NEEDLING

I have come from the depths of drunkenness, I have spilt everything which could have been spilt anywhere in my house, I have slumbered on and off from restless sleep to somnambulistic meanderings... I am the barely awake of Sunday morning. My kitchen is a mess, the laundry room seems to be at a standstill, the washing machine broken it seems, the dog all about the place going insane, I spill a brand new bag of dog food into his water bucket and onto the floor, the cleaning process is halfway successful, I skater mud and debris all over the house, water spillage, I try to recover as much of the dog food as possible running it through the colander... all the water soaked nuggets of expensive protein intense big puppy food finds its way into my refrigerator. There’s a weeks worth of soaked food in my bean casserole, the only dish big enough to hold all the wet dog food and fit in my cold box. I need to cook beans today for the rest of the week. This is a pain in the ass, and it’s only just the beginning, the rising from bed, the trying to have a more or less normal Sunday. Maybe what I need is a bath. Last night, my next door neighbors invited me to a doggy party. Zep, their dog, turned 4, and thus they invited lots of people with lots of dogs. All graduate students, scientists, chemical engineers, and computer programming experts. I felt about as smart as the dogs. At one point, the conversation turned to wine and spirits... finally, something I could talk about... and then, no matter how smart all those folks certainly are, once you get enough alcohol in any person of any level of intelligence, the conversation seems to always fall into more or less the same themes: past alcohol induced feats, exaggerated, and sex, or the lack of, the raunchy jokes, et cetera. Basically, a fun evening all around. Talked with one fellow about his Hungarian and Lithuanian origins, he talks neither languages of his parents. His mother when a little girl, jumped on a train right after church one Sunday many years ago, with her parents, on a day the Soviets guards had forgot to put a sentinel on the train heading to Austria. The train sped towards the border not stopping for anybody else. A whole bunch of folks in Sunday clothes with their Sunday suppers slowly simmering on their kitchen stoves, all bunched up on the coal wagon speeding towards Austria with the Soviets shooting bullets at the train trying to get it to stop. And that’s how, I was explained, his mother started her journey to America. I wonder what happened to all those meals simmering in all those kitchens? Did the village go up in smoke? Did the Soviets eat the meals? Did the priest jump in the coal wagon as well?

(Notice the subtle underlying theme of going on the wagon.)

His grandfather worked for Ford Inc. as a machinist in the factories in Cleveland, Ohio, for 25 years.

“He was an incredible man,” is all I was told.

Being a Hungarian soldier during the Second World War, he fought for the axis powers. He was made prisoner by the Americans, and interned in an American run concentration camp located somewhere in France. For months, they gave him nothing to eat. The prisoners survived by eating grass and leaves found on the campground. And still, in the mid-fifties, when they escaped the Soviets, America is where they were headed. During the war, his grandfather was an interpreter of Hungarian for the Germans. Because he was an intelligent man and spoke both languages with great aptitude, he ended up in some dangerous circles. Such people as Heinrich Himmler used his services when the Germans walked into Hungary.

I can’t even begin to imagine finding myself in such a situation. Once, when I was eighteen, I landed a job as an interpreter for this Californian millionaire who had the idea of starting a black truffle ranch in West Texas. He brought the biggest mind on the subject to Texas, paid them handsomely, and hopped to get as much information from them as possible. These truffle specialists, scientists and such were all French. This is where I come in. One of these scientist in question was a horrible man, and being the interpreter I was stuck in the middle, having to translate what he was saying without changing the meaning of his words. There were times when I was ashamed of what this man was saying. The man who had hired me, the millionaire’s brother in law, for whom I had worked earlier that summer helping him build stain glass windows told me after that horrible man was put back on the plane, that I had done a great job, and that they all knew these words were not mine own, that I had done my job as an interpreter, and that was what I had been hired to do. Pancho was an artist who lived in the hill country, he was poor, an ex-hippy from the sixties, a wonderful man who happened to be related to a very rich Californian. This French scientist lived in what had been Vichy France during WWII. He was one of those French who had been more than happy to see the Nazi’s coming in. There were many more than most would admit today. He collected Nazi memorabilia such as uniforms, medals, photos and such, but also guns, specially automatic guns, which are highly illegal in France as far as I know. He explained that one of his favorite games was to invite unknowing friends to his place, set them up in his living room with a drink, and then disappear for while. He’d come back in the living room dressed up as a high ranking SS officer with a loaded automatic gun and scare the living shit out of his guest. This is part of the stuff I had to translate, which wasn’t so bad. He kept telling these types of anecdotes which I translated to his hosts, my boss and Pancho. This man was a sick man, and I hated him, even more so because this man was French, and in my silly eighteen year old mind, I was afraid my hosts might think all French people were like this man.

When our work was done, and that it was time to take this asshole back to the airport, we had a few days left and we asked him if there was anything in Texas he wanted to see. There was. He had always wanted to see the Confederate Air Force – now the Commemorative Air Force – an organization which collects old WWI and WWII airplanes, fixes them up, and flies them on a regular basis. At the time, they were located in South Texas, and we traveled all the way to the valley, to my parents’ distress since I was at the time an illegal alien, and if stuck in an Immigration Check Point, I could have been taken into custody. I went anyway. I looked and sounded American, and I had a driver’s license. We were driving on those long highways. We would see whole family of poor people walking on the sides of the roads. At one point, our scientific asshole friend said to me... this was at the time of the first Iraq war, the one Bush Sr. started... “we should gather up all these people, put them on a plane and make them walk hand in hand, every single one of them, parents, children, the whole bunch, in front of the American Marines in the desert to clean out the mine fields. It would save us a lot of money, and at least these people would serve a purpose instead of just being parasites.” When he said this to me in French, and the millionaire and Pancho were looking at me for a translation, and the French asshole was egging me on to translate what he’d just said, and we were traveling down the highway passing all these poor people walking down the side of the road, I looked at Pancho, whom I liked and respected, and translated what the scientist had just told me. I was angry and almost in tears at having to say such a thing.