Friday, January 07, 2011

Advertisements for myself: Baumholder 1961

Having rec'd a couple fan raves about this today, I reread it -- it's a short novella -- and yes, this stands up well, this is a compelling story against the true backdrop of my almost surreal Army experience. I'm so glad I finally did this experience justice.

Reading options (free)

Paperback ($6.25)

Some excerpts:
There were 57 bars in downtown Baumholder, a figure made astronomical by the fact that downtown consisted of nine square blocks. Most of the bars had names chosen to appeal to Americans: the California Club, the Florida Club, the Texas Club, Jazz Alley, Blues Alley, Martini’s. Others tried to lure in soldiers with exotic names like The Golden Hirsch, Dancers A’GoGo, The Femme Fatale, Gangster Den. It was rumored – and Bass believed the rumors to be true – that most of the bars in Baumholder were owned by a syndicate of German businessmen, most of whom lived in Berlin and Munich. But others were owned locally, the way Konrad was a partner in The Family Club, which the linguists called their off-base home. Seeing how much money was being made by serving the troops. local farmers joined the frenzy to make a quick mark off the Americans, who after all had more money to spend than the Germans had seen in a very long time.
The bars had come to Baumholder during the troop buildup of the Korean War. The Soviet invasion of Germany was a threat real enough to respond to, and the U.S. responded by bringing tens of thousands of soldiers to West Germany. Baumholder, before World War II a small farming community in southwestern Germany’s Rhineland area, with a population never exceeding 3000, was chosen for the major American buildup because the Germans themselves had trained here, taking advantage of the bare, rolling hills for their exercises and war games. The Americans did the same.
Almost overnight, new bars opened downtown to entertain and serve the American G.I.s. Bakeries became bars, barns became nightclubs. Because the American army was segregated at the start of the Korean War, the new bars became segregated. The Florida Club, for example, became a bar that only black troops frequented. The tradition of segregation had remained even after the army became integrated, and today if Bass had entered The Florida Club, he would have been one of only a handful of whites there, and the others were likely to be young Germans eager to hear the American jazz on the jukebox. The jukeboxes in the white American bars mostly featured country-western music.
*
Someone fetched Bass’ guitar and brought it to him. Buddy-pooh suggested the next song, and Bass started it alone, to the tune of an old labor song, strumming along as he sang:
“I don’t want your spit shine, mister. I don’t want your shiny brass. As far as I am concerned, mister. You can shove them up your ass.”
By the time Bass reached the last verse, dedicated especially to the Russian linguists with their top secret codeword clearances, everyone was singing in a loud chorus, defiant and solemn, as if the song were an anthem:
“I don’t want your secret clearance. I don’t want your world-wide badge. All I want is a pair of my civvies. And the freedom I once had.”
*
His first whore parade. Bass remembered it like it was yesterday. He’d only been in Baumholder for two weeks when the linguists learned from the girls at The Family Club that the Animals would be in town the following weekend, which meant the influx of thousands of prostitutes to serve them would begin in mid-week. Taking a newk to the train station to witness their arrival was a kind of initiation ceremony for a new linguist, and Sullivan, on whose trick Bass had been assigned at Operations, took the newk under his wing and together, with a dozen other linguists along for the fun, they gathered at the bahnhoff to watch the first trains arrive.
Bass had no idea what to expect. The train station was a square stone building with a tower, no larger than the several churches in town. Inside were benches for travelers waiting for the train and tables for those who wanted to eat or drink as they waited. The linguists pushed several tables together and took chairs around them.
Bass couldn’t stop grinning, partly from anticipation and partly from the feeling that he was somehow being suckered, like the country boy taken on his first snipe hunt. Bass knew from overhearing his colleagues that several trains a day would be pulling into the station, each filled with hundreds of women, but Bass had no way of realizing the enormity of this migration and its impact on him. So he just kept grinning, waiting, and listening for the punch line of whatever joke was being pulled on him.
The arrival of the first train changed everything. Bass did not have to watch the parade of girls long to realize this was no snipe hunt, here was an event even more surreal and dreamlike than the descriptions of his colleagues suggested. Several hundred girls spilled off the first train, marching in disorder into the train station, women varying in age from teens to forties, women of all size and description, fat and skinny and in between, pretty and plain, hardened and innocent-looking. What struck Bass first was that so many of them were younger than he was.
“They look so young,” he said to Sullivan at the table beside him.
“The youngest are escapees from East Germany,” Sullivan explained. “They think they’re taking a job as a server in a gasthaus or a waitress in a restaurant, but it’s the syndicate bringing them into their fold. Once they’re captured, it’s hard to get away. They arrive broke, often without family or friends. They risk everything for freedom and end up here. It’s a tragedy really.”
Only Sullivan’s tone didn’t suggest tragedy. His voice had the hardened neutrality of a doctor working the midnight shift in an emergency room, who has seen every bodily disaster many times over. Neutrality, lack of concern, was the best defense mechanism.
*
Sullivan disliked sentiment and sloppy thinking and sometimes performed a routine that demonstrated as much. With a few drinks in him, he was known to recite a portion of a poem by William Blake to much delight and hoopla from his inebriated colleagues: “Tiger, tiger, burning bright,” Sullivan would begin, his blonde hair short but long enough to comb, which really meant long enough to look uncombed because Sullivan always had the shaggy look of an absent-minded professor, and as he began the poem, his hand would sweep the hair from his forehead in a theatrical gesture, “in the forests of the night, what immortal hand or eye, could frame thy fearful symmetry?” Here Sullivan would look positively baffled by the question, as if it had cosmic significance. “What the hammer?” he asked next. “What the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil?” – and at this precise moment Sullivan would scrunch his ruddy face into an expression of speechless horror and bewilderment, as if the questions were too great for the contemplation of mere mortals, hanging in the air like painful reminders of human ignorance and insignificance – and after holding the moment for all it was worth, and perhaps making yet another theatrical sweep of his hand to brush hair from his forehead, Sullivan would shout with an exuberance that never failed to set the first-time listener aback, “What the fuck!? WHAT THE FUCK!?”

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