Who, Me?

by Who, Me- A Memoir (retail) (epub)

  So I took his advice, went over to the local synagogue in East Lansing, into the main office.

  “I want to become a Jew, convert to Judaism . . .”

  “OK,” said the secretary, as if I’d just ordered ten pounds of kosher corned beef, all matter-of-fact and efficient, “Classes begin on September tenth, there’s a fifty dollar fee, which includes the book.”

  I paid, got the book, and the following week began “Becoming a Jew” classes under the tutelage of Cantor Bruce Wetzler, this aging cantor from New York who eventually became one of the best friends I’ve ever had in my life. Bernadete went with me to classes.

  We learned how to read Hebrew, got a thorough history of Judaism—Jewish rites, learned about Torah, the Books of Moses—learned how to chant/pray: Baruch Atta Adonai, Elohainu Melech Haolam/ Holy are you God, God, King of the Universe.

  Margaret decided to become Jewish, too, also Christopher, and—believe it or not—Nona down in Kansas City. Luis Costa, Bernadete’s computer whiz kid brother from Brazil, had also moved to Lansing/East Lansing, and found a job as a computer whiz in a place called Eagle, just north of Lansing. Luis, his wife, Solange, and their daughter, Nineveh, converted, too.

  So I brought a whole crowd into Judaism with me.

  Margaret had spent one year out at Loyola University in Los Angeles with the intention of getting into films. She was beautiful, artistic, theatrical, why not? But she hated the movie business, came back to Michigan State and majored in (of all things) German philosophy.

  Started going over to the Hillel Foundation, the Jewish student organization at Michigan State, and met a Frenchman, a Parisian namedGerard Maalka.

  And the next thing I knew Bernadete and I were invited to Paris to meet the family.

  They lived in Enghein, a short train ride (like downtown Chicago to Oak Park) outside of Paris. Where the casino was. A lake next to the Casino called Le Lac de Cygnes/Swan Lake.

  Huge mansion.

  And it turned out that Gerard’s father was one of the richest guys in Paris. Originally from North Africa. Morocco or Algiers, I forget which.

  At first he was distrustful of me and Bernadete. Converts to Judaism, now my daughter getting connected to one of the richest families in Paris. Was it all done for the sake of geld, geld, geld?/money, money, money?

  But I started going around with him all day and we became pals.

  He’d buy old buildings and redo them, modernize them.

  Most of the workers were Portuguese and I talked Portuguese to them, which impressed him. My very much un-used French slowly sharpened up and I began to rattle away in French as if I’d been in Paris all my life.

  One day were in this seventeenth century building that he was making over into a modern efficiency-apartment place, and he offered to sell me an efficiency apartment at his price.

  “It would be nice to have you in Paris—summers, let’s say—a couple of visits a year, and when you retire, you could retire here . . .”

  Sounded good to me.

  Loved Paris, walking along the street meeting someone selling delicious salami sandwiches on fluffy rolls, a little ice cream, some coffee candy . . . loved the Louvre with all of its unabashedly modern updating, loved to walk along the Seine . . .

  On Saturday morning we went to synagogue.

  One of Maalka’s daughters was married to the cantor in the synagogue, and the cantor had told the rabbi I would be there.

  So when the rabbi brought the Torah down from the altar and carried it up and down the aisles chanting in Hebrew as part of the usual ceremony, he stopped next to me and said “Welcome to Paris, Professor Fox” in perfect English.

  Which made everyone in the synagogue curious, curious, curious about who I was.

  Rabbis never, but never! stop and talk to anyone during the carrying-around-of-the-Torah ceremony.

  So afterwards at the oneg, everyone in town came up and shook my hand, I was in with not Flynn, but Goldberg . . .

  I could just see myself as an integral part of wealthy Parisian Jewish society, all the sense of little village, belonging, being cared for, that was so important for me.

  The next day we went to the Rodin Museum and I was especially fascinated by the precious gem sculptures of Camille Claudel; the Rodin sculptures . . . at home, all my years at the Art Institute in Chicago finally paying off.

  After going through the whole museum Bernadete and I went out into the garden and found a nice bench. At home. My world. Chez moi, when Margaret and Gerard came over to us, Margaret crying, Gerard all deeply disturbed.

  “We’re breaking up. I’m breaking up with him.”

  “How can you do a thing like this to me? Why?”

  “He wants me to get rid of all my American makeup and get just French makeup!”

  “He wants to buy it for you?”

  “Of course.”

  “So why not just do it?”

  “I’m not going to be anyone’s slave!”

  And that was that.

  So we came back to East Lansing and she went back to Hillel again, and lo and behold, within two months, she had a second Frenchman, Johann Sadock.

  Funny coincidence, because a few years earlier, I had had a Tunisian student named Sadock Kallel.

  Brilliant guy. Astrophysicist, ended up getting a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Stanford.

  I got to be friends with the guy, invited him over to the University Club for dinner a couple of times, found him eminently simpatico, very helpful almost as a psychologist/counselor, when I was having all kinds of problems with Nona, Bernadete, Beryl, that whole mess.

  Then one day, a few years after he had been my student, and we were just friends, pals, I asked him, “Sadock, just out of curiosity, where would your family be on the social pyramid in Tunisia?”

  “You want me to be honest?’

  “Of course.”

  “It sounds so braggy, but,” making a triangle/pyramid with his two thumbs and index fingers, touching the top of the triangle/pyramid to his chin, “right on top.”

  “Ahaaaaaaa . . . can’t you just imagine me spending winters in Tunis?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I want to introduce you to my daughter, Margaret.”

  “OK.”

  Tunis, the site of the ancient Phoenician stronghold of Carthage, one of the most important, most interesting archaeological sites in the whole ancient world.

  He took Margaret out on a date, and the next day gave me a full report.

  “It wouldn’t work out. Not at all. She’s too—beautiful—well, I shouldn’t put it that way . . . too ‘made-up,’ if you know what I mean. Beaucoup joli/too beautiful . . .”

  “How can anyone be beaucoup joli?”

  “Well, marriages between Tunisians and the French seldom work out.”

  Tunisia had been a French colony, everyone who was anyone was fluent in French.

  “Why not?”

  “Beaucoup joli,” smiling, “I’ll be better off with a Moslem woman.”

  “Well, she could become Moslem, we could all become Moslem.”

  “It wouldn’t work out.”

  And that was that.

  I wasn’t anything at the time, was willing to try almost anything, move from total agnostic, to something, for God’s sake.

  Now along comes Johann Sadock, family from North Africa . . .

  Another trip to Paris to meet his widowed mother. A very simpatica woman living in an apartment by herself, one of Johann’s brothers a big shot in the French stock exchange.

  Bernadete and I had a great time. Oh, be in Paris again: the gardens, Notre Dame, ice cream at a little cafe on the island of St. Louis just behind Notre Dame, dinner in the restaurant that the family had always gone to over the years to celebrate major occasions, feeling very chez mois again, totally at home.

  I certainly didn’t expect to make any major archaeological discoveries, I was just on vacation, right? But . . .

  One day we w
ent to the Louvre and I saw a Sicilian Greek vase with a painting of Hercules on it, Hercules strangling a merman, and then the next day we went to the Musée de l’Homme, the Museum of Man, where they had some South American Indian pots, and I saw a Mochica Indian vase from Peru with a drawing on it of one man strangling another man, and the second man didn’t have legs but a fish-tail.

  “It’s the same thing as the Hercules pot we saw yesterday,” I told Bernadete.

  “How can it be the same thing? One pot is Greek, 200 B.C. and the other is South American in the same time-frame. No connection between the two places.”

  The Phoenicians in South America in 200 B.C. It didn’t sound too strange to me . . .

  When we got back to East Lansing, I took a train down to Chicago and went to the Field Museum/Chicago Museum of Natural History and the Art Institute, and within minutes I saw something that no one had ever seen before on the Mochica pots they had in both museums. Writing!

  I copied the words (because that’s what they were, words) down and when I got back to East Lansing, I consulted Das Schrift.

  It was a Phoenician word. You read Phoenician from right to left like Hebrew. The L is an L, the N an N, and the middle letter is a G. So it’s LGN. Add vowels (again a Hebrew-like characteristic, using just consonants in writing, then adding the vowels according to context) and you can get all sorts of meanings, like “bottle/flask,” “lagoon,” etc.

  I won’t take off here on twenty pages of archaeology, but slowly I began to realize that all the drawings on all the Mochica pots dealt with Hercules mythology.

  Hercules was the center of Mochica mythology.

  Also the center of Phoenician mythology, especially in Spain, where the biggest Hercules temple in the ancient world was: Cádiz.

  So a few months after we got back from Paris, Bernadete and I went to Cádiz in Spain for a week, and I met the archaeologist who was in the process of excavating the Hercules temple—which was now under water. He gave me copies of all his books after I told him what I’d discovered; he wasn’t at all surprised at my discoveries.

  It seemed logical. The Romans were destroying the Phoenicians. They had leveled Carthage (Tunis), invaded Phoenician Spain and destroyed the Phoenicians there. What must have happened was that some of the Hercules’ priests and their followers, had gotten on ships, sailed over to the New World, and settled down in Peru.

  When I’d been in Chile with Alexandra we’d gone to visit my old pal, Marino Baptista, in La Paz, and he had taken me to a museum to show me some letters on a stone dish that the museum people had christened the “Fuente Magnum.”

  When I’d gotten back to East Lansing I’d checked the letters out and discovered that they were Phoenician, too, but an archaic form of Phoenician letters called “Byblos style,” which went back to 1,000-1,5000 B.C.

  Remember in San Pedro how they’d told me the Indians had this story about King Solomon having been across the mountains there in ancient times?

  Solomon, the ally of the Phoenician King Hiram who had gone across the ocean to mine gold!!! Solomon’s gold! –

  early Phoenician letters/Byblos style – letters on the stone dish in Bolivia – exactly the same, nicht wahr?

  OK, so now it all made sense. The Phoenicians had known about South America for centuries and centuries. That’s where Solomon’s gold had come from: when the Romans had set out to totally wipe them off the map, they got out of the Old World altogether and came over to South America.

  It all hung together, made total sense.

  I published some articles on my findings, wrote a book called Stairway to the Sun which was published by my pal, Brian Clark, in San Francisco: Permeable Press. Then wrote a gigantic, scholarly book called Rediscovering America about the same materials—but much, much expanded—and it still languishes unpublished on a shelf in my office.

  Margaret married Johann Sadock.

  We had a huge wedding over at the synagogue Shaarey Zedeg in East Lansing, a huge reception over at the University Club, the snazziest club you could imagine, a little band and everything, with the photographer, Jerry Cohen, organizing everyone into dance groups, turning the whole thing into a gigantic fun-time. They both finished up at Michigan State, her still in philosophy, him kind of ironically with a degree in French (a Frenchman studying French in Michigan?), and the next thing I knew they were off to the University of Aberdeen in Scotland where they both got their Ph.D.s: French and German philosophy.

  Two kids now, Rebecca (5) and Alexander (one and a half), and she teaches at Harvard; he teaches at M.I.T.

  It’s so weird; all my years visiting all the pre-Columbian ruins, from Mexico down to southern South America, all through the Andes, up and down the Urubamba River, up to the Bolivian altiplano, all up and down the Peruvian coast, into the jungles in Brazil, as well as the north coast . . . and I go to Paris and see a link between a drawing on an ancient Peruvian pot and a Greek pot from ancient Sicily, then slowly begin to realize that all the drawings on all the Mochica pots centered on Hercules myths . . .

  Finally the whole big lie that all pre-Columbian peoples came across the Bering Strait from Siberian during the ice-ages was dead—and not buried but cremated and its ashes scattered to the winds.

  Talk about ironies: that old English Professor me should have been the one to finally see what all the archaeologists and Amerindianologists, cultural historians, art historians could have seen, but didn’t.

  My other kids?

  Well, there’s Hugh B. Fox, III off in Taiwan right now.

  He was the one I was toughest with. Tough, tough, tough. Like I remember one time when my mother came to visit us in East Lansing. I was already married to Nona. Mommy Wommy was curious about Big Nona, had to meet her. She arrived all in silks and satins with all her diamond rings and diamond watch, and Hughie vanished for something like ten hours. My mother I stashed away in the Kellogg Center on Michigan State’s campus (it’s the center of a hotel management program at the university), but she was shocked, shocked, shocked that her oldest grandson had simply vanished. So when he did get back I remember telling him to stand up against the garage door and I took off my leather belt and whacked him 20 times on the ass, twice for every hour he’d been away.

  I was always that way with him.

  But he finished college, got married, went down to Lubbock, Texas and got a Ph.D. in Communications. Actually became a pretty close copy of me. Ended up teaching English at a Catholic college in San Antonio, got divorced, married a second time to a Chicano, and then took off for China.

  I was on his e-mail list—me and 20 others—and we (his Foxy Friends Gang) got at least a letter a day. But he’s pissed at me right now because I wrote and asked him why he didn’t write me a Happy Father’s Day note! Total nasty cutoff. I just hope it doesn’t last too long; his wife is breaking up with him. I talked to her on the phone this week: “It’s not a marriage; years and years in China/Taiwan, and me in Texas. I’m out!”

  He drinks too much, and when he went bald he had some radical surgery that took off the top of his head and took the hair around the side of his skull and somehow stretched it up to the top . . . but I see him as some sort of mad genius writing about visits to the ruins in Angor Wat in Cambodia, visits to Viet Nam, back to the Killing Fields of the Viet Nam War, always on the move, writing, writing, writing . . .

  I’m trying to get him more focused on publishing, getting a copy of Fulton’s International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses and starting to send his meditations and observations out to literary magazines and small presses.

  Very bright guy, though nerdy, a kind of loner. I see a lot of me in him. Here’s an excerpt from an e-mail letter I got from him from Taiwan on the occasion of his 45th birthday, April 15, 2002:

  April 15th is also the day that Leonardo da Vinci was born. I sometimes think Leonardo and I are similar in that we are multidisciplinary types that have visions of future technologies. There was a biography o
f Leonardo on the television. I was struck by the similarities in our personal lives. Loneliness was a major problem in his life as in mine. I am an explorer of inner and outer space and

  would love a fellow explorer to accompany me, but lacking such a partner then I will go forth alone. I didn’t want to to go Cambodia by myself but am glad I went by myself rather than not at all. Leonardo was also a wanderer that never really found a home. Hopefully I will have better luck.

  Wanderer. Kind of lost. No ego problem though, on track, even if the track wanders here and there all over the world.

  The next one down, Cecilia, isn’t doing as well. She still lives in the basement of her mother’s house in East Lansing.

  Lucia is 74 and her house is one vast museum of pre-Columbian (mostly Peruvian) art, little pots and figures in stands all over the walls next to metal suns and endless hangings of weavings, is married to a retired librarian from the Michigan State University library: Clint Lockhert, who is still teaching Yoga down at Lansing Community College. At age 80.

  Cecilia is paranoid-schizophrenic, gets disability money from the State, and every day during the week takes a bus downtown to a place called Charter House where the state has set up a kind of rehabilitation program for people who simply can’t function. She either cleans the bathrooms or answers the phone or does the vacuuming (which is supposed to bring her down out of her Mind into Reality) and thereby “earns a lunch.”

  For years I’d pick her up every day after lunch, drive her back to East Lansing, and spend a little time with her. But last 6th of July she was over visiting at my old Victorian house in Lansing and I had some smoke bombs left over, lit and threw one her way, and she got scared, scared, scared . . . so she seldom lets me drive her home now. But I go over there every day anyhow, and sometimes, sometimes, sometimes she goes with me. Here’s the way she always sounds:

  “The staff doesn’t like me down at Charter House. They’d love to get rid of me. So many of my friends are already dead. Like Jerome, Maggie, you know, a lot of the members at Charter House hate me, too. I’d go and get a job over at Kroger’s, but when I see all that hamburger in the cases, how do I know that’s beef and not people? I don’t want to get killed and ground up and sold as hamburger. Everyone at Charter House is going to Mackinaw Island for a trip next week, but I’m not going. I think it’s just a trick to get me into a van to take me to the mental hospital. I don’t trust them—they hate my guts—and everyone in the mental health program dies so young . . .”