Jeff
here is what Jeff wrote about some of his life:
The summer of ' 75...
The War had just ended several months earlier
and I was free from the threat of the draft lottery
which had hung over my head for the whole of my high school period:
which came first the wars end or flight to Canada?.
I was of a generation in America who took for granted,
the body counts on the nightly news like we did the weather reports
(Apropos: déjà-vu modern times).
Well, school was out, war was over, summer beginning and I had just met a dream women.
Those were heady days ! What happened next????
Well, I never found a big love again in America, that came later...
I moved down to Newport Virginia for a brief time working in a shipyard.
A friend of mine had moved to Newport News, Virginia and called me to say they were hiring workers at a large shipyard there.
They were going into high-gear production of Supertankers and large scale container ships,
I worked for a month as a painters helper.
My friend and I sanded rust from the skin of an overturned hull section.
Everyday we sanded the same spot on the same hull section.
At night it would rain and as if was not roofed over it would rust a again
by the time we arrived in the morning. This went on for the entire month that I was there.
After a month we quite. The company had reclaimed a square mile of land from the river or ocean, I can’t remember. Then they hired 10,000 new body’s to work there. All sounds great!!
They forgot to buy new tools for the 10,000 new body’s working there.
As our employer was non-union they issued an order to us in the form of a gruff bark from our foreman that if a 7:00 am we had not the pneumatic tools to complete our job assignment for the day that we would be issued a warning. Our pay began at 7:00 A.M. and yet for us to pick up our required tools we would have had to stand in line at 6:00 A.M. with no pay.
As a dismissal slip usually follows a warning we acted on our own and just upped and quite.
After that I moved to Londonderry, Vermont working at one of the ski areas and living in a hut in the mountains with Brian and another boy from my town. We had our own grain mill with farm fresh milk, home made bread and buckwheat pancakes etc...
It was a good life. Cold though. At the coldest point inside our cabin when we woke up to -36 degrees.
When the winter was over I moved back to Connecticut.
I drove school buses for a couple of years. It was a funny job.
You saw the multiple personality's of age all in one day.
You had the 1St to 3rd graders who were true angel (with a bit of the devil in them to be sure)
You had the 4th graders who began to notice how cool the sixth graders were and consequently became slightly not so sweet.
You had the 5th graders who were sort of stuck in the middle.
Then you had the 6th graders who were well on the way to becoming little criminals like the high schoolers and so on...
After that I did some artwork with young (normal) children and then with young adults suffering from cerebral palsy and later working with the severely retarded.
I began scuba diving and in the attempt to train for a commercial diving career I learned welding at a night school and began to work in the nuclear submarine fabrication yard in Groton Connecticut.
After a year I got a job as a pipe welder at the Millstone nuclear power plant not far from where I grew up in Waterford Connecticut. I never did any commercial diving.
After several years I suffered a traumatic brain injury from a motorcycle accident.
I was a month in the hospital which was grounds to fire me from the nuke plant.
I had been brought into the International Brotherhood of Steamfitters and Plumbers union (a nasty bunch they are).
When I recovered I took off to work on the road so to speak.
Through the steamfitters union I worked my way down to Washington D.C. working at chemical plants, coal fired electric plants and one more nuclear facility in New Jersey.
I was practically living out of my tuck, renting rooms close to work
then moving on to the next job.
All through my twenty's I never made less that 1500-2000 dollars a week.
They say that money is not everything. Well Sister!!! that's the truth.
My soul was slowly corrupted without my knowing it. I was against the industry in which I was working. Young people should not make so much money
You could imagine the type of men I was working with, rough and wild and very macho. Seldom was a poet to be found amongst them.
My last job with the steamfitters was at Fort Belvior in Virginia.
The project was called C.E.T.A. (Computer Encrypted Topological Analysis)
which was part of the Ronald Reagan pentagon project name of "Star Wars".
Defence Department is a great pay check. When is this madness going to end Bridget?
Have we learned nothing?
When you see a scene in the movies where the NSA intelligence researcher is crouched amongst screens amidst banks of computers furiously grabbing Intel satellite photos for the next drone attack on a wedding party in Afghanistan, then you'll understand what C.E.T.A. (Computer Encrypted Topological Analysis) is all about.
By this time I was living in Washington D.C. (circa. 1984-5) sharing a house north of DuPont Circle with three Frenchies (all university students in D.C.).
Sister/brother and girlfriend of sister.
Sister and brother were the children of the chief of security for the French Embassy.
The son said the father was an ultra nationalist/fascist but I never met him.
I began work as a bike messenger and later worked for a stained glass restoration shop.
I was burnt out on life when my roommate (the brother) asked me if I wanted to go to France with him. The adventure was just beginning.
I had met a Parisian women in Washington a week before I was to go to Paris.
She was an acquaintance of my roommate, the sister.
When I got to Paris we met up and we began living together for the time I was there.
Very romantic for a young man from Flanders four corners in East Lyme, Connecticut. Kissing by the full moon under the Notre Dame. Stunning!!!
I went down to Marseilles with my roommate where he got me on to a Russian cargo ship which was in the harbour unloading. He had worked as a Harbour translator for the seamen who needed a taxi and such things and could speak no French.
I was not allowed to speak as Ronald Reagan had pumped up the cold war at this time
and certainly no Americans were allowed on a Russian ship for lunch which is what I was doing there. Borscht, Dark Russian bread, big blocks of cheese with garlic cloves which were chewed and swallowed. Plenty of Vodka.
Before I had left my mother had given me the address of some relatives in Germany.
It was news to me. I had never known such a thing before.
I first arrived from Paris in Munich and went straight to the Valley of Elmau,
not far from Garmish where the winter Olympics were held when we were kids.
Beautiful country. I began walking down an idyllic mountain valley road with my back-pack asking for Herr Mueller. Everyone pointed up to the castle Elmau at the far end of the valley which is where I wound up. My mother had never mentioned that part of the story.
It was now a castle hotel for the very rich from all over Europe (banal sub-intellectuals for the most part). I stayed for a week or so and learned to dance the Viennese Waltz.
My uncle it turns out is a Goldsmith and sculptor and his wife is also an artist in hand spun porcelain sculptures. It was a delight; in the midst of the breathtaking Bavarian Alps.
From there I wound up in Berlin. I was given the address of the best friend of one of my cousins in Munich. It turned out I had a bunch of them.
Her best friend had gone to Berlin to study Social Working at the university. After receiving her degree she began working with punks in the squatter scene and then she became one of them.
The flat I stayed in was a squatted factory with very high ceilings overlooking a river which was one of the dividing lines between east and west Berlin.
The East Berlin border guards would patrol in boats right below my window
and yet all around me were hard core punkers, students, musicians, actors, all engaged in a wild orgy of life. Berlin was a magic city in the time of the wall. The year is now 1986.
I killed two men on that day in Trenton New Jersey.
I was arrested and brought to the hospital as I was also injured.
I couldn’t remember anything. I had simply blacked out.
The case was a local sensation and it brought me a lot of attention.
I was surrounded by brilliant doctors who were all curious as to what had happened.
I soon had a great lawyer(young Irish American women) for free.
It was determined that the blackout was a result of a grand mal epileptic seizure
resultant from my prior motorcycle accident.
It has never happened again.
Fate’s a bitch. It could have happened in bed or someplace safe
and not at the wheels of a very heavy pickup truck.
I was released from the state of new Jersey and returned several more times for trial.
As I was able to prove that I had not been given prior warning by my doctor
as to the possibility of a new onset epileptic seizure:
all charges were dropped and the arresting officer
congratulated me and apologised for the arrest.
I went to a trauma counsellor for a year and then got on with my life.
I made a radio play about the event 20 years later.
Give me your address and I can send you a copy.
Now,,, back to our story
The cold War painted a surreal hue on Berlin.
Outside of being a symbol of the west in the middle of what was East Germany,
the city of West Berlin was of no practical use to anybody.
Therefor it was full to the brim with artists and musicians of all persuasion.
I was in Berlin for a few weeks when I met some people in a bar
who brought me into my first film.
Tony Curtis was filming in Berlin.
I was on the set for several days.
I had a small chit-chat with him at the coffee and food table
which was set up outside the studio.
Just a couple of Yankees a long way from home.
He was pleasant, but showing the ravages of too many years of the good life.
We did a show in Bonn a few years ago and as fate would have it Diana Ross
was our warm-up band (due to scheduling; she was still the top billing in reality).
She looked like shit. She had just gotten out of a rehab center.
She put on a great concert though.
My next film was funny.
I was brought in to construct a motorised track and motor system with another guy
which would carry subway station walls by a subway train
which had been brought into the studio.
The camera was set up inside the train cars so that on screen
it looked as though the train was actually pulling into the station.
We worked for 38 hours straight up until 2 or 3 hours before filming a 7:00 AM.
(and 18 hour days before that)
We slept in the studio and were woken up by the production team.
The director had an idea for the scene which was not in the script
(he was spontaneous that way).
He needed someone who was tired and dirty to fall asleep on the shoulder of the main actress.
She was not so happy as I was the only one on set with no makeup.
My dirt and stench were real.
I did a lot of small improvised roles in that film.
It was a musical which is much more fun to work on than and action film
Although it is fun to rig up tanker trucks to explode and such things.
I’ve worked now for many years in film, television and theatre.
It’s mostly bollux.
Everyone has such an ego, beginning with the catering guys
who wear cool sunglasses.
One of my best jobs was shortly after the wall came down.
One of the founding directors of the Royal Shakespeare Company
came to came to Berlin to produce a stage version of the Buffalo Bill show.
He bought the one of the four East German State circuses.
Our theatre piece was rehearsed and performed in a 120 foot circus tent.
We were a team of actors, lion trainers, clowns, bears, elephants, horse stuntman and women from France, circus orchestra from Poland, Tent workers from Morocco etc...
When we went on the road we were a caravan of 70 something vehicles.
It was every child dream except that I had no affinity to the circus as a child.
I came in at the beginning as technical assistant.
I knew that the director was having trouble finding more clowns
So I would do flips and summersaults every time he went by.
I got two stunt roles.
The director came into the tent one day as I was practicing being dragged across the tent-pulled from a rope by a galloping horse.
He thought it looked good and gave me a third role.
As Geronimo I would explode out of a clown car.
That was great, though I felt a sharp pain as the rope had caught me the wrong way.
My fingers were hanging at an odd angle.
I called my girlfriend who was a surgeon.
She told me to pull them straight, which I did.
I went back to work.
Ten hours later my fingers hardly fit through the door as they were so swollen.
My girlfriend picked me up and brought me to the hospital were she worked.
When I saw the exrays and thought of how I had been pulling on those same fingers,
I almost feinted.
My little finger on the left hand was broken in about five pieces and the one next to it was broken in seven pieces.
I had reset them pretty good and there was nothing left to do except give me a cast for the next twelve weeks.
As my role involved dying three time during the show in various ways
the cast fit in pretty good.
I was stabbed and scalped (a bloody toupee made for the scene), Shot with a shotgun sending me several meters sailing through the air and exploding out of my car.
Later I did a clown number in the circus with my exploding car.
I have been told that I should write my life story. I never did. It’s a lot of work.
You’ve inspired me perhaps.
That’s all for now though.
More to come:
My marriage in East Berlin before the wall came down.
Under surveillance by the East German secret police(STASI)
Bullwhip artistry and explosives
Puppetry theatre (Silent tide-look it up on Google it was our own piece)
LHPO-gas detonated, midi actuated cannons
South Asia
Music and performance projects
I met a painter East Berlin in 1986. She was a distant cousin I never knew I had.
She was talented attractive and intelligent.
I found the whole affair to be extremely exotic and erotic and intoxicating.
We lived not far from each other but as there was a wall between us
which was protected with land mines and guard towers every 100 feet or so,
automatic self triggering machine guns placed in various positions
and all watched very closely by the East German army with orders of shoot to kill,
well,,, she might have lived on the other side of the moon.
I would travel the underground train into East Berlin where I would join a long line of people going over to the other side for the day.
Some were tourists and some were Germans visiting relatives.
My passport would be taken and I would wait for a long time before receiving a day visa.
No matter what, you had to be back at the checkpoint by midnight. I was never late.
In East Berlin I would go to her apartment (in a "black taxi"-anyone with a private auto who was moonlighting) which she squatted (rent free) and which had 12 foot ceilings. We would make love, visit with friends, go to the theatre
or to the opera which was of extremely high quality and yet dirt cheap.
Everybody could afford it. Not bad.
Of course outside of spies and tourists, not many foreigners went over the wall at that time,
and tourists didn't go over but once or twice so I certainly attracted their attention.
A long cat and mouse game began.
After that I could only cross at the check point known to the world as "Check Point Charley" As this was a politically sensitive checkpoint, the border guards who staffed it were from the renowned East German Secret police known under the acronym "STASI".
I grew to respect them. They were real professionals. Proper nasty bastards they were.
The way the game played out was that I was the innocent American
visiting his East German cousin, which in fact was the truth (I would love to see my cia file).
As I was there every weekend and during the week
when I was not working in West Berlin where I lived,
I knew the guards and they knew me.
Of course they knew quite a bit more about me than I knew of them.
Sometimes they were smiley, jokey and asking me harmless questions
about how my cousin liked my gift last weekend or some such things.
Sometimes I would come in and would be escorted to a small isolation room
stripped of all possessions and grilled in detail as to as to any telephone numbers or addresses they may have found in my pockets. Then I would be left for hours at a time before I was released and issued a day visa.
They would play with all the weapons at their disposal and they had many. They would take your watch so you lost a sense of time. They would position windows in wall so that you could not see below the shoulders of the guard that you just relinquished you passport to. Then wait forever... Was he watching a computer screen with your data on it or was he looking at a confiscated playboy magazine. You never knew. Could be most unnerving after a while.
The door frames were set a centimetre off plumb at the top so that the massive wooden door would slam shut behind you with a reverberating finality which was self evident. If you were required to have an explanation for every thing in your pockets when emptied; every telephone number and every photo. Everything!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! One might find their own pockets being searched by their own hands at home where your safe and sound in an attempt to explain everything in them in a way that would not get anyone in trouble or imprisoned. Total mind control.
When I left the checkpoint to begin my journey to Lisa's apartment
I would confront 2 secret police who would accompany me on my journey.
Sometimes they got right in my face in a most aggressive way
although they never touched me or spoke to me.
As I had worked in sensitive industry in America
(Trident submarines, nuclear plants, missile defence)
they must have been quite curious about me,
I don't think they could comprehend that I was just there for such a simple thing like love.
Things like that were not on their radar scopes at the time.
The cold war was heating up once more and Ronald Reagan was quite bellicose
on the subject of freedom at the time.
As I couldn't take the mind-fuck any longer and
Lisa wanted to get out of East Germany anyway,
we applied to marry at the secret police and eventually we got the permission to do so.
By the mid 80's it was clear that if they allowed a marriage between an East German and a foreigner there was a good chance that they would let the East German out of the country
We got married in East Berlin under a big photo of Erich Honnecker
who was the East German Boss at the time. A real creep.
Really we were just boyfriend/girlfriend and were it not for the cold war
we would have remained that way.
She called me one day in Hamburg Germany where I was working
and said she was told by the Stasi that she had a release day on the coming Friday
and could I pick her up in New York.
It's a long story as to why she had to fly direct to New York
when we lived a stones throw away.
I returned to Berlin and grabbed a flight to New York.
We stayed in Connecticut for a while.
She got a scholarship to the Old Lyme Art Academy
and I went back to pipe welding.
We were saving up for a trip back to Berlin via China.
Well,,, one day we looked aghast at the tv and witnessed the fall of the wall
(which was the only reason we had gotten married in the first place).
We promptly returned... No China...
We squatted another flat lived together for another year or two and separated.
It was a once in a lifetime drama.
I'm not sure if there were any repercussions to me for
all this business behind the Iron curtain.
I was in Helsinki once and I was required to go to our Embassy to pick up a new passport. The Finish border guards would not accept mine when we came through the border
(we were performing for an event sponsored by the Finnish government); it was too dirty for them. My passport had been in my back pocket for five weeks on a small sailboat south of Singapore
and then on a mountain bike trip in Sumatra and up the Mekong Delta in Vietnam. Hey what to want!!!!
It was a travel document and I had gone traveling with it.
I though it would be a simple matter. Boy was I wrong..... I was pretty much called a spy or terrorist and sent out of the Embassy stateless. They had kept my passport and refused to give it back to me. At one point the consulate officer I was dealing with slipped fluently into German while we were speaking. Nice move. It fooled me.
I switched right into German without batting an eye. She really had me. When I realised what she had done I broke our conversation and complimented her. She now knew that I could speak German but as the english language is the official language in the Embassy that I would appreciate continuing in English. For the month I was in Finland I had no passport and did not know if I would be left behind
when our visas ran out and the rest of the team returned to Berlin without me.
I didn't feel so good.
I filed charges against the embassy and the consulate officer who took my passport. The Finish government put pressure on the embassy (I think) to settle this matter
outside of their territorial borders.
I was called back to the embassy to day before our departure date to pick up my new passport. I haven't set foot in an American embassy since.
Don't know what's in their computers about me.
I got in touch with the ACLU a few years ago to ask them what was going on.
They didn't know.
Maybe they thought I was a Russian Spy.
I'll tell you something but you must never tell anybody; I'm really not a Russian spy. Just a kid from the country in Connecticut.
Stay tuned, same time, same channel....
Jeff
P.S. do your kids know that you are romping though the internet with your old lover?