Pola Negri

Many years ago, twenty to be exact, my mother and I travelled by car to Northern California with my Uncle Zippy. Zippy was 87 at the time. Always easy to remember his age as he was born in 1900. My son Henry was born in 2000 and is likewise easy to compute. We drove south on I-5 to Grants Pass where we headed west to the Redwood Highway. As we passed through the Redwoods, my mom bought one of those bears carved from a log. Zippy really liked it. It sat outside of the window next to his chair for the next several years.
A quick and dirty family history lesson: Zippy was my grandfather's older brother. They came to America from Greece when they were teenagers and later sent for their parents and sister. Even though they went through Ellis Island on the same day, my grandfather Kostas Kampras was given the name Charles Kampras while his older brother, Uncle Zippy born Panayotis Kampras, was given the name Peter Cambras. I grew up listening to stories about Uncle Pete that lived Back East. There was a photo of them together taken on one of the trips my grandparents made on the Greyhound after they retired. My grandfather was a very snappy dresser, he bought only the best. He was the raconteur of the family. I have a set of his headshots from the Twenties when he was trying to break into the movies. They're pretty awesome, he's got a few looks going: The Leading Man, The Gangster, The Gatsby and The Immigrant. In his old age he had a thick silvery pompadour and a silver moustache. He was slim and although only 5'7'' he always seemed very tall. Uncle Pete was a different story. He had a round head with a few strings of hair. I always thought he looked like a cat. Come to think of it, in my childhood dreams my grandfather was often a big cat. I always thought he looked like a lion. By the way, it's extremely difficult to edit all of the memories that are flooding me as I write. So in the photo there's my grampa, the suave gentleman I loved beyond anything, and his legendary brother. Except Pete doesn't look so impressive. He was kind of roly-poly and wore very loud mismatched plaids. I later learned his lack of sartorial savvy was not only part of his charm, but the result of his very practical frugality that was to benefit me for the remainder of my life.
After my grandfather died in 1979, my mom really wanted to go see Pete and his wife, Aunt Julia. She hadn't seen them since she was a little girl. My mother moved from Hartford to Portland in the early 1950s. So we went back there to visit these very old people that we didn't really know. They lived in a three family house in the Blackrock section of Bridgeport, what was once a lively comunity of immigrant factory workers. By the 70s it was very blighted. It was my first trip Back East, as I learned to think of the East Coast from my grandparents. My first impression as we drove from JFK up through the Bronx to I-95 was basically piles of garbage, fallen buildings and stripped cars, some of them on fire. When we went to Manhattan later in the week, there were crazy people everywhere that would just come up to you and start talking or yelling. I was terrified, but felt strangely at home. My aunt and uncle were very set in their ways and didn't know what to do with us. Pete loved baseball, especially the Mets, and that quickly won me over at age eleven. We talked a lot about baseball while we played gin for hours on end. We went back for visits when I was fifteen and eighteen. Aunt Julia died just after my last visit to Bridgeport. They never had any children, so my mother went to Connecticut to help her uncle. He was going to go into a nursing home, but my mother wouldn't let that happen. She brought him home to Portland. For that he called her Mrs. Calabash. Pete had a gift for bestowing nicknames. Back in the early days of television, Jimmy Durante closed his show by saying, "Goodnight Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are." Legend has it that the real "Mrs. Calabash" was a lady that Jimmy took a liking to because she made him feel at home on his travels.

Back to the Redwoods and the bear. Uncle Pete named her Pola after Pola Negri, the silent film star, who coincidentally, and unbeknownst to us at the time, died earlier that very month. I would say, "It's not a polar bear, Uncle. And he would say, "Not Pola Bear, Pola Negri." He had a charming way of speaking that made me want him to repeat things. He was old and his false teeth were loose in his mouth. Even htough he had been in America for seventy-some years his English was very accented and stilted. Whenever I brought a girl to the house, he always muted the television, leaned forward in his chair and took her hand in his. Oh how I loved the feel of his hands! You could hear him getting his teeth right in his mouth. Then he would clear his throat before he said, "Doll, you are the most beautiful girl my sonny boy has ever brought to meet me. Take good care of him, he's a good boy." Then when they would leave the room, he would whisper, "Bring em back alive, sonny!" He said the same thing every time. Once he gave me some advice. He said I was too much like my grandfather. Whenever he spoke about my grandfater he would say, "Charlie, my brother, your grandfather ..." as if I needed the clarification. He told me, "I see the girls you bring to meet me, sonny. They seem like nice girls, but they're trouble. Too much time in the looking glass and not enough in the kitchen. Your Aunt Julia was an ugly woman, but she was a good woman. In those days you wanted a woman that had the cherry. The girls Charlie, my brother, your grandfather was with, they didn't have it. They said they did, but they were lying. When Julia told me she had the cherry I believed her and she took good care of me until the day she died. Remember that."
I drove to San Francisco this past Sunday. I thought a lot about the many trips I took back in the late 80s, early 90s on that same road. I didn't enjoy the scenery in the same way back then. I was too distracted by the all those girls that liked the looking glass. Nor did I wear polarized sunglasses which make it all look so much better.

nc