By now, I have a few published essays called “Ski Bums” (because editors seem to find it the easiest name for its purported subject), but this was the first, appearing in December 1992. It was also my first published piece, period, since a column “appearing alternating Tuesdays” in the college newspaper doesn’t count. This was London Magazine in the middle of the long Alan Ross era, and he would soon publish two other “travel” narratives of mine in short order: one on Key West, and the other on visiting Graham Greene’s grave near Vevey, Switzerland. If I had a true literary career, I would say I owe it to Ross: a diffident, cricketing poet-editor who almost died in a World War II naval battle in the Barents Sea. I was lucky to meet him once in his ramshackle South Kensington garden office, and wished I could have bought the magazine from him before his death, in 2001. Somewhere I have a funny note from him explaining why it wasn’t for sale and furthermore wasn’t worth anything; if I find it, I will share it here with the four or five of you.
— EW
Frauenschuh is a shop in Kitzbühel selling jeans, shirts, slacks, sweaters and other clothes, very likely women’s shoes. There are several Frauenschuhs in Kitzbühel, but the only one that really matters is the one on the Josef-Herold-Strasse, halfway up the road from the centre of town to the railway lines, and adjacent to the tracks, the Hahnenkamm cable car. Skiers walking from town to the Hahnenkamm must inevitably pass Frauenschuh, and so the sidewalk in front of the shop is an often dangerous place, a narrow cement strip trodden by pedestrians, shoppers and their dogs, and tourists walking awkwardly in ski boots and supporting on their shoulders and arms skis and ski-poles which wave in the air near people’s faces. Frauenschuh’s shopfront is a large plate glass window on either side of the door, through which one can see the entire shop floor, stock, and the five or six beautiful young women who work there. Under these circumstances, the traffic on the J.-Herold Strasse, human or motor, seems a distinctly minor threat against the danger that a skier, noticing the goods inside, will swing his head sharply around for a better look, risking the decapitation of those before and behind him, or at the very least, a broken window.
Everyone in Kitzbühel knows about Frauenschuh, even the tourists. Bob Simonds told me that he had once seen a group of Italians standing outside the shop: rich, stylish men, dressed in expensive clothes. When one of the girls inside turned around to face them, they burst into applause.
Bob himself has tried to date Frauenschuh girls. In Kitzbühel wealth impresses, and although Bob is not wealthy, he can dress the part. “Aviator sunglasses,” he says, “are key.” Twice this year Bob has gone into the shop—presumably wearing his aviator glasses—and while making a purchase, asked Frauenschuh girls to dinner. Each time he has been met with polite refusals. Everyone I know admires the Frauenschuh girls, but to my knowledge no one has ever gone out with one. They do not seem to socialize, at least not in Kitzbühel. No one has ever seen a Frauenschuh girl in one of the bars or cafes in town: not Biwak, the Goldene Gams, da Pepe, Big Ben, the Prax-keller or Seppi’s; certainly not the Glockenspiel or Londoner. They do not go to nightclubs. It is understandable, perhaps, why they should choose to avoid Royal Dancing, but why also Malibu, or the Drop-in? One might expect them to gather at Take Five, but they don’t. Perhaps they go to the Casino, but the one time in three months I went to the Casino, along with Howard, Tony, Pete, Darren and Kelvin, there were no Frauenschuh girls there. But it was a Tuesday night, and Frauenschuh girls must work at eight the next morning.
At the Casino there is a 170-schilling admission fee for which one receives four 50-schilling chips. I lost my first chip on roulette—I bet black and it came up red—and the next three on successive rounds of blackjack. I was watching Kelvin play, and he seemed to be on a roll, so I put one chip on each of his next three hands and lost each time. I had previously lost 30 schillings on the slot machines. The two hundred schillings I lost—about twenty dollars—would have bought somewhat less than an evening’s worth of drinks for a Frauenschuh girl and myself at a nice Kitzbuhel café. A large beer at Biwak is only thirty shills, but Biwak is no place to take a Frauenschuh girl: a loud, tiny, smoky place where the ski bums go to drink among framed photographs of shirtless men climbing rocks. Harald, the ski salesman at the shop where I work, told me once that Frauenschuh girls went to the Fünferl, an expensive pub on the Franz-Reisch-Strasse favoured by visiting businessmen and their wives. But each time I went there, there were no Frauenschuh girls, only Germans in furs and Burberry raincoats, their BMWs and Mercedes cars—all bearing Munich plates—parked in the street outside.
“At the end of the day,” Howard has often said, “they’re just ordinary shopgirls.”
“But at the end of the week,” Bob has been known to respond, “they’re all going to marry millionaires.”
Howard is 31, Bob is in his mid-forties, and is, he says, the only person in the history of the Vietnam conflict to be shot through the left femur. At 23, I am probably three or four years older than most of the Frauenschuh girls. The three of us are American, the girls are all Austrian, all from the Kitzbühel area, small villages probably. They live here year-round; we go away when the season ends. You would think we have something better to do than spend our time discussing the Frauenschuh girls.
But often we don't.
Saturday the sixteenth of March Peter Sulzenbacher had a picnic up at his parents’ place for the Kitzbühel ski bums. The big picnic was going to be held at Haus Pravda, a small cottage below the Sulzenbacher home, on the mossy strip of land back of the house above the creek. The creek didn’t have much water in it this time of year, even with the fresh winter run-off, but a small pool had accumulated just above the dam behind Horst Hőrl’s house, and we put the several crates of beer to soak in the ice-cold water. People had been instructed to bring beer and any meat they wanted to cook in the barbecue; the Sulzenbachers would provide rolls, salad, and condiments. By four o’clock, 40 or so Australians, Americans, Canadians, Britons, Swedes, New Zealanders, South Africans and even Austrians had turned the gully into a thick patch of mud, and cooking on the grill were hot dogs, slices of pork, chicken, veal, beef, and sausages of all description. In the creek we had cooling six, seven, perhaps even eight full crates of beer, all the brands we had kept close to us during the winter months: Stiegl Goldbräu and Columbus, Zipfer, Kaiser, and Gösser. Stiegl Goldbräu, from Salzburg, has a special place in the hearts of all Kitzbühel ski bums, as the beer served in the Londoner. The Londoner was the first place we went when we came to Kitzbühel, back in December when we were new in town and knew nobody and had no work; consequently its beer was the first we drank. Then it was cheap; now it was 47 schillings a beer, making it one of Kitzbühel’s most expensive. No one, at least no one working here, can afford a beer at the Londoner, so to go there one has to surreptitiously smuggle in his own, something fairly easily accomplished inside thick winter clothing and bulky ski parkas. Once inside, a bottle of Stiegl from the supermarket looks no different from a bottle of Stiegl as served at the bar, and the only difficulty is finding a secluded corner away from the eye of the bouncers and barmaids to work the cap off. But almost no one gets caught.
Some people don’t bother to bring in their own beer—Tony and Pete, for instance. They make the point that, with so many rich teenage kids buying drinks and leaving them lying around the place, stealing a beer is far simpler than smuggling one—walking around town at night with bottles stuffed awkwardly in pockets. One night they saw 15 or 20 almost-full glasses, all abandoned, their owners having left for the toilets, another bar, or, this being the Londoner, to dance on the tables. “A buffet,” Tony called it.
Tony is the originator of one of Kitzbühel’s most famous pick-up lines. What you do is this: rather than go up to a strange girl and ask if you can buy her a drink, ask if you can steal her one instead. “Hi, can I steal you a drink?” Everyone finds this amusing. I mentioned it to a Dutch girl I met once. She was from Amsterdam. I would be going there eventually once I left Kitzbühel, and she gave me her address and phone number. “We’ll go out in Amsterdam,” I said, and pulled a 10-guilder note from my wallet. “With this,” I waved the note, “I’ll buy you a drink.”
“No,” she said sweetly. “You can steal me one instead.”
The picnic at Peter Sulzenbacher’s started at about one and went on from there. Like everyone else I ate and drank, and drank more, because there was more drink than food. There was always more drink than food in Kitzbühel: it was less expensive, so long as you stuck to the supermarkets. By five o’clock I was seriously drunk, but I still had an errand to run. I was leaving town on the seven o’clock train Monday morning and the store would be closed all day Sunday; I had promised the people at Kitzsport I would come in some time and say goodbye. At the same time I could wax my new skis which I had just bought from Howard and adjust the bindings to my boots. At 5.30 I walked down the hill towards town, collected my skis and went to Kitzsport. I talked to Rudi and Hansi; and Lenz, my supervisor these last three months, a man of low intelligence who told me often that I should think, think, when performing my work. But I liked him, sort of, and was grateful for the huge chunks of time off he gave me each day so that I could go skiing; and the beers from Hölzl’s café-konditorei he would treat me to after a particularly hectic Saturday’s work. They had told me Lenz was a piss-head, and indeed the one time I saw him after working hours he was falling down drunk in the streets, mocking my Austrian companion who he seemed to think was my girlfriend; but he was a model employee who come to work early and left late and almost never took time off. The same could never be said of me.
Making the rounds at Kitzsport I saw Toni and Harald and Klaus; I was hoping to see the young apprentice Ernst, but he had left; so too had Gabi, the shop-assistant upstairs who I was hoping would kiss me goodbye. Still drunk I fitted my bindings and waxed my skis, after initial problems sliding the ski tips underneath the waxing roller; chores I had been performing all winter for tourists. I shook hands with Lenz and Toni, the white-haired monteur who was slowly working himself to death for Kitzsport, and then I went back up the hill to Haus Pravda. It was dusk, people were straggling down in twos and threes from the picnic, and I could see Frauenschuh was closing.
Unlike most people, who covet all Frauenschuh girls, the whole winter I had had my eye out for only one. I never learned her name, and always had difficulty describing her to friends: the least beautiful of five or six beautiful women is never the one people first notice. Blonde, a little heavy, she was always dressed casually in jeans, cotton blouse, and a scarf, and when she was working she tied her hair up in a ponytail with a strip of black velvet; it was loose now. She was older than most of the girls she worked with, 25 or 26 perhaps, and it seemed to me occupied some kind of supervisory position. I had never met her, of course, but thought perhaps she knew me, in the way you come to know all the people in a resort who are there for the season: by sight, by habit. In my case I would be the one in the red coat and white baseball cap who went up the hill to ski each morning between 10 and 11 and came back down again in the afternoon between four and five; plus all the other times I would just be walking by, by accident or design she would never know. Each time I passed I decided the next would be the occasion I walked into the shop and finally introduced myself. The evening of Saturday the 16th, with early Monday morning my departure date, this would be the last time. It was 6.30, the lights were on, and I could see her with the other girls, cleaning and tidying up; and I walked on by.
Ten minutes later I was in the kitchen of Haus Pravda with Howard. I told him, “I almost did it. I wasn’t drunk, like an hour ago, but I was half drunk, just enough to go in there, even with all those other girls around, and say to her, “I’ve been here all winter, you’ve probably seen me walking by, but I’m leaving Monday morning and before I go I’d like to know if I can take you out for a drink.” I was this close to doing it, Howard, and I held my finger and thumb apart to demonstrate how close I was.
“But you didn’t,” he said.
“No, I didn’t.”
Howard has told me about the most brutal rejection he ever suffered. He was in a disco in Copenhagen, watching from afar the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, a Danish girl sitting at the bar with a friend. He watched and stared; finally he got up, crossed the floor, and asked the woman to dance.
“She doesn’t speak English,” her friend said.
So Howard asked the friend to pass on his request in Danish. Would her friend care to dance with him? The girl duly asked and turned back to Howard with her answer: “She says no.”
Howard said, “Look. It took me two hours to get up enough courage to come over here and ask her to dance. Will you ask her again? Tell her it won’t kill her.”
At this point the woman in question looked at Howard and in perfect English told him, “You fucking Americans. You’re all the same. You think you can come to Denmark and just like that fuck Danish girls; well, you’re wrong.”
“What did you say?” I asked Howard.
“I said, ‘I asked if you wanted to dance, not if you wanted to fuck, and perhaps your friend is right and your English really isn’t very good.’”
“That’s pretty good,” I said. “Better than I would have done.”
Now that I had finished, Howard told me, “I would have been a lot happier if you had gone in.”
“Gone in? Frauenschuh?”
“Gone in and asked her. I thought that was what we were leading up to, that you went in and asked her.”
“I would have been a lot happier,” he added.
Bob, who has asked out two Frauenschuh girls this season, was sitting there too, listening.
It was quarter to seven, but I knew that at Frauenschuh they took their time closing up. Working there was as much a social affair as anything else, as you could see from the way the girls talked to each other, they way they left together for lunch, or in the evenings, for a shared ride home. Half an hour, sometimes 45 minutes after closing, one could see through the darkness the bright lights inside and the girls standing around, not even working, just talking happily among themselves. I raced back down the hill, and sure enough half a dozen of them were still there, folding clothes, mopping the floor, cleaning out the mugs they used to serve their customers coffee, counting the day’s receipts. But mine was gone. I thought she might be upstairs, in the storeroom where they kept their coats and other belongings, and if I waited long enough she would come down, but she didn’t. She had left. Still I waited. I waited outside, across the street and under the light of the streetlamp illuminating the telephone booth, until about twenty past seven and the last of the girls had locked up for the night and gone home, and then I went home myself, to do some packing before I left Kitzbühel for good early Monday morning.
(Undated photo—probably late ‘50s/early ‘60s) in the exhibit of memorabilia on the ground floor of Mt. Hood Timberline Lodge.)