Be Inspired ...

"Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore."
Anatole Broyard

Am I paranoid? Or am I living under a rock of grim reality?

* * *

After Siggi and I arrived at the university near the Washington-Idaho border, we moved into separate rooms in a dormitory and took care of our paperwork. Since I had spent little time here before, I explored the campus and its surroundings. Pullman is an island in the rolling hills of the Palouse, where in the summer golden grain grows in waves from the eastern horizon into the sunset. In winter the hills are brown or covered with snow.

The tree-lined streets and red brick buildings on campus radiated an academic atmosphere that thrilled me. I was proud to be a part of it and felt a sense of belonging. And there was no slimy mud or soul-wrenching screaming anywhere.

Up to this time I had given little thought as to what I wanted to study and didn’t know enough about the available choices. While slouching on my bed, I perused the course catalog to see what studies were offered. In less than an hour I decided to major in architectural engineering because I thought that being creative would offer me the greatest satisfaction. I hoped that this subject would quench my creative curiosity. I also remembered Pa’s lifestyle. He had been his own boss, had a lot of fun designing and supervising the construction of many buildings, while earning a lot of money in the process. My decision would cost me a lot of money, two inches of finger, and eons of office boredom.

I had made very few major decisions in my life and those had been mostly on the spur of the moment; all others had been made for me by higher, or lower, authorities. The big decisions that I had made so far were as follows: In Simonswolde, one, one, one…, will I able to jump across this ditch and not fall in? Yes, maybe or no. Always, two, two, two…, will my life be a blast? Always, not yet! Three, our decision to come to America was without a thought. The strong gravitational pull generated by books and movies, combined with our unending abhorrence in the bosom of our family, caused us to respond instantaneously to Maxo’s trap. Four, I found my first paying job out of curiosity about the stink of the place. Five, borrowing seventy-five dollars helped in my final escape from slavery. Six, the decision to attend college was a spontaneous firing of the synapses in my brain that might have been inspired by my guardian angel. Now seven, what should I major in?

I was doubtful about all of the mathematics required in my pursuit of happiness and therefore went into denial about it. It had always been one of my weakest subjects, but maybe it would go away if I ignored it long enough.

In the past, my imagination had offered me an escape from mother’s and father’s important activities and their consequences. I liked to draw, was good at it, and had always wanted to know about the inner workings of everything. By the age of six or seven, I had disassembled clocks to discover time. I took apart radios to learn the results of not reassembling them correctly. Over the years I destroyed many an object with my curiosity but also fixed some that were broken. In Simonswolde I researched our world on a globe which had a dime-sized compass built into its base. I rotated this base back and forth to figure out why the compass needle always pointed to the same direction. Finding no solution, I pried off its glass cover and forced it to go my way. But it always insisted on returning to the same bearing. While this little needle had an unwavering aim, our family floundered through its mortal existence.

When I was little I always had asked Ma, how, why and where? She remembered my curiosity in a letter:

“You always wanted to know everything and even asked me, ‘why do flies have legs and worms don’t have any?’”

* * *

When I showed the results of my grade prediction test to my academic counselor, he did not roll on the floor laughing his belly off, but kindly asked me to enroll in “bonehead” English, even though I was a hairy beast. I did not tell him that I had only recently been delivered by boat but told him that I had a good command of the English language and should not have to take a remedial course. I also did not inform him that when I took this test, I had been very tired and had been highly decorated with grade A moomookakapoopoodoodoofroufrou, because he might have misunderstood me and thought me to be quite witty.

I surprised myself that I had countermanded a professor since he represented the authority that had always frightened me. What had happened to me? Authority had made me stutter and stammer and had often punished, whipped or oppressed me. Then I was even more surprised that he granted me permission to enroll in English Composition as I desired. There was another big lesson in this.

By this time I had dated girls only a few times. Now that I was in college, I was slowly dissolving the chains that imprisoned my body and mind, and this was a period of confidence building for me. In my new freedom I could try to identify the ghosts from our past that might be dwelling within me, and it would take years to realize if there even were any because they were not easy to find. I had escaped from my exploiters, was able to shower, make friends and did not have to be lonely anymore. The tourniquets on my heart and brain were loosening also because no one told me anymore that I was stupid. I tried to make up for lost life and did not need a lot of material things to catch up. Being able to do what I was doing in college was all I desired as long as I didn’t flunk out.

No one could ever intimidate or abuse me again, and I would never have to work without earning a just reward for my efforts, even though in the interim it might still be hard labor at Screech and Stench. There were a lot of nice people in this world after all. I spent hours sitting in the Student Union lounge that was such a vibrant place, watching and visiting, often with girls. Students sat in booths and crowded around tables. We joked, smoked, sipped Cokes and listened to the jukebox. On weekends this building was usually packed with teachers and students and was pulsating with talk, laughter and music. Some of the songs from the jukebox never changed; “Scotch and Soda” and “Georgia” will always be on my mind.

Although I never realized it until many years later, Siggi and I never talked about our ordeals or about our father and mother, nor would we do so in the future. At this time we still had two big challenges to deal with, earning enough money for college and achieving good grades.

* * *

Twenty-some years later, my wife and I would return to visit our alma mater. I was anxious to relive an hour or two in the Union Building where I had spent some of the happiest times of my life, but we would be disappointed the minute we walked in. Who died?

The main lounge was morgue silent. The booths and tables we used to crowd into, up to eight at a time, were no longer there. Randomly arranged tables with two or three chairs had replaced them. The few students present looked sad and all seemed to be strangers to each other. The same jukebox was still there but the music had changed, and I didn’t like it. Oddly enough I still found “Scotch and Soda” and put a coin into the machine to play it. But it was not the same; the old spirit was gone.

In the lobby I perused a telephone book because I wanted to connect with someone, or something, from my mostly happy college years. The first section of listings therein was printed on blue paper. Blue made me feel good; it was my favorite color. But my mood would change quickly when I read the list for services, agencies and support groups unknown to me. Sex Offender Support Group, Suicide Helpline, Pregnancy Hotline and Alcoholics Anonymous, as well as numerous other official and volunteer groups. My unhappiness intensified.

I reflected upon my college years and back-sighted mentally to past markers as I had learned in surveying. I remembered when I had stood by the window in our dilapidated second floor apartment in Everett and had looked down to observe two girls. They had seemed strangely lost in our rundown neighborhood. They wanted to be positive and popular, and they would be labeled pessimists for pointing out unpleasant truths because so many people could not deal with disagreeable facts and therefore ignored them.

While thinking about these blue telephone pages, I took a mental foresight and projected the trend from my backsight ahead into the future. I could see America’s social fabric unraveling. I guessed that this could be the trend in all wealthier societies to varying degrees. Generally, people need humbling and loving experiences to stay the course. Siggi and I had had a few of the former, and if we gritted our teeth and continued to crawl upward, we could find success and happiness in life. But through my foresight I worried that our new country itself would backslide and pull us back down with it.

* * *

We didn’t start drinking booze in college until after our first year and then only to flush out stress after a difficult test. After one such, two of my friends, who were not quite old enough to drink legally, asked me to buy some beer. We drove to Moscow, Idaho, where the legal age was nineteen instead of twenty-one, and I bought a twelve-pack of Coors. On the way back I was driving the Ford past the campus police station, when blue lights flashed behind us. I tried to ignore that familiar sinking feeling in my belly while the policeman informed me that one of my headlights was out. Then he asked me to open my car trunk where he found our beer. He took it and asked the three of us to follow him into the station where he told his chief why he’d stopped us. The chief checked our driver’s licenses, warned us not to drink on campus, and dismissed us since our beer was unopened, and we were still breathless.

Even though I did not drink much, I did get drunk. Once. Involuntarily. Totally. Siggi and I went to a New Year’s Eve party hosted by our friends, Richard and Amir. They lived above us on Lombard Avenue in Everett during the time when we had to skip one semester to earn more money for college. As we entered their apartment, gracious Amir offered me a drink, a glass full of orange something. It tasted mildly alcoholic, and after I finished it, it finished me.

The last thing that I remembered was that I announced to the party that I was flying to the moon and departed. Since I passed out quickly, I didn’t know how I got there. At about four o’clock in the morning, I slowly woke up and was so cold that my teeth were rattling uncontrollably as they only could on a cold moon. But I was not there; I was lying on my back on our living room floor and could not move. Strangely, Amir was no longer my friend. I heaved, shivered and chattered weakly:

“Bbbb blankkket,” but no one heard me since I was the only one there.

Had I barfed, I could have drowned myself; I would not have been the first person to suffocate in vomit. I wondered how I’d gotten from the moon back down to our apartment, so when I recovered, I asked our friend, six-foot-four Richard:

“Did you carry me down to my apartment?”

“Er! No, I pulled you down,” he responded.

“Pulled me? You mean you grabbed me under my arms and dragged me?”

“No, I pulled your feet.”

“Even down the stairs?” I wanted to know.

“Yeah,” he confessed, “your head bounced nicely down the steps, ha, ha, ha.”

A year or so later, Siggi also flew to the moon, along with a lot of others. Fortunately my girlfriend and I missed the flight on that rocket. We arrived at the off-campus launch pad at about eleven o’clock at night and wondered why there were no lights in the party house, inside or out. I opened the front door and turned on the lights to expose lifeless astronautettes and cosmonauts scattered all over the place. Houston, we have a problem! They were lying on the floor, on beds and couches, singly or in bunches. I checked all the flight compartments to find survivors and found one in the bathroom. Siggi’s girlfriend sat on the floor and was the only one who had not passed out from space sickness. She was tenderly holding his head in her lap, face up, because he was unconscious like everyone else. He told me later that he had not passed out at all, and that intermittently boys and girls had come into the bathroom to empty their bladders. He could hear them tinkle and talk about privacy, but his girlfriend had assured them that he was not in this world, and I was also sure of that because he did not respond to my prodding. My girlfriend and I were glad that we had missed that moon flight.

* * *

Although I had now started using my head, Richard didn’t always use his; at least not when he cleaned his .22 and thought that it was empty. While I was visiting him one day and was standing at the open window, contemplating the symbolism and geometrics of the Star of David on the synagogue across our street, he banged a bullet into a wall behind me. Instead of reacting in terror, like diving out of the third-floor window, as I would have when I was younger, I ignored the sudden ringing in my ear and calmly turned around to see the most surprised man ever. After my adrenaline level fell back to near normal, I wondered how far this bullet had traveled, whom it might have killed, and realized that this might have been illegal. Therefore I hurried back to my apartment below, pretended to be intensely studying Shakespeare’s Henry VI, what’s this about lawyers?, in order to establish an alibi in case the police came looking for the guilty party. But no one ever came to investigate.

Then came a time when none of us used our heads. Richard, Siggi and I felt bored and longed for adventure, so we rented a small boat and cruised around a nearby bay. When we were far out, a gale rose to rock us around exuberantly, so much so that we became afraid and decided to return to shore. I was the captain operating the outboard motor, and while I was looking ahead and turning our craft around, I felt its control stick pull away. Instinctively, I gripped it firmly as our motor fell into the sea. It hadn’t been secured well enough and the vibrations must have worked it loose. We lifted it into our boat but could not start it again. Without control we bobbed around, to and fro, for what seemed like hours before the rental agent came to find us, maybe because he might have thought that we had stolen his boat. Fortunately the gale did not strengthen, and we did not capsize, but years later one of my roommates would drown under such circumstances.

* * *

Occasionally I went to a nearby self-service laundry in Everett to brighten my bed sheets, to brighten my outlook. One time, “Uncle” Maxo, whom I had not experienced for a long time, came in and darkened my outlook, and we exchanged information. After I had left his tideland, he had had trouble finding someone else to work for him, at least for the wage that he was willing to pay. He hired Lloyd, a retired neighbor, part time, and when I met him later, I found him to be a very, very kind and alcoholic man.

Maxo asked me what I was majoring in, and I told him that I was studying architectural engineering, a five-year curriculum. I knew that this would make him happy, and sure enough, his face lit up in the way that I had anticipated, which told me what he thought:

“Good, you’ll flunk out. I’ll get you back again.”

He saw the old Ford, and with a faint hint of a smile, he said to me, “Ah, you got a new car!?”

“No, we just had the old one painted.”

“I see,” he replied.

Siggi and I had the Ford painted, for thirty dollars, to stroke our egos, because it had looked like a wreck. Its hood had blown up, obstructing its windshield at sixty miles an hour while I was crossing a very long two-lane bridge. Gripping the steering wheel, gritting my teeth. Over the years we had replaced a fender and the trunk lid also and had bought all of these parts from genuine junkyards, so not much had matched in color, like my colorful, color-blind personality. Nowadays we might not be able to buy pre-owned parts from junkyards because we seem to have fewer junkyards. Miraculously many of them have evolved into classic auto malls and antique car supplies. Are junkyards also rising to a higher level, like Siggi and I?

Every time I would see Maxo over the years, he’d say, “You got a new car?!” But this was rarely the case. Even when my wife and I would visit him much later, he’d make such a statement. We owned, and I mostly repaired, a Cougar, the kind made of plastic and metal and without tail, for more than sixteen years. It was always the same color and he’d still exclaim, or ask, if we’d bought a new car whenever he would see our wild animal. He was always counting dollars, ours, always hoping that I would have to come back to his tideland because I might not be able to find or deal with other jobs or people since I had been such a loser. Is he hoping that I’d go into debt and default on my payments? His facial cast, his brain waves, his statements, his body language, all signaled that he had hoped this to be the case. Long ago I had developed a sense for survival that also could read the thoughts, feelings and the true and false signals from certain people.

Siggi, who got to know him much, much better than I, told me that he thought that Maxo was envious of people who were successful or did things that he was not able to accomplish himself, such as relieving himself, big time, on a wide-open tideland. Yodeling in a rainstorm. Puttin’ on the Ritz.

* * *

As I progressed in my college courses, I continued to gain confidence in myself and my abilities, especially when I earned an average grade in my first semester English Composition and an excellent one for the following semester. These were two courses that I was to fail, but instead, I had finally shattered my own and certain expert opinions about my intelligence. They had tormented me, and I was finally proving them wrong, even though most of these people would never learn about the dramatic ballooning of my intelligence, after they permitted me to loosen some of the Knoten in my brain that they had created.

I earned good grades in architecture as well but barely passed the mathematics courses, and during subsequent semesters I discovered a repeating cycle. I did very poorly on the first exam because I was extremely nervous. I’d stare at my test paper, sweating, scribbling and erasing. Toward the end of the test period I often would be wrung out and figured that I’d flunk now anyway, and that there was no further need to worry. Then my pencil and slide rule would race to beat the clock, and when the test period was over I would feel as sticky and relaxed as if I had just come out of a hot Swedish sauna, without the benefits of the hot, the Swedish or the sauna.

As the semesters progressed, my confidence came ever earlier during the test periods, and my scores would improve. The more I learned in a course, the more confidence I gained; mathematics was not so difficult after all. The ghosts from my past would play evil games in my mind, but I would stubbornly refuse to let them gain the upper hand over me, no matter how much pain they would inflict.

* * *

Over the years I would banish my more obvious ghosts. I would completely rid myself of this evil math test ghost long after leaving college, when I changed my career from architecture to highway design. My employer would teach me my new occupation, which included a three-day course of trigonometry. The night before the first day of this course, my firebombing or some of the numerous other interesting experiences combined with the early morning alarm clock ghost to trigger the midnight ghost to wake me at night. Exhausted the next morning I called in sick. I stayed in bed most of that day, dozing off and on between reading newspapers and magazines. Over the years I would miss work only infrequently and almost always because of this midnight ghost.

Before noon I answered a telephone call. A court clerk asked me to appear for jury selection that afternoon, and I told her that I was in bed because I was not feeling well. When I returned to work the next day, I was still tired but, strangely, in a good mood. Jim, the instructor who taught this class informed me:

“You might as well not come back since you missed one-third of this course.”

“But I want to,” my guardian angel replied. I could not have said this because I always ran away from math tests if I didn’t have to take them.

“OK,” he responded and his face portrayed his thinking that this would be hopeless.

At the end of the third day I had to again attempt to slay my math test ghost during our trigonometry test. As usual I sat in the front row so I could hear the instructor more clearly. I concentrated so hard on solving the problems that I was oblivious to my surroundings, and that I was the last one to finish this test. When Jim gave me back my graded test paper, it had only one red mark and it read 100, the only perfect score in that class in many years. When my boss asked Jim later how I had done, Jim simply shook his head, answering:“Boy, that Ami’s really somethin’.” He didn’t know that he’d just paid me one of the biggest compliments that I had ever received in my life. Neither he nor I told my boss that I had a perfect score and this in spite of missing one-third of the course. Jim did not want to swell my head, but I was proud that I had finally laid to rest one of my most agonizing ghosts.

My employer would also help me slay another one, fright of public speaking. I remembered how terrified I had been when I stood before the wall in high school, waiting to be shot, while reporting about The Wall. In this class, however, my fright would slowly dissolve somewhat when I watched some of the other employees shake at the lectern before it was my turn to show them how well I could tremble. After I presented my speech, I gained so much confidence that I volunteered to give an almost impromptu speech to this class the following year. For that one I listed a number of subjects that I knew something about and wrote them down on slips of paper that I put in a box. Then I asked a student to pick one out, and I spoke about inflation, a perfect subject to dazzle everyone with bullokaka….

* * *

Because of ghosts and my desire to keep my grade point average high enough to be able to remain in college, I had to drop a course early during one semester when I was not doing too well. I dropped physics almost three weeks after its start, hoping to enroll in it again during another semester, and substituted a math-less one, literature. Shortly before the end of that semester, Professor Krieger gave us copies of a poem called September 1, 1939. I did not read it, much less study it, and we never discussed this poem in class. Maybe I was to have studied it as a homework assignment but had not heard, i.e. comprehended, this instruction.

Again I had that familiar sinking feeling when one of the essay questions on our final exam was to discuss this poem. I had to fake my way to a correct assessment of its contents, and its deeper meaning. You could always find deeper meanings in the words of poems. I thought that September 1, 1939 must have been the date when Hitler had invaded Poland, but I was not sure. It was at the time I was born, and I had come into this world with a bang. I knew little about this big bang history even though I had been in it. In my test essay I described what I thought this poem might be all about and wrote about the evils of Nazism, relating them to the probable context of this poem.

Since it was the end of the school year, and I left Pullman for my summer job at the West Coast, I did not get back this graded test and did not know if my assessment of this poem had been correct. It could have been about floating the Amazon River in a bathtub. When I later received my grades in the mail, I was amazed that I had earned an average grade in literature. Since I forgot my analysis of this phantom poem the minute I finished the test, and I never received it back from the professor, I have been wondering ever since what this poem was really all about. So when I began writing this memoir, I thought that it might help me discover part of the dreadful history into which I had been born. I searched and discovered Auden’s poem on the Internet. When I read it I was surprised how closely the punch lines of each verse related to my own life.

* * *

My very good friend, Gale, and I took a structural engineering class together. One morning I woke up with my last ear plugged with wax and I felt desperate. I needed all my senses to earn a passing grade on the test that we had to take that day, and I knew that I would be haunted again by my math test ghost. Gale and I arrived at the classroom at the same time, at the sound of the bell announcing the beginning of my hell. The professor was already handing out test papers while giving verbal instructions. I saw his lips move and heard muffled sounds. Gale and I sat down next to each other, and I nervously whispered to him:

“I can’t hear the prof. What’s he saying?”

If we talked, the professor could accuse us of cheating. For that reason I did not want to say anything more to Gale, to get a clue as to what was happening. He pointed and motioned to me, but I did not understand his message; maybe he told me to be quiet. I felt as if I were drowning and no one would help me.

Not being able to hear well would cause me frequent problems throughout my life. Unbeknownst to me, the screaming of the saws and planers at Screech and Stench would slowly destroy my remaining hearing acuity. In noisy situations I would always feel that I was missing something because I could not fully participate in conversations.

I not only wanted to destroy my ghosts, but I also had to fix my ear; I had to stop the rot in my head and restore my hearing. In later years I would buy two hearing aids, but they would help me discern spoken words the least when I needed them the most, namely in noisy surroundings. Conversely, I imagined that I could get sucked down a toilet when I flushed it because it sounded like Niagara Falls. Therefore I’ve kept my hearing aids in a drawer because they are too expensive to throw out, yet. How many hearing aids are lying uselessly in our nation’s drawers?

A few girls tried to teach me to dance, but I had always been a klutz without rhythm. One day I discovered why. I turned up the music so loud that my girlfriend plugged her ears. I heard the beat of drums; I felt the rhythm. I had seldom heard the right vibrations, so I would bounce around to the clarinet or whatever instrument I could hear best, resulting in my counter-culture dancing. I started a new jig, and to this day people in much of the world still dance my way. It is a loose kind of dance, left arm in, right elbow out, step toe left, then hop around without embarrassment.

But it was not only the beat of the music that was too vague; it was also spoken words that could confuse me. One time I ordered a sandwich at a lunch counter. The cute girl taking my order asked me, “Breed or bite?”

Even though I hoped that I had heard correctly I said, “Pardon me?”

“Breed or bite?” she repeated.

I was confused, as I had been so many times before; the light in her eyes did not match her question. A basic instinct wanted me to breed right there, and I thought she gave me that choice because I was a handsome stud. I wanted to tell her that he’d be more than happy to breed and would not bite. But then it registered in my brain that she must have asked me, “wheat or white?” because I was in a fast-food joint and people normally don’t breed there. I pawed the ground, snorted with disappointment, and told her uncertainly “wheat.” Had I told her, “let’s breed,” would she have served me instantly? With a flying pie?

* * *

During my early days in college, Siggi’s first-year roommate invited me to live with him off-campus in his trailer that had a stick-built bedroom addition, which became my room. I accepted because he’d charge me far less for room and board than I had to pay for living on campus. I paid him a fixed monthly sum and this included about seventy-five cents a day for my food.

When winter became really cold, this fixed sum did not include keeping me cozy, so I used a floor rug as a blanket on my bed. When it became colder still, I also asked roomy’s dog, Rusty, to sleep on top of it to keep me warm. But he was heavy. I continued to strive toward becoming civilized and insisted on clean bedding, so I bathed Rusty. Since I did not want him to freeze I dried him off, and since I did not want to fuzz up my towel, I used the salt and pepper suit that Uncle Fullo had thoughtfully bought for me. I’d worn it only a few times, and after I dried Rusty with it, I thoughtlessly threw out this expensive keepsake.

I discovered that my roommate had a somewhat different view of the world than I, and this did not enhance my mood, because he was moody. He would sit at his desk for hours brooding over his studies without saying a word. But later in the semester he lightened my spirits when he placed an ad in a German national magazine advertising for female European pen pals. He received over three hundred replies, including portraits, from several countries.

I corresponded with one of these girls and enjoyed this long distance romance. She was an actress in Munich and said that she knew the Pirzers who owned the dancehall/beer cellar where we’d lived at the end of the war. Then she informed me that she did not mind sleeping with older men, and I wondered why she wrote me that because I was not much older than she. In her next letter she suggested that we should get married as soon as possible, even though we had never met. I concluded that she was pregnant by a forty-some year old man that she’d written about, so I quit writing her and began to write to several more pen pals from my roommate’s fine collection.

Because of the lack of food at my room and board establishment, I failed to score high enough in my physical evaluation tests: push-ups, sit-ups and chin-ups. Therefore I was required to take “bonehead” P. E. during the following semester, when I moved back into Sherwood Hall where I could eat in a dining room and always fill my belly. I had plenty of muscles from working hard, but they did not function too well during this time. But with sufficient nourishment I became one of the best athletes in that class and wondered what I was doing there.

* * *

Sherwood Hall and its twin dormitory were two-story, flat-roof wood structures adorned with old, gray tar or asbestos shingle siding. They were built at the end of World War II to house GI’s but only temporarily and were still “temporary” in the sixties. Should they be classified as hazardous sites? Or be placed on a national register of historic buildings? Some of the dormitory’s occupants unlocked each other’s doors with knives that they borrowed from the dining hall. They also removed walls to enlarge their quarters, and one of the students even kept a live turkey in his suite. The walls were so flimsy that I could hear simultaneous, poorly syncopated music from my neighbors that sometimes interfered with my studies.

I had worked very hard to be able to live in this dorm. I resided there for several semesters, during some of which the combined grade average of its occupants dropped below “2.0.” Once or twice with my help. Our motto could have been: “We’ll all flunk together when we go!” Before we do, we would like to thank the janitor for always keeping the floors and bathrooms spotless and shiny and our sheets and towels so clean.

Nowadays people have become much smarter than we were, because more than half of the students in many colleges are on the honor roll. I read that more than eighty percent of the graduates of one famous college now finish with honors. Had I been born a couple of decades later, would I be smarter, or dumber too? And with a lot less pain? These students achieve this even though many of them now sleep on top of each other. Boys on top of girls, or vice versa, or some such combination. If I had had my choice of where I could have slept, I would have flunked out before too many semesters. But we were deprived because our girls were always locked in for safekeeping every night in their own separate buildings. We did not dare return them to their dormitories after their curfew because they would be punished, and then they might not allow us to date them again. But unlike the girls, all the boys were allowed to be out all night. Because they couldn’t get pregnant? Didn’t need protection? Discrimination? Or was I befuddled?

Today I could not only be smarter, but I could also live in greater style. Near the center of a town not far from my present home is a beautiful brick building with immense skylights. It is also surrounded by a luscious green lawn. Its victim residents don’t pay to reside there. I do, along with many other fools. They live in comfort, study law, pump iron and watch movies. One of its occupants wrote a letter to our local newspaper saying something like, “I’ve been in jails all over the country and I want to thank your community for the finest facility I’ve ever stayed in.” Even though this jail was built only a few years ago, it is already bulging and new “portables” had to be added. These are surrounded with a shiny, high, chain-link fence, topped with coils of razor wire, in order to blend in with the aesthetics of the adjacent beautiful rose garden.

* * *

Siggi and I enjoyed the international flavor of Pullman, the quiet university town. There were students from all over the world, and over the years we socialized with, or befriended many of them. There was an Untouchable doctoral candidate from India and shy Bamadele from Nigeria who lived across the hall from me. I liked them because their black eyes reflected their lives; they showed that they were heroes also. There was Chaim, a master’s student from Israel, who would later discover the agents that caused aging in plants, and Siggi played a lot of chess games with him. Hans von Randech, the son of a Nazi general who was executed for disobeying Hitler’s orders, taught me sociology. A very good friend was Khadja Mohammad Fuad Softar Ali Butt, an architecture student from Pakistan, who could recite Shakespeare from memory and daily drank several glasses of milk that he reinforced with two teaspoons of sugar. This caused him to carry ever more weight. When Fuad had first arrived in Pullman, he thought that he had landed in the wrong state, because he expected to arrive in Washington D.C. and not in the empty hills of Eastern Washington. Over the years I learned some of the differences, attitudes and beliefs of these cosmopolitan students, and I respected them and enjoyed them greatly.

Siggi was an excellent chess player and beat most of his opponents most of the time. Sometimes he played on behalf of the Cougar Chess Club, which invited him to become a member, but he did not join. He also played against our mutual friend Steve and me and won almost all of the time. But after losing too often, Steve, others, and I quit playing him because he bruised our egos too much. He would sometimes even win after turning the chessboard around toward the end of a game to continue playing our losing side. And as if that weren’t intimidating enough for his opponents, he spent little time pondering his moves and sometimes even read a newspaper while waiting for his turns.

Argh!

He did not play chess according to the conventional wisdom of planning his moves in advance. He played like Napoleon played his battles. While his enemies were pondering their strategies, he’d pounce quickly to gain advantage and attack with full force. Likewise, Siggi usually brought his queen into the battle as soon as possible. It caused great damage to his opponents in the very beginning of the game. He studied history and tried to relate what he had learned from the past to the present, and I imagine that he applied this knowledge to fine-tune his chess tactics.

* * *

At the start of a new school year, we moved into a new dormitory, Goldsworthy Hall, which faced the loop road around campus. By this time I had overcome the chronic shyness of my youth, and when I was in a really good mood, I would even become feisty and adventuresome. For example, one day when new snow covered the ground, I was returning from the dining hall when I had a brain drizzle. If I roll a big snowball, will others push it onto the street?

I rolled one as large as I could, placing it next to the curb, and went to my room where I broadcast my brain waves, waiting and watching the setup below. Amazingly, within minutes a group of boys responded and rolled my snowball bigger. They created new ones and placed them across the street, eventually blocking it. Ever more volunteers joined my party, and a festive mood spread over the belly-filled, but booze-less, crowd. But soon I lost control over my revolution when my rebels began to ignore my brainwave broadcast and were breaking off traffic signs to embed them in the snow wall. This worried me because it was destructive and could lead to traffic accidents and hurt innocent people. I was relieved when a police cruiser arrived, although it was unable to push through the snow to clear a path.

My relief was short-lived, however, when my roommate who would later drown, dropped a big snowball from a pedestrian overpass onto the hood of a passing police car while yelling, “Cops hurt.” The police officer became enraged and spun away. This titillated my rebels, so they feverishly continued to add to my wall, and in the end they crowned it with a porta-potty stolen from a nearby construction site.

The seed of my idea blossomed into a barricade across a major road and into a leaderless riot. The police returned with a pickup loaded with snow for extra weight and attempted to push through again. It became embedded instead. The mob cheered, jeered and booed until several more cops arrived and dispersed the revelers, chasing them into dormitories and into hiding. Now I worried about undermining the authority of the police, because every act of insolence leads to further such acts. And if unpunished, leads to popular criminality.

Ami’s Avalanche Axioms. The implications of this theory could be enormous. An imported ex-slave started a riot, and only he knew why and how it began. Yet his nasty little idea and small effort had great consequences; his little snowball grew almost spontaneously into an avalanche of civil disobedience. He gave no verbal orders, informed no one, but achieved far-reaching results without great effort on his part, taking no credit, no blame for its consequences.

* * *

In college I caught the zest of life as much as my meager resources would allow. I dated girls and one of them was the epitome of hedonism. Nothing seemed to bother her. Everything was fun and funny. She was from Germany and was burdened with few studies because she was a live-in maid for a professor. I met her while attending a party at another professor’s house. While I was engaged in a conversation, she walked in, six feet tall with big sky-blue eyes. She played it cool and I had to meet her because a man chases a woman until she catches him. It did not take her long to catch me, in the middle of the night, in her basement bedroom, where we pursued one of man’s primeval instincts. And woman’s also. I had never had so much fun before and realized why half the people in the world could be the unintended outcome of such fun.

At three in the morning, euphorically and quietly I sneaked out to the Ford, coasting it downhill before starting it. I did not want to wake the professor because someday I might take one of his courses, and he or I would be embarrassed by what went on under his bedroom at night. When I arrived home, my roommate Bill assumed that I had spent another long night slaving away in the architectural design lab, which I occasionally did to meet deadlines. This night had been different, but I never told him.

* * *

At about this time Ma wrote me the following to enhance my zest for life:

“…Monday I read in the newspaper that Herbert is building a fifty-meter high building with twenty-four apartments, businesses and underground parking near the German border by Basel. Have you received any payments from him?”

Ma wanted us to know that he earned lots of money or should have, or could have, but was always scheming to avoid paying us. While reading this letter, I was resting on my bed while Bernard, my roommate at the time, was studying at his desk. I rose quietly, walked out of our room and went for a long walk. I was looking for a guilty party that I could pound into pulp but could not find one.

Years before, a court had ordered Pa to pay seventy-five marks a month to maintain his two sons. This amounted to less than twenty dollars apiece. Over time, because of Ma’s stubborn pursuit, this sum was increased somewhat. But this was immaterial since Pa paid his obligations only infrequently. A penny to his children was a penny that he could not turn into body fat, smoke or alcohol. Fine cigars were necessary to fumigate the aphids on his roses; fine wines were necessary to deal with the families that he had created, but I didn’t know about the usefulness of his fat.

It was Teufi who almost exclusively would enjoy the rewards of Pa’s talents as an architect. After all, that’s why she had married him. Ma continued her court battles to keep the early court orders in force, to enjoy the rewards of Pa’s talents also. Since they differed so much, I didn’t know why she would have otherwise married him.

I rarely thought about our past. I never wrote to our relatives in America, Germany or Switzerland. And I seldom wrote to Ma. But she kept writing us about our good old days and giving us useless advice. She scolded me and called me a scoundrel for not writing her more often. She even asked other people to encourage us to write to her. At this time I did not even want to hear, speak or write German. I forced myself to forget; therefore I wanted to avoid her intercontinental missiles because it would be easier for me to remain a hero.

But our past can be a boomerang, which, when it comes back to haunt us again, it’s best to duck. In the summer of 1962 one such arrived in my mail. It was a registered document from the Consulate of the Federal Republic of Germany in Seattle. It was addressed to me at Washington State University and was forwarded to our permanent home address, Siggi’s and mine: General Delivery, Everett, Washington. For too many years we resided in a box in this post office.

I wondered why the Germans were sending me such a big document. Pa had promised us that if we were good boys, we would someday inherit his Grundstueck, and Siggi and I would certainly have exceeded his expectations, if he had any. Did Buskohl die? Will we inherit his legacy? How did they find me? Did they want to draft me?

I tore open the envelope and tried to interpret the fourteen pages of turgid gobbledygook of German sesquipedalian words and protracted sentences. In essence, the court summoned Siggi and me to appear, personally, for the first time ever, around the time of my birthday in October. Our father claimed that he could no longer support us. He owned nothing and worked for his wife for less than two hundred fifty marks, a little over fifty dollars, a month. He claimed that the defendants were now of age and had not made any claim for support since January of 1958.

This court summons did not state that under the law, Paragraph 1602 BBB, every father would be required to provide support for his children. According to the Support Rights Laws, unwed minor children are doubly privileged “…in that the children do not have to deplete their own possessions in the support of their parents and, secondly, in that the parents are at the risk of their own support in having to share everything with their children.”

This summons also ignored that a father was legally required to pay for the education of his children until they obtained the same level that he had achieved himself, even if they were of legal age.

His complaint also twisted the truth in that we were gainfully employed in America and earned so much money that we even could afford to own a car. This claim was very misleading. The Ford jalopy had been in Maxo’s name for many years, and we still drove it without insurance. Owning a car in Germany at that time still implied a wealthy lifestyle. An automobile was mostly a luxury there because the efficient transit systems reached even the remotest villages. However, in America a car was an absolute necessity, like a roof overhead with a toilet beneath, especially in the expansive western states.

We could not afford to fly to Germany to appear in court. We learned from Ma’s past experiences that it would be futile to deal with, and through, the German laws or lawyers. Nor could we take time from our hell or our studies. At this time I commuted nightly to the planing mill on a single-gear bicycle without lights, that I had bought for ten dollars because Siggi needed the Ford to get to his job which was much further away than mine.

He and I did not respond to this court summons, as our enemies had undoubtedly anticipated, and thus we lost this case by default.

Poof! Poof!

Included with the documents from the German consulate was a letter written by Pa on the letterhead of “H & E Neuman, Architects,” Herbert and Elfriede, aliases Buskohl and Teufi. Teufi must have learned drafting from Pa, if at all. She could not legally practice architecture since she had not studied it, and Ma’s lawyer confirmed that she was not licensed. But the court accepted that our father was now working as an employee of his present wife, an impostor, to deny our support under German law.

These documents stated that Pa was now penniless. Teufi owned everything, we owned nothing. When I read this, I did not know if he were penniless only on paper or if he were now really a pauper. I knew that paupers lived in streets, attics and other idyllic places. Pa and Teufi had lied and twisted the truth so often that one never could be sure about the facts as they claimed them to be. Whatever the case, after I read these papers I placed them with my letters from Ma and promptly forgot about them. I saved them for a time when I might be able to face our past. I did not even discuss this with Siggi and did not ask Ma if Pa were now really a pauper. I did not care if he lost everything or became a multi-millionaire because I thought or cared little about our homeland and our family.

Only years later did I confirm that it was true that Pa had made himself penniless, and that he had paid an incredibly high sex-maintenance fee. It was true that Teufi had convinced our father to give all of his possessions to her so he could escape his obligations to support his children. Our father gave everything he owned to the devil in a Faustian bargain. He gave away his architectural practice, his luxury home, his Mercedes and his sweet little children. He bargained away everything but his clothes and only received heartaches in return.

Then Teufi divorced him.

Deals like this forced people to cheer themselves with jokes:

A Diplom Ingenieur, an ear surgeon and a lawyer were sitting at their Stammtisch, drinking beer and debating what the oldest profession might be.

“The oldest profession must be medicine,” said the surgeon, “because God was a surgeon when he took a rib from Adam and created Eve. Surgery.”

“No. It must be engineering because God engineered the whole universe from chaos,” said the Diplom Ingenieur.

“Who do you think created chaos!?” the lawyer retorted.

Two dozen hard-working jurists and two loving parents had created chaos in our lives, Siggi’s and mine. They had pretzled our souls, had stolen our worldly possessions, and had sent us into dirty slavery far from home.

And furthermore, no court tried Teufi for practicing architecture without a license. No court convicted her and our father for obstruction of justice and for attempting to mislead the judge. They were not punished for committing perjury by telling monstrous lies under oath. For that matter, not one of their lawyers was ever summoned to be tried for obstruction of justice or for misleading the judges. Pa had impoverished himself so he would not have to pay his obligations and had even lied to the court to become a pauper. It thus came to pass that he was reaping what he had sown. Did he still have humor left to joke about this fateful harvest?

* * *

Ma didn’t send me any letters about this latest court case but sent Siggi at least two of them, in which she instructed him to write to the judge for this upcoming trial. She wanted him to paraphrase her letters, as if he had written them spontaneously, without any influence from anybody else.

Siggi and I did not socialize much with each other in college and did not even discuss this case. We reminded each other too much of the past that we wanted to forget. When we incidentally met somewhere on campus, one or the other would usually say:

“Did you get any mail?”

In other words: “I’m so lost and lonely. Did you find our family?”

Usually the answer would be no and that would often be the end of our conversation, and we’d be on our way. We frequently walked fast wherever we went, as if we had a purpose, always going toward a goal. Even with full bellies, we’d pass everyone strolling back from our dining hall. We were always hoping to find a family or old friends in our mailboxes because someday, someone might send us some nice relatives. Everybody had parents, roots and soul mates; therefore we must have them also, and all we had to do was to wait patiently for them to appear in our lives.

I did not know if Siggi followed Ma’s advice and wrote letters to the judge. Her pro forma drafts were written to address His Honor but were a jumble of ideas and reminiscences. Her thoughts often shifted from sentence to sentence. Some seemed as if Siggi were to copy them for his letter to the judge, while others appeared as if she were only remembering the past, and he was to write to her instead:

“My Dear Siggi!

“It is certain that winning or losing your court process is dependent only on the letter that you will write…

“…think only about the ‘beautiful’ Teufi, how annoyed she will be, when she will have to pay you even a miserly DM100 per month. One needs only an enemy to be able to accomplish something. The law requires that a father of even an illegitimate child must pay a minimum of DM75 until it is eighteen years old.

“…It is a truly sorry democracy, where abandoned children have to sit in the corner and are mocked by their fellow pupils. Children are cruel as is well known, and their mothers in their loneliness and poverty do not know how to help. I will send the court documents via a law professor to the local justice minister. Ami is very upset to read in the plaintiff’s complaint that ‘both parties are guilty for the divorce.’”

“I will return to Loerrach and tell the truth to that liar, Dorothea Duckmeyer (Teufi’s lawyer), until she is blind and deaf. It must be a fantasy democracy where the fairy tales of swindlers are believed as being true and you as an honest, faithful, decent human being, who has never failed in her duties vis-a-vis our father and us, cannot receive an audience. I know it is only because of your good conscience through all these sad years that we stayed alive in spite of everything.

“Do you still think about the gallows humor in the cold attic about a judge of the orphan court, Blaersch from Saulgau. He evicted us from our house with the remark: ‘Clear out immediately!’ We did not even receive the required six weeks’ notice. We should have set up our bed in the rain. Our father could have read in the Bild (a nationwide newspaper) how we fared after he threw us out at the bidding of his new hatmaker. How was it even possible that he sold his house and became himself a person on pension?

“What this pig and especially his lawyer, Dr. Brauer, were able to do to us! When I think about them and of others that have tormented us, I sometimes wish that the Russians would overrun this country to the Rhine River. Then they would also feel what unjust treatment is like. Maybe her shiny career will come to an end some day. We will come and storm the bar association in Freiburg…

“We were the ones that suffered. What we will never forgive is that the police never helped us when our ‘father’ wanted to kill us. Poor Ami has required years to overcome the consequences of this terrible intimidation. We should have publicized this immediately, that for more than a year and a half, we had to climb in and out of the window out of fear. Not even the pastors of both religions, with whom Ami pleaded for help, came to our aid. You say that you are no friend of heroism. But when we overcome the greatest concerns, then we will announce your heroism…

“If we knew the German laws, or if we could find a lawyer who knew the West German laws, we would be glad to relieve you of the burden of always having to appear before the forum of rightfulness. I believe we were eleven or thirteen years old when we had the courage to seek out the sorry judge Bender when our ‘father’ wanted to take us away from you. This man was without any idea and stuttered about a mistake that he had made. How many mistaken judges are being taken in by Teufi? When Ami pulls nightly, year after year, heavy boards from a conveyor belt, he will always remember this. Teufi has to fear this pent-up resentment.”

“…The dictatorship of money is the worst kind. Our father could with all his money buy the president of the European council, and our innocent mother was declared to be also at fault in the dissolution of her marriage. We had to ‘suck our thumbs’ while our father blew his money on dozens of mistresses. And when our mother went to the police about this, she was told he could daily bring six women home, if they were over sixteen years old. This is the result of the new ‘freedom’…”

Ma quickly followed up the above sample appeal letter to Siggi with a second one:

“…That you don’t have a family that cares about you can be seen, because Uncle Fritz has kept all of the inheritance from his father for himself. He did not give Buskohl anything. He was at that time a mayor and was able to control everything so he could become the sole owner. Today he owns several stores in…

“…The Germans have become a compassionless and pitiless people. Teufi would have skewered us on a spit and eaten us at night, had it been allowed. Think about the constant shutting off of the gas main valve in the cellar for two months. She wanted to destroy us. We could not get one drop of warm water. (It was our luck that we could live better on cold water than on cooked water with unhealthy sugar, which ferments in the body, the acids which are formed destroy the teeth and maybe also cause headaches.)

“When I had to come to the initial divorce court hearing in Nov. 1949, Pa told me he wanted to go with me for a walk along the Rhine river after dark to talk with me. I have made the great mistake of never mistrusting Buskohl. But I smelled the bait immediately at that time. His invitation was so unnaturally friendly and excited. I told him, ‘with you I will not go walking along the Rhine River,’ and he answered promptly, ‘I am no murderer.’ So, blitz-like, both guessed the thoughts of the other one. It would have been a simple matter to push me into the river. Afterwards he would have gone to Dr. Lupfer who, as a drinking buddy, would have given an alibi. When someone would have found me three days later in the power plant grating, he would have said I committed suicide because of melancholy from the divorce.

“Dear Siggi, do not take this seriously, it is all in the past. But do not show this letter to Ami, because if he has to drive the old Ford to Pullman he could have an accident because of this sorrow. Besides he could become sick from failure of glandular activities, like the pancreas, which can happen after grief. This slides easily off you since you are slick as an eel. In the Hardtstrasse he had severe constipation, his intestines became lame, his digestion ceased to function, because we always had the same food. Keep an eye on him, since he has to drive and is in great danger in the old car…

“…What one has not experienced personally, one cannot feel personally. I walked from Rheinfelden to Loerrach to the church on the windy wedding day of Buskohl and Teufi, on 15th September 1953. …I wanted again to see and hear this stupid performance from the mouth of the otherwise very dear and nice Pastor Mennicke: ‘Till death will part you!’ (That I don’t have to laugh!)…”

These excerpts from Ma’s very long letters were examples of Ma’s fuzzy, unfocused thinking, even after I edited them, to clarify her thoughts as best as I could. She intended to write Siggi pro forma letters for the judge but digressed into his very most personal hygiene. She knew that I was not able to shower in America for extended periods and remembered our inability to stay clean during our past. Siggi never showed me these letters, but I retrieved them years later from Ma’s apartment. He must have returned them to her on his many trips to Europe during later years, or maybe she had never sent them to him.

About a year after Siggi and I were summoned to court, Ma was so disgusted with the German social-judicial system and its treatment of the three of us that she wrote Siggi, who seemed to have a lot more correspondence with her than I did:

“…That is how Buskohl always does it. He builds himself houses, the one in Weil is already his third, and this one belongs to his wife, and the debts to him…

“…He presents a piece of paper to the court showing only initials, no addresses: ‘Owed to H.C. 10,000 marks. A.K. 5,000 marks.’ He claims he owes more than 70,000 marks. He uses this as an excuse that he can’t support you…

“…Khrushchev recently said in East Berlin that he wants to sweep us away and all my acquaintances are glad about this and I the most. It cannot continue like this.”

Besides long letters, Ma also wanted to send us clothes in America. And sometimes succeeded. She sent Siggi a suitcase with seven overcoats and several dozen socks. He kept one coat, gave the others away or threw them out. Ma still ate little, partly to satisfy her addiction to hoarding, but could not afford to mail us her presents for which I will always be grateful. In case Siggi worried that he did not receive enough coats from her, she informed him that this was not her fault:

“Because the postage is increasing, I asked Pastor Mennicke if he could pay it, to send you some stuff for Christmas. He said he did not have anything. The church had to build homes for cripples because of the many people who are crippled in traffic accidents. He offered me a fifty-mark gift for the postage. I told him to keep it since a one-time fifty marks was not enough for the postage for all the things I have to send. If I were to pass a law, there would not be so many cripples. (During frost periods the giant trucks are damaging the tar street.…)

“Maxo told me that lately he had difficulties with you, but you were not at fault, but Aunt Helene. She treated you like a serf, but I wrote you this before.”

* * *

During my third year in college I was engaged to Wendy, and we had a lot of good times together. She invited me to a dance in her dormitory because my skills had improved enough that I did not crush her toes anymore. The band played and the forum romanum was crowded. Gracefully I danced Wendy into a pillar that caused it to bend in the middle. It was ready to topple. These pillars were made of split corrugated cardboard, that fluted Pompeiian look, wrapped around cylinders of chicken wire. When I tried to straighten this pillar, I initiated an earthquake. The pillar collapsed. All pillars in the forum tumbled, domino style, because colorful streamers were tied from column to column. The earth was shaking, girls were screaming, boys were cheering, while the band played on.

At the end of our school year, Wendy and I returned with our belongings to the coast in the old Ford. Since I did not have enough room to take all of my stuff, I threw out the architectural designs that I had painstakingly created in ink on expensive illustration boards for my architectural design courses. I really wanted to save them because I had spent so much time preparing them, and I also needed them for my résumé to obtain a good job in the future.

I stored my ancient typewriter and two old snow tires in the basement of my dormitory. But when I returned again for another semester, those items were gone. Somebody probably threw out my tires because they were worn out. We bought only used ones, although it might have been illegal to drive on them because they did not have enough tread left.

On our way to the coast our engine overheated repeatedly, and I kept adding water to the radiator in order to be able to finish our journey. Near Moses Lake, in the middle of Washington, I discovered bubbles rising from the coolant and guessed that the engine block was cracked or a gasket had blown. In either case we could not risk continuing with such a defect. There were so many problems that needed to be repaired that it was not worth fixing this car anymore.

“What I won’t do for love,” said Wendy to me. For her this was an adventure, but I kept ripping at the cuticles of my fingernails. What could I say? The transmission was ready to go out again, and I had already replaced it twice with used parts. Since I had no money to have a mechanic inspect it, I sold the Ford to a junkyard for twenty-five bucks. This bought a bus ticket for the rest of my trip. Wendy went home to Seattle, while I traveled to Tacoma where I had heard about a summer job with an engineering firm. Since I did not have a cent to my name, I walked from the bus station to the engineers’ office. I arrived there travel weary and sweating from the humid afternoon sun. My hair was greasy, neatly plastered in place, my stomach was growling, and I felt befuddled and forlorn. In the reception office I asked the first employee who walked through the lobby if his firm would be hiring anyone, and he said no.

I went back out, bummed a dime, and called Mike Hanson, a friend from college whose father operated a molding mill at the Tacoma harbor. While I held the phone, Mike asked his father, who did not know me, if I could work for him. Mike told me that I could start the following Monday. I informed him that I would have to walk there, and that I could not afford to rent a room. He put me on hold again to consult with his family a second time, and when he returned said:

“I will pick you up. You can live with us.”

A crushing burden lifted from me. That familiar sinking feeling in my belly dissolved almost instantly. Suddenly I became very hungry. Without the Hansons I would have had to sleep under a bridge, eat from people’s garbage and might have become homesick for the good old days in Germany. But maybe not because I found Americans to be more helpful than the people I left behind in my old country. I did not contact my relatives because I had not liked my previous experience, and it had taken too long to extricate myself from it.

* * *

I did not know where Siggi went for the summer, or if he had found a job. After I settled in with the Hansons, I located him at a YMCA dormitory about fifty miles away. When I called him he sounded forlorn and nervous, and I worried. So the following weekend I took a bus to visit him, and he kept picking his thumbnail cuticles with intense absentmindedness. Some of his fingernails were rippled like a washboard and one thumbnail had dried blood crusted at its base. This confirmed that he was a nervous wreck, much worse than I. His worry gauge signaled a state of crisis. I checked my own indicators but could not yet detect an improvement in my own state of mind.

Ever since I could remember, whenever we were under great stress, Siggi and I had the habit of tearing away the cuticles of our fingernails, particularly on our thumbs. We probably started this habit while waiting out the bombings in the bunkers, because in dark, shaking bunkers, minutes became hours, and hours became days. This treatment of our cuticles created horizontal grooves at the soft bases of our nails that grew outward. The depth and spacing of these ripples were directly proportional to the intensity, frequency and durations of our worries, and I have never noticed anyone else with such a stress gauge.

Fortunately Siggi found a job during the following week.

I worked for the Hansons all summer, received union wages, and they did not charge me for room and board. Even so, by the start of the fall semester I had not earned enough for another year of schooling. The mill production diminished, and the Hansons did not need me anymore. Since I had no car, Mike’s mother and two sisters drove me with my stuff to Everett where I returned to Screech and Stench which had promised to employ me again.

Unlike my father, Mike’s father shed tears when we said good-bye. Unfortunately I have lost contact with this very generous family and have never expressed my gratitude enough for their kindness. If it had not been for them I would have been hungry and homeless, that is, had I decided to stick around. I lost Wendy because I had no car or money to contact her often enough to maintain our relationship a long thirty miles apart.

* * *

By the end of the first semester of my fourth college year, life was getting too easy, so I rotted my right index finger. I worked all night to finish a model for a school that I designed for an architecture class. Since the architecture department thought that we should get some sleep, it often sent a policeman to evict us from the building at about 2:00 a.m., locking the doors behind us. But because of time pressure some of us, this time including me, hid in the building and continued our work after he left again. At about eleven o’clock the next morning, zombie-like, I went to the workshop to cut a piece of plastic. But three small saws had no blades or did not otherwise function. Since I was under great pressure to finish, and I could not afford a lousy grade, I groggily used a big table saw. It used me instead when it nicked the bone on the back of my finger.

I went back to the design room to complain about the dull saw blade and held my hand up to prove it. When the student whom I was reporting this to grew pale and his eyes bugged out, I realized that trimmed fingers might be serious. The professor took me to the hospital where I waited for about two hours before I received attention. By then I had lost a total of only about two or three drops of blood, not enough to worry about.

The surgeon sewed up my finger, placed it into a brace, and after a few days I was released with the instructions to come back again in a week for a checkup. During this time, to ease all my pains, I partied at night. We drank, in moderation of course, and danced to The Beatles at the house of Count von Randech. The next night I went to a party at Chaim’s house where we revved our pulses by dancing to Israeli folk songs. And we drank in moderation of course. The party houses were bursting with students who were dancing, singing, rocking and bouncing. The walls and floorboards were thumping, and it seemed that the whole world had joined our rhythm. It was cosmopolitan time.

My date went to the bathroom. Another girl noticed this and quickly made her move. She disconnected her dance partner and came to embrace me, to hug me tightly, so she could extend her tongue into my mouth. Even though I liked this very much, I pushed her aside. You shouldn’t take someone’s man just because his date went to the can. That’s what happens when you’re not reeking of the dairy that seemed to have overcome my virile smell in the past.

I happened to be looking at my finger while the rubber band that fastened around the end of my brace suddenly snapped. I walked to the hospital and the doctor yanked it, ouch, to knot it back together and dismissed me again. Before too long, during one night my finger swelled to almost double size, became purple and was bulging out of the bottom of its bandage. I was in such trauma that I did not think of or dare to take off the bandage that was choking off the flow of blood and caused such intense pain. I also might have fainted if I saw the condition of my finger. I tossed around on my bed and tiptoed through the hallways of our dormitory most of that night, whimpering in agony, because my finger was crushed in a vise. I prayed, dear God, release me from this torment. I will never sin again and will always honor my mother and my father. At five o’clock in the morning, I tiptoed to the student health service to find relief. Walking intensified my pain. It was still dark outside, and the nurse told me return at eight when the doctor would arrive.

One hundred years later, when the doctor examined my finger, he said, “You have gangrene! I’ll have to amputate. I’ll try to leave as much as possible. See, this much,” but he did not chop off his finger to demonstrate how he was going to customize mine. If I had known that he would have to remove the dead part of my finger, I would have chopped it off myself years ago because it would have saved me an eternity of deepest hell.

“Then I cannot practice architecture anymore. I won’t be able to hold a pencil,” I mumbled to the surgeon.

“You will be able to draw if you hold it like this,” he responded.

I was tired, paranoid and doubtful. I had invested a lot of effort to make it this far in college, and in life, and now I felt that it was mostly wasted because I would have to change my major to accommodate my new digit configuration. And I still didn’t know what else I could study, my choices still seemed to be limited, and I would need a lot more money to extend my studies.

While I was resting in the hospital bed after my amputation, the surgeon removed my bandage and asked me to dip my stump into an antiseptic solution. Even though I did not even touch the bottom of the bowl, my whole index finger felt as if it were poking through the metal. I expected the solution to run out, but my sensation was only imaginary. Since my mind and/or nerves created a virtual finger that could do anything, I wanted to drink the solution to acquire a virtual brain that could do anything, but the doctor did not recommend it.

I stayed in the hospital while my finger remainder healed again, although it continued to be very sensitive to touch for a long time thereafter. To prevent infections, nurses tickled me with needles, and I enjoyed their attention, so much so that I looked forward to them daily. The nurses, with or without needles, were the highlights of my hospital stay.

A week or so after my second admission, a nurse pushed me out of the front door in a wheelchair, per protocol. I walked away and did not know where I lived. I could not remember how to find my dormitory, but somehow I arrived there. It was the end of the semester, and I did not study for my final exams. I did not understand what the teachers were lecturing about, and my notes were so scribbly that I could not decipher them after my reality came back. Without being aware of it, nor when it happened, I drifted or snapped into amnesia from the shock, the drugs or the anesthesia.

I functioned, for I don’t know how long, in a complete intelligence and emotional vacuum. I did not know how to find classrooms, restrooms, labs or lecture halls. I think that somehow I ended up in the right places, at the right times, most of the time. It was as if an invisible hand led me wherever I had to go. I crossed streets without paying attention to traffic. I went to restrooms without being aware of why I was there or what I was doing. I had no mind of my own. I was not responsible for what I was doing because I did not know who or what I was or anything else. Did I shower with clothes on or roam the dorm stark naked?

And no one seemed to notice that I was a brainless zombie. And no one seemed to care.

Afterwards I remembered that I had asked my physics professor if I could postpone my final test until later. I explained that I had recently been twice in the hospital and was still in great pain. But because he would not allow me to do that, I squirmed around in my seat for two hours, holding a pencil with my bandaged stump. I only wrote my name on the test paper, found it later to be illegible, and I did not grasp the meanings of the questions I was to answer, much less answer them.

During my final checkup, while I was waiting in an exam room for my doctor to arrive, I sneaked a peek into my medical file which the nurse had placed by the door. I found a note from a doctor to my surgeon, mentioning something about what the “interesting patient talked about.” But I did not want to get caught reading my file, so I quickly put it back into place. I’ve been wondering ever since what secrets, or nonsense, I spoke while under the influence during and after my surgeries. Had I babbled about Nazis or playing in doodoo? My love for lawyers or girls? Or had I boasted about the many ghosts in my soul?

After I received my final grade report for this semester, and my brain functioned again, I figured out that my grade point average for all classes had dropped by one whole grade because I had missed or flunked some of my final exams.

* * *

My self-mutilation started a tradition in this architectural school, much like sword dueling at the German universities of yore. It used to be a status symbol for their male students to have nice long dueling scars on their cheeks. My ear and my new stump were as prestigious and as heroic as any scar of those swordsmen. But no one realized this.

Our architectural design workshop was a real butcher shop, a dueling ground for the creation of status scars, a battleground where we built fine models. Exactly one year later, another student cut his finger, the same finger, on the same saw, during the same finals week. The same surgeon sewed his finger back together, and he did not lose any of it. But it remained scarred, rigid and bent backward. We compared index fingers and agreed that my shortened configuration looked more distinguished than his crippled one.

With one quick swipe with his sharp utility knife, my friend Fuad sliced cardboard as well as three of his fingers.

Another student committed amateurish hara-kiri. Gripping his utility knife in his fist as if thrusting a dagger, he pushed down hard while guiding it along a metal bar to cut cardboard. He came to the edge of the table it was resting on, before he came to the end of the cardboard, and jabbed the knife into his leg, severing the main artery. Since he did not have a hose repair kit, he went into shock and froze in place, while his pants became soaked with blood. Fortunately someone applied a tourniquet and took him to the hospital or he would have bled to death. Even after this event, we never received any verbal or written safety tips, nor thought of suing anybody because this was still the era before proliferate laws protecting humanity from itself.

* * *

After Siggi and I were separated by coming to America, we grew apart and had little contact with each other. In Pullman we never roomed together and hardly visited each other. I did not remember that Siggi had visited me in the hospital, or if he even knew that another small part of me had returned to dust. When I reminded him about this years later, he told me that he had visited me twice, but both times I had been asleep. We were struggling to get through college and avoided pain. We were like so many people who are in denial of the existence of unpleasant, even life-threatening situations, and tried to avoid such mental pain as much as possible.

Often I knew that Siggi was nearby because on many evenings, after dark, he walked by my window while I was studying. He would shout, “Neuman hurts.” I think he meant me and not himself, or maybe both. I still do not know why he did this because he won’t tell me; we felt no animosity toward each other; at least I felt none toward him.

One evening he sent me this message for the last time. He had borrowed my old bike and was cruising downhill past my dorm room. Again I was studying and heard, “Neuman”…. Crash, scrape, tinkle. I looked out, and in the streetlight I saw Siggi dragging my old bike off the road. Its handlebar had broken off where it had been welded, and this had caused him to crash.

This reminded me of another one of Siggi’s bike-sailing experiences. We had taken a bicycle trip from Rheinfelden into the Black Forest, and as we were racing down a hill, his brakes had failed. At the bottom of this hill was a blind railroad crossing. Because he could not see what danger might be ahead, he had played it safe and had stuck his foot into the spokes of the front wheel, which caused him to sail expertly over the handlebars and land flat on his back on the pavement. Fortunately he was unhurt and only tore a hole on the back of his sweater. His front wheel and fork bent so much that I took his bike back home on the train, while he continued his journey on mine, accompanied by our friend who had come with us.

* * *

Every summer we returned to the coast for our jobs. I simply walked into the office of the sawmill, hoping to be re-hired, and in the beginning years we always were. Siggi got a job at Screech and Stench as well, in the laboratory of their paper mill, testing the production runs every night. I spent one shift with him up high in the factory and watched his activities and those below. He started out by gathering paper samples, took them up to his lab, ground them up and reconstituted the resulting pulp back into paper. Then he conducted various tests, such as folding, punching and tearing the specimens, and we could not visit much because he had to concentrate on what he was doing.

In the factory a huge, long, rectangular box poured forth a wide ribbon of paper that spooled onto a giant roll. Whenever it was full, several men cut this ribbon and manually threaded it onto a new spool to start another roll of paper, while a bulldozer carried away the full one. All the while the unending ribbon of paper never stopped flowing from its iron womb.

By the end of his shift I was becoming very bored, when suddenly an alarm sounded. I looked down and was astounded by what I witnessed. A full spool had been removed, and the paper band continued flowing out of the machine. The new spindle had not properly taken up the new end, and the paper was now growing into a big, messy mountain on the factory floor. The bulldozer kept pushing this aside, while several men cut the paper umbilical cord, attempting to properly re-spool a new roll without getting buried under the growing pile. They had to work quickly because the paper kept coming at a steady speed and would soon bury them and the dozer. After repeated attempts they finally succeeded in starting a new roll.

Siggi did not have to work very hard physically and fortunately during my last summer at Screech and Stench, my job also became a lot easier. I did not have to do heavy labor anymore, and better yet, I did not have to suffer the constant mind-blowing screaming of the wood planers. Now I worked in the parts room and in the machine shop doing various tasks, including drafting machine parts and fueling the tall stack carriers that could straddle over piles of lumber to move them. I liked this part of my job the best because I could look down from great height while cruising around. At times I spotted for a welder with a water hose to squelch potential fires as he welded in various locations of a sometimes very combustible environment.

For two weeks I also worked in the machine shop during the day shift. The foreman told me to slow down my production or his crew would be expected to keep up this level of output. I could not understand why this should be so and as always continued to give it my best effort. This ethic was in my genes; it had been pounded into my soul. Was this yet another ghost?

Besides our summer jobs, Siggi and I worked in the dormitory commissary in the evenings throughout some semesters. In addition, every Sunday evening during one semester, from eleven until two o’clock in the morning, I enhanced my social life by cleaning and mopping the kitchen floor of the empty student union building for a generous one dollar an hour, less than half of what I earned at Screech and Stench. This late night carousing helped me stay very alert in my favorite class at eight o’clock on Monday mornings, “calculus and analytical geometry.” Then my tiredness joined with my math test ghost to torment me almost unbearably whenever I had to take a test in this subject. I passed this course only because a classmate, who later became a successful commodities trader, and I studied together for one of these tests. He read our textbook, outlined all of the important formulas and theories that he thought might be on this test and wrote them down on paper, which I then solely studied. Because of his approach to absorbing the study material, I earned a good grade, which helped me pass this difficult subject.

My own method of studying had always been to try to load the entire textbook into my brain, being afraid that I might miss something, and thereby overloading it enough that I would do poorly on these types of tests. Someone had ingrained this habit in me. Actually it was more than a habit; it was a neurosis. I finally realized that the more I studied, the worse my grades could be. So before the next finals, I severely weakened this neurosis ghost by playing a lot of jolly volleyball in the courtyard of our dormitory, instead of overloading myself with extraneous info, worries and neuroses. I kept encouraging my teammates to get the ball over the net by yelling “over.” Before long, both teams kept yelling “ova,” imitating my accent, regardless of who had the ball. From then on, Ova became the mantra for all players. Ova improved my grades because I studied less and worried less. This was another example of how Siggi and I had to unlearn some of what others had pounded into us. Literally. We had so many ghosts to destroy.

* * *

I think that Siggi and I have never knowingly told anything bigger than little white lies or cheated anyone, even if the truth would hit some people like an express train, or we’d shoot ourselves in the foot, so to speak. Although I needed to achieve good grades in all subjects to counterbalance the damage done by my ghosts, I would never cheat to raise my scores. For example, a classmate asked me if I wanted to study with him for an upcoming written architecture test.

“That will help us both,” I said to him.

“I found a copy of the test in the waste basket,” he whispered to me as we sat down.

“You mean the real test?” I questioned.

“Yeah, I’ll show it to you.”

One of my ghosts caused me to leave him sitting there by himself, dumbfounded, because I rose again, said good-bye and left the room. My honesty ghost would not even allow me to remain in the same room with him because I felt so strongly that by remaining near him, I would somehow be associated with his dishonest practice. Uncompromising honesty prevented me from improving my score. Throughout our lives, that particular ghost would even cost us money and more. It might be like François VI, Prince de Marcillac, Duc de La Rochefoucauld had said in 1678: “Honest people will respect us for our merit; the public for our luck.” So far we hadn’t had much luck in life. Do we have any merit, Siggi and I?

At one time I had been so desperate for money that I advertised to sell the Ford for one hundred dollars or less. After Maxo had found out about our experience in LaCrosse, he had let me register it in my name, but I could not afford to insure it. When Jon came to buy it, I had told him everything that needed repair.

“The front wheels need aligning,” I had told him.

“The gears are really loose. Sometimes they lock up when you shift into reverse,” I continued.

“I’ll have to think about it,” Jon had finally said to me.

No one ever bought that Ford at that time.

Eventually someone did steal it.

During a summer stint in Everett, I had come home one Friday night and by next morning the Ford was missing. I had reported this theft to the police, who then had found it a day or two later. It had been abandoned where it had run out of gas not too far from our home, and one fender was dented as a thank-you for its use.

* * *

Although neither Siggi nor I told our roommates in college that we were impoverished, they knew it. I brushed my teeth with soap scraps that I found in the dorm showers. One day my roommate, Bernard, insisted that I attend a dress-up scholarship dinner in our dining hall. I was not interested and informed him that I did not have anything fancy to wear, thinking that he would accept that excuse. But sly Bernard ironed one of his white shirts, at two o’clock in the morning, so I could wear it to this function. Because of his efforts I felt obligated to attend. During dinner the master of ceremonies called my name and presented me with a 100-dollar scholarship check.

Siggi had been the first one to receive this award during the previous year. The boys in our dorm must have collected it specifically for us and did not want to embarrass us, so they contrived a scholarship to disguise their acts of charity. After two years this was discontinued, and as far as I know, only Siggi and I benefited from their generosity. Thank you immensely, Goldsworthy boys; you helped us a lot. I never applied for or received any other scholarships, and this one helped greatly to pay for my college costs, which amounted to an astounding all-inclusive 1,200 to 1,500 dollars a year.

These so-called scholarships and the assistance from the Hansons were by far the biggest help that we had ever received from anyone, except for the postwar packages from the Schitzmas. There had been two other instances, but they were part of an organized impersonal effort. For some months after World War II all of the children in Simonswolde had received free chocolate milk, compliments of America.

CARE had sent us a five-pound can of butter while we were squatting in the attic in Rheinfelden. The donor’s name was listed as Mr. Northrup from Hollywood. At that time we wrote him a letter of thanks, but we did not know if he received it, or if he could read German. Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Northrup for your kindness; there was no butter in our neighborhood garbage, and your gift was greatly appreciated.

Then there was my friend Fuad who smoked Lucky Strikes and always offered me one whenever he lit one in my presence. I always tried to quit smoking, but never could resist his offers because I was addicted. I finally overcame my addiction when I taped a few cigarettes to the inside of my room door. Whenever I passed through, I squirted them with a water pistol. The brown juice ran down the door and was disgusting enough that I was able to quit smoking and for the final time. Quitting was also made easier because I did not see Fuad much anymore. I began spending most of my free time with my future bride, Linda, who did not smoke, and therefore I was not directly tempted nearly as much.

I first met her in the dining hall when she sat across from me during a dinner. She was tall, had beautiful eyes and long, thick, shiny hair and I kept staring at her, which made her nervous. When I finished my salad I asked her if she were going to eat hers. When she said no, I asked her if I could have it, she agreed, and thus began our life-long relationship.

* * *

In September, days before starting my fifth year in college, Linda and I were married in her hometown, and the many wedding guests astounded me. All of them except for Siggi were Linda’s family and their friends. They gave us many presents and Maxo also sent us one, a silver tea platter with sugar bowl and creamer that were engraved with an old Frisian pattern. And on the bottom of the platter was engraved, “Best Wishes from Uncle Maxo.” Three decades later I would introduce this present as evidence in court.

While we both completed our final year in college, we lived in a tiny, forty-dollar-a-month attic apartment that did not have a living room. It was located in downtown Pullman, had moldy bathroom walls and a miniscule kitchen. Some couples paid two hundred or more dollars for their rents but unlike many of them, we did not go into debt.

At graduation time my friend Gale and I finished our final examinations before Linda finished hers. While she was studying, he visited us, and he and I played “Sea Battle.” For this simple game, each opponent drew his “ships” on a sheet of grid paper that we hid from each other, x-ing out an equal number of squares to represent them. We could arrange them in any linear fashion and could make them any length. The first player who blackened out his entire navy lost the battle.

After we built our fleets we started our naval battle. Gale said:

“D12.”

“Missed,” I informed him.

“A1,” I continued, knowing that Gale was smart and probably would hide one of his ships in one of the farthest corners of his ocean.

“Missed, J19,” he answered.

And so we continued, missing and damaging each other’s ships more or less at random.

Suddenly I got lucky. I had a number of successful hits in short order.

“K2,” I said.

“Hit,” Gale said in a cold voice.

“L4,” we could send an additional torpedo for each successful blow.

I blasted him repeatedly and could not control my laughing.

“M19.”

“This guy is psychic,” mumbled Gale as I finished him off to win the battle.

I was not. Had I been, I would not have believed how good my new life was going to be and in the not-too-distant future. Now that Linda and I had graduated from college, we were ready to conquer the world. Or at least travel around and enjoy its wonders!

* * *

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