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Volume CXXXIII, Number 14 |
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Beyond the pines
LUDWIG RANG
ALUMNUS WRITER
I remember the moment exactly. In summer of '65, standing
at an intersection on Market Street in downtown San Francisco, waiting
for the lights to change, I happened to glance at a newspaper, in a coin-operated
dispenser, with the headline, U.S. TO BOMB HANOI.
I couldn't believe it. America was getting deeper and deeper
into what many Americans themselves thought was not only an unjustified
war, but a deeply immoral one. For me, it was the straw that broke the
camel's back.
On the home front, race riots were engulfing American cities.
In Los Angeles, a huge cloud of black smoke hung over Watts, an outlying
district with a largely black population.
"Burn, baby, burn," black youths on the rampage,
not for the first, nor the last, time, were chanting. What was happening
to America? Was this still the same country with which I had fallen in
love after driving across it, "from sea to shining sea," at
the end of my first year at Bowdoin?
Then, too I was beginning to have personal problems. My
relationship with Ron was deteriorating. He deceived me, and I him.
Ron worked at the Post Office, and I not at all. So, I'd
pick people up and take them back to the room we shared on the top floor
of a house on Larkin Street. The landlady I remember had a colored photograph
of FDR hanging on the wall; just like my Mrs. Lincoln at Brunswick, my
landlady at 101 Union Street, where I'd shared rooms with fellow TD's,
Ed Podvoll and Zal Colodny…those were the days.
I'd come a long way, but wasn't sure if I hadn't actually
lost my way. Was I really gay? Did I really want to spend the rest of
my life with Ron or in America? What did I want to do with it anyway?
As Watts burnt and Hanoi was bombed, a decision ripened
within me.
I would go back to Europe for good, back to college even. To study what?
Film-making.
My twin brother, a librarian in Berlin, whom I had last
seen while in the Army, had, in the meantime, married. Mathew's wife happened
to be the librarian at the newly founded Film Institute in Berlin, sponsored
by the West German government. I should start by learning to make 16-mm
films Dora advised.
But would Nellie, in her late eighties and visibly ailing,
agree to finance yet another course of studies for her errant 'German
boy'? Incredibly enough, I managed to persuade her. Maybe because she
sensed, though she didn't know about us, that it would be good for me
to get away from Ron for a while.
"I'll tell you what, Lou," she said, having discussed
with her attorney how best to help me, "I'll put a certain amount
in an account for you, on the condition that you use it to go back to
school." Having given her my word, I would do so. Nellie decided
to let me have five thousand dollars, the equivalent, then, of twenty
thousand marks. I was over the moon, as the English say.
Ron, too, thought it was a good idea I should go to Berlin.
He himself, hoping to get back into the theatre, was thinking of going
back to New York, he said.
In January of '66, we celebrated my 30th birthday, in style,
at the Mark Hopkins.
Then, disaster struck. Nellie had a massive stroke. I rushed
down to Carmel. Luckily, being a tough old bird, she hadn't suffered irreparable
damage. Nevertheless, I didn't feel I could leave now, or at least not
until she'd fully recovered.
She needed a period of convalescence of at least three months,
the doctor told me. So, with her approval, I booked passage by boat from
New York to Rotterdam in May. In the meantime, she would try and find
someone else to look after her.
Due to her brush with death, though never a religious person,
Nellie suddenly became interested in the B'hais, a 19th-century off-shoot
of Islam stressing the unity of all religions, with millions of followers
round the world and a temple in Chicago.
Even in Carmel there was a B'hai community. And it was its
local guru who offered to look after Nellie, probably in hopes of her
leaving the B'hais some money. A bearded fellow in his thirties, with
an extraordinarily high voice, Norbert, after I left, moved into the self-contained
little apartment next to the garage of Nellie's western-style bungalow
in which I used to stay. She'd be in goods hands, Nellie beamed; sitting
on her glass-enclosed patio and enjoying the view of Carmel Bay in the
background. Not all her friends were convinced though.
To tell the truth, I didn't expect to see her again or Ronnie,
determined as I was to turn over a new leaf. I wanted to get away not
only from America, but the gay scene. Good luck, Ron said, with an ironic
grin.
After flying to New York, I once again boarded a boat of
the Holland-America Line; larger and more luxurious than the one that
had carried me to the New World for the first time in 1954. As an unattached
male, I was put in a cabin and at a table with two others, one a retired
railway man from Sacramento, the other a Reverend from Cleveland, who
for some reason (not hard to figure out) took a great shine to me.
But, I'd put all that behind me. Or so I thought, until
a chance encounter in Berlin I'll tell you about next week.