Here’s a sneak peak at a chapter, one that’s a bit eerie and quirky, from Hardship Alaska, my memoir coming soon from Epicenter Press about serving out my alternative service as a conscientious objector in the wilds of Alaska during the Vietnam War.
I somehow fell into the company of an odd group of men. Their oddity only came to light when I found myself hanging with them in the basement apartment of a plump middle-aged man who resembled a character out of a Dickens’ novel, the kind you should most likely avoid; not like a Fagin, but more like a Bumble or Sowerberry. Housing in Anchorage was expensive and to find someplace cheap meant settling for shared, cramped and often dismal spaces, like this windowless basement room in someone’s private home. He wore a cape… all the time. When he pulled it closed around his tumescent middle you could see the sloppy spattered remnants of a recent meal’s bolus that had dribbled down the garment’s front. The stains reminded me of the food-soiled commoners or scholars gowns worn by Princeton students in a dining hall I stumbled into by accident one evening while wandering the campus in the late sixties. His two companions, now that I look back, were perhaps more concerning, in that they never seemed to question the Capeman’s ideas or actions. They reminded me of henchmen following their boss’s orders in carrying out some shady scheme.
I must have met this crew a few months after arriving in Alaska when I was still working in emergency shelters and adolescent group homes for kids in crisis, my Selective Service alternative work assignment, before my time working with the people of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in June 1971. I say this because, once I found myself involved with the church, my circle of friends seemed to improve. More than likely I came to know these men after attending a community theater performance, which they were either acting in or patrons of, maybe it was in January. They seemed to take an interest in me for some reason—I don’t remember if I was being flirtatious or merely looking lost—after the performance had ended and while attending a small meet-and-greet with the cast and crew. We were chatting about the Anchorage theater scene when the Capeman suggested we continue our conversation in a more private setting as the building we were in was about to close for the night. I followed them back to the Capeman’s apartment. I missed that part of my life and thought that becoming active in community theater again would be good for me, something to help remedy the long darkness of the Alaskan winter and the emotional stress I’d accumulate each day while working at one of the city’s emergency shelters or group homes. Maybe befriending these three would give me a better chance at joining the company. But once I got to the Capeman’s apartment, things turned weird.
These three believed they were reincarnated friends and relatives of Beethoven and divinely brought together to finish writing his Tenth Symphony, a work that Beethoven had begun composing prior to his death but never completed. When they were talking to me about this project in the Capeman’s cluttered one-room, dungeon-like basement apartment, they mumbled something about the Curse of the Ninth. The long-forgotten rumor was most likely spread by Gustav Mahler about how a handful of Romantic era composers had died once they had finished writing a ninth symphony. Turns out it was all fabricated by Mahler. He was obsessed with the idea and even seemed to believe it. After he composed his eighth symphony and before starting his ninth, Mahler decided to write a symphonic-like work for two singers and orchestra, Das Lied von der Erde, thinking he’d be able to out smart the curse. The opus was to be a decoy to distract the curse. When it was completed, he then wrote his ninth symphony. He died anyway while composing his tenth.
At any rate, the trio exposed their outrageous plot to me around a small wobbly coffee table surrounded by stacks of books, piles of classical records, discarded clothes and a random assortment of junk, all while sipping glasses of cheap sherry and nibbling on stale Ritz crackers. The Capeman said they’d been waiting for me to join them as the missing link they needed in order to realize a finished Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony. I had never met these three before, so found it unfathomable that they’d been waiting specifically for me. I think anyone that they would have encountered that night in the theater’s lobby, and who had the misfortune of following them home, would have heard the same tale. They thought I was the reincarnated spirit of Karl van Beethoven, the composer’s nephew, who Beethoven fought over in a contentious custody battle with his brother’s widow. I knew the story, having read the account in a Beethoven biography while a student at Westminster Choir College.
And although my mother occasionally talked about being reincarnated, I’m not sure I was ready to believe that line of thinking just yet. I do recall during my early twenties, however, of having a recurring dream, a nightmare really, of living in Vienna in the mid-1840s and waking up at the exact moment I was about to cross a street and be crushed to death by a quick-paced horse-drawn streetcar. But I didn’t think I was Karl in that dream. He died in 1851 from liver disease not from a tram accident.
With Karl supposedly residing in my body, the trio felt they’d have the power to reach out to the maestro himself, who would then feed the needed musical notes to the Capeman, or rather me as the musician in the room, from the great beyond, capturing fragments of leitmotifs in what sounded to me as an unlikely Ouija-like dictation process.
One part of me, the small crazy part, was flattered, even though I wondered why Ludwig himself hadn’t opted to invade my body. The rest of me was scared out of my mind as I scanned the room for an exit, hoping desperately that the only door in the room was unlocked. I eyed the door with its concealed narrow staircase hiding behind it and waited for a lull in the conversation in order to make my escape. The lull arrived and I offered my thanks to the Capeman and his little friends for their hospitality and a no thanks to the offer of helping them, stating strongly, “I am not Karl!”, and bolted out the door, up the stairs and into the bleak midwinter’s night and freedom.
As I drove back to my apartment, I heard my mother’s familiar warning about strangers in a strange land and how she worried that I’d be cannibalized when I least expected it. I considered finding an exorcist to cleanse my soul, but instead decided that maybe community theater wasn’t what I needed in my life right then.
