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"
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.
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