Monkeyshines
chapter four

The next morning we steamed out of Istanbul on the M. S. Karadeniz. For the "deck space" cost of $22 we would stop at Athens, Naples, Marseilles and Barcelona. Deck space allowed each of us a cot in a dormitory set up in one of the ship's empty cargo holds. At each port, the ship's crew took a day or two to off-load and load cargo. Frank and I reconnoitered the town and bought cheap food.
Living cheap was the key to our kind of world traveling. While traveling over land, we'd eaten in commercial vineyards, olive groves and orchards. In Turkey, we'd stayed for free at a resort on the Black Sea just north of Istanbul. It was out of season, so we were allowed to camp in an empty refreshment stand on the beach. We shopped at a local shop, where a big bunch of grapes, some tomatoes, a couple of watermelons and two loaves of bread cost a dollar. There was a problem with the local shop, for me at any rate, because thousands of wasps shopped there also. Whenever I went in, wasps hovered everywhere and walked around on the food.
I'd been afraid of wasps forever. At Grandma's I was bitten many times as I slid down a haystack and over a hive. And I was psyched-out by a wasp in a one-on-one confrontation in the upstairs bedroom. I was a kid at the time, lying in bed reading a magazine. The ceiling was low over the bed and angled toward the floor. A big buck wasp walked slowly across the ceiling. He looked like he'd be around all night if I didn't do something. I had a sturdy magazine in my hands, and a clear shot, so I decided to kill him. I eased myself up in the bed and folded the magazine into whacking shape. As I curled my right arm around in a wind up, the wasp stopped, and turned his head. He looked straight at me. Somehow this wasp sensed my intentions, I thought, and I eased back down in my bed. I opened the magazine like I was reading, and the wasp returned to his original course.
He was walking out of range, so I reassured myself that he couldn't know what I planned, and I decided to smack him as soon as I could manage another wind-up. Sure enough, though, as I was about to strike, the wasp stopped, turned its head, and looked at me again. I almost laid back down again, I was that surprised, but I also felt silly being intimidated by a bug, so I stayed in my wind-up position, eyeball to eyeball with that wasp.
After a couple seconds, the wasp must have catalogued me as a shadow. He turned back on his original course, and I smacked him the moment he did. He was a big strong wasp, though, and I only knocked him off the ceiling and into my lap. I whacked him over and over, maybe a dozen good licks. He still tried to crawl, but he moved very slowly. I slid out of the bed, whacked him some more, then ground him up between the pages of the magazine until he was just a stain. This was in my mind when I went into the shop by the Black Sea.
Tired of flinching, bobbing, weaving and ducking the whole time I was in the shop, I decided to confront this phobia and resolve it. Wasps didn't seem to bother anyone else, so I'd simply refuse to let them bother me. I'd act like everyone else. For good measure, I'd go in without a shirt.
I dismissed the nagging suspicion that there was a wasp hot sheet with my name on it, and that the wasps in Wisconsin were in telepathic contact with these wasps in Turkey. I went into the shop shirtless, and proved I could do it. I was proud of myself.
I didn't enjoy the trip, though. The wasps kept bumping into me, my chest, my back, all my bared skin. I didn't flinch or duck, but I moved like I was made of wood, barely able to distinguish apples from oranges.
Next door to the wasp shop was a restaurant that served the freshest fish dinner on Earth for one dollar. The cook stepped out on the balcony and threw a line in the water while we ate salad and bread and drank wine. He caught the fish, and his helper cleaned them in the kitchen. When he'd caught enough to fill the orders, the cook broiled them.
We left all this to sail to Spain. I don't recall any specific purpose for the trip and only a few highlights.
I remember steaming into Piraeus, Athens' harbor. Frank and I sipped drinks at the ship's bar on the main deck along with ten or twelve other people. The sun shone brightly in a blue, blue sky. It was charming and serene. A guy played "Never on a Sunday" at the piano, the theme music from the movie of the same name. The movie was about Piraeus. My only negative thought was about the pitiful single ice cube the bartender put in my gin and tonic, like he was paying for each cube, which maybe he was.
I looked at the table to my right, at a pair of distinguished looking Eastern fellows in expensive, English-style suits. Their fancy turbans must have meant something, but I didn't know what. As I studied them, discreetly, I thought, one of them took a bite out of his highball glass. Then another bite. He picked the pieces of glass out of his mouth and put them on the table. Next he chewed up a razor blade, into several pieces which he put on the table next to the pieces of his highball glass. Frank and I watched, then looked at each other. Frank grinned and dropped his chin onto his chest. I raised my eyebrows up my forehead. Someone said the chewing fellow was a Turkish Fakir, whatever that means, but they didn't explain how he could chew up such stuff.
The boat docked for the day, and Frank and I foraged in Athens. We steamed through the next night, reaching Naples the following morning. We met a peculiar squall there. The weather was beautiful, and the sun was a couple of hours above the horizon. In the distance a dark gray area overshadowed a few acres of sea. This gray area moved across the water slowly. We watched it cover a neighboring ship a mile away from us. From the portholes of the bar on the Karadeniz, across the sunny sea between us and the other ship, we watched that ship pitch and roll sharply. For a few minutes, it disappeared from view in the gray of that visiting squall. Then it steamed into the clear.
The squall came over and jumped us. It got dark, and we saw only gray rain. A cold wind blew furiously. Tables moved, drinks slid off the bar, people fell from their stools, and crawled around trying to get hold of anything that didn't move. The buffet lunch headed south. As suddenly as it came, the squall left. Sunshine returned and things went back to normal. People arranged their clothing and hair, the bartender picked up glasses, and we all watched suspiciously as that gray spot wandered away like a cat looking for another mouse.
It was Naples, Marseilles, then Barcelona. We missed Munich by then. The Oktoberfest. The tents with 10,000 people in each, people from everywhere standing on chairs and benches singing Oompa-oompa-oompa tay-da-lay, and waving quart size steins of beer. Eighty guys played tubas in the center. One night, 100 guys brawled in one corner while the crowd ignored them and kept singing.
The Gothic beer halls of Munich were calling us back. The Hofbrau Haus had a cellar where I witnessed a last stand by one of Germany's WW II veterans. His army greatcoat filthy and tattered, his face almost hidden under a long beard and shoulder-length gray hair (birds had made nests in his hair), he nodded in his beer. He looked the quintessential derelict. One empty sleeve was folded in half and pinned at his shoulder. He was smelly and messy. The waitress harassed him shrewishly. She wanted this one-armed sot OUT. She poked him repeatedly. She pulled at his coat. She screamed directly into his ear. Finally she yanked on his hair.
As if waking from a deep sleep, the old soldier moved--very slowly. He hauled himself up on his feet, turned, and faced the waitress. His face was as blank as a pile of ashes, but a pinpoint of light sparked very faintly deep in the shadowy sockets that held his eyes. As if in slow motion he made a fist then landed a solid right cross to the waitress' jaw. It knocked her down and put astonishment on her face. She sat there on the floor for only a moment. The old soldier had been drinking beer, not eating Wheaties. The waitress jumped to her feet and attacked in earnest. She screamed, clawed and kicked. The bouncers arrived and rescued the old soldier. They carried him to the door and HEAVED him toward the street. He landed in the gutter.
In this same beer hall, on another day, 50 Australians stood on the benches, arm in arm, singing their national song, "Waltzing Mathilde." A fellow I assumed wasn't Australian walked up to them, shouted "Fuck the queen," then pulled a couple Aussies backward off the bench. The cellar erupted in a massive brawl. The manager and his wife got trampled. For some days after, a bouncer stood by the entrance alongside the manager's scowling wife whose arm was in a cast. As customers entered, she spoke English to them. If they answered, they were bluntly turned away.
On our way back to this delightful scene, we stopped off at Katya's in Aix-en-Provence in southern France. It was right on the way.
The reunion was emotional. I left Paris tidy and intact, but since then I'd suffered obvious wear and tear. My long hair was unwashed, and a beard had magically covered my face. My smile had a hole in it where my capped front tooth used to be, and Katya started calling me "old toothless". She sang songs to me, like "Lay me a pallet on your floor" and "Good-time Charley's Back in Town." She and her friends tended us affectionately, and introduced us to some French students. We visited Paul Cezanne's house and enjoyed the pleasures of Aix for three days.
Then we went on to Munich. We crossed Switzerland, marveling at the incredibly manicured countryside. Yodeling music played on the radio like Country and Western in America. The weather turned wintry.
Munich was anti-climactic. Oktoberfest was over, and people had gone back to ordinary lives. It rained, and there was a fohn. (Pronounced like fern without the r). A fohn occurred when a hot, dry Sirrocco wind blew high over the Mediterranean and the Alps, and suddenly dipped down into Germany causing a sharp drop in barometric pressure. On such days the university cancelled tests, and there were many headaches in south Germany. Anyone arrested for a crime committed on a fohn day got special consideration. It was after a fohn that Frank and I left Europe. We were nearly broke, so we begged airplane tickets from our families. In 8 hours we flew from rainy cold Munich over the North Pole to freezing Chicago knee-deep in snow.