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Chapter Two: Adolf and Bambi
 You don't notice it coming on at first. It's late. You're tired. You think: wow, am I feeling extra tired all of a sudden?
I had this feeling almost as if I'd walked into the lake and was underwater.
I heard voices talking and couldn't see people around me anymore.
I knew by then that something was very wrong.
"She's wasted," Shari said.
"Let's get her home," Laurel said.
"You go girl," Dori said. "Oh come on, honey… Alina… what's wrong, baby? I drank more than you did, and you can always hold your own."
A disembodied womanly voice I didn't recognize said from somewhere in the black, swirling lake water all around me: "There have been some guys putting things in women's drinks lately."
Another woman's voice floated behind that one: "Date rape drugs. Better get her home to bed."
That's the last intelligible thing I heard until I was back at the apartment lying flat on my back.
"That stuff stays in your system half a day or more. She may still be flashing off and on again tomorrow."
I know somehow I barfed into a bucket held by one of my friends.
I thought I was going to drop my face into that bucket with it, but they toweled my features clean and let me pass out on my bed. At least I was safe and sound, with protective friends, so I let go and hoped I'd be back to normal in the morning.
When you have dreams on a trip like that, you don't remember much about them later.
All I know is that I was terrified, and running the whole time.
Picture an old sepia film, full of floating rips and tears in morgue-white.
I had fleeting but persistent mental snapshots of Adolf Hitler, mustache and all, with those black merciless eyes behind which there was no normal human soul. And that lipless, cruel mouth that stupid people think represents power and justice, but is carved from a wooden mask of Satan. Just a sociopath, a sick and narcissistic toddler who never grew up, who plays into the worst instincts of village idiots and drives them to murder and violence as his whims dictate, and the rich clap loudly and laugh as they make billions in the war industries.
As I reflect on all this long afterward, when I'm recovered from the nightmare and moving on with my life, I know this also. There is a Hitler number (about 37%) that represents how many votes the Nazis actually go in the 1933 elections. Hitler wasn't elected. He was appointed at the demand of the bankers, the industrialists, and the militarists because they thought they could manage him (even though they loathed him and looked down on him, as they had done with Kaiser Bill a generation earlier). The zillionaires, the ambitious and ruthless, live in the moment like any sociopath. They want money and power, and they want it now. They don't care about consequences, whether next moment or a few years out when all of society lies in rubble and ruins with a corpse odor that gags and nauseates you from miles away.
Also in that mental nightmare (thanks to Mr. Adolf in that bar) I had flashbacks to Bambi, and it wasn't a warm fuzzy cartoon with Flower and Thumper the Bunny and Friendly Owl, and the other little forest creatures. It was a rather typical dark Germanic nightmare full of foreboding, like the Grimm stories or, from across the Channel, English nightmares like Alice in Wonderland or those English nursery rhymes. Since ancient times, grandmothers have told mythic stories to children, to arouse their sense of wonder, to put them to dreamy sleep, and above all to teach them moral lessons by scaring them silly. Until modern times, people weren't really children; they were little people who had to work from the earliest age, most of them got no education, and there really wasn't any such thing as childhood, at least officially if you listened to how the world was run by predatory dukes and pukes, who rode around on horses, wore medals, and owned factories and sailing vessels in addition to all the land. As the children of more recent ages grew up, and got to take charge of their story telling, they demanded warm and fuzzy stories to warm the heart, so all those old nightmare tales got sanitized. But those dark realities live in the gloomy swamps of our subconscious, where they were born, and come out to haunt us when we are hallucinating (like on a serious date rape drug, as I was).
What saved me, I am sure, is my fundamental belief that we are capable of both the worst and the best, and as long as we strive for the best, we can live lives of virtue and kindness and sunshine. I clung to that faith the whole time.
So Bambi is this little deer in the 1923 story, whose mommy got knocked up by one of the Great Princes among deer (who have their fun and then saunter off to do antler stuff among each other, while the females are left to raise the young). Bambi doesn't meet his dad until later in the story.
There was enough of the original in the cleaned-up, animated Disney film to make me weep as a little girl when I first saw it. That came from a time (1942) at the darkest points in World War Two, when Hitler had not yet been defeated. The world still teetered in desperation and uncertainty. The great victory had not yet risen out of darkness. The world still bore that same darkness that spawned Adolf's bloody vision in early 1900s Vienna and then Munich, where he joined the Royal Bavarian army and fought for the Kaiser in Berlin.
In those years, Adolf and Bambi breathed the same air of a soon to vanish imperial fantasy that would be replaced by far darker nightmares before the coming of gray dawn in 1945.
The real moral of Bambi is one that has been picked up by conservationists and earth-savers (hurray, I am one of them). Namely, the bad guys are humans. Add to that: we're only bad guys as long as we follow the dark side of our souls, led by stern-faced crazy guys of whom there are plenty to go around in every age (like Kaiser Bill, or Adolf, or that same type of smelly monster eating the world alive today with the help of his village idiot supporters who are there in every age of history, ready to lynch and to riot and to burn cities and to kill as many 'other' as they can once old Stern-Face has put the empty but burning terror in their blind little minds, always with the help of religion gone bad).
Bambi's sweet momma raises her little fawn in the safety of the deep, dark woods. Then, as he begins to feel his oats (or his nuts?), she takes him (cautiously) into the open, sunny meadows with all of their dangers (yet lots of cute female deers or dears to scamper with).
The great terror of Felix Salten's story is a horrifying, shadowy creature the animals call simply He, also known as The Man, who comes with a gun and kills innocent forest creatures. Like any carnivore, he then takes it home to his den, and devours his kill along with his mate and offspring.
You guessed it. The Man shoots at Bambi, but misses. He kills Bambi's momma. So poor little Bambi lies sobbing and crying with his head on his dying momma's belly as she coughs and breathes her last breaths. Nothing warm and fuzzy about that dark cartoon.
She whispers her last words to her little guy: "I love you, Bambi. Mommy loves you. Be good and stay safe. Find a nice little girl deer, and look for your daddy. He's the Great Prince of Deers and he'll take care of you." And then she dies, leaving Bambi (and kids like me watching) forever with a broken heart.
Felix Salten continued with a very gloomy, sober story in which Bambi has a rather sad marriage with a lovely deer named Farina, among other almost-romances and bar-hopping around the forest and meadows. He has to do the antler thing to destroy other stags who are bullying him (so human, while not humane). He becomes the Prince of Deer himself, when he is old enough. In the end, he's got the putz and the nuts and nobody can give him any buts. But he's not a happy prince nor a happy stag, and…
…yeah, whatever…
I just wonder if The Man, as he raises his gun and fires, is wearing a Hitler mustache. Wouldn't surprise me.
Is there anything we can do to save this world from the insanity in our swamp?
What if The Woman came along, about six feet tall and wearing armor and waving a sword. What if *She* kicked The Man's ass from one end of the meadow to the other, and broke his gun over his Klotz of a head while he cowered there, whining pitifully and holding his tattoo-covered skull like the coward that he really is?
Well, listen to the rest of my story. I can't explain it, but for a short time I became The Woman…
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