Not Red and Not Dead

I poked my head into the Soviet Union. Yup, climbed right up on the wall and poked my head over. Wasn’t the Berlin Wall, was an old timey concrete wall with shards of glass embedded on the top. My roommate from a few years earlier went to high school to Tehran and later worked as a ski instructor in Germany to pay his tuition for attending the U. of Maryland. Like that George Thorogood song eh? Yeah so a friend of his hopped a railcar in San Diego and rode with the hobos up to visit us in Vallejo and they were reminiscing about the time they snuck into the Soviet Union and dipped back. So it was on my mind, in honor of that wizened old (24) friend who pointed to the world as my canvas and handed me a brush, and took it back and told me to go get my own. So yeah, there was the Iron Curtain, maybe 10 feet and 6 sambuca’s high.

I was being followed by a spy, not sure if the wall climb was before or after I saw him again. We were in Trieste, Italy at the time. And I guess you could say Trieste was also in Italy at the time as there were often times it weren’t. A few weeks earlier we were in Naples and had made the trip around the boot and up to the little spit of land sticking into the Adriatic. While in Naples I had run my routine – see my waiter bud, have a couple espressos, a couple 3 or five cokes, he’d stuff something in me, cake or biscuit or some such, and off I’d go. The Gut (I’d guess you could call it the old town) was off limits, so naturally it was the best place to go, if you could handle yourself properly. Right, so, straying here, anyway I’m up in the Gut, find this little hole in the wall joint and see some old dudes playing chess. They see my interest, one leading to another, deep into the night, we’re unknown jugs of homemade wine along, I’m speaking Italian (was good wine). I won the first match, I didn’t win another. Wasn’t gambling or nothing, were very serious and honorable chess dudes. Was brilliant, stereotypical Italian exuberance and gesticulation, all about chess stuff.

Over at the edge of the small bar was a dude just hanging. Was different, younger certainly, maybe 40, and what I figured to be a light skinned Italian dude. I can still see the mental picture of the dude. Now we go up to Trieste and I’m walking around with a few fellas and I see the guy again. He kinda gives me a head nod, like yeah, so?, and I’m wondering about it with the guys. We sorta determine that yeah, we knew that ships would be followed, port-to-port. Was funny sometimes in that we were told to never speak about where we were heading but there were times when the hey joes and hookers knew before we did. Was no sweat or worry about “the spy”, hell scuttlebutt was we had like one maybe two days of survival if the shit went down. We’d be protected as fuck, being critical supply for the fleet but that’s also why we’d be the first knocked out. And ain’t nothing the dude could get from us that he couldn’t get from the kid selling henna as hash down by the pier.

Barcelona, Spain, walking down the street and hear the sounds of drums maybe, people, some kind of fiesta going on around the corner. I turn the corner and see up ahead of me, a parade, heading my way. Cool, wassup. Only it’s not a parade, it’s a protest. It’s a Basque Separatist / Anti-NATO “parade” and they’re headed straight for Mr. Symbol of NATO about half a block away. Easy escape though yes? Just turn around and walk away, none the wiser. Um, but there’s this little issue with this big eagle that’s spread shoulder to shoulder in red, white, and amazing star spangled blue across the back of my cruise jacket. If I turn around, holy shit, be like the rabbit giving the hounds the finger. Now this is crazy right, but I owe my escape to something I read as a little kid in one of those kid detective novels. Encyclopedia Brown if I had to hazard a guess. It was about an optical illusion and in the story our hero is approaching a group of people from a distance when he realizes they are the bad guys. Rather than turn and run he knows that if he just walks backwards, same gait, same pace, from a distance it may take a while before they can tell he’s not getting any closer and he can get a jump on it. And that’s what I did. Walked my ass backwards back around the corner and nope’d down the road.

I saw the end, nuclear winter, apocalyptic landscape, for maybe half a second, in the middle of the bazaar, in Tunis, Tunisia. Ever see that movie with that guy? You know, no not that one, the other one with the Warriors “come out and play-ay” dude jumping into people’s dreams? Hang on, will look it up… Dreamscape (1984), yeah, so in it the president is haunted by nightmares about a nuclear aftermath and in his nightmare he’s riding a train and looking out the windows at the world in flames. That’s what it looked like.

Ok so it’s straight out of Indiana Jones right, crowded and swarmed, brushing off hey joes like flies, smells like a spiced up curried shit. Dafuq I’m doing there I don’t know. I guess cuz I was there, so if I’m there I might as well be there, so that’s why I was. I see this motion approaching me through the crowd, like a ripple, just like in Indy, and pop, right there in my face is my bud Steve. He’s the Radioman, the Keeper of All Knowledge. In those days all we had was what came and went through the radio shack – To Seaman Jones…stop. Congratulations… stop. Your wife had a baby… and like the time when the super bowl result was kept secret until we could get some film of the game, was like 2 weeks I think, so anyway yeah, Steve got the real skinny. He’s says to me, looking very concerned, “This country is at war”. And I have my half second when I think he means us, we’re at war, but before it even syncs in I realize he’s talking about the country we are in. Trading shots with some Chad or some shit. But for that one moment.

Peppa LePeu, that’s my memory nickname for her, because she had a black sweater with a vertical stripe that bore a resemblance to the cartoon character. And because she smelled worse than a skunk. It was around who the fuck knows o’clock in the morning, Christmas morning, in Villefranche, lil joint between Nice and Monaco, and we can’t get back to the ship because the liberty boats aren’t running because of the weather. Dave and Katy, a Kiwi and a Brit, don’t remember which was which, kept their bar open all night so we had somewhere to stay. No charge for anything, even let some of the guys call home to say Merry Christmas to their families without a care about long distance overseas toll charges. So said Mademoiselle LePeu approaches and inquires – are you American, and I reply in the affirmative. You, you are a warmonger! I wished her a Merry Christmas.

That was ’80 – ’83 up there, the Better Red Than Dead days. Wisdom had it that if the Soviets jumped the wall they could roll tanks through the breadbasket of Europe and nobody would be able to stop them. And along came Uncle Ronnie with two small words that made them blink and Europe shit it’s pantaloons  – Tactical Nukes. And holy fuck, he’s got the balls to do it too. Man they were burning effigies of the ol’ cowboy, it was getting nastier all the time. The Eurps had a concern, you gonna nuke us to save us? But what it did was force a failing Soviet system to compete with us in our own game, they can’t just take what they need or want. Was like, ‘scuse me whilst I whip out this capitalism. We just jacked up our economy, we jacked up our military, and now we’re fixin to jack up in space too. So Ivan, what’s it gonna be? You gonna jack up or you gonna jack off?

And they jacked off and the wall came down. Back in their home country the commie crooks were replaced by capitalist crooks and then vice versa, lather, rinse, repeat. But it was done. We defeated the Soviet Union and we didn’t die.