Ever since the kids been little they’ve always known that I vanish from their lives periodically, and they um, they ah, never really had any idea of what it is that I do. What do I do? If I don’t know, why should they?
Yeah, Brendan, the 14 year old, he got to travel with me during the summer. But we got a chance to talk to each other as adults. You know, as uh, well, as adults, instead of just father and son.
We left Boston, we were headed up to the Left Bank Cafe in Blue Hill, Maine. And uh, Brendan…just about Marblehead, turned to me and he said, “How did you get to be like that?” It’s a fair question. I knew what he meant, but he didn’t have all the language to say exactly what he meant. What he meant to say was “Why is it that you are fundamentally alienated from the entire institutional structure of society?” And I said, “Well, I’ve never been asked that, you know…Now, don’t listen to the radio and don’t talk to me for half an hour while I think about it.”
So we drove and talked. We were on highway one because it was pretty and close to the water. Got up towards the main border and there was a picnic area off to the side with some picnic tables, it was a bright clear day, so I pulled into their parking lot, sat down at the picnic tables and said “Now, sit down, I want to tell you a story,” because I thought about it. So we sat down.
I said “You know, I was in Korea.” And he said “Yeah, I always wondered about that, did you ever shoot anybody?” And I answered as honestly as I could, “Well, I don’t know. But that’s not the story, listen to what I’m telling you. I was up at … by the ... river. There were about 75,000 chinese soldiers on the other side and they all wanted me out of there. With every righteous reason that you could think of, I had long since figured out that I was the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time for the most specious of reasons. But there I was, my clothing was rotting on my body, every exotic mold in the world was attacking my body and my person, my boots had big holes in them from the rot. I wanted to swim in the ...river and get that feeling of death, the feeling of rot, off of me.
The Chinese soldiers were on the other side. They were swimming, they were having a wonderful time. But there was a rule, a regulation against swimming in the ... river. I thought that was foolish, but then a young Korean, filling in as a carpenter, all his family had been killed off in the war…but he said to me in what English he had, “You know, when we get married here, the young married couple moves in with the elders, they move in with the grandparents, but there’s nothing growing! Everything’s been destroyed, there’s no food. So, the first baby that’s born, the oldest, the old man, goes out with a jug of water and a blanket, sits on the bank of the ... river and waits to die. Then, when he dies, he’ll roll over the bank and into the river and his body will be carried out to sea. And we don’t want you to swim in the ... river because our elders are floating out to sea.
That’s when it began to crumble for me, you know, that’s when…well, I ran away, and not just from that, I ran away from the blueprint for self destruction I had been handed. As a man, for violence and excess, for sexual excess, for racial excess. We had a commanding officer who said of the G.I. babies, fathered by G.I.s and Korean mothers, that the Korean government wouldn’t care for, who were in these orphanages, he said, “Well, as sad as that is, someday this will really help the Korean people because it’ll raise the intelligence level.” That’s what we were dealing with, you know.
So, I ran away! I ran down to Seoul City. Not to the army. I ran away to a place called Korea House. It was Korean civilians reaching out to G.I.s to give us a better vision of who they were than what we were getting at the divisions. And they hid me for three weeks. Late one night, because they didn’t have any clothes that would fit me…Late one night, it was a stormy, stormy night, the rain falling in sheets. I could go out, because I figured no one would see me. We walked through the mud and the rain.
Seoul seemed devastated, and they took me to a concert at the AWOL women’s university. There were shell holes in the cieling and rain pouring through the holes, and clyde lights on the stage hooked up to car batteries. This wasn’t the USO, this was the Korean’s Association. First they invited to sing-I was the only white person there-first person they invited to sing was Marian Anderson. Great, black, operatic soprano who had been on tour in Japan, you see, and there she was! Singing Oh, Freedom and Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.
And I watched her through the rain coming through the ceiling and I thought back to Salt Lake, and my father, Sid, who ran the Capital Theatre, played movies there, but it had been an old Vaudeville house and he wanted to bring back live music there, and in 1948 he invited Marian Anderson to come sing there. I remember we went to the train station to pick her up. I took her to the biggest hotel in town, the Hotel Utah, but they wouldn’t let her stay there because she was black. And I remember my father’s humiliation and her humiliation, then I saw her singing there, through the rain…
And I realized, right then,” I said, “Brendan, right then, I knew that it was all wrong. That it all had to change. And that that change had to start with me.
