‘Sir, can I talk to you?’
The raggedy man on the subway platform is just about to show me his arm. The latter is bandaged and doubtless contains a tale of woe. But as I am becoming city-hardened and always feel particularly vulnerable in my sedentary battery-powered state…I feel cynical and not inclined to respond. Within me two truths are clashing. One is that if you have trouble with your arm, or trouble keeping needles out of your arm, San Francisco’s network of social services…however badly frayed…can offer some help. Second, even if this man is conning me, he’s got problems. Something is wrong. Some screw is loose. A little money won’t hurt him. Giving a little won’t hurt me. Still, all I say, pointing at the arriving train is ‘that’s going to the airport.’ It isn’t, and the man points to a timetable on the pillar to our right. Thanks, I say, as though any of this matters. I roll on board. Next stop, Glen Park.
For three minutes I face a homeless man two seats away. On this rainy November day, he is likely on board for shelter. The man has what is probably a deep tan, and not from afternoons on the beach. He has been sleeping rough. Too much of the not-so-great outdoors. The man is wearing a chartreuse and white tracksuit. These are clothes nobody wants. He is living a life nobody wants. And nobody wants to acknowledge how big a picture of American reality this man represents.
Leo Litwak taught me creative writing 45 years ago at San Francisco State University. And it is one of the great bits of luck in my life that he is still around and I am back in San Francisco. And we are more or less in the same neighborhood. Like everything in this city of high taxes and high services, San Francisco’s public libraries are a treasure. The Noe Valley branch has a reading group. And at yesterday’s monthly meeting Leo was our guest. His book ‘The Medic’ is one of the finest works of nonfiction I know. As the library group’s book-of-the-month selection…well, it couldn’t have come at a better time. I am starting the rewrite of my own memoir. I had a second chance to read and contemplate Leo’s masterly book.
And then, there he was at the front door of our local library. At 93, Leo uses a walker. I watched as for a moment he regarded a very tall flight of stairs. I ushered him into a room on the ground floor. Where 20 of us waited. A good turnout. I was relieved. Leo’s book and his live appearance, well, it was all my idea. Everyone had enjoyed the book. Some had loved it. Everyone had questions.
Leo’s book recounts the last months of World War II. He was a medic at the front. The norms of war, such as they were, had begun to fall apart. Just left everyone exposed. Whatever values, assumptions, habits, customs the youthful Americans had brought with them gradually came to the fore. Everything was unexpected. Rules no longer applied.
As the war neared its end, the Germans drafted anyone who could breathe into their army. 14-year-olds. 80-year-olds. When the American soldiers saw something moving in a distant trench, somehow they failed to see the white flag…in the hands of an old man, somewhere in his 70s. They opened fire. The surrendering man fell and Leo, a medic, rushed to his aid. There was nothing to be done. The wounds were mortal. In Leo’s book, he recounts how the dying man looked up at his Red Cross helmet and muttered ‘vater, vater.’ The man was calling him father, thinking he was a priest.
The moment is poignant enough in the book. But live before our library group, Leo could barely talk about it. Tears rose in his eyes. He asked for a tissue. No, he told us, he couldn’t talk about the incident any more. We moved on. But the book involves many other deaths. And Leo couldn’t talk about those either. More than 70 years after the experience, Leo was still present, his humanity utterly intact. I steered the conversation around related books. The Siegfried Line. Philip Roth. Leo was looking tired. It was time to wrap things up. Everyone had been very moved. ‘Thank you for your service,’ one of the library group observed. Don’t, Leo replied. Wars are full of noble sentiments, he added. Our meeting was over.
I had asked Leo a few of my own writerly questions. How does one find action in a memoir? How does one handle issues of plot and pacing? Leo said he didn’t really know. These were his biggest challenges. But once the evening was over, none of this mattered. Leo had shown me everything I needed to know about writing a memoir. That human consciousness is painful. Forgetting, or avoiding, is not only easy but natural. That recalling things means reliving them, frequently. That retaining your humanity, remaining a mench, is everything.