Robert Butler - Mr. Spaceman

I sound like a religious man. God forbid you should take me for that. My mother and father were both lefties from the old school. They had me late — Mama was past forty — and I was their only child. For my two grandmothers I was their little shayna boychik, but for my mother and father I was their right-thinking Marxist youth. My father’s father was a Bolshevik who thought Leon Trotsky was the model of what Jews would finally become in the twentieth century. The Überjuden. Not that he fared any better than his hero. He was clubbed to death by a policeman in 1937 at the Republic Steel Memorial Day Massacre, three years before Trotsky got an ax blade in the head in Mexico. My father was just seventeen, but he’d learned well from his father. My mother’s father was a leftist, too, a Jewish boy from Brooklyn Heights who died in Spain fighting Franco. So this was the Tradition in my family. We never lit a Shabbat candle, never went to temple, but we made a pilgrimage to Highgate Cemetery in London and laid a stone on Marx’s grave, and every summer my parents sent me to a leftist summer camp up in the Adirondacks.

Maybe I should have learned from my father like he learned from his. He sorted the world out a different way. It’s not if you’re a Jew or not a Jew, it’s whether you’re a worker or an exploiter. The camp was full of the children of leftist Jews like my parents. But there were plenty of others there, too. Without a God, who of course was the big capitalist boss in the sky running the Corporation of Opiates for the Masses, if you overthrew him, then there was no people chosen by God. Jewish meant the same as Irish or Italian or German or English. And there were exploited working classes among all those peoples, and there were true believers in the dialectics of history, too. This was a chosen brotherhood.

Which fit the times pretty well. It was the sixties when I went every summer to camp. And we’d do craft projects on exploited peoples of the world and skits on great moments in socialist history and at night we’d watch films like The Grapes of Wrath and The Battleship Potemkin and we’d sing, of course. There was plenty of singing. At lights out every night our prepubescent voices piped out into the darkness of the mountains: “So comrades, come rally and the last fight let us face, The Internationale unites the human race.”

That’s what my father would have had me learn from him. He saw Hitler’s ovens as an expression of the capitalist spirit. Nazism and capitalism thrived together in Germany, they were locked in a passionate embrace, soulmates, which I guess was true enough. “Away with all your superstitions, servile masses arise, arise. We’ll change henceforth the old tradition.” I sang with a fervor at camp to make my parents proud, and I suppose they were. And there were a lot of songs, not just “The Internationale.” That’s the first one to come to mind, with me suddenly remembering all this, but we had a leftist hymnal published by the IWW, called the Little Red Song Book, and we sang all those songs, and now that I think of it, there was another song that stood out for me back then. In 1914 the capitalist bosses of the copper mines framed a man named Joe Hill for murder because he was like a working-class troubadour wandering from migrant worker camp to hobo jungle to city slum and singing about the truths of capitalist exploitation. He died a martyr before a firing squad. Many of the songs in the Wobblies’ songbook were written by Joe Hill, but one of them was written about him, after his death.

I haven’t thought about all this in a very long time. That camp sat in the center of almost every year of my childhood, but there’s so much that’s just faded away. I grew up to disappoint my father, I suppose. I still visit him once a week in his apartment in Brooklyn and he sits at the kitchen table and spreads out the New York Times and he interprets the news for me in a steady stream of Marxist analysis and at the end he always shouts at me, “You’re not hearing what I’m saying,” and I say, “I’m listening, Papa. I’m listening,” and he says, “Listening and hearing are two different things,” and I say, “Saying and propagandizing are two different things,” and it goes like this every time. We have this ritual dialectic and when I say I have to go, he gives me a handshake, but he will not look me in the eyes.

What did I know of death when I was a child? Joe Hill was shot to death. It meant nothing to me, except as an idea. The Holocaust was the same. I’d heard the tales of those things, I’d heard the numbers of the dead, I’d heard the invocation of mother and father and sister and brother, lost, gassed and incinerated. But I was a child. I knew nothing of death, except as an idea, a child’s idea. I sang, “I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night.” I sang, “‘The copper bosses killed you, Joe. They shot you, Joe,’ says I. ‘Takes more than guns to kill a man,’ says Joe. ‘I didn’t die.’ Says Joe, ‘I didn’t die.’” And maybe that’s why the song stuck with me. Joe said he wasn’t really dead. With what little I knew directly of the world, that seemed more real to me. And it took the edge off the tales of the Big Death, the millions. Joe wasn’t even Jewish. If he could do it, if he could overcome death, so could they.

But then there was Tony Marcello.

I don’t know what’s going on in my head right now. I’d put him out of me long ago.

He was a kid from Philly, a first-timer at the camp, and he had some kind of grandfather situation, too, his father’s father, I think it was, being close with Palmiro Togliatti. It was another like-grandfather-like-father thing, though on his mother’s side everyone was still a practicing Catholic, praying to the saints and so forth. Tony bunked right beside me — he and I were both on the top of doubles — and I never could get to sleep too fast, even in the mountain air, and I remember every night listening to him breathe. He was louder than the crickets, though it wasn’t a snore he made, exactly, the air just seemed to move heavily inside him and I could hear it and I’d listen to him, even though I didn’t want to.

And it was about four weeks into the summer that one day we all went swimming in the lake. Officially, this was, with the camp counselors and all — there were a few nonpolitical summer-camp-type things we did — and Tony was a good swimmer. So he heads out deep, and this all happened so quick and simple that it just made things hit me even harder. He swims out and one of the counselors calls to him to come back. I was clinging to a post on the little wooden pier because I wasn’t a good swimmer and I was scared of the water and I was just holding on there in the shadow of the pier and waiting for this to be over. But when the counselor calls out to Tony, I look and I see him maybe a hundred yards out and he stops and his head bobs up and then he goes down. I figure he’s just turning around or something, or swimming back a ways underwater, which I guess is what the counselor is thinking too. But after a few moments, Tony’s head comes up again and it’s in just the same spot and this time it’s quick, just up and back down, and the counselor jumps in and starts swimming out.

I don’t know exactly how it went. Another counselor leaped in, too, and a third one took all the rest of us out of the water and brought us up to the mess hall, and this is where an atheist is at a disadvantage, I suppose. It was hard to apply the dialectic of history and the oppression of the working masses to what was happening in the lake. And to their credit they didn’t try. They just let us be. So I started inching my way back to what I somehow knew I had to witness. I went to the mess hall door and nobody stopped me. Then I went out into the sun and over to the edge of the slope that led to the lake and nobody stopped me. There were a few people on the pier and somebody near them in the lake and then there was some activity between them and I went down the slope. I lowered my eyes and watched the rutted path as I walked but I went down to the lake and I arrived just as they laid Tony’s body out on the pier. Once it was there, they sort of backed away a little, struck themselves, I guess, by the thingness of it.