Of Work, Boredom and Demons

When my GI Bill money finally came through, I had already gotten my undergraduate degree. I took the money and enrolled in night classes at the University of Missouri at Kansas City Law School. I was a married man now. I had a day job as well, in the promotion department of Hallmark Cards. I edited a weekly in-house newsletter and contributed to a monthly magazine, Cards, which was distributed to all Hallmark Card dealers in the US and Canada. I wrote how-to articles on laying out display windows, attracting new customers to stores, displaying merchandise in the store to maximize sales and I did occasional features on Hallmark Card artists and new products like paper dresses, pop-up greeting cards and paper designs. The job was more boring than watching paint dry. But it paid the then princely sum of $12,000 a year. My wife was a designer in their art department.

I should have had a clue about the place, when in my second week there a crew of five white-suited storm troopers carried out one of the design artists in a strait jacket after he’d gone berserk in his cubicle, had ripped all his clothes off and had set about to trash the joint, tossing ink wells and paint pots against the walls. He also tried to crash through the floor-to-ceiling glass walls surrounding the ninth floor, but had only succeeded in bouncing off the reinforced glass and knocking himself out. Everyone just stood by silently and watched. No one lifted a finger. No one discussed the incident afterwards. It was as if it had never happened.

My boss, a fellow named Gus Johnson and in his late forties, showed up one day after I had suffered through several months of tedium, wearing a flashy, double-breasted navy-blue zoot-suit with wide white vertical stripes over a light blue silk shirt with French cuffs and a flowery Ascot. It was an extraordinary statement to show up in such a suit, because the Hallmark Cards white-collar uniform was a plain black suit, white shirt and a narrow subdued tie. Nothing else was acceptable.

No one looked at him or paid any attention to him. He strolled through the department, stopping a various cubicles to shoot his cuffs or adjust his tie, trying to show off his new suit in the best light. When he didn’t get a reaction, he retreated to this office and soon reappeared in shirtsleeves. At Hallmark that was considered out of uniform and cause for reprimand. Again no reaction. The tie went next. He flung it over his shoulder into the aisle between the open waist-high cubicles. Soon the shirt followed, than the shoes, socks, trousers and, finally, his yellow polka-dotted boxer shorts. He was now stark naked. Still no one reacted. Everyone pretended it was business as usual, discussed his or her assignment with him, asked about his kids, talked about the weather.

I made the mistake of asking him, if he wanted to try one of the new A-line paper dresses that had just been added to the Hallmark line and of which I had several samples hanging in my cubicle. He looked at me as if I had just stepped off a UFO, turned beet-red and commenced to scream at me: “How dare you speak to me like that? Why would I want to wear one of your paper rags? I am wearing a brand new Zegna suit.” I tried to point out that he was bare-assed naked, but he would have none of it. “You are toast here,” he yelled and stormed down the hall toward the corner office of the VP Marketing to finalize my demise. But nothing happened.

We never saw him again. And again, no one talked about Mr. Johnson’s bizarre flame-out. I decided it was time to look for other employment.

My wife’s father had been a crooner on the radio in Kansas City in the 30’s and 40’s. He’d had his own show. He knew the General Manager of one of the city’s radio stations, who was a friend and a fellow member of the Kansas City Country Club. Membership to this club was restricted to white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Jews, Catholics and other exotics, never mind blacks, didn’t need to apply. Anyway, he got me an interview and I talked myself into a job in the station’s promotion department. Money-wise it was a lateral move, but at least I could relate to the people working there. They seemed normal.

Mike McCurdy was my new boss. He always wore a jaunty bow tie, spoke softly and drank gin like a fish water. He liked dry Martinis. His Martinis were made up of a generous helping of Bombay Gin, what my brother would have called a three-finger shot, followed by a close pass past the glass with an open bottle of vermouth. He believed that the vermouth fumes gave his drink that special je-ne-sais-quoi. He never appeared drunk, but I know that five of those gin-only Martinis had to have an effect. Mike never showed it. Only his speech became even softer and slower.

When he had to fly, he always carried a large thermos filled with gin. He feared flying above all. By departure time he had to be pushed onto the plane in a wheelchair. He explained to the stewardess that he had a lower intestinal problem which sometimes weakened his system, but that he would be ok, since he carried his prescribed medicinal fluids with him in his thermos.

The station carried the games of the AFL’s Kansas City Chiefs. Those were the Hank Stram glory days, when the Chiefs won Super Bowl III. I got to know most of the players. I helped them cut commercials and promos at the station, guys like Len Dawson, Buck Buchanan, Ernie Ladd, Otis Taylor, Fred “The Hammer” Williamson, Mike Garrett, Jan Stenerud and Fred Arbanas, a one-eyed wide receiver.

My job was to write copy for station promos, retail ads and to schedule placement of radio spots. I did voice-overs and handled special sales events for the retail sales guys. There were no women in this or any other sales department in town then, nor were there any other minorities selling advertising in those days before affirmative action. I also made sure that my boss made it back to the station after his five-Martini lunches. He had a tendency to wander when he got loaded and needed tending.

About six months into this job, I decided to quit smoking. By then I had a 2- to 3-pack-a-day habit. Pall Mall non-filters were my brand of choice and they began to affect my health. I was 29 years old and could not climb a flight of stairs without huffing and hacking my lungs out. I decided to quit cold turkey and I did. Everyone was impressed. The problem was that I compensated for the Nicotine-urge with stuffing my face with chocolate. I blimped up to 230 pounds.

My wife suggested amphetamines – speed – to help me lose weight. She knew a doctor who prescribed them freely as part of a weight-loss program. They worked in getting my weight back down to 190, but they made me totally paranoid and brought to the surface all my suppressed memories, which I had banished from my conscience as a matter of survival. My nights were wracked by nightmares.

The faces of the dead I had left behind in my years in the employ of Uncle Sam swam up out the mists of my drugged and paranoid mind. Dismembered body parts and scenes of destruction flashed before my eyes. It all came flooding back. I thought I had buried my nightmares deep enough to be rid of them forever. I was wrong.

I went to work in the mornings totally exhausted, tense. I was a bundle of nerves. I didn’t eat and reverted to my old stand-by – vodka – to take the edge off. I was a mess. My job performance suffered. I skipped Law School classes regularly and ultimately had to resign. My home life suffered. Finally, one of my co-workers suggested I join a gym and work out. I took his advice. I put a stop to the speed, the vodka and the chocolate binging and began to feel better. I worked out every day. My body improved. Sleep returned and I re-buried my nightmares. I also increased my neck size to 17 inches and noticed that most of the serious guys in the gym were taking steroids. They kept after me to try some of their concoctions, which helped them bulk up and give their muscles definition. They looked great, but I had had it with chemicals in my system and refused. I quit the gym and took up golf.

I Don't See A Reason For Belgium

I know, you’re thinking what’s the big deal about Belgium. They seem like nice enough people. They haven’t hurt anybody, except maybe the Congolese. Call me a bigot, but I have my reasons for being blinkered about them. Let me try to lay out for you where I am coming from (and damn the dangling participle).

When I was a kid, we had a parlor game, called: Can you name one famous Belgian whose name isn’t Leopold? Of course, you can’t, because they don’t exist. Perhaps there is a list of famous Belgians somewhere. I never saw it and wouldn’t know where to find it. I don’t think I am going to search for it either.

Belgians aren’t a people like say the Brits, the French or even the Poles. They don’t identify themselves as Belgians, but as either Flemish or Walloon. Most Belgians are Flemings, protestant and speak Dutch. They are settled in Flanders, in the northern part of the country. The rest are French-speaking Walloons and Catholic and they populate the area bordering France. Only around Brussels do they mix to any extent. Another 10% are German, who live in the east along the German border and they all hate each other. It is an extremely dull place. The only reason that there is a country called Belgium is religion and European power politics.

Here’s a brief history lesson: The region known as the Southern Netherlands was ruled by the Catholic Spanish and Austrian Hapsburgs. In 1795 the French Republic invaded and annexed what is now known as Belgium. After Napoleon’s defeat in 1815 it became part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands as a buffer against French aggression and was ruled by a protestant Dutch king. In 1830, aided by the French, the Catholics staged a revolution against protestant domination and the place became independent under the first Leopold, a German from the house of Saxe-Coburg, which is still in charge there today. Today, the French don’t understand why anyone would want to annex Belgium.

If you ask a Belgian the question about famous Belgians, he or she will at first get very upset at being asked such a condescending question and then, after calming down, will name The Singing Nun, Hercule Poirot, Jean Claude Van Damme, Tin Tin and a number of other names you’ll never have heard of. It’s tough to be known for the reputed nutritional values of Brussels sprouts, Belgian waffles, chocolate and beer. And keep in mind that Tin Tin’s first adventure took him to the Soviet Union (Knifje in de Sovietunie, 1929). Are the communists behind Belgium’s existence? And the Swiss would heatedly contest the notion that Belgian chocolate is any good. Ditto for the Bavarians and Belgian beer. Belgians are the European version of Newfies. They are the butt of jokes. They are thought of as unsophisticated rubes, a bit dim witted and phlegmatic, sort of like their beer – heavy.

If you ask a Frenchman his opinion of the Belgians, he’ll shrug and point out to you that you can’t expect much from people who favor horsemeat as their national repast. He’ll add that eating horse dulls your senses, because, as everyone knows, Belgian horses are plough horses, huge, heavy and hairy.

I know a little bit about Belgians, besides the fact that I grew up next door to them. My oldest son married one. I had made the mistake of inviting him on a tour of the beer halls of Bavaria, when he graduated from university. I had ignored the fact that he was not a connoisseur of outstanding beer. On our first stop in a small city along the Rhine, we invited ourselves to a stranger’s wedding reception. We had to drink many toasts to the bride and groom and all the relatives in attendance. I had a very good time. My son got sick, threw up and plugged up the toilet, flooding the joint. He was embarrassed and didn’t believe me when I tried to tell him that this was nothing out of the ordinary. Instead of hair of the dog, he decided to head south to Venice to soak up some culture. There he met this Belgian girl, who was camping on the steps of the Venice railroad station. And being a naïve American from Kansas City, he fell for her. I can’t blame her for trying to escape the tedium that is Belgium.

I tried to warn him off, endeavored to point out some of the Belgian shortcomings, but to no avail. He didn’t want to understand my peculiar predilection. He didn’t see the point about being rude to Belgians.

But my bias runs deeper than ethnicity. Consider this: Belgian women don’t shave their underarms or anywhere else, for that matter. Well, it’s not really a Belgian-only thing. Lots of European women don’t, but among Belgians it seems a pervasive custom. Now I know that some guys think that bushy pits are an olfactory Garden of Eden. I can relate to that. I have a very sensitive nose and can appreciate a fragrant whiff of funk firing up my brain’s pleasure centers, but it can get overwhelming. For example, if you’re in a car with a hairy woman, the wafting bouquet of smells can get pretty funky. I’m speaking from experience here. It’s an odd thing, but women with furry pits always seem to also have a thing about not opening the car’s windows, lest they catch a draft. They seem inured to stink. To be honest, before I arrived in North America, b.o. never bothered me, but it sure does now. Would you call that cultural assimilation or delayed bias? I blame the Belgians.

Like many Europeans, especially those from deepest Bavaria, Belgians also seem to have an adverse relationship with their orthodontists or, more likely, none at all. They have terrible looking teeth. Maybe they don’t have orthodontists in Belgium. I have never seen anyone there sporting braces. The combination of buck-toothed choppers, shaggy armpits and funky odors has put me off Belgian women. I imagine Belgian men are no different, though I haven’t had any personal relations with any.

Perhaps Belgians have redeeming features, but their country doesn’t serve a purpose. They are lousy at war. They are not good at peace either. They are unable to agree on anything among themselves, including forming a government. The various ethnic factions simply hate each other. The specter of the country’s break-up is never far from the surface. Call me jaundiced, if you must; but I say: Who cares?

Lessons Learned from Love, Beer and Brawling

I was 16 when I fell in love for the first time. Her name was Lorelei Kuehn. She and her family lived in a huge apartment in the Plassenburg, the medieval fortress overlooking my high school in Kulmbach, in the northeastern corner of Bavaria. Her father was a portrait painter and a bomb victim from Berlin and a died-in-the-wool Nazi. All his kids had Germanic names that started with the letter L. Her brothers’ names were Lohengrin, Leberecht and Liebhart. Lorelei was blond and she was hot. I was besotted with her. She flirted with everyone. I couldn’t really compete with some of my classmates. Most came from well-to-do families and they were city kids. I was a country bumpkin who was only a mediocre student and on top of that I had broken the code by asking uncomfortable questions about the recent past and my teachers’ involvement with the Nazis. Many had been ardent believers and had a difficult time reconciling current realities with their past. Questions about recent history were not welcome. In short, I was not one of the gang.

Lorelei allowed me to become her personal bag wallah. She let me carry her books from the Lyceum, the girls’ high school across town next to the city park, through the center of the old city with its cobblestone streets and ancient framework houses and up the steep approach road to the castle. I am sure all the other kids in my class were snickering about me behind my back. I never got past first base with her. I was too innocent and timid. I didn’t believe all the dirt my friend, Helmut, told me about her. My infatuation with her lasted a year, before I grew tired of her. She told me I was not advancement material. Her ambition was to become a translator in the Foreign Office in Bonn. She obviously had plans for bigger and better things. I don’t know whether she ever reached her goal. I lost track of her.

The result of my unrequited crush on Lorelei was that I shut myself off from further pain and stayed away from girls for the duration. I shut down emotionally or, rather, I channeled my feelings into aggressive behavior. Here I was, 17 years old, a frustrated virgin, determined not to get hurt again by opening up to another person. Not a very bright decision, but 17-year-olds are not known for thinking things through. At least not this one. In case you’re wondering, I did not lose my virginity until I was 21 years old and that momentous event took place in a cathouse in Phenix City, Alabama. More on that at some other time.

To compensate, I developed a taste for beer, basically because that’s all I could afford at the time, and for brawling. Keep in mind that in that part of the country beer was considered one of the basic food groups, part of the grain family. After all, it was made from barley or wheat. You’ll find it in the lunch buckets of most workers for consumption in the office or on the work site or in the factory in Bavaria. It is normal.

In those days, a bottle of beer cost the equivalent of two bits. But one of my classmates was the scion of the Reichel brewing family, who owned one of the four major breweries in Kulmbach, which called itself the "Beer Capital of the World." Through him we gained access to what was called “green” beer, beer that hadn’t fully fermented and thus had not been inventoried yet. This brew was quite turbid and had bits of all sorts of matter floating in it. It also had a tendency to clean out your system. We didn’t care. We called this condition “der schnelle Fritz” – the speedy Fritz. The refugees among us called it “der flotte Otto” – the nimble Otto. Fritz, Otto – the result was the same.

Sometimes when I was flush with cash, I invested in a bottle of “Kulminator Eis Bock”, a strong local beer with a 13% alcohol content. It came in a short stubby brown bottle and had an almost cloyingly sweet taste. One bottle was all you needed to put you out of your misery.

Fridays after school was beer day, when we’d meet Karl Reichel behind his brewery and he’d let us have however many bottles we could handle. There usually were five or six of us. I remember riding my bike home after those sessions, a 15 km trip, and being so out of it that I crashed into the ditch and passed out, waking up soaking wet and freezing in the dark. The offshoot of those occasions was that my mother, who always waited up for me, berated me when I got home and threatened to slap me about severely.

If I didn’t fall off my bike on the road home, I usually was able to get the booze out of my system by the time I reached my house. The road, a two-lane highway, was fairly level for the first 13 klicks, but the last two were a real bugger. The two-lane road turned into a gravel country lane and became steep and twisty. You had to stand on your pedals the whole way. This was in the days when 3-speed bikes were the latest. They gave you a real workout. Getting off and pushing the bike was not an option. It was a sign of weakness and all the kids’d be on your case.

Sometimes I took the train for the first 12 km and rode my bike the last stretch from the depot up the mountain to my house. In winter I skied down the mountain to the railroad station in the morning and back up in the afternoon. It made for strong legs and healthy lungs.

To make matters worse, I joined a fraternity, R.A.V. Absolvia, were the raison d’être was the consumption of large quantities of beer, which had to be drunk standing up, from a tall five-liter glass boot without spilling a drop while the rest of the gang sang Latin student drinking songs. "Gaudeamus igitur juvenes dum sumus" (let us rejoice therefore while we are young) was our favorite. You had to hold the glass boot with the toe down or it would create an air bubble when you reached the foot and your face would be sloshed in beer. After a couple of these, it was hard to tell whether the boot pointed up or down. The older members of the group, the “Philisters,” were university students and, even though it was outlawed, some of them secretly practiced dueling with sabers. It was a sign of esteem and honor to sport a dueling scar. Fortunately, I never advanced up the ranks that far.

The offshoot of my frequent encounters with beer was not always oblivion. More times then not I got into fights and usually got my butt kicked. I’d come home with bloody knuckles and bruises and gashes on my face and torn clothes. And my mother would berate me.

Saturday night was usually fight night in the beer halls my friends and I frequented. The slightest perceived insult or affront could result in a wild melee with chairs and beer steins flying and blood and vomit everywhere. The favorite trick was to smash your stein on the table’s edge, so it broke from the handle and to start whaling away. This ceramic or glass handle was our version of a knuckleduster. It was very effective and persuasive. Drinking and brawling went hand in glove. That’s what you did in a small town for entertainment. Everyone participated, including the ladies. No one ever got injured seriously. I think my mother enjoyed applying her iodine tinctures and tonics to my cuts and bruises, listening to my howls.

I had joined the local soccer club, which played in the lowest level of the county league and game day, Sunday, was the highlight of the town’s social scene. The day usually started with church services at 10, followed by a gathering of the players, their families and followers at the Goldene Rose pub. Fortified by several liters of beer each, this mob then moved to the soccer pitch. By game time at 2 o’clock, the home crowd and the visitors, who had invigorated themselves at the town’s other pub, “zur Linde”- to the Lime Tree – were in fine form, with insults flying and the odd scuffle breaking out.

Visitors never showed their faces at the Goldene Rose. That was the rule. Even though they came from nearby villages, they were considered foreigners, to be distrusted. You had to keep an eye on them. It didn’t matter which side won the game. Whatever the outcome, it was the poor referee’s fault. The fans of the losing side would chase him with sticks, walking canes and umbrellas, rocks, anything that was handy to zur Linde, where he had to change into his civvies and where his moped was parked. Sometimes he’d have to lay low for hours before it was safe for him to mount his moped and head home.

After one particularly galling loss of the home team, the three Braunersreuter brothers, all star players on our team, and some of their friends waylaid the referee on his way home, beat the hell out of him and tossed him into the creek that paralleled the road, for good measure. He filed charges and half the town had to appear in court as witnesses against the Braunersreuters, but all the witnesses turned out to have been blind, no one had seen anything and the charges were dismissed. The league, however, declared our home field off limits and we had to play all our games away for a year. We lost every match. One of the reasons was that the opposing teams and their fans didn’t have to worry about retaliation when they visited our village. But we kept score and when the suspension was finally lifted, it was payback time with a vengeance, but not on the soccer pitch. We didn’t want to get suspended again

It was a tradition that on the evening of the game there was a dance at the zur Linde for players and fans of both teams. These Sunday night dances were considered neutral territory. Disputes were settled outside. As long as none of the foreigners, that is the visitors from the next village over, tried to make out with any of the local girls, things remained fairly civilized.

The dance following the first game after the lifting of the home-field suspension made the front page of the local weekly newspaper, the Stadtsteinacher Nachrichten. The visiting team that Sunday was the F.C. Tannenwirtshaus, a village about three miles up the road. Most of the inhabitants of this town were either named Turbanisch or Buss and were the descendants of gypsies who were force-settled there after the Napoleonic Wars. They were basically tinkers, poachers and fruit and vegetable traders, whose gaily-painted trucks could be seen all over northeastern Bavaria buying and selling local produce.

One of the visiting players, a fellow named Bartl (short for Bartholomew) Buss, worked for my father as custodian of his fish farm, located in Tannenwirtshaus. He had learned somehow that there was going to be trouble after the game. He instructed his teammates and fans to bring ax handles and to hide them behind the zur Linde for use that evening.

The Braunersreuters expected nothing less and had directed their youngest brother, Albin, who at 15 was so short that he could easily have passed for a midget, to hide in the bushes behind the pub to keep an eye on the guests’ activities and to report back to the Goldene Rose with his findings. Needless to say, the home side appropriated the ax handles while the visitors were dancing inside. Everyone waited in the shadows outside for the show to begin. When all was set, Guenther Schwappacher, the mayor’s son, tossed two stink bombs onto the dance floor, emptying the hall in no time. We set upon the hapless dancers with our borrowed ax handles and beat the crap out of them. Several ended up in the hospital with broken bones and other lesser injuries.

The upshot was a major trial with 43 defendants from both villages and with jail sentences and fines handed out to the combatants. This time there were plenty of witnesses pointing the finger at each other. Revenge was sworn. It was the beginning of a vendetta that lasted for years, maybe not as deadly as those in Sicily or the Balkans, but certainly as deeply felt.

I learned a valuable lesson from this incident, several actually. One, never step into harm’s way sloshed, two, always have a solid exit strategy and three, you got to have deniability, in case there are repercussions. It’s not enough to have a sound plan of attack; you also need a way out, if things go sour, to stay below the horizon in the aftermath and you need an alibi. And you need a clear mind to see what’s going on around you. I didn’t have any of the above in the incident following the opening of the soccer season. I was arrested along with everybody else and it was only my father’s standing and influence, which got me out of this mess. He was not very happy with me. My mother, of course, berated me to no end.

The other lessons I came away with from this incident were never to trust somebody else to look out for your best interests and it’s best not to have any partners, who can later rat you out to save their own skin. Of course, the downside of this is that you can’t blame anybody else for your blunders.

Remembering My Mother

I was leafing through an old photo album of mine the other day and I came across some black and white pictures of my grandparents on my mother’s side. My grandfather was Swiss and a cheese-maker by trade. He came from the Canton of Thurgau in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. He was a large and extremely strong man. He used to shave his head with a straight razor every Saturday morning and when he was done he’d polish it with a smoked pork rind. He didn’t care that this attracted flies to his head. He’d convinced himself that the medicinal benefits outweighed the nuisance of the flies buzzing around his shiny dome and that the rank smell emanating from his head protected him from disease.

My grandfather had other strange routines as well, such as his eating habits. Watching him eat was not everyone’s cup of tea. He’d mix his salad and dessert together with the main course, cut everything up into bite sizes, then pour gravy over the whole mess and eat it with a spoon. He felt it all ended up together in his stomach anyway, so why bother with separate courses or table manners.

He rolled his own cigars from tobacco plants he grew in his garden and he always had two 100-liter barrels of potent apple cider in his cellar for his fortification. The cider came from trees in his orchard. He also raised rabbits and chickens and turkeys. My grandparents lived off their land in the middle of the city in the lean years during and after the war.

His arms and hands were huge. His skin was as tough as leather. One time he showed my brother and me how he could bounce a pointy kitchen knife off his biceps by flexing at the moment of impact. He didn’t even bleed. He was a tough man and not very nice. He spoke Switzer-deutsch, the guttural German dialect spoken by the people from the northern part of Switzerland. It was sometimes very difficult to understand him. But you never dared to tell him that, because he assumed everyone spoke like him and should be able to understand him. If you didn’t, you were stupid. Perhaps his hearing was impaired. I was scared to death of him when I was a child.

In his youth, he had been the Swiss “Hoseluepfle” champion, a form of wrestling popular in Switzerland in which you tried to upend your opponent by picking him up by his shorts, which ended in heavy cloth rolls around the waist and thighs and tossing him unto his back or off the mat. It literally means “lift by the pants,” sort of like a Swiss version of Sumo. His strength came from manipulating the 200 lb. wheels of Swiss cheese every day of his life since he was a boy.

My grandparents lived in Schweinfurt. During the war and the countless bombing raids on Schweinfurt’s ball bearing plants and extensive marshalling yards, my grandfather believed that because he was a Swiss citizen and thus a neutral, he should not have to suffer any bomb damage. When the bombs did hit his place, he was outraged. My grandmother told him that the airmen who dropped the bombs probably hadn’t seen his Swiss passport, which he always carried with him, and so mistook him for a Nazi. He didn’t think that was funny, but he never had a sense of humor, least of all about himself.

He also hated the Americans because they arrested him after the city fell and took him, along with all males over 16 years old in Schweinfurt, to an internment camp near the airport, where they were trying to ferret out the Nazis among them. The soldiers who arrested him, weren’t impressed with his Swiss papers. It didn’t matter, that they sent him home the next day with his passport. My grandfather held a grudge.

They should have arrested my grandmother instead. Unlike the rest of my family, my grandmother was a true believer before the war, a Nazi party member. On formal occasions, she liked to be addressed as “Partei Genossin” - party comrade. She had been turfed out of Switzerland before the war for insisting on flying swastika pennants on her car while visiting my grandfather’s family. They said it violated Swiss neutrality. She said it was the future. My grandmother was a nurse-midwife, who during her long career brought more than 5,000 babies into the world. My grandmother was also a speed demon who believed haste was of the essence when driving her car. She drove a 1936 DKW convertible, with which she and my grandfather toured all over Europe, until the Nazis confiscated it for the war effort in 1941.

The car’s seizure by the Nazis in the second year of the war forced her to use a bicycle to go to work until she retired in 1949. She believed in Germany’s destiny, as she put it, that is, until Allied bombs flattened the city around her. After that happened, she withdrew into her work and began to age fast. She died soon after the end of the war.

This fascination with speed seemed to run in the family. Maybe it was something in the genes. My mother was a motor-racing fan. In fact, she named me after Bernd Rosemeyer, the greatest Grand Prix driver of his day. Rosemeyer drove for Auto Union and was known as the “Nebelmeister” – the master of the fog. He excelled in wet driving conditions and his races against and victories over Rudolf Caracciola of Mercedes Benz and Tazio Nuvolari of Alfa Romeo made him a hero in Germany and abroad. His career was meteoric and lasted only three years. “Bernd literally did not know fear,” Caracciola said of his great rival. My mother never missed any of his races and would be glued to the radio at race time to follow the exploits of her hero Rosemeyer was killed in an Auto Union Streamliner during a land speed record attempt on the Frankfurt-Darmstadt-Heidelberg Autobahn on January 28, 1938. My mother was heartbroken when he crashed and died.

My mother, who got her driver’s license at age 50, followed in her hero's footsteps. She drove a 1955 Lloyd 400S, a tiny four-seater of a car with a 2-cylinder, 2-cycle engine which generated 13 HP, with the power of a souped-up lawn mower and a top speed of 80 kph. It cost DM3,780, about $900 in those days. The car sounded like a hoarse and hungry wolf, when it got up to speed. People called it a “Leukoplast-Bomber” even though its body was no longer made from Bakelite, plywood and imitation leather, as the earlier models. Leukoplast was the name of a then-popular form of Band-Aid. This model was the first with a steel body. I sported two rear-hinged doors, a trunk, which, for the first time, could be opened from the outside and, another first, windows that could be cranked open by hand.

My mother didn’t care what people thought of her. To her, the Lloyd was a racecar. She was, what you might call, daring, maybe even reckless, behind the wheel. She passed other traffic on principle and knew only one speed, petal to the metal. She was a good driver, never hit another car, never got a ticket. Of course, this was before speed limits were posted on highways in Germany.

There was one incident my father always brought up when my mother’s driving was discussed. My father hated riding in that car, because he barely fit in. He was too tall and his head was jammed against the roof. But he had never gotten a license to drive, so he had to ride in what he called the death seat next to my mother. This particular incident happened on a winter day on an icy road in northeastern Bavaria. The Lloyd, going full out, failed to negotiate a curve, rolled over and ended up upside down in a snow bank. This was in the days before mandatory seatbelts. Anyway, they were lucky. Nobody got hurt. They climbed out of the car, turned it right side up, popped out the dent in the roof. Got back in and drove off at speed. This car was my mother’s ticket to freedom.

My mother died while I was working for Uncle Sam on the other side of the world and my uncle’s needs prevailed. She died from cancer caused by secondary smoke at age 59. She only got to enjoy life for a short time. Thinking about her still makes me sad, particularly this time of year.

My mother’s birthday is on the 23rd of December. She would be 104 years old this year, if she were still alive. My father, who had a somewhat droll sense of humor, used to give her one shoe for her birthday and the other for Christmas the next day. My mother didn’t think it was funny at all.

My mother has been dead a long time, 45 years, in fact. She and I were close. I was her baby, born when she was 35 years old, ten years after my older brother, an afterthought or an accident. I had a sort of love/hate relationship with her. When I was a kid, my mother was the enforcer in our house. My father wasn’t into punishment. He never touched me, but deferred to her. She had a very fast, vicious and accurate back hand. This went on until I grew too tall for her and she’d have to jump or use a stool to smack me in the mouth. By then I didn’t stand still for that anymore. After that she berated me with sermons on the pratfalls of alcohol and the deadly sin of sloth and how they were going to ruin my life. I didn’t listen. Perhaps I should have.

She could be intimidating. She stood barely 5’and weighed at most 100 pounds. She had a voice that could do a drill sergeant proud. She also had a broken nose, where one of her classmates had whacked her with a medicine ball when she was a teenager. She’d never seen the need to have her nose straightened. When she got angry, you didn’t want to mess with her.

She was my protector. For example, when I had problems in high school my mother stepped front and center. I had asked my teachers, who all had been fervent believers in the man with the funny mustache in their previous incarnations, to explain Auschwitz and Dachau, a taboo subject in those early days after the war. You don’t rock the boat in Germany. Instead of answers I got bad grades. My teachers told my mother that I was not classic education material and would never make it to university. My mother didn’t help matters when she called my teachers Nazi swine and warned them that she would make a major public stink about their past, if her son didn’t graduate.

At least she didn’t kick them in the balls and throw them down the stairs, as she had done with the Reverend Krenkel, our Lutheran minister, who made the mistake of coming to our house to tell my mother that her son would not be confirmed, because I had laced the reverend’s New Testament with sneezing powder during confirmation classes and had embarrassed him in front of his students. My mother made short shrift of the good pastor and threw him bodily down the stairs into the entry hall. She followed him downstairs and asked him if he thought his superiors would appreciate his well-known taste in little girls. Needless to say, I was confirmed on schedule.

I don’t know what it is about this mother-son relationship, but even nearly half a century after her death, I can feel the tug of the umbilical cord. I know that I am who I am because of my mother. She believed in never giving up, in seeing things through to the end, in standing up for what was right and damn the consequences. I can feel her presence. Following her lead was not always easy and I have learned to compromise, something she would never do. But then she wasn’t a salesman like I. Her success or failure wasn’t measured in dollars and cents. She was a mother.

The Cobbler's Coup d'etat or the "Schuster-Putsch"

In 1949, I lived in a village on the extreme eastern edge of what was then called West Germany, in the Rhoen Mountains. It was a dead-end place within walking distance of the “Iron Curtain”, the divide between east and west. This was a fortified border with minefields, machine gun emplacements and armed watchtowers, manned by East German guards with shoot-to-kill orders should anyone try to get too close to the barbed wire. Gunfire from that border was a common, nightly occurrence. It was aimed at desperate people trying to escape to the West. Some made it across, most didn’t. We got used to it. It was like background traffic noises.

About a mile and half east, along the main road out of our village toward the boundary line, lay the little hamlet of Maierhof. The frontier ran along the edge of the fields surrounding this place. A Meier in medieval times was an estate manager or leaseholder, Hof means farmstead. This hamlet belonged to a baron, for whom my father worked as a forest manager. The main buildings of this place used to be part of a fortified farm, one of three this titled gentleman owned. There were no stores of any kind in Maierhof, no pub, only the farm, a smithy, a barbershop and a cobbler’s workshop. The rest of the inhabitants were pensioners, peasants and day laborers, who mostly worked for my father as loggers and handymen. The farm was run by a German refugee, who’d been kicked out of the ethnic German region of the Banat in Romania in 1945.

The barbershop was the main draw in this hamlet. The barber’s name was Willi Albus. He was not a real licensed barber, but had learned his trade in the army and his haircuts showed it, but he had a monopoly. There were no other barbers around. His shop was open only on Saturdays. Herr Albus was on the road Monday to Friday plying his other trade - black marketeering and smuggling. He was a veteran of the recent war and had rescued a German army motorcycle with sidecar, which he used on his scavenger hunts, as he called them. Herr Albus had great organizational skills. He was a man who could get you pretty much anything your heart desired, if you had the cash or something worthwhile to barter.

Once a month, early on a Saturday morning, my father and I would trek to Maierhof to visit the barber. In those days a haircut cost the equivalent of two bits and a brick of coal to help heat the shop. I liked going to the barber, because it was gossip central, even though the haircuts were pretty much below par. Anything and everything that went on in the surrounding villages was discussed in depth. My father usually went under the scissors and hand-held clippers first and then he would visit Albus Sr., who worked for him as a foreman on one of my father’s logging crews.

Once my father was out of the room and I had been sworn to total silence about what was about to be revealed – the villagers feared my father and didn’t want him to know what went on after his departure -, the conversation in the barbershop switched to sex and the barber would open the top drawer in his desk and pass around the latest sex magazines and pictures he had picked up in his weekly travels and he’d let everyone look at – never touch – his collection of “Parisers,” French condoms, which were his pride and joy. He had them in all colors of the rainbow, with and without warts and protuberances, made from vulcanized rubber or sheep gut. We were fascinated. We couldn’t think of anyone who’d possibly use these things. “Nur die Franzosen” - “only the French,” was the common conclusion. They were much too exotic for our remote neck of the woods. It was sort of a glimpse at a totally foreign and forbidden outside world about which we knew next to nothing. Obviously, we were rubes.

These Saturday mornings were for men and boys only. Women were not allowed and when someone’s wife, mother or girlfriend had the audacity to knock on the door and demand entry or, God forbid, barged in unannounced, the barber would tell her in no uncertain terms to leave “our sanctum” at once and get lost. As odd as this may seem today, his rule prevailed. There was no bra-burning in front of the barbershop, no outraged women waving placards or throwing eggs.

On one of those Saturday mornings in the fall of that year, a man named Alfred Bittermann, who lived next door to Herr Albus’ hair-cutting emporium, was part of the barbershop crowd. He was a cobbler and a bitter old man and a bit of a drunk. He was bitter, because until the end of the war he had been the local Nazi party boss in Maierhof. He had been important and he’d got to wear a fancy brown uniform with its swastika armband and he’d had an official title and he could tell people what to do. He told the barber that he was disgusted with his French trash, “Franzosendreck”, he called it, and that in Adolf’s time smut like that would have been burned in the village square and the purveyors of such un-German vulgarities would have been shipped to the Eastern Front forthwith or to the nearest “KZ” (concentration camp) for re-education. Everyone laughed and ignored him.

You may not know this, but titles and uniforms are big in Germany, always were and probably always will be. To give you an idea of how absurd things are over there when it comes to titles, consider this: I have a friend who was a colonel in the Bundeswehr, the new Germany army. His wife, who was not in the army, was and is addressed as Frau Oberst, Mrs. Colonel. If you have a PhD in, say, botany, you are addressed as Herr Doktor and your spouse is Frau Doktor. If you were a department head in your business or with the local government, you were the Herr Direktor and, of course, your wife was the Frau Direktor. It’s that Prussian thing about one’s place on the social ladder and the need to let everyone know that you are better than the next guy.

Now Herr Bittermann was a nobody. His lofty position, his fancy uniform and his fear-inspiring title were gone. To compensate for this loss of status and change in fortune, he’d turned to booze to drown his disappointments and sorrows. He was a tiny man. If he topped five feet he was tall and I doubt that he broke 100 pounds. He also had the disgusting habit of taking snuff up his nose. He didn’t believe in using a handkerchief in purging his schnozz, but used his fingers to empty both nostrils at the same time in a noisy explosion of snot into the coal bucket by the stove. This created a bit of awkwardness, because no one wanted to volunteer to root around in that bucket to feed coal into the stove to keep the place warm. It took an order from the barber, who, of course, was the boss of his little empire there, for someone to gingerly fish a lump of coal out of the bucket and into the stove. Nevertheless, Herr Bittermann was a very good shoemaker. Every year around Christmas, as long as I can remember, my father had him cobble a new pair of boots for him.

Anyway, Herr Bittermann and his son Christof, who was a couple of years older than I, were both into their cups already that Saturday morning. You’re probably wondering how an under-aged teenager could be drunk in public. That was nothing special. In those days there was no minimum drinking age. If you had the cash and were tall enough to reach the counter, you could buy beer in any pub, no questions asked. It’s probably still that way.

The elder Bittermann announced to the assembled patrons that he had enough of this new government in Germany and that he, Alfred Bittermann, former “Ortsleiter” (village leader) of Maierhof, was going to do something about this deplorable situation. He was going to lead a “Staatsstreich,” a coup d’état, against the incompetents who were running things these days to restore the proper order to things “wie zu Adolf’s Zeiten” - as during Adolf’s time. The men laughed at him and told him he was a drunken fool and to go sober up somewhere. This really infuriated the would-be putschist. He staggered to his feet and told one and all: “You are all traitors and should be shot out of hand,” he yelled, as he made for the door. “Tomorrow is the day of reckoning. You watch me.” We laughed and thought no more of it.

Maierhof’s main connection to the outside world was the bus line, operated by the Postal Service, like all bus lines at that time in Germany. The bus stopped twice a day in Maierhof, at 8:00 in the morning and at 6:30 in the evening. The way I heard it, the next morning, a Sunday, Herr Bittermann, dressed in the full Nazi regalia of his former position and armed with a handgun, hijacked the bus, attached a large swastika flag to the front of it and forced the driver, who didn’t know whether he should laugh or be afraid, to drive the bus back and forth through the village and the surrounding farm country along the border. Herr Bittermann, waving his pistol wildly in the air and taking long pulls from a schnapps bottle, exhorted passengers and the gaping villagers and border guards to take up arms and follow him to the county seat to topple the enemies of the people who were running things into the ground these days. He was going to restore proper order in the Reich. Not surprisingly, no one took up his call to arms. No one followed him. Maybe he should have brought a megaphone to spread his message.

The East German VoPos (People’s Police) on the other side of the border didn’t know what to make of this farce and thought it best to get prepared for an attack. Maybe they saw the threat as real. In any case, they set up machine gun and mortar emplacements and their officers were running back and forth yelling out orders. Some among the onlookers on our side got nervous and there was talk of getting their guns out of hiding and prepare for combat. Most farmers in those days had military hardware stashed in their hay piles. I knew one, who had a functioning “Tiger” tank hidden under his hay in his barn. People were looking for our border police. But, of course, there were no border guards on our side of the line. No one was trying to escape to the East, so there was no need for guards. After a while, when the VoPos didn’t see anyone else armed on our side, calm was restored in their ranks and they started digging foxholes and watched the drama play out. Peace prevailed.

In any case, after about an hour of this, the schnapps got the better of him and Herr Bittermann ingloriously passed out in the front of the bus. A gendarme – that’s what the rural policemen were called -, who’d at last made an appearance on his bicycle and had been pedaling in pursuit the bus, disarmed him and tried to arrest him. But how do you arrest a passed-out drunk, if all you’ve got is a bicycle for transport? This cop had obviously been in similar situations before. He got some bystanders to help him lift the unconscious and sagging would-be putschist onto the handlebars of his bike facing backwards, then got on himself, placed the drunk’s head and arms over his shoulders and started zigzagging down the road to the police station in the valley. When last seen, the former Ortsleiter Bittermann was draped over the policeman, with his head and arms dangling over the constable’s back, disappearing down the road.

Nothing much came of the “Schuster-Putsch”, as the local paper called it. After a couple of days, the court released Herr Bittermann from the county jail due to his age and booze-related problems, but without his uniform and shooting iron, which pissed him off to no end. He became known as the “Putschist” and a minor celebrity in Maierhof and surrounding towns and villages. His new found notoriety helped his cobbling business pick up too.

Drifting Together, Drifting Apart

It is odd how things sometimes happen in life. It’s as if you are watching a movie, as if someone else was responsible for your deeds, your Doppelgänger, perhaps, or that your actions were due to some shift in time or dimension. When I look back on some aspects of my life, I’m sure that I must have lived in some parallel universe. If the theories of quantum mechanics have value, it is entirely possible to be in different places at the same time. I have been trying to explain to myself some of the choices I’ve made in my life that were not in my best interest and that ran counter to my better judgment. It wasn’t me; it was my apparition. My first marriage is a case in point.

I met my first wife at an off-campus party in Rosie Hayder’s trailer. Rosie was a fallen Amish girl from southeast Kansas, who was working on her MFA in painting. She was a girl who, as they say in Texas, could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch. She was shacked up with my friend Hannes DeBruyn. Hannes was a Dutchman from Rotterdam, whose main ambition in life was to ingest as much booze as possible without having to pay for any of it. He used to stage poetry readings in his digs, which sported a life-size porcelain urinal attached to the front door. He called his place Le Pissoir. To be admitted to his readings you had to bring a bag of doobers or a gallon jug of Gallo Hearty Burgundy, what today you’d call two buck chuck, for the “Intendant,” as he styled himself. Most of the poetry at these do’s was phallic in nature and pretty gross.

Hannes was a slob who looked as if he’d just gotten out of a gypsy caravan. Hygiene was not his strong suit. But he was built like a rugby player with a low center of gravity and he loved to fight. His problem was that he was usually high on something or another. As a result, he mostly lost those dust-ups and his face looked the part. He made up for this shortcoming with his popularity with the girls, who for reasons I couldn’t fathom were all over him. He was on a tight budget, because his father back in Holland had cut him off due to this refusal to graduate. Hannes paid for his tuition and room and board by harvesting the funny weed, which grew wild all over eastern Kansas and selling it to students who didn’t yet know you could just go out into the countryside and pick it along most roads around Lawrence. There were garbage bags full of the stuff under his bed. His place reeked of it.

Hannes was an anarchist at heart. When the campus of the University of Kansas erupted in riots over the Vietnam War in 1965, it was he who led the charge to firebomb the ROTC building. He and his band of agitators occupied the chancellor’s office for four days, before Kansas state troopers rousted them with tear gas. The next year the Student Union building was gutted by fire. Again Hannes was front and center. I don’t know how he did it, but he was never fingered as the instigator. He always tried to get me involved. “We need your military expertise,” he’d urged, “somebody who knows how to shoot straight.” I declined.

Hannes majored in cinematography. He wanted to produce “significant” documentaries. His senior project was called American Apocalypse. It included a scene where two of his pals carried a 6’by 12’canvas backdrop that featured a giant, full-color blow-up of a mushroom cloud over Hiroshima. They waited outside the Religious Studies Hall for some of the nuns who taught there to take their daily lunchtime stroll and then walked with the upright backdrop next to the unsuspecting sisters, while Hannes, sitting side-saddle on the backseat of a friend’s motorcycle, filmed the scene while keeping pace with them. “I want to juxtapose the Pope and the nuclear holocaust,” he explained to me later when I viewed his chef-d’oeuvre in the editing room and didn’t quite get the connection.

Another one of his masterpieces contained a scene that was set in the dug-out basement of a house construction site. Three of Hannes’ cronies sat around a fire skinning a road-kill cat and roasting it on a spit, while Hannes hung suspended from the top of the basement wall filming and I held a Klieg light, illuminating the macabre scene. He called it Life after the Apocalypse. I don’t know if he ever finished these projects. He was still working on them four years after I graduated. When it came to his work, he considered himself an artiste, a man of nuance.

Hannes liked my writing. My problem was that I had learned English in the Army, in other words in the gutter. I knew precious little about grammar and syntax and compound sentences or prepositional phrases and gerunds. My vocabulary was basic and lacked the big words being bandied about by the serious English majors. I wrote about my experiences working for Uncle Sam and I shocked my classmates, who thought I was crass.

I read one of my compositions at one of Hannes’ poetry extravaganzas. He’d rigged a stage by placing a sheet of ½ inch plywood on top of his bed. It was a pretty rickety and unstable set-up, particularly after a few slugs of red wine and a couple of fat spliffs. My contribution was a short story I called The Dance of the Greedy Maggots and the gist of it had maggots feasting on the remains of a VC soldier who had been sprayed with Agent Orange. The toxic chemicals caused the white grubs to grow into super-sized marauding man-eaters, which had turned fluorescent orange and sprouted a double set of large green chitinous wings, three pairs of comely legs and massive blue mandibles. It also gave them an urge to dance a la the Rockettes as they marched through the jungle, devouring everything in their path. It was a very bizarre story. Hannes loved it and told me later that it inspired his apocalyptic documentaries.

Anyway, Hannes asked me to come along to this party at Rosie’s trailer. There were three or four others, among them my future wife. Her name was Ann and she was a graduate student working on her MFA in Printmaking and Rosie had dragged her along because she thought this girl needed to get laid.

A little more than a month later, Ann and I decided to get married, even though I knew in my heart of hearts that this was a major mistake. She and I had precious little in common, except loneliness. She didn’t trust men and I can’t say I blamed her. She was divorced. Her first husband had dumped her for his secretary while she was pregnant with their second child. On top of that, he gave her a vaginal infection that led to a miscarriage and rendered her sterile, unable to have any more children. Not surprisingly, she wasn’t very high on men after that, but she wanted a father for her four-year-old son. She was an artist and she cared about little else. She was tall and good looking, extremely intelligent and a talented painter and printmaker. She had an adversarial relationship with English grammar and structured education in general, even though she had been the beneficiary of the best schools money could buy.

We misunderstood each other from the get-go. I was on my best behavior and tried to come across as European, urbane, civilized. She saw someone malleable in me, who would give her what she needed. But I was not some nice American boy fresh off the farm. I had survived the cauldron of war, death and destruction. I had built a wall around my emotions so thick, I didn’t have a clue how to penetrate it. My objective at the time was to finish university as rapidly as possible. I didn’t want to get sidetracked. I didn’t want to lose sight of my immediate goal – graduation and a job. She was absorbed by her art and I by a drive to succeed at university, to get a job, to make a living. I was also lonely and tired of being an outsider and I hated it. So we drifted together.

The clues for eventual failure of this union were everywhere from the start; I just failed to see them. Take our marriage ceremony, for example. We got married by a justice of the peace, whose office was in the atrium of the Douglas County jail. Two jailhouse deputies were our witnesses. The hoots and whistles of the inmates looking down on us from the cell blocks above cheered us on our way. There was no party, no honeymoon. The fact that no one from Ann’s family showed up for the rite should have given me pause, but I wanted to belong, to be accepted, to be part of a family.

Except, this family turned out to be rather dysfunctional. Her parents lived in the past. Both traced their lineage back to the Mayflower and never let you forget that fact. Her father was a direct descendant of John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay colony. Her maternal grandfather had been a circuit judge in Kansas City. Her mother was a hypochondriac who was always down with some ailment and whose family owned large chunks of downtown Kansas City. Hallmark Cards was built on their land. Her father was the only straight one in this clan, a gentleman. He ran a hardwood lumberyard for his step-brother. His family came from Virginia after the Civil War or, as they called it, the War of Northern Aggression. They had lost everything and were forced to move west.

One of her uncles was a Missouri state representative, courtesy of the old Prendergast Machine in North Kansas City, which had him in their pocket. Her other uncle was a real estate broker, who profited from his political connection in Jefferson City through his brother and his mob friends. One of her aunts was a drunk; another was married to a well-known Hollywood writer, who drank himself to death. Another had been married to a successful surgeon, who shot himself in despair.

Everyone in this family hated each other, but they all pretended to be close, with weekly dinner parties at the grandmother’s fully staffed mansion on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River. They weren’t about to accept an immigrant.

I knew this marriage was not going to work, but I went ahead anyway. It lasted 13 mostly miserable years, before I decided enough was enough and I pulled the plug. We had drifted apart, lived in separate dimensions. As Woody Allen once put it: “There is no question that there is an unseen world. The problem is how far is it from midtown and how late is it open.” Quantum physicists theorize that there is not just one, but many universes, worlds which exist side-by-side along with our own. My quandary is which universe is which and who was that other guy? Was he a phantom or was he real?

A Primer on Education and Survival in the New World

Should you ever wake up clueless and alone, after a night of indulging your baser instincts, in a foreign country, where no one speaks your language and, what’s more, doesn’t give a hoot about your condition, here is a primer on how to deal with this predicament.

The thing to do is to pick yourself up out of whatever gutter you find yourself and head for the nearest bar. Bartenders the world over have a knack for understanding folks with speech impediments due either to too much booze or lack of mastery of the local idiom. This road to recovery is called the “hair of the dog” cure. I have tested this therapy more than once over the years and found it not wanting. I only wish that I had been familiar with it when I first stumbled off the boat onto the docks of Hoboken, New Jersey; but I was a rookie, an innocent.

Looking back on my own experience, perhaps I should have taken the above route. It probably would have saved me from a lot of grief. But the phrase “hair of the dog” meant nothing to me at the time, so, alas, I took a different road, when I found myself without the faintest in a foreign country. I must warn you that before you try to emulate the path I chose: it is not for everybody. I joined that country’s military service. I figured being in an environment that was extremely structured as well as goal-oriented, would level the playing field a bit and afford me a chance to learn how to cope in this strange place called America. This army’s recruiting slogan was “Join the Army and See the World.” I didn’t join to see the world. I had seen it already and was trying to get away from it. But misconceptions prevail when you don’t understand what they’re saying to you. I thought the army would be a great place to learn English.

And in retrospect it was. Obviously, the first step in mastering English under those circumstances was an intimate acquaintance with military commands and your response to them. The drill sergeants corrected you promptly and loudly, if your pronunciation, elocution or execution of the command left something to be desired. The incentive to learn quickly was that you didn’t want to get their full attention too often, because their corrective steps invariably included push-ups or running in place with your rifle at port-arms or some other chicanery.

The second vocabulary group added to my repertoire early on was cuss words. I have become somewhat of a scholar of this subject over the years and I must say that Army drill sergeants have a vast and original supply of expletive-laden profanities at their disposal. The f-word became my favorite English adjective, verb and noun. It seemed to be used in odd and curious combinations with various prepositions and gerunds that mystified my mind. There was f-off, f-up, f-over, f-with, f-around, f-ing this and f-ing that. The combinations seemed endless and at first I was truly baffled. But no one could say that I was slow on the uptake. I always considered myself a quick study and soon mastered that chapter of my educational curriculum. I moved on to food, military gear, pieces of the uniform, components of the M-1 rifle, the chain of command, contents of your footlocker display drawer and sex, all fleshed out and made transparent to me by the f-word.

Necessity improved my pronunciation to acceptable levels, because you didn’t want to be ridiculed in front of your peers. It took me no time at all to figure out that “fuckinkraut” wasn’t one word and didn’t mean recruit. It took me roughly six months to get a handle on the rudiments of the English language, albeit with a very limited and, you might say, not salon-rife, vocabulary.

It may not come as a complete surprise to some of you, but most of the Army training cadre believed that all Germans made excellent soldiers. They didn’t elaborate, so I took their word for it. In any case, after about a month into basic training, they decided to make me acting corporal and a squad leader, which seemed a big mistake to me, because my nearly non-existent English made it very difficult for me to communicate with my squad. The Army believed in loud communication. You were not allowed to mumble. Commands had to be enunciated clearly and at the top of your voice. By then, I had command of maybe a hundred English words, most of which were accompanied by the f-word and are unfit for print. My drill sergeants didn’t care. They told me that I needed the practice. My fellow recruits thought it was hilarious. My struggles gave them some levity, which otherwise was in short supply during basic training.

The problem with learning a language from scratch in the enlisted ranks of the military is that you really never move out of the gutter and onto the next plateau. This became clear to me when I got to university some years later and was required to write endless essays on subjects that didn’t call for the f-word to explain my thoughts. My lack of language skills turned out to be a major handicap which held me back for some time and clearly highlighted my shortcomings. In fact, it was a disaster.

I had arrived at the University of Kansas in Lawrence in the last week of January 1964, after a two-day Greyhound ride from Philadelphia. It was bitter cold. The university sits on a hill about 300 feet above sea level, with nothing between it and the North Pole, it seemed, to hold back the icy winds that swept down over the wide open prairies. All my gear was still in transit on a US Army troop ship somewhere on the Pacific. Not that any of my stuff in my errant footlocker would have done me much good in Kansas. This was not the tropics. I did not own an overcoat or a pair of gloves. I was frozen and I was pretty much broke.

A classmate turned me on to a gig as a waiter at the Fire Pit, a steak house just off campus. I should never have taken a job as a server in a fancy restaurant. Here I was fresh out of the abattoir of Vietnam, where my job had been death and mayhem and now I was supposed to be polite and kowtow to some asshole whose steak wasn’t done just right. I had to restrain myself from shoving a steak-knife up their nose. The f-word returned from its exile and took center stage. I lasted three days before the owner suggested that I probably would be better suited for work in construction or some other outdoor job that required rigorous activity.

My salvation arrived in the form of English for Foreign Students. Even though I was not classified as a foreign student, I was able to talk the professor teaching this course into letting me transfer to his group. All the students in that class were graduate students from abroad, mostly Taiwan. They spoke English worse than I did. To teach these foreign kids to get a handle on the King’s English, the professor used the writings of the ancient Greeks, like Homer, Aristotle and Xenophon, translated into English, of course. I loved it. I had spent six years in high school reading this stuff in the original. I wrote essays that were the envy of my classmates. I drew on my memory and quoted freely in Greek and I learned to love the English language and banish the f-word from sober speech.

One of the graduate students, a girl from Greece, stood up in class after I had quoted a passage from Homer’s Odyssey in the original and said: “I don’t understand a word you are saying, but the Greek, she sounds beautiful.” She had tears in her eyes. I thought I was pretty cool.

She told me about an outfit called People-to-People, which, among other things, arranged summer jobs for foreign students. This group was run by co-eds who wanted to broaden their horizons. I wasn’t a foreign student, but one of the girls there liked me anyway and promised to find me a job, if I taught her German. She wanted to visit Germany that summer. She was a large and healthy farm girl from around Salina, Kansas, and she had this slightly sour aroma of milk about her. I agreed to tutor her in the finer aspects of the German language and culture. I figured what the hell, it’s only two months and then she’ll be off to the fatherland. How bad could it be? She turned out to be extremely energetic and nearly wore me out, but she was true to her word and found me a summer job with a construction company in Gypsum, Kansas, which repaired grain elevators in small towns all over Kansas, Oklahoma and Nebraska.

This construction job turned out to be the final chapter in my education in and my understanding of how things worked in America. The day I arrived in Gypsum the skies opened and dumped more than 18 inches of rain on the area in the space of two days. The local creek broke its banks and the town found itself under about three feet of water. All basements were flooded, including the basement of Mr. Frisbie’s house, where I was billeted. All roads in and out of town were cut. The first thing I learned was that the people didn’t sit around and wait for the authorities to arrive to organize assistance, as would have been the case in Europe, but they went to work pumping out basements and clearing debris to allow the water to drain away. Everybody simply rolled up their sleeves and helped each other to rectify the mess nature had created. It was an eye opener for me. I liked it.

This deluge also gave me my first taste of snapping turtle, which popped up everywhere in the floodwaters. I shot them with Mr. Frisbie’s .22 and Mrs. Frisbie deep-fried the meat from their legs, neck and tail. It tasted great, a bit like young crow. The trick was to shoot them in the head, so that they’d float. If you shot them anywhere else, they’d dive to the bottom and you’d never find them. My skills came in handy.

I didn’t realize how dangerous work in those old wooden grain elevators could be. There always seemed to be some clown who had to have a smoke as he dumped his truckload of grain and a spark would ignite the grain dust and the place would blow up. I remember one occasion in Yoder, Kansas, which is down near Wichita, where a guy lit up and got blown off his tractor and through the boards of the wall. Other than a broken collarbone and scorched hair, he was OK. These were tough people. Welding jobs in the metal grain bins were the worst. If you weren't careful, the ensuing dust explosion, contained in the metal bin, would blow everything above it, including the welder, to kingdom come.

There was always work for our crew. We’d go in and repair the damage after some mishap. This usually meant climbing up in the rickety and damaged wooden tower that held the grain conveyor belts and trying to re-attach the wooden timbers that held the structure together. If you were lucky the old paternoster elevator still functioned and you could ride it to the top. They ran in a continuous loop and you had to jump off and on, a skill quickly acquired, if you didn’t want to crash to the ground below. I also learned how to weld and how to cut metal with a blowtorch. This was hot work. The temperature outside would reach 110 Fahrenheit and inside it’d be 20 to 30 degrees hotter. You drank a lot of water and after a day’s work you smelled pretty raunchy. But the money was good.

My work crew consisted of four guys. Two of them were my age. They had been shipmates in the U.S. Navy. One was a local boy, the other a very large Hawaiian named Todd Kakuakane. He easily stood 6’5” and weighed 285 pounds, none of it fat. Even though I was an ex-Army guy – and they never let me forget – these two ex-sailors took me under their wings. We understood each other. We were kindred spirits.

Saturday nights the three of us would go out to party. This was not an easy thing in those small mid-western towns. Many were dry or didn’t serve liquor by the drink. The beer was a pathetic 3.2%. But there usually were roadhouses outside the town limits, where you’d bring your own bottle and you could dance to live music. My new Hawaiian friend was the star wherever we showed up, at least with the ladies. The guys didn’t like him much and more times than not we got into brawls, but we tended to prevail. The three of us stuck together and had each other’s backs. We’d been in worse.

My Hawaiian mate would do what he called the Tahitian hula, a Polynesian version of the haka, the Maori war dance, in which every muscle of his huge body shook in rhythm to the music while he performed. He had unbelievable control. He could twitch his muscles all at once or in sequence or only some and not others. He was a sight to behold, particularly, when he stripped to his waist and got down into a squat to show the action of his massive gluteus maximus. The ladies went wild. The three of us did all right and never lacked for company. My education was complete.


.

My Brother Willi

My first memory of my brother is when I was three years old and he grabbed me and made tracks on his skis down the hill from our house to get away from my mother who was unhappy with something I had done. He was 13 years older than me and he was my protector. Soon after, he was drafted into the army. He was 16 at the time and we didn’t see him until after the war ended 3 years later. We didn't know whether he was dead or alive, whether he’d survived or given his life for “Fuehrer und Vaterland.” He returned on my birthday in 1945. He was 19 years old and he was a wreck.

I’ve been thinking about him lately. His name was Wilhelm, Willi for short, and he’s been dead for two years. I loved him. He was named after my father’s oldest brother, who fell in Russia during World War I. He was my friend. He was a forester and game warden like our father and his father before him. He was the last to choose that profession in our family and he was an original.

But before I get into the story of my brother, a little background might be in order. I’ve already discussed his dexterity in rolling cigarettes with one hand and his willingness to flout authority in providing food for our table after the war in other stories touching on my brother’s life. I knew him for 67 of his 80 years here and I can’t recall ever seeing him in a suit and tie. He felt most comfortable in jeans or in his green forester’s uniform. He had the chance for advancement to the upper levels of his profession, but he chose not to, because that meant giving up his outdoor job and moving into some office in the city. My brother was one of the most unpretentious people I have known. Some might say he was naïve. He cared little about world affairs or politics or the size of people’s bank accounts. All he ever wanted to talk about was his dog, hunting, his job and his family, in that order. He was happiest out in the bush and was very good at what he was doing. He was an accomplished woodcarver and turner and an expert designer of high-quality hunting knives, which he built from scratch. And he was a fine shot. I know none better.

My parents were not overly religious. They went to church once or twice a year, usually on Christmas and at Easter. Non-Catholic churches were far and between in this very Catholic part of Germany where we lived. It took an hour and a half to two-hour walk each way from our house to the closest Lutheran church, on the road to Fulda down in the valley.

This routine changed after my brother came back from the war. What happened was that as the war drew to a close and the Russians were about to overrun Berlin and we had not heard from my brother in months, my father made a solemn promise to his Lutheran God that he would go to church every Sunday for the rest of his life and be a true believer, if God would see fit to bring his first-born son home safely from the war. He kept his promise. He became an elder of the church and insisted that I had to accompany him to church every Sunday.

I had no choice. Every Sunday morning after my brother’s safe return home, rain or shine, my father and I would walk to church down the mountain and then back up the mountain. My mother stayed home to cook the Sunday dinner, which was the most important meal of the week. It was the only day of the week we ate meat, except during Lent, when my mother substituted fish, usually carp, sometimes eel.

My mother was an excellent cook and she outdid herself on Sundays. Sunday was dumpling day. It followed a strict routine. First thing Sunday morning, my father and I had to prepare the potatoes. A sizeable number of them had to be peeled and grated. The shredded spuds were then stuffed into a white linen pillowcase and, with the help of a wooden stool stood on its front legs to slant the seat, kneaded, squeezed and pummeled on the slanted stool surface to extract all juices as well as the starch into a bowl. The liquid was discarded; the remaining starch became one of the components of the dumplings. This prep job took about an hour of intensive labor. After my father and I were off to church, my mother took over the cooking. In Germany, the main meal is served at noon and in our house Sunday dinner was at 1:00 o’clock sharp and usually consisted of venison roast, red cabbage and gravy, to go with the homemade raw potato dumplings. After walking ten kilometers to and from church, my father and I were starving and ready for this feast. It wasn’t unusual for us to devour 10 to 15 fist-sized dumplings at one of those meals.

Now let me tell you a few things about my brother. One of the things you need to know to form a mental picture of him is that he held the world record, if there was such a thing, of dumpling eating. He once ate 42 of them. You wouldn’t know from looking at him. He was one of those tough, sinewy, lean guys who can eat all day and never gain a pound. True, those world-record dumplings were not Bavarian raw potato dumplings. They were Prussian dumplings, called “Dampfknoedel” (steam dumplings), much smaller and oval shaped and made with yeast and flour, not potatoes. These dumplings were the staple in the house in which my brother took room and board after the war to make up his high school finals. The landlord was a Lutheran minister, but from the north of Germany, ergo the very un-Bavarian flour dumplings. You could knock somebody out cold with Bavarian dumplings, like my mother made. They were substantial and required a knife and fork to subdue. Leaven dumplings, on the other hand, were soft and could be attacked with only a fork. Still, 42 is not bad, even if they were not real dumplings. It was a number that called for respect. The best I ever did was 12 of my mother’s dumplings, about the equivalent of 24 Prussian ones.

Another thing you need to know about my brother is that he never went to church. He thought of preachers as charlatans. His church was the woods in which he spent most of his days and many nights. He was totally in tune with nature.

His other hang-up was that he hated officers as much as he did parsons. He thought of them as cancers which ought to be excised. He based this low opinion on his experiences during the war. I learned about his proclivities when I found out about the four German General Staff officers, who were hiding in one of my father’s hunting cabins in the woods near our house. This was toward the end of September 1945, five months after the end of the war. I told my brother about them. He was furious and went to investigate. He found that these officers, two major generals and two staff colonels, had stocked the cabin with food and wine and other delicacies the rest of us could only dream about. They were waiting for an opportune time to surrender to the Americans. In the meantime, they were living the life of Riley in that log cabin.

This cabin was about a mile from our village, 150 yards off the main road, well hidden in a little clearing. Every day, between four and five in the afternoon, an American patrol, consisting of two jeeps led by an armored personnel carrier would drive along the road through our village and into the woods beyond. When they got to the edge of the forest, they would speed up and open up with their mounted .30 cal machine-guns. They’d go at full tilt without stopping and spray the woods to the left and right of the road with bullets. They never hit anything. They were afraid of the “Werwolf”, a non-existent clandestine resistance force of Nazi die-hards, which was supposed to carry out guerilla attacks against the Allies, along the lines of the Russian partisans. The Americans never found any "Werwoelfe" or the generals’ hide-away.

My brother decided to end their vacation. He asked me to help him. His weapons of choice were Molotov cocktails to roust the generals and their flunkies. Of course, in those days we, as Germans, had no access to gasoline to make those projectiles. My brother had a plan. We would simply liberate the gasoline from the Americans who came to our village every week to re-educate us kids and to teach us about democracy by showing Disney cartoons. That was to be my job.

It was a major sacrifice for me to skip Mickey Mouse the next time the Americans came and sneak out of class and siphon gasoline out of their ¾ ton truck parked behind my school. My brother had given me a length of rubber garden hose and a liter milk bottle and told me to fill it. It took me a while to get the suction going, but after gagging and spitting gasoline a couple of times, I was able fill my milk bottle. I corked it and hid hose and bottle in the bushes behind the schoolhouse and snuck back into the darkened classroom. Mickey Mouse was in full stride. No one noticed my absence.

That evening, after retrieving the milk bottle and hose, my brother and I emptied the gasoline into green half-liter beer bottles. There was enough for four bottles, each about half full. He then ripped an old shirt of his into strips and jammed them into the beer bottles with one end hanging out. Molotov cocktails can be tricky. The rag has to be soaked in gasoline to ignite and if you’re not careful, they can blow up in your hand. My brother explained to me how to do it right. He’d learned how to from the Russians. I thought I could handle the bottles. His strategy was simple. We would sneak into the woods about a half-hour before the Americans’ daily sprint-through. When we heard their guns open up, we would toss our Molotov cocktails into the cabin and drive the officers out and into the arms of the passing American soldiers.

It was a good plan. When we heard the Americans start to blast away with their machine guns, we lit the fuse on a bottle each and tossed them through the window into the cabin. There was an explosion of fire inside. We tossed the other two bottles in for good measure and hid in the bushes to see what would go down. Nothing happened. The officers didn’t come out, the Americans raced past, blasting away wildly, but apparently saw nothing or if they saw, didn’t want to take a chance and stop and investigate. The cabin burned to the ground. We didn’t stick around, but went home and my brother told my father that he thought he’d seen a fire in the general direction of his hunting cabin. They went to investigate. I was not allowed to come. They were gone a long time.

My brother told me later that they’d found nothing in the rubble of the burned-down cabin. My father opined that the officers had probably been drinking and accidentally set their beds on fire and burned the place down and then fled in a panic. Neither one of them mentioned finding any bodies. The Americans came back the next day to investigate with reinforcements. They had seen the fire, but had thought it better not to stop, afraid of imaginary Nazi partisans. My father told them that he had no idea who had lived in the cabin. He assumed they were DPs (displaced persons), who had used the cabin as a hideout. I thought I knew what had happened in that cabin, but I wasn’t asked for my opinion. The officers had vanished into thin air.

Soon after, our paths parted. My brother went away to forestry school and we lost contact. I eventually moved across the Atlantic and disappeared into the U.S. Army. When I finally re-emerged, we started corresponding again. He helped me survive. If it hadn’t been for him, I would have been totally broke in my first semester at university. He sent me $20 each month in his letters. He didn’t have much money himself. He had a family now. But he sent me what he could afford. He came to my graduation and later, after he retired, he traveled to North America almost every summer. We hunted together in the mountains of Idaho above the Snake River, the hill country of the Ozarks in Missouri, the swamps of southern Florida and in the Valley of 10,000 Smokes on the Alaska Peninsula. We spent weeks together most summers at my cottage on Kennisis Lake in the Haliburton Highlands north of Toronto. He was happy here.

I miss him.

Booze and its Consequences

When I arrived in America nearly fifty years ago it became clear to me at once that maybe I’d made a big mistake by coming here. Here I was totally alone, without the safety net of family or friends, no backup of any kind. The people here didn’t speak my language and I didn’t speak theirs. My choices were stark. Turn around and go home with my tail between my legs or tough it out. Thank God for Uncle Sam’s Army. It became my family. It wanted me. Without the Army, I surely would have dissipated and failed utterly.

Today, I am of two minds about my time in the service of my Uncle Sam. On the one hand, it turned the boy fresh off the boat into a man, able to handle himself in pretty much any situation. On the other hand, the military made me do things no civilized human being should have to do. I now believe firmly that they picked me because they knew I was alone, had no one to turn to, complain to. I was just an immigrant, not a citizen, expendable, without the risk of anything coming back later and biting them in the ass. Send the kraut, he doesn’t have an option.

There is no denying that service in Uncle Sam’s army caused unbelievable stress in many of his soldiers. Some of those with whom I served, dealt with their emotional problems by suffering breakdowns, wracked by nightmares and ghosts. Others turned to drugs, which were readily available everywhere. Still others turned into homicidal maniacs or offed themselves in despair. Many suffer to this day.

I indulged in – let’s say – reckless behavior and mostly it involved the use of my old standby, booze. By then, of course, I had graduated from beer. My libation of choice became vodka. Vodka takes the edge of pain, dulls the senses and numbs the mind, kills your inhibitions. Vodka erases all taboos. It's also not detectable on your breath, when you're dealing with your betters. It made me a star in the eyes of those who required my particular skills and who sent me out to do their dirty work. More often than not, vodka caused total embarrassment and the odd time, pain.

I remember an occasion on my tour in Europe at a NATO tank gunnery range in northern Germany run by the Brits. Our division was there as part of annual NATO gunnery practice. My military police company was detailed to keep the peace and maintain order. Our British hosts and counterparts invited us to their sergeants’ mess for drinks one night. The Brits discouraged their soldiers from fraternizing with the locals. Each company had their own bar in their barracks, run by the company sergeant major, where soldiers could buy drinks and sandwiches and relax.

There were four of us who showed up at their mess and in less than two hours we had drunk their whole month’ supply of booze. Keep in mind that pay in the British Army was lousy. They made maybe 10% of what we got paid. They couldn’t keep up with us and ran out of money very quickly. At first they were too polite and then too annoyed to accept our offers to pay for them. In any case, we proceeded to clean off their shelves and cupboards. To add insult to injury, I went in search of a washroom and in my stupor stumbled into one of their billets instead and thinking it was the latrine, opened a sergeant’s wall locker and relieved myself on his neatly squared-away dress uniform and hat in the bottom center of his locker, while singing “I wish I were in Dixie.” Needless to say, our hosts got nasty and tried to throw us out. We objected. One thing led to another and a melee erupted. We wrecked the sergeants’ mess before they finally tossed us out on our butts, bloody and black and blue.

We went back the next day to apologize and pay for the damage. But by then word had got around that one of the bloody Yanks had dishonored their queen by urinating on her emblem worn on the front of their dress head cover. We were not invited in.

A few days later, about 50 of us were in the base movie theater. I forget the name of the movie showing that night, but before the film started, the queen appeared on screen riding a horse and the sound system played “God Save The Queen.” Everyone stood at attention, except the Americans, some because they didn’t know any better, some because they were too drunk to stand and some because they “wouldn’t stand for no goddamn' foreigner.”

My friend, Dwayne Klopfenstein, of Fort Wayne, Indiana, who was on his second bottle of scotch by then, yelled: “Fuck the queen!” and caused a riot. We trashed the theater, but being outnumbered at least 5 to 1, we got our butts kicked. Our division commander offered an official apology for us and we were banned from fraternizing with the Brits for the duration of the exercise.

Dwayne, by the way, slept with a bottle of whiskey under his pillow and couldn’t dress himself in the morning unless he had swig or two first. Without that, he had the shakes so bad that he couldn’t function. He was a lifer and an excellent MP, as long as he had a slug to calm his shakes.

The Army, of course, knew what was going on, but didn’t step in as long as everyone did his job. It was a fact that many senior NCOs had drinking problems. I remember one sergeant in our outfit. His name escapes me now, but he was a cook and he had a retention problem. Every time he got drunk, which was every Saturday night, he shat himself and soiled his uniform. We made sure to avoid Sunday breakfast, if he was on duty in the mess hall, because he wasn’t too concerned with hygiene.

One time, my drunken buddies and I decided to milk a cow on the way home from a country bar in Germany in the early morning hours. We were passing a pasture with a lonely cow in it and I bragged about the fact that I had grown up in the country and knew how to milk a cow. So we stopped the car and jumped over the fence, marched up to the cow and I proceeded to demonstrate my expertise. The only problem was that the cow turned out to be a bull and he did not take kindly to being milked. He saw red at having his pizzle manipulated and kicked me flat on my butt and then took off after the others, chasing them all over the pasture. I was in pain and had trouble getting up. I crawled back to the car as fast as circumstances allowed while the bull was busy with my pals and just made it back before the beast remembered his erstwhile milkmaid and came after me in a rage. I was in pain for a week.

Another time, my buddy, Cpl. Williams, who was the old man’s driver, and I bought a case of Seagram’s Canadian Mist in the Army Class VI store and headed to a pub we used to frequent in a place called Jebenhausen, a small village about 10 miles from our base. We put the whisky bottles on the table and invited the locals to help themselves. The Germans were used to schnapps that burned your throat as it went down and thought this smooth whisky was not very strong and gulped down the bottles as if they were filled with water. Everyone got pretty wasted. One of the locals present was Fritz Flederwisch, the renowned painter of Mercedes cars, who believed cars should be painted any color, as long as it was black. He had stopped in only for a quick beer and was on his way home to deliver a freshly plucked chicken to his wife for dinner. When he remembered his neglected task after a bottle of rye, he decided he’d better get the chicken home. He tied a string around the carcass, stumbled outside into the rain and, cheered on by the patrons of the pub, walked it home, dragging it on his string through the mud all the way to his house on the outskirts of the village. His wife was not very happy with him and beat him about the head and shoulders with the muddy chicken in front of his pals. She also got together with the other women and they put the pub and the “verdammte Amis” – damned Americans – off limits to their men. It cost us a dozen butterball turkeys from the base PX to undo the ladies’ fatwa.

On rue Pasteur, during my tour in Saigon, I routinely swigged back a jar of Stoli before I went out on my close encounter jobs. It calmed my nerves and my conscience and it gave me the ability to act without fear. I associated vodka with success. Instead of being embarrassed by my boozing, it earned me slaps on the back and status. I couldn’t let anyone know how I really felt, so I drank more.

By the time I returned and left Uncle Sam’s employ at age 24, I couldn’t function without my comforter – vodka. This caused real problems at university, both in the classroom, where I was a total failure and in my dormitory. After a night of particularly heavy boozing, I and a couple of other losers decided to turn on the fire hoses on the second floor of the dormitory and flood the place. When the cops showed up, we jumped out of the second story windows. Luckily, we landed in a huge lilac bush and were able to escape. The police couldn't’t prove who had done the deed, but nevertheless I was told not to come back, that university housing would not be available to me. Someone had ratted me out.

I decided it was time to wean myself off booze. Not that I stopped drinking altogether, I still had the odd beer now and then, but I managed to lose the urge for and dependency on hard liquor. I realized that succeeding at university and being drunk most of the time did not compute very well. I have to thank my English Literature professor for that revelation. He convinced me that I had the potential to make it.

Politics on the Edge of Canada

I don’t know what it is about B.C. politics, but politicians out here seem to have a propensity to expose their privates in public. Maybe it’s something in the water or the air or maybe it’s the potent weed they’re growing out here. More likely, there are just more loony-tunes attracted to politics here than in other parts of the country.

Case in point: the other night I went to an all-candidates meeting on Saturna Island. Most of the candidates standing for the upcoming federal election were expected to be there. There were supposed to be five of them. Only four showed up, because Julian West, the nominee for the NDP had resigned that day, because he had brandished his woody at a group of teenage girls some years back. He was outed by a posse of Google sniffers. You can check it out at therunagatesclub.blogspot.com.

When I heard this, I thought it auspicious for the rest of the evening. I was hoping for some excitement, some flash. I was thinking that Briony Penn, the candidate for the Liberal Party, who had ridden a horse bare-breasted down the streets of Vancouver in January 2001 in an anti-logging protest, might pull a similar stunt here. But she disappointed and didn’t even have a wardrobe malfunction. No one thought naked horseback riding at all odd here. And I can see that. Doing a Lady Godiva and startling passers-by with your exposed hooters is not in the same league as “wagging your noodle in public.” (see same blog above)

That night, she only waved “my leader Dion’s white book” about at every opportunity. It annoyed me, because I was expecting a bit of a spectacle and all she could do was to parrot from Stephane Dion’s bleached green book. She had no ideas of her own. She could have done with some acting- and voice-coaching as well. Hectoring your audience may work in the classroom, but here it made her look like the rookie she is. The scene reminded me a bit of the days of Chairman Mao’s Red Book. At least he and his disciples knew what to do with power once they got it. I doubt that either Briony or her leader Dion know what to do, should they get elected. Thankfully, the federal Liberals are tanking in B.C.

Then there was the nut bar from the Canadian Action Party. His name is Jeremy Arney and he is a heavy equipment operator and a transplanted Brit, who believes the U.S. is ready to send its army up here any day to occupy Canada, that the Canadian dollar is about to disappear and Canada is on the verge of vanishing from the map. He’s also convinced that aspirins cause strokes. He didn’t have clue about reality or what the issues were on Saturna. I don’t know what it is with these Brits. They don’t seem to get it. I felt like pointing out to him that the vanguard of the American invasion is already here, because I and a number of others in the room were Americans. But I was too polite; I guess I lived in Canada too long. Maybe he’d think we were all part of the American 5th Column and have us arrested for subversive activities. Doing the Chicken Little thing is not a very good party platform. People at the meeting took him for a clown.

To be honest, there were two level-headed wannabe’s at the head table. One was Gary Lunn, who is the incumbent and a Conservative. He was in a no-win situation, since his and his governing party’s record was there for all to see and the audience proceeded to pick him apart on issues on which he was weak or had failed to act to the satisfaction of some in the audience, while the other three had never done anything and had no record, only promises. The socialist fringe, which has quite a following on Saturna, was well represented in the crowd. They tried very hard to paint him into a corner. He kept his cool and came across as pretty level-headed and, boring as it is, nobody has accused him of exposing himself in public or some other perversion.

The other was the chap representing the Greens, Andrew Lewis, another transplanted Brit. This is his third try at getting elected. He came across as pretty coherent and sensible. I say this, even though tree-huggers bring on the urge in me to grab my chainsaw and wreak some havoc. With no one representing the NDP this time around and the Liberals fading fast, he has a chance to get elected this time. On the other hand, I don’t know why anyone would waste their vote on someone who will have no influence whatsoever in Ottawa, should he get there.

All in all, it was a tame and unsatisfactory evening. Nothing even vaguely exotic happened. No perverts burst from the closet. No pyrotechnics erupted. No fisticuffs. No beer mugs flying. No one did a full frontal in support of his or her platform. Boring, boring, boring.

Maybe that’s the Canadian thing.