Farewell Clop with Ivars
Ivars said it would be hard to find a decent weekend clop in a city as “where-yuz-from” as Tacoma, but we decided to give it a try since his time at Fort Lewis was running out.
He said wryly that he was packing his peculiar vocabulary with his uniforms for his transfer to Vietnam. “Where-yuz-from” was his slang for a nowhere place, first thing kids with nothing to do, hanging around corner stores in Philadelphia, said to a stranger in the neighborhood. “Clop” was his term for adventure, based on the opening scene in an early TV detective series, Boston Blackie, in which an anonymous man in a trench coat walked rapidly through a night city, heels ringing on the cobblestones.
So we donned our Hollywood shades and our white clop-coats and headed for Tacoma. His was a genuine London Fog raincoat that he always folded carefully in restaurants, label out, and mine was a knockoff from a PX in Germany. Both of us stood 6’2 and weighed right at 200 pounds in those long-gone days and resembled big Bobbsey Twins in our look-alike outfits. Katzenjeimer Kids was more like it.
When we got to the Tacoma Greyhound Station, he spotted some sleazy-looking kids hanging around the entrance, and told me they were looking to score some dope. I would have given them a pass, but not Ivars. He marched right up to them and in his best Latvian-Pennsylvania Dutch growl wanted to know where the action was. The kids said they’d show us. Against my better judgment we wound up in the back seat of one of their tarted-up cars driving to some suburban neighborhood, where beneath a couple of street lights another gang of young hoods waited tensely, their faces lost in shadow.
“What the hell is this?” Ivars growled. But I knew: it was a rumble waiting to happen.
Our hosts piled out and squared up. I didn’t want to get out of the car, but Ivars was out before I could say anything, striding toward the opposing force, clop coat swishing around his long legs, laughing insanely.
“Where are the girls?” he demanded roughly. ”Dammit, we’re looking for girls.”
Oh brother. I got out of the car and stood with my hands in my coat pockets. Maybe they would think I was armed. I heard the kids ask if he had dope. I heard the scorn in his reply. Our hosts shifted nervously, looking between the other gang and his face-shoving act. I couldn’t hear everything. But abruptly the other kids were dispersing, getting into parked cars, leaving. Ivars marched back, got in the car like a commanding general, and said, “Shit, that was a waste of time. Let’s go find some girls.”
These kids were not accustomed to being pushed around; they were sullen and I still expected trouble. But they didn’t know how to deal with Ivars’ bald contempt. In the end, we wound up back at the bus station and they were glad to be rid of us.
“Losers,” Ivars said. “Perfect for this where-yuz-from town. When you put this in your damned notebook put it under ‘Clop for a Lost Weekend.’ Let’s get a drink.”
We got several. The night crawled by and they kicked us and everybody out at closing time. We nearly picked up two women who were leaving a cabaret across the street by asking for a lift. They said they had to drive up the street to turn around, and must have come to their senses and kept right on going. We took a local hotel room to sleep it off and woke up in time to watch a televised basketball game he wanted to see, between the 76ers and the Knicks.
By then I was hungry enough to risk my unsettled stomach and Ivars had a headache, so we found a buffet in walking distance and ate a lot. The little waitress who had our table poured us over ten cups of coffee apiece, which was just right for the two hours we sat there recovering.
Ivars was in a contemplative mood, and began to tell a little of his life history. He was born in Riga when Latvia was occupied by Nazi armies. When the Soviets counterattacked while he was still very young, many citizens of Riga — including his parents — chose the Reich over the USSR. They fled toward Berlin.
He had a fragmentary memory of a bridge across some river, his mother running with him in her arms, while overhead the Soviet air came down on them to strafe and bomb.
His first cohesive memories were of air-raid alarms in the night, bombs raining down on Berlin, urgent whispers of the grownups about the crumbling of German armies in the east and west, and that the Russians and Americans were coming, advancing on their final objective, Berlin. Of terrifying concussions from the bombs, explosion after explosion, debris showering down. And of lifeless ruins everywhere; in the shadow-land of his memory they were uniformly gray and sterile and dead.
He said the family photo albums are full of pre-war and early-war shots: Ivars and his playmates standing among smiling military men in crisp German uniforms. Neighbors, he said, home on leave from France, from Africa, from the Russian Front. One by one, they stopped coming home.
All families have stories about their children, told and retold into something like legend: the family story about Ivars is that, as a tiny toddler, he marched straight up the first American infantry he saw in the street and soberly executed a classic Nazi salute and said “Heil Hitler!”
The Americans placed his family in a DP camp in Wurzburg. Eventually they were sent to Pennsylvania for resettlement since they couldn’t go home again. His parents had run their own clothing store in Riga, attended Paris fashion shows and been fairly well-to-do. The only work they were given was as field hands for Quaker farmers. He said the Quakers were harsh taskmasters.
From that final dead-end they struggled into more accommodating professions — his mother selling clothes and his father riding armored cars as a shotgun guard. Now years later, his mother still working, his father had descended into the shadows of senility, and Ivars was tagged for the 41st Artillery, scheduled for Vietnam in August. He would get a home leave before he had to report, and was to leave for home in a matter of days.
