by R. M. Ryan
All of a sudden she opened her eyes and looked at me.
“Nice, huh?” she asked, a remark that seemed to take in the sex, the light, the ocean—the everything of being in California just then.
“Nice,” her partner said. He began to thrust harder. His eyes were still closed. “Nice.”
I walked back to the car slowly, looking for the cartwheeling girls. They had disappeared, and I drove back to Carmel to pick up Jenny from work. I was depressed. I wasn’t sure I wanted a wife. I really wanted to fuck women besides Jenny. My mother had told me: I wasn’t ready for marriage.
At the end of the bits of German dialogue, a crisp American voice came on the tape.
You will now hear some phrases not contained in the dialogue. You are to repeat the phrases.
39.
Here is the head of Henry Kissinger again, floating, bobbing this way and that. Once again, his eyeglasses become opaque when he turns toward the light.
“Ja, ja,” he says and, occasionally, begins laughing.
In this dream, the head of Henry Kissinger is held in place by three braided stainless steel cables that rise fifty or sixty feet from a normal-sized but headless torso seated at a desk far beneath the head. The body wears an elegant blue suit, white shirt, and silk tie. The collar of the shirt wraps around a dark hole. The cables disappear inside the hole and are anchored there inside the body.
The head nods and speaks in that avuncular Henry Kissinger manner.
“Who’d have thought an immigrant boy like me could rule the world.”
Then he laughs again.
The body at the desk aligns and taps some papers and puts them in a neat pile. “Ja, alles in Ordnung. Alles klar.”
Everything in order. Everything clear.
Across the front edge of the desk is a row of old-fashioned, wooden-handled stamps.
Occasionally a young man in a Harris Tweed sport coat much like the one I bought at I. Magnin presents himself to the headless body and looks up at the head of Henry Kissinger with a kind of awe.
“You are a fine young man,” the head of Henry Kissinger booms. Then he throws his head back and laughs. “Yale is it, young man? Are you a Yale man?”
The head of Henry Kissinger looks down. The lenses of his glasses are opaque.
“Yessir, Mr. Kissinger. Class of 1967. A Yale man, yes.”
“Very good,” the head of Henry Kissinger says.
His right hand, yards beneath his head, picks up a stamp and stamps the young man’s face. The stamp head is circular, a foot across.
CIA, the black letters across the young man’s face read. CIA.
“You are one of us now,” the head of Henry Kissinger proclaims. “One of us. Yes, yes.”
Then I am standing there in my Harris Tweed sport coat.
“You, young man. Where are you from?” the head of Henry Kissinger asks me. The arms of the body in front of me cross on its chest. I can see the head, far above, swaying back and forth on the steel cables.
“Columbia perhaps. You look like you might be a Columbia man.”
“Arkansas,” I say. “The University of Arkansas.”
The right arm of the torso reaches toward the stamps and stops in midgesture.
“I have Harvard,” the head of Henry Kissinger booms. “I have Yale and Princeton and Columbia. I have Stanford, but not Arkansas, no. I don’t think you’re one of us, young man. You’re just not smart enough. You’ll have to move along.”
I back away from the desk and pull out a .45.
Bam. Bam. Bam.
I fire and fire some more. The spent cartridges clatter on the floor, smoking as they fall. I miss him every time. I am sweating and terrified.
“I’m a killer, you fucker,” I scream up at the head of Henry Kissinger. “You don’t understand. I’m a killer.”
“I’m sorry,” Henry Kissinger laughs. “You missed. You didn’t qualify as a killer. Remember? Peter Everwine did that for you. Peter went to Yale. I’m sorry. You’re just not one of us, are you?”
But I want to be, don’t I? I want to be one of us. I start to cry.
“I’ll try, sir,” I say. “I’ll do what you tell me to do. I’ll do whatever you say. Just give me a chance. Give me a chance.”
40.
On Wednesday, October 15th, our German teachers took all four or five classes of their students on a field trip to San Francisco. We went to the German Consulate, where we watched an earnest black-and-white movie about a plot to assassinate Hitler, a movie to prove to us that there were “good” Germans as well as these stock SS villains gleefully exterminating Jews.
What did I care about the difference between “good” and “bad” Germans? The Hitler era was a long time ago. Besides, I had my Harris Tweed sport coat on. I thought I looked pretty elegant. God, I was excited. I just wanted to inhale the wonderful possibility of learning a new language in the company of my bright new friends. I wanted to walk narrow cobblestone streets in Europe in my new green jacket.
After the movie, our teachers took all twenty or thirty of us over to Schroeder’s German restaurant on Front Street in our civilian clothes. It was a delicious feeling, being in the army and leaving my uniform behind. Our group included two Green Berets. They were hillbillies, one from Tennessee and the other from West Virginia. They didn’t look so good out of uniform, though. They looked diminished in their short-sleeved shirts and out-of-style brogans. One of them had a faded tattoo on his forearm. Shabby, shabby. The rest of us, dressed mostly in tweed coats of some kind, look as though we’re on our way to teach a university class. Those tweed clothes are our real uniform, and we look jaunty.
While the dark paneling, the beer steins, the murals, and the buck heads on the wall of the restaurant were Germanic clichés, I didn’t care. The place seemed European to me, far more European than anything I’d ever seen. I was so excited about the possibility of going to Europe that I could hardly contain myself.
The streets around the restaurant were crowded that day. It was a national day of protest against the war in Vietnam. Since many of the protesters wore black armbands, it was also a day of mourning.
Most of us PFCs were against the war, but we didn’t say or do anything as we walked through the throngs of demonstrators. We didn’t want to jinx our chances for assignments in Germany.
Even my euphoria couldn’t cover up what a strange day it was. Here we were in the army walking among thousands and thousands of antiwar protesters. In the restaurant, we sat under stuffed boar heads and sang “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,” which is still the anthem of Germany.
“What’s a little compromise among friends,” Goldberg said. “We’re the good Americans, right?”
Out of our group, only Neil Renner, a charming blond kid who wore John Lennon glasses and punctuated his speech with little whistling sounds, had the courage to make his opinions known and showed up at the lunch with a black arm-band around the sleeve of his tweed sport coat. The rest of us looked away, embarrassed. When Neil tried to make a joke, we studied our plates filled with sauerbraten and spaetzle as if he weren’t there.
I still have one of the Zap Comix Neil gave me. He bought it in San Francisco. Mr. Natural Visits the City.
WATCH OUT a street sign says in the comic. WATCH OUT.
Nisei Hall was a two-story cinder-block building named after the Japanese Americans US officials quarantined in what looked a lot like concentration camps after the start of World War II. Some of the Nisei taught American soldiers the Japanese language to help the United States occupy Japan at the end of the war.
Room 250 wasn’t very big. It was actually half a room, divided off from the next classroom by a folding accordion door made by, oddly enough, a firm in Janesville. The classroom probably wouldn’t have held more than eight students and a teacher. Even our little class of six felt crowded.
Each classroom door had a window so that the supervisor could check on us and our teachers. That supervisor was gener
ally Frau Schneider, who would sneak up on the classes, her head suddenly appearing in the window like a portrait. The language programs had stringent testing standards imposed by the army, and there simply wasn’t time for idle chit chat. We had to memorize, memorize, memorize. It was Frau Schneider’s job to keep us on schedule.
She occasionally made a surprise visit inside a classroom and threw her arms up and down for emphasis as she went through a dialogue.
Week after week went by at DLI, and we sat in Room 250 of Nisei Hall repeating aloud the dialogues we memorized every night as we listened to our Wollensak tape recorders. We didn’t study Beethoven or Goethe or Nietzsche. No, our guides were military people: our dialogues had characters with names like Captain Quick who guided us around. In German his name was more elegant: Hauptmann Schnell.
So what if all the characters had military ranks? They were teaching us German, weren’t they? Did it matter how that happened? We had castles ahead of us, river cruises on the Danube, cobblestone avenues, and tall glasses of beer. Did it matter how we got there? We would get to culture later on, wouldn’t we?
Night after night, I sat in the corner of the living room, headphones on, snapping the keys of the controls. PLAY, STOP, REWIND, PLAY. The American voice introduced the German.
Listen carefully,
he said. But eventually the voices were German. A little tired, sometimes thick with cigarette smoke or hangovers, they slowly enunciate basic German sentences. While many people my age are getting stoned and listening to Pink Floyd through their earphones, I’m sitting in a chilly two-room apartment in Monterey repeating German.
Was machen Sie in Monterey?
Ich lerne hier Deutsch.
Wirklich? I lerne auch Deutsch.
Through the heavy green Koss headphones with the big plug attached to the Wollensak came the crisp German syllables.
What are you doing in Monterey?
I am here learning German.
Really? I am also learning German.
Every evening I sat in the corner of that apartment going over and over the dialogues. I occasionally looked up and saw Jenny sitting there reading or staring off into space.
I went back to the Defense Language Institute last fall. The Basic German course is still being taught, though with new materials.
“But Hauptmann Schnell continues to be a man of these new times,” Ben de la Silva, president of the DLI alumni group, tells me. “I understand that there are photographs taken in East German bathrooms after the Wall came down. ‘Hauptmann Schnell Was Here’ was written on the toilet walls, as if good old Captain Quick, famous DLI alumni, had beaten everyone there.”
I still have the tapes and the books from my class, but I no longer have Jenny, no. Not Jenny sitting there, her legs folded up beneath her. Jenny sitting there, rocking back and forth, holding on to her legs. I should apologize for what I did to her.
I am so sorry, Jenny. Will you forgive me?
But then, back then I have drills to learn. Idioms to master. I don’t have time to apologize.
New pattern,
the flat voice says.
New pattern.
Model.
Jung.
Ich bin jung.
Now you do it.
Yes, I say to myself along with him.
Now you do it, Rick.
You do it.
You’re young.
Now you do it.
41.
My mother came to visit for Thanksgiving. She was so excited. She hadn’t been away from Janesville in years. Before coming to see us, she spent a day in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
“I took a secret trip to San Francisco,” she said. “Your grandparents would have worried—me alone in that big city. So I didn’t tell anyone.” She ate Egg Foo Young in Chinatown and, the next day, flew on to Monterey. Even now, decades after the fact, I smile when I think of my chubby and not very cosmopolitan mother clutching her purse as she gets into a cab outside of her hotel for the trip to the airport.
Later that week, on Saturday probably, I took her down to the Big Sur beach I loved. Sure enough, several women were there, naked and cartwheeling.
“Don’t see this kind of thing much in Wisconsin,” my mother said.
No, you don’t, I thought. Bless my mother’s heart and her secret trip to San Francisco, but I’m going to take my own secret trip, I vow in my soul. I’m becoming a cultured person. I’m really leaving Janesville for good, I think. I’m taking off for the good life. A grand tour all courtesy of the United States Army. A life of women and good food—a life in Europe.
It was beginning already in Monterey when Jenny and I and the Goldbergs became friends. Nancy Goldberg knew about food and art and a kind of—what?—joie de vivre.
At the Goldbergs’ apartment we ate this strange spiky vegetable I’d never seen before called an artichoke. We had Gouda and Jarlsberg cheese. Little pieces on toothpicks. In Janesville the only cheese I remember is Kraft, and that usually in grilled-cheese sandwiches or melted on a hamburger patty. One weekend Nancy made paella using fresh fish from Fisherman’s Wharf. I’d never seen squid or cod before.
“It doesn’t taste fishy,” I said, remembering what my mother always said about the fish in Janesville.
The four of us went to San Francisco and ordered wine with our lunch at Ghirardelli Square. The restaurant had walls of exposed brick, the kind of thing we covered up in Janesville. I heard the word “Chardonnay” for the first time in my life that day.
On another Saturday, Nancy mixed the insides of another strange California fruit with chopped onions and tomatoes, and we had guacamole to dip in with chips before our Mexican-themed dinner with tortillas. That was the first time I’d seen a tortilla.
It was a rich life for me. The weekdays were filled with German. “Die Hauptgeschäftstrasse von Frankfurt ist die Zeil,” it says in our army homework. The main business street of Frankfurt is the Zeil. Pretty soon, I thought, I’ll be driving there. Me in Europe, I thought. I was giddy with the prospect. Jenny and I studied various Dansk dish patterns. Nancy, who had relatives working for the army in Germany, said we can get them at huge discounts from the PX in Germany.
“We will live like royalty over there,” she said, “on nothing at all. It’s all so cheap.”
Yes, I was giddy thinking of myself there, driving on die Zeil. Die Hauptgeschäftstrasse von Frankfurt ist die Zeil. I got so excited, I test drove one of the new Volksporsches, squealing around corners while the car salesman asked, “When are you leaving for Germany, Lieutenant?” I didn’t correct him about my rank, nor did I tell him that I probably can’t afford a Volksporsche with my meager savings and my PFC’s pay.
This wasn’t a time for reality. I was inventing a new and cultured Rick Ryan. I read Herb Caen in the San Francisco Chronicle. On Mondays, with the graduates of Ivy League schools, I discussed movies and ballet performances. Even though I’m on a military post where a brisk trumpet plays reveille at seven A.M., retreat at five thirty p.m., and taps at ten p.m., even though we all wear the green suit, brown shirt, and black tie of the American army uniform, the real military of drilling and bivouacking and fighting a war in Vietnam seemed like it came from another planet.
Most weekends Neil Renner went to San Francisco in his yellow Fiat 850 Spyder convertible, a car so small it almost looked like one of those cars circus clowns wore around their waists held up by suspenders. Neil came back to class on Mondays looking groggy as he showed us Grateful Dead records, psychedelic tie-dyed T-shirts, and comic books by R. Crumb.
My big counterculture moment was going to hear Jerry Rubin, a founder of the Yippie Party and one of the Chicago Seven, speak in the gym of a local Monterey college.
“Program?!” Jerry sputtered to a question someone asks.
He’s short, maybe five feet five. He paced back and forth.
“We have no program. After the revolution, we’ll do it as we feel it. The pigs always want to take the magic out o
f things by demanding programs.”
Circling in and out of the crowd were the kids who organized the speech. The boys wore Castro-styled fatigues and Mao caps. The girls had on fringed, peasant-styled clothing, with muslin blouses that show off their breasts. I got a hard-on looking at them, but I imagined what would happen if a guy with a short haircut went up to one of them and asked her out.
“Ha!” I said aloud. People turned to stare at me.
They circled through the crowds with steel cooking pots to take donations. “The judges ought to go to jail and see the reality they’re sending people to.”
“What is law? Law is any goddamned thing the pigs want it to be.”
“Pigs”—that word sounded so inflammatory back then.
“You can’t riot every day,” Rubin said at the end. “You get tired.”
It’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for?
Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn.
Next stop is Vietnam.
The music was scratchy, played over a sound system the boys in the Castro suits had rigged up.
Man, I think, I know that music. I’m in on the deal.
Jerry bowed his head and raised his arms over his head, his fingers formed the V of the peace symbol.
“OK, everyone,” a fat girl in a too-tight blouse said as she came on the stage pulling her hair out of her face. Her belly and breasts flopped as she walked. “OK. OK. Thank you for coming.”
Jerry disappeared, and the crowd was leaving the gym. Every so often a door banged.
“OK, people. People?” the fat girl said. “OK, listen up. OK, let’s use this energy to let the pigs at Fort Ord know what we think of their stinking, awful war. OK, there’s a sign-up sheet in the back of the room. OK, people.”
The crowd kept leaving.
“Off the pigs,” a man in the audience yelled, but he left, too.
“Far fucking out,” another man said, right behind him out the door.
The next week, going to the PX at Fort Ord to buy a Bob Dylan record, I passed a scraggly little group set up 100 yards from the main entrance to the post. The heavy girl was there holding up a sign that read, BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!