The Dreaded Angst


The summer of eighty-nine I was living in a cubicle in a grunged-out basement a few blocks north of the University of Michigan main campus. In this cubicle-which I had transformed the summer before from a dank room of junk into a semi-livable space-I slept on the floor. There was a thin red carpet on this floor, but no padding, and I softened it with a sleeping bag unzipped and spread out on the rectangular area between my dresser, my desk, my small couch, and my row of books in milk crates. Sleeping on the floor each night in this style was fine with me. I liked the floor. The floor was good. The way I saw it, a bed was an unnecessary luxury and could be done without.

I was living in this cubicle because of the cost. $120 per month-which, as things went in Ann Arbor, was a very good price for having your own room near campus. But being scrunched into that little box as I was, with the walls slowly crushing in, had its effect on me. By the beginning of summer, a dreaded angsht set in. This dreaded angsht was due (in part) to those walls, but mostly due to the failure and consequent break-up of an eight-month relationship. She, the ex-girlfriend, quickly found someone new while I, the possessor of dreaded angsht, felt the walls crush me further. Aggravating this situation even further was the fact that I had just graduated with a BA in English from the “Harvard of the Midwest” yet had absolutely no future. I had the same variety of job opportunities available to me as I had had before willingly stepping into the higher education meat-grinding machine.

To prove this point I took a job as an entrance attendant at the university hospital. I wore a uniform similar to Gopher's on The Love Boat and valet parked cars and, in general, assisted people who needed assistance. I also made sure there was always a nice row of available wheelchairs out front between the two automatic doors. A fellow attendant soon became my best friend that summer-a frizzy-haired thrasher in a local heavy metal band named Axid. (Ax as in guitar; id as in Freud.) He, the thrasher, had recently halted his lithium ingestions, I soon came to learn. By the end of summer I felt on route to lithium myself, or worse, since I was so clearly capable of perceiving the long stretch of nothingness ahead of me. I needed to do something drastic.

A friend since fifth grade, Joe, was stationed in Stuttgart. He did not live on barracks; he had an apartment in Ludwigsburg, north of Stuttgart, which he cohabitated with his German wife, Kat. I had met Kat the previous Christmas when she and Joe visited the States to get married. To my amazement, she was a blond bombshell, in possession of genetically-superior Germanic babe-genes. How Joe had scored her-good-hearted guy that he was-was beyond me. He did tip me off, though, that in Europe he had gotten laid like crazy (whereas in the States the girls were so prissy and uptight it was ridiculous). Deep-rooted and inherently perverse Puritanism did not exist over there in that sophisticated continent. To illustrate this point: whenever Joe went to the public pool accompanied by Kat and her equally genetically-superior babe-gene’d friends, the girls all unstrung their bikini tops and exposed their breasts to the radiance of the sun like the natural act it should be.

I bought a one-way ticket to West Germany.

*****

With my cheap rent and entrance attendant job--taking overtime whenever it was offered--I had been able to save one thousand dollars, a fortune to me at the time. I had never had more than a few hundred to my name previous to this, and thought that this amount (minus the three hundred bucks airfare) would be more than enough to last me till I got settled into an apartment and job. What kind of work I would do did not matter. Joe informed me that the base where he was stationed had plenty of jobs, plenty of civilians working there. I was already doing the base-of-the-pyramid-scheme wage-slave thing in Ann Arbor: I could just as well do that anywhere. Basic, unskilled labor of any sort.

*****

At the end of August I spent five days at my mom’s place, a rented house just outside of Detroit. I bought Joseph Campbell’s Creative Mythology and lounged in the backyard on a lawn chair, alternately reading and gazing up into the sky. The book provided a lot to reflect about. It described how we of these modern times have not so much a common mythology as we do our own personal ones, constructing life-meaning via them. I knew already I had my own personal mythology. People and events in my past had taken on mythic-like proportions, becoming characters and chapters that were connected together in a seemingly coherent (though in reality not) story unfurling all around me.

Lounging on that lawn chair on that lush back lawn under the pleasantness of the late summer Midwest sky, I sensed I was about to enter into yet another phase in my own little personal-trip myth-story. A climax was coming. I was counting on experiencing something, anything extreme.

*****

First was a connecting flight in New York, then Zurich. The flight from Zurich to Stuttgart was brief but intense. Out the window was a patchwork of European countryside, farmland interspersed with hamlets. In those hamlets house after house was roofed in the same style of red slates. The plane flew at an altitude where it constantly cut in and out of disparate clouds. The puff of these clouds-which seemed to have excessive puff due to my intensity-transposed itself against the landscape below to give me the feel of being in an impressionistic painting.

Joe had been ordered to go into the forest and play army the week I arrived. So Kat, his babe-gene’d wife, had the honors of picking me up at the airport and entertaining me for a couple days solo. When I got off the plane I was not sure if I would even be able to recognize her-only able at the time to recall a spectacular burst of blond when I first met her last winter-and was relieved when that blond-burst traipsed up to me out of the crowd at the gate and gave me an obligatory hug. This was, as I took it at the moment, a very auspicious beginning to my European existence.

In the car shortly thereafter I discovered that Kat was what could be described as an offensive driver. She seemed to be in a race to get back to her apartment. And whenever she was prevented in her onward aggressions, terms like sheisse spilt from her lips. “You don’t have to go so fast,” I told her: “There’s no rush.” Though Kat did not reply verbally to this, I sensed an explosion rip through her innards. An explosion I had detonated. I immediately realized: this girl is a stick of dynamite, and I know nothing about handling such sticks. In an effort to find common ground, and perhaps defuse any further bursts, I asked Kat if she was into Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, which I was at the time. I thought this inquiry was innocuous enough, and even complimentary, but she shot back at me with: “You like that shit?” The development of a lose-lose situation began to dawn on me.

Kat and Joe’s apartment in Ludwigsburg was on the main strasse, near two enormous palaces situated on ornately-landscaped palatial grounds. Both of these palaces were centuries-old and magnificent to the extreme to my fresh eyes. I expressed to Kat how exciting it must be to be living so close to them. “We’ve never visited them,” she explained: “After a while, you forget they are even there.”

Once I got settled into their spare room, Kat led me out to a wine festival that was taking place within walking distance. On route we passed a building with a plaque on it stating that Mozart had spent a night there at the age of seven-and-a-half with his father Leopold in 1763. This astounded me. The child prodigy had been here. Right here. Right at this very spot. I pointed it out to Kat, but she could not figure out why I cared so much about old shit like that.

What amazed me about the wine festival was how people of all ages were partaking in it. There were teens and there were elderly people, everybody sitting at elongated tables together. Kat and I found a couple of empty places in the middle of one table and immediately began chatting with the people around us. This did not make sense. None of it made any sense to me. At U of M I had only drunk at kegger frat parties or at college bars full of college-aged people. I would have never hung out at places with anyone old at them. And what was this deal with sitting at tables with strangers and talking affably with them? In the States you go to a bar, or anywhere, and stick to your isolated little clique. Everyone else--well they have big L's slapped on their foreheads.

The highlight of the night came when a grandpa in his seventies (putting him smack dab in his twenties during the Nazi era) leapt up from his seat in the middle of a song with half a large breadpretzel jutting out from his mouth. He danced a jig while I, and many others, laughed and clapped to the beat.

What the hell was going on here?

*****

Next day Kat brought me out to the Ludwigsburg streets for the purpose of a shopping spree. At a clothing shop, she paused at the lingerie section to carefully examine the goods. For a moment I fantasized her trying on various pieces and asking me how she looked in them-her sunny hair, azure eyes, and creamy skin glowing phosphorescently as she twirled and I scoped. I even knew how her body would look in the lingerie, or out of it for that matter, having chanced upon a photo album in the guest room the previous night which contained pictures of her and her fellow genetically-superior babe-gene’d friends topless at a public pool. If the public pools had been like that where I grew up, I would not have been able to go swimming, that was for sure. Not with that uncontrollable post-pubescent mini-pole stretching out the fabric at front of my swimtrunks. (I had enough trouble keeping it down just sitting in class--looking at girls fully-clothed.) But then again: had I grown up in that blessed environment, with all the babes I fantasized about in my teens exposing themselves to the radiance of the sun, the sight of a pair of tits would not so unnaturally titillate me as it does. Damn the Puritans and what they did to my psyche!

That night, after a bistro and few beers, Kat and I talked in the living room. I had earlier informed her that my plan was to find a job and my own apartment as soon as could be accomplished. I was expecting the classified ads sections in the Stuttgart newspapers to be the same as in the States-packed with employment opportunities and immediately available dwellings. Kat now thought it the appropriate time to set me straight. She informed me that there was, in fact, a horrible housing shortage in Western Germany, with at least a two-year wait for apartment openings. I could not believe it. But Kat insisted. She told me to look in any newspaper, and a housing section would not be found. Her country, she explained, was already packed enough with Germans, let alone the overabundance of Turks who were originally brought to Germany as cheap labor for rebuilding the country after the war. Plus, the border between Hungary and Austria had recently been opened--the Iron Curtain was beginning to lift--and East German refugees were pouring into West Germany via this route, like how they used to pour into West Berlin before the wall went up. Kat explained that this housing shortage--which, as far as I could tell, seemed to be primarily blamed on the Turks, and others of non-Germanic origins--provided the justification for current neo-Nazi movements. This was definitely news to me. I had never thought there could be a justification for a neo-Nazi movement. Worse, I was unable to tell what Kat’s views specifically were and, if they were in the extreme, if they were typical of West Germans. I felt like I was treading in enemy territory.

I roiled on the guest bed till five in morning trying to figure out what exactly I was doing here now, and what exactly I was going to do. The dreaded angsht tightened in my gut a further notch.

*****

After spending an uneasy morning and afternoon the next day with Kat, Joe returned from his stint of army-playing in the early evening. He poked his head into the living room and exclaimed: “Hey dude!” What a relief he had finally come back. It had only been two days since I arrived, but due to my inner intensity and tensions with Kat, it felt extremely longer.

In search of dinner, the three of us drove to the base where Joe worked. My preconceived notion of what an American army base would be like was totally wrong. It was not Spartan. It abounded, in actuality, with everything an overseas American might desire. The barracks were apartment buildings. There was a large grocery store stocked with American goods, items reduced by approximately 30% from their cost in the States. There was a liquor store with goods similarly reduced. There was also a mall containing the very essentials of American mall culture: a pizzeria, a movie theater, fast food places, clothing shops, and even a bowling alley. It was a mini American city within the realm of a foreign country.

Joe reminded me that I could get a job on one of the three bases in the Stuttgart area. I did not have to speak German. I did not have to speak or be anything but American.

*****

Next day Joe brought me to Robinson Barracks-a base within the Stuttgart city limits-in order to visit the job office. It was closed because this day turned out to be American Labor Day. The two of us went instead to a Stuttgart McDonalds housed in an old building to eat lunch. I was impressed with how you could buy beer by the cup, and how you were given mayonnaise with your French fries plus a tiny three-pronged fork to pick them up with. It was like viewing American culture through German-tinted glasses.

Later that night, while watching tv, Joe and Kat slipped away to their bedroom and I considered the evening over. Within thirty minutes, however, Joe exited their room and expressed his desire to play a game of Mastermind. Kat came back out too-clothed only in a t-shirt and a pair of soft pink panties. Her t-shirt barely concealed those soft pink panties. I could barely conceal how well I noticed that the t-shirt barely concealed those panties. At one point while playing the game, sitting around the coffee table on the carpeting, Kat crawled to the tv to change the channel. On all fours she grasped the knob, and her t-shirt shot up to the region of her lower back, exposing in the most tantalizing fashion her soft-pink-pantied bent-over ass. I glanced at Joe. He reacted as if there was nothing to see here. Kris was evidently engaging in absolutely normal behavior in this region of the world, and I had wasted my life growing up in the States.

*****

Next day at Robinson Barracks, as Joe and I were getting clearance to enter from the entry guard, Joe asked the guy if there were any entry guard positions open. The guard gave us a definite yes. He said that if I applied today, I would probably start working next week. Joe and I went to the job office and I filled out an application. I had no desire to be an entry guard at the base, but had few options. I would be entitled, at least, to carry a firearm and, if needed, use that firearm for the protection of myself and my fellow Americans. I did consider this to be a step up from working as an entrance attendant at a hospital, where I was not entitled to kill people.

That night after dinner I went into the spare room to read. I was still working on Campbell’s Creative Mythology. Again it set me off on a meditation about what would happen next within my personal-trip myth-story. Everything was so gray at the moment, so uncertain.

Joe walked into the room at this moment and cleared some of this grayness away. With head hung low, he muttered, “Bad time. It’s a bad time, dude.” What he meant: this was a bad time for me to come and visit him. Besides from his wife disliking me, Joe now had to go back out and play army again for three weeks. There was no way, I knew, that I could stay alone again with Kris in the apartment. I grated on her majorly. This brand new twist in my myth-story gave me only a handful of days now to find a new place to stay-in a country with no place to stay, where I had no job and did not speak the language.

I took a walk solo to relieve some of the newly-acquired dreaded angsht and ponder more intensely about what exactly I was doing here, where exactly all this was going.

*****

Back at the job placement office, I was informed that my tourist status gave me only one option for employment on the base: the Burger King. Due to how difficult it was to secure and retain workers for this fast food chain, the cabal ruling the barracks put in force the stipulation that Americans with tourist status had to commence their employment on base at the Burger King for three months, thereafter able to upgrade their daily labor to other positions within the shopping mall complex. I could not believe this. My first job after graduation had been as an entrance attendant, and now my second job would involve flipping burgers for a pay barely over minimum wage. Burgers made, in a figurative sense, from the beef churning out from a meat grinder with a conveyor belt of hapless university students being carried along towards it (yes: just like the scene from The Wall). My bachelors degree in English Literature was worth absolutely nothing. But hold the phone: it was worth less than nothing, a negative amount: a negative amount that I had to repay and get to zero for having the privilege of acquiring it in the first place.

Dazed and disillusioned, I scheduled for an interview in two days.

That night I patronized a Ludwigsburg bistro with Joe and one of his army buddies. Sarge was cool. He kept the command persona on base. Here among the three of us, we were simply three regular American guys hanging out and getting ripped. Me: too ripped. Sarge took pleasure in handing me shots of ouzo even though I did not truly know what ouzo was but liked for some reason its bitter taste of black licorice. While the three of us drank and yakked, my ouzo mixed with my beer, and I blacked out.

*****

Swirling back into consciousness, I discovered myself on the guest room bed. I was in agonizing pain. To combat this, I forced myself up and stumbled into the kitchen to obtain a large portion of water. I barged in on Kat, who was in the process of taking a very peaceful sip of tea. At my appearance she nearly spit that sip back into her cup. “What happened last night?” I asked and opened the fridge. Kat responded very calmly: “You don’t want to know.” I grabbed a bottle of water, took what she said in a barely coherent fashion, and limped back into the spare room. That don’t want to know sounded bad. Really bad. I had been through don’t want to know’s before—and the people that had uttered them, they had been absolutely correct.

I gulped the water and lay back down on the bed. A great weight, like lead, was centered in my skull. The bones of my cranium itself felt like they were throbbing. Blood vessels felt on edge of bursting. I would not be able to lift my head again from my pillow for the rest of the day.

Due to the extreme pain, I was not able to fall back into numb sleep. I had to suffer. To pass this torturous time, I strived to bring to light any unerased images from the night before. I got as far as my fourth or fifth shot of ouzo, but that was all. I knew that Kat and the Sarge’s wife were supposed to show and join us but had no memory of them. I deduced that they never arrived.

Joe walked into the room and solemnly sat on a chair next to the bed. “Dude,” he said, in an undertone, “last night was too much.” “What happened?” I asked. Joe looked at me blank. I told him: “I can’t remember a thing after you, me, and Sarge downed all that ouzo.” “You can’t remember anything?” Joe asked in disbelief. “No.” “You mean you don’t remember when Kat came to the bistro?” “She did?” “Dude, you don’t remember calling her bitch and downing her drink and her slapping you in the face?” This definitely was a don’t want to know-and a significantly large one. “No, I don’t,” I confessed. Joe gazed at me in amazement. “And you don’t remember throwing up all over our living room?” he asked. “My god. Did I?”

Joe left me in the room with my new inner pain and more-deeply dreaded angsht-ridden thoughts for the next couple hours. The way it presently seemed, I would not be able to set foot outside of this room again. At least not with Kat within a mile radius.

The door opened again, and to my surprise Sarge sauntered into the room and took the chair where Tony had been sitting. He asked how I was doing. I stupidly said fine. Then he asked me things like how much money I had, and did I have return tickets, and did I know anyone else in Stuttgart or how about Europe? He was smooth and cool, and thank god for that, but of course I saw where this was all leading. I had been in West Germany a week and had already worn out my welcome.

Sarge left the room. I was alone again with my intense outer and inner pain. I heard muffled voices from the living room-Joe, Kat, Sarge, Sarge's wife-discussing things that I could only guess at. In reality, I did not want to hear what was being spoken. I was the center of a major controversy. What was to be done with me, they were asking each other. I definitely had to go. That was a given. But I had nowhere to go: that was the ethics at heart.

Joe entered back into the room and, after lugubriously retaking his seat, informed me that I could no longer stay here. I could not even wait until he left to play army in the forest in a couple days: I had to be gone tonight. It was his wife, he explained, as if the explanation were necessary. The Fire Goddess had to be appeased. Plus I had to admit that I had really fucked up.

I made clear to Joe how incapable I was of lifting my lead-filled head off the pillow. If I were right now forced to arise and leave, I would only collapse into a contorted mass on the sidewalk in front of their apartment building. I could easily be gone, I explained, if this could all wait till the following morning. Joe exited the room for a moment to confer with his wife. She gave a reluctant okay.

*****

Next morning Kat barricaded herself into her bedroom while Joe helped me out of the apartment with my duffel bag and sack of books. Since I had thought that I would be living in Europe indefinitely, I had brought a few dozen of my most-prized books with me. They were intended to look great in the supposed small bookcase I had envisioned in my supposed small apartment in Stuttgart.

Joe drove me to the nearest suburban rail station. He said that he was sorry about everything. I said the same. He told me to make sure and call him to let him know how everything turned out. I said okay. I got out of the car and yanked out my bags. Joe drove away.

I was now way on my own in West Germany.

Stuttgart, gigantic city that it was, had only one youth hostel. I took the train to the main bahnhof and asked at the information booth where it was located. They gave me a map. I put my books and duffel bag into a locker and set off with my knapsack. The map confused me. When I reached the area where the hostel should have been, it was nowhere in sight. I tried asking a man for help, but he ignored me. A woman did the same. I felt ridiculous. So I ended up asking a little girl to help me. She glanced at the map and announced: “Ich bringge.” I followed her to the foot of a long stone stairway in the side of a small hill of trees and buildings. She pointed up this stairway. I gave her a grateful danke and climbed the steps.

I had never stayed at a hostel before but had heard many stories from people at the University of Michigan who had backpacked through Europe. They all spoke of their experiences with such a gleeful romanticism, as if they had already achieved at their young ages the ultimate in life. And this was the type of place where they stayed: at these cheap hostels, eight bodies to a room, with communal showers and communal meals. I knew it would most likely be nerve-wracking for me, but I also knew that I could quickly adjust, chameleon-fashion.

I checked in and was handed a type of large sleeping sack to sleep inside of on my bed, in order to prevent my bodily parasites from spreading. I then walked into my designated room. No one was in there. The room consisted of four bunk beds, eight lockers, and a window. My bed was a top bunk in a corner next to that window. I set my sleeping sack on top of it. I glanced around the room and wondered who or what would be awaiting me in here later this night.

I left the hostel and walked down the stone stairs back to the bahnhof. I took the train to the station nearest Robinson Barracks. I showed the entry guard my passport and told him I had permission to enter the base today-which he called to verify-then I walked to the mall building. In Burger King I asked a girl working the counter for a manager. She pointed one out and he waved for me to come behind the counter-an area of a fast food restaurant that I had never been within before, having formerly considered myself to be firmly established on the customer side of the line.

The manager took me back to the employee break room and gave me my interview. I showed him a recommendation from my entrance attendant job. He read it and nodded. Then I showed him my diploma. He smirked. All I had to do now was fill out some forms and bring them to an orientation meeting for new mall employees tomorrow. After this meeting, I could start working immediately. I thanked the manager and left.

I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around the barracks. I was not eager to get back to the hostel and awkwardly strive to converse with the well-seasoned travelers. I was as green as a “backpacker” got, and desired-if at all possible-to mask this fact for at least my first jittery night. If I could return to my hostel room somewhat late-maybe eight o’clock, then shower and crawl into my sack-I may be able to by-pass any conversations which might reveal my internationally sophomoric nature. I knew nothing yet about the various rituals and mysteries which occurred within a hostel’s walls. I was almost panicked.

While waltzing around the base that day, something bizarre happened. I was walking along a sidewalk, with a variety of civilians and soldiers also walking within my vicinity, when suddenly everyone in my sight froze in their spots. I slowed my pace, slightly freaked by what was happening, and twisted my head to look all around. I then noticed that everyone had their right hand placed upon their hearts, they were all facing the same direction, and a speaker somewhere far off was blaring some type of taps. I looked at where they were staring, and it was at a flagpole and large flag in the center of base. The red-white-and-blue was being lowered for the day. I joined in, then, with my fellow Americans and placed my right hand over my heart and beamed proudly at Old Glory. I had not performed such a task since elementary school and our daily recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. As soon as the flag was down and out of sight, the taps ended, and everyone around me resumed the directions they had been moving in. I resumed too, feeling more or less like I had been a good robot.

I returned to downtown Stuttgart after dark and mounted the long set of stairs up to the Stuttgart hostel and approached my dormitory room door. I knew I was about to partake in a rite of passage.

On two bottom bunks I find two guys speaking in English together. They stop and ask me: “Where are you coming from?” Perhaps I am supposed to give the name of a palace or festival or something else relevant to backpacker coolness and culture, but instead I blurt out: “I just got a job at Burger King!” They are perplexed. I explain my situation. They find it interesting. I crawl up onto my bed and join them in their conversation.

One of them is British, the other from Holland. There is also a silent Asian guy in the room and a German man. During our conversation, another German walks into the room. The Dutch guy suddenly yelps: “Ahh, we got ta nother Deutschey for you, Deutschey!” The new German guy smiles slightly-perhaps without understanding. The Dutch guy has a serious dislike for Germans and expresses this much to the Brit and me. Then he calls back to the German: “Ahh Deutschey, ya gettin around Europe on a bicycle, are ya?” The German guy stares at him blankly. “A bicycle, Deutschey, a bicycle!” The German guy does not appear to understand. My own blood pressure is rising. Aren't the cohabitants of a youth hostel room supposed to try and get along together and make our small (and getting smaller) world a joyous and peace-loving place? “I SAID A BICYCLE, DEUTSCHEY, A BICYCLE!” The German guy ignores him and crawls into his bed, confrontation over. I am probably the most shaken one in the room.

*****

Next morning I attend the orientation meeting for new employees at Robinson Barracks. The woman in charge is a bit wary of me because I put no local address or telephone number on my personal information sheet. “I’ll have that info for you soon,” I tell her. She lets me pass.

I meander towards Burger King-wondering if I should actually go through with this, then realizing that I have to-and am immediately given a tight maroon t-shirt and greasy cap. I put these on and am placed at the burger-making counter. How the routine works, I first place frozen burger patties into a patty-cooking machine with a slowly rotating treadmill grill. The burgers are carried through this machine where, as the commercials always tout, the patties are “flame-broiled”. They come out the other end of the machine dripping with gunk and grease, fully cooked. It is revolting. With tongs I take these patties and place them inside of buns and set the patties-in-buns in a steamer bin to keep them warm till I need them.

Burger King’s motto is “Have it Your Way!”-and seemingly every person that walks into the restaurant wants it his or her own special way. Nobody ever orders a regular Whopper. They each have a culinary preference for their polluteful discs of grease and gunk. On a screen above the my burger-making counter their requests appear. WHOPPER NO ONIONS DOUBLE CHEESE. WHOPPER EXTRA PICKLES. WHOPPER NO KETCHUP NO ONIONS NO PICKLES EXTRA TOMATOES. WHOPPER PICKLES TOMATOES MUSTARD ONLY. WHOPPER THREE PATTIES. WHOPPER WITH BACON AND CHEESE BETWEEN PATTIES. WHOPPER NO PATTY (“vegetarian Whopper”). I crank these delicacies out and punch a large metallic button beneath the screen in order to clear the uppermost items off the list. The flow of soldiers and their dependents never seems to stop. The line nearly runs out the door. I rapidly manufacture burger after burger. Time consequently flies. Hours whiz by with me in a flurry of Whopper-creating madness.

Before I know it, I am given a thirty-minute break. On break, each Burger King employee is given a $2.15 credit for the purchase of Burger King food. I buy a chicken sandwich.

*****

At the hostel the Deutschey-hating Dutch guy has left and two Milano Italians have moved into the room. Their English is good. I tell them this and they explain to me how they must have good English in order to fully appreciate Pink Floyd.

*****

Next day I return to Burger King under the presumption that I will be creating Whoppers again. Instead I am given a mop. I can not believe this. I made excellent Whoppers yesterday--or at least I had thought--and now it seemed like they were trying to weed me out. I spend the next several days cleaning the floors, the dining booths, the men’s bathroom, and emptying the trash into a dumpster out back. I had already worked one summer vacation as a janitor for a small cleaning company, so none of this was new to me. Still: I felt that a diploma of any shape or form should be a guaranteed key to the door of second rung employment at Burger King. I am supposedly among the intellectually elite of my country: I can make good burgers.

I am given a name tag with the name Chris still on it. I tell the managers it is fine. I want to be Chris. I would rather be Chris. Chris Who Mops Up At Burger King.

While mopping the floor around the dining tables one afternoon, I notice a blondburst in my periphery. It is Kat. She is eating at a table with a female friend. We are both shocked at this impromptu encounter. I am sure she had expected me to be working somewhere in back of the counter-not out here, performing the lowest rung of Burger King duties. For some odd reason she acts polite to me. She says that she has come here in order to see if I am still alive. I tell her I am, but as Chris.

*****

Back at the hostel an Australian takes a bed in my room for three nights. We hang out together each of these nights. Our routine is to hit a bistro, drink some strong beer, then pace about the active downtown area of Stuttgart where an endless array of street performers busk for spare change. There is a wide variety of these performers. One-man bands, jugglers, conga trios, tap dancers. They are all very talented at what they do. They even surpassed Ann Arbor's supreme street talent at the time: Shaky Jake, an elderly deranged man with a raspy incoherent voice who funkily banged and strummed a completely out-of-tune and loose-stringed guitar all night on university area street corners. On Jake's good nights you might perceive what song he was attempting to play.

The Aussie and I wander these streets with buzzes and indulge in food-stall bratwursts as a nighttime snack before heading back to the confines of our hostel room. In that room an overweight, thirty-something Lebanese man has taken an upper bunk. He is only worth mentioning because he snores like a chainsaw. The Aussie and I take clandestine turns shaking his bed each night. We would like him to roll onto his side, which he never does. We have to suffer the noise each night the dreaded “Leeb” stays in our room. Part of the hazards when eight bodies share one small room.

*****

To take the tram, you purchase a ticket at a machine before boarding and keep that ticket with you during your ride. If a ticket inspector happens to enter your car, you produce your ticket for him. Other than this, there is no verification.

Due to my abstemiousness with my monetary funds, I ride the trams without purchasing tickets. I have never seen a ticket inspector on board, and highly doubt whether I will ever happen to see one on my brief and occasional trips.

One afternoon, wouldn't you know it, a ticket inspector enters my car. I break into a sweat. For the price of a very cheap tram-ticket, I could have avoided this ridiculous situation. I stand up and casually walk to the back of the car, near the rear doors. The ticket inspector slowly works his way down the aisle, glancing at the tickets dutifully produced before him. Everyone has one except for me. The Germans are a very law-abiding people. They do not even walk across a street on a red light when no cars are around. They stand and obediently wait for the light to change.

At the back doors I wonder how I am going to get out of this. I feel like a rat stuck at a dead end in a maze. The ticket inspector gradually makes his way to the very back of the car where I am standing among several other people. These other people produce their tickets for the inspection as the tram finally approaches its next stop. The train slows down and jerks to a halt. The ticket inspector confronts me at this moment and asks to see my ticket. I quickly shrug and make a hand gesture (careful not to speak) that here I am, at my stop. The doors open on cue. I smile apologetically at the ticket inspector-sorry, must get off now, not even a second to show you my proof of fare, which of course I do in fact have and would produce for you had we but just a few seconds more -and descend. After this episode, I purchase a ticket each time I take the tram.

But something is still out there, wanting to get me. The Nordic Goddess of Trams, is my guess. I have angered her--just as the Goddess of Fire--and reforming my ways and abiding by her laws is not enough.

One afternoon on the tram a ticket inspector enters my car and announces for everyone to produce their tickets. I have mine and proudly display it to him, like the good person which I now am. But in reality: I am not. The ticket inspector scowls at me. I wonder what the problem is. He starts to explain in German but I tell him that I can't understand German. This seems to spark his vengeful rage, and he explains to me in English that I am in the wrong car. My ticket is for regular passage, and here I am, sitting in the first class car. I have been completely unaware of this dual ticket system. I tell the ticket inspector that I am sorry and stand up in order to change cars. No no no, he tells me. It does not work that way. I must pay a fine right now. This fine equates nearly thirty dollars-thirty of my extremely precious, extremely limited dollars. (Each night at the hostel, as a comparison, costs me under ten bucks, and that includes a continental breakfast.) I tell the man I can just simply move to the appropriate car. He insists overbearingly that I must pay my fine right now or he will bring me to the police at the next stop. I perceive that I am stuck. I accept this doom. I pay the man and he gleefully struts away. I vow to be more considerate of the local deities.

*****

At the Stuttgart youth hostel I converse with backpackers from a number of countries. Netherlanders, Englanders, Americans, Italians, Germans, Japanese, Canadians, Australians, South Africans, even a Thai girl. I learn from them the common anecdotes of the European traveler (phony Euro-rail Passes can be obtained; sleepers on trains in Spain/Italy will be robbed by Gypsies; more than one person has had passport, money, and tickets stolen while showering at a hostel), plus I become knowledgeable of possible backpacking routes and destinations and where to stay within these destinations. I find myself telling new backpackers I meet that I am working at a Burger King at a nearby American army base until I save enough money to move on towards Cairo where I will room at the Oxford Pension, study the local language, and perhaps deal hash for my livelihood.

*****

As usual I wake up at the hostel at seven and walk out to the lobby to pay for and thereby secure my bed again for the night. There is a rule at the Stuttgart youth hostel that a guest can only stay for five nights in a row. The guy who works at the desk has so far let me by-pass this limit. This morning, however-ten days after I first set foot into my room-the desk clerk tells me that I cannot get a bed here for this night. I ask him why. He says that 210 reservations have already been made by a group of German teenagers on a school trip. I do not believe it. Perhaps this is, I surmise, his way of telling me that I have overstayed my welcome. The clerk, sensing my doubt, points towards a sign on the hostel door. It has been there since the day before (though I had not noticed) and states clearly that all rooms are for one night only. I have no idea what to do now.

I check out of the hostel and lug my duffel bag to the bahnhof. I place it within a locker where-on a pay-by-day basis-I am still keeping my bag of books. After this I go to work.

The head manager at Burger King, Mr. G, has been very open towards me since I started. He is just a few years older than me, from upstate New York, and living in a suburb of Stuttgart with his wife who works at the mall sports & camping shop. I explain to him my situation for the night. He already knows why I am not staying with Tony and tells me once again that my buddy’s wife is a bitch and the source of all my problems. I slowly nod my head not fully in agreement. Then Mr. G surprisingly offers me the chance to stay at his house starting tonight through the upcoming weekend. He and his wife are going on an excursion to Munich; I can watch the house and take care of their dog. But, he makes clear, they cannot put me up longer than that due to the head of mall security at Robinson Barracks living in the house directly behind them. It is against base policy for managers to allow their employees to stay with them. Whether or not this is actually true-the head of security living behind Mr. G, or the policy just stated-I do not care. The main point is that I have miraculously found lodging for this night and a few more.

Mr. G draws a map to explain how to get to his house. The journey involves taking the tram to a village called Marbach (birthplace of Schiller, I find out), then transferring to a bus for a place called Steinheim, then transferring from there to the hamlet of Hopfigheim. This is where Mr. G lives. I am to call him once I get there and he will walk me the rest of the way to his house.

I follow the directions, wait a long time for each bus transfer, miss my stop, and vow to not waste my time on the buses again. I can easily walk the seven kilometers from Marbach to Hopfigheim in less time than it takes dealing with the buses.

Mr. and Mrs. G show me to their guest room and let me unpack. The room is much larger and more well-furnished than Tony’s, with a full-sized bed. I take the cover off this bed and spread it on the carpeted floor. Mr. and Mrs. G walk back into the room and stare at the bedcover with pillow established on the floor at the foot of this spare bed. They look at me questioningly. I tell them that the floor is fine with me. The floor is good.

*****

At work I get taken off cleaning duty. From now on, I make burgers, help “expedite” (place orders on trays and call out order numbers), and take orders at the register. An endless river of soldiers and their dependents flow past me. They consider this food good for them. They believe it to be nutritious. If they only knew how the burgers come ice-solid in boxes from overseas, and how these boxes are then stored in the basement freezer vault for an indefinite period of time, and then how these old frozen patties are placed into the evil “flame-broiling” machine and spat out dripping with grease and contagion on the other end. Witnessing this burger fabrication, Burger King-style, has led me to swear off fast food beef the rest of my life.

*****

After Mr. and Mrs. G leave for Munich, I walk the seven kilometers from their house to the Marbach tram station in the morning, work eight hours on my feet at Burger King, then walk the seven kilometers from Marbach to Hopfigheim at dusk. A portion of the road on route to Hopfigheim is rural, winding through farmland and dells. It contains no sidewalk for two kilometers. When I see the lights of a car approaching, I sidle off as far as I can onto a shoulder-one side of the roadway edged by a hill, the other side dropping off. The darkness on this road between the cars is intense. I march down the middle of it and wonder where I am on the hike and how much further I have to go. In the shallow blackness of a valley ahead of me, the lights of Hopfigheim suddenly appear. A small galaxy of lights. I begin to run down the road, energized, towards this cluster of scintillating stars.

I am running down the middle of a dark rural road in West Germany to a sparkling hamlet. In that sparkling hamlet is a house where I am staying. Not only am I staying in it, I am staying in it alone. I presently have my own house in Europe. I juxtapose this situation with the situation I was in just three brief weeks ago, scrunched into a box in Ann Arbor barely able to breathe.

*****

Mr. and Mrs. G come back from Munich Sunday night and on Monday morning I quietly pack my duffel. The two of them watch me as I lug my bag down the stairs and out the front door. I am prepared for my return to the hostel.

Mr. G walks out. I am standing by the car, waiting to go. “Put that bag back in the house, you maniac,” he says. “We can put you up a couple more weeks.”

*****

I fall quickly into the routine of going to Robinson Barracks in the morning in Mr. G’s car, then making my own way back to Hopfigheim each evening. After my eight-hour shift, I walk down a hill to a tram stop, take that tram to a suburban rail line, take that line to Marbach, then hike through Marbach to Steinheim and tramp down that rural road through the countryside to Hopfigheim. Each time I complete this I am thoroughly exhausted. I enjoy this feeling of being exhausted. The dreaded angsht cannot wreak havoc in my gut without proper inner energy to feed on.

*****

One afternoon at work I am assigned the task of cleaning various pieces of BK cooking equipment in a large tub in a side room. In this room are also the salad refrigerator, the salad prep area, and the salad maker. Our salad maker is a middle-aged woman from Utah. As we talk, I learn that she is not really from Utah at all: she is French, married to a man from Utah. She is working at Burger King for the same reason as me: she has tourist status.

As I gradually learn, there are several co-workers in a somewhat similar situation to me. Because of their tourist status, they must work at BK before moving on to other jobs at Robinson Barracks. One girl is a cellist. Another girl hails from Washington State and is a former backpacker through Europe. A few of the other employees have recently been discharged from the service and are continuing on in Stuttgart. My case is not as strange as it might otherwise seem.

*****

Late one afternoon while walking across the base, patriotic music begins to blare over speakers. I notice that all of the people around me stop. They face the same direction and place their hands upon their hearts. I take a few cautious steps while observing this, wondering what to do. Then I look in their communal direction. Of course it is the flag. It is being lowered for the day. I too stand still on the sidewalk, with my hand on my heart, and observe the descent. I have not been forced to behave this way since elementary school.

*****

One eve Mr. G and I drive to a Hopfigheim bistro and drink several steins of German wheat brew. We get quite buzzed. He reveals to me that he and his wife have been hiding down in the basement each night taking puffs of hash out of fear of freaking me out. This is a laugh. I tell him I have been smoking pot since I was seventeen.

After this revelation, the three of us spend our nights sitting in the living together, gulping beer and smoking hash while watching the Armed Forces Network. The hash is potent, and mixed with the weizen beer it makes my brain reel.

“You know why we put you up?” Mr. G asks me one of these spacey eves. I ask why. “Because what goes around comes around. We do this good thing for you now, and later some good thing will happen to us. That’s exactly how it all works.”

In my stoned state of mind I suddenly perceive the interconnectedness of all human actions-the karma with which this earthly realm is imbued-and I perceive that I am a causation of the absorption of good karma in others, which results, ultimately, in the absorption of good karma within my self. I am a vehicle through which positive cosmic energy flows.

*****

The girl at work who hails from Washington State-her name is Lori-is nineteen years old and possesses freakishly over-sized breasts. She cannot hide this fact in her inevitably tight maroon Burger King t-shirt. Her breasts are so gigantic that they become constantly distractive to me during my workday. Whenever the opportunity arises, I glance at them and gasp to myself: My god, look at those things. They never cease to amaze me.

The two of us become friends. After work we occasionally walk to the commissary-the supermarket on base-and shop together. Lori tells me how she backpacked in Europe last year and that is how she met her German boyfriend. Now she lives in his government-assured room while he is in the army. She could not get an apartment in Stuttgart on her own, she explains, not even being able to speak fluent German. Whenever she called for information about an apartment, one of the first questions the land-lord or -lady would ask was: “Where are you from?” As soon as she pronounced the word Amerika they would hang up.

*****

While expediting one afternoon (handing the orders to customers), a man, glancing at my name tag, says: “Thanks, Chris.” I love it. I am: Chris Who Expedites At Burger King. I am: Chris, A Regular Joe With Of Course No Experience Of The Dreaded Angsht. I am just simply: Chris, Good and Helpful Guy.

*****

The two weeks at Mr. and Mrs. G’s residence ends. They have to boot me out, they say, because of the head of mall security living directly behind them. If their neighbor sees me, Mr. G could lose his job. Or so the story goes.

I load my duffel bag into Mr. G’s car and get driven to the base. “You know what you should do?” Mr. G says on route. I ask what. “Get a tent and camp out somewhere cheap. It’s as easy as that.” But camp out where, I ask myself. And where would I shower. And would it be safe. Plus the cold weather is coming.

I store my bag in a locker in the employee break room. Each employee is entitled to one locker, but due to my situation I manage to procure two of them, storing my books in one and my duffel bag in the other. The hassle of using the day lockers at the Stuttgart train station is over.

I work my shift this day then dash toward downtown Stuttgart to the youth hostel. As long as two hundred German teenagers have not reserved each and every bed, I have a very good chance of obtaining one for myself. But, to my amazement, they have. I am again informed that not only every bed in the Stuttgart hostel but also in the two hostels in suburbs of Stuttgart (both of which I had never looked into) were booked solid for the week due to a festival and an international student tennis tournament.

This cannot be.

I stand perplexed a few moments in the lobby. I happen to hear a few guys speaking English. They have maple leafs stitched onto their backpacks (displaying non-American-ness is always of benefit wherever traveling). They too have no place to stay now in Stuttgart. I ask them what they will do. “Well we’ve got tents,” one of them tells me. “We’re going to make use of a nearby park. You’re free to join us-if you’ve got your own tent.”

That is twice today with the tent motif. Something is definitely happening deep within the fabric of the myth-story.

I drudge back to the bahnhof pondering extensively about what I am going to do this night. I have seen backpackers sleeping in a huddle at the train station. People leave them alone, I have heard. Perhaps I can live in the train station. Perhaps I can sleep there and use the public restroom to clean up and shave each morning. Perhaps I can acquire a shopping cart and dump my stuff in it and push it around Stuttgart during my off-shift hours and accost passers-by for change.

I know what I have to do. I take the suburban rail to Ludwigsburg. I walk to Tony’s apartment building and call him from a public phone at the corner. “Sorry to bug you, but I can’t get a bed at the youth hostel and have absolutely no place to sleep tonight. Tomorrow night I’ll have something arranged. So tell Kris it’s just for one night.” Tony-buddy of mine since fifth grade, and Appeaser of the Fire Goddess-talks to Kris. She acquiesces. The two of us, though-Kris and myself-must remain in different rooms for the night. This is more than fine with me. I tell Tony I will merely shower and hit the sack and be gone early next morning. That works, he says. Then he asks how long it will take me to get to his place from wherever I’m at. I tell him approximately fifteen seconds. He laughs.

*****

Next day at work I utilize my meal break to visit the Rec Center on base to rent a tent and sleeping bag. On a map of Stuttgart I have discovered there is a very small forest right next to Robinson Barracks. It could not be more perfect.

After my shift, in the dark, with tent and sleeping bag and other necessities in my duffel, I exit the base and wander over to the tiny forest. A dark path leads all the way through it, the distance of one city block. This path is near one edge of the forest. I know I cannot set camp near it; I need to delve into the other three-quarters of the woods. In the blackness I use my flashlight to discern a slightly worn footpath. I follow it. Immediately I find myself on the slope of a steep decline. With my duffel swaying on my shoulder I totter, land on my ass, and skid down. I stand back up and balance myself and progress cautiously to the bottom of the slope. I continue to follow the almost indiscernible path. It leads me to the darkest depths of this small forest-a darkness and deepness I had not been expecting. This dark and deep area, however, is the perfect place to set up the tent. Nobody walking along the main path through the woods will notice me down the slope. Nobody strolling along the edges of the forest will notice me, either. I step off the footpath into a small clearing, flat enough for the tent. I unzip my duffel and set the tent up using the light of my flashlight. I then crawl inside and unpack the sleeping bag, food, and candles that I have brought.

Food for me is a baguette of bread and some spread. I crack the loaf open, use my Swiss army knife to put on the spread, and indulge. I wash this down with a bottle of cheap white wine. As I eat I listen carefully to the sounds around me. For all I know, local youths use this forest on a constant basis for partying. Or perhaps ancient Aryan rituals. Either way, the very last thing I want is to be intruded upon by drunken German teens shouting ausländer raus! [foreigners out!]

I blow out the candles and ensconce myself within the sleeping bag. A sweatshirt wrapped in a towel is my pillow. I lie awake in the tent, too concerned about who or what might be prowling around. I hear strange noises. At the deadest part of the night-around four a.m.-a creature comes burrowing around my tent. I hear it shuffling and scraping. I am too scared to stick my head out and look at which type of animal it is. It does not sound very big, but definitely big enough to have claws and fangs and it can most probably leap in the air and latch itself onto a humanoid’s face. I lie in the tent motionless, striving not to reveal my existence. I am sure that it can smell me, though.

At first sign of dawn I repack everything into my duffel. I walk the footpath back up the steep slope then continue on the main walkway through the forest. I am surprised at the amount of rubbish I can see in the small amount of gray light. Rubbish from American products purchased at the commissary at Robinson Barracks. I realize I must appease the local nymphs, satyrs and other mythic woodland creatures, and grab a handful of garbage along the path on my way out. This act is good karma. The forest will protect me because of such acts.

*****

I sleep in the forest every night for three weeks. I do not bother to go back to the hostel. The forest is a five-minute walk from the base; the Stuttgart youth hostel takes well over an hour to reach, requiring two tram rides then a trek through downtown. The hostel will always be there if need be. I can shower in the men’s room at BK for the time being. Perhaps I will return to the hostel once the weather begins to freeze.

I move to the best shift of the day at Burger King: the early morning shift. I start at six, an hour before the doors open. I slice vegetables, cook eggs, thaw croissants, and prepare for the breakfast rush. I am alone at BK for nearly half an hour each morning between the ending of the midnight shift (when two guys clean the kitchen top to bottom) and the arrival of the first manager.

When the midnight shift guys leave, I go to the salad prep room and open the refrigerator. A selection of yesterday’s leftovers awaits me. The chicken salad with blue cheese dressing is a decent enough way to start the day. I chow one of these down each morning as quickly as I can. This is, of course, an offense worthy of termination-but I am, after all, living in a forest in order to work here. And I am, with respect to the Burger King motto, having my breakfast my way.

*****

Burger King regulations are unduly severe. A sandwich cannot sit under the heating lamps longer than a handful of minutes. During the lunch rush, we prepare sandwiches ahead of time in order to meet the unending demand. If a sandwich does not sell as quickly as expected, it must then be thrown away. The managers insist on this. They will not even allow me to store throw-aways for my own personal consumption. Allowing such behavior, I am told, would result in employees intentionally fabricating superfluous sandwiches with hopes of reaping undeserved benefits.

I consider this wastage of food a crime against humanity. Whenever I observe one of the managers tossing out several perfectly-good chicken sandwiches, I quickly pull out the garbage bag the sandwiches are in, tie it up, and carry it to the dumpster out back. I then, of course, re-open the bag and remove the still-warm sandwiches to store them in one of my lockers for later.

Here I am, a recent graduate from the University of Michigan, eating out of garbage bags and sleeping in a forest. The diploma I brought (or is it bought) could not be worth less.

*****

One morning at work I glance at the day’s Stars And Stripes on a break room table. It blares: BERLIN WALL FALLS.

*****

Next time I go to the Rec Center to rent the tent and sleeping bag another week, the guy running the place-named Kevin-takes an interest in my current life. Kev is ten years older than me, from Connecticut, and lives in a Stuttgart suburb with his wife and two daughters. He too believes in good karma and offers me the usage of his own tent, sleeping bag, rain cover, rain poncho, and ground sheet for as long as I will need them. Again I am the vehicle through which positive cosmic energy is absorbed.

*****

Each night I exit the barracks with my stuffed duffel on my shoulder and enter the forest. I inevitably slip on the steep slope and fall on my ass. It is expected. It is part of the ritual. I locate my same camp spot and set up the tent. Inside the tent I light the candles and eat my baguette with spread and gulp down a bottle of wine. I listen to classic rock on my walkman. This type of life for some reason appeals to me. I feel strangely at home. I am alive sleeping in this forest, foraging for food at my workplace, and dealing with the elements in the increasingly fall-like weather. I have tapped into something primal inside of me. I am enthralled by the daily success in the struggle to survive.

Each night the same animal appears and rummages around my tent. Each morning I pick up trash to appease the forest deities. They protect me from that animal and all else.

The gate guards at Robinson Barracks never fail to give me a certain knit of the brow as I appear out of the blackness before dawn, my hair a mess, my duffel on my shoulder, a plastic bag of garbage dangling from one hand. They never ask about my myth-story. I flash my barracks ID and am allowed to pass.

*****

In the middle of a lunch rush Mr. G glides past each of us and calmly intones: “Bomb threat. Everyone out. Meet at the church.” I look at him like he is insane: “Why would someone bomb Burger King?” “It’s not Burger King, numbnuts. It’s the whole mall. Happens all the time. Now go into the dining area and tell the customers to clear out.” I do not want this duty, but nonetheless perform it. I roam around various sectors of the tables and announce: “Bomb threat! Everyone out!” I have not the appropriate aura of authority. The soldiers roll their eyes at me. “Come on! Everyone out!” “What about our food?” a couple of dickish-looking sergeants bark at me, as if since I am the message-giver I am the one deserving their wrath. Various responses to the question enter my mind. I settle on: “Bring it with you.”

Once the dining area has been cleared, I bolt into the break room and take my two bags out of my lockers. My whole world is in these bags. I lug them out the back door towards the church where everyone is waiting for the all-clear to be given. A teenage coworker joins me. Bomb threats, she says, are actually quite welcome among the Burger King staff. A guaranteed thirty-minute break. “Who would make these threats?” I ask her. “Neo-nazis. American-haters. Foreigner-haters. Lots of people here.”

*****

Some nights I set up my tent in the dark and in the rain. I place the ground cover down first, assemble the tent in the light of my flashlight, then top the tent with the rain cover. The ground cover does its job at keeping the mud from soaking through, but nothing prevents the water. I wake up sopped after the few fitful hours I am able to sleep inside a soaking sleeping bag.

*****

After three weeks in the forest-in the rains and the increasing cold of October-I arrive at work one morning to find a note waiting for me: “Steve, still sleeping in the forest? Call me and maybe we can work something out. Trudy.” Trudy is an American who has done her three months at Burger King and is now working at a clothing store at the mall. She had originally been a backpacker in West Germany and had struggled to stay here. Now she lives in her own flat in a suburb.

I call Trudy at the clothing shop later in the morning. She has a slightly rough touch, and does not completely trust me, but says she can put me up for at least a week, as long as I am no trouble to her and do not invite any “friends” over-whatever that means. I tell her this sounds great. I meet her after work and she takes me to her flat. This journey involves taking the tram out to the suburb of Winnenden, east of Stuttgart, then walking for a couple kilometers, including a brief trek through a small woods.

Trudy’s landlady lives in the flat upstairs. Trudy is friends with the landlady’s daughter. My first night there the three of us talk in the living room while sipping wine. I decide to go to sleep early. In order to make it to work on time-and guarantee the have it my way breakfast-I must wake up at four in the morning. Trudy gives me a blanket and a pillow and I try to fall asleep on the living room floor while the German girl gives Trudy a language lesson. Because these two young women are in the same room, I have decided to try to sleep fully clothed. This does not work well for me. With my clothes on, and with the girls chatting, and with my paranoia that they are talking about me, I can not sleep till the German girl finally leaves late in the night.

*****

Next night my sleeping situation improves. The landlady’s daughter has taken pity on me. She brings down to Trudy’s apartment a spare single mattress. I throw this mattress down on the kitchen floor, wedged snugly between the wall and the bottom cabinets. It makes a perfect nook and bed. I can sleep easily in the kitchen now, unclothed, while the girls chat away about whatever they wish in the living room.

*****

At the commissary bakery works a girl my age with long straight black hair and chartreuse eyes. I have been going there every afternoon to purchase my baguette of the day.

One afternoon when I approach she smiles brightly almost as if she has been waiting for me. “One baguette, right?” “Right.” She hands it to me. I pay. She holds the money in her hand. “So do you, like, ever come here with any of your family members?” she asks. “No. I’m here alone.” “You’re not connected with any of these army people, are you?” “You can tell?” “Yes. There’s something about you. Something different. I had a feeling you weren’t connected with anything here.” Due to this overture, I briefly describe to her my situation. Becoming privy to it is more than she has bargained for, but she acts concerned and says that she will try to help me if she can find a way.

Next day we talk some more. Her name is Judi. She is from Maine. She is married to a soldier, lives on Robinson Barracks, and has two little girls. But most importantly: her younger sister, Teri, is currently visiting from the States. She has told Teri about me and Teri has expressed an interest in meeting me. I say arrange it. If she looks anything like her older sister, this will be my greatest find in years.

*****

One night at Trudy’s I eat a can of spinach for dinner and go to bed. The next morning I do not have to work. I wake up at dawn and lie on the mattress and gaze across the kitchen out the window opposite me. I see gray-greens and leaf formations and an expanse of gray sky slowly morphing towards an azure hue. While observing this dawn grow, in the purity of an absolutely passive state, something suddenly jolts inside of me. A knot of tight energy explodes and I exude what must be cosmic radiation. Significant inner change is presently occurring. I bask in this intense inner energy-release till it fades away as suddenly as it had begun. The dreaded angsht is gone.

*****

Now it is time to set things in motion towards an ending. A denouement. There is no rush but the end game must begin.

An occurrence at work provides me with the perfect “out”…

One day after the lunch rush, Mr. G calls me into the office. He shuts the doors and dramatically throws his pen across the room. “That’s it,” he exclaims: “That is it!” “What do you mean?” “You know what I mean!” Mr. G then imitates me taking someone’s order, face excessively glum and snide. “That’s what I mean!”

He is right. I possess zero thrill at the register taking orders from the soldiers and their dependents. I cannot force a smile. I would like to inform them, if anything, of the evil “flame-broiling” machine and the contagion they are about to consume. I explain to Mr. G that I am not a very naturally gifted service sector provider-which he very well knows. He tells me that I do not have to kiss the customer’s ass, but at the least I should strive to have a tiny amount of courteousness towards them. I say okay.

But Mr. G is not done. There is an underside to his rage against my behavior at the register. He abruptly asks me the following question: “Did you take a camera from my house?” “What?” “The camera my wife and I took to Munich, it’s gone.” “Why would I take your camera?” “Why? You’re living in a goddam forest, that’s why. Now did you take it or what?” “Of course I didn’t take it.” “Yeah well…” “Well what?” “I haven’t forgot that frat boy thing…”

Moronically, I had told Mr. G one night-while he and I were consuming large amounts of strong wheat beer-the meant-to-be entertaining tale of how I “rolled” a passed-out frat boy at a frat party once. I swiped forty bucks from the guy to impress a buddy of mine about how “rad” I can sometimes be. It worked. My friend was quite impressed. Obviously, though, Mr. G was not. Why I had been brain-dead enough to tell this story to him-to a man who was so graciously allowing me to stay at his home for two weeks-this is my current existential dilemma.

Nothing I can say in the office seems to take any of Mr. G’s suspicion away. I am guilty until proven innocent, and that proof of innocence is not forthcoming, unless he manages to find his camera somewhere within his house or car. I swear to him that I did not take his camera, and go back to work.

Later in the week, nonetheless, Mr. G concocts a sinister snare for me. One morning as usual one of the managers asks me to open a certain register. How the procedure works, you count the money within the register to make sure that it totals the amount documented within it when it was closed the day before. Every time I have done this, the amounts have been exactly the same. On this single occasion, though, I open the register and discover that there is indeed a forty dollar surplus. I count and recount to verify this anomaly. Each time it remains forty over. (The exact amount I had told Mr. G that I taken from that frat boy!) Each of us at work familiar with the opening of the BK registers knows in our hearts that if there happens to be an excess of cash which miraculously appears, that money can-theoretically-be easily snatched and kept by simply stating that the register does contain the exact amount of money documented. No questions will be asked. That is, as long as it is not a trap.

As soon as I perceive what is happening, I report the overabundance of cash to one of the managers. He walks to the managers’ office and informs Mr. G, who comes out and puts on a show of counting the money within the register to verify this “surprise” event. I watch him with as much suspicion as he had for me when he asked about his camera. He tallies it all up and states that I am correct: forty dollars over. Then he walks away. Another manager steps up to me and, with a smile, congratulates me on my admirable honesty-which, he qualifies, he has always suspected me of.

This incident is destiny and fate and karma rolled into one exclamation point. I put in my two weeks notice at work the next day. When I hand it to Mr. G he acts amazed. “Why would you want to leave now?” he asks me. “Just one more month and you’re able to switch to another job on barracks with ease.” “It’s just time for me to go,” I explain: “I’ve had a great experience. Learned a lot. Gotten myself together. All that crap. Now I want to do a loop of Europe before I head back to the States and apply for the Peace Corps.” “The Peace Corps?” Mr. G enunciates with distaste: “Does that thing still exist?”

*****

Trudy tells me I have to leave her apartment. She states that her landlady will not allow me to stay in her flat longer than one week. The lease, after all, is for just one tenant.

I pack my duffel next morning and lug it to the employee break room at Burger King and stick it in a locker. It is early November and the forest has gotten very cold. I want to avoid the forest now. The forest is not good. The forest is bad.

Kris, the Fire Goddess, is presently visiting her family in Bremen. She will be gone another four days. She has instructed Tony, however, not to let me stay at their apartment while she is away. But I am homeless again and why should I be with one of my best friends since fifth grade living in this same European city. I call Tony and explain my situation. He has been expecting me.

I spend the next three nights at his apartment in Ludwigsburg. Without Kris around, the two of us are pubescent again. We laugh like kids at everything. We reminisce about everything. Tony plays acoustic guitar-Guns N Roses’ Patience-and I sing. We practice it together every day. I sound like Axl.

The morning of the day that Kris is to come back, I pack my duffel and bring it back to BK. I am now alone and in the cold again.

*****

I walk to the commissary after work and tell my bakery-section friend, Judi, that I am back in the forest. She perks up. “Well guess what,” she says: “My husband is doing a CQ tonight [a twenty-four hour guard shift]. That means you can stay at my apartment and meet Teri! She’s really looking forward to meeting you.” Judi jots down her apartment location and tells me to come around six. My torso tingles with anticipation. I cannot believe how I have fallen into this fortuitous situation. Being the vehicle through which positive cosmic karma is absorbed has obviously produced some good karma in my direction. I feel as though I am about to enter onto an entirely new path in the life-myth.

At six I trek across Robinson Barracks to Judi’s building. Inside her apartment I met Teri: a younger, slightly hotter version of her older sister. My gut burns. This cannot be happening. I have not acquired this much good karma, have I?

In reality: I have not. As it turns out, a friend of Judi’s husband has already outpaced me to the finish line. He and Teri have just started dating within the past week. My inner self slumps. She had been a prime piece of fruit just waiting to be picked, and an army guy—an army guy!—got to her first. I realize I must do some soul searching and reassess the true value of my perceived merit-making actions. Obviously I am not doing, or non-doing, enough.

We eat dinner and socialize on the couches in the living room while watching tv. Teri and Judi’s two little daughters go to bed at a surprising nine o’clock. Judi and I watch tv alone now on a couch. We talk a lot while watching this tv. She enjoys my company so much that she takes out her high school yearbook to tell me more about herself-in particular, how she got pregnant by her then-boyfriend/now-husband while in twelve grade. She had one daughter at age eighteen, the other at age twenty. “Both caesarians,” she explains to me: “I was too tight for natural birth. And because of the caesarians, I still am.” She scoots closer to me on the couch. “After my second daughter, I thought enough was enough. I got my tubes tied. I can get them untied any time I want, but in the meantime I can have sex without a condom and never have to worry about getting pregnant.” I cordially nod. “I don’t know if I should tell you this,” she continues: “but my husband and I once split up for a while. We were thinking about getting a divorce, but then we got back together. Before that, though, while we were broken up, he had an affair. He never told me about it, but I knew. One night when he thought I wasn’t going to be around, I went to where he was staying and looked in his bedroom window. I saw him in bed with the bitch! She was so nasty-looking I couldn’t believe it. He had really sunk low! But just think of that bitch with my husband. I’ve never forgiven him. And you know what? In all our four years of marriage I’ve never cheated on him. Not once. But as far as I’m concerned, I’m entitled to have at least one affair on him just like he did on me. Just one single time. Don’t you think?”

I tell Judi that I think I had better go to bed now. I am feeling quite sleepy. I have had a long day and will have another long day tomorrow. I thank her so much for her hospitality.

Judi acts as if this is okay with her. I spread a blanket in the middle of the living room floor, between the couches and the television, while she cleans the dishes in the kitchen. When she comes out, I am lying on the floor, head on pillow. She turns off the lights and says she hopes that I sleep well. I thank her. She seems to be taking this well. Then, right as she is about to close the door to the bedroom hallway, she pauses. She stands in the doorjamb, a silhouette staring down at my silhouette on the floor. I can feel clearly everything that she wants me to feel. I have been hoping it would not lead to this. I have tried hard for it not to lead to this. I have done all I can for it not to lead to this.

“I hate to go to bed now,” Judi pleads, “with someone here who actually listens to me. My marriage is so unhappy…”

*****

In the morning I must leave before her husband returns. “Is he a big man?” I inquire. “Very big,” Judi replies. Great, I groan to myself. I pack my knapsack and she kisses me at the door. Where this is all going, I have no idea.

At work I am on high. Here I am having the adventure of a lifetime in Germany, living in a forest, ridding myself of the dreaded angsht, and having an affair with an attractive married woman with chartreuse eyes. I absolutely, one thousand percent, made the correct choice by coming here. I decide to extend my employment at Burger King a further two weeks, which Mr. G immediately accepts. I need these two extra weeks in order to see how things develop. I have tapped into something very worth experiencing at the moment, whether so-called right or wrong.

During the lunch rush a woman who has been keeping her back towards me in line suddenly spins around once she reaches my register and exclaims: “Hi Chris!” It is Judi, referring to my erroneous nametag, which I love. I am so happy to see her. We cannot talk openly due to the mass of soldiers and their dependents surrounding us, but we have our moment-evident, I would guess, to anyone not salivating on visions of grimy pollutants they desire to ingest.

That afternoon, after my shift, I go to the commissary bakery to purchase my baguette for the day. Again Judi and I have a moment. Our mutual smiles can be easily deciphered by her workmates, but we cannot and do not care to control them. With my dollar for the bread I slip her a sticky-sweet poem. She beams brightly and asks: “Where are you staying tonight?” “In the forest.” “But it’s raining!” “I know. I’ve slept in the rain before.” “You can’t sleep in that cold rainy forest,” she tells me. Then in a whisper: “I think there’s a chance you can stay at my place again tonight.” I am highly uncertain about this. “What about your husband?” “I think I can get him to say okay. He won’t like it, but at least you won’t have to sleep in the freezing rain.” I automatically accept the idea, without cautious thought.

I come back to the commissary at the end of Judi’s shift. It is dusk at this time and the initially gray skies have turned even grayer as the rains continue to soak the ground. Judi runs outside in this rain to a car where her husband is waiting for her. She runs back inside and tells me I can come. “And don’t worry,” she adds on the sly: “He doesn’t know a thing.”

Her husband, Kenny, is indeed a big man. My age, but approximately three times more bulk. In the car he tells me that his wife says I need a place to stay tonight. I say yep. He says he can help me out for a night. I say thanks. And then I suddenly realize that I do not wish to be doing this. Why am I doing this? I would rather be on route to the forest where the camping situation, despite the cold and the rain, would still be many times less probable of degrading into seriously life-threatening danger.

At the apartment, Judi and Teri make a pasta dinner while I sit in the living room with Kenny. He possesses a military machismo. His core is pure American-bred manliness. I must have appeared like a runt to his eyes. “So you live in a forest, huh?” he asks me, skeptical as hell. “Right.” “And you’ve got no place to stay, huh?” “That’s right.” “So why did you come here?” I explain my reasons while he scrunches his face in disbelief at every sentence I emit. I am obviously some kind of con man to him. He reacts like this so many times and so intensely that I begin to feel suspicious about myself too. Who the hell am I really? And what the hell am I truly doing here? On top of this I must strive to clear my mind of what his wife and I did on the carpet beneath his feet a mere eighteen hours ago. I fear I might somehow transfer certain images into his scrutinizing brain.

In the dead of the night, lying on a blanket spread out on the living room floor, I hear someone enter through the bedroom hallway door. If it is Kenny, I am dead. I accept this fate. I have been suicidal enough to sleep with a married woman one night while her husband was away, then stay again at her apartment the following night with her husband there. My ability to partake as an active participant in such a situation is proof of the valuelessness of my genetic information, let alone its propagation.

The footsteps softly approach my head. I gaze up. It is Judi. She crouches down. Her face hovers over mine-chin to my forehead, forehead to my chin-and she whispers: “I just want to tell you that I thought about you all day long yesterday.” Crouching down even further, she plants her lips on mine, upside-down.

*****

I am back in the forest. Autumn is in full force. The leaves have changed and fallen. It is presently a gray November on route to becoming a white December.

I spend the next seven nights shivering in my tent. One of these nights I am so cold that I cannot sleep. Cold definitely equates pain, and I cannot get relief from this pain. Fully clothed and jacketed, I scrunch into a ball deep within my sleeping bag. I tell myself that I can do this. I must to do this. I have no choice.

*****

I continue to see Judi each day at the commissary. I am eager for the next time we can be together. I ask if I can come to her apartment one afternoon (while Kenny is gone) in order to tape songs I like from their CD collection. She agrees.

At her apartment, with Teri and her two small daughters there, I tape the songs while we chat like old friends. We do not have the opportunity that afternoon to be alone.

Next day at the base library-where I spend hours of my spare time after work-Judi appears behind me. “I knew you would be here,” she says. She pulls another chair toward my cubicle and sits down. She is smiling, but it is a forced smile. Not unhappiness forcing a smile, more like neutrality doing so.

“Steve, I keep getting the feeling like you want something more from me. I get this feeling at the bakery, and got it at my apartment yesterday. But really, I can’t give you anything more. I’m wrapped up in my life. My two girls, my sister visiting, I have no privacy. Even things with Kenny have been going better lately. Our one night together-you and me-was very very special to me. I will never forget you. You really have brightened my life, especially at a time when it needed brightening. I thank you so much. Really I do. But nothing more can happen between us. It really shouldn’t. I hope you understand.”

She hands me a folded-up note. I unfold it. It is a sketch Judi has drawn of a dazzling sun coming out behind dark clouds, lighting up a valley of trees and flowers. Underneath this she has written: Thank you for brightening up my life.

Judi leaves the library. Sitting at my cubicle I accept that it is over-not exactly sure what the it even was. But I am aware that because of this it I still have two weeks to go at Burger King.

*****

The guys on the midnight shift, Tito and Mike, they have a nickname for me. Every morning when I come into Burger King to relieve them-after their eight hours of scrubbing all the food prep equipment while jamming tunes-they call out: “Hey, Scully! Hiya, Scully!” I ask them what it means. I want to be in on the joke. But the two of them shrug and tell me that it means nothing. I just look like a Scully. Mike augments it after a few weeks: “Hey, Scully McBeanfield! How ya doin?” I love it. A further persona for me. Scully McBeanfield, Comical Personage: he works at a Burger King, lives in a forest, eats out of garbage bags, and while simply strolling haphazardly through life winds up in the most uproarious misadventures.

*****

Lori at work-the nineteen year old with the freakishly gigantic breasts-has become a good friend of mine. We have gone shopping together at the commissary many times after work. I have never introduced her to Judi, and have never told her anything about my fling with her, but Lori has seen me sneak away while shopping to get my baguette from Judi several times. And several times I have seen Judi glare in Lori’s general direction. She has obviously jumped to a conclusion about the two of us without being aware that Lori is engaged to a German who is currently doing his military service. I allow her suspicions to grow.

*****

A former soldier at work, named Conrad, says he can let me stay at his apartment for two weeks. However, the night I am first supposed to stay with him, he is absent from work and I do not have his phone number. The managers will not give me his phone number due to policy. I explain this situation to Lori. It is mid November now and extremely cold at night. She agrees for the first time to let me stay with her for a night. She has been uncertain about letting me do so because, for one, she occupies her fiancé’s government-guaranteed room and, for two, this room is on a floor with many other rooms, each of the occupants sharing a communal bathroom and kitchen. She would be highly unpopular among her floor-cohabitants if a strange non-fiancé man were seen entering and staying in her room for a night.

I arrive at her building at dusk. I mount the steps to the top floor and enter her room. It is very small, consisting of a table, a bed, and a nook where a dresser is stationed. Lori reminds me how she is lucky to have even this due to her being an American and having only American tourist status in this country. If she did not have a German boyfriend, she states, she might be in the same situation as me.

I scurry into the communal bathroom and shower. No one sees me. Afterward, Lori and I share a bottle of wine and chat in her room. While we talk, it is difficult for my eyes not to gravitate towards her chest. My eyeballs are like two small moons being pulled by her jupiters. I am uncontrollably lured.

Lori leaves the room to take her shower. I spread a blanket out on the floor. When she enters back into the room, she is wearing a pair of skin-tight long johns. The wind gets knocked out of me and I am momentarily speechless. Her enormity fills the room. Lori stands near the door after closing it, smiling at me. Obviously she knows why I am stifled. She must be used to this.

Lori steps over me to get into her bed. As she lies on it, fantasies of Lori pulling a “Judi” fill my head. Will she blessedly start telling me about how tight her vagina is? Will she go into details on whether or not she needs to use a condom? Will she reveal how unhappy she is in her present relationship? I certainly hope so.

We chat with each other an hour more in the dark while lying on our beds. Perhaps I am the one to make the first move. Or perhaps not. I cannot tell. In the middle of our conversation we both suddenly stop talking and lie there in silence. I feel tension all around me. It takes a painfully long time for me to fall asleep.

*****

Judi comes to visit me next morning while I am expediting. She prances up to the counter where customers receive their orders and chirps: “Hi, Chris!” I am happy to see her. I stop what I am doing and am just about to say something when I see that Judi is glaring coldly over my shoulder. She then shouts: “What is that bitch looking at?!” I spin my head and see Lori standing behind me at the burger prep counter. Lori has a blank look on her face, as if what Judi just said does not matter. I turn back and look at Judi. She is furious. “See you later,” she says to me and marches away.

Later I go to the bakery at the commissary to get my baguette and see her. She greets me with: “Why does that girl always look at me like I’m a bitch?” I have no idea what she is talking about. Has there been some type of bitch-staring contest between Judi and Lori behind my back? I highly doubt this, knowing Lori so well. But Judi is absolutely the type of woman to create such scenarios within her head. Jealous, spiteful rage is a well-nourished passion of hers.

“She’s your new girlfriend, isn’t she?” Judi asserts. “No, she’s not.” “Oh come on. You must love those huge tits...”

*****

I finally begin my stay at Conrad’s apartment in a suburb south of Stuttgart named Bonlanden. Conrad, who has recently been discharged from the service, keeps his apartment spotlessly clean. No dish is allowed to remain in the sink. After every meal he scrubs all dishes and eating utensils then wipes down the kitchen counter first with a sponge and then with a towel. Residual behavior from his days as a military drone.

I can stay with Conrad for two weeks, he says, till his German girlfriend returns from a sanatorium for a lung infection. His girlfriend does not live with him, and I am not exactly sure what the connection is between her return and my departure, but now that the snows have started I cannot care. Those crystalline snowflakes falling outside represent what my red blood cells might be.

*****

Thanksgiving arrives. A manager at work, Mr. H, generously invites a group of employees without family in Germany to come to his home and share in his family’s Thanksgiving meal. Conrad and I go, as well as Trudy, Lori, and another fellow worker named Lynn. The group of us gathers at Mr. H’s house and delves into the traditional American holiday feast that his wife has prepared. Afterward we drink beer and play with their two small boys while watching football on the Armed Forces Network. I am at home here among my BK family.

*****

My days at Burger King end. Conrad goes to work while I stay at his apartment and listen to his vinyl collection and ponder about my immediate future. I have managed to save twelve hundred dollars the past three months due to my abstemiousness. That currently gives me sixteen hundred dollars to my name. Three hundred of this I will need for my ticket back to Detroit-if I decide to go back to Detroit. I am not yet certain about going back there or anywhere else. All I can guarantee right now is that I will do a loop through Europe and then return to Stuttgart where my bags will be stored. I do not know how long that loop will last, how long tangential loops off that loop may last, or what new developments may be awaiting me once I get back. The loop is the only thing I can focus on at the moment.

*****

After the completion of my two weeks at Conrad’s apartment, another opportunity appears which enables me to spend a further two weeks for free in the Stuttgart area. Lynn-another ex-military BK worker, who was present at the Thanksgiving dinner-asks if I want to stay at her place while her roommate is out in the field playing army. Her only condition is that I take care of her roommate’s four-year-old daughter, Ashley, thereby sparing her mother two weeks’ worth of daycare fees. I agree completely.

Lynn picks me up at Conrad’s and takes me to her apartment in Ostelsheim, west of Stuttgart. Ostelsheim completes the circle. I have now stayed north, south, east, and west of Stuttgart, including having stayed within its center at the youth hostel. The completion of this circle is a further symbolic indicator in my myth-story that it is time for me to leave.

*****

I am left alone with Ashley each morning after Lynn leaves for work. I make her breakfast and, later on, lunch. She is allowed to watch one video each afternoon. She always wants to watch The Cat in the Hat. We watch it together many times. I begin to look forward to seeing it again as much as Ashley.

Each afternoon Ashley has her naptime. During this naptime, I sit at a table in front of a large window and write in my journal. I spend a lot of Ashley’s naptime gazing out this window at the surrounding houses of the village-all roofed in the same red slate, that style I had noticed when I first flew into Stuttgart from Zurich. I reminisce about this arrival and the many things that have happened to me since that arrival. Kris, Tony, the youth hostel, Mr. G, the forest, Trudy, Judi, Lori, Conrad, and now Lynn. I feel as though I have been here for such a long time, but it has only been a little over three months. The relativity of time has stretched these three months into a year within my psyche.

One afternoon in the midst of my window-gazing meditations, I realize that Ashley’s naptime has progressed much longer than usual. She usually comes out of her room the minute when it is over and asks to watch The Cat in the Hat again.

I walk into her bedroom and am shocked to see that Ashley is not in her bed. She is not in her room or in the bathroom or in any other room in the apartment. She is gone. I begin to panic. Ashley is a quiet, slightly quirky little girl, and I have not been able to discern what exactly she happens to be thinking about. She seems to already have her own private world. This leads me to believe that she could do something such as sneak out of the apartment and embark upon some type of quasi-existential infantile quest. Perhaps this is projecting, but in my state of panic this is the main thought that preoccupies my head. I also feel anguish at the fact that Ashley has slipped away while under my guard. How incompetent can I be? I frantically re-search the apartment calling out Ashley’s name.

About to crack, a hunch hits me and I barge back into Ashley’s room. I throw open the closet door. There she is, seated on a small pile of dirty laundry, staring at nothingness.

*****

I rent a backpack from Kevin at the Rec Center for my upcoming rite-of-passage backpacking loop through several European nations. My last week at Lynn’s apartment I carefully pack this backpack with all that I will need. The remainder I stuff into my duffel and give it to Kevin-with my bag of books-for safe keeping while I am gone. Kev and I have become good friends over the past couple months. In big brother fashion, he tells me that I will be able to stay with him and his family whenever I return from my loop.

The night before I depart, I pack my rented backpack, unpack it, analyze all of the contents, then slowly pack it again. Zen and the Art of Backpacking. Each article has its essential importance.

Lynn and Ashley drop me off at the Stuttgart bahnhof the next morning. I have no definite plans. No schedule of where to go, what to do. Just take things as they come is the philosophy. See where I happen to end up, and with whom.

I look at the departure board and read Amsterdam. That sounds right. I buy a ticket.



Steve Kostecke © 2006