Hollywood Animal (40 page)

“I want to help you fight them,” I said. “Please, Papa?”

He smiled and patted my head.

“When you are older, we will fight them together—good, Jozsi?”

I envisioned us together—our silver guns blazing, wearing our black cowboy hats, getting the Komchis!

All three of us went to see the movies
Quo Vadis?
and
The Robe
. They were about Jesus.

My mother loved them. She said they were like watching a prayer. I loved them, too. The women in the movies hardly wore anything. My father said he was bored.

Sometimes when I told my parents I’d have to go to the public library after school, I walked over the bridge to the stadium when the Indians were playing. After the fifth inning, they let kids in for free.

When the game ended, I hung around outside hoping to get autographs. I saw Mickey Mantle come out. I ran up to him. I asked him for an autograph in my thick accent. He grinned at me and kept walking.

Suddenly I saw Billy Martin was there. I asked him, too. He grinned and kept walking, too.

“Hey,” I heard someone say. “What’s wrong with you guys? Sign the kid’s book.”

I looked. I saw a squat and homely man: Yogi Berra. Whitey Ford was with him.

“Get over here, Mick,” Whitey Ford said, as he was signing my book. Mantle and Martin came back sheepishly and signed my book.

“You happy now, asshole?” Mantle grinned at Yogi and walked away.

“Yeah, you’re damn right I’m happy,” Yogi Berra said.

The others got into the car and Yogi Berra turned to me.

“You German or somethin’, son?” Yogi Berra said.

I told him I was Hungarian.

“I’m Italian.” Yogi Berra smiled, winked, and walked over to the car.

I stood there, staring as the car drove away. Yogi Berra turned back, grinned, and waved.

Thanks to his friend Katherine Webster, the librarian, my father was occasionally getting copies of the books he had written in Hungary. Every time he brought one home from the library, he was overjoyed. He immediately sat down and read it.

“Why do you read it if you wrote it?” I asked him.

“To make sure I wrote it well,” he said.

“Did you write it well?” my mother asked him as he was reading one of his books.

“So far so good.” He smiled.

The Hungarian bank robber Lou Teller and his gun moll, Tina Mae Ritenour, were captured by the police in an apartment in Detroit, where the Detroit Tigers played.

There were pictures of them in the
Plain Dealer
trying to hide their faces from the camera. They had been captured without firing a shot.

I was disappointed in Lou Teller. How could he let them take the beautiful Tina Mae Ritenour from him without firing a shot?

And as a young American newspaperman, I tried to arrange interviews with Lou Teller and Tina Mae Ritenour, now out of jail, no longer together, and trying to lead ordinary lives
.

They both turned me down, but I spoke to Tina Mae Ritenour over the phone
.

“Why do you want to do a story about something that no one cares about anymore?” she asked
.

I had my reasons
.

Heh. Heh. Heh.

· · ·

On the 23rd of October, 1956, when I was twelve years old, Radio Free Europe told us that a revolution had broken out in Hungary.

We hardly turned the radio off. We hardly slept. All we did was listen to Radio Free Europe. Oszkár Moldován had gotten me a Davy Crockett raccoon hat.

All the time we listened to the radio I wore it.

October 23
Tens of thousands of Hungarians pour into Budapest City Park, where stands a twenty-four-foot-high statue of Josef Stalin with the inscription “To the great Stalin, from the grateful Hungarian people.” They yell, “Mindszenty! Mindszenty! Mindszenty!” They wind cables and ropes around the statue’s neck to pull it down. They can’t do it.

Acetylene torches appear. They try to melt Stalin’s knees. Stalin finally topples. They yell:
“Russki haza!
”—Russians go home! The crowd breaks the statue into little pieces with iron pipes and hammers.

Stalin’s two bronze feet, each six feet tall, are left intact on the pedestal.

October 24
Russian tanks are in the streets of Budapest, firing on the crowds. Boys and girls flush the pavements with soapy water. The tanks swerve and spin into each other. Boys and girls approach the tanks with bottles of gasoline, a lighted rag sticking out of them, and hurl them at the tanks.

October 25
At Parliament Square in Budapest, secret police and Russian tanks fire on the demonstrators. Five hundred demonstrators are killed.

Students, union members, teenage boys and girls, bandoliers over their shoulders, hand grenades in their belts and tommy guns in their hands, hurl themselves at the troops and the tanks. They call their tommy guns “guitars.”

October 28
Radio Free Europe tells us that the Red Army is withdrawing its troops from Hungary.

The freedom fighters have won!

The Komchis are fleeing!

My parents stand in front of the shortwave radio hugging me and crying.

“Hungary is free!” my father says.

“We can go back home!” my mother says.

I think:
Home? This is home. The Num Num Potato Chip factory is home. Pep Up is home. Bazball is home. Al Rosen is home. Jerry Lee Lewis is home. Tina Mae Ritenour is home. Davy Crockett is home
.

· · ·

November 3
Cardinal Mindszenty has been freed from prison by Hungarian freedom fighters and is on the radio. The world’s press is reporting a massive Russian troop buildup on the Hungarian border.

Cardinal Mindszenty says, “The great powers of the world quail before the Soviet army while schoolchildren fight on the streets of Budapest and in the mutilated torso of Hungary. The West is blind as well as impotent.”

“What is impotent?” I ask my father.

“A man whose
pimpli
doesn’t stand up.”

Well … I certainly didn’t have to worry about that!

November 4
Sixteen Russian armored divisions equipped with two thousand tanks launch an attack on Budapest. The scale of the attack is as large as Hitler’s attack in World War II.

Most of the troops are from Manchuria and Mongolia. They don’t even know they are in Hungary. They think they are at the Suez Canal. They ask Hungarians to show them the canal.

They begin collecting watches and lining them on their arms. They rape women aged seventy and girls aged six.

November 6
My mother is keening. Her head is lowered, she moves it from side to side, and moans. My father is rigid and pale.

Radio Free Europe rebroadcasts a message from a radio station in Budapest: “The last flames begin to go out. The Soviet army is trying to crush our troubled hearts. Their tanks and guns are roaring over Hungarian soil. Save us! SOS! SOS! Our ship is sinking. The light vanishes. The shadows grow darker from hour to hour. Listen to our cry!”

As my parents cry, I try to hide my happiness.

It means we won’t leave America …
my home
.

November 11
It’s all over.

Twenty-five thousand Hungarians—as many as five thousand children—are dead. Another thirty thousand Hungarians are wounded. Another twenty thousand will be deported to Siberia. Twelve thousand are imprisoned and one thousand will be executed.

Cardinal Mindszenty has been granted political asylum at the American embassy in Budapest. He will live in the building, saying daily Mass for embassy staffers, for fifteen years.

West Side Hungarians formed a caravan of cars to a rally in Public Square in honor of the freedom fighters who had lost their lives to Red Army tanks.

Everyone wore a black armband. It was a cold winter day. My father was the main speaker. He said America had let Hungary down. He said President Eisenhower wasn’t a true anti-Communist. He said the blood of thousands of Hungarians was on President Eisenhower’s hands.

“Why do you attack America?” my mother asked my father afterward.

“What I said was true,” he said.

“They will send us back if you attack them,” she said.

“I have to tell the truth.”

“You!” she said. “You have to hear applause!”

My mother’s father, Antal Biro, who had married the
kurva
, was dead. My mother got her stepmother’s letter. Inside were black and white photos of the dead Antal Biro in his casket.

They were close-ups. A very swollen, fat face, his eyes closed, rouge on his face, his mouth slightly open showing bad teeth.

“What kind of human being sends photographs like this?” my father said, throwing them to the kitchen table.

My mother was crying and staring at her dead father’s face.

Very quietly she said, “
Jaj, Papa … Jaj, Papa …
”

Dénes Kacso, my poet friend who taught me about witches and how God created women, who hated Father Gottfried as much as I did, was dead, too. Drunk, he had passed out and fallen into his blazing fireplace.

He burned to death.

My mother’s weight was fluctuating wildly. She put thirty pounds on, took forty off, put fifty on.

She was suffering such severe headaches that she was forced to quit her bookkeeping job at Central National Bank.

She sat at the kitchen table for hours, razor-blading her Herbert Tareyton cigarettes, an iced towel wrapped around her head to ease her pain.

Father Benedek Biro, who had picked us up on the road outside Margie’s Diner, who had told me to blow my flute louder and louder, was dead, too.

He was one of the greatest émigré Hungarians, my father told me, respected by Americans as well, a personal friend of a man in New York named Dewey who had almost become America’s president.

Father Biro, my father said, wasn’t like the Franciscans in Cleveland, who would now become the newspaper’s publishers and my father’s bosses. These Franciscans here were “stupid” and my father worried that they would try to force him to print “ugly” articles in the paper.

“What kind of articles?” I asked.

“About the Zsidos,” my father said.

After school or on weekends, I was out on the playgrounds playing bazball. We played with balls held together with masking tape. Few of us had gloves. Many of the bats we used were cracked.

I was a solid line drive hitter and a good fielder. I chased a ball down in the outfield and made a catch that was better than Willie Mays’s catch off Vic Wertz of the Indians in the World Series. I lunged after the ball, my back to the batter, my hands outstretched, running as hard as I could. I caught the ball, lost my balance, did a perfect somersault, and came up with the ball in hand.

Then I yelled “Fuck you!” at the kid who’d hit it.

My teammates rolled around on the ground in laughter. The kid who’d hit the ball was so angry he chased me for two blocks, the bat in his hand.

I felt increasingly at home on the playgrounds and in the alleys with new friends who weren’t Hungarian … José, who was Puerto Rican and had biceps the size of my thighs … Chuckie Chuckles, a bantam-rooster hillbilly kid with more freckles than I had.

We pitched baseball cards against the curbs and that led to pitching pennies. (We dug through the maggots in the garbage cans looking for more bottles to return.) José and Chuckie had pairs of dice in their pockets and soon I had my pair, too. We rolled the dice for anything—pennies, baseball cards, sometimes even to tell the future.

Okay, let’s see whose mom is gonna live the longest, yours or mine?

There were always older kids around who tolerated us condescendingly—kids with lipsticked and mascaraed girlfriends, kids who had brown paper bags with bottles of Thunderbird or muscatel inside which they shared, kids with smokes who’d let us take big drags.

I loved the very first drag of a cigarette I tasted on a playground. I was twelve years old.

From then on, I started stealing some of my mother’s or borrowing them from José, who’d started smoking when he was eight.

Going to school one morning, I saw Father John Mundweil up ahead at the West Side Market and quickly shoved the lighted cigarette into my pocket. When my mother washed and ironed the pants, she found the pocket burned inside.

“Don’t do this,” she said, “please. I’ve suffered more from this my whole life than anything else.”

“Will you tell Papa?” I asked.

She looked at me and shook her head and said, “May God forgive me.”

· · ·

Time
magazine picked “The Hungarian Freedom Fighter” as its Man of the Year.

My father was very happy.
Time
magazine, he said, was run by a good man named Henry Luce, who had been a friend of Father Benedek Biro’s in Connecticut.

“Luce is as good an anti-Communist as Zenator Mekarti,” my father said.

We stole cars and took them for joyrides.

We went out on the Shoreway sometimes and stomped the gas pedal and got the speedometer up to a hundred miles an hour.

It was scary, exciting, exhilarating, criminal, and a helluva lot of fun.

My favorite joyride was to take our newly acquired car to the drive-in theater in a suburb called Parma.

That’s where I saw Elvis in
Jailhouse Rock
… at a drive-in … sipping beer … in a stolen car.

Chuckie had a transistor radio that changed my life. There was music coming out of it that made me feel like I was exploding somewhere deep inside. Jerry Lee Lewis. Elvis. Chuck Berry. Little Richard. Fats Domino. Jackie Wilson. Sam Cooke. The Platters. Buddy Holly. The Everly Brothers.

At home in the apartment, when my parents were asleep, I’d sneak from the living room couch back to my father’s office and put the big Philips shortwave on. I found the AM band, turning the knob back and forth, its green cat’s eye flickering on a station, trying to listen through the static to WLS in Chicago and CKLW in Windsor besides WERE and KYW and WHK in Cleveland.

My father watched me listening when he wasn’t working in his office.

“Jungle music,” he said in Hungarian. “What’s next?”