Hollywood Animal by Joe Eszterhas

rubber band inside their panties. They were also left dead, as were many men and children.
    My paternal grandfather, Jozsef Kreisz, was a Hungarian teamster. He loved his horses, his beer, his wife, and his three children. He was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army after the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand and fought on the Russian front. He fell into a hole, nearly froze, and was captured by the Russians. When he was released, he was half blind. He had aged so much that his wife didn’t recognize him.
    Hungary had been taken over by a Communist government, run by an angry Hungarian named Béla Kun, whose leather-jacketed, Lenin-capped followers hanged many Hungarians on lampposts. My grandfather took my father, who was a little boy, out into the streets of Budapest and showed him the bodies on the lampposts.
    It was my father’s earliest memory. He remembered the corpses up there and that they had been hung there by Béla Kun, who was a Communist and a
Zsido
… a Jew.
    My father grew up in Kispest, a Budapest working-class district, not far from the canning factory where my grandfather now worked, since he was half blind. My grandmother, a devoutly religious Roman Catholic, prayed and raised the three kids, my father and his two older sisters.
    They were dirt-poor. When he was a little boy, my father contracted scarlet fever, which infected his hip. Surgery was required. My father had surgery eleven times on his hip without any anesthetic. There was no money for anesthetics, which, after the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, were in short supply. The surgeries left him with one leg shorter than the other and a pronounced limp.
    He was the baby of the family, doted upon by his mother and two sisters. He stayed in bed and read much of the time. He read
The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers
, and his favorite, the German writer Karl May, who wrote of the American West he had never seen (but which my great-grandfather had). My father’s favorite Karl May character was the gunslinger called Old Shatterhand.
    And there was another little boy living not far away from my father, in Austria, whose favorite writer was Karl May and whose favorite character was Old Shatterhand. This little boy’s name was Adolf Hitler.
    My father thought, reading so much about Old Shatterhand and the Count of Monte Cristo, that maybe he could write, too. He began writing short stories and sending them to the Budapest newspapers. They were, in the time-honored way, all rejected.
    He went to school and excelled, knowing he couldn’t support himself with physical labor. He kept writing the stories which kept being rejected. He became a mailman but his hip couldn’t take the walking. He got a law degree and was the world’s worst lawyer.
    Then a story was accepted by one of the Budapest newspapers. And another. And another. A book was published which became commercially successful. And another. And another.
    He became an adviser to the Hungarian prime minister. He paid for the eye surgery which restored my grandfather’s sight. He was a successful Hungarian writer. A short, balding young man so heavy that a half circle had to be cut out of his desk so he could reach it. He loved Westphalian ham, Csabai kolbász, hard salami, black bread, palacsinta, and dark beer. He still lived with his parents and two sisters, a hardworking responsible young man who only occasionally lapsed.
    Like the time he was in a small town on the Hungarian Plains and was arrested for shooting out half the town’s traffic lights.
    He saw my mother in a Budapest church one day and fell in love. Her name was Mária Biro. She was ten years younger than he, twenty-seven years old, a classic Hungarian beauty: tall, high-cheek-boned, her dark hair highlighted by slanted, deeply brown Eurasian eyes. He inquired about her, discovered that she was a secretary in the Hungarian government’s secretarial pool, arranged that she be assigned to his