Charles Rammelkamp: History, Politics, and People

 The Crud  

 My mother called him “the crud,”
 my brother’s friend Alan.
 I’m not sure what she had against him,
 besides his lack of ambition –
 she was a schoolteacher, after all –
 Alan destined to work 
 in one of the steel factories
 after graduating from high school –
 at least until the steel factories all closed.
  
 The Crud loved cars.
 He could tell you the make and model and year
 of anything with four wheels and an engine,
 sported decals of hotrods and muscle cars
 all over his school folders.
  
 He did speak vaguely 
 of “joining the service,”
 as his older brother had,
 then having all his teeth pulled,
 dentures installed in their place,
 the stubby twisted teeth in his mouth,
 a source of private anguish.
  
 When my brother mentioned to their friends
 our mother called Alan “the crud,”
 the nickname stuck, 
 but only behind his back.
 Everybody referred to Alan as “the Crud.”
 Initially offended, hurt, Alan soon embraced it,
 wore the sobriquet like a badge,
 though still, nobody called him
 “the Crud” to his face.
  
 Sometimes I wish I knew
 what became of the Crud
 after I left home,
 but never enough to try to find out.  
 
 Ribbensnob  

 “The little champagne salesman,”
 Hitler’s dismissive nickname for von Ribbentrop,
 his Foreign Minister,
 whose college friends had teased as “Ribbensnob,”
 a man whose savoir faire gave him
 entrée around the world –
 at least until everybody but Argentina
 shunned the German government –
 a tennis player, an iceskater, 
 his old-fashioned manners and elegance intimidated.
  
 But he’d begun his career importing champagne –
 Mumm and Pommery from Reims –
 before becoming der Fuhrer’s yes-man, enabler.
 If Hitler said “grey,” the common knowledge went,
 Ribbentrop would encourage, “black, black, black!”
  
 A teacher recalled Joaquim
 “the worst student in class,
 full of vanity and very pushy.”
  
 Hitler finally tired of him,
 despite Ribbentrop’s enthusiasm for his master.
 Even after his conviction at Nuremberg –
 crimes against humanity and other charges –
 he remained loyal to Hitler,
 who’d already committed suicide.
 “Even with all I know,” he averred in prison,
 if in this cell Hitler should come to me
 and say, ‘Do this!’
 I would still do it.”
  
 The first of ten men hanged on an October day in 1946 –
 Goring having committed suicide before his scheduled execution –
 ascending the thirteen steps to the gallows
 he uttered his final words: “God protect Germany.”  
 
 Trumplandia  

 We sailed into the Birch Run exit
 like a leaky catamaran,
 the Service Engine Now light
 pulsing like a migraine on the dashboard.
  
 After checking into a motel,
 calling Triple-A as if tossing out a lifeline,
 locating likely local repair shops –
 Sunday afternoon, all businesses closed –
  
 we went to dinner 
 at Oscar and Joey’s Roadhouse, 
 a nearby bar, trophy kills – deer, 
 elk, moose – mounted on the walls.
  
 “Went into limp mode,” the guy
 at the table next to us nodded
 when we told him about our car problems.
 He named a garage we could try.
  
 “A Nissan?” he frowned, disapproving.
 “Used to work at GM in Flint
 until they shut down the plant
 more’n fifteen years ago now.
  
 “Now I drive down to Chrysler
 in Detroit, every day, 
 a hundred and six miles there,
 a hundred and six miles back.
  
 “Why don’t I move?
 I just ain’t a city boy.
 ’Sides, I got my farm up here.
 Okay, sorry about you folks’ car.”
  
 When he got up, he pointed
 to the stuffed bear next to the bar,
 rearing up on its hind legs, 
 Canadian flags behind its ears.
  
 “Missy shot that up in Canada,”
 he indicated the waitress with a jerk of his head.
 “She says the best part was
 her husband didn’t shoot nothin’.”    
  
 The Plot Against America  

 That semester at the community college,
 we taught Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America
 in our Intro to Literature classes.
 Mina and I shared an office,
 both of us adjuncts in the English Department.
  
 She told me she’d compared the novel,
 in which Charles Lindbergh, a Nazi
 sympathizer, is elected president,
 to the Trump administration:
 the persecution of minorities
 (Jews instead of immigrants and Muslims),
 the attacks on the free press,
 an authoritarian con man in the Oval Office.
 Her students, unable or unwilling 
 to see the similarities, thought 
 she just had an ax to grind,
 still hadn’t gotten over the election.
  
 I remembered Professor Wilson,
 my Elizabethan Lit. professor
 when I was a college student,
 talking about all the sex symbols
 in Spenser and Shakespeare.
 Billy Dooley, in the desk next to mine,
 wondered in whisper if Wilson wasn’t
 getting any sex at home.
  
 “They don’t think Trump’s ‘presidential,’”
 Mina clarified, “but
 they aren’t scared out of their wits, either.”    
 
 Noir  

 Nancy could have kicked herself for her indiscretion,
 mentioning to her boyfriend Sonny
 the old guy at the bank, Mister Hughes,
 one of the regular Tuesday customers,
 inviting her out to lunch last week.
  
 It had been an innocent date,
 Mister Hughes old as her grandfather,
 a delightful meal in a posh restaurant
 she’d never have been able 
 to afford on her own.
  
 “We can use this to our advantage,”
 Sonny said, eyeballs like cherries
 rolling in a slot machine
 to a sensational jackpot.
 “A lonely old guy
 sniffing after the young stuff.”
  
 “It’s not like that!” Nancy protested.
 “He’s just a sweet old man.
 Leave him alone, Sonny!”
  
 “Riiiiight,” Sonny replied,
 the calculations still spinning in his eyes. 
   

Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review. A chapbook of poems, Jack Tar’s Lady Parts, is available from Main Street Rag Publishing. Another poetry chapbook, Me and Sal Paradise, was recently published by FutureCycle Press. An e-chapbook has also recently been published online Time Is on My Side (yes it is) –http://poetscoop.org/manuscrip/Time%20Is%20on%20My%20Side%20FREE.pdf Charles Rammelkamp once arm-wrestled Sonny Liston in a bar in East Saint Louis.