Battle Fatigue (10 page)

Chapter Twenty

Two Karls and one Che Guevara

The letter was forwarded by my parents. It was from Karl Moltke in West Berlin.

March 12, 1967

Dear Joel,

I hope you remember me. I am sending this to your parents because I don't know where you are. But here in Berlin I am thinking of you as we learn in the movement about the great struggle in the U.S. and I hope that we are now brothers in the revolution. In the words of Che, “If you tremble with indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine.”

I am coming to Boston for the movement. “I am not a liberator … The people liberate themselves.” But I am coming to help. Are you going to the demonstration in April in Boston? We could meet there. Please write me and tell me how to find you.

Yours for freedom,

Karl

I show the letter to Rachel and explain the story. She points out that more than half of the letter is actual quotations from the South American revolutionary Che Guevara. I don't know what this means but certainly it is a good sign that Karl has not taken up his family's politics.

We are planning on going to the demonstration. Rachel has her little red Volkswagen Beetle, which we call the Mao-mobile because the Chinese leader is always waving red books and red flags. She is driving Donnie and me. Sam is meeting us in Boston to demonstrate with us. I have promised my parents that I will take good care of him and not let “anything happen to him.” Of course, I cannot guarantee this at a demonstration, but I am able to get away with it because my parents do not acknowledge how brutal the police are—even if they don't mind Rachel saying it. Also they are comforted by the fact that Donnie will be there because Donnie was known in Haley as a kid who never got into trouble. It will be Sam's first demonstration and it will change him and help him to not be so straight. A good whiff of tear gas gives a kid perspective. I only have to persuade him later not to give our parents all the details.

What will Karl be like? How has he turned out? We arrange to meet at a small café off Commonwealth Avenue, where Boston University students spend hours in debate while lingering over twenty-five-cent cups of coffee. It was Karl's suggestion. I wonder how he knows about this place. It is dark and smoky but still I immediately spot Karl. He is three times as tall as he was when I last saw him and probably weighs the same. But on top of the long, angular, bony body is the same face with the same pale eyes. Only the blond scraggly beard is different. He is dressed in a blue beret and green army fatigues with the epaulets running off his narrow shoulders and down his arms. I suppose the beret is intended to make him resemble Che, which he doesn't because he is too tall and thin. The green fatigues resemble the Cuban uniforms of Fidel and Che but it is clearly someone else's West German uniform because the name “Spieldorf” is printed on a breast pocket. I can't help but think about him wearing a German army fatigues jacket that he hopes will look Cuban while I am wearing American fatigues worn to kill Germans.

He recognizes me too and throws his long arms around me. “I knew we would be brothers in the revolution,” he says. I am not sure why but I always find this kind of talk embarrassing. I introduce Rachel, and Sam—who doesn't remember him. Donnie does but Karl is not sure he remembers Donnie. We all sit down for a coffee and Karl expands on his revolutionary theory, which seems to involve killing a lot of people—“a million atomic lives.” I look at Rachel and she confirms with her eyes that he is quoting Che again. But she and Donnie seem to be largely agreeing with Karl while I can't help thinking, “Why only a million and not six million lives?” But I am not going to say that and Sam says nothing. He is mostly looking around the café with great curiosity. I can see that he is impressed, that for once he thinks his big brother does interesting things.

We all go off to the demonstration together, comrades in the revolution, agreeing that if it gets violent and we get separated, we will meet back in the café—except that I cannot let Sam out of my sight.

Of course, it does get violent. Not too bad. A lot of tear gas and some clubbing. A few arrests. Donnie has brought his motorcycle helmet, bright yellow like a target. He always brings it to demonstrations, tucking his long hair into it and fastening the chin strap just as an event gets started. Only this time I talk Donnie into letting Sam wear it. Sam doesn't want to but I tell him he has to.

“What for?”

“Because Mom will kill me if you get clubbed in the head.”

The one I worry about is Karl. He is so tall and his head sticks out above the crowd, an obvious and tempting target. Karl wanders through the heart of the police line unafraid, without ever flinching or covering up, tear gas swirling below his high head.

This is how we were spending weekends. But I have to get Sam out of here and Karl, a foreigner on a tourist visa, comes with me. Surprisingly, it is Sam who points out to Karl that as a foreigner he could not afford to get arrested. Rachel insists on staying longer, on “not backing off from the pigs,” and Donnie stays with her while we go back to the little café and wait. Sam, red-eyed, his cheeks wet with tears, has had a moving experience. I knew he would. He is now talking revolution with Karl, who enthusiastically says to him, “A revolution does not fall when it's ripe. You have to pick it.” It is not difficult to guess the source of these words of inspiration.

They are now engaged in an improbable conversation about New England–West Berlin solidarity. But what I am thinking is that Fenway Park is only about two blocks away and the Red Sox are playing the Yankees. Jim Lonborg, a great right-hander, is starting for the Sox against Mel Stottlemyre, who is also having a great year. Karl, remembering baseball from his brief American childhood, thinks going to the game is a great idea. Sam questions, “Is it right to go to a baseball game after a demonstration?”

Karl smiles, cocks his beret appropriately askew, and says, “One must harden without ever losing tenderness.” Sam wonders what that means while I wonder if there is any occasion for which Karl cannot find a Che Guevara quote.

When Rachel and Donnie arrive Rachel has no enthusiasm for the plan. But Donnie wants to go. I know what he is thinking because I am having the same thought: Stanley should be here. The last time I went to Fenway Park was with Donnie and Stanley, right after our high school graduation. That was also a Yankees game. Stanley and I liked to harass Donnie about his rooting for the Yankees. Rachel looks like she is about to cry and I almost back down, but then I realize that her red eyes only have that look from the tear gas. She decides to come along, maybe because my eyes have the same look or maybe because young Che, the German revolutionary, is smiling so eagerly, nodding his head with such excitement—and looking so goofy.

We buy the cheapest seats we can, high above right field. I have never understood why these seats are cheap. The batter is a long way away, but it is the lowest outfield wall so it is a good place to catch home run balls. Sam, Dad, and I used to go there with gloves hoping to catch a home run ball hit into the stands, though we never did. Sam and I explain this to Karl and he seems very excited. We point out the red seat only four rows behind us where Ted Williams hit a home run in 1946, the longest bomb ever hit out of Fenway Park. I tell Karl how it hit a man in that seat on the head, crashing through his straw hat. Karl looks very impressed.

I can see that Karl, in his excitement, does not remember much about baseball because he is shouting something about a touchdown. The Yankees are leading for the entire game. Only Donnie, clutching his motorcycle helmet in his lap, is happy. The Yankees are two runs ahead in the seventh inning when the Red Sox get two singles and Carl Yastrzemski comes to bat. On the third pitch he sends the ball over the diamond, past the outfield, and right at us. While everyone around us strains to catch the ball, Karl, who has no fear of club-wielding police but remembers the poor man in the straw hat, folds up his long body, curling into the space in front of his seat, and covers his head, shouting, “Touch
d-o-w-n-n-n
,” holding the last note.

The ball lands in Karl's seat with an enormous cracking sound that makes him look up. When he does, the ball bounces into his lap. Karl has Yaz's home run ball. That is all it takes to turn the three of us into little boys again. Donnie and I argue about what kind of pitch Yaz hit. Donnie insists that between Mantle and Joe Pepitone the Yankees will come back.

“Yeah, you always think that, but they're through,” I say.

Rachel is listening with quiet disdain. After the Red Sox win, Sam says to Karl—who is studying his souvenir—“You've got to get Yaz to sign it, man!” Over Rachel's protests we elbow our way into the crowd in narrow Yawkey Way and wait for Yastrzemski to come out. By then the crowd is smaller and we manage to get up to him. The ballplayer, a head shorter than Karl, looks surprisingly small. Karl is so excited to talk to him that his English fails him. He says, “
Meine Nom
is Karl too and I am from Germany. I caught dis from your touchdown.”

“He means home run,” Sam shouts anxiously.

“
Jah
, could you sign it ‘From Carl to Karl'?”

“Sure,” Yaz says with a big smile. As he writes on the ball, Sam, who knows the value of a good souvenir, shouts, “But don't forget to add ‘Yastrzemski.' ”

He reclicks his pen and adds his last name.

What a night. I could stay up talking to Karl until dawn. But Rachel points out that we have to get Sam back. Our parents are probably worried.

Karl (Moltke, not Yastrzemski) and I swear we will stay in touch, but for some reason I think we probably won't. We hug and then touch fists, and he says, “Friends and brothers in the revolution.” If I read about West Berlin exploding and Germany in flames, I will know that at the center of it will be a radical revolutionary with a home run ball signed by Carl Yastrzemski.

Chapter Twenty-One

Our First Trip to America

We are all back in Haley for the summer and when Rachel comes for a visit, I introduce her to Rocco. We talk about his problem and Rachel tells us she knows a draft counselor in Boston. Rocco goes to talk with him and discovers that because his father died in combat in Korea, he will not be drafted. So he signs with the Detroit Tigers and is sent to a class-B team called the Warsaw Warriors. When Stanley hears that they sent him to pitch for a team in Warsaw, he laughs, since his family left Warsaw and never had anything good to say about it. But this turns out to be Warsaw, Indiana, in a midwestern league called the Triple I—Illinois, Indiana, Iowa.

Donnie comes up with the idea of us all going to Warsaw to see Rocco play. Donnie has a big blue van, a Ford Econoline. He has taken out the back seats and put in two beds and calls the van “the love machine.” He points out that with the love machine we have no need for the expense of motels and we can get there quickly by driving and sleeping in shifts. We have little money, and what we do have we are saving for college. We also have little time because our summer jobs are about to start. Stanley is working at the tool-and-die plant. Donnie is working in the front office of a textile company. And I have been hired to spend my summer in the cool comfort of a large, dark walk-in refrigerator, keeping the shelves of the dairy store stocked.

Stanley comes up with the idea that during the trip we can live on canned food, and he puts a case of Campbell's Pork and Beans in the van. So I contribute some cans of tuna and Donnie brings cans of soup. Now with the Cold War getting hotter we are all eating from our family shelters.

We leave Haley and only get as far as Connecticut when Stanley hungers for some pork and beans. Then we remember that no one thought to bring a can opener and we have to stop in a store to buy one. This keeps us laughing until New Jersey. At eighty miles an hour on the wide lanes of the Pennsylvania Turnpike we are singing Motown—the Four Tops, Smokey Robinson, and Martha Reeves. We take turns driving and sleeping. Cold canned food tastes a lot better than you might think and soon we are in Warsaw, Indiana.

This is a different place and we are foreigners. It reminds me of being at sea on a calm day, but there is no water. It is just so flat, the horizon is always straight ahead, and the houses and even the people stick out against a too-bright blue sky. Maybe that is why the girls all dress in bright colors—no browns or grays, only true red, blue, or yellow. The men, even the ones our age, wear short-sleeved white shirts and have haircuts like Dickey Panicelli's when he got back from boot camp.

We don't fit in. Our hair is longer, especially Donnie's. He has a beard, I have a mustache, and Stanley has a lot of facial hairs though they don't seem to add up to much. We're still wearing our World War II clothes—Stanley in his Eisenhower jacket and me in my uncle's field jacket.

Though nobody says so, they don't like us. They grumble a lot about hippies, college students, and draft dodgers—which are all the same thing in their minds and they think that's what we are. And, of course, they are right. Several times, police order our van to pull over. They study us and ask what we are doing in Warsaw. Everything changes when we tell them that we have a friend on the Warriors. Then we all talk baseball.

But we don't really speak the same language. They have a twang, though a policeman, whom we were getting along with, became very angry when Stanley asked him why he spoke with a southern accent. They have trouble understanding us too. They say we have a “Kennedy accent,” which isn't true and clearly they don't mean it as a compliment. At the baseball stadium we ask an attendant where to park and he says contemptuously, “What do you mean, ‘puk'?” But then I realize that he really doesn't understand what we are asking.

The home of the Warsaw Warriors is no larger or in any way better than the ball fields we played on in high school. But the players are. The catcher knows how to catch Rocco's hard fastball and guides him, and he is getting more control, looking better than I ever saw him in Haley. They only let him throw about ten pitches a day, which is good for us because it means we get to see him play all three days we are there. And we can see from the attention the manager and coaches give him that he is being seen as a serious prospect. He seems very happy to see us in this town where everyone speaks differently and where he is the only short dark person with thick curly black hair. He is in training and refuses to eat canned food and makes us go to this local restaurant that is so cheap we wonder why we have been eating canned food.

The only women in the restaurant are waitresses. The customers are all men and they are mostly talking about “the Negroes.” Sometimes they use less polite words. They are very angry about “the Negroes.” There have been race riots in Cleveland and a few other cities, and the men of Warsaw have strong ideas about what to do in Warsaw when “the Negroes” start rioting. This seems odd because, as far as I can tell, there are no Negroes, not even at the baseball games.

They also talk about the war and how we are winning in spite of the hippies. We eat very quietly. Probably the only reason they let us in is that we are with a baseball player.

At the baseball game we sit next to a group of men who are talking very loudly about “the Negroes.” Then they leave, all but one. He looks about our age and is very tall with enormous ears—or does the haircut just make it look that way? I can't help myself. I have to ask someone.

“I notice everyone here is talking about the Negroes coming. Who is coming?”

He smiles and slowly looks around and then laughs. “Damned if I know. I keep asking my dad the same question.”

He introduces himself as Lester Parkman and I say, “Joel Bloom.” We shake hands. My hand hurts from his grip.

“You fellows aren't from here,” Lester says.

“No, Massachusetts.”

“Damn,” he says, seeming genuinely excited. “That's why you have those Kennedy accents.” Then he moves his face closer to mine, staring. “You Jew?” asks Lester.

Is he saying “You Jew, you,” or is he really asking? Stanley is looking very worried. I say that I am and his face lights up. “Damn! I've never seen a Jew before. You fellows too?” he says to Stanley and Donnie. When they shake their heads he looks disappointed.

Lester has volunteered to be a marine infantryman. He is leaving in four days. As I talk to him I realize he is not that different from me. He doesn't know where Vietnam is and he doesn't want to go. “I don't have anything against Vietnamese people. I don't even know what they want,” Lester says. “I guess they just want people to stop invading their country.”

“So if you feel that way, how can you go kill them?”

Lester shrugs. “No choice. I'm not going to be a draft dodger.” When Lester gets out of the marines he wants to go to college, and he hopes to eventually be the principal of the high school in Warsaw. For two days we go to ball games and little restaurants and walk around town and talk and talk. He keeps saying that he doesn't want to kill Vietnamese but he has no choice. I cannot convince him that he does have a choice. And under his terms he doesn't, because he knows that if he doesn't go to Vietnam he will never be the principal of the Warsaw high school.

The last time I see him we hug. I wish him good luck and he wishes me good luck, which reminds me that I haven't figured this out either, I have just deferred the decision by going to college. I hug Rocco too and tell him next time I watch him play it will be on a class-A team, and he smiles and pats my shoulder so hard it hurts.

In the van again, on canned food again, singing more Motown, we talk all the way back about baseball and Rocco and Lester. I feel like it would be very hard to stop a war in this country. No matter what you did in New England, there would always be Indiana. But the truth is, as Stanley glumly says, “Lester isn't any different from us.”