There's a Man With a Gun Over There (12 page)

Grimes Poznik kept playing. He played everywhere. He'd sit on tree limbs, pop out of bushes.

“All the world's my stage, man,” he'd tell you if you asked what he was doing. “I'm giving melodies to the air you breathe.”

You'd be walking along, and he'd jump out from behind an acacia tree to play parts from a Mozart horn concerto. He'd be sitting in the far stall of the men's room in the commons playing Miles Davis. The muffled tone of his horn echoed through the whole building. How strange those moments were, how they'd catch you, on your way to your bit of business, there'd be Grimes, that slice of hair down over his forehead, bending into the notes of his song, a reverie right through your day.

“I bring you the night; I bring you the day,” he said.

Who could guess that Grimes would die, homeless, of alcohol poisoning, on a street in San Francisco in the harder years that came after the 1960s.

In spring semester of 1966, I took European history with Professor Kleinholder. I remember the day he brought this ancient record player to class. It had a detachable horn on the top and played these thick 78s.

“
Ja, Ja
,” he said as he put the contraption together. “I am very interested in this American business of powdered foods, of taking water out of things. I think this is how history is— little shiny crystals, and we must put them in water, return them to the life they once had. Here is such a crystal from the past.”

His hands shook as he put the record on the machine, cranked the handle to get it going, and set the giant needle on the record. First the sound of spinning static.

“You hear, the way it sounds like the past. Like dust from years ago blowing here into this classroom of our little college.”

The blare, then, of a long-ago oompah band began playing a march with a chorus of men singing.

He lifted the needle to pause the playing, and we could still hear a grinding noise as the record went round on its mechanism.

“I have now an experiment. You will get to participate in the old days. The old days for you, but the new days for me. From a time when I was young. History for me, almost yesterday for me. Come stand up.
Ja
, come here. All of you.”

Professor Kleinholder became animated as he showed us how to line up in front of the blackboard.

“It is a march song,
ja
. When it plays you will march around in a circle here, to get the feel of it. It is an experiment. We have now a laboratory of history.”

Once we were all lined up in the space between the blackboard and the first row of seats, he cranked the handle and put the needle back on the spinning record. The static and then the oom-pah music began again, and a chorus of sturdy male voices sang.

At first awkwardly and then more and more in time to the beat of the music, we marched in a small circle at the front of the classroom. Professor Kleinholder waved his right arm up and down and back and forth as if he were conducting this.

“
Ja
,” he said. Actually he yelled over the music, which seemed to get louder. “This is the tune of an old German folk song. We used to sing it in the mountains. It is like the melody of that hymn, ‘How Great Thou Art.' I was visiting Berlin in 1932. I was your age, and I heard it playing in the distance. It brought tears to my eyes. Reminded me of when I used to hike in the woods with my friends.”

Professor Kleinholder looked off into space.

“When I got closer and heard the song clearly, I could tell that they changed the words.
Ja.
All changed, and these thugs were marching.
Alles verendert
. Do you understand the words? When I first heard this song coming from the streets of Berlin, I knew my innocent days were over.
Vorbei
. Here, let me start the record over. I'll translate for you.”

The street free for the brown battalions

The street free for the Storm Troopers

Millions, full of hope, look up at the swastika

The day breaks for freedom and for bread.

We quit marching then and stood there, looking down at our feet, while the scratchy harmonies played themselves out on the cylinder.

“It breaks your heart, what they did to this song, to the country. The country of Beethoven and Schubert. These were the famous Brown Shirts, the precursors to Hitler. You remember this,
ja
? You remember how this goes from sentiment to horror. You remember how easily you marched. You be on your guard. Watch out.
Man muss immer aufpassen.
You must always pay attention. Be careful what you sing,
ja
?”

In his fedora and his elegant suits, Professor Kleinholder was at every war protest that I saw at my little college. I thought about joining in myself, but then it all seemed too complicated. I just watched from across the street, afraid to cross over.

“Has anyone noticed,” I heard someone in basic training ask, “that our uniform shirts are brown? We're like the Nazis, man. We're Brown Shirts.”

“Oh, fuck you,” someone else said. “This is the goddamned American army. We're not Nazis. We save the world.”

23.

A
s I look at that army uniform I found in the attic of 332 East Acacia Road, the first image that comes to mind is the little army post office where I mailed the box. It's a single room fronted by a half door with a counter on top.

It was tucked away in a corner of Turley Barracks. Open from ten to noon in the morning and from two to four in the afternoon. Private First Class Ellert the clerk there. Yes, I recall, so clearly now, his name stenciled over the right-hand pocket of his green fatigue shirt,
US Army
printed over the left-hand pocket. The little black stripe on a rocker—the PFC emblem—on each of his collar corners.

He never got promoted in the two years I knew him, and that was odd during the Vietnam War. Even though the combat was a continent away from Germany, promotions fell on us like confetti at a party.

Yes, PFC Ellert and the APO—at the end of my time in the army . . . I was . . . yes . . . oh, now, I remember . . . I was mailing my uniform home so I would have a souvenir of my time in the army.

I actually spent a lot of time with PFC Ellert during the last year of my army service. It began when I started applying to graduate schools. You see, I was trying to get back to where I'd been before the army nabbed me. I was just desperate to be out of the army and go back to studying Emerson and poetry.

In my dreams, though, the army wouldn't let me go.

I was riding in a deuce-and-a-half truck with the rest of my platoon. I could see us—both from an overhead viewpoint and also from inside of the truck. You could smell our fear. We wore our steel combat helmets and rested our rifles on the floor of the truck. It was a moonlit night, and one of us quietly sobbed in the dark. Seen from overhead, our helmets lined up like green-gray eggshells, hardly enough protection against what lay in the dark ahead.

I would wake up then, afraid to go back to sleep.

Yes, I wanted out of the army's clutches. While I'd so far managed to stay out of combat, Vietnam was always out there, like a cancer diagnosis. It could always get you.