Monkeyshines
chapter two
The boat docked at LeHavre late the following afternoon, and I was left alone as everyone else took the train to Paris. With two quarters, an army dufflebag, an extended thumb, and an unacknowledged expectation that everyone in the world spoke English, I walked out of LeHavre into the darkening French countryside. I asked fellow pedestrians for directions to Paris, but no matter how I framed the inquiry, they just squinted, scratched their head, or looked back at me vacantly. Remembering an old Charles Boyer movie, and feeling inexplicably effeminate, I asked a guy, "Pareee?"
"Oui,oui," (wee wee) he said, gesturing me on down the road.
The dufflebag got heavy after a few more miles, so I picked a grassy spot and bedded down. I was well out of town, and there was little traffic on the road. Farms and hills surrounded me as I lay there inspecting the French sky. I looked at the Earth from an imaginary platform in space, and drew an arc from Wisconsin to a point just inland from LeHavre. Many miles separated me from my family, but I was struck by the feeling that I could be lying in a field in the Wisconsin countryside where my Grandma's house was. The hills and trees looked the same, and the crickets sounded the same. And there were the same smells of earth and hay.
I remembered it as "Grandma's house," because Grandma Mabel Hart-Chase-Bateman was the dominant figure in that union. A Daughter of the American Revolution, she lived some years longer than Grandpa Ernie Bateman. I remembered hearing that Grandma's first husband, Mr. Chase, was shot and killed in a hunting accident after their children, Mildred and Helen, were born. Grandma picked gentle Ernie Bateman as a father for the girls. He then fathered two girls of his own, my mother, Alma, and her sister, Gertrude. Mabel was a school teacher, and Ernie operated a farm implement business and a dancehall. The implement business failed in 1929, during the Great Depression, and the dancehall burned down.
In those days, most of the people of northern Wisconsin lived as harsh a life as anyone on the planet. Jobs were few and the pay was bad. There wasn't social security or welfare. People got sick, starved and died in Republican dignity. To feed his family, Ernie went to Chicago where he worked as a mail handler for the Illinois Central Railroad. He had to leave Mabel and the kids in Wisconsin, and it devastated him. He sent back money and increasingly despondent letters, but he had to bear the separation for years before he rejoined his family.
When I was in High School, I did the same job that Grandpa had done for years. I dragged bags of mail out of trucks onto the same wooden platforms. I stacked the bags on carts that took them to the baggage cars in the train yard. Those bags of mail were delivered to other mail handlers in other train yards all over the country. Working in the cold, blustery dark of the 12th Street train yard was eerie and lonesome, even for me, and I could take a bus home at night. For Ernie, living in a workingmen's barracks 450 miles from home, it must have been a nightmare.
Old and tired by the time I knew him, he sat quietly, listening to baseball on the radio, and taught me cribbage and pinochle. By the time I was a teen-ager, Gramps was completely broken and senile. He lived with us in Chicago. I wasn't responsible for taking care of him, so I thought he was sort of funny. Sometimes at dinner, Gramps would spread mashed potatoes on his bread, or pick his nose flagrantly.
I remembered the time my mother had some women friends over and they discussed weighty issues at the kitchen table, with coffee stimulating their tongues. Gramps walked into the kitchen, went to the sink and started peeing into it. "Oh, DAD!," my mother said ever so mournfully. Gramps immediately realized something was wrong, and he stopped peeing. He walked over to the front-loading washing machine, holding his penis in his hand, and started peeing into the washing machine. Mom got up and herded him back to his bedroom.
Another time, he asked me to play cards with him after we hadn't played for a long time. I jumped at the chance. I got out the cards and sat down at the dining room table. Gramps said, "You deal." I started shuffling.
He said, "You got a cigar?"
I said, "No, but I have cigarettes." He wasn't allowed to have cigars, but no one had said anything about cigarettes.
"Thanks, I'll try one," he said, quite plainly. I let myself believe that he seemed completely lucid. I gave him a lighted cigarette. He started gumming the end of it, and after a couple of puffs it started coming apart. I was still shuffling cards when he squashed the cigarette into an ashtray, and said, "I think I've had enough cards. Thank you, boy." Then he got up and went to his room. He was such a sadly depleted Grandpa compared to the warm, funny, whiskery, cigar-smoking Grandpa I used to play cards with in the North Woods. In the old house.
Then I remembered that old handmade farmhouse. It had one main room with a lean-to kitchen Gramps built on the east end. It had shiplap siding and a steeply pitched roof covered in green asphalt roofing. Real shutters guarded the windows.
The open stairway on the south wall rose to upstairs bedrooms. Grandma and Grandpa shared the one at the top of the stairs. I slept in the other. I had to go through Grandma and Grandpa's room to get to it. Sometimes I shared it. Sometimes relatives slept on the floors.
There was no plumbing in that old house. The toilet was an outhouse thirty yards away. Or a chamber pot with a lid. If we used the chamber pot, we had to empty it first thing in the morning. To get water I carried a bucket out the back door, past the raspberry patch, to the wooden platform where I cranked the thirty inch iron pump handle up and down until the bucket was filled with water.
In the summer we swam in the lake to get clean. In cold weather we heated water on the wood stove, and bathed in a two bushel, galvanized metal tub in the kitchen. The well water was very hard, so for washing hair we collected rainwater in a 200 gallon galvanized, corrugated metal horsetrough that sat outside the backdoor.
I remembered coming out that back door in my snowsuit into chest deep snow. And I remembered coming out that back door into sunshine and birds and green. In the summer I explored the fields and woods. Once I found a row boat in a far corner of Grandpa's pasture, on the edge of the pasture where the trees started. The boat was far from any water, and completely rotten. It had no bottom at all, but I considered it a great discovery. I imagined this boat and I were linked in some way. The boat, the thicket of pines, ferns and poplar where it laid, and I seemed to all be part of a very private, yet unimaginably vast adventure.
One of the best times of my life took place near that boat. As I walked along talking gibberish with Clare Odell, she swept me into her arms, and in one powerful move, kissed me hotter than anything and pulled me down to the ground. I was 11 and Clare was 13. It was heavenly. That was the summer when Grandma slapped me for throwing a rock at a bird.
I remembered the first time I walked in the woods with a shotgun. I hadn't seen any deer for hours when I saw a bird sitting on a branch above my head whistling and chirping. I shot it. There were only a few feathers left. And a hole in my conscience. I felt sad and stupid. And I could feel my grandma's eyes on me.
After playing cribbage with Grandpa, and smelling the incense of his cigar, it was easy to fall asleep at Grandma's house. They'd be sleeping in the next room, and the sound of crickets poured in through the funny little window near the floor. And there were the smells of earth and hay... .

The next morning I woke up in France. I walked down the road and found a little grocery store. My words to the proprietor communicated nothing, or, at least, they brought no response. I mooed like a cow and did a charade of drinking and swallowing hungrily. The proprietor said what I took to be the French equivalent of eureka and ran out of the room. He came back grinning and carrying a sauce pan full of milk. The milk was room temperature, and had a yellowish muck nearly solidified on its surface. There were a few hairs, cow hairs, I thought, sticking out of the muck. Along with two tomatoes, it was a surprisingly good breakfast. The proprietor was non-committal in the way he accepted my two quarters as payment. I said, "Thank you." He shrugged amiably, looked at the quarters for a moment, then put them in his pocket.
I said, "Chug-a-chug-chug, choo- choo, toot-tooot." He smiled, walked over to the door, and pointed down the road to where I was sure I would find a train station. I got on the train and rode to Paris without a ticket. I never figured out why I was permitted to do that.
I went to Katya's address in Paris where she shared a room with two other students. There wasn't the slightest bit of extra room, and I hadn't spoken to Katya since the night she'd knocked at my cabin door on the ship, but I was immediately invited to stretch out my sleeping bag at the foot of the bed. They went to school the next day. I listened to baseball on the American Armed Forces Radio Network and felt homesick. Waves of doubt washed over me. I started a letter to a friend back home, "Dear Louise, I think I've had enough of Europe. It's been two weeks since I left home and..." That wouldn't do. "Dear Bob, When a guy makes a mistake, he should just admit it. Well, I think..." No, that wouldn't do either.
I hadn't felt so alone since the day back in Chicago, in the Loyola student union, when I overheard my sweet Maggie May giving directions to Bob What's-his-name, so they could meet at her grandmother's cottage in Fox Lake. Maggie knew I could hear. Six other people heard, and they all knew what it meant. Only Bob seemed to miss the message Maggie was sending me. It was a blunt good-bye, a bolt out of the blue.
I was broken hearted and stunned, so I slinked over to Mr. Jones', and started drinking. An hour later I saw Maggie walking alone toward the subway station. I got off my barstool and crossed the street to intercept her. I walked up to her. We looked into each other's eyes for a long moment. Then I slapped her face. Medium hard. Her hair flew to one side of her head. She looked straight at me with hurt and angry eyes, but said nothing. I started to feel like I'd shot another innocent bird, when she let me off the hook. Her eyes, lips, and face, all told me she understood the slap. She shared the responsibility for this ugly development in what had been, up to that point, a very tender relationship.
Katya's return from school extinguished my homesickness, and she and her friends started teaching me French phrases. But two days in Paris had been enough. I had to go on to Freiburg in order to keep a modicum of faith with my parents' expectations. Katya loaned me a hundred francs (I paid her back six years later) and I was off.
En route I met a young French student, named Jean-Louis Dupe'. He spoke English and was a fountain of useful information. In return for his assistance, I taught him how to eat fried chicken. Huhnchengebratene they called it in Germany. (Hewn-khyen-gay-bra-ten-ay). It wasn't easy. I had to take away his knife and fork. As he picked up the chicken with his fingers, he seemed to flush slightly. He kept looking around as if to see if anyone, like maybe his mother, might be watching him.
Freiburg was in the Black Forest, the Schwarzwald, in western Germany. Not unlike the Black Hills of Dakota. But with all of Europe spread out around me like a picnic lunch, I wouldn't be going to classes that year. I sent my parents a postmark from Freiburg, and explained that my German was not up to university standards. I told them I would travel and work in Germany, and improve my language skills.
I hitch-hiked on to Jengen-bei-Buchloe (Yeng-en-by-boo-klo-eh), a village in Bavaria near Augsburg. Florian Eberle lived there. He had been studying agriculture at the University of Wisconsin, and I'd met him on the Aurelia. We'd gotten drunk together, talked about Wisconsin and farming, and eaten Bomba Vesuviano. At his farm, he gave me a room in the barn; beer, bread and sausage every morning at five o'clock, and a job.
Sometimes I helped store bales of hay in the barn or shovelled grain, but mostly I took the cows out to the pasture every morning and made sure that none escaped. It was boring, but not painful. I watched bees pollinate flowers, cows do gymnastics with their tongues, and had romantic fantasies about Florian's sister. And I learned how to unerringly distinguish which pieces of cowshit were dry enough to kick a field goal with. I wondered what the U.S. Air Force guys thought as they flew over low in their helicopters. I saw them seeing me. They saw a guy in madras bermuda shorts, gray sweatshirt and white tennis shoes shooing cows with a long buggy whip.
Before long, I got a more lucrative and demanding position as the "myrtle" man on a six man construction crew. When one of the guys on the scaffolding yelled, "Myrtle," I would take my wheelbarrow full of stucco, roll it along the plank runway to the rope and pulley nearest the guy who'd yelled, and haul a bucket of stucco up to him. They kept me pretty busy. I thought it meant stucco, but I didn't know for sure, maybe myrtle meant "asshole" in German. They yelled it, I hauled it.
This was my first exposure to the elegant conditions that could be found in European work places. Before starting to put up the main buildings, the crew built a small cabin with a picnic table, two long benches and a refrigerator in it. A beer truck came by regularly, and the driver made sure our refrigerator was stocked with beer (in bottles each of which had an attached glass stopper and a rubber gasket). Even the workers on the top floors of the scaffolding kept a bottle of beer with them. At twelve o'clock precisely, everyone would stop work, gather in the shack and have lunch. At precisely one o'clock everyone went back to work. No one swallowed their sandwich in five minutes, no one came back late.
I earned enough money to take off and attend the Oktoberfest in nearby Munich. My first night on the road after leaving the Eberle farm, I stopped in a small gasthaus (tavern). A couple patrons found out I was American, and they started to buy me drinks. A drink was considered to be a shot of Steinhager along with a pint of warmish, dark, bitter beer. One of these guys bought a round, the other bought a round, I bought a round, etc., round and round. Beyond this, I vaguely recall the three of us walking arm in arm, along a road flanked by pastures, singing loudly.
The next clear memory was of a screaming shaft of light from a partly risen sun. It came through the window of the hotel and flashed into my face. I couldn't open my eyes, and I couldn't quite close them. I could only squint. I dragged my head out of the path of that light, then my awareness turned to my mouth, which was so dry, I thought I might have eaten my socks during the night. The bed was wet, and the room stank from the vomit on the floor by the bed. A broken lamp lay next to the table. Muddy footprints crisscrossed the room. I sneaked out of there as quickly as I could, balancing my head as if any motion might detonate a bomb inside. My only thought was to avoid meeting the operator of that hotel.
Several miles down the road, I looked for my missing American flag. It had its own tiny wooden flagpole, and I kept it attached to my rucksack. The horrific truth came to me. I'd stuck it in a flower pot back in my ruined hotel room. I committed myself to sobriety for the Oktoberfest.
I was told that nothing done during Oktoberfest could be used as grounds for divorce, as the usual seriousness with which the Germans approached their working lives was suspended during the festival. Mostly, there was lots of drinking. 100,000 people got drunk together in enormous tents and sang songs. I failed in my commitment to sobriety to the extent that I snatched the hat from a German policeman's head as thousands of us reeled out of the beer tents one night. I succeeded to the extent that I graciously offered his hat back as he raised his truncheon to bat out my brains. He was a grim, Wehrmacht-looking guy, but my smile softened his attitude. He spit the word "scheisskopf" at me and walked away.
I also had my first "small world" experience there in Munich. I ran into Kathy Black and Tom Corcoran, two friends from high school. They were going to school at Loyola in Rome. We literally bumped into each other in the Lowenbrau beer tent. I had no idea they were in Europe and they had no idea I was in Europe. We looked at each other for a very long moment as our brains patched through this statistically impossible fact. Mountain ranges of experience shifted. Oceans of time crashed together.
Munich became my European home after the Oktoberfest. I met a student who moved out of her flat in Schwabing, leaving some rent paid in advance. She let me take her place. It was a bare room in a six floor, walk-up building, and the toilet (Water Closet) was down the hall. There was a sink with cold water outside the WC. As was customary, she took the electric light switch cover plate and the ceiling fixture when she left.
I sat on the floor reading Aristotle, Plato and Marcus Aurelius by candlelight. Marcus Aurelius was the Stoic Roman emperor and philosopher who said, "Give the people what they think they want, the sooner that they might realize what they really want," and "If you go into a carpentry shop, do not be surprised to find sawdust on the floor." These notions appealed to me and quieted my spirit. Also I was experiencing some of the first privacy of my life. I suspected that my mother and father lived their whole lives without any privacy.
Before getting this room, I'd stayed in youth hostels mostly. They were good shelter, but you had to be in by 9:oopm and out by 7:30 a.m. Cancel the nightlife. It was the privacy I wanted, though, not nightlife. I was evolving gradually and needed to go slowly.
I spent my time reading, walking in the town, and wandering in the Deutsches Museum. Across the street from the museum was a bath house on the banks of the Isar river. It was super clean, had infinite hot water, and a cafe in the lobby that served perfect ruhreier mit schinken und bratkartofeln (scrambled eggs with ham and fried potatoes). Most of my contact with people came through daily trips to the American Express office. There were always travellers there looking for mail or money from home. I fell in with two of them, Jack Peters from Canada and Frank Verdugo, a Chicano from L.A.
One day Frank said, "Hey, why don't we go down to Innsbruck for lunch?" We piled into Jack's Mercedes and took off. There was another guy with us, who said he'd been a missile trajectory plotting analyst. He was covered in an electric fog, and seemed tangled up inside himself. He rarely said anything intelligible. After lunch we ditched him in Innsbruck.
It was still early, so we decided to look for my relatives in the Italian village of Carisolo just over the Brenner Pass. The village where my father had had to drown his dog. It wasn't easy to find. As we drove through the Tyrolean Alps, along the same route Hannibal and his elephants had taken, we saw rocks and trees with signs painted on them that said, "Freiheit fur die Sudtyrol." (Freedom for the south Tyrol)
We turned off the main highway, and drove through a succession of high villages, each looking the same. A huge Cinzano sign painted on the side of a building, a small bridge, a church, and a cluster of ancient stone buildings. It was morning before we found the right Cinzano sign, and at last, Carisolo. And a bunch of relatives I'd never met. They welcomed me like a son who'd left long ago and been sorely missed.
A family gathering was called for that very afternoon. A feast. A celebration. My uncle and I tried to speak German to each other, as I spoke no Italian and he spoke no English, but for the most part, we grinned a lot.
******
Grinning is an elemental monkeyshine. (mung' ke-shin') noun. Usually plural slang. A mischievous or playful trick, prank, or joke. [monkey + shine] shine = a disturbance or commotion. A monkeyshine is a behavior that's rooted in the antics of monkeys, such as dropping nuts onto the heads of passers-by, or tossing banana peels in their path.
Grinning was inherited from our distant ancestors, the monkeys, from the time before we had souls. We met in the wild, and grinned to show what big, sharp teeth we had, as this might serve to ward off attack. Our modern grin is that ancient monkey shining through our present human self. We grin to show how friendly we are. All human behavior has at least a trace of monkeyshine in it, and we forget this at our peril. When we monkey around without knowing what we're doing, and presume knowledge beyond ourself, the most devilish confusion may result.
******
A dozen celebrants gathered in the dining room for the banquet. After we all sat down, I was served. No one else was served until I started eating. After the adult males were served, the children were served. The last to take food were my old aunt Julia and my twenty year old cousin, Clalia. They had a few string beans, bread and water. I thought to myself, "Is this a hierarchy ritual? Maybe they ate while they prepared the food. Maybe they're on diets."
I learned that my father had sent them money from America, and they'd built a big house with it. When I introduced myself as Pete's son, they acted like Santa Claus' son had arrived. It was a nice house. The walls were three feet thick, and the roof was fashioned from whole trees. Many armies had passed through that village over the millenia. The people built houses that could withstand direct hits from cannon fire.
As I was being shown the house, Clalia apologized, in a sort of sign language, for the decor in some of the rooms. Delicate flowers were painted on the walls with a goat's head surrounded by grapes and leaves, and an overflowing cornucopia. It was very beautiful, but Clalia seemed embarassed, because they didn't have enough money for wallpaper.
Another sliver was jammed under the fingernails of my mind, when Clalia's brother described his plan to build a bowling alley near the dry river bed. The river was gone thanks to the people at Commonwealth Edison. They built a power plant that gave everyone electricity by diverting the river into a tunnel that was the intake for a turbine generator. "Hmm," I said to his plan, as we stood on the ancient bridge over the dry bed of round stones. I looked up and down the riverbed, trying to work up a positive aesthetic feeling for his concept. Bits of antique and recent flotsam added a note of contrast to the endless stretch of stones, and I felt reduced somehow, choosing between the river, a bowling alley, and electricity. But, then, it wasn't my river, my electricity, or my business.
Great hugs and kisses went around, and we left for Rome. We found the Olympic compound, which had become Loyola's dormitory, and we found Corcoran. We also found an old priest who thought our hair was so offensive, he ordered us to leave the campus and never return. Until this incident, I had no awareness of my hair. I thought the old priest was an isolated old crank. Jack must have encountered this phenomenon before, because he argued long and vehemently. After the priest walked away, Jack said, "It's a conspiracy of crewcuts!"
"What?" I said.
"People with short-haired minds are creating long-haired devils. It's a re-hash of the old devil theology. We're the devils in this new mythology, because we have long hair."
"Bullshit, Jack," I said, "nobody's that crazy."
"I wasn't just arguing about long hair with that priest," Jack said. "It was sex, drugs, all that stuff. That old priest figured us for heretics, man, commies, renegades."
"He was just a goofy old man," I said, "You're making a mountain out of a molehill."
Jack said, "You keep thinking like that, and you're going to be wearing your ass for a hat one of these days."
"You make it sound like everybody's crazy," I said.
"Shit, Michael," Jack said, "What's bigotry? Habit? Convenience? Hidden self-interest? Consider the guy who meets a woman searching for something under a streetlight.
She says, 'I lost a twenty dollar bill. I have to find it.'
'Let me help you,' the guy says, and the two of them look around, but pretty soon it's clear the twenty dollar bill can't be there. The guy says, 'Are you sure you lost it here?'
She says, 'Well, actually, I lost it in the alley over there, but the light is better here,' and she keeps on looking."
******
I didn't fully understand what Jack meant, and I quickly forgot what he said, but he'd described Monkeyshine #2, Self-delusion, seeing things as you wish to see them, contrary to clear facts, and #6, Bad Habit, the persistent replication of faulty procedures. They would entangle me later, and I would think of this story many times--later.