Читать книгу Hollywood to Vienna - Donald Ellis Rothenberg - Страница 9

Jesse isn’t sure if he will be forty-eight going on thirty-five, or if he is still standing in front of Pinky Lee at the May Company in Los Angeles, on the “Miracle Mile,” wearing that black-and-white checkered hat (bowler style, but soft) and the shoes with the pink shoe laces and a pink shirt (heliotrope), a promotion for his father’s merchandising efforts. Hundreds or maybe thousands of kids are cheering and waiting. “Hooray, its me, my name is Pinky Lee,” is being sung live by none other than the real Pinky Lee, of television fame. He is rather short, dark hair, middle-aged.

I used to visit him in his house, and he didn’t look as happy as he did on television. He did have a piano, and was without his make-up. He performed in the fifties, or what? Jesse and his older brother Harris were dancing to another beat.

What does all this have to do with the little boy born in Hollywood one day, or should we say, early evening, just in time for dinner, not so long ago?

This is a tale of nonsense and reflection, an ambitious, even ambivalent tale which can be imagined as true or only mistaken circumstances, serendipity-wise, at the whim of random computer keys. Going online in this arena has its drawbacks, and besides, almost fifty years have passed and what has happened in between? Jesse wonders. Is there any real sense in making meaning of life? Why not climb back inside that dark womb and go to sleep, wait it out a little bit in the quiet dark and warm waters where it’s safe? Rip Van Winkle waited for a thousand years or so, didn’t he?

Jesse has already seen too much, and the rich are getting richer. The humanitarian values and ethics have gotten lost in politics and money. Here in Austria, they welcomed-in the Nazis, gave them shelter, Nazis who made some of their own neighbors sweep the streets, wash the streets on hands and knees, all the while taunting them, before they took everything from them, destroyed everything on Kristallnacht, killed them or sent them away to concentration camps, or they escaped to England, South America, USA, elsewhere.

Some say that no such thing happened, and that the millions gassed, massacred in showers, never really happened. Those wearing mustaches now are prone to idolize the past and seek power through fantasy. Oops, that’s not me, only the Hitler-type of mustache.

Anyway, this interesting mindset has all the makings of intrigue, and a memory file played out of key and lost somewhere in the computer directories abandoned along with the lost art, gold jewelry, gold from teeth, insurance policies, and confiscated property and businesses. The new technology has caught up with the thrill of living, and radiation threatens to spray over Europe, just as the big earthquake hits Tehachapi. Is that spelled right?

So who is talking here? Yes, it’s me, Jesse, telling a tale that cannot be told only in first person, or third, or by following the rules.