by Rob Spillman
“Mother, Robby is going to stay here and keep his grandfather company,” my father told his mother with none of the southern accent I had heard on my uncle’s farm. I was surprised by my father’s stern tone, as was my grandmother, who gave a stiff nod. I was relieved to be away from her, even though this meant that I would have to spend two or three hours with my grandfather, who hardly moved or spoke.
After the Pacer pulled away I sat on the sofa opposite my grandfather, who was sitting in his faded pea-green easy chair. With his equally well-worn green cardigan, it appeared as if he was melding with the upholstery. I didn’t know what I should do or say. Does he even know I’m here? Does he care? But he was watching me, and in his eyes there was a spark of life. I didn’t know that much about my grandfather except that he was really old—eighty-three, born the previous century, in 1895, the last of eleven children. I thought about asking him about his siblings, but instead reached for more reliable family-story fodder—combat.
“Where were you during the war?” I ventured.
My grandfather smiled and slowly sat up. It was like he’d been buried alive and I had yanked him into the light. “I was a truck driver,” he said. “I drove supplies to the front. I was in Verdun when the Germans used mustard gas on our boys. I drove through clouds of the stuff. I drove with water-soaked rags over my face.”
My grandfather’s skeletal hands fluttered as he spoke of his many perilous trips to the front. “That was my hardest adventure,” he said, leaning forward. “My greatest adventure was when I spent two years in India.”
“You were in India?” I asked, stunned. My grandmother, who wouldn’t go fifteen miles down the road to visit her son, had lived in South Asia?
“Incredible—the people, the food, the land. After I retired from the university in 1960, I joined a State Department–sponsored program to help third-world countries help themselves. I chose to work in Goa, which is in the southern part of India. At the time they were in the middle of a very bad drought and many people were starving.”
“What did you do there?” I asked.
“I taught basic crop management and crop rotation, which was hard, but very gratifying when it worked. And it was beautiful. A beautiful, beautiful place with lovely people.”
“How did Grandma like it?” I asked, trying to imagine her anywhere foreign, much less India.
My grandfather chuckled and shook his head. “She didn’t. She didn’t go. She stayed in Lexington,” he said with a wistful smile. He didn’t need to say that those two years were the happiest of his life.
Though he flagged a few times, my grandfather was animated for the two full hours that my grandmother and my father were gone, shutting down when the Pacer pulled into the driveway, apparently not wanting to be noticed by his wife. Later, driving back to my uncle’s farm, I told my father about our conversation.
“Wow, that’s terrific,” my father said. “I haven’t seen him come to life in years.”
“I feel bad for him,” I said.
“If I ever get like that, please shoot me,” my father said without a hint of humor.
“What did he tell you about India?” I asked, not wanting to even go near my father’s mortality.
“What he told me,” my father said, “is that my mother said she would never live among ‘Indian niggers,’ and instead moved by herself from Berea to Lexington to be near Uncle Don, even though the family has to come to her. After he returned from Goa, your grandmother insisted that your grandfather’s stomach had been ruined by the spicy food, so that’s why she makes ‘the meal’ every day.”
We had just suffered through the meal—a beef roast surrounded by carrots and green beans, which she put in the oven at noon and didn’t take out until 6 P.M., by which point the meat and vegetables were desiccated. Twice on that trip, including the last afternoon of our visit, we managed to take my grandfather out to my uncle’s farm. We sat him at the dining room table, where he was surrounded by his grandchildren, who peppered him with questions. My uncle brought him a snifter of Scotch and my grandfather accepted it in silence, his eyes teary. He lifted the snifter slow and steady, then took the smallest of tastes.
28
“If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”
—Andy Warhol
Soundtrack: Velvet Underground, “Beginning to See the Light,” 1968
I LACED UP MY BATTERED ASICS, the same shoes I had worn when I injured myself while running in the mountains four years before. If I took it easy, didn’t run too far or too hard, my left knee would hold up. After a week in our Prenzlauer Berg apartment, I needed to stretch my legs, get away from people, even the ones I loved. Hank was off sketching the Wall, like he did every afternoon, and Elissa was fast asleep, having gone on a six-hour writing jag where she didn’t move from the little desk we had found. Every morning we had scavenged, decorating our new flat with refuse, constructing our lives out of the detritus of other lives. Now our bare, cold-water flat had been transformed into a cluttered home, filled with a half-dozen working lamps, two sofas, eleven chairs, stacks of books and framed pictures of spacemen and generals, piles of Communist trinkets, and two tube radios that pulled in a strange stew of music along with a cacophony of unknown tongues.
I jogged past the brand-new, impromptu wine bar on our corner, wondering if it would be open again that night, then crossed into the park, overruling muscle memory, my body’s former ability to churn out six-minute miles ad infinitum, and instead focused on running slow and steady. I passed the CV, where we would no doubt start off our night like we had every night in the East. I focused on my breathing, slowly pushing out my abdomen as I inhaled, then forcefully exhaling. Cadence and breath synced with the first song on Daydream Nation, “Teenage Riot,” and my internal soundtrack pushed me forward toward the Wall.
As I cut through backstreets, the chaos of the week sorted itself out. How ignorant had I been; I had thought that the Easterners had been in the dark, deprived of Western music and books. But they loved Sonic Youth, had passed around paperbacks of Kerouac and Ginsberg. It was a game they played with the Stasi. American and British and French radio stations were blocked and jammed, but everyone in the East shared smuggled tapes and books. We met Ralf every night at the CV, and he, in his scientific manner, answered any and all questions for us, from the mechanics of Stasi to his yearly springtime visits to Lake Baikal, where he was part of a research team looking for the neutrino, the elusive subatomic particle.
With music and literature, Ralf explained, “We would make copies; Stasi would take them and put them in our files. But we could always make them faster than they could take them.” The game was much more serious when it involved creative acts by Easterners, which, if not state-approved, could be deemed subversive. “Last year a friend wrote a novel,” Ralf told us, “and it was not so political—a fairy tale about Chernobyl—and she made six copies and gave them to her friends. Stasi tracked down all six. They took my copy from my apartment while I was at work.”
Out of Prenzlauer Berg and into a blasted and blighted industrial area, I ran under dead traffic lights and past crumbling warehouses to the Wall, then along it until I reached a collapsed brick building that blocked the path. I thought about scrambling over the piles of bricks, but I had already been out for a half hour, so I turned back toward home. In August 1945, Berlin had an estimated forty million tons of rubble. Forty million. It took thousands of workers, mostly women, two-and-a-half years to clear the ruins. How long would it take Berliners to replace forty-five years of Communist rubble?
Not long, I imagined, as this was the self-reinventing Berlin of Marlene Dietrich, the polite schoolgirl born Marie Magdalene who reimagined herself as an androgynous chanteuse, who was the belle of the drag balls in the twenties, who toughened herself up for stage and s
creen auditions with boxing lessons from the “Terrible Turk,” Sabri Mahir. Mahir himself was a reinvention. He was born Sally Mayer in Cologne, and picked up boxing, and his Turkishness, in Berlin. Then there was Berlin ballet star Helene Bertha Amalie, who reinvented herself as the filmmaker and intentional or unintentional (depending on if you believe her denials) Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl. Or going back another hundred years, Hegel, who said, “Nothing great in this world has ever been accomplished without passion.” He had been studious and thought within proscribed norms in his birthplace of Stuttgart, but reinvented himself as a revolutionary idealist philosopher here in Berlin.
Now, everyone in the East was going to have to reinvent themselves once again. Every time we went to the CV we heard new tales of re-creation. Craftsmen from the neighborhood were volunteering at the Rykestrasse Synagogue, a grand house of worship that had survived the Nazis and the neglect of the GDR, and which was now being refurbished. Everywhere, doors were being knocked down, secrets spilling out, the frenetic energy stoked by most everyone’s lack of money. Apartments were cheap, but what would happen when the free market invaded in October? Same with food, clothes, alcohol. Cheap is expensive if you have nothing. The theater people had subsisted on government subsidies. Now there were no subsidies and theater patrons (aka theater people’s friends) didn’t have money for tickets, so writers, directors, actors, and anyone else involved were basically putting on their shows for free, with no admission price and no pay.
There was no work on the Western side of the Wall for Easterners, who were considered lazy and untrained. Instead, we kept hearing crazy stories of how people were surviving, like the previous night’s wine-bar experiment. Others we met were being paid to give away “West Brand” cigarettes at bars, employed by a West German tobacco company hungry for the huge new market of smokers raised on crappy East German cigarettes. And then there were all of the shadier dealings that were going on. Ringo was always darting in and out of the CV, fetching things for anyone with money. Where he found these “things,” I don’t know, but he had connections everywhere. In a few weeks the Rolling Stones would be playing Radrennbahn Weissensee, the huge cycling stadium in the north of East Berlin, and Ringo was going to work the lights.
“Is there anything you can’t find?” I asked him in a rare moment of stasis.
“No,” Ringo said with a mischievous smile. “Let me tell you, I have this friend, who, I am not joking, said that he can get me old GDR tanks.”
“C’mon, Ringo.”
“No, no, I swear. He says they are the real Soviet T-55s and T-72s.”
I should write about the new rebuilding, this new transition, I thought, not for the first time, and again felt sick about the idea of being a mercenary journalist. I wanted to protect my new friends, not exploit them. I had sporadically written in my diary, but nothing more. When I looked at Coffee and Absinthe, I was horrified by the frothy intellectual nonsense. As I ran back through Prenzlauer Berg, I knew there wasn’t a single genuine thought or emotion in that book.
I slowed down, our corner in view, my knee achy but bearable. Screw it, I decided—I would reinvent myself, here in this secret interstitial zone that raided both East and West, Communist and capitalist. It was a well-used slate, pockmarked and cracked, but it was ready to be written over. East Berlin was about to cease to exist. In October it would become part of a new city, a new state. I could be at the rebirth of Berlin. I could live here. Not just for a few weeks. This could be the place. This could be the cultural moment I’d been waiting for my entire adult life. I was at the epicenter of post-Wall life, a petri dish of creation and foment, a rubble field in which to create a new world and life with the woman I loved.
I took the stairs two at a time, stiff and sore, but exhilarated. I wondered if this was how my parents felt when they’d settled in Berlin. Did they believe they had found their own perfect space, completely removed from their parents’ cold, narrow, judgmental worlds? Or was Berlin just a way station, just another city but with better gigs than the last city? Did they believe there would always be other cities, other gigs? “Leave your mark, make your music, make the town remember you, but put down no roots.”
As I banged into our apartment, startling Elissa awake, I thought that I wanted nothing but roots. I wanted to be ivy. I wanted to be a strangler fig. I wanted to dig down into the concrete and wrap myself around the cobbles and never let go.
29
“The only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone, by questioning the society’s values, can force it to change.”
—Samuel Delany
Soundtrack: Joy Division, “Disorder,” 1979
THE TRANSITION FROM Chautauqua in 1977 to Aspen in 1978 felt like a leap from 1877 to 1978, from a near-parody of Victorian correctness to jet-set cocaine-fueled disco fever. Aspen was just starting to become the playground of the filthy rich, fueled in part by moneyed Texans wallowing in expendable cash from the post-OPEC-crisis years. The drugs and decadence spilled over into the relatively sheltered summer classical music festival. Only thirteen, I was mostly on the outside, literally. I spent my days riding my bike, hiking, fishing, playing in the Roaring Fork River, and rafting the Colorado River forty miles down-valley.
I started the summer thinking that I would take part in the operas, like I had in Chautauqua—especially since the first production was Albert Herring and I could reprise my role of Harry. But I was not eleven, and I couldn’t get into inhabiting the persona. The festival had a coach who worked with kids, and she had advice for me about how to lose myself in the small details of the clothes, the set, the lyrics, and I felt like saying, I was born on the damn stage. But I should have listened to her. My performances were okay, but just okay, going through the motions. I felt nothing except uncomfortable. Even while I was singing, I knew that this would be the last opera I’d ever perform in.
I still, however, loved being around the production and the spectacle. And was very curious about the nightlife and these strange new party animals.
“What’re they doing, Dad?” I asked my father at the first big Aspen cast party. I gave a meaningful glance toward Gary, a tenor wearing black leather hot pants and a leather-and-chain bondage top. The party was in a sprawling ski condo on the edge of Aspen, overlooking a burbling river, snowcapped mountains cutting through a wall of fir trees. The festival faculty and performers were housed in ski condos, and Max, a composer and teacher at the festival, had lucked into this huge, secluded house, which was now filled with young musicians letting loose. I had grown up going to rowdy cast parties and had been around many a “scandalous” outfit, so Gary’s leather getup was not the source of my confusion. What I couldn’t figure out was why Gary had a straw sticking out of his left nostril. Katie, a quiet soprano in a plum-colored peasant dress, was holding up a square-foot mirror like a serving dish and Gary was bending down toward it.
“Coke. Cocaine,” my father said matter-of-factly as I watched a thin line of white powder disappear, Gary sweeping the straw along the mirror like some kind of a leather-clad anteater.
“Isn’t that . . . dangerous?” I asked as we kept walking toward the bar. I’d seen plenty of people smoking pot, and had even tried it once with a fellow faculty brat, resulting in something resembling a high that was no doubt due to a lack of oxygen to the brain caused by uncontrollable coughing. But I thought that cocaine was like heroin and LSD, things that either killed you or made you crazy, and seeing a professional singer doing this scared me. But I also didn’t want to let this fear show.
My father slowed and looked at me. I could tell he was measuring his words, deciding how much I needed to know. But he said nothing and kept walking. I followed him out of the den, where I had recently finished a game of chess with our host, a somewhat decent player. We squeezed into the crowded common room but got stuck behind Sarah, the cute redheaded violinist
from Eastman, who was kissing Mary, the surly blonde violinist from Juilliard. There were women in men’s laps, and men in men’s laps. I could usually tell which of the guys liked other guys and which of the girls liked other girls, but I missed Sarah’s queerness, and I was bummed that she wasn’t kissing me.
My father and I maneuvered around the intertwined couple, then through other groups of musicians tossing back glasses of wine and vodka, toasting each other and themselves. The whole packed place buzzed with happiness and relief after two tense weeks of rehearsals and three demanding performances of the Francis Poulenc opera Dialogues of the Carmelites, a grim little tale about pious French nuns who end up being guillotined.
As we moved through the crowd, singers reached out to take my father’s hand or pat him on the shoulder. “Great job, Bob,” I heard. “You really pulled it off.” My father humbly said, “Thanks,” and “You were great.” I was proud to be his kid and wished that I could accept praise like he did, instead of mumbling into my shoes, my hair in my face.
In the living room people were gathered around the grand piano, listening to Karen, a beautiful brunette soprano, playing and singing Joni Mitchell’s “Chelsea Morning.” Her voice was similar to Mitchell’s—light and sweet, but with ragged edges, a soft smile hiding some private hurt. Hearing her, my stomach tightened. I didn’t feel this way when I saw Karen on the stage. But now, up close, I was in love. I wanted her to put her arm around me and whisper in my ear all the secrets of the world. The last notes fell from Karen’s lips, and she smiled at me. Not a cursory smile, but a smile that said she was full of joy because I was in front of her.
Her lips moved again, and it was as if I were underwater, the sounds moving slowly toward me. “Hey, Robby, having fun?”