Continental Drift

In the fall of 1970, my family — version 3.0 — was winging its way to Europe. To explain the “upgrade,” which it was in no wise at all, I'll take a stab at revisiting the thought processes of my mother at the time. “My children are thriving in this bucolic setting,” she may have thought. “I have a lovely home, a decent, intelligent husband, a fulfilling career, and a host of interesting friends. And yet—. Something is missing. I can't figure out what, but surely this isn't all. I'm intrigued by this fellow illegally squatting in the house across the street, the fat drunk with the absurd afro who was recently ejected from the Peace Corps for molesting favela children in São Paulo. There's something about him. It could be his violent temper, his cat-killing prowess, his subhuman intelligence or his love of cheap whiskey… I don't know. But something about this man makes me want to cuckold my husband, run him off, sell the house out from under him, and take off for Europe in an insane plan to open a restaurant in Florence.”

Or something like that.

And so happened the ouster of Quarnstrom and the installation of Dennis Corcoran, the bane and bugbear of my young life. Too young, I think, for a bête noir, but there you have it. My mother, an agent of chaos the likes of which were unknown in the world since Loki, only knew or cared about the following: the new circumstances would make it easy to stay drunk all the time, it would really piss off Daddy (the colonel), and her romantic fantasies of being Zelda Fitzgerald, exchanging witticisms with literary lights in sidewalk cafes, would finally be realized. (Author’s aside: ri-i-i-ight.)

Dear reader, you will hear some hard things about Dennis Corcoran in this narrative, but he did teach me many things. He showed me how to bleed and how to take a punch. (Not that tough, really, I discovered my role in those skills was mainly passive.) I learned that stitches were not such a huge deal, that broken bones mend, and mainly, that I was a pussy. I know, because he told me, and because I lost every fight that Dennis and I got into. See, he didn't beat me — we fought. Yes, Corcoran was 27 years old, over 6 feet and 200 pounds and I was ten. Not a big ten, either. That hardly seems fair, you might be thinking. I'll tell you what Dennis told me: life isn't fair, and if I didn't want to fight I shouldn't be smarting off.

It started thusly. I had pissed him off somehow, maybe breathed some of his air, I don't remember.

He says to me, “Man, I wish I was ten so I could whip your ass.”

“How do you know you could?” I responded. “Maybe if you were ten I'd whip your ass.”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the moment my innocence took flight, never to return.

Dennis got on his knees and said, “Okay, we're the same size. Put your hands up.”

I did and he hit me so hard I left my feet and flew across the room. My nose and lips exploded and I cracked the back of my head on the table, splitting it open. I ran to my mother, shrieking in pain and fear. Dennis followed, all apologies. “I was teaching him how to box and one slipped through,” he told my mom.

* * *

By the time we got that flight to Heathrow, I was several beatings in, a changed boy. Any cockiness I might have had at being an intelligent, talented and appreciated child was long gone. I just didn't want to get hit any more and for the next two years that was my life's focus, the crux of my existence: just stay away from those fists. I became a cringer, a jumpy, fearful ball of nerves. Loud noises and raised voices made me roll up like an armadillo. I took refuge in books and was forever searching for a secluded nook or dark corner in which to read unmolested.

However, reading was another thing that pissed Dennis off. He would often slap the book out of my hands or into my face. “Go outside and play, you little queer,” he'd say. So I began disappearing. I became ghostlike in my movements, striving toward invisibility. If he couldn't see me, he couldn't hit me, and if I wasn't around, he couldn't see me. I suppose if anyone had cared about my welfare or whereabouts this would have been a little more difficult. But I honestly doubt that an absence of less than days was ever notice.

I was struck at an early age at the difference in reaction to the same parental stimuli by me and the kids on TV: car in the driveway, the key in the lock, the heavy footfall that would send the Brady or Douglas kids happily scrambling to the front door, arms outstretched.

And me hastily grabbing supplies and slipping out the back door.

It should be noted here that my mother was also being regularly abused. It wasn't just a violation of her firstborn son she was ignoring, it was also constant assaults on her own person. Crazy, right? The assaults began maybe a month after they met, continued for two years, and the night he finally left, her pleas that he remain were somewhat obscured and muffled by her broken nose and busted lips. Love — ain't it grand?

We arrived in London in October and took up residence in a cheap rooming house in SW-6 run by a mean old lady named Mrs. Zurita. Breakfast was included — (“Eggs on toast, or beans on toast?”) — and was often our (the children's) only meal of the day. Some small kindnesses were shown us by her son, who looked and sounded like Mr. French on Family Affair.

He brought a TV up to our room and gave us the occasional sweet or sticky bun. Mom and Dennis slept or laid around until opening time at 3pm, then hit the pub where they remained until closing, having found fellowship in that universal fraternity of drinkers the world over.

Out of boredom, hunger, and in the spirit of disappearance, I hit the streets of London and began hustling in earnest. At first I remained in the general area, haunting the used bookshops and filching fruit from open-air markets. After selling all my own books to buy food, I needed to figure out a way to generate some cash. I considered stealing books from one shop and flogging them at the other, but I couldn't bear the idea. The shops were all manned by kindly old gentleman who let me pass hours unmolested within their walls, reading and killing time. (Those of you familiar with my case will note the irony.) One of those kindly old book-gentlemen even gave me books occasionally, usually worn or damaged, but perfectly readable. It was he who gave me my first Dickens, David Copperfield.

One day I wandered into a hotel to use the bathroom and decided to do a little exploring. I walked up broad carpeted stairs to the second floor and discovered outside the doors a veritable feast of leftover breakfasts on room service trays. Croissants, toast, eggs, sausage, fruit — some meals barely touched. I ate my fill and filled my pockets.

I was lucky that first day in that no staff or guests happened upon me. Later, I would learn that it wouldn't do to tarry and savor the repast, rather I should fill a bag and disappear.

Although I was never nabbed, I was chased off a few times. It was my search for fresh hotels and fresh cuisine that got me venturing further afield on the tube.

The notoriously incomprehensible London subway revealed its secrets to me after a couple of weeks of constant riding in which, incidentally, I never spent so much as a sixpence. At first, I simply hopped on random trains and got off at stations that sounded likely or interesting — here a Stoke Newington, they're a Shepherds Bush, maybe an Ealing-Broadway or Croydon. I emerged into the neighborhoods and went exploring, finding and noting and exploiting new hotels, sneaking into movies and playing the fruit machines in the bars and casinos of Piccadilly. I could generally get in 10 or 12 pulls before I was chased off.

One day I popped out of the tube into a fairly dodgy East End neighborhood. It didn't seem a place to offer up much in the way of hustling, but I decided to go out and roam around anyway. I came upon an empty lot strewn with trash. At one end was a pile of empty beer and wine bottles. I set up a few of those bottles against a fence and gathered up a pile of rocks, 30 or so feet away, and set to mowing down Pirates. I glowered from under my brow at the bottles and shook my head. “Seaver on the mound to start the ninth, facing Stargell. He shakes off a sign, then another. He's into his windup. It's a heater — strike! Green glass exploded into the air. “0-1 to Stargell, who has a double and a pair of singles today… Seaver needs this out…

I looked over at the first baseman before winding up for that second pitch and saw three boys about my age, whispering to each other and looking worried. What was this? Eventually one split off and walked over to me. “Get fruppins femboh-ooz,” he said, or appeared to say.

“What?” I asked.

He repeated himself exactly, no help to me at all.

I shrugged helplessly. “I don't get it,” I said.

He pointed. “You boh-ooz,” he said. “Y'tykem to you shop” — he pointed down the street — “and he gie ya fruppins for each on em.”

A light dawned. “Ah,” I said. He was saying, “You can get thruppence (3d) for those bottles.” I had been smashing up cash money!

We gathered up the remaining bottles and headed to the grocers, the boys quizzing me on America the whole way. “D'yer know Elvis? … Are yer a cowboy? … Are yer rich? … D’yer hate the English?”

I assured him I loved England, and we cashed in our booty and bought KitKat bars for all, at that time a strictly English confection.

The boys, whose names are unfortunately lost to memory, and I spent the day together, roaming the streets, kicking a football around, and showing me off to their friends and families. “This here's Flynn, but he ain't no Irisher, he's an American from Call-ee-forn-ah,” they would say. “His mom don't even know where he is.”

I was taken to tea at one of their houses, and that meal I do remember — hot, sweet, milky tea; toast, bacon, jam and biscuits. I felt a right proper Englishman.

It did not escape me that I had overlooked many of these same bottles on my hotel forays. I began taking my little suitcase with me on my raids and filling it with returnables. At four bottles to the shilling, it was a rare day when I didn't pull in a pound or nearly a pound. Plenty to keep me in comics and candy.

Our stay in London was intended to be a matter of days, but stretched into four months, during which time I went completely native. I developed an accent, took my tea regularly at three, and acquired some skill at football. I could happily have stayed there forever, but in February we hovercrafted over the channel and rented a flat in Paris.

* * *

At first, life in Paris rolled along similarly to London. I immediately set out bombing around the city, scavenging and committing petty thieveries. The charm of the city for me was mainly gastronomic and embodied by two things — pomme frites and patisseries. The frites in particular. Sold on street corners in a paper cone with a little cup of mayonnaise, I learned why they are called French fries. Nobody fries like the French. And if you haven't had pastry from a French patisserie fresh from the oven early in the morning, you haven't had pastry. Even the day-old stuff beat to flinders anything I've ever eaten.

I was still making myself extremely scarce and suffering for it when I didn't. The folks had found themselves a local watering hole and spent most of their time there. But when our paths crossed Dennis generally found a reason to belabor me physically.

“Did you drink my wine, you little shit?”

Me: “I don't even like wine.” (This would change shortly). “You're a drunk — and a liar.”

Crack! “Go get me some more wine, you little shit.”

After a month or so, the atmosphere around our apartment had changed in a way that made it far more safe, interesting and profitable for me to hang around there than in the Paris streets. Apparently the bar they'd been frequenting, Le Rotonde, was a haunt of thieves, drug addicts, dealers, revolutionaries, expatriates, and assorted international rabble, most of whom started hanging out at our place. There was the Spaniard, Antonio, who took me out on raids following milkmen and fishmongers who left their deliveries at the backdoors of restaurants. Peter from Delft, who taught me poker and baccarat and the art of gambling. Sean from Belfast, who taught me how to smoke and roll joints. Abdulaziz from Algeria, who used me as a courier to transport opium and hashish around the neighborhood.

Not only was I paid well for these runs, I charged for wine runs and joint rolling, and became skilled enough at cards to generate a decent income.

I've always been adaptable and I can't deny that it gave me great pleasure to come in off the streets and be part of things. The atmosphere was wild and convivial. Dennis was defanged by the crowd and I reveled in my role as criminal protégé. I have to smile thinking of the 11-year-old me sitting there dealing cards to a group of European lowlifes, drinking wine, smoking Gauloises, tossing down my hand with a disgusted “Merde!” or gleefully raking in francs with a “Tant pis, mes amis.”

After six months in France I was reasonably fluent in the language, thoroughly criminalized, and bore little relation to the boy back on Zayante Road. I had completely missed fifth grade, spent little or no time around children, and was learning things I probably wasn't ready for. I was reading Kafka, Sartre, Voltaire, and Kierkegaard. Antonio had won me over to communism and convinced me that Franco had to go. John told me that my beloved England was the devil's own country and terrified me with tales of Block 47 and the Easter Rising.

I was a thoroughly corrupted little boy, having acquired vices and ideas it would take most people many years to amass. I was jaded, blasé, and world-weary. I was a smart-ass in several languages and had absolutely zero respect for authority. I was a drinker, a smoker (of cigarettes and pot), a curser, a thief. I spouted political slogans and revolutionary rhetoric. All of which made completely surreal our next stop: A small town smack dab in the American heartland.

Next: The Party's Over — An Ohio Adventure.

This was Part 3 of Mr. Washburne’s life story.