LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter 4

      Your Father’s Mustache was a bar in the Cambridge area and was populated heavily with students from the various Boston colleges. The owners had embarked on pursuing the current trend of showing old movies. Tonight’s features were Little Caesar with Edward G. Robinson and Public Enemy with Jimmy Cagney. The atmosphere was just as informal as in the old days. Customers would sample the free peanuts and throw the shells on the floor. The movies were funny to all of them, but Craine was really roaring at the imitations of the people with whom he had actually rubbed elbows. His son, Randi, and Molly ribbed him about several lines, particularly Jimmy’s line about his brother, “Goin’ to school to loin how to be dumb.” They all had a good laugh about that. Corlando’s wife, LeBere was getting on the chunky side and was teased a lot about it. Randi whispered to Molly and Liana about it; after the movies, when a karaoke was held, all three girls got on stage wearing white tee shirts they had in their handbags and started to sing a song from South Pacific. They rang out with, “A hundred and one tons of fun. That’s my little honey bun. Look at all the fun me and Honey have.” LeBere was not to be out done. She got up on stage and belted out with, “My is a crazy chick; 6 feet tall and a quarter inch thick.” They all laughed and hugged, about them emphasizing a Yiddish accent, only one of which was fake. Michael and Moses.

      Now it was the guys’ turn. Tyndall and Moses got up and sang Sweet Molly Malone, both played She’ll be Comin’ Round the Mountain on a wash basin and a harmonica, while Pat yodeled it and Corlando danced to it, wearing a tutu. LeBere ran up on the stage and pinched him on his thigh. He limped off stage and screamed, “By God, she crippled me, did my Little Honey Bun.”

      Their mirth was cut short by three bruisers teasing a little oriental fellow, who appeared to be having the shakes. They heard: “Look at the little Gook. Couldn’t win the war he picked with us at Pearl Harbor, so he comes here, lives off of us on Welfare because of a gimpy leg, then has the nerve to become a junkie. Let’s teach him we don’t appreciate losers and beggars.” They started shoving him and slamming him against the wall. One of them reared back his fist to give him a haymaker, when Tyndall and Moses picked him up in the air and threw him in the street. He got up to face McTavish and Craine. Craine threw him back down, and McTavish stepped on his neck. The other two had to face Brython, Mendel, and Michael. They did not move a muscle. “Little Gook, is it. They used to call me Little Jew boy. Care to try that one?” piped in Moses. He added, “Get your bigoted arses out of here while we give you the chance.” They picked themselves up and ran, as fast as they could. The group picked up the oriental and took him home and helped him clean up. They found out his name was Ki Lond. He was the first born in this country to Jimi Lond, who had immigrated to America when the militarists seized power in Japan. Jimi had used his last money to buy into a shoe store and wanted to prove to the Westerners that he was a loyal American. His effort was rewarded by a Nisei camp. He died there and asked his oldest son to show his loyalty to his new home. Ki joined the Marines and fought on Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal. He was horrified that he had to shoot at people that had taken refuge in caves and had no food, but they would commit Hara Kari because of the shame of surrender. He saw an officer do this to himself, but he was not allowed to register any sympathy for him to his American buddies because they’d see him as a traitor. That would be breaking his promise to his father. He was haunted by the picture of the officer’s suicide that kept coming up in his dreams.

      After the war, he wandered around Asia plagued by the recurrent vision and found that opium could provide relief. He wandered from Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal to Okinawa to Japan to China to Burma to India to Afghanistan with the faces of the officer gutting himself plaguing his vision day and night for two years after the war and his father’s image extracting a promise from him he could not keep. He also saw the pleading eyes of the Japanese soldiers emerging from the caves, as he shot them. Ki stowed away on a ship, heading for San Francisco. He wandered around the states smoking and shooting up drugs to blot out his pain until he reached the point of only wanting the drug and forgetting what he wanted to relieve. From city to city and state to state he became an object of ridicule and abuse until that night in Cambridge. Craine and Rodin got him into a rehabilitation program, had constant contact with his counselors and doctors, and closely monitored his progress for a year until they were sure he was clean. Then Corlando hired him as a chauffeur, handyman, and gardener. This later proved to be a wise investment in a human being.