Kissing Hitler

This is an essay I wrote for a nonfiction class last year. I like it, so I thought I'd post it here.

Kissing Hitler


I’ve dreamed, more than once, that I am deeply in love with Saddam Hussein. Sometimes, he drives up to my house in an armored Hummer, honks the horn, and yells in broken English for me to hurry my ass up. He can be rude like that, but it doesn’t mean anything.
Sometimes he’s my executioner. He’s come to kill me, but he can’t put a bullet in my brain so he slides a diamond ring on my finger. He knows I must die, but he can’t do it himself—he orders it done, and I love him for it.
Every once in a while, he’s both Saddam Hussein and Satan—these are my favorite times with him. His legions of demons do menial work for me, sing Mozart when I ask them, and paint, paint, paint (because Hell was so drab before I lived there). I can’t understand a word that SS (Sadam Satan) says, but his moustache twitches so bewitchingly that I smile, nod, and kiss his ringed hands.
I wake forlorn and aching from these dreams. In those first few waking seconds, I miss him—his combat boots laced tightly, his neatly ironed Middle Eastern military uniform,
his Byronic eyes. Then I remember that my dream lover is a mass-murdering deposed dictator and wonder what that says about me.

I took a course titled “Representations of the Holocaust in Art, Film, and Media” my junior year of college. The professor warned us beforehand, saying, “If you have any mental issues, or feel that you are or have the potential to be mentally unstable, drop this class now.” I didn’t drop the class, though I was taking antidepressants and felt emotionally
detached from life. Representations of the Holocaust had little to do with the actual Holocaust, and I thought it was slightly obscene that we should be studying genocide from the comfort of the Turner Arts Center, air conditioned, cushioned, dimly lighted. I felt I was beyond the immediacy of horror that comes with the first recognition of evil. Hitler was long-dead, his images all in black and white; Poland was over four thousand miles away. Birches and rowan and wildflowers now grow from the remains of the invisible six million.
I wasn’t beyond it. Many nights during that semester, I woke up terrified and sweating. I dreamed I was a Jew being sent to a concentration camp. Nazis tore me from my mother’s arms and threw me into the back of a truck with other screaming young women. I remember kneeling by my own newly dug grave, waiting for a shot to fire. At the time, I couldn’t separate reality from the dream—for a few seconds, I forgot that I couldn’t possibly be dead, or dying, or under Nazi control. I smelled something sharp and sulfurous; I turned my head and saw a teenager kneeling next to me, eyes clenched shut and calling for her mother.


Schutzstaffel: SS, runic lightning zigzags on black lapels, red swastika-ed armbands. Hugo Boss designed those uniforms in 1932, and you can buy reproductions of them online.
The world’s sexiest men have donned the SS uniform: Harrison Ford sported one in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade; David Duchovny wore one in an episode of The X Files titled “The Triangle.” Blurring the line between real and imagined, neither actor portrayed a Nazi officer; both men did, however, beat up Nazi officers to steal the uniforms they wear. They must disguise themselves for the greater good; this knowledge allows us to separate the negative symbolism of the uniform from the primal reaction we have when we see them; for good or bad, these men look hot in SS black and gray.


My grandmother was born in 1938, the year of Kristallnacht. She grew up in Chicago, watched her cadet father, Thomas Parsche, drink, and her homemaker mother Catherine bear the drinking with resignation. Her grandfather was a renowned physician, and though he might have been disappointed by Tom’s failure to follow in his footsteps, the pride of his West Point graduation and subsequent invitation to play the trumpet at Herbert Hoover’s inauguration made his son’s choice seem more credible.
They were good German stock, echt deutsch, the Parsches, descended from Schmidts and Schellenbergs, and until the end of World War II, made much of their Bavarian roots. They denounced Tom’s marriage to a second-generation Swede named Catherine Jacobsen. Who was this poor Scandinavian immigrant to marry their son, they wondered, so they shunned her, pretended the marriage had never occurred.
My grandmother, whose mother called her Mare, had no idea of the grandeur of her father’s old life; she saw him only as a handsome, frightening man who drank his salary away, who complained that he might have been a doctor, if he’d listened to his father. He yelled, taunted, criticized, whipped, but never touched her with his hands. She hated him. She wished he would die.
When she was seven years old, in 1945, he did.

By the time she was forty-five, my grandmother had married and divorced twice, lost her home and most of her personal belongings, and endured a series of electroshock treatments that dimmed her hallucinations but left her sick and weak. Having nowhere else to go, she came to stay with us in Fort Lewis, Washington, in 1985. I was three; my sister’s birth was four months away. My mother, her eldest daughter, was alone: my Army father had been stationed in Korea, leaving her with a hyperactive stepson, a daughter with a penchant for putting peanut butter in the VCR, and a bipolar mother.
When Dad returned, I didn’t know him—any man in a camouflage uniform resembled Daddy. My mother had to point him out, and as I performed cartwheels for him, my parents kissed and mom said, “Frankie’s testicles haven’t dropped.”
“He’ll have to have surgery.”
“I love you. I’m so glad you’re home.”
More kissing, more tears, then:
“My mother thinks you’re Satan.”
No one remembers how my father responded. No one knows why or how Grandma got this idea into her head. One night she came home, certain that a second Star of Bethlehem was shining above our house. My sister, newly born, and I were angels, and my mustached father in his BDUs was the Devil, there to suck the souls from our little bodies before crunching on our bones. She had to save us.
We never found out what this salvation might have entailed. My mother grew alarmed at her mother’s hallucinations, worried that one day she’d come home to find her children drowned, but saved.
One afternoon (I remember the fluorescent kitchen lights—they were unbearably bright) grandma made gingersnaps that would prove to be as hard as stone. Someone knocked at the door. My mother opened it. Two men in white coats stood at the step. Though I’m sure they said many official things, I remember nothing but silence as they each took a bony elbow and dragged—gingerly—my struggling grandmother backwards towards their van. That was the last time I saw her.
In 1996, my grandmother lived with her sister in Arizona. They had argued, and she huffed out to wander the Tucson streets. Sometime during that chilly November night in which the stars shined so brightly, she grew tired, lay down in an abandoned parking lot, and died. It didn’t take them long to find her there, her back curved, her head bowed, her arms and legs curled in a fetal position.

When I was four years old, I used to watch my father dress in the morning for physical training. At 4:30 a.m. he put on his fatigues, his Army-issued green T-shirt and his daily-polished combat boots. He laced them so carefully; I was impressed because I didn’t know how to tie my shoes yet. He stood so tall above me; he wore his fatigues with martial authority—he exuded authority. When I was six, he boarded the school bus to “have a talk” with the bus driver, who had tapped me on the rear for singing “The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round.” I scuttled to the back of the bus as my father said, “If you ever touch my daughter again, I’ll kill you,”—he was omnipotent, my dark-haired father with his groomed mustache and wire-rimmed glasses. He might as well have been God.
Dad is a recovered alcoholic. The past couple of months I’ve had nightmares in which he starts drinking again, though he hasn’t touched a drop since I was nine months old. (It was then that the divorce from his first wife Sheila was finalized and he was able to make an honest woman out of my mother). He’s always been the best of fathers, the best of men. Often when he was a first sergeant, he brought home young soldiers who had no family or friends, so they wouldn’t be so lonely; when I was in college, he drove all the way to Waco, Texas to pick me up when my car broke down on the way back from a Rufus Wainwright concert; he sold an old car he coveted so that he could give me the five hundred dollars I needed to correct my negative bank account. When I think of reasons why I have those nightmares about him drinking, I remember the few nights I’ve ever seen my father act violently towards somebody he loved.
One night, when I was nine years old, my father, frustrated, anxious, pondering military retirement, beginning a new life doing something else, had enough of my mother’s “bitching.” I was in my room, reading in bed, when I heard her scream. I ran out into the living room—my dad had her by the throat, was pinning her with his grip against the wall. A teenager my dad had rescued from the streets was staying with us that month; he had watched his own mother being beaten to death by his father, and he called 911. The police came, but by then my father had calmed down.
One summer my half-brother Frankie brought home a bullet casing he found on the street. My father, furious at Frankie’s carelessness, told him to go to his room. Told him he’d be there in a minute to punish him, using a method he called “the nutcracker.” I listened as my dad closed the door; I listened as I heard Frankie scream, heard thuds against the wall, heard slams and crashes. Part of me thought that Dad must be fabricating these noises, to fool us into believing he was punishing Frankie, so he wouldn’t lose face. But he wasn’t. He was beating Frankie. I made myself believe Frankie deserved everything he got, because my father never laid a hand, except in love, on my sister or me.

Later that year, he acquired a white ’45 Chevrolet. The paint was peeling and the engine sputtered when it ran, but he was proud that he had restored it to working order, and invited me for a drive. While he negotiated sharp turns and fiddled with the radio, I became certain that he was going to kill me. He wore a white wife-beater; his arms were so muscular, so red from years of too much sun. I was afraid of them. Afraid of him. I knew what he was about to do, knew he would pull over into the pine trees, put those hands against my throat and strangle me. I wanted to go home. He sang “King of the Road” as he drove. He offered me a Butterfinger. I wanted out of the car. I wanted my mother.

These dangerous, powerful, mustached men I would have control me, order me, love me—why? When my father shaved off his moustache, I sobbed. I laughed when Saddam Hussein proposed to me—how ludicrous to be a fourth wife!
I fear the night I dream of Nazis again, with their guns, their streamlined uniforms and Totenkopf trimmed hats. I dread the night I dream I love the SS officer who puts a gun to my head and pulls the trigger. I know that dream will come.

Then I will be Unity Mitford, a blonde English teenager who spends her “year abroad” befriending Hitler; I’ll be Magda Goebbels reading books on reincarnation; I’ll be Eva Braun on her wedding day, on her death day, dancing with dozens of uniformed men before I entomb myself with Hitler and bite down on the cyanide capsule. I’ll wear a black silk dress; put my arms around him; ask him to call me Frau Hitler, and then hide my head on his chest so the world becomes a blur of red and black.