BY STEPHEN ROGER POWERS
Thirty-one years ago this month, I was stopped at Checkpoint Charlie trying to cross into East Berlin. The Wall had opened only four months before, but it was still very much East and West Germany. The border guard, who looked every inch the Hollywood cliché of a frightening Soviet-era official, demanded to know, in German, where my parents were.
“In the United States?” I said in my sophomore-year German, and, pressing on meekly, I tried explaining why I, a fifteen-year-old American, was crossing into an Eastern Bloc country without them. “High school German club? Two-week trip? Free afternoon on my own while my host family is in school? Got sunburned detasseling corn last summer to earn money for this?”
I was scared shitless. I didn’t know if I was about to be hauled off, never to be seen or heard from again. My eyes diverted to the ceiling, as if they might find up there, buzzing around the lights like a moth, the German word I was searching for.
One second the guard was the normal Hollywood cliché, but the next, when I returned my eyes to him, he’d grown strange black horns that smoke rolled around like feather boas. His pallor was the color of a gasoline spill, his teeth were cigarette butts, and his eyes were watches missing their hands. A long, bony arm, tipped with burnt fingernails, beckoned me closer while he leaned forward, his mouth opening like a moray’s.
I blinked, and stub-mouth was a Hollywood cliché again.
“Nein!” the guard barked. He slammed my passport shut, slid it toward me, and pointed authoritatively back toward the West as if he were sending me to my room.
I don’t think this is where my deep-seated mistrust of authority originated. I can remember long before that thinking everything the priest said at mass was nonsense primarily because everyone around me was paying attention to him. In grade school, when we were supposed to recite the “Pledge Allegiance,” as the nuns referred to it (I don’t know why they always dropped the “of”), I moved my mouth up and down silently like a ventriloquist puppet. If I had had the confidence then that I do now, I would have remained seated, arms crossed, leaning back, mildly amused at the rest of the class marionetting their way through what I thought was a ridiculous nationalistic indoctrination ritual.
This is how, these days, I see lemmings who, in the midst of this pandemic, blindly follow Donald Trump straight off a cliff, and who wallpaper Facebook with memes blaring confirmation-bias false analogies that surely create a feeling of superiority in anyone who shares them. Only these days I’m appalled, not amused.
I don’t like the sniping on Twitter much either because it usually demonstrates the same breakdown in critical thinking, but every now and then I appreciate a Tweet that is well crafted like a punchline. I used to do stand-up comedy to help pay the bills in grad school. I needed extra cash to pay rent, and my TA stipend just wasn’t covering it. Stand-up was a good excuse to hit the road every weekend too. The road was in my blood. Still is, and I still appreciate well crafted punchlines. I saw a Tweet the other day that said, “Idolizing a politician is like believing the stripper likes you.”
This reminded me of the lecturer I shared an office with back in my grad school days when I was a TA and a stand-up comedian. The lecturer’s name was Dick, and he was quite a bit older than me. He gave me useful teaching advice though. One day, Dick wasn’t feeling well. Soon after that he was in the hospital. Then he was dead. I didn’t know him well, but I valued his mentorship, so when I learned he died, I was shook up.
Back then, I knew a buffoon who was pushing sixty and who was always coming down to comedy nights in the Milwaukee bars. It was odd how he was always trying to hang around twenty-somethings and how he was always trying to pick up twenty-something “guls.” He called them guls like the General does in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Late Encounter with the Enemy.” I doubt the buffoon ever read it, but the first time I ever did, I heard the buffoon’s voice when I got to the part about the preemie and the guls. The guy looked like a gull too. His neck was like a pelican’s, and his smile was like a toucan’s beak.
The buffoon dropped by my flat unexpectedly, and he saw I was upset. He could be kind once in a while, so he offered to take me for a drink. One drink turned into two, and from there it was exponential. His kindness wasn’t really kindness. What he really wanted to do was take me to a strip club after he got me good and drunk first, and he knew I hated strip clubs and would refuse to go if I was sober.
But by this point I was really drunk and a little bit scared, and I was upset about Dick, and I worried if I made the buffoon mad he’d leave me stranded somewhere, so what could I do?
At the strip club, I stayed at the bar, my back to the stage, and tearfully nursed another drink (also by this point I didn’t care at all that I was crying a little in public) while the buffoon tried as hard as he could to impress the strippers. They were happy to take his dollar bills but wouldn’t do much else for him.
One dancer though noticed I had my back to the stage the whole time. She came over to me, turned my head toward her with her finger on my chin, and asked me what was wrong.
“Dick died today,” I said. I was crying too.
“Well,” she said, spreading my legs, stepping between them, and rubbing my thigh, “let me bring it back to life for you.”
“No, really!” I said, offended, shrinking back from her in horror. “Dick died today!”
Soon I was surrounded by dancers, all offering condolences. They asked me questions about my office mate. They said how sorry they were.
The buffoon, however, was so angry at being ignored he stormed out, left me stranded there.
I had to scrounge up some change to call another friend to take me home (remember pay phones?), and I wasn’t even sure he had answered his phone after I dialed. It was so loud in the club I couldn’t hear the dial tone or the ring or the answer, so I shouted “Pick me up at the Airport Lounge!” and hoped he got the message.
When he arrived and I got in his car, of course the friend who picked me up wanted to know what the hell I was doing at the Airport Lounge.
I said the buffoon’s name.
“Ah,” the friend said.
So, idolizing politicians. Southern Gothic writers have painted the south as a place where people are generally tolerant of and mildly amused by eccentrics. But you cannot openly question or mock idolized authority figures here, like preachers or conservative politicians, and expect to count many natives as friends.
I have lived in central Georgia fourteen years, so I should be used to this. Nevertheless, you can imagine how aghast I was to see flags being run up everywhere with a certain politician’s name on them. Flags fray and fade, and I have seen no other flags fray and fade as fast as the ones with a certain politician’s name on them. Cheap junk mass produced in China, probably. The same place that, you know, made the CHY-NA virus.
I used to feel antsy if I hadn’t left the country in over a year. A week or so ago, I realized it’s been over a year since I last left the state of Georgia. Texas last March for a writers’ conference was the last time I’ve been anywhere except Jekyll Island, where my wife’s family owns a vacation home on the marsh side that is seldom used. My wife’s grandmother supervises a calendar in her kitchen, and we sign up for a week once a month or so because the drive is only four hours and we can easily hide from maskless lemmings on Jekyll Island.
Central Georgia feels like a foreign country sometimes, so once in a while when I am not on Jekyll Island I pretend I am off somewhere strange and far away when I am right here in Thomaston.
Now that the first microchip has been implanted in my arm that will allow the government to track my movements, take over my brain, and alter my DNA, I look forward to maybe traveling farther afield for real not too long after my second microchip in three weeks. I haven’t been to Dollywood since August of 2018, when Dolly Parton paraded through the park, chauffeured in her replica antique Dewitt motorcar, and waved to her fans. Maybe the government will raise its eyebrow and scratch its chin when it tracks me returning. I’ve always loved Dolly; I loved Dolly before loving Dolly was cool.
A couple summers ago, I was in Berlin, and I went back to where the old Checkpoint Charlie was. I was a little disappointed at how touristy the whole area has gotten. There was even a Kentucky Fried Chicken there. The complex where you crossed the border is gone now, and a facsimile Checkpoint Charlie shed now stands in the middle of the street. Actors play guards that tourists can pose for pictures with.
One guard was, I swear, a Hollywood cliché, aged another thirty-one years, and, for half a second, in the corner of my eye, his cigarette-butt teeth smiled at me, and smoke cloaked his black horns like Spanish moss.
The End
