| Author: |
Robert Ziegler |
| Dated: |
Sunday, September 14 2003 @ 08:15 PM EDT |
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3062 times |
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Billy Joel sang a song about Allentown. I only heard it once so I never caught the lyrics, but I was born and grew up there, so I know something about it.
As Billy did, it was common to locate Allentown by placing it next to Bethlehem, the site of Bethlehem Steel. Allentown’s claim to fame was that it was the home of the Great Allentown Fair. Every autumn, farmers from the surrounding countryside brought together a dazzling collection of livestock. The stables were jammed with 400 pound pigs, goats and sheep, crowing roosters and calico hens; the barns housed the gigantic Budweiser Clydesdales, shining race-horses, and ponies for kids to ride. On hot afternoons, the combined smells of pig shit and horse piss, bull sweat and ram’s wool, were pungent enough to recall forty five years later, as I turn sixty.
Every day during Fair week, the animals were paraded down a dusty trail and out onto the race-track. We’d line up and watch excitedly, especially when the bellowing bulls, led by thick, brass nose-rings, swung their dangerous horns in our direction. After the animals were safely back in their stalls, the sulky-races, and, later, the Indy-500 cars churned the track into a dust bowl, which blanketed even those who could afford seats in the grandstands. Everyone sweated and applauded in the heat of those Indian-Summer afternoons. Though we lived over three miles from the fairgrounds, my brother and I laid awake on humid nights, listening to the scream and whine of the Offenhauser-specials as they split the heavy air with their souped-up engines. We all wanted to drive like madmen too, until one morning at school when we heard that Johnny Hinnerschitz, a two-time Indy winner, had crashed into the retaining wall, and his head had rolled across the track. We wondered what they did with it.
The midway grew, year by year, and the candy-cotton and candy-apple stands, and the balloonmen who sold bird whistles and badges, began to increase faster than the farm preserves and homemade pie contests. The Mighty Atom, an eighty-year-old Russian Jew with a thick accent, stood shirtless on the flimsy platform behind his tiny trailer. Wisps of hair nestled in the hollow of his chest just above his Buddha-belly. With his long gray hair pulled into a greasy bun pinned up with 6-penny nails, the old gypsy drove10-penny spikes through thick boards with his bare hands, refusing to be pushed aside by synthetic progress. Year after year, he sold snake oil lineaments guaranteed to cure any ailment, to transform even us scrawny kids into the iron man he was. His long gray beard covered an old microphone wired around his neck, and he stamped his cracked black shoes on the dusty planks as he commanded us to buy his tonics. He told long flatulent stories about constipated people in lavatories, who sounded like sputtering car engines running on bad gas; with his lips pressed to the microphone, he blew imitation farts then guaranteed that our bowels would be as clean and regular as his if only we drank his elixirs.
Jack the Blanket-Man competed in the adjacent space, wooing the crowd in his direction to purchase his brightly colored blankets. When the Mighty Atom got too loud, Jack would start his vegetable-dicer whirring, and, talking faster than an auctioneer, drew us in to witness the endless possibilities contained in his easy-to-afford, how-could-you-live-without-it, Dice-o-Matic miracle! He performed sleight-of-hand on mundane vegetables grown in any garden, turning carrots into bouquets, turnips into peonies, beets into delicious, muscle-building concoctions. He transformed cabbages into sauerkraut in ten seconds. His multi-faceted Dice-o-Matic could change ordinary housewives into Sou-chefs, charm wandering husbands back home, save foundering marriages, and, for an additional $19.95, blanket the whole family into a winter’s coziness never before dreamed of.
By the time my hormones had kicked into high gear, the midway had incorporated sideshows that had splintered from Ringling Brothers and had inserted themselves between the old-time hucksters and the agricultural displays. Gigantic pumpkins and John Deere tractors in frayed canvas tents were now sharing the space with New Midway Shows. Freak Shows promised two-headed cows, 500 pound fat-men who would devour 12 chickens and 10 quarts of milk right before our eyes, at every show; midgets, dwarves, and pin-headed people were put on display for us to ogle at. Carnies with swarthy skin and bulbous, alcoholic-noses, barked out “The Seven Wonders of the World,” awaiting us naďve yokels, “just inside.” And all for the price of less than a “dollah.” See the Tasmanian Wonder swallow a full-grown bull snake! See the man with breasts and the woman with a penis! I had grown tired of riding the Tilt-a-Whirl and vomiting up hot dogs and candy-cotton, and, by 16, had grown wise to the fakery and lies “just inside.” Besides, there were, again, new shows elbowing their way onto the Midway.
It was 1959, and, to the dismay of the Bible-belt farmers, striptease was now shimmying out onto the main runway. Tubby Boots, a fat clown, wore golden tassels on his nipples which he had learned to spin rapidly, in either direction. Tubby wore only polka-dotted boxer drawers and black stretch-sox, held in place by garters, so his act arrested anyone moseying down the midway around midnight. Couples with teddy bears they’d won at the ring-toss dallied and blushed. Men from the beer-gardens halted and hooted, their faces red from beer and farm work. Tubby twirled and shimmied in his polka-dot boxers, onto which were sewn two quivering foam-breasts. Tubby stopped traffic, and then he brought out the “Girls.”
The atmosphere changed in an instant. Wives tightened their grip on their husbands’ arms; the beer drinkers were suddenly less mouth, and all eyes. Lola, in blue and gold sequins, snaked her way across the splintered platform, tottering on towering satin stilleto heels, her bikini barely containing her cleavage; she smiled like a cartoon-fox wearing lipstick into the hen house. Monique appeared beneath a mound of black curls, her tiara twinkling like a Coney Island Ferris wheel, her long legs straining against black-mesh stockings. One by one, like big cats escaping from a busted cage, the “girls” took the stage, did a little bump and grind, then disappeared into the midway mirage.
One night I went in, after some coaxing from the guys on the ball team, and we slid onto a hard skinny bench down near the front of the stage. I remember glancing nervously around hoping no one would know me. I saw faces of farmers who’d leered from the crowd, and tattooed punks with their cigarette packs rolled up in the sleeves of their t-shirts. Mostly, though, it was a blur. I’d never seen a woman naked before. Tubby killed time, waiting for the tent to fill. He cracked us up, he shook the boards, he twirled his tassels, and then he made way for the main attractions. Close-up in strong light, the “girls” looked different. Their makeup was garish, almost farcical; their shoes were worn down at the heel, or split at the instep; their stockings had been re-sewn many times, and were giving way because their legs were too heavy. They teased us with breasts that were tired and drooping. They were fakes; they were only an extension of the Mighty Atom and Jack the Blanket-Man. Cat-calls arose from the back of the tent. Foot stomping began. Tubby ballooned through the tent-flap, spinning a bowler hat on one finger. There was still one act to go, the one we all been waiting for, the one he had been saving till the finale. Angelina’s Wine Dance!
"It had better be good," someone yelled. Men with farmer’s forearms were rolling up their sleeves. Then the front flaps of the stage tent began unfurling upwards, pulled by invisible strings. A facsimile of a marble fountain sat dimly lit in purple shadows. As the piped-in music began to play, the statue in the fountain began to slowly undulate. Purple jewels of spray began to rise like a fan of wine, and the lights began to brighten. Angelina stood, veiled and smiling, in the center of the marble ring, glistening and white as alabaster. The air grew silent as she lifted one wet veil from her belly button, revealing a sparkling rhinestone. She paused. Did we want her to lift another? A slow clapping began. She had us hooked. The wine jetted up more strongly now, between her legs, and she straddled the rising stream as if it were giving her great pleasure. Peeling back the dripping veils on her breasts, she released a clasp, and stood coyly, her breasts gleaming in the now-gold lights. We were steaming, stomping, begging for more. She wore no shoes and placed her bare foot on the rim of the fountain, then turned and bent over to gaze at us from between her legs. She danced like a water nymph through the arcs of wine, toying with the skimpy bottom of her costume, dragging us through the fields of our fantasies. As the lights dimmed slowly, she pirouetted into the diminishing wine jets and slowly froze again, back into her original statue of midway-marble. My hands stung from clapping, and I was suddenly on my feet with my friends and the tent full of men, participating in my first standing ovation, yelling "Encore! Encore!" but the tent flaps rolled back down. We were left with only Tubby, inviting us back to the next show. The trump card was his, and we left the tent in a satisfied scuttle, unmasked onto the midway, hoping our teachers or ministers or parents weren’t in the crowd.
Allentown also had storybook farm country: fat green hills and cow-filled pastures, orchards, and backyards of apples, peaches, pears, and cherries. Fields sparkled with bushels of sweet corn and endless acres of huge pumpkins, from which we pilfered jack-o-lanterns. We hooked trout in the little Lehigh River, golden carp and muddy catfish in the reservoirs. There were freshly mown grass parkways with covered wooden bridges to ride our bikes through, and red barns with Hex-signs gaily painted, to ward off the evil spirits which plagued the superstitious Pennsylvania-Dutch country folk. We hunted pheasants and rabbits between the corn rows in November, and ice-skated on ponds or tobogganed down hills through the winter. We had safe neighborhoods and we knew everyone for blocks around. No one worried where we were after dark; we were within whistling distance, playing kick-the-can or touch football. We biked to the Y, or to the swimming pool, hung out at the corner store eating Tasty-Cakes and drinking Nehi Orange soda. Years later we washed down plates of steamed clams with pitchers of beer in the same bar and grills as our fathers had. We parked and necked with our girlfriends by the duck pond, had sex for the first time, were wounded forever for the first time, graduated, and went away to college, or to war.
I was 25 in the summer of ’68 and that’s when I left my country forever. The Vietnam War was unavoidable, and I had already ruined my college teaching career. That was not my intention, but my naďve out-spokenness and my rebellious attitudes sabotaged my career, and that set the wheels in motion that resulted in my eventual exile. At the time I didn’t know that, that I was living on the edge, deaf to the warnings from my friends, family, and colleagues at the small college where I had landed my first teaching job.
Looking back, 35 years later, it seems that I always struggled with authority and institutional learning strictures. Through junior and senior high school I was consistently unable to connect with any academic discipline until I joined the wrestling team. Even my wrestling career had been characterized by a steady string of losses and self-deprecation. I generally lost my match before I even stepped onto the mat; I already lost at the weigh-in scales, when I compared my muscles (or lack of) to the apparent strength of my opponent. I lost in advance; I flunked tests before I took them. Due to a sudden slap across the face from our charismatic team captain, before a tournament against our cross-town rivals, I was thoroughly awakened, Zen-like, from my low self-esteem and apathy. I unexpectedly flattened their hairy-chested team captain and was propelled into the beginning of a two year winning streak. This change was somehow accompanied by a simultaneous improvement of all my grades, and, though I lost in the State Finals, I received a small wrestling scholarship to Wilkes College, in Wilkes Barre, Pa. Thus, I left my first girlfriend, my friends, and parents behind in Allentown and, except for occasional visits, I never returned.
After one year at Wilkes College, I transferred to Penn State University, again drifting from courses in accounting and economics (insisted upon by my father) into poetry, philosophy, and the counter culture of the campus beatniks which widened the growing rift between my father and me. What was the point of e.e. cummings and his ungrammatical writing when my father’s personal dreams had been punctured by post-depression necessity and bitter disappointment? Dad had watched his own cherished degree in English and his youthful hopes of becoming a journalist eradicated by the war effort and replaced by munitions-making at Bethlehem Steel. Didn’t I know that poetry, like Brazil nuts, was a lousy seller? People chose peanuts because they were easy to crack; if I had to write, then I should take up advertising, write jingles and slogans, or else I’d end up pulling weeds and planting trees in a nursery, like he had. There was wisdom and good intentions in his warning, but I found accounting and economics to be the equivalent of weeding, and I’d done enough of that during the summers at his nursery.
When I graduated from Penn State in ’65 with my BA in English, the Vietnam War was snatching any male bodies that appeared adrift, and I somehow managed to float up on the shore of Bowling Green University, in Ohio, temporarily rescued by a teaching-assistant bursary. I would be safe for the next two years. My father seemed relieved yet skeptical, as I gradually sailed out into the deeper waters of literature and philosophy: from Melville to Joyce, from Kierkegaard to Kafka, Dostoyevsky to Nietzche, William Carlos Williams to Virginia Woolf. I moved from a trailer in the countryside my first year into a two room apartment in town my second. Though I was deeply immersed in my graduate studies, it soon became clear in my freshman composition courses that my grasp of grammar was weak. I could write creatively and stimulate my classes into airy discussions, but I had somehow glossed over the foundations of composition during my high school years. I was winging it, teaching by the seat of my pants. And suddenly it was time to research a thesis, to deepen, widen, specialize and master something, someone.
I chose Virginia Woolf. I was already swimming out of sight of the shoreline and her writing seemed a lighthouse with a beacon of glimmering narratives. Ms. Woolf had, for me, unshackled the wings of language, snapped loose the grammatical constraints with which teachers had stifled my own interest in literature throughout my school years. Her writing seemed rebellious. Throughout my thesis I felt I, too, was wrestling with the old priests who had analyzed the soul out of poetry, then pushed us students to follow suit, seemingly awarding honors to those who best reduced literature to science.
My eccentric biases emerged ever more strongly during my thesis work. I was humored by colleagues who adroitly assembled the requisite proportions of research materials, threading them together with slivers of speculation from their own humble perspectives. Their papers were clear, readable, congruent, finished. Au contraire, I madly labored for six months, days/nights/weekends/semester breaks, attempting to deconstruct and discuss, in a phenomenological manner, a stream of consciousness process which was, essentially, un-nameable, and my writing remained as kaleidoscopic as her novels. Even today, when I attempt to reread my thesis, I have only the vaguest idea of what I was trying to say.
Nor did my thesis chairman, who’d published his dissertation on Ms. Woolf, fare any better with my writing. Why I refused to simply duck in from that psychic ocean and shore up at his well-constructed dock, I don’t know, other than, in my youthful arrogance, I deemed his work too shallow, didactic, and smug. We clashed. In hindsight I realize how generous he was with me. He wrote, at the bottom of my third draft: “One has the sense that one is being led through a labyrinth with golden walls, being led ever closer to a hidden city; however, one never quite arrives. The intellectual take-home pay for the effort required is, unfortunately, too small.” His colleagues on my thesis committee were in solid agreement with him. I was, apparently, unable to grasp the scholarly nature of a thesis. They were right: I was in the wrong boat. This was not to be a creative, personal journey, nor an exploration of interior vistas. I had, at times, authentically attempted to ignore the lure of the dark waters, but the undercurrents pulled me steadily out of sight. When the semester ended, my venerable committee rose reluctantly, extended a vaguely congratulatory handshake, then collectively cautioned me against proceeding any further into academia, suggesting that I take several years off to reflect upon the true nature of being a scholar.
Acquiring my master’s degree may have been one of the few things I did of which my father was able to approve. He was a good man, and I now realize he loved me, but, at that time, he certainly did not like me, as I stood there in his living room, with my shaggy hair and second-hand store clothing.
“Well I’ll tell you one thing; I’d never hire someone who looks like you, not even to transplant trees.”
“So what? I’m not interested in looking like someone who works for IBM.”
“You always did have a wise answer, didn’t you? You and your loud-mouthed talk about this country. And you can play that damned Dylan crap somewhere else. Sounds like he has a rag stuffed up his nose. It was always something with you. First those Everly brothers, whining like cats underwater, then Presley, now this dope.”
On Martin Luther King’s burial day, I’d requested we bow our heads in silence.
“Not at this table we won’t. This whole business is out of this world. Three whole days of carrying-on about it. I’m not saying he should’ve been shot, but he had something to say about everything.”
“And?”
“And enough is enough.”
“Enough of what?”
His eyes narrowed into “the look”; his voice took on “the tone.”
“You know damned well what I’m talking about, buddy.”
Years before, the next step would have been banishment from the table, to stay in that bedroom until I could return to the table with a friendly smile, to give up the attitude, the damned questioning. But at 24, and seldom home except for seasonal visits, it wouldn’t do to disturb my mother with our former scenes of unpredictable magnitude.
“Bobby,” she’d implore, while maintaining her dignity, and passing the gravy. “Please. You know what your father means.”
Yes. He meant don’t talk about American interests in the resources that Vietnam has. He meant don’t talk about the dehumanizing of people, which makes it easier to destroy them. He meant “negroes” are fine, as long as they don’t move up here, to the north end of town; he meant don’t question the Christians who go to our church an hour each week, then capitalize on the Puerto Rican laborers. He meant keep quiet, pretend; he meant, “You’re not the son I wanted. You’re a mistake who talks too much,” and he’d leave the table to down a double vodka, then return, red-faced and silent, all of us wishing I hadn’t come home.
Later at night, when we’d drink together, I’d watch him compulsively clean crumbs from the kitchen counter, the way his German immigrant father had drilled him to do night after night at their restaurant, to keep those tables clean, spotless, and to mind his mouth because the customer was always right; work 18 hours a day, seven days a week, and good children are to be in bed when German fathers come home and sit down to their silent dinner. My father and I would have a nightcap, go to bed distant as strangers, and in the morning shake hands; then I’d walk back out through his door, both of us glad I was leaving.
I’d bagged a teaching job at a small college in Maryland and had three months to unwind before fall classes began. It was the summer of ‘67, and a grad-school friend who was driving cross-country to Washington State had asked me to ride along. His car broke down in Utah, and as it would be three days until transmission parts could be bussed in, I decided to hitchhike on to my destination of Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco.
An evangelist with a pistol under his front seat drove me to Las Vegas, where I wandered the night in the casinos. Once into the Haight, I hooked up with an old college friend who was now dealing soft drugs to dudes in wizard hats and long cloaks with sequined stars and moons sewn to them. He turned me on to weed they smoked in a hookah, which unwired me completely. From the bastions of East coast academia, straight to the heart of the Haight, I felt flung into a warped-zone, where experience was defined by a simplistic language of vibes, grooves, and bummers. In two short weeks of Acapulco-Gold toked in bong pipes and hookahs, I was as confused as when I had attempted to define my straight perceptions to my thesis committee.
At the top of Mt. Tamalpias, among 10,000 half-naked, stoned hippies, I was swallowed up by Jim Morrison & the Doors, Country Joe & the Fish, Gracie Slick & the Jefferson Airplane, and a legion of grizzly Hell’s Angels, who took the stage whenever they felt like it. My world-construct collapsed on amphetamines and hot-knifed hashish, and I found myself, early one morning, with my thumb out on the edge of town, hitchhiking back to Allentown. Sometime later I was standing beside an endless, empty stretch of road somewhere in Utah; thunder drummed across the boundless sky like black buffalo; lightning sheets zigzagged like silver forks, and the sky opened wide. I was alone and soaking and exhilarated. A farmer and his wife took me home in their pickup, fed me, and, when the rain let up, walked me out back to their pelican sanctuary where hundreds of pelicans floated beneath a rainbow. I had a dry place to sleep that night. I was still a part of the American Dream.
In the morning I was on my way, catching a ride all the way to Pennsylvania with a hearing-impaired Mormon, a zealot. The price of my ride was three days of captive teachings about Joseph Smith, the founding father of the Mormons. I liked this zealot a lot, his desire to instruct and convert me, his eagerness to understand me. The long drive gave me time to simply listen, observe, float, and settle. He said he was, ultimately, heading to Expo ’67 in Montreal, to a worldwide Mormon conference. I declined his invitation and invited him to my parents’ home. My father, perhaps, would enjoy a gentle soul like this man, someone who heard as little as I did, but who answered only when spoken to.
Several days after the Mormon left for Montreal, a wealthy friend of my younger brother, John, invited us out to a cottage on the land owned by his millionaire father, to do some LSD. I’d avoided it in San Fransisco, feeling too fragile to risk that trip, but in my hometown, with my solid brother, I gobbled several tabs and went for a walk in the woods while I waited for it to come on. I watched, amazed, as a tree breathed, its bark a million moving molecules, and realized that it was alive, really, really alive. I understood what alive meant, was understanding everything in a radically different way. I communicated telepathically with several dogs, then called to a curious chickadee and was astounded when it landed within a foot of my head and looked straight into my eyeball. I picked flowers and watched their color drain away the moment they were torn from their stems. It sounded like they were sighing, tiny grieving voices rising from the living, pulsing flower bed.
Time telescoped as the motionless car traveled towards our house, and suddenly we were in my father’s living room. His 85 year old mother, my grandmother, was there for dinner. I’d always loved Nana. Her face had so many wrinkles on it; her glasses were so thick; her hands were thin as bird-claws. Her sleeves had little puffs at the shoulders. Tonight I felt sad for her. I was trying to explain to her how flowers die faster than we imagine, and that they sigh, collectively. My father was suddenly sitting next to us, his face becoming dark red, his nose seeming to expand, his blue eyes smoldering. I laughed and laughed at something. It seemed like we were all in a Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers cartoon.
My younger sister Linda was descending the stairs. She was a born artist who played guitar and painted by candlelight since she was seven, and, to the dismay of my father, admired me, had been warned about me. When I got up and went over to greet her, I was startled that her eyes were two different colors, and I seemed never to have noticed. Her face asked me what was going on and, while I was explaining to her that we are truly telepathic, Mother brought the roast beef to the table and we were all called to sit down. My father said I was sitting in the wrong chair and that I had to move. It seemed hilarious to me that there could be something like a wrong chair, but he narrowed his eyes into hooded slits; these were his falcon eyes, so I’d know what he meant. His brow would furrow, his flushed head would turn, and then the sharp beak opened.
“You’re way out of this world, buddy. Off this planet. Nobody ever heard of flowers sighing. That’s pure baloney. I’ve run a tree nursery for 30 years, and no one ever heard of trees breathing. You’re from some other world.”
My body got small, like Alice’s in Wonderland, and the fork looked too big. The center of the roast beef was rare; blood was oozing out onto the plate. I heard myself trying to describe what we were really eating, that it wasn’t really something called “roast beef,” but my Grandma said she’d always called it that. My mother’s face was turning gray and she said she was getting ill, quickly excusing herself from the table. Now my father’s face was purple, like a character from Beowulf. His Teutonic blood was thrumming as his eyes stabbed at my dilated pupils. I was the Antichrist, revealed at his very table, and I was suddenly walking out, through his ivy groundcover, through his huge yellow tomatoes, down the street and around some corner, past street signs that no longer made sense, through neighborhoods I’d never truly seen before, wandering for a long time, then into some gas station with a phone on a desk, phoning the airport for a flight to Montreal, then asking for directions to my own home, six blocks away. I cried as I walked because I felt I had never really known much about anything.
It was dusk when I re-entered our yard. My mother and a friend of hers were having drinks on the patio. I heard them talking about my dinner fiasco, their voices lowering as I neared. I heard my mouth saying that I was leaving immediately for Montreal, to work at Expo, plenty of jobs for everyone up there. I packed only a toothbrush. I was wearing an orange tie that my brother’s friend had brought back from some Mod store in England. He said it suited me well. I walked through the living room door. (Did I say goodbye to anyone but my brother?) I got into a taxi and got out at the airport. A woman with crisp orange hair informed me that all flights to Montreal had been booked for at least three weeks. Her eyebrows arched and she disappeared through a door. I stood mesmerized by a Trinidadian steel drum band that had suddenly appeared in the little Allentown airport. Their music spun me towards another counter, empty save a silver button upon which I leaned my elbow for what seemed a very long time, until a red-faced man burst through the door, demanding to know who’d been pressing the goddamned service buzzer. Service buzzer? This one right here, he fumed! We agreed that it must have been me, but now that he was here could he please help me get to Montreal, as I was going to be working up there in a pavilion. And he did. He re-routed me to La Guardia, onto a bus to the JFK International in New York, and then he, too, disappeared. I spent all night shuttling here and there, and when the sun came up, I was floating in the clouds above Montreal.
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