I told him about my reception.
“Yes, well. It’s not your job to decide whether people should think you’re important or not, hey? Huh? What others think of us is none of our business. Maybe you’re more important than you give yourself credit for. This could be God’s way of showing you something you should know but don’t.”
“Yeah, but Ray, that’s part of what I’m worried about. I know that there’s God in San Francisco. But is there God in Germany? My God?”
“Well, let’s see.”
“How?”
“Go to a meeting.”
“How do I do that?”
“You’ve got that contact number you said someone gave you for twelve-step meetings in Munich?”
“Yeah.”
“Call it.”
One hour later, as I waited in front of the hotel, a Brit named Dick pulled up in a Saab, rolled down the window: “Are you Alan, then?”
“That’s me!”
“Well, get in. We’ll just make it to the meeting.” And as the sun set Dick drove off, asking a million questions about recovery in San Francisco, on a drive that seemed to take hours. Then we were in a forest, the darkest and most ominous I’d ever seen.
I said, apprehensively: “What’s this place called?”
“Black Forest,” he said.
Didn’t like the sound of that. Few cars, bigger trees, dense woods, expected wild wolves and big razor-tusked boars and immense dagger-clawed black bears bounding from the brush across our path—but in deeper Dick went, and then deeper still, turned off onto a side road and I thought: Well, here we go. I’m now officially fucked. We’ll be met by machine gun-toting Sieg Heilers, and that will be that.
Ahead loomed a military base. I prepared for the worst. The sentries, though, were American. “Here for the meeting,” Dick told the sentries, who waved him through to a Quonset hut. Inside, circled chairs filled with an assortment of civilians and military personnel. Dick announced: “Everyone! This is Alan from San Francisco. Shall we ask him to be our guest speaker?”
“I should say so!” exclaimed another Brit, a woman with bright red hair and intense blue eyes. “It’ll be a nice change from listening to your boring stories every week.” Everyone laughed and Dick nodded in appreciation.
And so I sat at the head of the group and told the story of how, just a year and a half earlier, I had lain on a bench in Tompkins Square Park, dying, and now here I was, an invited poet at an international literary festival, on an all-expenses-paid professional junket, telling my story to a group of clean-and-sober alcoholics. When I finished, met with a round of warm and appreciative applause, there was no doubt in my mind that my Higher Power had traveled with me from San Francisco to Germany.
Mona Winters informed me that news of my coming had spread throughout the network of German and Austrian literary institutes known as Literaturhäuser and I had received an additional four invitations to perform in Frankfurt, Hamburg, Salzburg, and Berlin. Holman could join me for three of those, she said, but in Berlin only I had been requested. In return for this, my ticket would be extended at their expense, I would stay in hotels and private apartments as a guest, and would receive travel expenses to each city, out-of-pocket expenses, and fees ranging from $500 to $1,000 per reading. Would this be, she wanted to know, all right?
Certainly.
Holman arrived the next day. That evening we performed for the festival. My reading was telecast live nationwide to 60 million viewers on Germany’s equivalent of Sixty Minutes. As I read “Last Emphysema Gasp of the Marlboro Man,” I glanced down at one point to the foot of the stage, where a mob of camera lenses was aimed at me. A month before, I had performed the same poem to an audience of ten, most of them half asleep, at a Sunday afternoon reading in San Francisco.
I had another pact to keep, one I’d made with Old Ray, to visit sites of the Holocaust wherever I went. In Munich took a suburban commuter train to Dachau, where I found drunken German soldiers clutching beer bottles as they weaved arm in arm, singing, through the concentration camp, a tourist site replete with gift shop and a soccer field right behind the gas chamber complex, where a soccer match was in progress, fanatical fans cheering good plays near the crematoria. I had brought a prayer book and yarmulke and stood over a mass grave, said Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.
The next day visited a Munich synagogue walled in by security barriers and barbed wire. An Israeli sentry in a small watchtower with bulletproof windows kept vigilant watch. He asked questions and checked my papers before allowing me into a modest-sized synagogue with a tiny congregation of bent old men and one or two youngsters with sallow, inbred-looking faces such as I had seen in photos from the Warsaw ghetto. They were a man short for a minyan, the quorum of ten required to hold a proper prayer service, and so greeted my arrival with considerable fanfare.
I was called up to the Torah to read—an honor. After, they crowded around me. They were, compared to me, so small, tiny even, many with numbers on their arms. They insisted that I remain for lunch, which I couldn’t refuse. We sat to a long table in the synagogue attic, their wives and daughters bearing trays of kosher food. More prayers were said, and then my plate piled with one delicacy after another, all homemade, and no sooner had I eaten than more was heaped on. They all watched happily as I ate, seemed to enjoy my pleasure in the food even more than eating it themselves, and asked me numerous questions.
Then the head rabbi, a large, bearish man with a gentle bearded face, broke his silence to ask: “So what brings you all the way from San Francisco to our little synagogue?”
They all waited for my answer.
“I’m a poet and a Jew. So I’m making sure to visit Jewish points of interest. And you are one.”
“I see,” said the Rabbi, smiling. “So, we are a point of interest. What, if I may ask, do you find interesting about us?”
“How few of you there are. Not enough to make a minyan. And many of you have numbers on your arms.”
A few of them nodded to confirm my observations. The rabbi said, “This is something we talk about all the time. What will happen to our congregation, so many of us are old, just a few young people come.” He shook his head. “I’m not sure that we’ll survive another generation.”
“Your English is fantastic,” I interjected.
He smiled, grateful for the compliment.
“We’ll survive!” exclaimed one of the young men, his English also excellent. “You’ll see. We’ll get married, have lots of children. The shul will go on.”
But no one else seemed to agree.
The rabbi said: “Imagine. All the way you came from San Francisco, just so you can make the tenth man at our minyan. God must have a special love for you, to entrust you with such a mission.”
I couldn’t help but think of what Old Ray had said about new experiences emerging from new choices, new ways of looking.
“My mother,” I said, “was in the Holocaust. A French Jew. She was twelve years old when the Germans marched into Paris. She escaped from a round-up of Jews deported to Drancy and then Auschwitz. She fled to Italy, where she was arrested and put in Borgo concentration camp. But somehow she escaped from there too and into the mountains around Torino, where Italian Communist partisans found her and took her in. She saw terrible battles fought. She saw terrible things. When the war ended, she came back to Paris, where she learned that half her family had died in the camps. And her own name was on the list of the murdered. Her escape had gone unnoticed. The Nazis had marked her for dead. She was seventeen years old.”
At this, the table grew quiet. All stopped eating to look at me, listen to the Rabbi, who was preparing to speak.
“Then you cannot know how much this means to us. We are the last Jews of Munich, the remnant of the thousands who perished under Hitler. We remain to show Germany that to snuff us out is not so easy. And now, here you are, from the French branch of the same murdered family. Alan, welcome. You are among your own here.
And we are grateful that you are here.”
In Hamburg Holman and I stormed the city with a new level of ferocious impudence. The fact that the Beatles had premiered here drove us in part. We were messengers of a new avant-garde. Now, we thought, half seriously, our turn had come. We toured the Reeperbahn, the red-light district where the Beatles had debuted and rocked the Hamburg nights.
We were booked to perform in a former palace, now converted into the Hamburg Literary Institute, or Literaturhaus Hamburg. At long tables sat the assembled dignitaries, attired in evening wear. We were expected to perform on a stage while the guests supped on haute cuisine. Holman and I exchanged a look that said we were nobody’s dinner act. While Holman rocked the mike dressed in a punk cheetah-patterned lounge jacket, I jumped onto a row of tables and proceeded to rant a loud poem that equated gluttony with fascism while storming up and down, sending dinner plates and cutlery every which way. Our hosts were exhilarated and appalled. A review of our performance appeared the next day in Hamburg’s biggest German-language daily beneath the headline “Wild Tigers Attack the Stage.”
I continued on to Berlin alone while Holman returned to America. On the train to Berlin, no one spoke except a passenger who noted the camera around my neck.
“American?” he asked, smiling. A young, sallow-faced man with a trim blond mustache.
“Yes.”
“You want to see something very funny? Quite amusing?”
“What?”
“Stand up, point your camera at the passengers as if to take a picture, and see what happens.”
“Your English is excellent,” I said, trying to change the subject.
“Yes. I studied your English in school. We all do. English is the new lingua franca, huh? Go ahead: do it, as they say in Nike. See what happens! You will see something. It is very amusing.”
Curious, I stood up, pointed my camera at the passengers.
Every head, as if on cue, ducked, noses tucked into coat collars, eyes averted, some passengers pretending to tie shoelaces. Not a single passenger remained upright or looked ahead.
My fellow passenger grinned, delighted. “You see what is this? Reflexes of the old GDR! Ha! Ha! Ha! Is so funny, yes? They still think there are Stasi going around like the old days, photographing and informing to the authorities. Everyone in GDR spied on his friends. Everyone was Stasi.”
“And you? You were Stasi?”
“Everyone,” he said.
“And now?”
“Now is no one to report to. The Stasi is over. Everyone feels lost.” He laughed himself sick over this.
Just then, a flood of uniformed men in greatcoats and military boots appeared, an entire battalion, it seemed, laughing and shouting, arms around each other’s shoulders. In my car, a stampede of passengers rushed to get out, into the next car. My fellow passenger stayed, but his face, on seeing the soldiers, grew hard, ugly with hate.
The seats filled up with troops. They were, I gathered from the insignia on their caps, Russian tank soldiers.
My newly unamused fellow passenger said: “The occupiers. They’re unemployed now. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union the whole Russian occupation force is on unemployment benefits paid to them by us, the occupied! Germany pays them their salaries because there are no jobs for them in Russia or here and we don’t want these rogues to turn their guns on us. They have nothing to do but get drunk and make fools of themselves. Look at them. Idiots!”
He stood up. “Excuse me, my American friend. But this is more than I can bear,” he said, and exited into the next car.
The Russians filled every seat, including his. The train pulled out. I was the one civilian left among them. Soon, the Soviets broke out bottles of vodka. Everywhere, bottles circling my head, passing under my nose, swung in big-knuckled fists, contents splashing on me. The tank soldiers sang and shouted, laughed and shoved, falling over each other.
“Americanski!” someone howled. Next I knew, there were vodka bottles shoved in my face, soldiers urging me to drink, drink! Vodka breath all around me. Vodka-soaked whiskers brushed my face and hands. The car reeked of it. The laughter was soaked in it. The songs sung were vodka songs. The Russian blood of my father’s father did a mazurka in my veins. Vodka! My ancestral beverage! Purim! Dostoyevsky! Taras Bulba! Tevye the milkman! It all pressed in on me, urging me to drink. I closed my eyes. Prayed: Oh, God, help me now. And God’s voice came back loud and clear: Why don’t you just leave this car and go to the next one?
That hadn’t occurred to me. Stood up and elbowed my way into the next car and the next—a strange nightmarish pastiche of silent sallow oppressed-looking East Germans and drunken brawling Russians—until the vodka-soaked tank brigade was far behind. At last found a quiet spot, a kind of dining car with hard little seats to discourage lingering, and sat, closed my eyes, imagined my favorite 12-step meeting in San Francisco. And there they all were, my beloved clean-and-sober friends. Eugene, Old Ray and Carl Little Crow and Suzy and Kevin and Si and Red Man, everyone I knew and loved in recovery, seated around the table in my mind.
My name is Alan, I said. I’m an alcoholic. And held a meeting in my head: said the Serenity Prayer, then the 12 steps, and, appointing myself as guest speaker, shared about the experience I’d just had with Russian soldiers and endless vodka. I don’t know how long I sat like that—it was a long meeting, so peaceful—and when I opened my eyes I felt safe and good, my Higher Power with me in this most improbable of places, as was my recovery network, their spirits and examples. Each face kept me company right until I reached Berlin. And they are always with me, to this day, the meeting that I carry in my soul.
BOOK NINE
64
MY LONGING FOR MY DAUGHTER WAS A CONSTANT ache. Year after year, I didn’t know what to do. An impossible situation. Despite my repeated calls, Esther refused to allow me to speak with Isadora and often just used my calls as an opportunity to scream at me and then hang up. It had been seven long years since I had last seen my daughter. In the interim, my mother had died, and despite my efforts to reconcile with them I was hopelessly estranged from my father and brother, who wanted nothing to do with me. Slowly I was struggling to get on my feet, making headway as a writer. But it wasn’t enough. The way that Isadora had slept in my arms as an infant, the complete trust and understanding that we seemed to feel with each other at the most gut level—I needed to see my little girl.
I knew that somehow she needed to see me. Yet to think of it filled me with dread. The thought of facing Esther again made me angry, sick inside. I hated her. She had stolen my daughter from me and, no doubt, filled Isadora’s head with poison about me. She was a lunatic.
I told this to Old Ray. He looked at me. “Resentment, justified or not, will kill you,” he said. “It seems to me that you need to take some personal inventory about it. Do a fourth step. We’ll have a look.”
I wrote out a full inventory about Esther, outlining not only my resentments against her and how I perceived that her actions had affected me, but also my part in things, where I had been in the wrong. This was harder to do. Harder to see. But it was clear. I certainly had my fair share of responsibility for the wreckage of this situation. I had married the woman, a stranger, while on a binge. Had never really stopped drinking during our entire time together. And when things went from bad to worse, I resorted to alcohol—the very action that had fueled the problem in the first place—because my solution to any crisis was to black out, destroy myself and my life entirely. In the process I had deprived Isadora of a father and had abandoned her to a crazy mother—one nearly as psychotic as the one I had had.
It was also clear that, as I was then construed, with the tools for life then in my possession, I could not have done otherwise. Did what I had always done, acted as I’d always had when things got hard—whether as an athlete, a writer, a student, a lover, an employee, or as a father: I quit.
Seated across from Old Ray, in our usual café spot, I went through all thi
s, detail by painful detail, fully expecting that Old Ray—as he had so many times before when I brought up on fourth steps that, love apart, purely on a person-to-person human level, I owed that little girl an amends, to somehow be in her life—would say: “Yes. But not yet.”
This time, he said: “You’re right. Go home, do steps six and seven. And on your eighth step, list of amends owed to people you’ve harmed, just put two names: Isadora and Esther. You owe that little girl. It’s time to make amends.”
I stared at him, astonished. “You do? Now, when I haven’t a dime to my name and I owe all this money on unpaid back taxes and student loans and I’m unclear how to pay this month’s phone bill—now, of all times, you say: ‘It’s time.’ Esther won’t even put her on the phone to me.”
“Alan,” said Old Ray, voice quieting into that calm inflection-less tone it acquires whenever he stands face to face with my anxieties. “Are you in charge, or is God? Either God is, or God isn’t. Which is it?”
“God is…” I said reluctantly. “But.”
“And if God is in charge of amends and this amends is owed, then you’ll need His help to make it, won’t you?”
“Yes, but…”
“So, all you need to do is the footwork and leave the outcome to your Higher Power. Yes? No? Huh? Which?”
“Yes,” I said sullenly. “So, what am I supposed to do?”
“How much does a ticket to Israel cost?”
“A lot. Round trip? Plus hotel? And out-of-pocket expenses, food, cabs to and from the airport, and what about gifts? I’d want to get her things. I’m her daddy…” I looked down. “Her daddy,” I said hopelessly. I looked Ray in the eyes. “I haven’t seen that kind of money in years.”
His eyes did not soften. “Make a budget for how much you’d need. Call me when you’re done.”
I looked at him, dejected, a little resentful.
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