Oh?

Found this comment at a Yahoo! Group for Defense Language Institute alumni, which is what the Army Language School in Monterey is now called:

An example of participation is RU Alumnus Charles Deemer, who is writing a screenplay about 'Monterey Marys' set in cold war era Berlin. If you have annecdotes, please visit the community discussion, ALS era. 

This became a novella instead, Baumholder 1961 (free pdf; also available as paperback).  It must have been quite a while ago when I conceived this as a screenplay, which would be expensive to make and therefore a risky spec script. You'd need an actor or director married to the material to get this done as a film. It would make a good movie. It's a surrealistic setting that has received very little attention in any media. Actually the entire era would make a better documentary film if done accurately, including all the raunchy elements. In the 1950s an American magazine called Baumholder "the sin city of Europe" and this was right on. I don't think any of us, American students for the most part, were ready for it.

Here's one of my favorite passages from the novella:

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!? 

This routine is a true story, performed by a Russian linguist colleague and drinking buddy named Jim Donovan, from Boston, who introduced me to the guitar jazz of Charlie Christian. I adapt a lot of "true events" for the novella.

The swastika on the cover has puzzled some. It's because many of the German farmers in Baumholder remained unrepentant Nazis, as noted in the story. So here you have clean cut American students (think 1950s) coming into a town filled with Nazis farmers, prostitutes for the G.I. bars and con men after the American buck. Quite a mix.

When I became a writer, I knew this was extraordinary material, but it took me almost half a century to get it down. I had many false starts as an epic Army novel. They ended up boring me. What was essential to the experience didn't need that much space, hence finally the novella. I remain pleased with how it turned out. This got rid of one of the narrative monkeys on my back, and the short film Deconstructing Sally got rid of the other.

No more monkeys!