Cigarettes, Cowboys, and "Cielito Lindo"

Jeff the Dutchman and the armpit of Germany

I know, trust me, I know. Reading about scandalous dating disasters is much more fun than musings about my grandparents. But I must finish what I started. The quartet has to be complete, and now it’s Opa’s turn. And really, my romantic pursuits have been colored by the men who raised me. So, without further ado, here’s “Jeff the Dutchman.”

Jeff Beaumont used to give us the most slobbery wet kisses that completely grossed us out when we were little. But I owe him. After all, I inherited his mouth, which I’m rather happy about.

Opa, whose family was from Orly, France, had big lips, big bushy eyebrows, and a big laugh. For some reason, in the army they called him Frankie Boy after Frank Sinatra, though he looked nothing like him. He just adored the Rat Pack style of the era, so maybe that was why.

Opa before he became “Jeff the Dutchman”

Later, when us grandkids came around, he completely changed his look. During the war, his best friend, Gordon Tripp, was an American whose family ran Glen Isle Resort in Bailey, Colorado. Jeff and his German war bride (more on that later) visited every summer and came back laden with silver and turquoise jewelry.

Picture a Dutch transplant in a conservative German town decked out in fat ornate belt buckles, bejeweled watches, and oversized rings. All that was missing were the spurs and the horse. I loved the look. It made my grandpa different from other grandpas.

He drank and chain-smoked — Camels without filters — but never cursed. Instead, he sang. Mostly American songs like “San Francisco, open your golden gate,” and after many, many beers he’d switch to Spanish and “Cielito Lindo.”

How did he know so many languages? Well, they came naturally to him. No, actually, he studied and wanted to be a translator. Then war broke out.

When the Americans came to Heerlen in the Netherlands, where he grew up and lived, he was recruited. The translator gig didn’t last long because Opa wanted to fight Nazis. He soon graduated to the tank destroyer battalion and transferred to France and Germany.

One of his favorite stories was that he shot a German in the foot. Not the head. Just the foot.

As the story goes, an obstinate mof didn’t want to take orders from a “cheesehead” and entered a forbidden area. When the German didn’t listen, Opa aimed.

At the end of the war, he aimed again. This time it was Cupid’s arrow. It landed on a German girl called Inge.

It was love at first sight and made absolutely no sense because Jeff hated Germans. And yet, he whisked her away to Holland and made her his bride. His family wasn’t amused. Neither were the citizens of Heerlen. According to my grandma, they would spit on the street in front of her and call her a Duitse hoer.

She wasn’t very happy. But she was madly in love with Jeff and their two daughters, Antoinette and Angelique. Eventually, after enough begging and nagging, Jeff relented and moved the family to a small town in southern Germany, where he was hired at the local newspaper.

Inge was over the moon. Opa and the kids, not so much.

My mom, who was seventeen at the time, wore her hair in a Bettie Page cut, loved miniskirts and yé-yé pop, and was horrified to see the local yokels still in braids and the Swabian equivalent of dirndls. People would stop and stare at her. She was a unicorn.

But that’s where they settled, and Jeff got a nice little house with a nice little garden and a big beige corduroy sofa where he’d nap in a Heineken haze. I’m not sure he was an alcoholic, but he always smelled of beer. I think he drank because he was in Germany. And not just Germany, but the armpit of Germany: parochial, backward, and gossipy.

Being from the Dutch flatlands, the bucolic local mountains didn’t call to him. I don’t think he ever went on a hike in his life. He wasn’t much for the outdoors or anything green, including salads, come to think of it. Or German food.

His meals were “imported” from back home. He had a favorite breakfast: beschuit — crisp sweet bread — with butter and sliced strawberries, plus alarming amounts of koffiemelk in his morning coffee.

He loved music and film, especially film. And since my grandparents babysat us kids so much, we got quite an education that scarred us for life. While my grandparents chain-smoked, we watched ultra-violent Spaghetti Westerns and sexy French movies.

Those films probably sparked my obsession with erotica early on, along with my love of the American Southwest. Of course, I had no idea that Sergio Leone shot his films in Spain and at Cinecittà. To me it was all real: Texas, New Mexico, Arizona.

Forever crush Clint Eastwood

As we all grew older, the beers became more copious, and Opa disappeared deeper into his memories of WWII and the life he could have had anywhere but the armpit of Germany. Colorado, which he pronounced Colo-ray-do. Or San Francisco with the golden gates. Or Tchi-cago.

He drank and napped and, when awake, regaled us with stories of eating horse meat in France or escaping bears in the Rockies.

The adults grew tired of his tales, but I could never get enough.

How big was the brown bear, I’d ask. What did the German look like — the one you shot in the foot? Tell me about the hangings in Heerlen.

It would have been nice if he could have returned to the Netherlands in the end. But he’s buried in a Kraut cemetery, surrounded by people he never had much rapport with. At least they can’t talk shit now, being equally dead.

And whenever I find myself in a Mexican restaurant with a mariachi band, guess what I do?

I ask them to play “Cielito Lindo” for Jeff the Dutchman.

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I swear I won’t buy a pack of Camel’s.