Hollywood Animal (27 page)

I said, “No, Father.”

“Are you stupid?”

I said, “No, Father.”

“Then why does this report card say you’re stupid?”

“I don’t know, Father.”

“Is this report card lying to me?”

“No, Father.”

“Then you
are
stupid.”

“No, Father.”

“We’ll see.”

He almost threw it at me.

The radio said a tornado was coming. My parents didn’t know what a tornado was. There were no tornadoes in Hungary or the camps.

The sky blackened. Hail the size of golf balls fell. We heard the sound of a roaring locomotive, although there were no train tracks near us. The apartment started to shake. A window in my father’s office exploded.

We ran to the living room and held each other. The electricity was gone. Police and ambulance sirens sounded all night. My mother held on to me as I shook and cried.

The next morning, my mother walked me to school and my father came with us. As we walked down Bridge Avenue, we saw houses collapsed and trees down everywhere. My father stopped and looked at the devastation.

“It’s nothing compared to a bombing,” he said.

Dénes Kacso told me about witches while he was whittling a piece of wood with his pocketknife in the concrete yard.

Witches, he said, were beautiful women who hovered in the air from midnight to dawn singing beautiful songs. Witches could saddle young men and ride them like airplanes. No grass ever grew where witches met. A circle of mushrooms grew to show where they had been. Witches drank from the hoofs of horses and oxen and feasted on human flesh. The surest way to keep them away from you was to keep a horse’s skull nearby.

“Where can I see some witches?” I asked Dénes Kacso.

“You will see them when you’re older,” he said. “Every man sees his share. Before he dies.”

· · ·

Father Gottfried went out of his way to be mean to me when he saw me in the concrete yard playing ball. He would roughly push me, once even knocking me down. At another time, he picked the ball up as it bounced from the wall and threw it on the roof. I told my father and he told me to stay out of the priest’s way. But I had a better idea.

I stood on the iron grille patio above the concrete yard and waited for Father Gottfried to come from the circulation office toward the printing shop. I had pieces of lead I had picked up near the linotype machines in my hand.

When I saw him, I fired. I hit him in the side of the head. He was bleeding and screaming.

He came running up the stairs and charged through our door. He and my father yelled at each other. Then my father yelled at me. Then my mother slapped me. But Father Gottfried never bothered me again.

My father insisted that my mother and I go to his speeches, which were three hours long. He spoke with broad gestures, his face red, his voice falling and rising dramatically.

He spoke over and over again about the danger to the world posed by Communism. He referred always to Stalin and Lenin and Marx and to Mátyás Rákosi in Hungary. And he spoke of the Treaty of Trianon and how it had unfairly taken Hungarians away from Hungary.

At the end of the speech, he was drenched in sweat.

The hundreds of Hungarians who were there applauded him loudly. That’s when I usually woke up, asleep in my mother’s arms.

When I was a grown American man and considering the image of my father speaking to one of his many audiences, I thought his oratorical style similar to: Fidel Castro, Everett Dirksen, John L. Lewis, George Wallace, Jimmy Swaggart, the Reverend Ike, and … Adolf Hitler
.

The other speaker at many of these events was a Franciscan named Father Dobay. He was a fat and effeminate man who sometimes wore rouge. He had a haircut unlike any I had seen—combed straight down his forehead almost to his eyebrows. He was extremely shy and nervous.

So that when he spoke at these Hungarian events, he spoke this way: He read his speech into a tape recorder in the basement of our apartment house. Then the tape recorder was driven to the place of the gathering. It was placed center stage. The spools started spinning and we heard Father Dobay’s voice coming from the tape recorder. Sometimes we stared at the tape recorder on the stage for two hours, listening.

Father Dobay stood backstage, listening, too.

· · ·

I became an altar boy. My mother was very proud of me. All of us altar boys were petrified of Father John.

He caught Steve Wegling and me tasting the wine in the sacristy before Mass. He slapped us so hard our faces burned for hours.

At the altar early one morning, as I was pouring the water and wine over his hands at the offertory, I spilled the wine all over him. Father John looked at himself, looked at me, slapped me … right there at the altar in front of the congregation … and continued saying the Mass.

Besides witches, Dénes Kacso, who sat in the courtyard whittling with his pocketknife, told me stories of princes and horses, of trees that reached up to the sky, of magic ships and frogs with diamonds in their eyes.

He also told me how God created women. God took a rib out of Adam but a dog came along and grabbed the bone out of his hands. God chased the dog and grabbed the dog’s tail. The tail stuck in God’s hand but the dog got away with the rib.

Tired from the chase, God just turned the dog’s tail into Eve. That explained, Dénes Kacso said, why women acted the way they did.

On my eighth birthday, my father announced that he was taking my mother and me for a special dinner at Nick’s Diner, just down the street from us on the corner of Lorain Avenue and 41st Street. It was the first time I’d ever been in a restaurant. I’d passed Nick’s each day on the way to school with my mother. I’d stared at the big steamed window with the grilling hot dogs behind it.

My father wore his Salvation Army trench coat and beret. My mother wore her black Salvation Army velvet dress. We sat in a booth and everyone stared. Everyone else was wearing rolled-up T-shirts, tight black pants, and ducktail haircuts.

A waitress came over, smiling, and asked what we wanted. In his broken English, my father said “Tree franfoorter.” But it sounded like “Ree Foorter.”

The waitress said, “What was that, hon?”

He repeated it, louder this time, but she stood there smiling blankly. He repeated it again, still louder, his face red, but she still didn’t get it. The place was pindrop silent, all eyes on us.

Finally, in a near roar, he said, “Hoat dog! Hoat dog!”

And the waitress smiled brightly and said, “Okay.”

My days ended sitting on the living room couch waiting for my father’s friends to leave so I could go to sleep there.

His friends were people like Gyula Kovács, a former Hungarian army general who worked on a factory assembly line … Jenö Szebedinszky, a Hungarian
journalist
who came to visit him from Pittsburgh … Lászlo Ágh, a quiet, good-looking man, the president of the MHBK, the Hungarian Soldiers Friendship Association … Imre Ács, a poet who went up and down Lorain Avenue reciting his verses in a loud, staccato tone accompanied by arm movements suited to a symphony conductor.

My favorite among his friends was the pipe-smoking Gyula Bedy, a novelist, short story writer, and poet, the only one ever to say: “Let’s get out of here so this boy can sleep.”

When I was eight years old, I was allowed to walk to school and back by myself. I took a different way home one day and saw a group of American kids playing bazball. I watched for hours, studying the way the game was played.

At home, I started listening to Jimmy Dudley describing the Cleveland Indians games on the radio. Jimmy Dudley said, “And that ball is going, going, and gone for a home run!”

When Oszkár Moldován or the American men at Num Num or Pep Up couldn’t play with me, I practiced bazball in the concrete yard behind our apartment.

I stood facing the towering furnace wall of the potato chip factory. I threw the red rubber ball with my right hand. It bounced back at me off the wall and I swung at it with my stick left-handed. I dropped the stick and chased the ball as it came off the wall again.

And all the time, quietly, I’d narrate the play just like Jimmy Dudley narrated it on the radio: “The pitch from Vitey Ford! Rosen svings! A hi fly ball to zenter! Mantle go back! He gots!”

I learned new English words each day, sometimes even on my way to school.

Older boys as old as eighteen hung around Nick’s Diner. They wore black leather jackets and smoked cigarettes. Some of them owned old cars whose motors were loud and sounded like something was broken inside them.

As I tried to walk by them, sometimes they would grab me and push me from one of them to the other. As they did, they taught me new English words.

“Come here, you wimpy little fuck!”

“Hey, fuck you, asshole, speak English!”

“What did you say, motherfucker?”

“Come on, pussy! Hit me, hit me!”

“Well son of a fucking bitch!”

“Shit, look at that! The little pussy’s crying!”

On Friday nights, when my father was away making a speech, my mother and I would stay awake past midnight. We had so much fun.

We couldn’t eat meat on Friday, the Catholic Church said, so my mother and I waited until midnight and she sliced the Hungarian bacon she’d gotten that day at the West Side Market. She made tiny strips she called soldiers and put them on bread.

She talked to me about her mother and how much she’d loved her and about Hungary and how beautiful it was. Sometimes, when we were finished with our soldiers, she cried.

But even when I saw her crying, I was happy.

I heard my father tell his friends once that he was trying to obtain copies of all the books he had published in Hungary.

“Just so I can convince myself,” he said with a smile, “that I really did write them, that they still exist, that the war didn’t blow them away.”

He said he’d written some letters to American libraries and that the one book he thought he’d have trouble finding was
Nemzet Politika
—National Policy—that he’d written when he was twenty-seven years old.

My father bought a broken violin at the Salvation Army for $3. He glued it back together.

He played it often, standing in his office, looking out the window, playing mournful Hungarian folk tunes and bright upbeat
csárdáses
, his expression the same while playing both: his eyes lost somewhere out the window, staring at the sky.

I listened to the sound of his violin sometimes as I played bazball with myself against the Num Num Potato Chip factory wall.

At noon on Good Friday, my mother knelt on the kitchen floor with two other Hungarian ladies, saying the Rosary.

A Trappist monk had predicted that the world would end this Good Friday at three o’clock in the afternoon and my mother and her friends were preparing themselves.

My mother urged me to kneel down and pray but, instead, I went into my father’s office. He was beating away at his typewriter.

“Papa,” I said, “they say the world will end.”

“Maybe it will,” he said.

I said, “Really?”

“Sure,” he said, “sometime.”

“But not today?”

“No,” he said, “not today.”

At 2:30 in the afternoon the sky turned black, chunks of ice fell from the heavens, and zigzag lightning flashed through the air.

My mother and her lady friends were working themselves into a frenzy on the kitchen floor.

I could still hear my father’s typewriter beating away.

I went back to his office to see him.

“Are you sure?” I said.

“About what?”

“Are you sure it’s not going to end?”

“What?”

“The world.”

“I’m pretty sure”—he smiled—“but I could be wrong. I’ve certainly been wrong in my life before. Many times, actually, to tell you the truth.”

“Should I pray?” I asked.

“Prayer never hurts,” he said.

I knelt down with my mother and her friends and prayed while he kept beating away at his typewriter.

At ten minutes after three, the sky cleared and my mother said to me, “God has answered our prayers once again!” She was very happy.

I was, too.

My father came into the living room and saw us hugging each other joyously.

“Still here, eh?” He smiled.

My father was trying to learn English by reading American novels. They were paperbacks with brightly colored paintings of half-naked women on them.

His favorite American writer was Mickey Spillane. My father said Mickey Spillane was so wealthy from his writing that he had a typewriter that was solid gold.

When he saw me take a great interest in the covers of Mickey Spillane’s books, he started tearing the covers off and ripping them into little pieces. My mother caught me trying to reassemble a Mickey Spillane cover on the living room floor.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m trying to learn English like Papa,” I said.

She took the ripped-up pieces of paper away from me.

“I see,” she said.

Josef Stalin was dead. The radio said he had killed twenty million people and put another twelve million in prison.

My father knew he was dead last night, before the radio told us. He knew because on our shortwave, Moscow radio was playing music all the time and not saying anything. The Russians do that when a leader dies, my father said, they stop talking and play music.

I heard new Russian names on the radio now: Malenkov, Bulganin, Mikoyan, Molotov, Khrushchev.

My father said, “This is the happiest day of my life!” But he didn’t look happy.

My father took me to the soccer games on Sunday, across town on the East Side at Latin Field. We rooted for the Hungarian team, the St. Stephen’s Dramatic Club team.

The championship showdown was between the Hungarians and a German team.

The referee, a small pudgy bald man named Lieberman, called a foul on the Hungarian team in the final moments with the score tied. The Germans got a free kick and won the game.

The Hungarians chased Lieberman down the field into his car. They were screaming things at him. One of the things I heard them—but not my father—yell was “
Büdos Zsido!
”—Stinking Jew!