliver me from one parent to the other across thousands of miles and through chaotic airports where other travelers were going to hundreds of other cities. What was to keep me from landing in the wrong city? Who could guarantee that one or the other parent was going to be at the airport to pick me up? Instead, I told my classmates that when you are a kid flying alone you are treated like royalty. That the beautiful stewardesses would take me up the spiral stairs of the 747 and into the lounge, where they ignored the first-class businessmen beckoning for drinks and instead entertained me and me alone.
Of course, I also didn’t mention that I dreaded landing in Louisiana. I missed my mother, and couldn’t understand why she had moved so far away from me. Each time I visited I was afraid to see this person I didn’t really know, along with my uncle, cousins, and grandparents, whom I didn’t know at all. I felt like a foreign exchange student going off to live with his American family.
I had the same feeling in my new school in Rochester, where I no longer had lingua franca with other kids. TV was the foreign language they spoke. While American schoolwork was ridiculously easy compared with the German curriculum, I could never watch enough reruns or sports to not feel uncultured. So what if I already knew the Pythagorean Theorem? I didn’t know squat about The Mod Squad, The Rockford Files, or even Bugs Bunny and Scooby-Doo. After school I wanted to get to the safety of my father as fast as possible, but before I went to Eastman, I had to watch reruns of I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, and Laugh-In, shows that shaped my classmates’ worldviews.
I kept watching, but I was always a step behind. I knew that no matter how hard I studied, I’d never be a native TV speaker. No matter how many I watched, these shows appeared to be about mythological times and places, and I kept wondering, Are the people on these shows really like my classmates’ families? Is this American reality? I found the TV images alluring—nuclear families, sitting around the table for meals, problems solved quickly with group hugs. These were the equivalent of another new cultural experience—cheap Chinese food that we frequently ate for dinner near Eastman, where my father spent most of his time. The food was kind of interesting, but left me feeling empty, and a bit queasy.
Sports was the other subject my classmates talked about, and I was mostly ignorant about baseball, football, and basketball. My sport was soccer, and even in 1974, a World Cup year, just a few of my classmates knew or cared about it. “Only wetbacks and weirdos play soccer,” one of them told me. My classmates treated me decently or indifferently; I didn’t leave much of a mark on them. It was clear to me and everyone else that I was not from the same planet.
There were opportunities on my part to connect, like the day after one of the networks aired a two-hour special about what went on behind the scenes of the hostage-taking at the Munich Olympics. I happened to see the TV special, while my father was at an “adult party” that he assured me would be boring. He came home after midnight to find me crying in bed. “Why in the world did you watch that without me?” he asked as he hugged me. “There’s nothing to worry about here.” The next day, at recess, a committee of boys and girls came over to where I was kicking around a soccer ball with the two Hispanic boys. “You see the thing about the Olympics?” a blonde girl asked me.
“Sure.”
“Were you there?” she asked, hopeful.
I hesitated, thought about telling them a made-up, heroic story, but the truth was scary enough for me. “No,” I said. “I was in Berlin, which was kind of close, sort of like if the Olympics were in New York City and we were here.”
“Oh,” she said, disappointed. I could have told her I was terrified anyway, told her what it was really like living behind the Wall, but that would’ve meant exposing myself. Instead, I turned back to kicking around the ball.
After school, I rarely hung out with classmates. Instead I would dash to our sparse apartment for a crash course in TV while I knocked off the easy homework, kept company by Linus and Lucy, the brother-and-sister shelter cats my father let me adopt. While I slept on a single bed, my father slept on a futon on the floor, which I thought was pretty cool for a forty-year-old; I hoped that I could be that cool when I was his age. The futon was an artistic badge of honor, like his indifference to money. One Saturday before rehearsals we went to see a discount matinee of Harold and Maude, but arrived late and had to scrounge under the seats of our secondhand, beat-up green AMC Hornet to find enough change to buy regular-priced tickets. To me, this is what you did if you were a true artist.
Most evenings I’d join my father for dinner at a nearby diner or Chinese place. The infamous lake-effect snow, when bitter
cold air rushed down from Canada, picked up moisture from Lake Ontario like a massive sponge, then squeezed it all out on Rochester; it started in October and stayed until early April, the downtown area around Eastman slushy gray, a frozen, dingier echo of winter in Berlin. After a quick meal, we’d trudge through the slush to Eastman, which was worth it because I got to stay up till midnight exploring the massive, creaky old music school. I would sneak into the main theater and sit in the red velvet chairs, work my way up onto the catwalks, and if I got bored go to the main building’s basement snack lounge, where I would play chess against the students and faculty. Much to my shock and mild embarrassment, I was good enough to beat most anyone.
My father arrived at Eastman at eight in the morning and stayed until nine or ten or twelve at night. He took breaks only for dinner and to walk the two blocks to the YMCA, where I tried to keep up as he ran on the banked indoor track, but was never fast enough to match his long, loping strides. After a hard run in October, my father saw a sign advertising that a visiting grandmaster was looking for opponents for a simultaneous exhibition, and still thinking that chess might be my thing as piano was his, and with visions of me supporting him in his old age as a chess champion, he signed me up. Most of the other players were adults, but I was one of the last players to be defeated. When I was finally cornered, I made everyone laugh by asking how to spell “resign.”
As I adjusted to my new life in Rochester, I wondered what my mother was doing in New Orleans. I received fact-filled letters about how her classes were going and how she was applying for teaching jobs now that she almost had her master’s degree. Occasionally we had awkward phone conversations during which she told me how challenging it was for her to be back at school at her age, which I didn’t understand and wouldn’t appreciate until much, much later.
At Thanksgiving, on my first trip to Louisiana after we moved to Rochester, my family seemed as foreign as the damp, oppressive heat. Compared to cool, gray Berlin and then brutally cold and snowy upstate New York, the lush, teeming world was an assault on my senses, the dense flora lurid, the birds, frogs, and insects disconcertingly loud.
It’s hard for me to picture my mother. I’m sure she was happy to see me, but I can’t remember her greeting me at the airport. My main memory is of how, when she was near my grandmother, she made herself smaller than she already was. She spoke softly around her mother, a bitter, sullen woman who lived in the huge yellow recliner from which she watched Lawrence Welk on a bulging, green-tinged TV. Occasionally I would notice her lizard stare fixed on me and I would attempt a smile, and her eyes would go back to the dancing bubbles on the screen. How tough must my mother have been to have forged a strong self under that judgmental glare?
By contrast my grandfather, as soon as I arrived, took me out to their junglelike backyard, and when he spotted a black snake sneaking through the strawberries toward the porch, he moved with surprising speed for a big man and chopped the snake’s head off with a hoe and laughed as the headless body writhed around my retreating feet. My two cousins also thought my fear was hilarious, and one handed me his BB gun and offered me a shot at the cluster of small songbirds in the bough of the nearby willow. I sighted a blurry-winged brown bird, but shot wide, on purpose. At night, the strange world became stranger in the dark, with a cacophony of insects and frogs, and when I stepped out of my grandfather’s big green Cadillac, huge, scurrying water bugs crunched underfoot. Small green lizards, the quick ones that stuck to the bathroom windows at night, dashed across the crushed white seashell driveway.
After two nights I felt more relaxed, but when my mother brought out a tray of lemonade I said, “Thanks, Dad,” and my strong, in-control mom flinched, then covered it with a tight smile. I was once again reminded that she never talked about him, never asked me what life was like with him. When I returned to my father, it would be the same thing—as if they didn’t exist to each other.
I was more relaxed and comfortable with my two cousins, with whom I had no baggage. As long as my two cousins were doing something physical—swimming, climbing trees, picking strawberries—I could play along with the concept that we were related and should therefore be close. When they started rehashing the last episode of Charlie’s Angels, I nodded politely as they broke down Farrah’s latest close brush with death and whether or not she did her own stunts. The subject exhausted, I told them about playing soccer with the Turkish kids in the Gastarbeiter complex next door in Berlin and what it’s like having tanks roll down the street in the middle of the night, and then one of them asked, “But don’t you live in Rochester now?”
I paused. I nodded. But I thought, No. I am a Berliner. And I’ll always be a Berliner.
16
“Honor thy error as hidden intention.”
—Brian Eno
Soundtrack: Brian Eno, “Baby’s on Fire,” 1973
ELISSA LINGERED in the chapel while Hank and I waited outside in the shade, the sun now baking the red hills, vendors putting up umbrellas to cover themselves and their brightly painted clay plates. When Elissa came out, she glided over to our shaded area. “More, more, more,” she said, wide-eyed. “I want to see every ossuary and every crypt from here to Berlin.”
Hank raised his hand. “Second that.”
“Well, we’d better motor if we want to make that funeral,” Elissa said, and headed for the car.
“Guess I picked a bad day to stop drinking absinthe,” Hank said.
I, too, was now fired up to drive to Berlin. First, we were due to join up with Elissa’s childhood friend Fiona in Lisbon and were going to take her around Lisbon for the weekend and then over to Madrid. Our plan was to recover in Zambi for a week, then drive to Berlin where we would overlap with Hank for a few days. If Hank left within a day or two, he’d have two weeks to see cathedrals on the way to Berlin. If.
Yet after our day in Évora, he did not pack. Nor the next. Nor the day after that. I couldn’t explain his reluctance to myself. Or to Elissa. I avoided him and wrote in the café while Elissa barricaded herself in our place and wrote and slept and glowered at me when I came in to check on her.
“What’re you doing?” I asked him at Xica’s on the third night back from Évora.
“Change of plan. Condensed trip. Too good here.”
“Seriously?” I said, with not a trace of the usual lightness of tone we had between us.
“Seriously,” he said, willfully ignoring my urgency.
“Don’t you think you’ve racked up enough comfort points?”
“Still plenty of adventure points to be found here,” Hank said.
“You should go,” Andreas said from behind the bar. “You must see the magnificent Kölner Dom.”
“I will, I will.”
Elissa was sitting at one of the small tables with Xica, their heads together.
On our walk home I pointed out the waning moon over the dunes.
“Why doesn’t he leave?” Elissa asked, looking at me, not the moon.
“I don’t know,” I said, still pointing.
“Have you asked him to?” Elissa said as we entered the long alley behind the bakery.
“You know I have.”
“Like you’ve asked about getting stringing work?”
“That was shitty,” I said.
“If the shit fits . . .”
“I’ve tried,” I said, and held open our garden gate.
“Well, you need to do something,” Elissa said, pausing on the threshold.
“I have. I don’t know what else I can do beside throw him in the car.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about,” Elissa said, and marched ahead.
“What?” I asked, but she went inside without answering.
After two more tense days, Hank was still sketching dunes and the Zambi locals, human and animal, and writing the occasional cryptic postcard to his s
tatus-unclear girlfriend Anna, a British painter living in Cincinnati. Elissa and I left him behind when we drove up to Lisbon to meet Fiona, who hadn’t traveled that much and was either going to marry or break up with a former rugby player back home, and so gave herself over to our giddy tour of Lisbon and the smaller towns down the coast and back to Zambujeira. Elissa and I remembered how well we traveled together and were a great team as tour guides, me handling the logistics, Elissa doing the hand-holding. We mostly forgot about Hank. Yet four days later he was still in Zambi as the three of us drove off toward Madrid.
“Send a card and let us know when you’ll be in Berlin and hopefully we can meet up there,” I said as I got in Dusty.
“Definitely. I’ll write as soon as I hit Dresden,” Hank said, his hands jammed into his paint-flecked Carhartt cutoffs. I nodded and looked to Elissa, who rolled her eyes, and I wordlessly reiterated my old argument that we have to trust our friend when he says he is going to do something and this time he really does have to leave because he has reached his financial limit and has to buy his Eurail pass now.
The drive from Zambi to Madrid was eight hours across Spain’s “frying pan” of scorching sunflower fields, the July sun pushing the temperature up to 43 Celsius (109 Fahrenheit). Dusty, alas, had no air-conditioning, so Elissa poured water over a bandanna I had wrapped around my head. We were burned clean and ready for Madrid’s sensuous beauty, a louche contrast to southern Portugal’s rough purity. For three days we rambled through beautiful parks and around ancient fountains and statues, and reveled in the magnificent Prado, where, as Louis MacNeice wrote at the beginning of World War II, “half-wit princes looked from the/Canvas they had paid for/(Goya had the laugh).”
La Movida, the post-fifty-years-of-Franco exuberance, was infectious, dizzying, the country moving at twice the speed of Portugal. At cafés we sipped espressos and watched women with long dark hair and short sundresses scooting by on their Vespas; at bars we squeezed past couples making out at the brass rails, then ate dinners outside in the plazas surrounded by sprawling Spanish families, eating at midnight at the earliest; and then we would dance past dawn.