Clarence Major - My Amputations

Reality was not just a portrait in pastels: especially not this November, in this city. Among these strangers he thought he recognized — sober the next morning — were Nietzsche; and Gauguin posing as Lucifer and yes, that detective guy whose name turned out to be — according to Roy Seidel Ota, fence supreme — Andrei Gorbatchev, a Russian spy. Mason took the city tour of West, not East. This was Yalta's legacy? This and that half-remembered explosion last night. Anyway, the newspaper had a full story this morning and the waiter told him it was the work of a neo-Nazi group. No RAF fluff. The tour guide had a morbid sense of humor but his English was spotless. He joked about Hess in his cell costing taxpayers thousands: the most expensive prisoner in the world. Mason's memory: Angels with dirty faces live fast and die young. They were approaching The Wall. Its grimness and scars were especially sharp in November dreariness and chill. Checkpoint Charlie and its guardhouse were bleak. Lonely. Ah, snail-paced winter held frozen any sense of, ah, the thrill of victory the agony of defeat or was it… Surrounded by porcelain silver gold and glass Mason watched the alien yet known world with mistrust with awesome respect. He was dying to light a Camel. At the end of the tour he strolled at dusk on the mall people-watching. Zaftig women in furs, the Porky Pig-men in business suits and top coats. Charmed strollers of Old Frutz's chic veneer… Durchreise and the interchic! A gaze at secret frosty reminders of the hysteria of bygone. Where? Was he hearing whispers of the death camps and the death packed earth already?

When the bus stopped at Keiser damm Bismarck near the Zoological Gardens for a stop light, about twenty young men in black leather jackets rushed in front of it. Like figures out of an Elizabethan tragedy, they chanted blood. Mason watched three of them beat at the metal and glass of the door. The tour guide was scared. The boys started rocking the bus. A couple of women tourists screamed. An old man stood and shook his cane at the window, shouting in British English to the boys: “Get away, you scoundrels! Go campaign your Nazi propaganda in hell where you belong!” The boys shouted German back at him. Neither could hear the other. Mason cringed. The tour guide forced the old man back to his seat. “Just be calm.” Two or three of the boys now had lighted torches and were shouting threats of fire bombing the bus if the driver didn't open up. Suddenly the light changed to green, the Marquis de Sade's good eye. Mason felt the bus lunge. The boys went crazy. Some of them were hurt. The guide ordered the driver to stop. He slammed on the brakes. A woman standing in the aisle fell. The guide pulled the lever that opens the door. It opened. The torch bearers stormed up into the bus, followed by some of the others. Meanwhile, the sirens of police started up in the distance. The boys grabbed the bus driver, Mason, two women, the Englishman, and marched them out. The captives were roughly pushed into an alley and herded along the narrow paved darkness till they came to a building with an iron sliding-door. One boy was bleeding badly. Mason could hear the honking and bitching of traffic back there where the stopped bus now caused a jam. Police sirens were closer. Mason felt enraged. But the knife at his throat kept him quiet. He figured the way things were going lately he had to quickly do something aggressive or he'd lose not only what little identity he had left but his entire existence. The kidnappers knocked them along a long dark corridor till they reached an elevator. They were kicked and shoved onto it. The leather-jackets, six or seven of them, crowded on too. They were nervously chattering away, barking at each other, snapping orders to Mason and the others. It was minutes before one, then another, switched to English. Their English was excellent. When they were all finally locked in a dimly lighted room far beneath the earth, the leather-jackets slapped the women for whimpering which only made them cry harder. The Englishman got a knee in the balls when he tried to defend the ladies. Mason was taken to a separate room, one the size of a closet. A single uncovered bulb hung from the ceiling. The two young men who'd led him there smiled at him. “I'm Franz.” “I'm Alfred. We know you Americans like to use first names. We know your name already: Right?” “No.” “Oh, yes we do.” “Oh, no you don't.” “Oh, yes we do.” Franz, a red-faced youth with a preppy haircut, punched Mason in the nose. “We said yes we do.” Mason swung at the guy but Alfred blocked the effort and drove a serious-business fist into Mason's guts. Mason folded, holding the area with the delicate and passionate concern one might give to an exotic, newly captured bird. Outside, in the larger room he heard the sounds of brutality, hysterical outbursts, and the small whimperings of grim diffidence and taciturnity. While Franz and Alfred quietly but intensely discussed some urgent matter, Mason entertained himself with a song he'd sung as a small child when he was the seeker rather than the hunted: Three pound of beans/ Three pounds of greens/ Who not ready holler queens./ Strawberry chocolate vanilla pie/ Who not ready holler I. I'm not ready. Ran to the rock. What an indecent moment, full of obscene godforsaken torment. Alfred squatted before Mason. “My friend, you are now going to tell us all about the Magnan Rockford Foundation. Okay? Ready?” Mason grunted. Franz kicked Mason's thigh. “Start from the beginning.” “We have ways of getting you to talk,” Alfred assured Mason. He had broken teeth, yellowed from too many cigarettes. He was lighting one now. He blew the smoke in Mason's face. It made him want one too. Mason smelled the cigarette smoke but he also smelled another kind of smoke. Smoke was coming in under the door. Franz and Alfred too were aware of it. In German, Franz said he'd go to see what was going on. Alfred handed Mason the cigarette. “Unfortunately, this may be your last fag. Enjoy. You see we plan to break you of many habits. Smoking may be one of them. A lot depends on you. Our mission has started in Berlin, the hottest place — politically speaking — in the western world. Unlike in Hitler's dream for the future, we plan to include the likes of you. The Magnan-Rockford Foundation doesn't know it, but it's going to help us, the way Ford helped Hitler. We have plans here in Berlin you wouldn't believe. On your little precious tour I'm sure you saw some of our targets. Among them, that Jewish Community Center on Fasanenstrasse, is going to speak to the world for us.” Mason inhaled. He let the smoke out in Alfred's face. At this moment all hell broke loose the door was kicked in and torrents of smoke poured in. Men in fireproof suits, wearing gas masks stood ten deep at the door holding machine guns. In German, Alfred and Mason were told to surrender. They put up their hands.

Everything changed. On the plane to Frankfurt he lighted a Camel. Holding it by its hind legs he watched the hair along the hump sizzle: its smell, a fresh skid mark. “Turkish & Domestic Blend.” The city on the back was hot and dry: just the place to be: down through clouds: a glimpse of the vast metropolis. Settled in, he took the train out to Mainz and arrived at eleven sharp. Professor Rudolf Semler gave him a warm but brief intro and the students in the typical German fashion rapped their desks with approval. Hating the taste of a recently smoked Coffin Nail he climbed up. But it was better than Alfred's smoke in his face. Hungover, the would-be decided to try to merge his personal disaster with its desolation and psychic gangplanks from Georgia to Chicago and from the inner coils of his longing to Be-Somebody-Safe to their — or what he imagined to be their Black Forest, their old-woman-roasting-children-in-the-oven, Tristan and Isolde and their stained glass-fear of the same unknown he feared. Dreamer! Mason dared trust a blind connection: It was as insane as dumbass engineers of say a spermbank scheme — the gimmick of a nut with the smell of Hitler's asshole coming from the lower depths of the throat. These bright-eyed undergraduates? connect to his mysteries? What shape could they put to the incongruous rubbish merged in this voice-filled presence? Perfection can never be deliberate!… Think about it: his crazy sea his gentle ladies fanning themselves his maze of one-night-stands his quickies his harsh knife-warfare-life behind the walls of Attica his, praytellblasted Celt! Could they see their own secrets through him and see through him? How about the crushed and cursed desperate enterprise of that night's rush to the isolated trainyard as a connective tissue in the action? Should they? And this deeper question (even halfway admitted to himself) of scathed name, of forged identity with its built-in layer upon layer of the genuine the unreal the sort-of-authentic, the honest geocentric force of the gray area — what of all this? What of this complex, plumed and damned quest to… well, you know the story! I don't cast the first stone, mind you. Well, at least he hadn't stumbled going up on the stage to face, three or four hundred faces. Here in this tiny city where the printing press had its beginning, Mason wanted so much to leave an imprint: to inform with form, to push a verbal text beyond a pretext. What could he on the other hand take away with him? That ancient sound of the press's grinding and the hard stone of germanic faith…? He tried everything: forced connections, exchange and conflict, the secret design, you name it. You gotta give him a bit of credit I guess: he did reach these inheritors of another kind of difficult history without telling them about his ancestors of West Africa and the Middle Passage and the pit. And the centuries. What he said was, at best, symbolic: the plan was this: survive and try to survive without too much humiliation and gracelessness. Nietzsche was right on at least one point: writers wrote to conceal. The possible reality of the effort? Mason's good intentions were not writerly, folks. He wanted out from under. He spoke a convincing game. Hark! Whatcha do wid dat? Had Mason's fear tipped the scales — now that he was insanely sure his game'd been peeped, at least by me — or would he swing the other way toward arrogance and defiance, toward graceless combat with shadows armed-to-the-teeth with expert weaponry? You're close enough: Ask him. Mason, step forward, my son: speak !