This article is essentially a synopsis of my weird life.

As bizarre as it may seem, mine is a true story. However, do not be saddened by its beginning, for I have enjoyed many wonders of this world. Because I was born and raised on the edge of hell, between life and destruction, it took me years to claw myself to the starting line of life, to enjoy small and great pleasures. But on the face of it, I had to do so almost entirely through my own efforts. Since words cannot begin to describe my early experiences, try to imagine clawing yourself out of each of the following corners of hell:

Killer illnesses: While you’re still a baby, one of them literally rots one ear and destroys your hearing. Others cause you to choke and pant for air and attack your organs. Meanwhile you’re in dead center of a…

War: You hide in underground bunkers, because the firestorms around you explode out of control and suck the oxygen out of your world. Afterwards there is widespread…

Starvation: When you're about seven years old, your mother makes you scavenge for food on a manure pile. All the while you try to behave in order to avoid…

Floggings: Mother zaps a wire cable across your naked buttocks. So you will never be morally confused and dig yourself into deep craters. When you grow too big for such treatment, your father forces you into…

Homelessness: While he lives in luxury, you, your mother and brother have to squat in an attic. Your brain shuts down and causes…

School failure: Gristlehead, you’re too dumb! Don’t ever come back again! All the while you reap the continuing benefits of very pervasive…

Injustice: This can never, never be possible! But it was! You hope to escape but instead are sent into …

Exile: Your parents trick you into taking a six thousand mile journey, while telling you that you’ll never see them again. After you arrive at your destination you’re captured in…

Slavery: You work without pay, in deep manure, and are not allowed to rid yourself of such nutrients, which you have absorbed into your body and soul. When you’re sure you hit the bottom of the world’s deepest crater, because your soul is now completely crushed, your master forces you to wrestle around in lonely…

Isolation: You’re nineteen years old, and your feet are literally stuck in mud. You sleep with merry bands of rodents, and dynamite sticks, which your master stored under the bed in your cute little starter home shack.

These were my experiences, when I was still wet in one ear and still yearned for a toilet.

Since I saw no other options, I had to become a big criminal, to liberate myself, and to pay back my mentors.
Far from it! I did not even become a little criminal. I refused to buckle under, even though I saw absolutely no hope for my future. Instead I took my bulls by their horns and wrestled my way though college to become a world traveler.

I grew up not in a dysfunctional family but was a piece from an exploded one. It started to blow itself up even before I was born. When I was young, many people misjudged me, because I was very shy and slow to respond. I could not learn well, because my parents forced my soul into in a dark cloud, and I never could hear well. This, along with the hole in my head, made big people think that was dumb and would grow up to be a big loser. How do I know? Because they graded me and told me so.

I was born at the beginning of World War II in Germany, within blocks of the Swiss border. This war went on for more than five years in Europe, and when it was over, many of the cities were full of holes and in ashes.

We moved around to many places. For awhile we also lived in the top floor of a four-story apartment, along with its owner who was dying from tuberculosis. In order to keep me from dying that way, Ma, my mother, thought that I needed a lot of sunshine and fresh air. So she placed me on a sill of a window open to a hot Mansard roof. This turned out to be slight miscalculation, because I was cooked. With a heatstroke. I would not know this until many years later, when Ma would write that she had carried me to a doctor who had saved my life.

Besides trying to cook me, she also forced me to become a famous inventor. She placed me into a net, hung me from the ceiling and cleverly put newspapers on the floor. To catch my drippings. That’s how I invented disposable diapers, even though I was only a pampered baby.

Not long thereafter, I had an ear infection, and a Nazi organization would not allow me into a hospital until it was almost too late. When Ma finally got me there, a doctor informed her that I might be dead within hours. Again. A few days later, little Siggi joined me in the hospital and for the same reason. In order to save my life, a surgeon removed my right middle ear, along with a chunk of skull bone, thereby creating a big body piercing. I had to learn to walk again, and can always be cool without having to staple wire loops into my head.

Little Siggi and I also had whooping cough. It is a very infectious disease, which causes some children to cough so hard, that they turn blue in the face and sometimes vomit. Or die.
During January of the last year of WW II, Siggi and I grew leather. In our throats. This made it difficult to breathe. We had diphtheria, which kills nearly one out of every ten infected people. I till have two invoices, which prove that during this time we spent twenty-six days in a hospital. But this was our great luck, because that’s when our apartment went up in flames during a bombing raid. Living through a firestorm is such a thrilling experience, that when I first saw a photo of the World Trade Center burst into flames, I burst into tears.

A few months after World War II ended, Ma, Siggi and I moved to North Germany, while our father stayed behind. We traveled hundreds of miles by train, cozily crammed into boxcars, cattle cars and open-air coal cars, somewhat like in the movie, Schindler’s List. Normally it takes less than two days to travel that distance, but because of war damage and fuel shortage, it took us seven days to get to the Dutch border.

We moved to a small village, into a small brick house, in which our grandmother, aunt and some refugees were already sardine-canned, along with the old owner. She always had a bead of pus oozing from one cheek and would gently wipe it off with twiggy fingers. She’d smear herself on doorknobs and other convenient places. I worried about this, because she looked quite empty, and I was also smearing myself around with stinky stuff from my permanently runny ear.
That reminds me, our bathroom was an aromatic outhouse, within a few paces from the domestic well, both cleverly located inside a little barn, which was directly attached to the back of our sardine can. The out of the house dumped into a plank-covered cesspool attached to the outside this barn.

Once a year a farmer would scoop soupy poop, including roly-poly maggots, with a long-handled bucket into an ox-drawn, wood-stave casket on wheels and spread it over his fields to plow it under.

After World War II the country’s economy and monetary system had collapsed, and nobody had enough to eat. We also did not have enough fuel to heat even one room. One winter was so cold that trains froze to their tracks, and General Lucius Clay, the U.S. commander in occupied Germany, concluded that Germany's predicament was "truly appalling."

Did he know that the chamber pots froze under our beds? Did he know that our grandmother’s washcloth froze rock solid on her couch, where she lingered for years until she too became rock-solid?

There was not much to buy in the village store, but this did not matter, because people had very little money. Ration tickets allocated each adult two hundred grams of fat per month. Therefore in our struggle to become fat, we had to scavenge for food. When Siggi and I were about six and eight years old, Ma, and her ever-present whip, enticed the two of us to become hunters of dead pig parts. She required us to retrieve fresh guts, which a farmer had thrown onto his fresh manure pile.

Our aunt cooked pig’s lungs de la manure, and Ma gave Siggi and me two choices: "Eat! Or!" Siggi and I chose, Eat! Slowly we gagged down this gourmet meal, including chunks of bronchial tubes, pieces of rubber hose. A few hours later, we squirmed around on the floor, until we found bellyaching relief through competitive upchucking. Mother fed these chuckings to our chickens, and unlike us, they cackled.

Might Or! have been a better choice?
The lesson then might be, when times are tough, stay close to a manure pile, because there’s not much competition for your quest for food. We would eat furry, moldy bread, rancid lard and semi-rotten fruit, which for years to come, Ma would gather from a food-wholesalers waste pile after sundown.

Was this a more health-benefiting fare than what many people hurriedly stuff down their throats today? Because we did not grow fat or fade away!

And the only time that I remember Ma ever cooking, besides rooftop cooking me, was a rabbit. But while she was doing so, she locked us out of the kitchen. This made Siggi and me suspicious, and when we began to eat, we forced her to confess that she was feeding us a cat. A road-kill-cat, which she had skillfully peeled off the pavement. This was ten years after the end of World War II, when our father was earning a lot of money and testing the sexual responses of a lot of women. Having to eat road-kill-cats was but one little example of our world-record familial judicial injustice.

Earlier I referred to Ma’s whip, which she used vigorously for our corporal and spiritual counseling, Siggi’s and mine. For years she had a fashionable length of 220V electrical appliance cable pinned to her waistband, to have it handy for whenever she became grouchy. Then she’d pull down my pants, asked me to bend over, and wire my bare-naked buttocks until she was exhausted. I would simultaneously broadcast the audio part of our performance to our neighbors, by screaming so hard until I had to gasp for air. Again. And again. We also entertained in public, and that’s how we may have invented mooning. I hereby apologize for being forced into starting this fad of disrespect for others.

After we survived deep poverty in Northern Germany for about six years, the three of us traveled by train back to the Swiss border to live with our father. Siggi and I did not even know that he had just built a new three-story house, which also contained his architect’s office in the basement. When we walked up to our huge, new home, we were astounded, because we had never known that we were so rich.
Siggi and I were eager to inspect our new fortune: Masonry walls and concrete floors, clay tile roof, lead-glass doors, double windows, gypsum bas-relief on ceilings, car in garage, instantaneous limitless hot water, bathroom with snow-white fixtures. This was the first real bathroom that I had ever seen, and now at the ages of ten and twelve, Siggi and I could finally toilet-train ourselves. We owned a car at a time when few Germans could afford one, and this convinced us that life could not get much better.
But our recombined family was devoid of hugs, smiles and laughter. We never ate one meal together, Ma never cooked, and Pa gorged and imbibed almost exclusively in cafés and restaurants. A judge granted our father a divorce from our mother, but Siggi and I didn’t know when or why this happened, because they conducted their affairs in secrecy and did not inform us about the tenuous status of our family. Our father had his own bedroom, and Ma, Siggi and I slept together in another. Pa brought home lots of women and introduced them as our aunts. Before too many months, our father blessed us with another mother, when he married one of our many aunts, Siggi’s and mine. She moved into our house. But at that time he and I did not know that we had a second mother, because no one told us, and she did not behave like one.

Our father and newest mother began to terrorize the three of us. Because we were such difficult adversaries, who cried a lot, they hired a merry band of powerful lawyers, and for about ten years, one of these included a good friend of the West German chief, Chancellor Adenauer. This lawyer would someday even become president of the European Parliament. On the other hand, our mother was assigned a lawyer by a government agency. Not until years later would Siggi and I learn a few of the behind-the-scene details about the extent of our Progenitor War, the war of our silent torture.

Titans versus forgotten Heroes in Attics!

Everywhere!

To get us to leave, Pa flew into rage and beat and kicked our first mother, while she was curling herself up on the floor. I ran out to fetch the police, and when one arrived, on a bicycle, Pa invited him in for a beer, thus ending this episode of domestic violence. I still have a copy of a letter that he wrote to a lawyer, in which he threatened to kill the three of us. And for a good reason. A judge had increased our child support payment by fifteen dollars per month. This was less than he spent on cigars, which came in individual gold-colored aluminum tubes. To protect them from a mean environment.

To protect ourselves from our father, the three of us kept ourselves locked in our bedroom. The potty-bed combination in our prison became the center of our universe. The bed: We were sick in it, rubbed dirt in it, cried in it, dined on it, read and wrote on it, and kept our potty under it. And we even slept in it. The potty: Our white enameled chamber pot now has great value, because I’ve seen them in antique stores. If only it had come with a tight cover, because we only dared to empty it when we were home alone. We were so afraid that the three of us would often enter and exit our prison through our window, and during that long year, we wore the paint off the sill to expose its wooden edges.

Since there were no school buses, Siggi and I choo-chooed by train, often pulled by a huge steam locomotive, to an elite, boot-camp-like school in another city. On the day before Christmas, Siggi and I walked home from the train station. But when we arrived there, we found all of our belongings out in the rain. Mattress, chamber pot and all. No one was home to cheer us with carols or presents. Since we had no keys, and we did not dare to break into our own home, we slumped down and waited. And waited in the rain.

As it was getting dark, Ma finally arrived, pulling a quaint little, wooden handcart. She told us that we had been thrown out. To spare us some anguish, or prepare us for a big surprise, she did not explain this, and Siggi and I did not ask her about this now and never would do so in the future. To us this was just another one of those many physical and psychological bombs from those who hated us, loved us or were enriching themselves by creating and prolonging our upheaval. Only years later would I learn a few details about this. Ma would write me in America, explaining that a judge had sent a couple of men to forcefully evict us. Hey, this judge may have had a bad childhood! These men executed his eviction order, which he had issued about a year earlier, because Ma had insisted on staying put in our cozy little prison. But Siggi and I never knew why this was so, because we did not dare to think, we felt shame, and did not dare to question anyone about our situation. Now Ma simply told us that she had found another place to live, and that was about the end of our conversation for the rest of this celebrated evening.

Merry Christmas! This will have to be our biggest present ever! Our own apartment with racy real-live toilet!
With extreme mixed emotions, we loaded our big, wet mattress and a few other things into the handcart and pulled it along empty, shimmering streets across town to our new abode. There were no colorful lights in our lonely, little light-less parade. Our big surprise: One little hellhole. In a stranger’s attic. Along with a family of cute little bats. We could stand up in only half of it, because its ceiling sloped almost down to the floor. There was no heat, no electricity, no toilet and no water. When I discovered that, I almost exploded with RMBS, Reverse Miracle Bladder-bursting Syndrome, by almost letting go of my own water. It would not have been my first such attack. Over the years RMBS had become one of my misunderstood, stress relief methods. At least for my little bladder.

It did not take very long to learn that it could not only be very hot in hell, it could also be very cold. One could shake there and shiver. To keep warm, we slept in our clothes. To super-charge our mornings, Ma lovingly preened us with her own spit on the seam of her skirt, since it might have been laundered only a few months before. But Siggi and I insisted on wiping our eyes with our own spit-moistened handkerchiefs and reaming our ears with it. Since we could not afford canvases, we had to recycle our artistic creations in the unique media of spit’n’snot‘n’goo. Over the years, we would produce hundreds of them, with an originality and imagination that could compete with famous, far-out artists. Had we been able to save them, we could have opened our own penthouse art gallery-museum, Bats’ Loggia d’Art and Pigsty‘useum, and invited Pa and his entourage of legal counsels, to purchase them, to enhance the ambience of their wood-paneled offices and courtrooms.

To keep from going bonkers, from lack of clients, and to entertain ourselves during the long evenings, the three of us slouched on our mattress around one candle and read hundreds of books from two libraries. One of which was an American bookmobile. Eventually we would read most of the books in its youth section and many of its adult ones as well. Through them, and by watching many American movies, our minds became very American, Siggi’s and mine.

When the owner of the apartment came back from her vacation and discovered us in her batty attic, she had someone remove the electrical outlet, which we had paid someone to install. She also tried to have us removed. But again, Ma clawed into the floor, because there was no place to leave to. We knew of no caves in our city.

When we finally did get an apartment about one year later, it did not have a bathroom or shower. For most of our lives, we had rarely been able to bathe or shower. In the not too-distant future, this soap-less condition would become even much more significant for me. Significantly more stinky and extremely sticky.

During the months following our move, Siggi and I became slowly aware that Ma was developing a new art form, BYS, bury-yourself-sculpturing. But she never asked us if we liked this kind o’live-sty‘. We did not dare to advertise her new passion, in order to forestall competition for limited resources. Or because of intense feelings of shame. While we were in school, she kept filling our three rooms and kitchen with odd stuff, which she acquired from second-hand stores, dumpster-diving and other secret mines. Eventually she would chaotically tangle her important heirlooms up to the ceilings, until we could no longer move around broken lamps, newspapers, piss pots, wires and clothing. Ma’s treasures became our new soul-crushing torture, Siggi’s and mine. To get more room, Ma even stacked both of our beds on top of each other, thereby building the world’s first and only two-story rat’s nest.

During this time Siggi and I dwelled in the darkest doom imaginable, which was intensified to its limits, by our teenage hormones. A calamity so intense that I would barely talk anymore. Then one day, after about two rat-years, when we were fourteen and sixteen years old, an American, Maxo, brother of our two American uncles, unexpectedly crawled into our nest. He invited us to come over. After World War II, these relatives had sent us a lot of packages, which literally had helped keep us alive. They usually contained cigarettes, coffee and teabags, which we could trade for food. On the black market a pack of cigarettes could be worth between one and three months worth of income. Since we had learned a lot about America, Siggi and I were very exited about visiting there. He and I ignorantly assumed that Ma would come with us, but after our visitor departed, she told us that we would be going alone. Enough red flags for a May Day parade: Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. But Siggi and I did not notice, and those in the know did not warn us.

After having been sitting ducks near bombing targets, such airplane and dynamite factories, during the bloodiest war in history, waiting to be liberated, and having been uniquely processed by our parents and their lawyers, patiently waiting for justice, Siggi and I were still very sane and very much alive. As strange as it may seem, he and I never learned what our lawyers and judges looked like. Not one of them would ever ask, “Are you comfy in your rat’s nest? Would you rather live in luxury with your father?” Only years later would I be able to dig up the names of at least two dozen of them, and probably not all of them. Even during this time of great hope, Amerika, we still didn’t dare thinking for more than one hour into our past, or dreaming for more than a few minutes into our future.

Several months after his visit, Maxo took Siggi and me to a big ship near the Dutch coast, to be delivered in New York City, while he remained in Europe. After we were tossed around the Atlantic Ocean during a barf-rich hurricane, and admired America during our long train ride, we arrived at the West coast of Washington at four o’clock on a Sunday morning. Our relatives, two families, met us and drove us to their separate dairy farms. Siggi and I had no idea that our family would now be chopped into its smallest components, and therefore did not say goodbye to each other.
Our family had always been so incommunicado with each other, that the two of us always knew very little about who was planning or manipulating our fate, Siggi‘s and mine. Only many years later would we discover from letters that discussions about our migration had already been taking place years before our trip. And we would never learn who paid for our long journey. Now we were completely uninformed about how long we would stay, if we would attend school, join the in-crowd in the land of unlimited opportunities, or when or if we would return to the nursing bosom of our family. Or if we had finally escaped from it forever.

Shortly after I arrived at my new home, an isolated farm, I fell into bed. Wow! I’m in Amerika! In my own room my kind uncle built just for me! Out in the woodshed! But I was soon awakened by a knock on my door and someone telling me to get up, even though it was still dark outside. Because a wire whip flashed through my sleepy mind, I immediately responded to the authoritarian request from somewhere.

My aunt handed me a ragged pair of coveralls and a used flannel shirt, both of which were about three sizes too short and four sizes too wide. Then she told me with an artificial smile, that we were going to look at cows and asked me to wear old, shrink-wrap rubber boots. Instead of becoming a cool cowboy as I had hoped, I became a tattered scarecrow. I had no idea that one had to disguise oneself to look at cows, but I had learned from books and movies that Indians did have to sneak up on bison.

My last glimmer of hope?

Like so many times before, my naiveté about normal life prevented me again from recognizing during this time that Siggi and I had suddenly changed status in society. By coming to these farms, abandoned children quietly became slaves in the true st sense of the word. It took me a few weeks to realize that we could not escape and had no way to return to Germany. But I quickly sensed that my master, Fullo, had a hot temper, because he growled at me, beat my noggin with his fist, and therefore I always did everything he told me to do. He also was extremely stingy, would never pay me for my labor, and would not even feed me enough. So when I got really hungry, I ate cow grain and calf feed in the privacy of the milk barn, liberally spiced with rodent poop ‘n pee.

Every single day for more than two years on these farms, during which we rarely had contact with each other, Siggi and I had to perform heroic deeds. These were necessary to prevent escherichia coli, tapeworm, pinworm and other outbreaks. My two twice-daily courageous activities required intense willpower on my part. One was udder washing. Professionals do it like this: While clutching a rag with a bare fist, I had to force myself to dip it into a bucket full of hot and heavily chlorinated water. Then I had to slosh this rag from bucket to udders and rub off, depending mostly on weather conditions, encrusted or glutinous mud-manure mixtures. And as everyone knows, after an udder or two, the content of the bucket changes into thickening manure soup. Since there was no source of water in the barn, I could not take time to replace it as often as necessary, because I had to haul it down from the somewhat distant milk house, to which I also had to carry up the farm byproduct, milk, in buckets, two at a time. At times, gripping cold temperature combined with my gripping of steel handles, and the desiccating effect of chlorine/barn-yard acid-laden soup, to split open some of my fingers like little overcooked wieners.

My other twice-daily heroic effort involved backbreaking labor. And a little patience. I managed nutrients with muscle power. Specifically, I had to load huge quantities of the main product of this farm, in terms of weight, volume and aroma, one scoop at a time, into a wheel borrow and push it out of the barn, over a slippery plank, unto and into a rain-soaked pile. And on the occasions, when I lost balance, I gained invaluable experience by becoming Bootless near Seattle. For those not in the know, this meant that I had to extract suddenly green, cold, squishy feet from nutrients. And this reminds me, because Siggi and I learned lessons, which can never be taught in the hallowed halls of universities, that I honored my three uncles in my book with descriptive names, Fullo Schitzma, Deepo Schitzma and Maxo Schitzma. For two years we had to wallow deeply in their name.

And what was so earth-shockingly significant about this?

It would make President Clinton feel my pain!

Years later!

Fullo would not allow me to shower!
Within a day or two after my delivery to his farm, with a very serious expression and tone of voice, Fullo suggested that I had to wash myself in a concrete laundry tub out in the woodshed. And I did so, because I had the strange compulsion to purify myself, even throughout winter. I want to emphasize, that he did not allow me to shower under the threat of punishment. As I said before, I would now always be significantly sticky.
While living on this farm, I attended high school, but could never participate in any extracurricular activities. And by far the worst of all, I could never date girls, because I was stuck in a very explosive situation. Can you imagine what it’s like not being able to cuddle with one the most beautiful creatures in the universe, until you are about twenty years old? Wouldn’t your love-filled soul cause you to explode?

Just before I graduated, I volunteered to take a grade prediction test, which was required to get into Washington colleges. I had often been frightened by test-taking and had no hope of ever being accepted, because my past school performance had proven, and convinced me, that I was dumb. Furthermore, my English was not yet proficient and there were no ESL classes. My masters did not help much in that regard, because they intermingled English with Low German, an almost unwritten language. But my guardian angels must have insisted that I’d take this test, because I always run from tests. It was administered on a Saturday forenoon, a day without school buses, and after the only night my masters had kept me up long past my bedtime, until midnight, in spite of my reluctance to do so.

On the morning of the big test I finished my heroic deeds in the barn. Then I walked up to the house to use Fullo’s car, for the first time ever for myself, to drive to school to be tested. With great concern for my future, or because this would make Fullo mad, or I might get a taste of independence, my aunt yelled after me that she would not allow me to use it. So while I was tired, dirty, hungry and hopeless, I attempted my first baby steps to freedom by walking down the highway. But soon a classmate who happened to drive by, to also take this test, gave me a ride.

Later the test results correctly predicted that was tired, dirty, hungry and hopeless, and therefore would flunk college English and do poorly in other subjects as well. But since the reasons for my score were misinterpreted, by authorities, and myself, I gave no more thought about attending college. Again I was proven to be dumb and could not escape, because I had no friends or money, and most importantly, had never known a normal life. During my occasional flashes of daring to think about my future, I was sure that I would be stuck forever in deep doodoo, because that’s where I was and always had been in one form or another.

Don’t despair! Life will have to get better! Only question is when. At least it cannot get worse!

After Siggi and I had arrived in America, Maxo, the man who cleverly had shipped us there, had built a two-mile long clay dike around some of his tide flat out in the Puget Sound. Now he wanted to farm this reclaimed land, but severe storms and high tides had eroded most of this barrier, and therefore it needed to be repaired and protected. Shortly after our graduation, Siggi’s and mine, Maxo picked us up from the dairy farms so we could do this. He and I floated truckloads of lumber down an adjacent river and into the bay, to nail them to newly-driven pilings in front of the dike. We continued doing this until fall, when Siggi suddenly became a proud Cougar, by enrolling in Washington State University on the other side of the state. Since Maxo paid me a only few dollars now and then, I could not leave, and gave no thought as how Siggi could afford to do so. Maxo had planned for me to remain on his land and fix the dike during the winter months. He also wanted me to help him farm for years to come, but oddly, would only tell me this years after I had escaped to freedom.

Someone had shot holes into Maxo’s boat and dumped sand into the fuel tanks of the heavy equipment. Because his property had to be guarded, and his dike had to be inspected and frequently repaired, Maxo moved an old hut unto his tideland and moved me into Villa Schitzma-in-the-Mud. I lived there alone until the following spring, while he spent the winter at the US State Department in Washington, D.C., and traveling around Europe.
There was no road to my villa. And since the field was muddy clay, or because I was just wasting my young life instead of matriculating in Harvard, Yale or Cambridge, Maxo’s jalopy would sometimes bury itself to its axles. Therefore I had to park hundreds of feet away and had to carry in my groceries and drinking water. Along with that, I also tracked so much mud into my hut that I had to shovel it out. Significantly, again, my new home did not have any utilities, not even an outhouse. But I felt that I now lived in an outhouse, because dozens of rodents deposited black little rhymes-with-nerds everywhere. In my bed and on my kitchen surfaces. One morning I woke and was startled by a mouse scurrying away from my head. I could not blame her if she wanted to sample from my ear, from which surgeons had twice harvested wild meat, proud flesh. She might have been the last one leaving a cheese-tasting party, to come back another night, because I could feel it go wish, wish and squish, and I could smell that my head cheese reserve was still brimming with the finest.

My other friends were ducks and snow geese. Hundreds and thousands. They quacked and honked, dropped poop like this dupe, to help keep me forever in deep doodoo and or my soon to blasted, crater.

This lonely soul never realized that anytime he was inside Villa-Schitzma-in-the-Mud, he was very close to violent death. Maxo had stored dynamite under my bed, and within three to four feet of an oil stove, which I used only once, because one freezing night, its smokestack became a flamethrower. One day he wrote me in one of his letters, which I still have in my possession, that I should deliver this explosive to another farm, and also informed me that it was not particularly dangerous, but that I had to be very careful with black powder, of which he had none. In order to load it into the trunk of the car, I had to hold the bottom of its cardboard box together to keep it from falling apart. I erroneously assumed that it was wet from having absorbed moisture from the very humid air of the Pacific Northwest. Then I drove this precious load over a washboard-like gravel road and placed it on the concrete floor of a shed.

Only recently did it occur to me that my life might have been endangered, and without having benefited from the thrill of it. To find out, I contacted a bomb disposal expert and described this materiel and my mode of transport. He replied that instead of water, the corrugated cardboard was soaked with nitroglycerin, which had leached out of the dynamite. He also informed me that my survival chances had been very low. He suggested, that with my luck, I should enter the next lottery. Little did he know about my luck! He also said that if I had dropped this explosive only one inch, I would not have asked him questions.

Should I have become a swarm of tiny UFO’s? Or could I have been drilled into a crater? Did Maxo have insurance to change my worthless life to riches?
After surviving years without potty or shower, or having to use such under duress, my highest goal in life was to acquire these. Maxo did not pay me a regular wage but did let me use his old jalopy. Intermittently he also sent me a little money in the spirit of making a gift.

I was twenty years old, and even though I had worked hard for two and a half years, I still had no savings, no job, no place to live and no human friends. But I never thought of misbehaving or rebelling, because I continued to be very naïve, as well as intimidated from years of serving as a turnip, target and punching bag for too many people. During the following spring, I volunteered for the Army but was rejected because of my customized ear. I choose an alternative life-style by finding the toughest job in town, with the Screech & Stench Company, that I’d heard about in high school.

I reported to work on a Monday evening, because I chose to work night shift as it paid a few cents, for me a lot more, an hour. I was asked to buy leather gloves and a long leather apron, meaning that I was not going to work in a soothing-music, climate-controlled office with chances for rapid advancement.

I took my station at the infamous green chain, a conveyor belt system of moving boards. The two human robots already sweating there paid little attention to me. A few weeks thereafter, I was transferred into the screaming hell of a planing mill. Five nights a week, I wrestled tons of rough-sawn and green lumber unto stacks of different lengths and lumber grades, in a saw and planing mill. By the end of each night shift, I felt like my back was compressed, my arms stretched and my soul bursting to scream. To escape before I died, I sometimes did double shifts. I did so until fall and saved almost every penny not necessary for survival. To keep us robots from keeling over from dehydration, the kind Company provided free salt tablets in their salt-lick candy machines and humanely allowed us fifteen minutes twice a day, to suck up nicotine inside a glass monkey enclosure. This had a temporary dampening effect on our schnozzles sucking up nauseous rendering plant miasma from across the slough and acrid effluent from the aerial sewer pipe stacks of the paper mill.

I applied to become a Cougar and never expected to be accepted. But I was. My college counselor wanted me to take bonehead English, but without a thought I responded to his suggestion that I would not do so. My guardian angels were still with me. This opposition to real or apparent authority was unique. In retrospect, I believe that this was the first time in my life that I opposed authority, and this marked the beginning of the turning around of my life into a positive direction. Instead of flunking English composition as predicted by an official test, I earned an “A” for this course during my second semester. The perpetual dark cloud around my soul was beginning to dissipate, and this let me finally activate my brain. I slowly started to gain enough confidence to start breaking my invisible chains of culture shock and slavery.

By doing mostly this kind of work, I would wrestle my way through four years of college, and before I started my fifth year, the extra year required for an architectural engineering degree, I married my wife. She then helped me financially, while being a final-year student herself. After more than thirty-eight years we’re still married. And amazingly still to each other.

Upon graduating we decided that we needed a huge uplifting experience to reward ourselves for our hard work. We figured that it would not take us all that long to work and save enough to be able to travel around the world. With such an exciting incentive it took us only one and a half years to be able to quit our jobs and begin our six month long, low-budget journey. The adventure of a lifetime. Because this addicted us with wanderlust, we subsequently took other trips to other exciting counties.

The following are a few random highlights of our travel adventures:
In the South China Sea our ocean liner ploughed through high mountains and deep valleys of taifun-whipped water. Dolphins frolicked around our little ship in the Caribbean, as if inviting us to join them. I thought that I was in a watery paradise, when I snorkeled among the reefs with hundreds of colorful fish. I could almost touch them.

Since I never held grudges or had any feelings of revenge, we visited my father and my first and second mothers. To celebrate our good ol’ days, he and I would even attend the oldest, biggest and most boisterous party in the world, the Munich Oktoberfest. My proud father would boast to some of the other revelers around us, “this is my son from America,” and lie, “he’s a reporter for Time magazine.” And since one always takes pictures at family reunions, I took one of him, humbly bowing down to a beer-recycling trough, to finally get a grip on himself, to deal with the families, which he had created. And discarded.
Why did it never occur to me to ask him, Why did you make my life so exciting?

Father’s activities were the perfect proof of what goes around, comes around: To keep from having to pay for our support, even as late as while Siggi and I were still struggling through college, our father recorded all of his belongings in the name of his second wife, who then divorced him and thereby leaving Siggi and me without a second mother and the inheritance, which he had promised us so long ago. Because the law required fathers to pay for the higher education of their children, he made himself penniless in order to avoid doing so.

The court allowed him to do so, even during a time when women still had very few legal rights in Germany. These facts alone finally ended our eighteen yearlong, lonely Progenitor war, which our poor mother had fought on our behalf, Siggi‘s and mine. Perfect proof, that for us, it’s not over until the fat lawyer sings.

But back to our travels and again in no particular order: My wife and I roamed around castles, cathedrals and museums all over Europe. We climbed up a mountain, through fog and snow, through a forest to the fairy-tale Neuschwanstein chateau high in the Alps. We sat under a half-moon in the ruins of the Parthenon on top of the Acropolis in Athens. And while there, we looked down on an ancient amphitheater, where actors were performing a play about those three thousand year old people, who had built these magnificent structures.

Back in the Caribbean another time, we cruised up the river where the first Tarzan movie was filmed. Not far away, we visited an orphanage in the jungle, and I cannot think about the little children for more that a few seconds without having to squeeze back tears. This is also true about one little girl, who lived in a palm-leaf hut on a tiny little island. Her neck was embellished with a necklace of double-sided razor blades, and she saw her little paradise through the saddest liquid eyes of the world.

In Australia my wife and I hopped around with kangaroos. In Japan we rode a bullet train, a rocket flying just above ground. In Hong Kong we traveled in a rickshaw, which was pulled by a barefoot coolie. In this most exciting city, we also enjoyed a nine-course dinner, while delighting in the dancing of glittering girls, fiery dragons, smashing gongs.

In a Bermuda nightclub with were awed by a bare-chested man rolling around in broken glass, while in South Africa I was agog of bare-chested Zulu women. My hair was tousled, my hide tanned, my eyes bulging. I made it my thrilling duty to rest on Non-White Only benches and eat at Non-Europeans Only establishments.

I floated one hundred and eighty-some miles down the wild Colorado River on bubbles of air. I clawed for the sky when I climbed to the top of glacier-covered mountains and soared even higher in helicopters and planes.

Come soar with me.