The Poorest I've Ever Been So Rich

I was the poorest I’ve ever been but I didn’t know it at the time. I had no home, no car, no savings, few clothes and fewer friends. What I did have was the promise of a job once I returned back to the states in three months’ time. Meanwhile, I was back wandering through Europe without a care or a clue in the world.

It would be three months of rediscovering Europe and myself at the same time. From the welcoming arms of the Amsterdam whores in the Red-Light District to passing acquaintances in Danmark, there were chance encounters never engaged. Finally meeting up with a pen pal who was as charming as her letters and just as unavailable. Fleeting encounters (drinks and promises) with troubled, itinerant women up in Nordic Country. But for the most part, I was pretty much a lost soul in need of little and wanting more.

A year earlier, my first sojourn to Danmark had only lasted six months before the Nordic winter, summer clothes and a boring job at a laundry sent my fleeting feet south toward the French Riviera. I never made it that far. Paris was supposed to be a temporary respite from the bitterly cold winter winds that swirled around my hitch-hiking thumb. But fatigue, hunger and loneliness drove me to a TWA store front and tickets back home.

This time around would be different. My internship at the Public Television station in town had ended with a job offer, commencing three months hence. I said yes, bought my ticket and headed back to Europe. A chance encounter with an artist at a Dutch coffee shop/pot shop cemented two months of living the life; if only in my mind.

John, an art student and artist, was about my age, finishing up his college degree and anxious to practice his English on any tourist he could engage. I’m sure he spotted me as an eager American, unsure of himself, but open to adventures that leaned to the mild side. We connected immediately.

John’s goal was to, one day, get to America and enjoy all the fruits that the movies, television and the rag trades had layered on his eager imagination. I was the key to the truth of what America was really like. In turn, John introduced me to the real Netherlands; its culture, people, political leanings, sub-culture and a world I didn’t know existed. It was our mutual master’s degree in learning about ‘the real world.’

The entry point to this subculture of unemployed, social misfits who didn’t fit in was John’s good friend, the potter. I can’t remember is name but his intellectual prowess ignited a thirst for future salons in me that has never died. He was at once; brilliant, confusing, mad, insightful, and a font of knowledge that even AI today would have a hard time competing against. I became his eager student and he my willing teacher.

The potter lived in government housing on the outskirts of Amsterdam. He was unemployable and living on a government stipend and government housing. Social services were then and are much now more generous in Holland than anywhere else except Scandinavia.

The potter lived with his vivacious, outgoing and brilliant Malaysian wife. They had a daughter who could charm the skin off a cobra. They made a fascinating couple drawn together by their love of the arts, the eccentricity of their native country and adoration of their beautiful daughter.

As is so customary with that unique group of people, I was immediately welcomed into their home and made to feel like an old member of the family. I lived with them for almost two months and became totally ingratiated into their lifestyle. It felt like a home I’d only seen in the movies. An outlaw’s enclave welcoming all the oddballs in the neighborhood.

We slept in late, read (he did) the morning newspaper, listened to jazz, folk and rock and roll music all day long, painted, and made pottery (I watched.) I did try sketching and failed miserably. I tried writing poetry and only scratched the surface of what I was trying to say. It was a salon inside my head; safe, secure and open to the wonderings and wanderings that only a twenty-five-year-old can muster up.

For me, it usually meant long solitary afternoons meandering around the neighborhood, taking pictures, observing daily life and wondering about my future life back in the states. Gradually, there came this strong urge to chuck it all and stay. I didn’t have a visa, a work permit or a sponsor but the thought of living the life, off the grid, was sorely tempting.

A couple of times a week, John would come to take the potter back into town and I would tag along. Dropped off at the main train station, I was given free rein to wander and take pictures with a time to be picked up by one of the canals near the Red-Light District.

I’d learned early on to pretend to be Canadian. Americans were highly suspect because of the Vietnam War and it was just so much easier to play the red cloverleaf card. I even got a Canadian patch for my backpack. Fortunately, we all talked the same rock and roll language. Pot was king and legal in Holland. It worshipped in Amsterdam.

The back rooms of most coffee shops were where the action happened. There were titillating sexual images everywhere, sex toys for sale, magazines and friendly women. I was like a dumb lamb in the slaughter house. Back then, we all pretended we were doing it but few of us were. Fortunately, I was spotted as an American backpacker as soon as I entered that fog-filled abode and ignored for as long as I lingered there. Message received.

Other times, my hosts would take me some local attractions the tourists never saw. Swap meets and the zoo. The local shopping plaza and churches we never attended. It was a simple life and a good one without all the trappings of ‘so-called’ American success. Few of our neighbors had cars, none owned their own home and fewer yet had a clear pathway to retirement. It was living  life on a day-by-day basis and making each one memorable.

Then it all ended. I still had London and the British Isles to explore. The fleeting thought of staying in Amsterdam gradually evaporated with the harsh reality that my life back home would be a thousand times easier and more productive than trying to make a hard-scrabble life there. I opted out for American ambition and imagined images of me as a business owner and entrepreneur; whatever that was going to be. So, I said good-bye and grabbed the tram for the airport.

Gradually, those memories of the wonderful times I had with John and the Potter’s family began to fade away. My new job in public television was exciting and time-consuming. Thoughts of a new girlfriend (the blond receptionist) began to consume my every day. Then there was the ocean between me and my old European-self.

I’m sure John and I promised to write one another. I never did. Like two wanderers on a mountain trek, we passed on some rocky trail, exchanged pleasantries and went on our way. Before the internet, cell phones and Facetime, it was American Express or expensive international correspondence. So, like the self-absorbed kid I was back then, I opted out to make the effort and those friend-ships were lost to time.

Now, some sixty years later, I still regret that I didn’t take the time to hold on to that connection with like-minded people who showed me a whole different way of living and loving and taking in all that life had to offer. Lesson learned and I’m still learning.

Thanks, John. Thanks, Potter’s family, thanks Amsterdam. I love you guys, all of you. With few pictures and fading memories, it’s still fun to go back to a time and place where welcoming smiles took in a naïve wanderer and showed him a slice of life he hasn’t seen since.

Going Back into the A Shau

Sixty years after the fact, I returned to my old barracks at the Presidio of San Francisco. It was part of a journey arranged by Brian and Melanie to celebrate my Eighty years of pondering life’s ‘what ifs?’ Our journey began where my military life was born and ended on the beaches of San Diego a week later.

Fast forward two years from that Kerouac-inspired Road trip and I once again ventured back into the A Shau (pronounced A-Shaw) Valley in South Vietnam. This return journey was precipitated by a phone call from out of my past, the decision to reread the novel (part autobiographical) that encompassed that part of of my life and the thought of giving birth to yet another storyline wrapped in the same mid-Sixties environment.

Funny how things turn out. After writing the first version of “Love in the A Shau,” I assumed I had put that part of my fictional past behind me. I was done falling in love freshman year, feeling the exhilaration and angst of that first romantic entanglement, harboring wonderful fantasies of our future together and ultimately experiencing the painful realization that it wasn’t meant to be.

That long, monotonous bus ride from Minnesota down to boot camp at Fort Leonard Wood Missouri was but a dark spot on my collective memory. Yet I can still feel those emotions in the middle of the night when my sweetheart and all my friends were safely ensconced in their beds, dreaming of their bright collegiate futures ahead of them.

But much to my surprise and chagrin, my journey as author and protagonist was relived all over again with that reread. For reasons that gradually began build in my subconscious, I slowly came to realize that returning to the A Shau was an exhilarating experience and I was sorely tempted to go there again…in the form of yet another novel. Perhaps my journey back in time wasn’t over yet.

Standing in front of the barracks with my two kids brought up a plethora of mixed emotions. I was still around; a lot of my barracks buddies weren’t. Some were brought down by the conflict overseas, others made their eventual escape back to civilian life and the rest simply disappeared. But what if, I asked myself, a different scenario had played out. That thought then became the genesis for another possible novel that had long been percolated in the far reaches of my back brain.

‘Presidio Adieu’ is the working title for yet another novel from that same time period that has been percolating in my brain for some time now. Its birth is very tenable considering the numerous other projects screaming for my time and attention. While I don’t envision its creation anywhere in the near future, it has still gotten my imagination going into overtime once again.

Readers loved so many of the segments of that first book. This was especially surprising coming from my female readers. I worried that the graphic descriptions of war and the profanity of military talk would them turn off.  I feared they might see it as just gratuitous profanity used for shock value. But the opposite was true. As one friend mentioned out to me, quite pointedly. “Oh, come on, Denis, give us credit. We’re much smarter than that. We understand the violence of war and the profanity-laced dialogue that comes with the territory. It just added to the flavor of the moment and painted a vivid picture of the profound changes your protagonist was going through.”

It might be a tough trip back because I tend to get very vested into my characters. Yet it’s not often that I get to go back in time and revisit San Francisco of the mid-sixties. It was a world of barracks banter, office intrigue, sexual liaisons, cunning and stealth and all culminating in the bloody battlefields of the Nam.

To be sure, this proposed novel would have a totally different storyline with a different cast of characters. It would be more of a mystery novel than a story of combat. Yet the same emotions captured, lost, gained and lost again would be present. Whether in the post newspaper office, the barracks or the streets of San Francisco, it would be a world where only a few of the women were virgins and manual dexterity with the boys didn’t refer to their working on car parts.

It would be an interesting journey that I and my characters would love to travel. Proving once again that in fiction you really can go back to what once was and change it for the better or worse.

As I mentioned the odds of ‘Presidio Adieu’ starting anytime soon are remote. But if I do find the time, I think it would be an interesting journey well worth the effort if I can keep my fear of dying in battle and conflicting emotions of love in tack. It would be another trip back to the barracks again. Older and only slightly wiser this time around.

That Was My War and I Missed it

Down through the ages, most generations have had a war or two occur in their lifetime. Some were called to duty, others volunteered for action, some watched it pass by and a few looked the other way.

In his outstanding book ‘Mekong First Light,’ about his involvement in the Vietnam War, Joseph W. Callaway, Jr. quotes the Greek philosopher Aristotle who said: “The search for truth is in one way hard, in another way easy. For it is evident that no one of us can ever master nor miss it wholly.” The truth is that war is bad but that perspective is often lost on youth.

Adolescence and competitive behavior often times run in parallel tracks. Many young men engage in high-risk behavior in order to satisfy their sense of self-worth.  This “rite of passage” can manifest itself in many ways; athletics, mountain climbing, fast cars, sexual activities and bar fights. If I were to think long and hard about it, that was probably my back story in the condensed version of my life.

I never really did anything ‘totally stupid’ in my youth but there were moments…

Volunteering for Vietnam was about on par with my failed attempt at grabbing a tramp steamer out of high school and sailing around the world and escaping to Europe after college to find myself. None of those events were thought-out, rational or goal-seeking. They were just ideas that came into my head one day and sounded ‘very cool’ at the time.

Vietnam could have been my war but, in the end, I only manned a typewriter instead of a hog (M60 machine gun) and sat behind a desk instead of in a foxhole. Two years of honing my journalism skills plus learning self-control and discipline was the best I could get out of the service. Mind you, I’m not complaining. It was a life-changing experience and I have only the greatest respect for those who wear the uniform of the United States of America. Truly spoken, unless you’ve lived in a barracks and marched the parade grounds, you really don’t understand what it means to ‘be in the service.’

Now, fifty-nine years later, I find myself somewhat ambivalent about my lack of combat experience. To be honest, the closest I ever got to bombs exploding nearby and bullets flying overhead was in basic training. It was reenacted in one of my first novels ‘Love in the A Shau.’ Fortunately, I was able to reimagine that as a cathartic experience of combat and translate it to the written page.

I wasn’t there; not really. Writing that novel was an exercise in purging my soul of a lack of real-life combat experience. In that vein, I tried very hard to be realistic and respectful of the brave men (and women) who did go through that special kind of hell. It must have worked. I’ve had several combat veterans compliment me on the ‘action sequences’ in the book so at least I got that part right.

In past blogs, I’ve rambled on about various sequences in my military experiences. Fort Leonard Wood was where I went through basic training. I had a chance to sign up for OCS (Officer Candidate School) but chose not to because of the additional four years commitment required. Good decision or not; I don’t know.

The Presidio of San Francisco is where I did volunteer for duty in Vietnam. But only because of the extra bonus pay; overseas duty and hazardous duty pay. A year and a half later, I was offered the opportunity to reenlist with a guaranteed transfer to Vietnam (they had kept my record of volunteering). I politely declined their offer.

While Army slang labeled the Presidio the ‘Country Club’ of the Army, it also pigeon-hoed Fort Polk in Fort Polk, Louisiana as a certain part of the human anatomy which, in fact, came close to describing the place in the hot, humid summer months I spent there.

Fort Lee, my last assignment, meant a promotion to sergeant (Spec 5), a nice desk job and weekends spent in D.C. Then it was an early-out and back to finish college.

In a couple of weeks, I’ll be returning to the Presidio 58 years after I left there. My kids and I are going on an ‘On the Road’ venture to celebrate my eighty years of being around. We’ll start in San Francisco and then swing down the PCH (Pacific Coast Highway) to L.A. and then over to Palm Springs.

It should back some very strange memories and interesting feelings. It seems like a million years ago and relative to all that’s happened to me since, it probably was. I followed a different path instead of a jungle trail and now here I am. Life can take some interesting twists and turns. I’m so fortunate I got to experience them.