by Christopher Luppi

Gavin is a Nazi. This fact is evidenced by the many Nazi tattoos that adorn his arms and perhaps other parts of his body that I have never and do not wish to ever see. Gavin is from Australia but is quick to let you know that he is of Irish heritage. Gavin is 44 years old, not tall, easily 280 pounds, and Gavin has gout. Not “ouch my toe hurts” gout, but gout that at its worst has his feet so swollen he can’t get them into shoes and his lower legs so black you can’t even make out the tattoos he has there. Gavin pronounces “urine” as “yuron.” He does so when he is telling you about one of his recent episodes with the gout. “Ah, mate, I been in bed for days. I take these meds that make you piss all day and night and, oh, you should have smelled the yuron coming out of me.”

Gavin lives in a small house a few kilometers down the road. Gavin has a girlfriend named Nit. She lives with her family nearby, runs a noodle shop and a small mini-mart. Gavin met Nit in Khorat. Nit is married, but separated. She has two kids. Gavin and Nit’s relationship seems to consist mostly of telephone arguments wherein she calls him, asks where he is, he tells her where he is presently drinking, she yells at him and tells him he’s a Kee Mao (alcoholic). Gavin’s house is a small and unpainted cinderblock structure next to a small pond down a dirt rice road. He has a bed, a boom box, and a George Foreman grill that he speaks very highly of.

Gavin loves his mother and apparently has a special fondness for her cat who he is looking forward to spending time with during his upcoming tri-monthly six week visit to Melbourne so that he can get done whatever needs doing to ensure that he continues to get the monthly disability checks that he survives on. It’s not a lot, but it’s enough and it’s more than I make. In short, Gavin is better paid for being fat, alcoholic, and gouty than I am for being a teacher of English at the university level.

Gavin likes punk and metal which is how we met. My wife and I were at a local restaurant owned by Nik and Jens; she, Nik, being from here and he, Jens, being from Norway. Jens was in the hospital at the time with bleeding ulcers and liver issues. Gavin waddled over and introduced himself. He was wearing a Motorhead shirt. I told him I’d seen Motorhead a couple times, and we got to talking music, punk – GBH, The Pistols, The Ramones, etc. and so on. I noticed, as one would, the large SS on the inside of his forearm but decided to let it ride. Some folks go through a thing when they’re young and are just too poor to have it scraped off their body later on. I don’t remember how we got on to the Irish thing. I think he said it right off… “Australia, Melbourne, but my family’s Irish.” In stature, Gavin falls somewhere between Tony Soprano, who he in fact resembles facially as well, and Jaba The Hut. Gavin always wears band shirts: The Ramones, Motorhead, GBH, Discharged. Always black.

Gavin and I have now gotten drunk together at my place on four occasions. I have dropped all the social hints I can think of.

“Yeah, I’ll swing by your place sometime. I’ll call first, though.” By this I meant that one should always call first before swinging by. Gavin just swings on by anyway. “Yeah, well, in general, if my gate is open it means I’m open to visitors and if it’s closed, I’m not.” I thought this was pretty clear. Last week, I pulled in to the house and Gavin was here. He’d opened the gate himself. “If you can see me upstairs on the porch, I’m probably not too busy. If you can’t, it means I’m downstairs either practicing guitar or writing.” Twice now, Gavin has pulled in when I was working downstairs.

Like a lot of foreigners up here, Gavin is lonely, and like nearly all foreigners up here, Gavin “likes a drink.” Gavin knows that if he calls I will probably say something along the lines of, “Hey, yeah, not tonight though, I’m pretty busy right now, but I’ll give you a call later in the week…” But he also knows that I won’t give him a call later in the week and if he swings by without calling and happens to get me after I’ve had a couple that I am likely to agree to a couple more even if begrudgingly and only as a result of my not knowing quite how to say no. He always swings by in the early evening as that is when I am most likely to have had a couple.

Our conversations are usually the same. Gavin begins by giving me the latest news on the local farang population. He starts with Jens as Jens is the only acquaintance we have in common and actually the only other farang I am on speaking terms with in the area with the exception of Remy, the Swiss chef at Nik and Jens’s restaurant. He will tell me that Jens is drinking again despite doctor’s warnings of certain death. He will tell me that Jens and Nik are fighting all day every day. He will tell me that Jens is talking about hiring a hit man to knock Nik off. He will then laugh and make reference to Jens’s stories of having been a sniper of the highest caliber and having been on “jobs” as far afield as Gaza back in the days when he was working in conjunction with the CIA and Mossad and “the mafia.” He will tell me their restaurant is on the skids and Remy, the Swiss chef, is going to take a job in Samui and Nik and Jens are selling. He will then move on to other foreigners in the area, guys I have seen around but not as yet spoken with, mostly in their 50s and 60s, and – if one is to believe Gavin – all suffering some kind of horrible health issue and relationship dysfunction that when juxtaposed to Gavin and his gout and his relationship with Nit squarely place him in better standing than them.

We then move on to music and Gavin knows a lot and has a lot of information in all things 70s punk, a lot of things rock, and some things metal. And this leads us, inevitably and usually by my pushing, to the Jews. Let us not forget, Gavin is a Nazi. And when one is a Nazi, that fact overrides all others. You don’t say, “Oh yeah, that guy. He’s Australian. He’s of Irish heritage. He likes a drink. He has gout. Oh, and he’s a Nazi.” Being a Nazi trumps anything else one might also be. It usually goes something like this:

“Yeah, mate. The Ramones! Great New York band.”

“Absolutely,” I answer. “Seen them a few times. You like The Ramones?”

“Fuck, I love The Ramones.”

“Nice Jewish boys from New York, though, aren’t they?”

“Well, no, mate, I mean, one of them is.”

“I thought they all were.”

“No, are they?”

“I actually don’t know.”

“They might be.”

“We’re all Jews in New York.”

“Oh, boy, here we go. You are, aren’t you?”

“As far as you know.”

It has taken some work, but I now have Gavin half believing that I am Jewish. That I am often mistaken for an Israeli even by Israelis has helped my cause. Gavin knows that I am of Italian, Irish and Swiss descent. He asked early on and I told him. But this has not stood in my way. Neither has the fact that my name is Christopher – not exactly a popular Jewish name – but I have recently discovered that your average anti-Semite knows so little about Judaism that this never registers for them. This began during a conversation the first time he came by. I was well into a bottle of Johnny Walker. “So, I got to ask you right off, Gavin, what’s the fucking deal with the SS shit?” This lead to a conversation that was as predictable as it was ignorant. The Jews are not to be trusted. The Jews run everything. The Jews are taking over the world. The US is controlled by Jews. Yada, yada, blah, blah, blah. I tell him I am surprised by this line of thinking coming from a guy who is seemingly not without intelligence on some level. I ask him why I never hear people talk about “the Christian conspiracy” since the US government is predominantly made up of Christians. He says it’s not. He says many of them are secret Jews. I ask him what about the Bush family? What about all the wealthy and powerful Christian people? The fact that the US has only had Christian presidents and only one Catholic ever? Is this part of the Jewish conspiracy? He implies that it might be. I mention a number of very wealthy powerful people in the US who I don’t think are Jewish although I have never actually considered it before. I mention Warren Buffet and Bill Gates. He says, “Bill Gates is a Jew.” I say, “William Henry Gates the Third doesn’t sound like a Jewish name to me.” Gavin insists he is. He says he might have changed his name. He says “they” do that a lot. I say yeah, I know, and look at him sideways and try to affect a conspiratorial look. I say, “So, in other words, you don’t even know who is Jewish and who is not Jewish. Anybody might secretly be Jewish?” Gavin says that, yes, this is precisely the case. I propose that I might be Jewish. He says that yes I might. I tell him I am. He says, “Are you?” I tell him I am Chris the Jew. He looks confused. I say, “As far as you know I am, anyway. Me and Bill Gates.”

I have pressed him. I have said things such as, “For fuck’s sake, Gavin, the Nazis are the most loathed group of people ever to have existed. They are universally hated throughout the western world except by other Nazis. They killed millions of people; men, women, and children, tore families apart, conducted horrible experiments on human beings. Children, Gavin! They murdered millions of children! Do you support this? Do you support the murdering of children because they are Jewish?” Gavin hedges. Gavin goes into holocaust denial mode. No one knows how many. They say six million. It wasn’t just Jews. His argument is all muddled. At one moment he seems to be saying that the holocaust never happened and at another he seems to be saying that it did but that it wasn’t just the Jews so it was less evil in some way relative to this supposed inclusiveness. I tell him he is speaking hogwash. “Bullcrap!” I say.

At one point I suggest that perhaps the holocaust was a Jewish conspiracy. His eyes light up and he seems thoughtful and I laugh. “You are right there with me. Fucking hell. I am going to write a book arguing that the Jews were behind the genocide of the Jews and sell millions of copies to people like you.”

“You’re fucking funny, mate,” he says.

I tell Gavin that many of my closest friends are Jews. That these are guys I grew up with; have known since we were kids. That they are more than “mates,” they are family. They are brothers. I tell him there is nothing I wouldn’t do for them. I tell him that I love them and I love their families. I tell him that there is no way I will ever stop calling him to task as long as he comes around my place. I tell him that one day he might come by and they will be here and these are guys who, like me, are going to call him out and say, “What’s with the fucking SS tattoos?” I ask him how he deals with that. He says he has drunk with Jews before. He references a story about drinking with Mossad agents somewhere. “We didn’t talk politics,” he says. He says he’ll wear sleeves. I tell him this won’t work because I will already have told my friends about him. He says he looks forward to meeting them. He says it won’t be a problem. I tell him it most certainly will be and ask him how he would respond to an individual with “Kill the Irish” tattooed on his body. He says it’s not the same. I agree. I say it’s worse because history makes it so. I tell him that his decision to ink these symbols on to his body was a decision to pit himself against a good majority of the world that knows what these symbols represent. I reiterate that I am part of that majority and that were he and people of his ilk to hold a march or a protest of some sort, I would be one of the people on the other side of the police barricade hurling insults and challenges across the line of police protecting their right to free speech. I tell him that if he and his “mates” were ever to get their coveted “race war,” I would not hesitate to hold a gun to his head, blow his brains all over the wall, enjoy a slice of cherry pie and then have a nap.

When I see Gavin around the neighborhood, I always greet him with “shalom.” He laughs. I saw him at a noodle shop I frequent the other day. He asked where I was going and I said I couldn’t tell him. He laughed and asked why. I said, “You know why.”

“You are the fucking funniest guy,” he says.

“We’re all funny,” I say. “It’s part of our makeup.”

Note on Author’s Work:

Apart from Gavin is a Nazi Eastlit has published Christmas in Burma by Christopher Luppi in its inaugural December 2012 issue.