Hollywood Animal (12 page)

My father was frightened that if America put Jenö Máté in jail, then maybe America would send all the refugees he had sponsored back to the camps. I heard my father say to my mother that he was afraid of the Komchis here, too.

America was in a war with the Komchis at a faraway place called Korea.

What if the Komchis bombed America? What if the Komchis invaded America and started filling their arms with wristwatches again? What if we had come to America for nothing—if the Komchis followed us over here—and the same thing happened here that had happened in Hungary?

My father said maybe we should have gone to Chile or Argentina, countries that weren’t at war with the Komchis.

My mother’s solution was to pray and sometimes I prayed with her, kneeling down in that airless, overheated little room with sweat dripping off us, the car horns and the sirens echoing from the street.

She continued telling me about Jesus, which she’d begun doing in the camp. I was fascinated by Jesus. More exactly, I was fascinated by his crucifixion. They drove
nails
into his
hands
and
feet
and they put him up on a
cross
.

Why?

Because they hated him, she said.

Who? The Komchis?

No, she said, the Zsidos—the Jews.

The Zsidos killed Jesus?

My father overheard her and was angry. “Stop filling the boy with nonsense,” he said.

She got angry, too. “It’s true, the Zsidos killed him!”

My father lost his temper. “Jesus
was
a Jew!” he said, and left the room.

“But why did the Zsidos kill Jesus if he was a Zsido?” I asked.

My mother looked away and said I’d understand when I was older.

I was very sick. I was burning up. My throat felt like a wound. It hurt to move.

My father got Mrs. Szánto, who looked at me and used a word I hadn’t heard before:
polio
. She knew a Hungarian doctor, Dr. Szo. She would call him. We’d have to meet him at the hospital.

We walked through the garbage-strewn chaotic New York streets to the hospital.
My
father held me much of the way. My mother had stayed in the apartment. She was afraid of the noise in the street.

At the hospital, Dr. Szo examined me. He spoke fluent Hungarian. He said I was a very sick boy, but I didn’t have polio. He prescribed medicines. My father said we didn’t have any money. Dr. Szo gave us the medicines.

He hugged me when we left. He shook my father’s hand and slipped a twenty-dollar bill into it. My father put his head down and for a moment I thought he was going to cry.

“Go,” Dr. Szo said to my father. “Take the boy home. He needs rest.” My father carried me much of the way back and told my mother how kind this man had been to us.

“Zsido,” my father said to her. She said nothing.

On the way home that day from the hospital, in the withering humidity of the city, my father and I passed a watermelon stand. I had never seen watermelons before. They were the darkest green, lined up next to each other on the sidewalk. My father indicated to the man that he’d like him to cut into one so we could see it.

The man took a big knife, slit the watermelon in half, and the red juice exploded from it … and I started to scream.

Maybe it was my fever. Maybe it was something else.

At night in the tenement apartment in New York we heard the shooting begin. Gunshots and mortars and more sirens than I’d ever heard before.

We woke up. We huddled on the floor. War. The Komchis were in the streets. Korea was here.

My mother prayed and sobbed. My father held me. I felt him trembling.

The door burst open. Mrs. Szánto had heard my mother’s sobs.

“What’s the matter?” Mrs. Szánto cried.

The war, my father said. The gunshots. The mortars. The Komchis. Korea.

No, Mrs. Szánto said. Firecrackers. Cherry bombs. Roman candles.

The Fourth of July.

My father took me with him to visit our sponsor, Jenö Máté.

We walked the streets for hours until we found the address. It was a tenement like ours in a neighborhood like ours. We walked up a long flight of stairs and my father hesitantly knocked on the door. There was no answer. He knocked again. Something roared some muffled words in Hungarian on the other side of the door and we both took a step back and looked at each other.

And then the door was flung open and a giant of a man stood there bare-chested, wearing only a rumpled pair of pants. His chest was huge and flabby.

His stomach jutted out in front of him. He had a head bigger than any I’d ever seen and his coarse jet-black hair stuck out in every direction. His neck was thick and his eyes were red embers of burning coal. He stood there, glaring, looking like he would erupt. He looked us over like he was sizing us up for lunch.

“
Máté Jenö?
” my father asked timidly in Hungarian.

“Who wants to know?” he bellowed. His Hungarian was perfect and unaccented.

My father told him who we were and began thanking him for making it possible for us to come to America.

“What do you want?” the giant roared.

“Nothing,” my father said, “the boy and I came just to thank you.”

“Do you want money?”

“No,” my father repeated, “I don’t want anything.”

“I don’t have any money,” Jenö Máté said. “Don’t ask me for money.”

“Please,” my father said, “I’m not asking you for any—”

“I need money just like you do,” Jenö Máté said.

It went on like that for a while and my father asked him why he had sponsored us.

“What’s your name again?”

My father told him.

The giant shrugged.

“I’ve never heard of you,” Jenö Máté said.

“But you sponsored us to America.”

“Are you sure it was me?”

“Yes,” my father said.

“What do you do?” Jenö Máté asked.

My father told him he wrote Hungarian novels.

“I don’t know,” Jenö Máté said, “maybe I read one of your novels.”

“Which one?” my father said.

“Who knows?” Jenö Máté paused a moment and said, “I sponsor everybody. My friends bring me lists. I sign to be the sponsor. It doesn’t matter. This is a big country. There’s room for everybody. Just don’t ask me for money. I don’t have any money.”

My father thanked him again and shook his hand again. The giant peered strangely from his height at us and we started walking away.

“
Wait!
” he roared. He walked up to us. He handed my father some crumpled money he had pulled from his pocket.

“I can’t take this,” my father said. “Please. I told you. I don’t want your money. I came to thank you.” He held the crumpled bill out to him.

“
Take it!
” the giant roared.

“But it’s ten dollars!” my father said.

“Buy the boy a hamboorger,” the giant said. He turned to me. “Did you eat a hamboorger yet?” I shook my head. “It’s the best thing you’ll ever eat in America, a hamboorger,” he said.

“But this is a lot of money!” my father said.

The giant smiled.

“Buy him two hamboorger!” he said, walked away, and slammed the door in our faces.

In Hollywood as an American screenwriter, I asked about Jenö Máté, who was long dead
.

The Hungarians around Fairfax Avenue remembered him. He would sit in the Budapest Restaurant after his day on the movie set, his face still wearing the war paint of an American Indian, a feather tucked into his hair
.

He would eat three orders of chicken paprikás, one after the other, drink innumerable bottles of Tokay wine. Then he would sit at the piano and play Gypsy songs over and over again, his war paint mixing with sweat and dripping onto the keys
.

Mrs. Szánto found a job for my parents in White Plains, a town not far away. My father would be handyman and my mother a waitress at a place called Margie’s Diner. Margie, Mrs. Szánto said, was Hungarian—her mother, now dead, came from Hungary. Margie was born in America, but still spoke Hungarian.

Mrs. Szánto walked us to a bus station. My father carried the suitcase. My mother smoked. I blew my flute.

Margie spoke Hungarian with English like Mrs. Szánto. Her husband was an American named Ed.

My father was “Steve.” My mother was “Mary.” And I was “Joee.” Ed also called me “Heykid!”

When we arrived, Margie showed us where we would sleep—a garage filled with old furniture. My father said there was no room for us. Margie said there would be when he cleaned the furniture out.

I kept blowing on my flute.

Margie said, “Stop that! You’re giving me a headache.”

We cleared the furniture out. There were no lights, except for a flashlight Margie had given us. We slept in one bed. I was sleeping between my parents.

My mother’s scream woke me up. Instantly, my father had the flashlight on. I heard loud chittering noises. And I looked up. The flashlight was illuminating the girders above us.

Rats were watching and talking to us. Laughing. Snarling. Dancing their tails. Flashing their teeth.

· · ·

My mother wore an apron and a white uniform. Ed called her “Hanibonch” and “Sveeti.” My father was clearing a yard that was overgrown.

I blew into my flute and Margie yelled at me: “Put that thing down!”

My father started to itch. Red spots appeared all over his hands and face. Margie said, “It will go away.” But it didn’t. He itched more. The spots were all over his body as he cleared the yard day after day.

A Hungarian who ate at Margie’s Diner saw him. “He’s got poison ivy,” the Hungarian said to Margie.

“It’ll go away,” Margie said.

The Hungarian drove my father to a doctor in town, who gave him something to rub on his itch. Then it went away.

After my father had cleared the yard, Ed said “Heykid!” and took me out there. He had a stick and a ball. He put the stick into my hand and called it a “bat.” He threw the ball and I hit it with the stick and Ed ran to catch it.

Sometimes when I’d hit it hard Ed yelled, “
Horun! Horun! Heykid! Horun!
” He laughed when he said that.

I liked doing this very much. I liked this “bazball” very much. My father tried to play with me, too, but he couldn’t chase the ball.

I told him to yell “Horun! Horun!” when I hit it. But he didn’t.

When I was older, I considered the image of my father, the handyman at Margie’s Diner:

A successful novelist. An educated man. A man with intellectual interests. A man unsuited for physical labor, even to exercise. Now clearing yards. Unloading the garage. Sleeping beneath rats. Hearing his wife called “Honeybunch” and “Sweetie.” Seeing her in a maid’s uniform. In a place where he couldn’t even speak the “lingidge.”

My flute was gone.

I looked everywhere. My father looked everywhere. My mother looked everywhere. I cried.

Ed saw me in the kitchen, crying. He said, “Heykid!” He said, “Bazball? Come on, horun!” He tried to make me smile.

My flute was gone. I didn’t smile.

Margie was there. Ed said something to her in English I didn’t understand. She said something to him I didn’t understand. He got angry and left.

I sat there, crying. Margie turned to me angrily and told me to go outside and play.

· · ·

Ed and Margie took us to the county fair. She gave my father $10 and said, “Spend it on the boy.”

I rode in a merry-go-round. I threw a ball at bottles. I ate an apple with candy on top of it. I ate popcorn and a “hoadog.”

My father put a dollar on a number on a table and a spinning wheel stopped at that number and we won a big can with ham in it. My father said it was a Polish ham, the best ham in the world. We would eat it the next day.

We were very happy.

But when Margie and Ed drove us back, she asked my father for the ham. He was holding the big can in both hands. He told Margie that he’d won it. Margie said that he’d won it with money she’d given him. My father said this wasn’t fair. Margie asked him if he wanted to lose his job. He gave her the ham and mumbled something under his breath.

She turned angrily and said, “What did you say?”

My mother whispered, “
Jaj, Jézus Mária
.”

“Nothing,” my father said to Margie.

But I’d heard what he said: “
Kurva
.”

I was drinking milk in the kitchen of Margie’s Diner. Margie and my mother and father were there. My mother was making “sanviches” for the diners from the big Polish ham my father had won.

I said, “This milk doesn’t taste good.”

Margie tasted it. “It’s fine,” she said.

I drank some more. “It’s spoiled,” I insisted.

My father tasted it. “The milk isn’t good,” he told Margie.

“It’s good enough for
your
son,” Margie said.

My father took the milk and threw it into her face. She started screaming at him. He started screaming at her. He called her a “
diszno
”—a pig—and a “
kurva
.”

She screamed, “You dirty Nazi! You’re lucky I hired you!”

He screamed,
“I am not a Nazi!”

She screamed, “You’re all Nazis, all you dirty DPs!”

DPs were “displaced persons.” Everyone, even Mrs. Szánto, called us that.

My mother, whose hands were shaking now as she made the sandwiches, ran outside. Ed ran in.

Margie and my father were still screaming at each other—then Ed and Margie were screaming at each other. Ed slapped Margie and she ran outside.

Ed looked at my father and shook his head. Then, quietly, he said, “Get out, Steve! Go!” He jerked his thumb at us.

We stood at the side of the road near Margie’s Diner, the suitcase between us. My father had his thumb out.

Okay. Hov arr yu! Zank yu! Heykid! Kurva! Jaj Jezus Mária! Horun! Horun!

We weren’t there long. Only two or three cars passed. Then a big black car stopped. Two men got out. They were Hungarian.

They introduced themselves—the Reverend Benedek Biro and the Reverend Ipoly Dési. They were Franciscan priests. They had come to Margie’s Diner to look for István Eszterhás, the Hungarian novelist. They had read and admired some of his novels. They owned a Hungarian language newspaper called the
Catholic Hungarians’ Sunday
. They were hoping he’d be interested in being its editor. They took our suitcase and put it into the trunk. They helped us inside their big black car. They drove us away.