Chapter Twenty-one: Journey on the Super Chief
My stay in the City of Angels was a short-lived adventure. Nine months after I arrived, I was on my way back to Massachusetts and my mother.
After her suicide attempt, it was clear that my stepmother, Dory, was not ready to raise an adolescent boy. Dory was a beautiful, caring, and loving woman, but she was fighting her demons. As a bi-polar, or manic-depressant, person her mood swings were a frightening roller coaster ride and it took all she had to hang on and stay on track. She had nothing left over to deal with a rambunctious boy.
Less than two weeks after she attempted to end her life, I found myself onboard the Super Chief, a Boston-bound train.
The Los Angeles sky was a yellow-green haze as I hugged my father, stepmother, and my little stepsister goodbye. I took a window seat and waved to my west coast family until they vanished from view.
For the second time in less than a year, I would be traveling across North America without the company of an adult. My mind was a bit of a mess as I took my seat. My stay with my father had been a bizarre experience; my English teacher accused me of plagiarism, I got shot at by a gang of bullies, my stepmother tried to kill herself, and I my babysitter raped me. Other than all that, I had a great time.
My mood was a smorgasbord of emotions, and I did not have the appetite for any of them. I took a small taste of the thrill of travel (needs more salt) and sat back in my seat and sulked. As bad, as my time had been in California I dreaded the thought of returning to my mother.
Going back to live with Joyce felt like I was jumping out of the frying pan back into the fire. Joyce and I were in a constant state of combat. She never missed an opportunity to humiliate me and let me know how inadequate I was as a human being. My mother dismissed my writing as childish crap. When I did the dishes and cleaned the kitchen, she would rip apart my work searching for something to complain about and then launch into an extended rant about what a lousy job I had done. Virtually every exchange I had with her began or ended with a complaint or criticism of something I had or had not done. Given a choice, I would much rather have stayed with my dad. I suppose most children lived life to enjoy childhood. My goal was to survive.
I had enjoyed my time with my father and had tried my best to make it work. My stepmother was a different story. We each tried to do right by the other, but her shifting moods were an impossible moving target for both of us. Try as we might we just could not connect.
The landscape gradually changed from crappy looking neighborhoods to dumpy looking blocks of rundown buildings as the Super Chief wound its way into the foothills around the city. As we climbed into the hills, the view shifted from flat and dusty brown to hilly and dusty brown. Without irrigation, most of Southern California looked like a garden badly in need of watering.
I left my funky mood behind in the smog bank as the train emerged into clean air beneath bright blue skies. I decided to explore my temporary home on wheels.
Powered by a Diesel engine, the train featured Pullman sleeping cars, several coach cars, a dining car with tables and beautiful white linen tablecloths, and three dome cars that afforded a grand view of the countryside. I loved the elevated view, and it was kinda like flying slowly across the land at an altitude of 15 feet.
On the evening of the first day, an elderly gentleman offered me a seat next to his. Since it was the only vacant seat in the observation car, I accepted his offer.
Karl Decker was his name, and he had a peculiar foreign air about him. He spoke with a thick German accent, but his English was precise and sharp. He pronounced every syllable of every word as if he was stamping them out on a punch press.
If Father Christmas ever wore a crew cut, he would have looked like this man. The old man's carefully cropped hair was snow-white. A neatly trimmed white beard framed his face.
He had a weathered look, which suggested that he was no stranger to the wind and nature's elements. His eyes were a dark blue behind a set of gold wire spectacles. When I shook his hand as I introduced myself, he had the grip of iron vice wrapped in soft velvet.
The old man had been a soldier for most of his life, and now he was too old to serve, and with no wars left to fight, he had retired. "I fought this country in two wars," he said as he waved his arm at the passing landscape. "America is a strong, beautiful, and very strange country."
While we talked, he told me, "You would make an excellent soldier. You seem to come from good stock. Real soldiers are trained to obey orders."
Then he sighed and looked out the window into the twilight. He appears to be gazing at something only he could see.
"In the war, I had many young soldiers under my command. They were all really beautiful young men, and today [A cough] they are no more. They followed their orders to the gates of hell and beyond," he said.
On into the night, Karl Decker talked. Mostly he spoke about growing up as a young boy in Bavaria and working on his parent's dairy farm. He spoke little about his time at war, and when he did, he used words, which seemed reserved and carefully chosen.
"In the beginning, it was all glory. In the end, it was all death. We lost everything that was good," he said.
I think he was talking to himself as much as he was speaking with me.
"Sometimes in a war, we are ordered to do terrible things, and there are things which no man should ever do. But as soldiers we had no choice except to follow orders," he said with a grim expression.
We talked long into the evening and for most of the next day. Finally, as the train pulled into Kansas City, the old man said this was his stop, and we would be parting company. As he collected his things, he took a bright silver coin out of his pocket and gave it to me saying, "This is a very lucky coin. The Fuhrer himself placed it in my hands."
It was a five Reichsmark coin about the size of a silver dollar. On one side was a stern likeness of von Hindenburg and on the reverse face, there was the German eagle clutching a wreath with a large Swastika in the center. The edge of the coin bore German writing, which roughly translated into English as "The community comes before the individual."
Holding the coin in my hands, I shuddered a little at the thought that this coin had once been in the hands of Adolph Hitler.
I thanked the old man as I put the coin into my pocket and said goodbye.
I watched the old man as he left the train and disappeared behind a crowd of passengers waiting to board.
Our encounter was a strange affair, which closed a circle for me. At the age of eleven, I had a brief love affair with all things Nazi.
The second floor of our house back in Ithaca, New York had an odd little room at the end of the upstairs hallway. My father called it a "builder's mistake." The room was unfinished. It was too small to be a bedroom or a bathroom, and it was too inconvenient to be a closet. It was dead space, which my brother turned into a darkroom. After he had moved out on his 18th birthday, I took over the room and converted it into a Nazi shrine of sorts. I had no idea of what a Nazi was. Nevertheless, the glitter and glory of their pageantry and uniforms enthralled me.
Thirteen years after the end of the Second World War America was awash in Nazi memorabilia. German coins were in abundance and easy to acquire. Television programs on the war featured endless hours of newsreels celebrating our victory in Europe. Many of the newsreels relied extensively on German newsreels.
My father even brought me to see "Triumph of the Will" a 1935 propaganda film directed by Leni Riefenstahl. The movie was a masterpiece of propaganda, which chronicled the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg.
My father wanted to take notes on the stagecraft and use of lighting for dramatic effect.
Being way too young and impressionable and I fell in love with the majestic images of power and glory.
Practically every American who served in Europe brought home war souvenirs and trophies by the metric ton. Our local Army and Navy store had an entire floor devoted to German uniforms, heraldry, and equipment.
As a shrewd trader, I was able to exchange one item for another of higher value until at last; I was able to get my hands on several Nazi flags which I hung around my shrine along with a German Hitler Youth helmet just my size.
I never got any pushback from my parents. However, I think my father noticed my infatuation.
He took me to see a movie, actually feature-length documentary made by US Army photographers showing the liberation of several Nazi death camps. I was horrified. Behind the glitter and glory of the Nazi state was the systematic, cold-blooded mass murder of millions of innocent men, women, and children.
A fifteen-second scene moved me to tears. It showed a bulldozer pushing a mound of naked bodies into a mass grave. The pile of corpses twisted, tumbled and turned in a sick parody of life as the dozer pushed them along the flat ground. Each body had known love and joy before hate ended their days on this earth.
I left the movie theater shaken to my core. I visited my "shrine" when I returned home and ripped it apart. The flags, helmet, and other Nazi trinkets went into the trash.
On a winter evening, several months later I took the coin the old man had given me out of my desk drawer and looked at it while sneaking a smoke by my open bedroom window. It was a cold winter night, and heavy snow was falling.
As I studied the coin, I felt a chill pass over me, and it did not come from the open window. I remembered with shame my brief childish love affair with the Nazi Empire. Suddenly the shiny coin was not a thing of beauty. It was evil.
On a whim, I tossed it out the window into a snow pile at the back of the parsonage. The next day I searched for it, it had vanished. I looked for it every day until the snow melted. I never saw that coin again.