LES

"Slow tonight." "You got that one right, Les, but it's a Tuesday night. What do you expect?" "I'm not bothering you, am I, Tommy?" "Not at all. I'm bored with reading, anyhow." "What are you reading?" "War & Peace." "What's it about? Damn thing is thick. I can't read much more than the newspaper anymore and the only reason I can get through it is because there's not much in it anyway." "It's a love story that takes place in Russia during the time of Napoleon." "Why are you reading it?" "I'm taking a Russian literature class next semester and I don't want to be overwhelmed. If I don't get a headstart, I won't have any beer-drinking time and Austin is too much fun to be wasting your time doing homework. Did you go to college, Les?" "When I came home from the war, I entered the seminary for a year and received some college credits." "You were in the war and you wanted to be a priest. That's an interesting juxtaposition. From the blood and guts of humanity to the blood and guts of Jesus Christ. How long have you lived in this dump?" "Three years." "How did you find your way to the sewers of the Americas?" "There are worse places." "Between the United States and Mexico flushing their toilets into the Rio Grande and the dispossessed finding temporary refuge on the border before either dying or disappearing, we are inhabiting at this present time one of the most unenviable spots on earth." "I've been to plenty of places during my lifetime and Brownsville isn't bad. You have the ocean, Mexico, sunshine, palm trees, tropical vegetation, two cultures intermingling and good people." "Perhaps you're right. I don't have any regrets about my upbringing here. Maybe I can't appreciate the girl next door quite like the outsider. You haven't answered my question. How did you find your way to the border?" "It's a long story." "You saw that I was reading War & Peace. I like long stories. If you tell me a good one, the last hours of my shift will whiz past and I'll invite you to the Palm for a cold beer." "I haven't received an offer quite that good in a long time. Where do I start?" "Start at the beginning. You have a captive audience. Camera! Lights! Action! I guess that's how it goes." "My ancestors were Irish. They were part of the Great Potato Famine exodus. They settled in Pennsylvania and worked the coal mines. My father was part of a large, traditional Catholic family. Though times were tough, he would speak fondly on his youth. He was quite a baseball player in his day. In fact, my Uncle Jim, his brother, played a half season with the Boston Red Sox. The story goes that Tris Speaker replaced him. I've look at baseball almanacs and, sure enough, he and Tris Speaker arrived at the Red Sox at the same time so there might be some truth to the story. My Dad played a year at Boston College, but he met my mom who was a telephone operator and they married. Her family was Irish also, but they were more middle class. Her father was a foreman at a factory and her mother was a teacher. They thought my mother had married beneath her, but probably most parents think their children are more deserving than they get. I know that my father loved my mother very much even though he wasn't an affectionate man. When she died, three days after being hit my a car, I remember him walking through the house shaking his head. He had lost his lifelong companion. They would drink coffee together on the front porch every morning and feed the blue jays. I had three brothers and three sisters who survived child birth. My dad, like many of the Irish in those days, became a cop. Unlike me, he was short and stocky. He was tough and never tolerated anyone disrespecting a woman. He liked his beer, he liked sitting in his rockingchair listening to the Phillies and he slept with a gun under his pillow. Even though he lived many years after my mother, he wasn't ready to die. My brothers and I were at the hospital during his final illness and I'll never forget one of his last statements: 'I know I'm old, but I'm not ready to die.' You would have thought that he was prepared to accept his fate, but he wasn't. And that perplexed me because he was a quiet man with no great beliefs. With the exception of proclaiming after too many beers that 'the Irish are the most despicable people on the face of the earth', he never had much to say. He was a guy who appreciated the little things in life. We had the security that my dad, we called him 'Pop', was always there, but it was my mom, we called her 'Mimi', who cemented us as a family. As a result of her parents' pretensions, we learned to play the piano and we had one in the house. It was her pride and joy. And it was also her escape. She taught all of us to play although none of us were very adept with the exception of my sister Martha. We were working-stiffs like my father, but Martha inherited some of my mother's talent." "Did she do anything with her talent?" "Nothing. She married a Pollack, became a housewife and dropped dead while taking a bath. My brother-in-law had died a few years earlier, so when they discovered my sister's body, she was disfigured from the internal bleeding and lying in the water for several days. My mother had the ability to make each of us feel special. It was the Depression and nobody had any money. My father wasn't working except on occasion as a bouncer. Everyone had to contribute to the welfare of the family. I sold newspapers all day from the time I was seven or eight and I would earn a quarter, but a quarter in those days was enough to buy a pound of ground beef and a package of noodles. I would give my quarter to my mother and she would prepare Old Reliable with those basis ingredients, adding tomatoes, onions, tomato sauce and various spices. It was hot and delicious and my mouth waters thinking about that meal. And that was the bottom line: No matter how tough things would get, we could count on a steaming plate of Old Reliable." "Were things so bad that you found yourselves on the verge of starving?" "I don't remember that we suffered because everyone was in the same predicament. We stayed united as a family and the Catholic Church kept us together as a community. All of us went to St. Francis de Assisi from first through twelfth grades. There were 15 kids in my graduating class, but even with those small numbers, we competed against the public schools in football, basketball and baseball. I didn't play any sports my senior year because I worked fulltime after school at a gas station. The other three years I played all three." "What positions did you play?" "I was an end in football, a forward in basketball and a catcher in baseball." "Any memorable moments?" "We never won a football game although we had some success in the other sports. The only time we came close to winning we were trailing 7-6 with seconds on the clock. I was playing receiver and I caught a slant-end for the winning touchdown. Or so I thought. We were called for offsides. There was time for one more play. We ran the same pattern, but I was tackled six inches short of the endzone. I suppose if we had won, I could never look back with the satisfaction of the perfection of never winning a football game. I graduated in 1943 during the middle of the war. I tried to enlist the previous year, but my parents refused to sign for me. My older brothers Mike and Ted had shipped out. Mike flew a P-47 in Europe and Ted suffered combat ending injuries from shrapnel wounds at Guadalcanal. I joined the Navy and saw my share of action. After the war the government returned the body of one of my classmates. We went to the funeral and his mother confronted mine on the steps of the church. She was shrieking at my mother: 'It's not fair, it's not fair. I had only one boy and he didn't come back and all three of yours did.'" "What did you do during the war?" "I was on an LCI, which was an acronym for a small ship called a Landing Craft Infantry. We had as much firepower as any ship for a few minutes with the numerous rockets we could launch in order to soften up the beaches before the transports landed." "Did you lose anyone from your crew?" "Not one sailor although a fellow who transferred from our ship was later killed. We used to collect dead Japanese from the ocean. We would weigh them down and discharge them back into the water." "What did you do?" "I loaded the stern gun." "Did you ever down any Jap planes?" "We were credited with 20. One afternoon we downed five. I was showering when the alarm sounded. I didn't have time to dress so I ran to my station nude. Zeros were zooming over our heads. The guys would rib me that the Jap pilots were so shocked to see me standing naked that it made them easy targets." "How far east did you go?" "We went to Tokyo. If it hadn't been for the atom bomb, I would have mostly likely died. We were part of the first wave scheduled to hit the Japanese mainland." "I've spoken with guys returning from Vietnam and they seldom talk about the action, but R&R was nothing short of orgies, drugs and alcohol. Did you have experiences like that?" "It wasn't like that for us. I didn't touch a woman for two years. When I returned to the states I had some fun, but during those extended periods of time we lived like priests. The only incident I remember that makes me laugh occurred after our invasion of the Solomon Islands. The Navy dropped a few thousand sailors on an island for a couple of days with two warm cans of beer. We proceeded to have the time of our lives. In fact, I almost drowned in the surf. I don't know how, but we got drunker than skunks on those two cans each." "Did you keep in touch with those guys after the war?" "I stayed in contact with a couple of the fellows for a brief time, but we scattered to different parts of the country and continued with our own lives. Transportation and communication weren't quite what they are now. Besides, wife and kids pretty much dominated our lives from that point." "You mentioned that you were in the seminary. When did that take place?" "After my discharge. I loved the mass and there was the myth that every mother wanted a priest for a son. My wartime experience wasn't traumatic, but I thought that I might have the calling." "How long were you in the seminary?" "I knew right away that I didn't have the calling. I lasted a year. It was the only college education I picked up and it left me with one regret: I would have liked to have been a history teacher, but that wasn't meant to be. I left the seminary and became a salesman the rest of my life. I sold insurance and even drove a truck for a short period of time." "You don't strike me as a truckdriver, Les." "I wasn't, but I got caught between jobs and didn't have any other alternative with kids to feed. I was destined for cheap suits and dry-cleaned white shirts." "What did you finally settle on?" "I sold eyeglass frames. For 20 years I drove from one end of Pennsylvania to the other. Nobody knew more about high school football or local politics than I did. No one knew about the best cafes or the best bars either. I would leave on Monday mornings at dawn and return Wednesday evenings. I had four distinct routes, all determined by the cardinal points. I could drive through Pennsylvania blindfolded." "And you were married? You mentioned kids." "I was married twice." "And how many children?" "I had four, two with each wife." "How did you end up in Brownsville?" "I had no one left in Scranton. My children were gone and my second wife died. I was alone and I couldn't take the cold anymore. I tried Florida for a while, but I couldn't survive financially. I was sitting in the Dade County Public Library looking at a map of the United States when I drew a line across the Gulf of Mexico and found the tip of my pen resting on Brownsville. Why not? I thought. South Texas had to be less crowded and less expensive than South Florida, and since I didn't have anything against Cubans, I figured I wouldn't have anything against Mexicans either. I packed my few belongings, hopped on a Greyhound and two days later I arrived. This was the closest hotel to the station as well as the cheapest and I've been here ever since." "No regrets?" "Lots of them, but I don't lose any sleep. You reach a point in life when you subsist rather than exist. Sometimes I think that I'm a fish, stationary at the bottom of the aquarium, unnoticed until I float to the top and someone scoops me out and discards me." "You've been here how long?" "Three years." "And you've been at the hotel the whole time?" "Except for a brief stay at the veteran's hospital in San Antonio. I haven't left here once unless you consider leaving the country to buy booze in Matamoros a trip."