Time to Grow Up

My days of playing war outside come to an end.

When I Was German is now FREE at Smashwords: 
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/356144


         I was in high school. I was growing up. Suddenly I was as big as my old man.
And sadly, my days of playing war in the woods came to an end.

          It was winter and Andrew was Fencing. Mike had a job after school at the
library. Colin was away for his first year of college. I was completely alone.
I played a lot of war outside that winter. The snow was deep and I loved to fall
and die in its snug white embrace. And fighting in the snow was fighting in Russia;
struggling in the bitter freeze, shivering in a faded Wehrmacht trench coat.

        One gray afternoon I lay behind a fallen tree. My rifle lay across the trunk, the
barrel pointed towards the Russian positions. The woods were silent; had the Russians
spotted us, or had we stolen upon them unseen? I was pondering a covered route of
approach when the dry brush line behind me crashed open. I spun around and four kids
almost stepped on me.

         Sorry, man.

         It was Jack, one of the kids from Elder Drive. He was a year younger than me.
He was a burnout, a kid who smoked dope. He was with three other burnouts I didn’t
recognize. They smelled like pot. They stopped and stared down at me and my rifle.
One kid smiled like he thought he should laugh but then his glazed eyes drifted off,
beyond me, further into the mist of gray fog and black tree trunks.

        Without saying anything else the four continued deeper into the woods, toward
the Russian positions. I watched them fade into the gray confused depth. Were those
tree trunks moving from side to side, or was it the burnouts?

       I felt the difference between them and me. It was the feeling I felt in school, like I
always had, of being outside. Of being weird.

       I was fifteen years old and I was playing war by myself. The burnouts were
younger than me, but they were already doing cool things, hanging out, going to parties,
growing up.

       Sex made me see this more clearly. I knew that I would never get any girls
playing war in the woods like a little freak. I would only get girls if I had friends and
went to parties. If I did cool things, like collecting rock albums, going to the mall,
drinking beer or smoking reefer.

      There was an empty spot inside me, and it ached. That ache was pushing me,
driving me toward something.

      I stood up and hurried home in the opposite direction of the burnouts. I was lucky
they were so stoned or they would have laughed at me. Maybe even beaten me up for
being a freak.

      I played war outside a few more times. Always looking over my shoulder for
somebody. It wasn’t very fun that way. I couldn’t lose myself in the action.
One day I raced around a corner in the trail, shouting for the platoon to follow
me, and there were people there. It was a guy and a girl, holding hands. They were
heading up the trail, straight into my battlefield. They looked at me, surprised. And
annoyed. They were holding each other very close and carrying a blanket. They were
looking for a place to make out. I was embarrassed and flushed hot and wanted to run
away. I tried to act like nothing was wrong; I headed off the trail, away from them
towards the creek gully and escape. The girl watched me and giggled. The guy pulled
her away, and they were gone.

      I plunged into the gully. I couldn’t do this anymore. It was over. My war play
was finished. I was too old to be caught playing kid games. I didn’t want to be the class
freak, I didn’t want to be Ooofy again. I couldn’t help it. I wanted girls and I couldn’t
get them if I was a war nut.

      I limped home, hiding my rifle, hiding it in shame for the first time ever, under
my trench coat. I knew I still had my tanks. I had board games too, wargames on maps,
sophisticated, realistic games far beyond simple games like Risk and Stratego. I could
still play war, I consoled myself. I just had to hide it.

      But I wanted to cry anyway. No tears came. My old man said, you’re in early,
too cold for you? I ignored him. I didn’t want a fight. I wanted my woods back, I
wanted to play there but all that had slipped away. Now I was slipping myself, so fast
my face burned from the wind, toward new things I wanted and feared at the same time.
My rifle was assigned an undeserved fate. A betrayal, really, considering how
faithful it had been to me. I stood it in the back of the coat closet and left it there forever.

     I laid out a force of model tanks on the dining room table and tried to forget.

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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.