Greek-Town, San Francisco, World War II; The World Shuddered, Demetrius K. Toteras (from Bitter Tears); A Great Greek Writer

The World Shuddered, from Bitter Tears, by Demetrius K. Toteras

  Demetrius K. Toteras ©2012

posted with permission of  Nine Muses Press, Occidental, California,

 and ©2012, the Estate of D. K. Toteras

Contact:

Nine Muses Press, , P.O. Box 1138, Occidental, California 95465

Introductory Note

The World Shuddered is the fourth of 27 sections or chapters of the fascinating, unpublished work,

  Bitter Tears, A Fictionalized Account of My Korean War Trauma. by D. K. Toteras. This section deals with the dimensions of modern war, and its impact on Greek members
of the population of San Francisco, and their sense of cultural identity.

I first met Demetrius Toteras on the Greek island of Corfu (the island from which his family hailed), 50 years ago this month, in December 1967. We kept in regular contact all his life. With the permission of his widow and family, I aim to post some representative sections from this extraordinary work, concentrating on Toteras' early experiences (very lightly fictionalized), as a Greek American growing up in San Francisco's Greek Town. D. K. Toteras is the author of the brilliant and intensely poetic prison play, Sunday They'll Make Me A Saint*. He left behind many other works in manuscript and type-script, and it is my hope that they will gradually see the light of day. With many thanks to Bronwen.

 I hope that by posting some sample sections, publishers, academics and interested readers will call for Bitter Tears and other important works by Toteras to be published, at long last.

D. K. Toteras fought in the Korean War, having signed up under-age. He was captured and became a prisoner-of-war. He died in California on Thursday 12 November, 2009.

Before that:

The World Shuddered

The World War brought great changes to Greektown. The Greeks that stayed behind and didn't go to war were either too old or had families. All the illegals were rounded up by the immigration and given the alternative, join the army and become a citizen or go to jail for illegal entry. Greektown was filled with skasti (illegally absconded) Greek merchant sailors who jumped ship at some Pacific Coast port.

The life of a Greek sailor in those days meant nothing. A Greek ship owner wanting to turn over a quick profit usually bought a ship that was ready to come apart, put a good insurance on it, registered the ship under a Panamanian flag and waited for the ship to go down in a storm or blow the rivets off the main boilers under high steam pressure.

If the owner couldn't wait for the inevitabilities to take place, he would help the situation along by making a deal with a willing captain to scuttle at three hundred fathoms of ocean. Deep enough and far out enough so the crew, if lucky, could get back again. The most favoured place to scuttle was off the coast of South America. The captain's pay-off was a cargo he could sell quickly on the black market, a cargo of cigarettes inbound and guana bird droppings outbound.   

Every Greek had a story of how he got here, and every sailor a horror story. An able bodied seaman's pay was 10 dollars a month and it was held by the ship's owner till the ship tied up at its home port in Greece. This didn't stop the sailors from jumping ship in South American or preferably U.S ports. Ships would lose half of their crews on a 2 to 3 year cruise. Buenos Aires, Santiago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle were the jump off  points. On the beach would be Greek labor contractors waiting to put the broke sailors to work, with a third of the sailor's pay going into the contractor's pocket.

One of the labour contractors, John B., considered himself a decent, fair Greek. "I find the poor devils, I take them home with me, I give them a bed to sleep in, a meal, and then I find them work." For the sailors and the illegals, the business of keeping the money began all over again.

"Where are they going to go?" K. told my father one day. "They're broke when they get here and the contractors keep them broke." So when the great nation of the United States said ‘Join the army and become legal’, it also meant ‘Join the army and get rid of the contractors’. Thousands of illegals joined throughout the United States.

"I pledge allegiance, yes sir!" A quick salute and thousands of young Greeks became G.I. Joe, and along with the illegals, the first generation Greeks born here in the United States joined up.

In Greektown, Mrs. M. had the first gold star in her window. Her youngest boy was lost on the cruiser Los Angeles. "I thought fate would take care of him on his ship," she told my mother after the Naval officer had come to her door one fine, foggy morning dressed in his black uniform, gold bands on his cuffs, his white cap with a gold braid glistening in the doorway on 339 T. street. He explained to her in perfect English, standing at attention in her doorway with a posture that only an officer can have, a military look that says ‘Be proud he died for his country’, and handed her a golden star to hang on her window; but the poor woman, H. said, could not understand him.  If he’d had tears in his eyes, she would have known immediately what his toneless words meant, but H. had to translate the cold English words that poured into her ears like hot molten lead. 

"Oh God," she cried. Grief, she told my mother one day, the kind that comes and never leaves. "I have been wearing black almost all my life and all of them have gone to the depths of the sea." Her brothers had drowned and a year later her father, Capetanios Spiros, in his own caique, 2 miles off the coast of Corfu. He went down in a raging mistral wind.

"My father, with 3 of my nephews, who were working on his caique as moutsoi (cabin boys, inexperienced sailors)… You would think that God…," she stopped, and made her sign of the Cross. "There is no use to raise the name of God and to blaspheme him, now that my boy's soul needs to enter Hades. Charon has taken him to the land of the dead, Hades. I swore when I got married that I would never marry a seaman. Someone had cursed my family, so I married a cook and my son became a sailor." Her pain shrieked from within her soul, the agony that comes when one realizes the horror of his life for a moment. One sees the absurdity of existence, life that hangs on a thread. Life as the Greek always says, is an illusion, and death is the permanent reality.

The wearing of the black is the color of mourning to the memory of the dead. The dead must be remembered. They were part of our lives now. They become part of our memories. They sit with us when we eat. They are there when we need them. The world of the dead can't be seen with the eyes. They can only be felt with the soul. To the memory of the dead women dress in black and mourn the dead.

The gold stars kept appearing on the windows of Greektown and the church was having a mnimosino (memorial service) every Sunday, in remembrance of the dead. Relatives were dying in Greece at the hands of the German occupation. Starvation, disease and war dead amounted to over 500,000. Dead misery struck every house in Greektown. There were no letters from Greece and no one knew if their families were alive or dead. Mothers, grandmothers, fathers, children, cousins, uncles, who was alive? No one knew for sure. One day there were hopes, and the next day grief, that all had died.

My mother would go to church daily and light the big 25 cent white candles in front of the icon of Saint Constantinos and Eleni. At home in her bedroom she had, on her ikonostasio (icon or prayer corner), the silver and gold icon of Saint Spyridon, the patron saint of Corfu. She lit a red oil dish in front of the saint and prayed, "Save us, Oh Holy Saint, from the barbarian hordes that have fallen on us."

The streets from Howard to Townsend were becoming a winos’ paradise. Soldiers, sailors, marines, dockhands from the China and India docks were spending their money on the Third Street dives. Mornings on Third Street, the smell of wine and urine, the smell of roasting lamb oozing up from ovens of the Greek restaurants, all of it mixed with the cold fog, the sound of children going to school, old men shuffling past laid-out drunks, push carts filled with oranges. Gus' fruit wagon filled with oranges, pulled by his old bay horse Johnny; saloons, Big Nick's Frisco Bar, Jimmie's place, The Phinika coffee house, the grand  restaurant Minerva with its blue and white front. A sailor missing his white hat passed out in front of Chris P.'s grocery store, the 15 street car clanking its way up Third Street.

This was the South of Market. This is the place Jack London called the slot. East West, from Third to Seventh Street. North South, Market Street to the China Basin, you were in Greek Town. There was once a Greektown just like there was a Chinatown. Up on Petrero Hill the Slovaks and bohunkers lived, Dagos' town up at North Beach, the Maltese in the Bayview, Paddy Hill at the Noe where the Irish lived…enclaves where English was the second spoken language.

The South of Market an area with old wooden two-and-three storey walk-ups that had survived the 1906 fire. Streets with names like Tehema, Lucy, Clara, Mina. Streets that once housed the Irish, the Germans and now you could hear Greek being spoken though the narrow streets along with the slurred English of the drunken street life.

War was bitter for the ones who fought it. For the ones that stayed behind - heaven rewarded them in the safety and pleasures of money - and what ever it could buy. All the bars and saloons in San Francisco were raking in the plunder of war. The city was filled with men going to war; they might never come back again and the only way to make yourself brave enough to do it was to find a woman and a bottle of booze.

Where they were going, money was of no concern. A drunken sailor blew his last dime on a glass of watered Rosé and the city provided whatever was necessary for its fighting men. At night one could see the Salvation army rescue gang descend upon the passed-out drunks and cart them off to the Harbor Light shelter on the Embarcadero, then turn them loose at daybreak. The shore patrol hauled the sailors back to their ships; soldiers went to the military police barracks at the Mission Bay freight yards where the Southern Pacific Railroad provided all the facilities for the troop movement and what was left on the street was reshuffled in the door ways by 9 PM.

Chew-tabakia was what the Greeks called the winos. On Howard Street the trademark and custom of winos in those days to chew tobacco and swallow the tobacco juice along with the help of a slug of cheap sneaky pete (homemade alcohol). This cranked them up to the level of a “2 bit glow”, the kind uptown people had. It was the magic elixir, that extra something to get them through the day, and by night time they had passed out dead to the world. Drawn by the smell of unwashed flesh and fermented grape juice, the flies crawled in and out of their gaping mouths while they dreamed of kingdoms and places they had once been. Muscadooloo Joe…a bottle of Muscatel in his coat pocket…and the month had 32 days in it, the year 1,000. What day was it? No one cared. Time was figured on the street by the bottle…how long it took to get it…how long it took to drink it. Nothing else took place, no other problem existed, no world other than the dream world made of fumes of wine.

It was a time in history when the sober world shuddered in the totality of the world war. As if everyone in his own way was trying to destroy that which he was capable of destroying ... the world like some wounded beast was rolling over on its side... a world frenzy that circled the globe like a cloud of doom with one thought in mind with one devoted purpose with one end in view and all the pieces fitted together so logically that everyone supported the destruction of mankind. 

The battles were becoming operatic productions larger and greater than life. The great actors of the time, like the actors of the ancient tragedies, replayed the war...and made themselves self sacrificing heroes for the maddening throngs standing in line ...waiting to enter the plush-carpeted dream palaces just as the Fox 20th Century on 10th and Market took the place of the ancient amphitheatre to recreate the original reproduction of the destruction of the world for the patrons on the big silver screen.

I remember its bigness…its beauty…its awfulness. I had to look at exaggeration backwards in front of a wall which never stood out, like the drabness of a gray concrete wall.

Everyone and everything was affected by the war of the 40's. Words with large meanings were used. The world was becoming familiar with bigness like at no other time in history.

Bigness, like every word that it touches, pushes itself beyond human understanding. Everything was Big. Men were recruited and drafted in the millions, tanks and planes were made in the thousands. More effort was called upon to feed bigness...things were made in days and destroyed in seconds.

The Americans were placed in a reminder mode…of their needed effort toward the great war. Food was plentiful but it was rationed to make one think that there is suffering in the world. Ration stamps were issued to remind one of the effort that war creates, the sacrifices and the needs that are ever present. Blue stamps, red stamps, everything you bought had a stamp value stuck to it. If you didn't have them you went without or dealt in the black market. If you were caught, you went to jail. Food…gas…shoes…coffee...had stamp values. The caramel colored Muscatel and all the wines that California could produce found their way into the war effort that was going on down at Third Street in San Francisco.

Before we went to sleep we would recite the prayer that every Greek child knows, "Oh God, I lay down to sleep and my weapons are laid beside me. Teach me to be brave and not to fear the death that approaches." 

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From the film

*From the foreword to Sunday They’ll Make Me a Saint, a play by Demetrius K. Toteras:

“In the course of thirty-five years of involvement with international writers from many cultures and countries, no work has made a more lasting impact on me than Toteras’ Sunday They’ll Make Me a Saint. I first read The Saint in 1968, and it has never become dated. It had a profoundly liberating effect then, as it does today. The Saint is a study of confinement which takes us into strange worlds without signposts, worlds beyond reason and logic. The language is one of constant inventiveness and the writing is full of original imagery. I believe Toteras is one of the most important voices of the English-speaking Greek Diaspora. This includes those Greeks who “dispersed” overseas to participate in the cultural and economic development of colonies, to trade, or who were refugees from poverty and political upheaval. In Toteras’ case, he found himself in tough circumstances, a Greek-American who grew up amongst the poverty of African-Americans, who fought in the Korean War and was a prisoner-of-war in his teens. His language reflects this background. It has the direct vitality and oral immediacy of the street, but his mother-tongue and further study of pre-classical and classical Greek gives his work extraordinary dimensions and philosophical resonances. Toteras also inherited the Greeks’ natural propensity for theatre and drama, including the heroic vision of self and the acceptance of death as a heroic act rather than as an inevitable event. In a lonely cell Toteras creates a 'theatre of the mind'. As you read The Saint you may say, “What is going on here?” Read it as a dramatic poem. Read it as a study of confinement. Read it as theatre of the mind. Read it to yourself out loud… Once you have read it, the experience will mark you. Perhaps we all need to experience confinement, even without bars, in order to become truly creative, free and human. I invite you to lock yourself in Toteras’ prison cell and participate in the canonization of the Patron Saint of Criminals and Men of the Night.

JAMES POTTS


Contents and Synopsis of Bitter Tears 

Bitter Tears, A Fictionalized Account of my Korean War Trauma Demetrius K. Toteras ©2012 Table of Contents/Synopsis Introduction........................................................................... Prologue................................................................................ 1. The Bus Station............................................................... 2. The Georgia Hotel........................................................... 3. Yet It Was Only Last Summer......................................... 4. The World Shuddered...................................................... 5. The Drunken King............................................................ 6. OXI.................................................................................... 7. Blasphemy...................................................................... 8. Enlistment...................................................................... 9. I Made My Mama Cry....................................................... 10. Fort Ord......................................................................... 11. Babs.............................................................................. 12. The Gambler.................................................................. 13. The Rule Book............................................................... 14. From Camp Stoneman to the MATS Patrick................... 15. Saipan............................................................................ 16. The Golden Days of Occupation.................................... 17. On the Road to Pusan..................................................... 18. Taejon............................................................................ 19. The Hills of Osan............................................................ 20. The Battle of Osan.......................................................... 21. The Battle of Pyonteak Bridge....................................... 22. Retreat........................................................................... 23. Captured........................................................................ 24. Friends in a Foreign Land.............................................. 25. The Burning of Taejon.................................................. 26. Kill................................................................................ 27. Epilogue........................................................................ From The Nut Festival "Let me just stop here for a moment," I told Jimbo,    "Can the meaning of it all be only to amuse and be amused?      Can't there be more in life than just the role      of an animated occurrence of events?" "I wrote the passages the way they came to me while I was in prison looking at the stone walls around me, looking at the same faces that crossed my path day in and day out, long drawn faces filled with the fading hate that men hold onto in order to live... Now is this possible to understand? Understand the nothingness of death?" See also, the following posting: D. K. Toteras, A Twenty-Year-Old Letter on the Meaning of Hellenism and On Being a Corfiot Mandoukiotis