The audience would be staring at Spencer with a mixture of indifference and dislike. He would want to do justice to his father. The meaning of a life is not provided by its end. He would say that.
‘The meaning of a life is not provided by its end. My father’s last years were not happy. He was a vigorous man, who despised his own failings. It was horribly frustrating and galling to him to be handicapped in the ways he was. When he had his stroke that was the first time he was ever in a hospital. No, I better not, no thank you.’
The waiter takes away his empty martini glass.
‘His history was extraordinary. That isn’t quite right. His history was extraordinary to most of those he would come into contact with later on in life. But it was an ordinary one for his place and time. The extraordinary thing was that he survived it. One aunt and one uncle of his also survived being a Jew in Warsaw in 1939. We had him in Biaiystok. Seventeen years old. Boy rebel, teenage communist. Of course he should be in the Soviet Union. Except the Soviet Union isn’t so good. He gets a job in a magnesium factory in Kaminsk. He loses the job in the magnesium factory in Kaminsk. He’s in the Ural mountains now, one of thousands of displaced Polish nationals trying to make it through a Russian winter. So, he decided to head back west. He made it as far as a town called Kowno, where, the story as my father tells it, told it, there was word put out that any Pole wanting a free train ride back to Warsaw should gather at the station at a certain time. No one there knew what was going on back home, but it had to be better than this. So two thousand people cram into cattle trucks, but after a day or so they realised they were going the wrong way. They end up in Siberia, in a forced labour camp, laying railway tracks.’
How much detail should he go into? That they had to build their own shelter for that first winter? That his father would pretend to faint once a month so he could spend a couple of days in the hospital shack?
But he’s got the order wrong. There’s the episode in Moscow to tell them about, and that comes first, the May Day celebrations. It is one of his favourite episodes from his father’s life, perhaps because nothing really happens in it. But he would have to go on, further into his description of camp life, hope that the pause would be interpreted as a manful struggle against excessive display of emotion.
‘In the camps, they were given a basic ration of food, but there was an incentive to work for more. And productivity was measured by the amount of earth they had dug up and transported by cart. Most of the inmates of course were working themselves to death, because the extra rations couldn’t compensate for the amount of energy they were expending; but none of them, these tough factory workers and farm hands, wanted my father in their work gangs, because he was too young and too scrawny and too Jewish. My father fell in with a gang of chancers and wasters, who would find other people’s earth to claim as their own without having to transport it the extra couple of kilometres. So the burly Poles were dropping like flies and my father kept making it through.’
And should he retell the story that his father had once told him? About the women’s camp, and the inmates’ enticements? This probably wouldn’t be an appropriate anecdote for the funeral oration. Except it was probably a significant experience for Jimmy Ludwig, the wrong lesson that was learned for later life. His father has always been a passionate man. Spencer has never thought of him as a sensual one.
‘As I said, I think I said, he beat the odds on so many occasions. About six hundred survived of those two thousand who made the original journey to Siberia. (And meanwhile any Jews left in Biafystok were wiped out after the Nazis occupied it. And we know what happened in Warsaw!) When the Germans broke the Molotov-von Ribbentrop pact, the Polish nationals, or what was left of them, were released from the camps. He had been there for sixteen months. He was given a loaf of bread, a kilo of herring, a jar of vegetables and the opportunity to join the Red Army. Instead he found his way south to where General Anders was forming a battalion of Poles that would later become part of the British Eighth Army. They marched, raggle-taggle and sick and malnourished, out of the USSR, made some kind of recuperation in Iran, where my father lay down, expecting to die.
‘He didn’t die. He didn’t die then, in Iran or Iraq or Palestine. And he didn’t die at the Battle of Monte Cassino, where he fired big guns in support of the assault. He ended up in London after the War, he survived all these things, and in London he was treated, he said, as a dirty foreigner. But he met his wife there, my mother, and they moved to America because that was a place where if you were smart and worked hard then you would be rewarded regardless of your origins. And it worked for him. He made money. He lost one wife, but he gained another, and for the first half of his second marriage at least, he was probably happier than he had ever been.
‘I don’t know whether he was fundamentally changed by his experiences, or being the person he was was what enabled him to survive them. That, and luck of course. He didn’t talk about any of this until he was well into his seventies. He said he didn’t see the point. He didn’t seek out the company of anyone with similar experiences, and he didn’t see the point of talking about something to someone who couldn’t have the slightest idea of what he was talking about. Is there a Zig Pianko here? No. I didn’t think so.
‘He knew that surviving the things that happen to you doesn’t make you into a hero.
‘He wasn’t a hero. He was selfish and obsessed by money, and didn’t have any insight or even much interest in the inner lives of others. His primary methods of communication were interrogation and flirtation, and were he not my father I probably wouldn’t have held any of that against him.’
Spencer’s father has fallen asleep.
‘I’m going to have to try this again. I don’t think I quite hit the right note,’ Spencer says.
Chapter Five
Spencer has no memory of ever sharing a bedroom with his father before. He once took a shower with his father and was disappointed to see that his father’s penis was smaller than he would have expected. Runs in the family, Spencer’s father had said, before commenting on the hair on Spencer’s chest in the way he had when he was putting other people down as being peasants.
Spencer strips down to his underpants and T-shirt. He is surprised at how modest he is in the company of his father, but then this is one of the few equalities between them: the physical proximity of each makes the other equally uncomfortable.
His father winces and shifts and extricates from beneath himself the room key that Spencer had dropped on to the seat of the armchair. Deftly he tosses it on to the table where they play backgammon and settles, as comfortably as his back and neck and digestion will allow, to watch the television. Spencer hurries to retrieve the key. He had been conditioned by his mother never to place a key on a table. Defiant boy Spencer would walk under ladders, refuse to throw salt over his left shoulder after he had spilled it, open umbrellas willy-nilly and carefree indoors. But despite his (father-learned) contempt for superstitions, he has never been able to accept a key on a table.
He washes his face and hands and rubs some water against his teeth and gums.
‘We’re going to need some things,’ he calls out to his father. ‘Toothpaste and so forth.’
His father does not reply. He has found some boxing on the TV. He sits in the armchair as he is accustomed to do at home, watching the screen with a look that is almost flirtatious, his chin sunk to his chest so he has to lift his eyes as high as they will go, demure and vulnerable.
‘I guess hygiene can wait till the morning. Which bed do you want?’ Spencer asks.
His father doesn’t seem to hear. He sits, mouth open, as if frozen, while two middleweights in a Las Vegas arena foxily circle each other, shadow-image brothers, one white, the other black, each with a left glove raised to protect his chin, the right held loose and low, ready for an opening.
Spencer gets into the bed that is further from the television. The commentary is horribly loud. He closes his eyes and pulls t
he covers over his head and, muffled, he continues to be attacked by names and numbers (Billy Boy Gardel, fourteen and three…Juan Riviera, second-round KO four times…), and the trained modulations of a commentator who is trying to arouse his listeners into appreciation of the suspense of the spectacle.
‘Would you mind turning down the volume a little?’
Spencer’s father does nothing and for one awful moment in which horror and fright mingle with a kind of dazed, fatalistic relief, Spencer is convinced that his father is dead.
He gets up again, and half totters, half runs to the armchair. His father’s eyes are open, unblinking. His arms and hands, which had always represented power and unassailable authority to Spencer, have no tone and hardly any substance.
‘Dad?’
Nothing. No response. Spencer reaches for the remote control, which is on the right arm of his father’s chair, and his father, jealously, sharply, pulls it tight to his own body.
‘The volume. Could you turn the volume down a little?’
His father slowly closes his mouth and opens it again as he continues to stare at the TV. Lightly, almost girlishly, he farts.
Spencer tries sleep again, he is exhausted, he is jet-lagged, he has big days ahead of him, he is in the unaccustomed position of having responsibility for his father, he needs sleep more than anything. He strains for it and then tries to relax into it. He holds the spare pillow over his ears against the boxing commentary and tries to bore himself into sleep.
He struggles to recollect the names of every child in his first class of secondary school. But in the hypnagogic zone between wakefulness and slumber, red mocking images of the day—his stepmother, Officer Porrelli, the Cheesequake rest stop—jeer into his closed-eyed vision like a gang of thugs invading a yoga retreat. On his second turn around the classroom, worrying if it was really Nathan Hunt who sat next to Alfred Jesudasen, he succeeds in surrendering to sleep. He dreams about the death and funeral of Muhammad Ali. And his consciousness is again penetrated by the noise of the TV. His eyes open again. His father sits as before, shielded by the dark, staring at the screen, while two semi-naked men try to destroy each other. Spencer gets out of bed. He puts on his jeans and T-shirt and sneakers.
‘I’m going downstairs, I think there’s a shop downstairs,’ he tells his father. ‘Get some toothpaste and so forth.’
‘Dentures. Denture soap,’ his father says.
‘Toothpaste for your dentures? Sure. I’ll pick some up.’
The hotel is preferable at night. It is less lurid. The brown corridor down to the elevator bank is sort of peaceful. The rattle of the ice-maker makes a pleasant percussion. Spencer rides the elevator to the first floor in the company of two large young men with their petite hairsprayed girlfriends. They are all drunk and have either just had sex or are just about to. Spencer again feels the absence of his camera.
‘Have a good night,’ he says to them when the elevator doors open.
The girls giggle. The louder of the men says, ‘You too, sir.’
‘Thank you,’ Spencer says and is childishly gratified by this unexpected courtesy.
In the casino shop he buys a large bottle of water, three pairs of underpants, two toothbrushes and two toothpastes, Colgate and Dent-kind, from the small oriental woman who can barely reach over the counter to serve him. And now, he can’t resist it, he wanders along the casino floor. He wishes he had his noise-reducing headphones with him, to protect his ears and sensibilities against the clangour and ching of the slot machines. Instead he has his father’s watch. If he were in the street, he would be feeling exposed and vulnerable, hiding his wrist against the avarice and bad intentions of strangers. But one of the tricks to get through life is to present the opposite of whatever you are feeling.
He has nearly a hundred dollars in a back pocket of his jeans, two toothbrushes peeping rakishly out of his souvenir store shopping bag, a gold eighteen-carat watch squeezed on to his left wrist. His senses are both dulled and alert, which maybe accounts for him falling for the tricks of casino designers and taking the wrong route towards the elevator bank and finding himself instead at the threshold of the card room.
The key to winning at poker, both online and off—and how Spencer mourns the absence of his laptop, which he hopes is in the trunk of the car and not left behind to the malice of his stepmother at his father’s apartment—is game selection. You do not join a game where the players engage in barely secret complicities and collusions. You do not take on strong opposition when you’re tired. You do not play with money you cannot afford to lose.
Spencer breaks all these rules, and more. He could just about afford the one dollar-two dollar no-limit hold’em game, but pride or, more likely, vanity pushes him to sit short-stacked at two-five. These are regulars he is up against, the graveyard shift, soft-playing each other, taking it in turns to fleece the tourists, of whom Spencer finds himself the sole representative. He plays up to the role, fumbling with his chips, asking the dealer to clarify the action, sitting looking nervous and concerned, which is almost not an act.
‘I’ll see you,’ he chooses to say when the correct term is ‘call’—and he enjoys the pitiless looks that pass between the regulars.
He is given credit for betting his hands, so, squinting at the board, rechecking his cards when the third club arrives on the turn, he makes a trembling raise of the original bet, which had come from the stern little Latino wearing a red-and-white car repairs cap. The Latino nods, flicks his cards away to the dealer, and Spencer gathers the chips and fumblingly arranges them in faltering little towers.
‘Where you from, buddy?’ says the player to his left, who acts the part of an expansive fellow—it just so happens he was born with the shrewd eyes of the operator who can assess the odds and costs of any situation.
‘Uh, London,’ Spencer says.
‘Nice,’ the expansive fellow says.
Spencer endures a conversation about weather, the royal family and exchange rates. He wants to sit quietly, but already the poker magic is doing its work. The world is shrinking to almost the dimensions of the table. These could be the only people in the world, the lady dealer with her apple-pie manner, expansive fellow and stern Latino and the other local grinders, who sit patiently as if they are just passing the time of day, as if they were not a breed of predator waiting for openings, the sniff of blood, the smell of weakness, sharks idly cruising, barely opening their mouths for the fish to come swimming in.
One of the local grinders, a man who displays a small excess of every physical detail, the thickness of his glasses, the straggliness of his beard, the double sniff he gives at the ends of his sentences, asks the expansive fellow about his recent trip to Vegas.
‘What about Candace? She give you any trouble?’
‘She wanted to go shopping and she wanted to go to shows.’
‘So?’
‘I did not want to do these things. And how was I going to earn the money to pay for our vacation?’ ‘Yeah. That’s right.’
‘Valium’s the answer, I recommend it. I’d just put these three Valium in her breakfast orange juice and go downstairs and play cards. She’d wake up in time for me to take her to dinner and a show. She must have slept thirty hours out of forty-two. Said it was the most relaxing time. I’ll raise.’
Spencer had stayed out of expansive fellow’s way so far. But he decides it is time to get involved.
‘How much is it?’
‘To you, my friend, fifteen dollars, no discount.’ ‘OK. I’ll see you.’
Spencer wonders whether he is laying it on a bit thick, this performance of nervously ignorant incapacity, his poker solecisms, but it had always been a failing with him to act out of aversion to the obvious. Oftentimes the obvious choice is the right one.
And he wonders whether he is sitting in on his own future. He could become one of these old sharks, in a card room anywhere in the world, taking advantage of the tourists and the young, grinding out a kind of li
ving, getting fatter and iller and airless. He has never been a nature boy. Apart from an affinity to donkeys and tortoises, the organic world makes him uncomfortable.
As if the result of the hand is foreordained, the locals chat away during it. Straggly fellow asks expansive fellow if he is going to be playing the big tournament. It becomes clear that the only reason he asked the question is so he can announce that he won a satellite entry to it.
Spencer bumbles his way to the end of the hand, without ever consulting his hole cards. He checks when the expansive fellow checks, calls when he bets. At the river, his opponent smilingly puts in a larger bet that Spencer reads as a bluff.
‘Can I raise?’ he asks the dealer.
‘You can do what you like, darling, so long as it’s legal.’
‘He can do a lot more than that, I heard, Rose-Mary.’
‘You hush your mouth Lloyd.’
‘I’ll raise,’ Spencer says.
‘How much, darling? You have to make it an amount.’
‘Oh. All of it. I’ll go all-in.’
‘I call,’ Lloyd says.
The board shows ace of hearts, three of clubs, king of diamonds, four of spades, three of hearts.
Lloyd tables his cards, ace-king, giving him top two pair.
Spencer turns over his own two cards, expecting nothing beyond the reproach for trying to be fancy when he is preoccupied and sleepless and poor. He has the six and three of spades, making an unlikely three of a kind.
A Film by Spencer Ludwig Page 9