Who, Me?

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

  It’s like my world in Chicago being reborn: that whole Jewish world my grandmother was part of but never told me she was part of. Although I really knew, didn’t I? The tailor across the street, the fish-man in the fish store down the street, Lerner, the dentist, the special way the Jews treated her. Everyone always wanting, deep down, unconsciously, wanting to revive the old villages after the Diaspora, the villages in Lithuania, Germany, Poland, Bohemia, Russia: that’s what everyone wants, the old villages that lead back to a Holy Land before Philistines or Romans or Arabs or anyone else invaded and took over.

  It’s a little hard to believe sometimes that I’m actually seventy.

  Living just four houses away from Steve and Angie Elliston who have been pals of mine since we were studying for our Ph.D.’s together at the University of Illinois back in the fifties. Friends for almost fifty years.

  Angie, all white-haired and buoyant, looks pretty good, but Steve is Mr. Bent Over, a little problem of incontinence.

  I see them all the time at concerts over at the music building or plays (and concerts) at the Wharton Center. The minute the music starts, he’s OUT, OUT, OUT.

  Yesterday I got a review copy of a book (The Sexy Sixties) from Harry Smith, these words scrawled on the first page:

  For Hugo,

  One of the first copies.

  With Love,

  Harry

  4/15/02

  I tried to call him, both in New York and at his place in Maine.

  No answer. Left messages. No call back.

  Maybe he’s on his island off the Maine coast.

  Congestive heart failure. The last time I saw him sitting on the back porch of his house in Brooklyn Heights, slowly, slowly, slowly puffing on a big dark brown cigar.

  “One a day . . . I’ve got to enjoy it,” pointing to his heart, “Congestive heart failure. No telling how long I have. I’d like to get a heart transplant, but . . .”

  Richard Morris kind of “frozen” whenever I call him in San Francisco.

  I know what he’s going through, him and his total immersion in a vision of a universe that makes no sense: no God/gods, just it out there, having spent his entire life trying to figure out how it began, how it developed, where it is going, dwarfed inside its immensity.

  And he’s just lost his apartment in San Francisco, after years and years on Pacific Heights. He makes his living writing books about cosmogony, cosmology; the market these days, with all the concentration on the internet, e-mail, TV, DVDs, the electronfication of the communication arts?

  I think most of my old friends, like me, sit around most of the time just thinking about death: How long, Oh, Lord, how long?

  Like Helen Moag, my grammar school friend from Chicago.

  The last time I talked to her she said: “My God, I was walking down the stairs and saw myself in the mirror, and who was there? My mother! Exactly like my mother! It was like seeing a ghost.”

  The Moags moved to downtown Evanston, out of the suburbs, “just to be close to things, a few steps from the lake, right down the street from movie theaters, restaurants, a grocery store, old folks, you know . . .”

  We’re all becoming our own parents, just before they died.

  Last time I talked to my cousin Jim (McNitt) in Berkeley, he had a story just like Helen’s.

  They’d had this house in Berkeley on a hill overlooking the San Francisco Bay. The most dramatic view I’d ever seen. You’d go out on the deck and there would be the bay, the San Francisco-Oakland Bridge, San Francisco itself in the background.

  But now . . .

  “We’ve moved close to downtown Berkeley. You know. No driving anywhere much, lots of good restaurants. We hardly cook at all. And, you know, drugstores sell milk and bread and stuff like that now; a little cappuccino—decaf—never hurt anyhow, right? All those little French and Italian bread melted cheese sandwiches filled with endive and sauces, you know . . .”

  I go to a play like The Glass Menagerie over at the Wharton center, a block from my house in East Lansing, and the average age must be seventy-five.

  Seventy-five! I would have thought that ancient.

  Now I’m seventy myself.

  Hard to believe.

  That crazy growing-up time in Chicago, soaked in art and music and literature, then Jesuits, pre-med, medicine, then the switch to American literature, the ten years in Los Angeles, two years in Caracas, a year in Mexico, a year in Spain, six months in the Atacama desert in Chile, the two years in Brazil, not to mention all the trips and trips down to Peru and Brazil, to Spain, Scotland, London . . .

  Sometimes I feel like just putting on one of my old Bavarian hats and green wool coats and going back to Prague, Vienna, or Valencia, Spain, Cadiz . . .

  Yesterday I got talking to this woman at Beaner’s coffee place. About politics, mainly; the terrorist-suicide bombers right in the middle of peace talks, the pipe bomber out west, the general insanity of the human race. A Spanish speaker. We talked in Spanish.

  And then, at the end I asked her where she was from.

  “Caracas. Y tú?” (And you?)

  “Tienes que adivinar.” (You have to guess.)

  “Argentina.”

  “No, Chicago . . .”

  So would I fit in in Spain or Argentina; anywhere Spanish-speaking. And I wouldn’t mind going back to Valencia or Madrid or Buenos Aires or Lima, stretch out and feel the real world.

  Although here in East Lansing, it’s a little scary how well I’m known, go for coffee down at Beaner’s next to the MSU campus, there’s Joseph Lebensfeld, the poet, “Hey, Hugh, howya doing?,” I sit down and we talk for an hour, or I’m walking across campus, here comes Nancy Bunge, an old pal from my department, we talk for half an hour, all about her wanting to retire but she feels she can’t; not enough moolah in el banco, I’m over at Meijers buying groceries and here comes Curt Gorwitz, “Hey, pal!”

  I miss Richard Thomas who is down in Las Cruces for winters now, in the Upper Peninsula for summers, couldn’t manage to fit East Lansing into his plans. And Al Drake, retired back to Portland, Oregon.

  Miss the COSMEP conventions, all my constant going back and forth between the east and west coasts, Blythe Ayne, Harry Smith, Kostelanetz, Winans, Richard Morris, Glenna Luschei . . .

  It’s Old Man Time now, although I look about fifty, not seventy. The facelift Bernadete did on me didn’t hurt.

  But arthritis. Sleep problems.

  Will I be walking across the campus someday and simply have a heart attack? Adios, compañeros de mi vida/ Farewell, companions of my life . . .

  It’s so insane, the whole world around me now. I was born just after the Great Depression, was seven years old when World War II began, lived through the Korean and Vietnam wars, through the World Trade Center attack and now, now it seems so endless . . . the Israelis and Palestinians, and some idiot guy putting pipe-bombs in mailboxes all over the mid-west . . . that’s only this week . . .

  Next week Nona, wife number two, is coming to Michigan with her sister—horsewoman-librarian, Martha—for Christopher’s twenty-first birthday. Margaret (now thirty) is driving from Boston with Johann and their two kids, Rebecca and Alexander. Nona, immense now, mental problems, sleeps most of the time; I’ll put them in House Number Two over in East Lansing.

  Then Bernadete has two weeks off. Vacation. Miracle. I’d like to go to Brazil and/or France with her. I’d like to see her family, wouldn’t say no if she ever decided to just move down there permanently. Florianópolis, the island of Santa Catarina, the perfect island . . . surrounded by great food, in-laws, old friends from the two years I spent there (‘78-‘80).

  And I’d like to go to Montségur in southern France, as soon as I finish this book, start writing a novel about this Israeli woman who leaves Israel to go to Paris, becomes a Catholic, and then the terrorist bombers start bombing Paris, destroy Notre Dame. She goes down to southern France, ends up in the area where the Albigensians/Cathars had been hundreds of years ago
, these heretics who saw the world created by two “gods,” one the real god who created spirit, the other a diabolical “god” who created matter. Anti-flesh, pro-spirit. She goes to Montségur where the Catholics burned five-hundred Albigensians who refused to renounce their beliefs. The book ends with her trying to believe that all matter is evil, trying to be an Albigensian herself, influenced by a group of Albigensians who still hang on in the area, but one morning she gets up and looks out at the window at the plain where the Albigensians were burned, believing the world and the flesh are evil. But, but . . . the sun is so beautiful, the day so perfect, that suddenly she is flooded with a sense of God’s benevolence, reverts back to Judaism and all its sense of God controlling, managing, guiding the universe:

  BARUCH ATTA ADONAI, ELOHAINU MELECH HAOLAM/ HOLY ART THOU, GOD, GOD, KING OF THE UNIVERSE.

  But Bernadete doesn’t want to travel anywhere by plane.

  The recent crashes in Tunis/ Carthage and Africa don’t help much.

  So we’ll probably go to Midland, Michigan, drive and see the houses and churches built by the architect of our new East Lansing house, Alden Dow.

  I’d like to take her over across Lake Michigan to Madison, Wisconsin, one of my favorite towns, drive down to Columbus, Indiana, kind of a showplace for great architectural masterpieces . . . one whole class on Columbus in our last architecture , maybe drive down to Chicago and see my cousin, Judy. Maybe we could stay at her apartment downtown on the near south side, which she bought just for fun. You look out the living room window and there’s Soldier’s Field and the Sears Tower, all of the Chicago skyline. Spectacular.

  I’d love to see my other cousins, Jack, Bill, Dick, David, Marge, Betty, George . . . the older generation is all gone now, and my cousin Bobby, my father’s sister, Babe’s son, just died recently after a liver transplant failed. The first in my generation to go.

  That’s what it’s mainly about now, I guess, waiting to die. Like in some huge waiting room waiting for the Death Train to Nowhere.

  I wish I believed it was going to Somewhere. Anywhere.

  Pearly skies, cloudy benches and wings in faraway heavens in the presence of God, total bliss, bursting with beatific visions of the Omnipotent, not one ounce of anxiety or pain left, just pure beatitude . . .

  I envy believers, but somehow, somewhere along the line my own beliefs in an afterlife evaporated and I saw all religions (whether it’s Sumerian or Akkadian, Egyptian, Jewish, Hindu, Christian) as inventions attempting to explain the inexplicable. I remember when I was in Chile with Alexandra, we’d go out at night sometimes, the Atacama Desert, what, 10,000+ feet up? I’d never seen stars like that before. Not an inch of sky starless. Enough starlight that you could read a paper by it, my mind voyaging out, out, out millions of light years into space, never coming to an end . . . how could it come to an end? If the universe was finite, what would it be contained inside of? And how could it have begun from nothingness? All that fire, all those endless suns and space and matter that wasn’t burning, how could it have just happened? So you invent a First Cause—God Himself causeless—and He begins to talk to you, talks to Abraham, talks to Moses, talks here, talks there . . . Why doesn’t He talk now to the Palestinians and Israelis? Why doesn’t he appear on international TV? Because He never talked to anyone anyhow?

  But if you take God out of the picture it’s even more impossible. If there is no creator, how does the universe just exist? It has to have begun, but how? Matter couldn’t always just have been? But how can all that endlessness begin?

  What I’ve finally come to is to simply live inside mystery, the inexplicable, the impossible-to-be-explained, an impossible-to-exist me living inside an impossible-to-exist universe.

  It’s enough to drive down to Eaton Rapids every Sunday afternoon and spent a couple of hours with Anne Nebe in her house out in the country overlooking a vast forest and marsh. A little green tea, a cookie, candles all over the house filling the air with all the right aromas, a little Debussy in the background, redbirds on the bird feeders out in the garden, maybe Ashley, her daughter, there, always a rib-crushing hug, “We’ll have to have coffee every week this summer, OK?” “Great.” As if she were my own daughter. Somehow turning me into her father, who’s in a ritzy-snitzy Detroit suburb now, remarried.

  Christmases at Anne’s with her two sisters and their husbands, all the kids. New Years. Easters, Thanksgivings . . .

  She’s my sister now, the sister I never had, her family the family I never had.

  My wife’s brother in Holland, Michigan now; too bad he left here and moved to Holland, he and his wife, Solange, and daughter, Nineveh, were more family that I loved/needed . . .

  I miss Harry Smith in New York, the month-plus I used to spend every year with him, miss Richard Morris in San Francisco, the couple of weeks every year I’d be with him. Miss Blythe Ayne (Washougal, Washington now), Glenna Luschei (Carpinteria), Jerry Dombrowski (Somerville, Massachusetts), Nona’s whole family down in Kansas City where I’d spend maybe a month a year . . .

  That’s what getting old means, I guess: everyone around you turning into old folks and joining the old folks community, sitting around waiting to die, watching your pals die off around you, seeing your kids get middle-aged and your grandchildren turning into adults.

  Like my cousin Judy said in an e-mail this morning: “Whatever happened? Suddenly I’m grandma all over the place!”

  One thing I’d like to see before I die is my novels published and getting a little critical praise.

  It would be nice to go down in glory instead of with a whimper.

  Like In the Beginning, my best novel, the one all about Pat Leahy out in California. My dying in Madrid of prostate cancer. How can anyone read the ending without tears?

  Opening her eyes just a bit. The sun almost entirely down now. Closing them again. Countdown, one-thousand-nine-hundred and ninety-nine, ninety-eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two . . . she could feel the difference, the slow cooling down. She could have been totally blind and still tell when the sun finally went down.

  Goodbye, Amon Ra. Until tomorrow. Good luck tonight in the Underworld, fighting the Monsters of Night.

  Opened her eyes, started to get up.

  “OK, pal, let’s go . . .”

  He’d fallen asleep. Eyes closed. Head down.

  “Come on.”

  No, not asleep. She didn’t want to touch him, tumble him down to the ground. Reached forward and gently touched his forehead, eyes, cheek. Cold. No breathing. She’d never heard of anything like this. Weren’t you supposed to cry out a little, one last squeal? Or slump over? Or . . .?

  “I love you so much,” she said to him, not loved but love. Now and forever. Not until death us do part, but forever.

  There’d never be anyone else. No alternatives or substitutes. This was it. The rest at best would be OK, the kids and grandkids . . . would she stay here or go back to California, go to Paris to be with Vicky?

  Stood there for a moment, staring at him, expecting, hoping for some sort of sign that he was still there, expecting something to emerge from him or surround him, some ectoplasmic emanation, glow.

  But nothing was there. Whatever had made him him, whatever “life” was, was gone. He was a dead puppet now. No one pulling on the strings any more. And “forever” suddenly seemed the silliest word in the world: “forever.” Along with “eternity,” “heaven,” “hell,” “limbo.”

  Then suddenly she felt badly about herself, all her little vanities and eccentricities, whatever had smudged and blotted their time together. If she’d had it to do over again, she’d “swing” full-time, be a sunflower instead of an acorn, a roast beef sandwich instead of a mushroom, Rachmaninoff’s unfinished Third Symphony instead of The Vespers . . .

  Ressuscité des morts . . . risen from the dead.

  Missing French, Paris, missing California, Palos Verdes; the immense silence of her immense house with her little room up at the top in the back. The
way she’d had it, all pink and warm, pillowed and quilted, stereo-ed and TV-ed. Missing her mother and her silly old tousled salt and pepper hair, her immense father with his long ox head and solemn mien. Missing 1958 (when she’d first met Bruce), Bufy St. Marie and the Rolling Stones, Ginsberg and Kerouac, that old theater out by Hollywood where they used to go and see German and Russian films.

  Where had all the flowers gone, long time passing, long time ago?

  Looking at Richard’s little old embryo face and remembering him talking about walking around in the Chilean desert:

  “You’d come across a circle of stones, some sort of solar-stellar clock. Or on a place called Loma Negra—which essentially means Black Rump—hundreds, thousands of old spear points, arrowheads . . . a whole world had lived there. Like the Sambaquis in Brazil or sites in Turkey like Çatal Hüyük: places where whole civilizations lived. And now they’re an obscure bunch of mounds, maybe some pottery, arrowheads, spearheads, skulls . . .”

  She was overwhelmed by an immense sense of tristessa , the sky above her, the air around her starting to go dark now, almost afraid of dusk and the coming dark. Wanting to just walk or even run away and just leave him there, her turn to go mad; everyone else seemed to have the right.

  When suddenly the man from the first floor of their apartment house, Señor Lopez, came walking by with his silly little white dog. Hair sticking out of its body like straws, for God’s sake. Like feathers. This tiny little ball of a body and all this hair. It almost looked like he’d been purposefully groomed to be a pom-pom. She could just imagine Sr. Lopez washing him and carefully combing him out, spraying him with hair spray so that the hair would stay erect. Lopez himself small and round, too. And for a moment she imagined him all covered with erect white feathers.

  “Señora, que pasó? No me digas que . . .” (What happened? Don’t tell me that . . .)

  Really wanting to just walk away now. It wouldn’t make any difference to Richard now. Richard wasn’t there anymore.

  “Il est mort,” (He’s dead,) she said in French, somehow not able to bear saying it in Spanish.