Hollywood Animal (25 page)

My father said Father Ákos came from a part of Hungary called Transylvania. And that this was a custom there.

My father had what he called a green card. It was very important, I heard, because if you didn’t have one you couldn’t be in America.

My mother took my father’s pants to Sarosi Dry Cleaners across the street and left his wallet in the pants. The green card was inside the wallet. First my mother and then my father went to Sarosi, but Sarosi said there was no wallet in the pants.

My parents were desperate. I heard my father say that he was afraid to go back to the Immigration and tell them he’d lost his green card. My mother prayed to St. Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of lost objects.

A week later the mailman brought my father’s wallet with the green card in it. Someone had taken the few dollars inside and put the wallet in a mailbox.

The Franciscans paid my father $100 a month plus the apartment. I didn’t know how very little this was but I knew it was little because I heard my mother saying, “How will we be able to buy food and clothes for the boy?”

I went with my mother as she shopped. Two-day-old bread at Timar’s Bakery, fruit and vegetables hardly spoiled at the West Side Market. We ate soup often and eggs, Spam, hot dogs, cans of sardines, and rice with hot milk and raisins.

We had an icebox that we couldn’t keep in the kitchen because the kitchen was too small. So we kept it at the top of the stairway leading to the apartment. It was mostly empty.

Every day, as my mother walked me to school through the outdoor stands of the West Side Market, an Italian fruit vendor threw me a shiny red apple and said, “Heer ya go, Joee!”

On days when the West Side Market wasn’t open, the outdoor stand area—which my mother and I had to walk through to get to St. Emeric’s—was overtaken by bums. As my mother was walking me to school, we saw a bum by a dumpster, looking at us and laughing. His pants were open. He had his
pimpli
in his hand and was pulling it.

When my mother saw what he was doing, she picked me up and we ran away.

I woke up on my living room couch and heard my parents moving around quickly in the darkness. I grabbed my cowboy guns. My mother shushed me.

Someone was at the top of the stairway by the icebox. My father was standing by the door. We heard whispering voices out there. We heard the icebox door open and close. Then we heard footsteps going down the stairs and footsteps again at the private alley at the side of our apartment. We ran to the living room window and watched them as they came out of the alley.

A man and a woman, nicely dressed, carrying a brown bag. They walked to a car and drove away. The next morning we discovered that they had taken a package of hot dogs from the icebox.

“The Komchis,” my father said.

“But why?” my mother asked.

“To let me know they’re watching me.”

My mother said, “Maybe it was just two people from the bar who were drunk and hungry.”

My father said, “Mária, you saw them. They weren’t drunk. They were nicely dressed. They had a car. Why would they take our
frankfurters?”

The Komchis stole everything in Hungary, my mother said. They broke into the poorest and the richest homes. They stole anything and everything.

They told men to take their pants off but let them keep the jackets they didn’t want. Or they took the jackets and let them keep the pants they didn’t want. Or in some cases, they took both the jacket
and
the pants and even underwear or even socks or eyeglasses.

They had machines which beeped when they found gold or silver. They opened people’s mouths, and if they had gold teeth, they pulled them out with pliers.

I was happy
I
didn’t have any gold teeth!

Rákosi was one of the most evil Komchis, my mother told me. He had worked for Béla Kun, the Komchi who had hung people on the lampposts when my father was a boy.

I saw pictures of him. He was a big, fat, bald man. My father said he had
been
in a Hungarian prison for years, but had then been released and exchanged for some flags the Russkis had stolen from Hungary many years before.

This, my father said, had been a very big mistake. Now Hungary had a Communist flag.

Rakosi, my mother said, had a gang of evil men who helped him hang people, put them in jail, and torture them with rubber hoses, pliers, and burning cigarettes applied to their eyelids and armpits.

Their names were Ernö Gerö and Jozsef Révai and Zoltán Vas and Mihály Farkas. All of them, my mother said, were Zsidos.

My father told me when we were alone that this Mihály Farkas began his days by peeing into the mouths of prisoners.

I told my father that my mother said that the gang were all Zsidos like Rákosi and Béla Kun.

My father said, “Your mother is right. But the fact that they are Zsidos doesn’t matter.”

The rapes were the worst, my father said. Many of the Russki Komchis were sick in their
pimplis
. Their
pimplis
had big boils and were full of pus.

When they stuck it into the women, the boils and pus grew inside them. The women sometimes killed themselves so they wouldn’t feel the boils and the pus in there.

Bishop Vilmos Apor was a great Hungarian hero. He hid women in the church cellar so they wouldn’t get the boils and the pus. When the Komchis came to the church, Bishop Apor stood in front of the cellar door. The Komchis shot him. Then they opened the cellar door, opened their pants, and did their boiling and pusing.

I was happy
my pimpli
didn’t have boils or pus.

The man I kept hearing about—from my parents, the Franciscans, my father’s friends—was Cardinal Mindszenty, the Hungarian saint.

He was in a Komchi prison in Hungary now, being tortured. He had already been beaten with a rubber hammer between his legs and on the soles of his feet, kept awake for months, and forced to wear a clown costume every day.

I asked if his fingernails had been torn out with pliers and if Mihály Farkas had pee-peed into his mouth.

I asked if the Komchi women had forced him to put his
pimpli
into the boils and pus inside them.

My mother got angry at me and told me to stop asking such stupid questions.

I
didn’t think they were stupid.

· · ·

I was sick in bed a lot with endless tonsillitis and fevers and nosebleeds—the result, the Hungarian doctors said, of vitamin deficiencies and the rickets I’d had in the camps.

I was thin as a toothpick, freckled everywhere, with overgrown fly-away ears. My carrot-colored crew cut was especially bizarre. Our Slovak barber, for some reason, had shaved the widow’s peak atop my forehead.

Bristly little wartlike hairs grew there!

I was learning English at St. Emeric’s quickly. When I first played kovboys and Indians with my classmates at recess, I spoke mostly Hungarian, then after a while, smattering the Hungarian with English words.

When we spoke English—Steve Wegling and Paulie Szabo and David Markovics and Willi Krassoi and I—we spoke with Hungarian accents. When we played bazball and Yook-Yook, a game where we tried to hit each other with a rubber ball, we’d call each other’s names in Hungarian, then switch to English.

Jozsi, gotcha!

My father asked me to accompany him sometimes on an errand. I knew hardly any English; I was picking some up.

We went inside a furniture store where he had seen a desk in the window.

The man inside said, “Thirty dollars.”

My father said, “Five dollar!”

The man started yelling, “Fok you!” He called us bums and DPs and greenhorns.

My father said, “Ten dollar!”

The man yelled, “Get the
fok
out of here!”

We left.

It was the first time I’d heard that word. I didn’t know what it meant. When we were out on the street, I saw the tears welling in my father’s eyes. I understood his humiliation.

I’ve been wanting to say this to that man at the Polster Furniture store on Lorain Avenue for fifty years. I know what it means now
.

No, fok you! Fok
you!

I saw an old Gypsy violinist who played next door at Papp’s Bar on weekends walking slowly down the street, inspecting the gutter. He was drunk.

“
Sanyi Bácsi
,” I said to him, “what are you doing?”

“What do you think I’m doing, boy? I’m looking for the gold.”

“What gold?” I said.

“You must be a very dumb boy,” he said. “Don’t you know that in America the streets are paved with gold?”

He cackled and slapped me on the shoulder.

Then he picked a cigarette butt up from the gutter and lit it. He took a satisfying drag and smiled.

“You see, boy?” he said, laughing. “It’s true. I have found the gold.”

At the same time I was learning to read English at St. Emeric’s my mother taught me to read Hungarian at home. We sat at the kitchen table and read about King Mátyás and St. Stephen’s Holy Crown and St. Stephen’s Preserved and Uncorrupted Holy Right Hand. Every time I made a mistake, my mother slapped me. They were casually administered and hard slaps that hurt. Sometimes during the course of a lesson, she’d hit me ten times.

I learned to read perfectly in Hungarian very quickly.

But for the rest of my life, as perfectly as I could read Hungarian, I didn’t read it. I would read books in English about Hungary and Hungarians, but I would never read my
… mother
tongue
.

St. Stephen, my mother taught me, was the founding father of Hungary. He united all the Hungarian tribes and taught his people to pray to God. That’s why his right hand was still alive today, thousands of years after his death, paraded through the streets of Hungary before the Communists took it over.

St. Stephen was no one to trifle with. He cut an enemy’s head off and then chopped his body up into little pieces and let the wind blow it away. St. Stephen’s son was St. Emeric, who didn’t become king because he was gored to death by a wild boar as big as a horse.

King Kálmán, my mother taught me, was the greatest Hungarian king after St. Stephen. He was known as Kálmán the Bookworm because he loved to read and encouraged all Hungarians to read.

When he was dying, King Kálmán the Bookworm was afraid that his brother, Álmos, would try to be king instead of King Kálmán’s son, István. So King Kálmán the Bookworm summoned Álmos and Álmos’s son, Béla, to his deathbed.

And King Kálmán the Bookworm had his soldiers stick fiery-red swords into their eyes. King Kálmán died peacefully, knowing his son would be king.

The Tartars, my mother taught me, invaded Hungary from Russia before there were Komchis in Russia.

They burned all the houses down, raped all the women, and cut all the men’s heads off. Tartar children used Hungarian children as human targets when they wanted to practice with their bows and arrows.

The year before they invaded, Hungarians knew there would be bad news. Wolf packs came down from the mountains. The sun disappeared from the sky at noon. And on a summer night, a blazing star with a long tail crossed the sky.

Then came the Tartars.

· · ·

The Turks invaded Hungary, my mother taught me, and cut Hungarian heads off with curved swords. They took women and children to Turkey, where they sold them in the slave markets. Beautiful Hungarian girls could be bought for a pair of boots.

The Turks were helped by a Romanian named Vlad Drakul, who, my mother said, was the greatest monster in the history of the world. She didn’t tell me why, but my father did.

Vlad Drakul made men sit on spikes that went through them. He boiled people alive and decorated his castle with their severed heads. He cut women’s breasts off and hung them on his walls.

The Hapsburgs, my mother taught me, spoke German, invaded Hungary, and made it into the new country of Austria-Hungary. They didn’t burn or rape or cut heads off, but they treated Hungarians like slaves and forced them to speak German. Until Lajos Kossuth, the Hero of Freedom, the Torch of Liberty, the Greatest Hungarian, organized a revolution against them.

Kossuth, my mother told me, was like my father. A writer. An editor. And when Kossuth lost his revolution, he had to leave Hungary. But he continued writing. He worked for Hungary’s freedom in America. Like my father.

Kossuth’s dream was freedom for Hungary. Like my father’s dream.

But it didn’t happen. Kossuth died in Italy. Old, half blind, and poor.

My mother worked in the printing shop at a linotype machine with the Franciscans and other Hungarian men and women. I watched her sometimes as she typed, her eyes squinted, the cigarette ever present in her mouth, while a few inches from her face a red-hot bar of lead melted into the machine.

She came back from the printing shop once crying. She closed the door to my father’s office but I could hear her through a crack near the linoleum floor.

She was alone, she said, and she was locking up, and she heard a noise in the back. She went to see what it was and she saw one of the priests, Father Peter … naked, on top of one of the other women who worked there.

“What kind of priests are these?” my mother cried.

We shopped for our clothing at the Salvation Army on Bridge Avenue near West 25th Street. All three of us would go.

My father bought suits for a dollar. My mother was very excited to find a black velvet dress with a matching black hat. They bought me a winter overcoat, but it was so big I could have fit in it twice.

After I wore the coat a few times my mother said to my father, “What kind of man are you? How can you stand to watch your son wearing something like that?”

They started to argue.

I kept saying, “It’s fine, Mama. It’s a nice coat.”

And when I was a rich American man, I found myself obsessively buying winter jackets and overcoats of the finest quality, Polo and Sulka and Giorgio Armani
.

In California, where it was never cold, where I couldn’t even wear them
.

At noon every Monday, the city had a civil defense air raid drill. America was in a cold war with the Communists. Atomic and hydrogen bombs could turn all of us into watermelon juice.