Stories from a Rearview Mirror

Stories from a Rearview Mirror

Ernest Kiss

Copyright © 2019 Ernest Kiss

All rights reserved

First Edition

NEWMAN SPRINGS PUBLISHING

320 Broad Street

Red Bank, NJ 07701

First originally published by Newman Springs Publishing 2019

ISBN 978-1-64531-439-4 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64531-440-0 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my fellow engineer coworkers, who encouraged me to write this book.

Thanks to my daughters, Vivian and Erica, for the support during the long process.

Thanks for my friends Marta, Fred, Paul, Jen, and all others who keep up their interest in my work.

And above all, let the credit go to my editors: a published author and friend, Michael Pinchot and Garrett Hazelwood from Reedsy. Without their support, this book never gets off from the drafting board.

Chapter 1

Early Years, 1948–1954

Uncle Zoltan’s Lesson on Communism

I met uncle Zoltan in 1948 when I was eight years old. He was not my real uncle but a distant relative of my mother. He was a military officer in the Hungarian army during World War II. After the war, which Hungary lost together with the Germans, he was discharged and faced hard times. He was unable to find a job until recently, as a construction worker in our small city, rebuilding the bridge across the Danube River, which was destroyed during the war. He had been hired along with many other war displaced persons. He lost his family and all their possessions during the war, agreeing to stay with us for a few months until he could stand on his feet again.

We had moved to this city a few months earlier, with me starting third grade in a new school. Everything was new, including the curriculum.

The communist had taken over the government and immediately started to teach their ideology even to very young schoolchildren.

I was eager to listen and learn, by the book and through our enthusiastic teachers, whose words portrayed communism as something wonderful, especially the simplified deceptive explication of the economic system. We’d been told that under communism, there will be no need for money because everybody can and will work in accordance with their talent and capability, and everybody will receive the goods in accordance their own needs.

This made me an instant believer in communism. My childish simple logic found it perfect. Who can dream for more? We all can study and choose a profession of our liking, and we will get everything which our eyes or mouth desires.

Usually, when I went home from school, my mother was still at work. Uncle Zoltan was home because he worked the night shift. I used to stop and talk to him for a while, and he would ask me, How was school today? I always give a short report and mostly stated that school was boring. He agreed but said that I must do it because it would prepare me for life.

However, one day I returned home from school full of enthusiasm, shouting, Uncle Zoltan, Uncle Zoltan. He was surprised to see me in this state and asked what was going on. I said, Today our teacher told us how it will be to live in a new communist society. It will be great.

Why? What is so wonderful about it? he asked.

I shared with him our teacher told us. We all can study and become what we can according to our talent. And under communism, there will no longer be a need for money because everybody will get all the goods according to their needs. Surprisingly, he did not show any enthusiasm. He turned serious and asked me, How do you think that will work in everyday life?

I answered, Just like they said. When we leave work, we stop in the stores, markets, or restaurants and take and eat what we like and go home. It’ll be that simple.

But he continued to ask questions. When you go into the stores, will there be some employees there, or will you just go in, nobody there, and take what you like?

I said, There will must be someone there to stock the selves and arrange the merchandise.

He questioned me further, What do you do if you like to have a pair of pants?

I’d go into the store and tell the employee that I need a pair of pants.

And what will the store clerk do?

He will give me a pair of pants, and I’m out of there.

Zoltan was silent for a moment before saying with a grin, No, he will not give you the pants.

I stood and shouted, But why not?

Because he looked at you and said that you don’t need a new pair of pants.

But why? I cried out loud.

Because you already have one pair.

Suddenly eerie silence felt between us. His last sentence hit me like a runaway freight train. My brain froze, and my face displayed an almost tragic-comic disbelief. My beautiful castle of cards built in my mind from the utopist communism crumble in a heap. I realized that it would not be me who defined what I want or needed; somebody else will make this decision for me. My world started to turn with me 180 degrees, leaving me dazed.

From that moment, I became, and remained, an anticommunist for the rest of my life. I also began to understand the function and importance of money. I said to myself, I don’t care if I don’t have a lot of money, but I want to be the one who decide what to buy with it. I did find capitalism a more natural system, thanks to Uncle Zoltan.

He explained this very smartly, by using the example of a simple pair of pants, because nobody goes to the street and into a store without pants, at least not then when I was a kid.

The following day in school, when I tried to explain this to the Marxist teacher, he got furious. He asked who told me this and called my whole family reactionary leftovers from the old system, which was finished and would be in history’s garbage dump. I found myself very happy to have witnessed, forty years later, which system ended up on history’s garbage dump.

Our Gang

My earliest childhood memories are connected to the Danube River. The Danube, an ever-changing living natural wonder. It sung a steady song. Never has the same tune. If you close your eyes, and just listen, it tells you what season it is. The winter tune was sharp clicking metallic one dominated by the floating ice. Then spring came, and the tune changed to a strong deep tumultuous murmur as the high waters carried the melting snow from the far away Alps. Then the summer brought friendly giggling human voices, playing and enjoying its refreshing waves under the warm rays of the sun. Then the leaves changed colors. The water level resided, and the tune became quiet, soft and melancholic. Then this cycle repeated years after years.

It was my childhood first love. A love which I was faithful throughout during my long adventurous life, more than to any friend, more than to any girl or women, more than to any ideology or religion. Since then, a lot of water flown down and the tunes are changed many times, but the love for the river stayed in my heart like an ever-burning flame.

The first time I saw the magnificent waterway was in 1948. My mother and grandmother moved to the town of Dunaföldvár, from my grandmother’s ranch in the eastern part of the country. We came by a truck and crossed the half-mile-wide river by ferry on a spring afternoon. The ferry filled in for the bridge, which was blown up three years earlier during the final weeks of the war.

The water level was high from the melting snow out of Austria. I was mesmerized by the tremendous amount of swirling muddy water, which created a constant murmuring sound. The ferry ran parallel to the rusty remnants of the steel bridge structure, sticking halfway above the water. It was during the crossing that I knew that I would be very happy living next to this wonder of nature.

The town was small, about fourteen thousand in population, with its only significance being that it was the location of the first bridge across the Danube south of Budapest, which was about sixty miles to the north. Although the bridge was out of service, its reconstruction was underway.

We settled into a house conveniently located next to the town main square. The home was owned by my grandmother’s sister, a widow of advanced age in need of care; the exchange was that my grandmother provided the necessary care of her sister.

I started school and soon acquired some friends. The childhood friendship with three of my new classmates followed me through a lifetime, although later we called home on three different continents.

My first friend was Feri (Frank). I learned from him competitiveness, the love of sports, and disciplined hard work to achieve my dreams.

Everyone called Frank Öcsi; the nickname meant little brother in Hungarian. It suited him because he had an older sister. Our friendship started in a very strange way. One day, around three o’clock in the afternoon as we walked home after school, we somehow physically bumped into each other. I don’t know who threw the first punch, but it started the longest fistfight and freestyle wrestling match of my life. Soon our nose started to bleed; then ears scratched raw. Our clothes were shredded and been covered in mud of a roadside ditch which we wrestled in.

First many students formed a half circle around us and cheered, mostly for Öcsi, because he was the local favorite, and I was the new kid in the block. Then as time wore on, only a few dedicated fans remained at ringside, which took a comic turn. Both of us run out of gas, but neither one of us wanted to accept defeat. So we grabbed each other’s clothes and tried to shake the other into submission. Even the most loyal fans became bored, hungry, and went home to eat dinner. Later, a few spectators returned to find us in the bottom of the drainage ditch, pushing our faces to the mud.

Eventually, as dusk approached, a couple of adults appeared—Öcsi’s father and my mother. With little difficulty, they pulled us apart, after which Öcsi’s dad gave us a stern verbal lesson and asked us to shake hands. We did; then suddenly, reacting to a strange impulse, we hugged each other as a way of paying tribute to our stubborn will of not wanting to accept defeat.

In that moment, a lifetime friendship was forged based on mutual admiration. When my mother took me home, she said that she was very surprised when the local bank manager, who was Öcsi’s father, knocked on her door and said, Madame, please come with me because our boys are killing each other down the street.

From that point on, we grew up like brothers and spent a lot of happy times together. We had a few close interesting adventures. Late one winter when the ice on the Danube started to move, we detected a black spot about two hundred yards from the shore. When Öcsi brought out his dad’s binocular, we quickly saw that the black spot was a cat stranded on an iceberg. We set out to fetch the poor animal. This was more of a dangerous expedition than we initially thought. However, despite the danger, we just jumped onto the ice and moved toward our objective. We had been out on the ice throughout the winter, ice-skating in more sheltered enclaves where the river froze over with a nice flat, even surface. However, now by the lift of the extra water from the melting snow, the ice began to heave and move, making the situation suddenly more dangerous. Some areas where the ice broke up formed six- to eight-feet-high icebergs. The breaking ice generated continuous eardrum-rupturing sounds. We fell down a few times as we navigated the nature-created obstacle course.

Finally, we have reached the cat; it was a large mature dark-gray male. He was half frozen and in a lethargic state. Although no clearly apparent, we were convinced that in addition to hypothermia, something else was wrong with him. Öcsi lifted him up without any resistance from the animal, then started to walk back toward the shore. As we reached about halfway, the ice broke up and started to flow downstream with the strong current. There was three- to four-feet-wide separation of open churning water between the sheets of ice. We were scared but had no other option but to jump from iceberg to iceberg. We slipped down numerous times, our hands covered with bloody cuts. We learned that we could not complete a jump while holding the cat. Therefore, we organized our jumps between the floating ice pieces by having the one to jump first be cat-free. When the first jumper landed safely, the second to jump would throw the first jumper the cat; thus, we progressed. After about a dozen jumps, we reached the last moving piece, when our hope was dashed.

We discovered that there was six to eight feet of open churning water between us and the final sheet of ice, which remained solidly affixed to the shoreline. We had no other choice but to swim. I was the better swimmer, so I had to carry the cat. I tucked him inside my coat, leaving his head exposed. Determined, I entered the water, never feeling the cold. As I took some strong strokes, I reached shore. We had to take off our clothes and wring them out before running the short distance to Öcsi’s house. We were severely reprimanded by our parents because for our irresponsible behavior. But Öcsi’s mom took the cat to the veterinarian, who determined that the poor thing was blinded by the sun reflecting off the snow, as well having hypothermia from exposure to the extreme temperature during his long stay on the ice. Happily, the cat fully recovered within two weeks, becoming an adopted family pet for many years.

Öcsi was my primary sport partner and inspiration. He was extremely competitive. His family had a canoe, a skiff, and a small motorboat used for fishing, which we used all summer long—except the fishing, which we went a few times with his dad, but he disembarked us because we did not stay still or quiet for hours doing nothing. I learned a lot of discipline and dedication from him and a lifetime love toward sports. This would serve me well in my future pursuit in a kayak-racing career. We played lot of tennis in the fall and spring and boxing in the gym on the winter. He was an exceptionally good boxer, strong and with fast reflexes. He became a local sensation at a very young age and later an international boxing champion. I did a lot of sparring with him during preparation for his fights. He had a strange career for the son of a bank director and a theatrical actress.

Our roads parted when I went to Budapest to study, until seven years later, when fate brought us together for one year in the army sports club. I was at ringside when he won his championship fight. I never felt so sure of the outcome, remembering the fierce determination displayed during our childhood marathon fight. Shortly thereafter, he retired from competitive boxing. When I asked, Why now when you are on the top of the world? he said that he did not want to live the rest of his life as a retard, unable to speak two sentences clearly, caused by brain damage from the uncountable blows to the head, like many people who spent a lifetime in the ring.

In 1995, when I visited Budapest with my family, we had a happy reunion. Then a few years later, I heard that life had dealt him a series tragic blows: he lost his mother and, a few months later, his wife to cancer. Soon thereafter, he experienced yet another tragedy: the death of his beloved German shepherd dog that he had for sixteen years.

He lived in a fashionable district in central Budapest and had a large apartment. After all of his losses, he felt depressed and lonely. He leased a part of the apartment to a young man, who later behaved in very unruly ways due to his problems with alcohol and drugs. When he tried to talk to him to curtail his bad behavior, he got violent, grabbed a kitchen knife, and killed Öcsi. I received the tragic news from my other close friend, Elmer, who had just repatriated from Australia, where he lived for forty years.

Elmer was the second of the three of my best childhood friends. I should admit he was the strangest one. Elmer introduced me to every vice I ever encountered during my younger years, and after that, it would be extremely difficult to find any new ones throughout my adult life. We had numerous disastrous and near-disastrous adventures together.

He was smart and talented, but often he acted as if he had one wheel less or more in his head. This, of course, made his behavior totally unpredictable. We have the same family name, but no relations. His given name also started with an E, causing the teachers to mix up our true identities, which almost always was detrimental to me.

Elmer’s father owned the local milk processing plant, which later the communists appropriated into state ownership, but retained him to manage it. At the time, food shortages were common; and some items like meat, butter, and milk were rationed. We teased Elmer that we should go into his father’s milk plant and drink it all up. Crazy as he was, one evening he stole the plant key from his father, and with four to five kids, we went to loot it. Well, we were able to enter the plant, but that was it—all the milk was locked up in cold storage, along with the tools in various cabinets. Sadly, he did not know where those keys were kept. Nothing edible or drinkable was left out, except one large can of half-and-half. The can was too heavy to lift and drink from, and there were no cups, spoons, or any containers left out. But our young ingenuity kicked in. The room had an electric light fixture with a screw-on type enclosed weatherproof glass lampshade. We unscrewed it, took turns, and drank generous portions of the half-and-half. It tasted good, but soon after leaving the plant, our stomachs turned upside down. We got an uncontrollable rush. Being halfway between the plant and home, there was no other option than to run for the roadside bushes.

Another time, his parents were out of town, and he invited all the guys to a party. This time, he got a hold of the key to his father’s wine cellar. There were more than a dozen kids at his house; soon everyone got stinking drunk. Then unexpectedly, his parents returned home. The kids started to jump out of the windows and run—as much as they could in their impaired state. I was one of the last to leave and was not fully drunk yet, so I tried to smooth over the situation and explain to his mother that it was not as bad as it looked. The poor lady just stood in the middle of the disaster and cried. We left Elmer with his parents and their house in shambles.

One crazy adventure was when we pissed into the chimneys at the gypsy colony; the idea was all Elmer’s. South of the town, the Danube had a tall soft sandy bank about 150 feet tall. The river carved it out over many years. Some gipsy families dug shelter tunnels into the upper section of the bank. To cook and heat during the winter, they drilled holes from the flat top of the bank and used them as chimneys. In a way, it was similar to what the Indians had built in the side of the Grand Canyon, but on a much smaller scale. One evening, we went up to the top of the tall riverbank, and we noticed various pipes sticking one to two feet out from the ground; some billowed out smoke.

As we tried to figure out what they are, Elmer suggested that the best way to find out was to piss into them. We did, and suddenly screaming and cursing erupted from the caves below. Then a band of gypsy men ran out and up to the top toward us, carrying sticks and knives. We realized that it was no longer a joke and started to run as fast as we could. But the gypsies were a formidable bunch and started to gain on us. We were very close to the lower road when we saw that one other group of young gypsies attempting to cut off our escape route. We reached the junction only a few yards before them. We kept running toward the town, chased by the now combined gypsy band. We got close to the railroad crossing and saw a freight train approaching fast. We collected all of our remaining strength and jumped across the trucks in front of the locomotive. We were saved, with the gypsies trapped on the other side of the long train. We ran into Elmer’s house, which was the closest, and lay low.

Elmer also had a strange desire to wonder off from home and school unannounced and would be gone for one to two weeks. He did not go to the big cities like many of the teenaged runaways but went out to the country, walking on dirt paths, associated with society outcasts: homeless, prostitutes, and gypsies. He hopped around the countryside, from ranch to ranch, doing odd works for food, sleeping in barns and railroad boxcars. When he ran out of options, he turned to the churches and convents, using his extensive knowledge of the Bible to impress the religious people in return for help. Then, without notice, he would return home and act like nothing happened.

Although I didn’t have the desire to maintain a close friendship with him, he was a very loyal admirer of me, and we stuck together for all the years. At seventeen, when I visited my hometown during the summer recess, I lost my virginity when he brought two girls to the country fair. He convinced them to come with him and leave their original dates, two Russian soldiers, behind. We had fun. We ate, drank, rode rides, and played games. Later in the evening on the way home, we passed one of Elmer’s father associate’s place. He had a small vineyard and kept some cows. We wanted to go home, but he insisted that we stop for a glass of homemade wine. We stopped, but no one was at home or in the vineyard. We went in anyway. He knew the place and found a couple bottles of wine. It started to get cold, and we headed for the barn, sat down in the hay, and soon things began to happen fast. Drinking, touching, kissing, then all came naturally with a little help from the girl, who was a few years older and definitely had more sexual experience then me. After, a strange feeling came over me. A myth was broken: I had sex without love. We escorted the girls home; then I split with Elmer and took a long lonely walk into the cool night, clearing my head before arriving home.

The next time I saw Elmer was a year later during spring break. Both of us attended out-of-town schools. I was in Budapest, and he was in a small town close to the Austrian border, where the country’s only milk processing technical high school was located. It appeared that the son was following in his father’s footsteps. By now, I took up kayak racing and had gone through hard indoor conditioning workout throughout the winter and just started actual on water trainings. To avoid the interruption of Easter recess, I arranged, with my coach, that I travel home by kayak and continue my daily training routine while at home. I wrote letters to my friends and advised them when I would arrive. I started out at seven o’clock in the morning and calculated about eight to nine hours trip to navigate the sixty miles downriver. I hoped to arrive no later than four in the afternoon. However, I failed to calculate the usual strong southern winds which blow throughout the region during the last weeks of lent. They started to blow around nine in the morning, and by noon they were thirty to forty miles with stronger gusts. If I stopped paddling, the wind blew the kayak backward against the current of the river. This was only the smaller problem, but the wind whipped up three-foot-high waves with four to five feet swells. Even though I have a spritz deck on my kayak, it filled up with water fast. I needed to disembark every five miles and get rid of the water. All my clothes and personal items were drenched in water. On the last thirty miles, I was the only (crazy) living soul on this section of the waterway.

Finally, half after six o’clock, I arrived. From afar I could see in the dusk one figure waiting on the shore. It was Elmer. I crawled out of the kayak dead tired. He hugged me and said that all the others had gone home, saying that he was crazy to keep waiting because in this weather, I would not come. But he told them if I said I was coming, I would come for sure. He wanted to try out my kayak. Even though I advised him to do so on other day, he insisted. I told him that it was a very narrow racing kayak, and he would fall out of it. Well, he got in one side and quickly flew out on the other. We laughed, and he said that at least he was now also as wet as me. I was deeply moved by his faith in me. I spent a good Easter week home, then on the return trip decided not to paddle upriver, packed up my kayak, and took the steamer.

Then for about five years, I didn’t hear from him. I was married and was living in Budapest when one day I accidentally ran into him at a bus stop. He invited me up to his apartment, which was no more than a rented room in a bigger unit, which he shared with another guy. To my surprise, there was only one narrow bed in the room, so I asked, How do two guys manage to sleep here?

Easy, he said. I work days, and he works nights.

That only made half a sense, but I did not inquire how they managed on the weekends when neither one was at work. At the time, Budapest had a chronic housing shortage. I myself was in the process of building an extra room onto the house of my mother, who at the time was living in her suburban home. To my surprise, Elmer offered his help on the weekends, which he did on the next five to six weeks. We worked morning to night pouring concrete, laying bricks, installing windows and doors, etc. Again, he showed his true friendship toward me.

After finishing the addition of extra room, he disappeared again. Then one day in late 1968, he visited me and said that came to say goodbye. He was moving to Australia for good in hopes of starting a new life. At the time, it was dangerous to say such things to anybody. If the authorities got wind of his desire to leave the country, they would prosecute him, and eventually anyone who had knowledge of it and failed to report to the police. According him, he had told only two persons: me and his Catholic priest.

A year later, I got a letter from him saying that he settled in Sidney and was working in a milk plant. I wrote him back shortly after I settled in California in the early ’70s. Another Elmer surprise followed six months later: he advised me that he was coming to California with his girlfriend to visit us. This time, we still lived in a small apartment in North Hollywood and wished that they would come at a later date, after we had moved into our own house, which we planned to do soon. But they came anyway, and I picked them up at the airport. We talked a lot, eventually mostly listening to Elmer’s stories. Apparently, he continued to follow his childhood lifestyle in Australia, as far as his extended escapades into the countryside, but on a much larger scale.

During his first five years in the country, he toured the entire Outback and made acutance with almost all the aborigine tribes. He also drifted into heavy drinking; he did not tell us, but we detected the effects on him. His girlfriend, who was good ten years older than him, told my wife that she had enough of him. They no longer slept in the same bed because he would piss on her while sleeping, after coming to bed drunk. He also liked to play with loaded guns when he was drunk. She also said that Elmer was arrested a couple of times by the police for drunkenness and urinating in public. The judge threw the book at him because he attended court half drunk and could not stop laughing at the judge’s wig. The judges in Australia followed the English tradition of wearing a long white curly wig in the courtroom. After a week with us, they left for San Francisco and, from there, returned to Sidney.

I did not hear from him during the following twenty years. Then in the mid-’90s suddenly came a letter advising me that he coming to Los Angeles and would like to stay with us for a week. At the time, I was married to my second wife and had just moved into a new house, which I built. Again, I picked him up from the airport. He had gray hair and was a little overweight. He fought and won his battle against alcoholism and no longer drank. He was divorced and had a twenty-year-old daughter who just married a Swiss guy, and they intended to live in Switzerland. After visiting me, he would continue to Hungary and survey the situation there, in hopes of repatriating to be closer to his daughter. This time, he behaved like a gentleman. My daughter loved his Hungarian/Australian, English accent and enjoyed his stories. No longer needing to be babysat, he took off alone every day to visit different areas of the town, but his nature remained the same throughout the years. We took him for dinner at a local Polish restaurant a couple of blocks from our home. We knew the proprietor well and introduced Elmer to him. They got along so well that Elmer spent the next four days from noon to closing time in his restaurant, sharing stories with each other. It didn’t matter where he planned to go; he always spent his day at the Polish restaurant.

After that, we kept frequent touch via phone; and about a year later, he told me that he bought an old farmhouse in the Hungarian countryside, which needed renovation, and that he would spend his retirement life there.

Then after my wife died, it was my turn to visit him. We met in the small town we spent our childhood. I drove down from Budapest in a rental car. Short on time, I tried to revisit the places of my happy childhood before meeting Elmer the following morning. We met and went to his house at the single-lane village about twenty miles from our childhood town. The house was a typical old-style Hungarian farmhouse that he had spent a lot of money and time to renovate and equip with all the modern day’s conveniences. He complained that the local tradesman overcharged him, being a foreigner who was not familiar with the local prices and wage rates. I had to admit that it came out very nice. He hoarded so much food and nonalcoholic drinks that there was enough for half the village. Crazy as he still was, he hired two prostitutes in hopes of us reliving our adventure in the barn after the country fair about half a century ago. I was not in the mood to do, so the girls were sent home unused. However, I did enjoy the specially selected gourmet food, which still tasted the same as I remembered from long ago.

Having talked until the wee hours of the morning, I woke up at eleven o’clock the following day, looking at a Soviet Russian military officer standing in the doorway. I breathed a sigh of relief as I recognized the officer was my friend Elmer. He had bought the uniform at a military surplus sale, wanting to surprise me. Then he introduced me to his neighbor, a man of our age, who was apparently a schoolmate of ours; however, I did not remember him. The neighbor had been the communist party leader in the village during the previous era. He and Elmer spent most of every day arguing over the superiority of the capitalist versus the communist system, as if they had nothing better to do. Before driving back to Budapest, Elmer filled my trunk with the leftover food.

The next, and the last, time that I saw Elmer was in Budapest in 2010. He still had the old farmhouse in the countryside but spent most of his time in the capital with his girlfriend, a female doctor, whose hobby was wine. She was the president of the Hungarian wine connoisseurs’ association and head of the jury for the official wine-tasting commission. Every year, they visited the vineries at the four to five distinct areas of the country’s wine-producing regions and rated the various products. Elmer too became one of the tasters and judges. I asked Elmer, now a self-proclaimed recovering alcoholic, how he could possibly function at such a position. He said, They prepare me a specially colored water for each kind of wine. I then lift my glass, smell its ‘aroma,’ view the wine as I turn the glass, and very officially taste, as do all the real tasters, a small amount. Then I give a little authoritative speech about the characteristics of the kind of wine I had just tasted before filling out a voting sheet rating its pluses and minuses—as simple as that. He laughed. I cannot drink even if I wanted to because we travel with a minibus, and I’m the driver. The previous few sentences fully described my friend’s true personality. No one, not even me, who knew him throughout his life, can distinguish what is real and what is fantasy in his life.

Our last evening together, we had a nice dinner together. With his girlfriend Dr. Liz being so very intelligent and knowledgeable, the conversation was very interesting. We admired each other’s knowledge and interest in various aspects of life. The morning after I flew back to California, on the long flight, I found myself wondering how a woman of her stature found Elmer an interesting partner. No, and I do not have the smallest bit of jealousy for my friend, only happiness in that he had finally found a good woman.

Then one day, I received an e-mail from Liz asking me to call Elmer because he was not well. He had lost his balance and had difficulty walking straight. She also asked that I call when she was at home because Elmer was hard of hearing and may not hear the phone. She further said that he had bouts with depression, during which he would often talk about me.

I called and tried to sound positive, hoping to pep him up. For moments, he was the old vibrating person I had known long ago and seemingly happy that I called. Then fear of the future overcame him as he expressed concern that he could no longer drive a car, which was like a death sentence for him. His adventurous self could not could not live without the freedom which driving a car provided him. Finally, he told me how much my friendship meant to him and that he always wanted to be like me. We talk almost two hours, signing off with both of us openly in tears.

Last year during my visit to Budapest, I tried to connect with him, but I only managed to talk with Liz. She tried to put Elmer on the phone, but he wasn’t in the mood to talk with anyone. Liz even offered to bring him out and have lunch somewhere so we could see each other, but he refused to go. I was sorry that I had to return without seeing him the last time. A few months later, Liz wrote me that my friend had passed away peacefully in his sleep.

Then there was Willy in the line of my best friends. From Willy I learned punctuality, organization, and discipline to handle one’s affairs at school. Our friendship survived over a half century. It started like as academic competition in elementary school. Willy was the best student in the class, except in some subjects which required logical solution, which was my specialty. I liked and excelled in geometry, the sizing of mechanical components, and calculating stress and forces. For some unexplainable reason, I can see the solution of the problem as fast as I read the question. It seemed as if I never needed learning in that area; my brain started to work on autopilot instantly. In some harder subjects, I stole the spotlight from him. However, he was the most diligent student I have ever known. When the teacher assigned us a homework for the following, he started to work on it during the next break, and his homework was finished before we left for home. I also did my homework during the breaks; however, it was during the break an hour before it required to turn it in. We both have four-point GPAs throughout our school years. However, unlike Willy, I spent little to no effort to study.

Willy was an excellent table tennis (ping-pong) player at a young age, winning countless tournaments and playing competitive ping-pong till his late sixties. We played sometimes, but he beat the hell out of me. I was never able to adjust to such a miniature game.

I spent a lot of time at his house, mostly during rainy days when we played a game called button football. The playing field was a flat tabletop. There were eleven selected polished coat buttons that represented the eleven players, like in regulation soccer. The largest button was the goalie, and the bottom half of a large matchbox served as the goal. The defenders were also larger buttons, but the offensive players were small for speed and impulse. The ball itself was a small shirt button. We even named each button from our favored players in clubs, of whom we were devoted fans. The play has certain rules. We moved the buttons by our fingernails. We can move any player with one shot; after the opposite team takes his shot and so on. The object was to hit the ball and put it to the opposite team’s matchbox goal. If you hit the opposite team’s button before hit the ball, it was a free kick, etc.

Willy’s father was a boot maker, a very good one. He got orders from people out of town. His mother was a good friend to my mother. In a way, they treated me like their own son. When, in the early 2000s, I went with Willy to see our old stomping ground, his father hugged me and said, Finally you came home. This time, his mom looked very healthy, but his dad was ailing. I was very surprised when the next year I got the news that his mom passed away, and a few months later, his dad died too. I was pleased that I had seen them before they passed.

We became closer friends when we attended the same technical high school in Budapest and became roommates in the dormitory. There, our common roots brought us together for the first two years; then I devoted more and more time to kayak racing, and we became kind of distant again. Although my commitment to kayaking lessened our face time, our friendship never wavered. I fondly cherish the countless times that he saved my dinner from the cafeteria, which was closed when I returned from the evening training sessions. I quickly got used to eating cold goulash for dinner. Time went fast. No sooner had I eaten the cold dinner, I would rise at 5:00 a.m. and travel via a cold winter tram at dawn to the swimming pool to start a new day of fitness training. When I returned from training, he just woke up and looked at my wet hair that had frozen over ice due to the long ride home on the open tram platform. I remember he received new pajamas for Christmas. They had very colorful Japanese motives, so I named him the emperor’s little grandson.

But as much as he was the model student who never did any wrong, he still had the devil inside him when it came to women. Once we came home by train late on a Sunday evening from the city. Each railcar had a conductor who punched holes on the tickets. It happened that the conductor was a good-looking young woman. When she asked Willy’s ticket, he handed it over and, in a high voice, said, Ms. Conductor, please give me a big hole. The woman got annoyed and tried to give him a lesson about manners, how to publicly address ladies who were simply doing their job. She then turned around and returned to her seat in the front section of the car. My friend then said in a loud voice, Now you see, she just sat down on the big hole. There were only a few passengers at this late hour, but they all laughed loudly. The woman got red-faced and switched cars at the next stop.

After high school, we studied at the same university too. After graduating, he stayed on as an assistant professor for the remainder of his working life, eventually becoming the professor of the railroad machinery faculty. He worked until age seventy-five.

We reconnected after the communist system failed and visited regularly during my European trips. I usually spent the last night before my departure at his apartment, which was very conveniently located on the way to the airport. We used to talk of old times till the wee hours of the morning. A couple years ago, I visited him at the university during the final exams for the semester. I was surprised that a good old custom, to bring a present for the professor, was still observed, as I saw the packages and bottles accumulated on his desk. It was late afternoon; the exams were over. So he opened a bottle of Johnny Walker as the deacon of the university stuck his head into the office. Willy introduced me as alumni, and we talked while sampling from the array of bottles.

Willy spoke about my Arabian experiences, sharing what he had done during the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, when Saddam’s forces set fire of the oil wells. Willy designed a very innovative piece of equipment which was very effective in extinguishing the raging oil-well fires. His invention used leftover Soviet military hardware. He removed the gun from a T55 tank’s turret and replaced it with a jet engine from a MIG fighter. This equipment provided protection against the heat for the operator, allowing him to drive up very close to the well on fire. When positioned, he would ignite the jet engine, and the high-velocity exhaust would blow the well fire out like we blow out candles. It was way more efficient than the American Red Adair’s bulldozer and dynamite-based method. I then shared that I had designed the safety and control system for the Sea Island terminal at Kuwait, which Saddam’s troops had misused to release the crude oil into the gulf. Small world, isn’t it? Our discussion went well into the evening, with all three of us getting drunk enough not to attempt driving home or to the hotel; we all called taxis.

Willy was also very active in organizing our high school reunions. Recently, he forwarded to me my golden diploma issued by our old technical high school for the fiftieth anniversary of our graduation. I looked it and asked myself, where did the time go?

Kucug was an orphan. His grandfather raised him and also taught him a respectable trade. The old man was a master cabinetmaker. His workshop was adjacent to his house, and Kucug was his apprentice. He was about four years older than me, and I really never found out why he chose me to be his close friend over more guys his own age. Maybe it was because I was fascinated with his dream occupation: he was seriously preparing to be a professional bank robber. The other boys laughed at him and brushed the idea away like a crazy childish dream. But I listened to every word he spoke on the subject and soon realized that he was very good and meticulous at preparing for every possible scenario. He never intended to use violence. His method was to be smart, quick, and stylistic: beat all security and safety protection devices, get into the safe undiscovered, empty it, and leave everything else as he found it.

He has an extensive collection of locks and an old large German-made heavy-safe leftover from the war. That was his training equipment. From him I learned how to open the safe without knowing the combination, by listening to and feeling the clicks. I also became experienced on how to open almost any kind of mechanical lock by a pair of hairpins. He taught me how to look for hidden trip devices, some electrical, some mechanic. Probably this early exposure set me up for my professional occupation in becoming one on the prominent, internationally recognized safety/security and control system design engineer for large industrial plants worldwide. He also talked about how careful he must be when preparing for an operation: do not leave fingerprints, footprints; never write any note by hand or typewriter; one must assume that everything is traceable. He claimed that the best way to message is to use the cut-and-paste method from old newspapers only. He showed me how to exercise one’s hands to be flexible and sensitive to perform lock-opening procedures and how to climb up and down to upper stories of buildings and open windows from the outside. This all was new and fascinating for me. He made it seem like a highly technical game, not a crime.

I also got some training about woodwork, and I especially liked to make inlays. I fondly remember making a nice jewelry box for my mother for her birthday.

His house was the closest to mine and on the way to the river, so many afternoons, I waited for him in the shop to finish his daily chores, and we would go to the river together. Usually when I went with him, we did not take the bridge but swam across, holding up our clothes in one hand. We could do it because, after me, he was the second-best swimmer in our gang. He also was excellent in various sports. He was a very good-looking guy: tall, slender, but muscular. He had a face of an angel reflecting pure innocence and was crowned with thick natural platinum-blond hair. He could also pose with the best manners. He taught me how important it is to be very presentable and elegant, in the event you got into trouble and needed to talk your way out of it. He definitely was an expert in these, and he was our gang’s elected spokesman, in case we got into trouble. He saved our hides many times.

The last time I saw him was at his eighteenth birthday party. Years later, I heard his story during the days of the 1956 Hungarian revolution. He was captured during a protest in the early days of the revolution and beaten by the secret police. Then the anticommunist revolutionaries freed him, and he joined them. He was in the center of the fight in the so-called Corvin ally. I have a photo of his group in a book issued for the fiftieth anniversary of the revolution. The same photo also appeared earlier in the communist issued white book and was used to track down the fugitive revolutionaries. Tall and blond, he stood out, holding a machine gun and standing next to a beautiful young girl. Later, after the defeat of the revolution, she was sentenced to death by the communist regime. Soon thereafter, her sentence was commuted to life to prison. Eventually, she was set free and became an elected representative of Hungary in the European parliament. After the fall of the revolution, Kucug successfully escaped to the West and immigrated to Australia.

Many years later, after Elmer also went to Australia, I received sad news from him. Our Kucug was with a gang that robbed a bank, with one of the guards being shot to death. They were captured, sentenced to death, and executed. He never advocated violence, and he never killed anyone. After all these years, it still saddens me when I think about this. But I elected to keep the young idealist Kucug, whom I knew so long ago, in my memories.

Riti, two years my senior, was not a real member of our gang, but he often got together with us. And because he and Kucug were the only two who had money, they often picked up the tab in an ice-cream parlor or a movie. He was the eldest son of an automobile and motorcycle mechanic, whose shop was our neighbor from the backyard. After school in the afternoons, I just used to climb over the back fence and hang around with him in the repair shop till my mother called me home for dinner. We became friends, and I learned from him everything about cars and motorcycles. Literally, I knew all about engines, transmissions, two- and four-stroke motorbikes.

After spending four years in technical high school and five years in university, I became a mechanical engineer, specializing in the design of motor vehicles. Sadly, I did not learn much more about the practical aspects of the industry than I knew as a fourteen-year-old. Only the theories of design and sizing various engines were new to me.

After the war, there were few private cars in Hungary, but there was a multitude of motorbikes of all types and makes: German Zündapps, BMWs, NSUs, English Nortons, BSAs and Triumphs, Italian Moto Guzzis, Austrian Pucks, Czech Jawas, Hungarian Csepels, and even a few older American Indians and Harley-Davidsons. Many had sidecars, which was very popular at the time, allowing the motorbike to function as the family car.

At first, I only helped out Riti, who already worked in his father’s shop with full accreditation. He gave me simpler tasks, like removing wheels, brakes, fuel tanks, etc. Later I disassembled engines and replaced faulty or broken parts. Within a few months, I became a junior member of the team and did my own work from problem diagnostic to repair and tryouts. I was proud to earn their trust. After that, his father started to pay me every week, not directly but to my mother. According to him, she knew better what I needed than I did.

The fun part was trying out the repaired motorbikes. Due to my age, they would not let me ride alone on the street, but I could go around the large backyard. It was easy with the lighter bikes, but once I rode a heavy Harley and slid out of balance on a turn. I hurt my leg a little, which I did not admit, but one of the Harley’s footrest was bent. I had to take it to the blacksmith for straightening, then to a plating shop for rechroming. The old man did not charge me for it. For the longer street tryouts, I sat behind Riti for a reason; he was extremely shortsighted and had very thick glasses, which his ego did not allow him to wear. So when we reached the main road, he asked me to look out and tell him if anything was coming.

Yes, I said, a big truck.

How far is it?

Looking back to these episodes, I saw the difference between a thirteen-year-old’s and a full-grown man’s judgment/logic. If I was twenty, I would never sit behind him under any circumstances. But the good Lord helps the innocent and we survived it all. But I still ran into a few problems. Once, we had a problem with starting a motor. I sprayed some starter fluid into the carburetor; at the same time, Riti activated the starter. The engine backfired, and my hand, wet from the starter fluid, caught on fire. I ran across the yard and put my hand into a barrel of rainwater. It was a bad mistake because when I pulled my hand out, it was all puffed up with steam-packed pockets under my skin. It was my right hand; it took two months before I regained its use. I had to learn to write and draw with my left hand at school. When my right hand was healthy enough to use, a very strange thing happened: I returned to using my right hand for writing immediately, but I kept drawing with my left hand even until today.

Riti also pulled a few practical jokes on me. With my friend Öcsi and me being very big admirers of the natural lifestyle, we slept all year round in our open porch. I used an army bed with thick blankets in the winter. I used to dress down in the house then run out and jump in the bed and get under the blankets. Once during a cold evening, Riti took the trouble to install an abandoned laundry sink into my bed, filled it up with rainwater, and carefully covered it with the blankets. Around ten o’clock, I was ready to go to bed, so I ran out to the dark porch and jumped into the sink full of cold water. Not a good experience.

I also learned from them how to handle firearms, both hunting rifles and revolvers. His father was a devoted hunter as a serious hobby and did gunsmith works on the side. That was a little tricky at the times, for after the communist took over the government, they introduced very strict gun-control laws. Many of the guns he had worked on were illegal. We used to try them out in the backyard, having to be careful because their left-side neighbor was the local police, and the right was the synagogue. We masked the noise from the gunfire by running three to four motors with badly adjusted timing, causing them to backfire and make chaotic loud explosion-type noises. Regardless, somebody, probably an unsatisfied customer, reported it to the police, and Riti’s dad was arrested and put into prison. This put Riti in a very hard situation, for at age sixteen, he had to run the shop and care for his mother and young brother. I was already in Budapest when I heard that he been released after having spent three years in prison.

A few months later when I returned for Easter holiday, he was in good spirits and looked like everything had returned to normal. He was glad to see me and even joked when he asked, What is the news at Budapest? Do they hang communists yet? We laughed it off, never thinking that a year later, it would become a serious reality during the revolution. I visited them again after I got my first car, an NSU Prinz, a small air-cooled rear-engine German car, similar to Volkswagen but with a more stylish body. NSU does not exist today; it became Audi.

Then there was a long pause in my visits after I left to the US. I could not return for twenty years, until after the communist system failed. I visited them again at the time when I visited Elmer, who just repatriated from Australia. Riti lived separately by now. He had married and now was divorced. Apparently, his wife couldn’t accept his dedication more to motors and cars than to her. We talked of old times. I politely avoided asking about his dad. I simply assumed he had passed away long ago since he would be over ninety years old by now. My biggest surprise came when Elmer asked how the newlyweds were doing. At first, I thought that he was inquiring of Riti’s son or daughter. My jaw dropped when I heard that his ninety-two-year-old father married a fifty-year-old woman the previous year. Well, when you hear that, you have heard it all. One never knows what is coming next.

Finally, there was Jani. He was four years my senior, and we did not consider him as a member of our gang but rather a mentor. In some ways, he was an older version of Willy: an exceptional student and an outstanding sportsman. I never figured out why he fancied me as a friend, just like Kucug, since both were, to put it politely, out of my league. Matter of fact, the other guys were a little jealous that he kind of took me under his wing and tried to teach me discipline, the importance of planning and preparation for life. For me, growing up without a father, this older guy filled in some void. He came from a very poor family and was a half gypsy from his mother’s side. Regardless, their small house, located close to the area where the gypsies lived, was impeccably clean. The house was always packed with kids from the neighborhood listening to Jani, who, by smartly scripted plays, gave us lessons for important things in the life ahead of us. Sometimes he simply read precious selections from world-famous literary classics.

As hard as I try to recollect memories from any pranks we had done together, I cannot come up with any. We played ball games, mostly soccer in the neighboring fields; and when the tennis court was free, he taught me how to play the demanding game. He himself was a talented athlete, and in track and field, for a few years, he held the national record in the 110 meters high hurdles, which is a