Mit 16 ist alles Möglich
I spent a month in Germany when I was 16. This was 1984, during the Los Angeles Olympics. My father worked for a German company and had hammered out a summer transfer deal between himself and a German from the home office, which was situated in a town close to Stuttgart called Göppingen (think: ger-ping-en).
The plan was to have Herr Strehler’s son Stefan stay with us at my Dad’s place for a month during the summer of 1983, and then I would go there for a month in ‘84.
Stefan was a tall, lanky, kid with long hair and circular glasses. Like most Europeans I’ve met, he was fascinated with American culture. During his stay, we discovered that he was obsessed with soft, doughy American sandwich bread, American cheese slices, and Coke. That was his diet while he stayed here.
One day, my buddy Joe and I took Stefan skimboarding on the endless puddles around Jersey Village, following a solid soaking of Texas rain. Stefan’s height raised his center of gravity, and although he was a huge fan of playing handball, his balance was wonky. Watching him end up in the water over and over again was a solid source of hilarity in our fun-starved lives.
Somehow, my father procured a ticket for Stefan to attend the Peter Tosh concert at the Cullen Auditorium on the University of Houston campus. I was super jealous, because I was a massive Tosh fan at the time. Stefan had a great time and took a crapload of photos on his trusty camera. I still have copies of those. And I’m still jealous.
My flight was to Hamburg, and from there I would meet Stefan’s Aunt, who would then shepherd me to the train station, where I would board a train for Stuttgart, and be met at the station by Stefan.
I retrieved my luggage and then headed out the front of the airport, where Stefan’s Aunt was waiting, holding up a handmade sign with my name on it, like I was in a bad movie. We had some time before my train’s departure, so she took me to a café to grab something to eat. As I was ordering, she asked me if I wanted a beer or something, to drink. As I mentioned, I was 16, so it came as a bit of a surprise. I managed to play it cool, though, because I wanted that beer. I asked her to suggest one, and she said I should get a hefeweizen, which is a pale, yellow, wheat beer, traditionally served in the South of Germany in a tall pint glass with a thin slice of lemon. Think Blue Moon but light years better.
After lunch, she helped me board my train, we said our goodbyes, and I was off for Stuttgart. It had been many years since I’d been in Europe, let alone Germany, and it was exhilarating to be back. The train passed through some beautiful countryside. A short way from Stuttgart, we passed a small neighborhood running parallel to the track. One of the houses had a halfpipe skateboard ramp in the backyard. I was obsessively into skating and surfing at the time, so running into a halfpipe in the middle of a German nowhere was super cool.
Somewhere along the way, the jetlag caught up with me, and I fell asleep. I was afraid this might happen, because I had no fucking clue where I was, and equally had no clue how soon Stuttgart would show up.
I was awakened by a nice German woman who had guessed my destination, and that I was American (which I’m sure wasn’t that tough). She told me that we were about to arrive in Stuttgart. I thanked her profusely and made my stop.
Stefan stood on the platform, looking even taller than I’d remembered, a big toothy grin on his face. We hugged, said our hellos, and then loaded my bags into his car and headed off into town.
He asked me if it was okay if we went to a mall because he needed to buy some new shoes, and Göppingen didn’t have great options. In the mall, he said he wanted to stop at McDonalds, and was surprised I didn’t want anything from there. I told him that McDonalds was not on my todo list.
To celebrate the Olympics, McDonalds Germany had a selection of milkshakes, each colored after one of the rings in the Olympic symbol. He explained that it was his goal to try them all. That day he grabbed the blue one, which was some sort of berry flavor. He was thrilled. I thought it looked disgusting. His shake urge stated, we headed for Göppingen.
Just outside of town, I saw a man on the side of the road thumbing a ride. To my surprise, Stefan began to pull off the road. He asked me if I minded sitting in the back, which was another surprise. But then it was his car, and I was a guest, so I hopped in back. Stefan and the guy chatted in German, which, of course, I didn’t speak so well because American.
After he dropped the guy off, I asked him what was up with that whole scene, and he explained that the man worked at a local factory, and that it was common for these folks to hitchhike to and from work, and equally common to give them rides. I told him that in the States, that guy would one-hundred-percent be seen as a child molester or serial killer, and that there was almost no chance of him getting a ride.
We arrived in Göppingen and pulled into the driveway of a charming white, textured, two-story house with a clay tile roof and a cute garden in the front yard. Stefan’s sister and her boyfriend greeted us at the door, and then I was shown to my room, which was in a fully appointed basement. The bedroom had windows at my head’s height, and maintained a cool and dry temperature throughout my stay.
Back outside, I joined the others at a bistro table where they were enjoying bowls of fresh lingonberries from the garden, with heavy cream and sugar. They were fantastic. We got into a conversation, but it wasn’t long before I was drifting off, so I excused myself and went to my room and went into a jetlag coma.
It was night when I awoke. I shook the cobwebs out and headed upstairs to meet the rest of the fam. Both of his parents were super nice, and I thanked them profusely for having me stay. We had a big discussion about what I wanted to eat and drink.
“Whatever you’re eating is good with me,” I assured them.
Stefan’s mother seemed particularly focused on buying me Coke, no matter how may times I told her I didn’t really drink soda. I got the impression she thought I was just being polite, because I was an American after all, and we were all out of our fucking minds for Coke, right?!
This prediction was accurate, because the next day she came home from the store with two bottles of Coke just for me. I thanked her as if she’d just procured me the crack I desperately needed to feel “normal.” When she asked how I drank it, I told her we drank it cold, on ice. You could have been forgiven for thinking I’d asked her if I could fuck her dog, from the way she looked at me.
Apparently Germans drank their Coke (if they drank it at all) warm. I would soon learn that this often was the case with their weizen beer as well. She was deeply apologetic for not having ice to put in my Coke, which I insisted didn’t matter at all. I drank my warm Coke with lunch while she looked on in obvious embarrassment.
Later, at dinner, she could barely contain her excitement when she informed me, at the table with the whole gang, that she had something for me. She rose from the table, and returned with a plastic bag. She handed the bag to me, and I realized that it was a bag shaped like a thin ice cube tray that you filled with water, tied off, and then put in the freezer, for, I guess, when you had insane American guests who rudely and exclusively demanded iced beverages. With the whole table watching, I had to break the ice into cubes and then carefully peel the plastic bagging off the ice. In the end, it became a running joke, and we never fucked with the ice again. She did, however, keep the Coke in the fridge from there on out.
After dinner, Stefan lent me a bike, and we headed off for the, get this, local bar, owned and run by his high school friends. I parked my ass at the bar and began putting back the weizen. Virtually everyone in Germany spoke English, so there was lots of interesting conversation about Germany, the States, travel, drinking, the differences in our cultures, and so on. I got waylaid that night, and it was glorious. On the ride home, we wobbled through the dark streets, laughing out loud.
“Don’t you have school in the morning?” I asked.
“Ja,” he said, giggling like an idiot. “I do!”
German kids stay in school year round. Their holiday breaks were substantial, but there was no months-long summer for them.
The cool, dry, fragrant summer air breezed by, and we rolled on home. It was a lifetime high.
I quickly established a routine on my trip. I drank all night and slept all day. That was pretty much the extent of it. And I was perfectly happy about it. Many nights would end at another bar, which served the best Greek food I’ve ever had. I would sit with Stefan and his Green Party friends, and we would communally eat the food and drink even more. Almost everyone smoked handrolled cigarettes. Stefan didn’t smoke, but his 14 year old sister did. I can’t imagine her parents were overjoyed about it, but then no one ever said a word. Their tobacco had a sweet, herbal smell to it, which I liked. I can recall it clearly even now.
I went with Stefan to school one day, to sit in on his English class. They were all advanced, so the class was just them discussing shit, totally in English. They asked me a lot of questions about the States, and about the language. The teacher got a rise out of everyone when he asked me if I was a teetotaler. I had no idea what that meant, which set them all off into paroxysms of laughter, because they all knew an English term I didn’t. When he told me what it meant, I assured him that “No, I can’t say that I am,” which absolutely killed.
For lunch, we went into town with some of Stefan’s friends. At a butcher shop we bought sliced lunch meat. We bought giant pretzels at the bakery. And then we bought a bottle of red wine. We sat in the public square and ate our lunch. I was invited to join Stefan and his friends as they painted the house they all had rented together on the next day they were off.
The house was in the middle of town, with a hand pump right out on the sidewalk that accessed a local spring well, fed by naturally sparkling mineral water. It felt like a fucking fairy tale in that country. The house, however was a fucking nightmare.
It was a two-story cottage-style home, that had to be at least a hundred years old. The place was filthy, and there were weird things like ancient children’s toys and furniture strewn about the place. This was exponentially worse up in the attic, which looked the set of every haunted house movie ever made. I honestly couldn’t believe they were going to live in that dump. But they were super stoked. Stefan decided to paint his room a pale, hideous pink, and we stood in there, big wide brushes in hand, painting over the decades old peeling wallpaper and dusty spiderwebs.
One of Stefan’s roommates was the sole, town punk rocker. All I ever saw him wear was olive green cargo pants, a sleeveless white t-shirt, and combat boots. He also had a pretty grisly mohawk. All the rest of Stefan’s friends were Green Party hippies. They all had long hair, faded jeans, plaid shirts, jean jackets, stuff like that. I struck up a conversation with the punk, during which he asked me “Do you know Meelions of Dead Cops?”
I laughed.
“They’re one of my favorite bands!” I told him in surprise. “They’re from Texas, close to where I live!”
Given his reaction, I think we could have gotten married right there and lived out a wonderful punk rock life.
I joined Stefan and the local Green Party folks for a viewing of the film Koyaanisqatsi projected on a screen in the courtyard of a fucking castle. Joints were passed around as we all sunk deep into the heavy imagery and hypnotic Philip Glass soundtrack.
After a couple of weeks, Herr Strehler began to become concerned that I was drinking too much. The last straw was the night Stefan and I returned from the bar and raided his dad’s wine cellar. His dad suddenly popped into my basement room, saw the bottle of wine, and lost his fucking mind. He and Stefan got into a shouting match. I almost burst out laughing because both of them kept shouting “Möglich!!!” at each other, over and over. It sounds something like: moog-leash and means possible. I suppose what was and wasn’t possible in our shameful boozing was a big issue. The argument ended in an stalemate, with his dad storming off back to bed, more or less over it.
When I asked him what that was all about, he told me that his father was upset because it was a very good wine, and we had the audacity to drink it straight out of the bottle, like we were barbarians. Turned out, he was cool with us drinking it. He just wanted us to use wine glasses.
The next morning, Herr Strehler called my father. I listened as he explained that he was concerned that I was drinking too much, and that I was not making good use of my time.
“Yes,” he said, “okay Bob, yes, okay.”
He handed me the phone.
“Hi dad,” I said.
“Hi John, how are you doing?”
“I’m good,” I told him.
Herr Strehler tells me you are coming home drunk every night?”
“That’s pretty much true,” I admitted.
“Are you having a good time?”
“I am.”
“Good.”
Stefan’s parents tried to save face by taking me on a long distance drive through the Black Forest. Picture a forest. A green forest. That was it. We flew down the autobahn, through hills and endless trees for hours, consistently over a 100 MPH, which never stopped being terrifying. Eventually, we stopped somewhere and toured a castle, where I was likely as bored as their daughter appeared to be. We then visited Stefan’s grandfather in a nursing home in the middle of nowhere. And that was our big adventure.
Next, Stefan’s father came up with the idea to send us to a waterpark. I spent about two hours in the deep end of the wave pool, treading water, which ruled. When I got out, I couldn’t find Stefan or his sister, so I went in search of them. I came across a sauna, and figured I’d take a peek inside.
I swung the door open and walked right into a room full of fat, old, pink, naked German dudes, who all looked up at me at the same time. I made a quick, pathetic look around the room, turned around, and got the fuck out of there.
Continuing Operation Keep American Loser busy, they sent me on a sleepover with the daughter’s class at a mountain chalet. We all hung out with the teacher into the late hours, smoking, drinking coffee, and laughing our asses off.
The whole trip was like this. To say that growing up in Germany would have been superior than in the States is a massive understatement.
I saw Harold & Maude at the theater, as well as Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise, and The Creature of the Black Lagoon on German TV, both in English.
None of these things I was doing were remotely possible where I lived at the time. Most of the trip was like this. One amazing experience after another. The takeaway of the entire trip was that I wanted to live there. More than that, I didn’t want to live here anymore. They seemed to have lives. We seemed to be existing. I’ve never shaken that feeling here in Texas. Never. Maybe the grass is always greener, but maybe it really does suck here.
You know, “maybe.”
My final night, Stefan came to my room and told me we were having a special dinner, his favorite.
“What is is?” I asked.
“I can’t tell you, it’s a surprise.” His eyes shone with mischievous glee.
This didn’t bode well.
I took my spot at the table, and Stefan’s mother began to serve some sort of soup from a large tureen. It looked like matzoh ball soup, but these folks were not Jewish. I tasted, the large dumpling, and at first thought it was delicious. Suddenly, I noticed that the table had gone quiet. Everyone was looking at me and smiling.
“What is it?” I asked, a sinking feeling setting in.
They all smiled like lunatics. They wouldn’t tell me. Fucking Germans.
As I ate the soup, the meatballs began to impart a strange aftertaste, increasingly freaking me out with each successive bite. I’d always suspected they served me giant testicle meatballs that night. But after a Google search, my closest guess is that we ate Leberknödelsuppe, which is basically giant liver meatballs in beef broth. Whatever it was, I ate all of mine, and gently turned down seconds when offered, claiming I was saving room for the rhubarb pie they’d made for dessert (also from the garden). We all knew I was bullshitting.
The next morning, a little bummed, I said my goodbyes, hugged everyone, endlessly thanked them all, and then boarded a plane and flew home to Texas.
Less than a week later, I would continue the summer in LA. But I’ll save that for another post.
Do a good thing, I'm thirsty…
coff.ee/johncramer