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The Seventh Round: Opening Lines

The opening lines of my novel, The Seventh Round, to be published in the near future.


(My childhood memoir When I Was German is available on Kindle at Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FM254KM
And also:
At Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/when-i-was-german-alan-wynzel/1116946664?ean=2940045270991
At Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/356144
At Kobo: http://www.kobobooks.com/ebook/When-I-Was-German/book-Yggik0p7ZUGyhMYqTTN2wg/page1.html?s=iVi7ZinlUkG-F-aEidZXYQ&r=1
At Inktera: http://www.inktera.com/store/title/06c86017-5f7a-4351-aef8-1ccfc9ff65bd
And at Apple using iBooks, search in iBooks on "wynzel"
Follow me on Twitter @alanwynzel)

THE SEVENTH ROUND

            Monday.  It’s an hour before dawn.  The apartment is cold.  I haven’t turned up the heat yet.  I can’t afford it.  Later on, I will.  For now I huddle on the sofa, shivering in an old quilt.  The leather sofa is my bed when my kids are here.  The leather is hard and cold like the jagged shards of frosted grass outside.

            The gun rests in my hands.  Also cold and dead.  But pregnant with possibilities.

            The gun is a .38 caliber revolver with a seven-round cylinder, cast in steel alloy.  Rendered in a deep blue unseen in the dark.  I feel the heft of it, the solidity of the thing, as I stroke the smooth metal with my fingers and thumbs.  I take it in my right hand.  A perfect fit, as if custom-made.  I finger the trigger and thumb the hammer.  I never gave much thought to guns before, but now I understand.  The shape, the weight, the easy fit in the hand.   The power inherent.  The potential.  The gun forge may follow the blueprint, but the design was cast from the base yearnings of the soul.

            I open and spin the empty cylinder.  The action is even, fluid.  It shuts with a soft click.  I haven’t loaded it yet.  It isn’t time.

            I have to get up now.  I wrap the gun in a hand towel and, feeling my way in the darkness, slide it with a tinkling of glass behind the bottles of vodka, gin, and tequila in the liquor cabinet.  I set it beside the box of shells.  Withdrawing my hand, I tip the gin bottle, and catch it just by instinct.  I’m well accustomed with handling those bottles in the dark.

            Now into the kitchen, where I shut the louvered door behind me, turn on the light, and put water on for coffee.  In silence, I will have breakfast then tiptoe to the toilet for an hour-long struggle to clear my bleeding bowels, a task never completed, and finished with the painstaking easing of my screaming hemorrhoids back inside myself.  Holding my breath and praying that they don’t rupture completely.  When that is all done, I will turn on the heat, awaken my kids and take them to school.  Then I will go to work.

I will leave the gun here, for now.

 

 

Hannukkah, Ham and Cheese, and Christmas

In this excerpt from my memoir, Christmas knocks Hannukkah to the mat.  A ten count KO.

My childhood memoir When I Was German is now available for Kindle at Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FM254KM
And also:
At Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/when-i-was-german-alan-wynzel/1116946664?ean=2940045270991
At Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/356144
At Kobo: http://www.kobobooks.com/ebook/When-I-Was-German/book-Yggik0p7ZUGyhMYqTTN2wg/page1.html?s=iVi7ZinlUkG-F-aEidZXYQ&r=1
At Inktera: http://www.inktera.com/store/title/06c86017-5f7a-4351-aef8-1ccfc9ff65bd
And at Apple using iBooks, search in iBooks on "wynzel"
Follow me on Twitter @alanwynzel

          At Hanukkah my old man told me the story of the lights again. He lit the candles
for eight nights, but I wasn’t interested. Christmas was coming very soon. I knew there
wasn’t a Santa Claus any more, I was after all growing big and smart, that instead there
was someone better, my mother, who would get me almost everything on my Christmas
list. I was too busy picking out toys and making my list to pay attention to the dreidle
and the chocolate gelt.

          We had a huge Christmas tree. My mother hurt herself putting it up. It wouldn’t
stay in the stand. She had to tie it to nails hammered into the wall. And she wasn’t
happy when she was finished. It wasn’t a German Christmas.

          I felt sorry for my mother. Her German Christmas was gone. Now all she had
was the American Christmas, with all its crazy gift giving she hated, and all the spoiling
of children she complained about.

          Despite that, the Christmas tree was surrounded by a pile of bright gift boxes,
each taped and wrapped tightly by her. I was given everything I had asked for. More
things than I could play with. Was I a greedy American kid who had it too easy? Was I
spoiling my mother’s Christmas?

          Or was my mother the spoiler because she couldn’t let go of the past? Was the
grief from her lost German Christmases, for her vanished father and her ruined country
so strong that it destroyed her capacity for joy? That it drove her to shame me for the
gifts she gave?

          How did my old man feel about Christmas? I don’t celebrate Christmas, he said.
I’m a Jew. You’re a Jew. But your mother likes to have her Christmas, to give presents.
It’s an American holiday now. Jews can go and celebrate with Gentiles, that’s okay, but
we don’t believe in Jesus. We don’t bring Jesus into Christmas.

          And neither did my mother. She lamented that Christmas was supposed to be
about something special. She wouldn’t say what, but I knew she meant Jesus. She knew
my old man wouldn’t allow that. She compensated by spoiling me. I don’t think he
realized how each new toy was another clod of earth burying Chanukkah and my
Jewishness. It was another facet of my mother’s secret battle, but no longer so secret that
he couldn’t have seen it. My mother kept undoing their agreement: If he is a boy we
will raise him as a Jew. And tragically, my old man, magnanimous about Christmas and
ham and cheese sandwiches, helped her.

          My birthday came soon after Christmas. I got more presents. That was good
because I had already smashed a lot of my Christmas presents. Ripped up the game
pieces, sent the trains flying down the cellar steps, smashed the Hot Wheels that didn’t
race fast enough with bricks pulled from the crumbled walkway alongside the house.
My mother was very mad at me. Why, she screamed, do you wreck your toys? What’s
the matter with you? Why don’t you appreciate what you have?

          I did appreciate what I had. But I didn’t deserve it when German children had
nothing in the war. I undid my mother’s mistake in spoiling me. It was easy because
more toys were always coming.

The Mayor's Old Clothes

In this excerpt my father is showing me samples from his newly acquired wardrobe of Salvation Army Thriftstore castoffs.  Now retired and bored, he likes to get dressy for his trips to the local Senior Citizen Center where the residents have dubbed him the "Mayor".  Their sarcasm escaped him.  I'm about 13 at the time.


 My childhood memoir When I Was German is now available for Kindle at Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FM254KM
And also:
At Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/when-i-was-german-alan-wynzel/1116946664?ean=2940045270991
At Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/356144
At Kobo: http://www.kobobooks.com/ebook/When-I-Was-German/book-Yggik0p7ZUGyhMYqTTN2wg/page1.html?s=iVi7ZinlUkG-F-aEidZXYQ&r=1
At Inktera: http://www.inktera.com/store/title/06c86017-5f7a-4351-aef8-1ccfc9ff65bd
And at Apple using iBooks, search in iBooks on "wynzel"
Follow me on Twitter @alanwynzel

    

                         Look at this, my old man cried, jabbing his finger into the label inside his new sports coat.  Once it had been red.  Now it was old and ghostly pink.  Frays gathered on the elbows.

            Abercrombie and Fitch!  It’s a beautiful jacket!  Where can you find something like this?
           Wrapped around a corpse in the bottom of a coffin, I told him.
           Today my old man is a corpse in the bottom of a coffin.  There is no marker over his grave.  Just earth and grass.  I don’t know what jacket he is buried in, if any.  There is silence, and blackness, where he lays.  What is he dressed in?  The funeral home said they would dress the body.  With what?  He had nothing.  He must lay wrapped in a sheet, and nothing else.
          What corpse?  What’s the matter with you, boy?  This is a sharp coat.  Look at this!  It fits great.  And I got a neckerchief to go with it.
          My old man yanked a bright blue handkerchief from the breast pocket of the jacket.  It shone like silk, but it couldn’t have been silk, because my old man paid a quarter for it.  With his knobby claws he snapped it into a short tie that hung around his neck like a loose lady’s choker.
         This is the way you wear it, he announced with pride.
         No, I thought, that’s the way you wore it forty years ago.  But to my old man, there was no difference between forty years ago and today.  He lived in the black and white world of Channel Nine, Channel Five, and Channel Eleven.  Maybe, I thought, if my mother could afford a color TV, my old man might realize the passing of time.
        It looks like shit, I told him.  My old man growled and stormed away.

Failed Gambit--Return from the Bad Trip

In this excerpt my mother and I are back home in NJ after a traumatic 12 week trip to Germany in which she attempted to escape my father by staying in Munich permanently.  My father eventually threatened to call the authorities, and we had to go back.  While we were gone he sold my Peugot 10-speed bike to pay the rent and my mother never forgave him for it.

My childhood memoir When I Was German is now available for Kindle at Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FM254KM
And also:
At Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/when-i-was-german-alan-wynzel/1116946664?ean=2940045270991
At Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/356144
At Kobo: http://www.kobobooks.com/ebook/When-I-Was-German/book-Yggik0p7ZUGyhMYqTTN2wg/page1.html?s=iVi7ZinlUkG-F-aEidZXYQ&r=1
At Inktera: http://www.inktera.com/store/title/06c86017-5f7a-4351-aef8-1ccfc9ff65bd
And at Apple using iBooks, search in iBooks on "wynzel"
Follow me on Twitter @alanwynzel

                         In my house it seemed the German trip never happened.  Nothing had changed.  My mother got her two jobs back, and she worked day and night.  The War plodded on.  The pattern of long silences broken by terrible fights resumed.  The house was freezing.  There was bronchitis and asthma attacks.

             No, things had changed.  They were worse.
            There was no more Hanukkah.  One snowy December morning my old said, You know today is Hanukkah, don’t you?  I didn’t.  He was mad.  That was our Hanukkah.
            I didn’t care.  I couldn’t stand to see him anymore.  We yelled at each other all the time.  We called each other Asshole and Sonofabitch and Stupid Jerk.
           There were no more family trips.  There were no more short periods of polite talk between my mother and old man.  There was either silence, or fighting.  And there was nothing new to fight about, except my Peugeot bicycle.
            My mother mentioned it every day, as if she had to keep fueling our indignation.  I can’t believe your old man sold your bike, she would say for no reason at all.  What kind of a father sells his son’s bicycle?  She told all her friends.  And she screamed at my old man about it.
            It didn’t bother me.  I missed having a bike, it was true, but when I tried to get mad at my old man for selling mine, nothing happened.  I didn’t feel angry.  I didn’t care.  But I grew sick of hearing about it.  I knew, without being able to say it, that it was all that stood between war and an end to war.
          I was changing.  I was tall, now.  And thin.  My face wasn’t round anymore, it was long.  I stopped looking like my mother, and I began to look like my old man.
          I stared in the mirror, at my long face, into my deep-set eyes.  I looked like him.  Would I become like him too?  Would I become a No Good bum someday?
         And the more I changed, the less I cared about what happened in my house.  It took some time, but I realized I just wanted out.  I wanted the same thing I cried about in Germany the night before my mother cancelled our flight home.  I wanted the fighting to end.  I wanted to go with my mother someplace away from my old man and never come back.
         My mother still talked about leaving, too.  Despite the bicycle, she was breaking down, slowly.   She took me to look at apartments.
         Let’s go, I told her now.  Let’s get out of that house.
        But she was still afraid.
        Oh, I can’t do it.  I have no money.  I have to save more money.
        Or it was winter and it was too cold to move.
        Or she didn’t like the apartment.
        Or she didn’t want to leave me without a father.
         Every kid needs a father.  I never left because I didn’t want to take you away from your old man.
         I don’t care.  Let’s just go!
         She was afraid.  Your old man will probably try to kill me if I leave him.
         I worried about that too.  But I really didn’t think he would do it.

The Bad Trip

In this excerpt, my mother and I embark at Kennedy Airport for our 5th trip to Germany, which we made in the summer before I began 8th grade.

My childhood memoir When I Was German is now available for Kindle at Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FM254KM

And also:
At Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/when-i-was-german-alan-wynzel/1116946664?ean=2940045270991
At Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/356144
At Kobo: http://www.kobobooks.com/ebook/When-I-Was-German/book-Yggik0p7ZUGyhMYqTTN2wg/page1.html?s=iVi7ZinlUkG-F-aEidZXYQ&r=1
At Inktera: http://www.inktera.com/store/title/06c86017-5f7a-4351-aef8-1ccfc9ff65bd
And at Apple using iBooks, search in iBooks on "wynzel"
Follow me on Twitter @alanwynzel

 
             My mother planned another trip to Germany.  A big one.           

             I have money saved and they will let me take time from my jobs, she said.  I told them Oma is sick.  I lied but I don’t care.  We’re going to leave after July Fourth and stay seven weeks.  You’ll be back in time to start school.

                        I thought that was a long time.  I wanted to play war with Andrew and Colin and ride my bike all summer.  At the same time I knew I would have a lot of chances in Germany to buy more wargame models, things I couldn’t find at home.

                        You’ll really learn great German.  You’ll be an expert by the time we come home.  You’ll learn more than you did in German school.

                        Why are we staying seven weeks?

                        I’ve got to get away from you old man for a while.  Two or three weeks just isn’t enough, I need at least a month’s vacation from him.  And while I’m gone he’ll find out what it’s like without a slave of a woman to cook and clean for him, to wash his dirty underpants.  Maybe if we’re lucky he’ll get sick of it after a couple weeks and go find some other stupid woman and take up with her.  That would be good, if he would just leave.  But he’ll probably stick around until I go crazy or drop dead, and then you’ll be left to take care of yourselves, or get put in foster care like he did with his other sons.

                        My old man was mad that we would be away for so long.  But my mother told him the lie about my Oma being sick, so he shut up. 

                        My old man dropped us off at Kennedy Airport, like he always did.  He didn’t stay long.  He kissed us with his scratchy, sweaty face and hurried away, turning and waving his arms.

                        Look at that idiot, my mother said.  My old man was waving both arms over his head like a leathered castaway signaling a vanishing ship.  Except things were backwards, it was him and not the rescue ship that was slowly vanishing into an erratic swell of human waves.  Then he was gone.

                        And as much as I didn’t want to, I felt sad to see him go. I bit my lip and hated myself for it until I wasn’t sad any more.

                        My mother sagged in her terminal seat.  She sank inside our palisade of luggage.  Thank God he’s gone.  Now I can relax.  She covered her face with her hand and she wept a little.

                        Her tears were a premonition: it would be a bad trip.  A very bad trip.

The Boy Turns

An excerpt from my childhood memoir When I Was German.  Some context:  it's a Saturday morning during a rainy spring in our broken down rented house on Lake Valley Road.  I'm about 11 years old.  My father launches an angry rant against my mother, who will no longer let him take the car.  And I, long a witness to their ongoing war and, manipulated into sympathizing with her, take up the fight on her behalf.

My book is available:
At Amazon:  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FM254KM
At Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/when-i-was-german-alan-wynzel/1116946664?ean=2940045270991
At Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/356144
At Kobo: http://www.kobobooks.com/ebook/When-I-Was-German/book-Yggik0p7ZUGyhMYqTTN2wg/page1.html?s=iVi7ZinlUkG-F-aEidZXYQ&r=1
At Inktera: http://www.inktera.com/store/title/06c86017-5f7a-4351-aef8-1ccfc9ff65bd
And at Apple using iBooks, search in iBooks on "wynzel"
Twitter @alanwynzel
alanwynzel@gmail.com

           Spring was cold and wet.  The winter’s snow sank into pools of mud and ooze.  The mud was ripe with the smell of the Green to come, and rank with all the Dead things freed from their tomb of snow and ice.  Clouds drifted no higher than treetops, unsure of what to do.  They clung to the empty branches.  The trees shivered and were black with freezing rain.
          Our house was cold and damp.  It smelled wet and rotten.  I remembered the kittens in the bag atop the storm drain.  And it smelled sharp; it burned my nose like a bottle of floor cleaner waved under my nose.  The basement was flooded, and the water drew the stink of Friskie’s old piss and his crap from the floor.  Clots of dog hair gathered in low spots in the cellar.  I saw kittens in them.  Friskie sat nervously, slept without resting, on the steps, so he wouldn’t get wet.  A four-inch salamander clung to the basement wall.  There was a sump pump down there, but it was broken.  Only I thought we should call the landlady to get it fixed.
          It was Saturday and my mother took the Plymouth to work.  She didn’t want my old man driving it anymore.  It’s my car, she said, I paid for it and I hold the title.  I don’t want you racing my car around anymore, ruining it, it’s getting old.
          She told me goodbye and she left.  The Plymouth slipped like fingers into a pocket of morning mist and was gone.
          I was eating cereal and watching the Road Runner.  My old man sat with his tea, clinking his spoon, slurping the mug dry with the sound the sump pump made when it used to work.  He was mad.  He stared at Wile E. Coyote like he wanted kill him with daggers that would shoot from his pupils.
           I waited.
           It came.
           My old man barked.  So now I can’t take the car, huh?  You mother won’t let me take the car on Saturdays.  I wreck the car!  I ruin it!  Who’s been taking care of it all these years, how many times we’ve gone to Wayne and Bob’s for service?  Huh?  How many times have I taken you?
           Hey Bob, hey Wayne, come on, grease the car and change the oil!  Bob and Wayne hated my old man.  I hated to go.  I wouldn’t go anymore.
           You know, boy, without a car, I can’t take you to Mike’s.  I can’t pick him up or take him home.  How you gonna visit with your pals, huh?  If your mother doesn’t let me take the car?  Her car?  It’s my goddamn car too, so I let her sign the title that day, so what, I hadda go to work so she went to the dealer and signed, and that makes it her car?  Who picked it out and test drove it?
            My old man leapt up.   He leaned over me as I lay on the sofa.  He worked his ugly, smelly mouth, he clacked his few yellow teeth.  Spit flew from his ugly hole.  He waved his claws in the air.  A giant, ugly old crow staggering on bony legs, flapping wings, squawking, jerking, louder and louder.
           So your mother doesn’t like that I retire, so she protests.  Yeah.  Let me ask you, in Mike’s house, or your other pals’ homes, do the parents sleep together?  Do their mothers sleep in another room?
            No, I said.
            No, of course not.  Your mother don’t like that I retire.  So she makes a protest, she gets her own bedroom and she takes away the car.  Well I got news for you boy, I got news for her too, I worked for fifty years!  Fifty goddamn years!  I busted my hump and I paid my Social Security, I paid my union dues, and now I’m done.  You hear that?
            I heard him.
            We’re getting four checks where we used to get one.  I get one, you get one, she gets one, and then I get my pension from the union.  Plenny of money.  Money your mother is getting from when I worked long before I ever knew her.  You hear me?
            I heard him.  On and on and on, squawking and crowing.  He banged his feet on the floor.  On and on, yelling screaming squawking spitting, stinking up the air. 
            I sat still and watched, while he screamed and stomped, on and on, without seeing, without knowing.
            I would make him see and know.
            Shutup!  I yelled.
            My old man’s head jerked back.  His ugly trap shut.
            Now, I was screaming.
            Just shutup, shutup, shut the fuck up!
            I leapt up and waved my hands in his ugly dark face.  He backed away a step and stiffened.  He was locked in place, an old man statue carved from old wood.
            I’m sick of your shit!  You lazy No Good sonofabitch!  What do you know?  All you do is lay around on your ass all day, you don’t do nothing, you don’t help out with the wash or the shopping or the cleaning or anything!  Mom has to work two jobs and you make peanuts!  You don’t want to do anything while she has to slave all day and night for you, for our money and our food and you don’t deserve it!  You’re nothing but a stupid loud-mouth idiot and you belong in the nuthouse, all you do for her is cause her trouble and make her miserable!  She suffered enough in the war without your bullshit on top of it!
           At that moment the War owned me.   If I hadn’t been screaming my head off I would have heard it chuckling.  On signal, the Krupps and I.G. Farbens stoked their furnaces and oiled their puppet strings.  The Hitlers and the Ludendorffs hatched strategies from immolated graves.  The Speers and the Riefenstahls, eyes covered and blind to consequence, sniffed the air for opportunities.  And I charged forward with all the self-righteous fury of the millions of deceived pawns who came before me.
           I was screaming from the top of the stairs.  How did I get up there?  My old man was still in the same place.  He stared at me with black dots in white circles.  That and two clenched fists were all I saw.
          Why my old man never used those fists on me for what I said that day, or worse things I would say, is beyond me.  Nor is why he didn’t confront my mother for turning me against him.  Didn’t he see it?  He would argue, and call me names, angry at me for my turning, but he never hit me.  I suppose he thought he would lose me, and the roof over his head and the meals he couldn’t cook for himself and the laundry he didn’t know how to wash.  Instead, he plied me from time to time with remembrances of cars, the black eye I gave him and everything else that had slipped away since November, 1970.  He did what he could, in his angry, faulted way, to win me back.
           What success he had, he didn’t live to see.