From the Fatherland, Christmas in Palm Springs
Like a Cadillac gliding effortlessly into the shop for major repairs, Gertie approaches our campsite with a stylish limp. She’s 88 years old. Ignoring the two humans beside him, she slowly dips to greet our dog. Always a gentleman, he rises to receive her with an admiring wiggle of his hips. As we all absorb the splendor of her person – the sparkling of her shirt, the improbable tightness of her jeans, and the dizzying height of her high-heeled shoes – her voice snatches what remains of our attention. The clipped vowels and swooping emphasis of an uncharacteristically friendly German accent roll over our dog’s back with the same tenderness as her liver-spotted hands. The dog is in a state of bliss; we’re in a state of awe.
Our campsite is in a mobile home park in the heart of Palm Springs - an oasis for some, a ley line of charming weirdness for others, and a sort of Mecca for snowbirds with just enough dollars between themselves and their end of days. We’re there for Christmas, two childless weirdos running from rain, just south of their mid-40s, traveling in a van with a dog. Gertie is clearly the mayor.
We want to know everything about her. I ask where she’s from. In fewer than three sentences, we’re transported to a German classroom in 1941, peering into the amber locks of a much younger version of the delightful woman. Gertie tells us her hair was not always as we see it, a short-cropped, stone-washed blondish-white flash of natural style. As a child, her hair was long, curly, deep red, and often worn in pigtails. “As you can imagine, most of my classmates were blonde. Red hair was VERY unpopular, and I was teased about it all the time.” She lifts and drops a handful of her imaginary locks with a lighthearted air and continues. “Well, one day, my kindergarten got a very special visitor…Can you guess who it was?”
My first impulse is to blurt out ‘Hitler?’ But I prevent the rude and presumptuous remark, only to hear, “Well, into our little classroom walks Adolph Hitler.” My wife coughs up a little sip of wine; I silently pat myself on the back for not stepping on the beat.
Gertie continues. “He gave a little talk to all the kids, but just before he left, he stopped at the door and turned back. He walked right up to my desk! I looked up at him, and he gently reached down, took one of my ponytails in his hand, and said – ‘You have such beautiful hair!’”
She seizes our attention the way a standup comedian grips an audience, knowing when to deliver punchlines for maximum impact. She’s told this story a time or two; that much is obvious. It doesn’t matter. We’re hooked.
“The next time I heard someone say that to me was after Hitler was dead and Germany surrendered.” A tall, black American G.I., standing in the rubble and ruins of her small town, came to her and took the same ponytail in his hands, saying, ‘You have such beautiful hair!’
“How did you end up in the States?” My wife asks after managing to gulp down a sufficiency of rosé.
“I married one of those American G.I.s many years later! In fact, he and I stopped here for one night about twenty years ago, and we never left!” Her attention is drawn down the lane by an arriving motor coach. She bids us farewell and promises to say hello to our dog at every opportunity.
My chair, poised to collect the rays of the midday winter sun, sits empty, calling to me like a sandwich missing its filling. Before I can fill it, I notice our neighbor, a svelte man in his later years, stand up quickly from the floorboard of a Volkswagen Beetle parked in front of his driveway. Clutching his nose, I hear him swearing, “AHH, SHIT!” I see dark red blood dripping from his nose like a faucet that just won’t quit.
“Are you OK? Do you need a hand?” I ask sheepishly for some reason.
“Ahh, yeah,” he says, managing to put a disarming chuckle into his voice. “I’m on chemo! I get these damn nosebleeds anytime I bend over for too long!” Blood pours onto the road like gross rain.
I hand him a stack of paper towels and walk with him across the street. He pinches his nose with practiced efficiency.
“Fhanks uh million…what uh pain in d’ attthh!” His otherwise spotless white shirt, tucked into perfectly clean and pressed dark blue jeans, is now spotted with several drops of blood. His hair, so flawlessly quaffed and whiter than his shirt could have ever hoped to be, nearly made true the lie that perfection is achievable on the mortal plane. He tells me his name is Gus. He’s 89 years old, from Brooklyn, and not fully retired. His cancer is back again for the 3rd time.
We chat for a bit, and then I get to work, finishing up his project: trimming and placing new floor mats in his wife’s VW beetle, following Gus’s ingenious, custom approach to keeping them in place. I’m thrilled he’s letting me help and surprised he only mildly teases me for getting a kneeling pad out of my van to keep me off the gravelly asphalt. “Ha! Delicate kneezz, hmmph?”
His wife, Doris, has notes on crazy DIY projects and insists Gus stay still for a while. She threatens him sweetly and says she’ll be right back with a clean shirt.
“D’OK, D’OK, I’LL THIT, I’LL THIT!” He sits down for about half a second, thinks of something else, then gets up to quickly search, one-handed, for a tool before his wife’s return. He finds his seat moments after his wife notices him rummaging through a toolbox.
“Gus!!!” Her exasperation is a polished marble rolling along a ten-mile groove.
“A’riiiit, I bnow, I bnow.” He says through the muffle of a pinched and still bleeding nose. Winking again over the bundle of bloody paper towels, his eye is a sparkling gem of mercurial wisdom.
Thanks to his dampened but concise direction, I make short work of the floormats. He tells me that he and Doris met when they were kids (by which he means in their 20s – the same age as me and my wife). He drops his hand and reveals his nose, dribbling blood, “I’ve been in love with her so long, I just forget!” Looking at the face she makes while he changes his shirt, wincing at the toll of age, cancer, and the lifesaving treatments, I see that she remembers quite well. Gus promises me he’ll be fine in an hour. Doris sighs and takes his soiled shirt to the sink.
Walking back to my empty chair, sunbathed wife, and tail-wagging dog, I feel a profound fullness of heart trailed closely by a bizarre aching, both inevitable and impossible to explain adequately. Why is Hitler’s taste in hair color and his insistence on a car for all the people suddenly such a forceful presence in our bizarre holiday locale? Was Eva Braun a natural blonde or a secret redhead? How does cancer choose its victims? There can’t possibly be a why, right? Jesus, the world is really out to eat us! How lucky are we to know love for any length of time? How lucky am I to have grown up near cotton fields and not a city bombed into freedom? It’s all going by so fast, isn’t it?
Looking into the faces of my beautiful wife and senior dog, with the ancient Gus, Gertie, Hitler, and Doris in mind, I got a frightening peak under the skirt of time. The sweet thigh of youth, the torn undergarment of aging, and the veiled and unknowable promise of what lies beyond the land of the living with all its unstoppable nosebleeds, vanishing pigtails, high-heeled geriatrics, and memories of Hitler’s sweeter moments.