There's a Man With a Gun Over There (27 page)

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 generally 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.

M
y 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 of 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.