Apologies to Cheever for the petty larceny of title and pathos.

In the spring of my 16th year, my high school took part in a nationwide competition put on by Daimler-Benz and the Goethe Institut. Eventually, good old THS was picked to be among the eighty-odd US and Canadian schools sending one student on a month-long, all-expenses-paid, international cultural exchange-cum-carefree summer jaunt around newly reunified Germany. Via various competitions and interviews (and there's a funny story about why I shouldn't have been allowed to participate in the first place - has the statute of limitations run out yet so I can spill it?) I was selected to be that one.

This was, for various reasons, one of the formative experiences of my young life. And so for my whole life, obviously.

That trip in the summer of '93 was not my first in Germany, or Europe. The first had come, ironically enough, just a few months before. I had already coaxed my parents into dropping a thousand bucks to go with a school group around Germany/Austria/Switzerland. So I ended up spending the better part of a month and a half of that spring/summer carousing through Germanic lands. What an indelible effect that had on me.

What effect did those few months, and especially that pretty exclusive, here's-it-all-laid-before-you second trip have on me? Thinking adult life was destined to be so jet-setting and cosmopolitan forevermore, probably; a blur of relatively innocent youth hostel parties (did anyone actually drink?), Mercedes-Benz factory tours, meeting diplomats and muckety-mucks, free flights, the Chinesisches Haus at Sans Souci. I had never been on a airplane before that April, after all. But it put me on a road.

In fact it was less catalyst than next logical step, the sprout first shooting out from the ground, from a seed planted long before by my father. The Air Force had dropped him in Germany decades earlier, stuck his enlisted, never-been-out-of-Jersey ass there right through the Cuban missile crisis. One minor detail aside - he worked in a little shack atop the command center, making him the first to be vaporized when Khrushchev gave the sign - I think it was and remains his lost paradise. Hearing his stories of working four days a week and getting four marks to the dollar while drinking away the rest, right there on the edge of oblivion, I'd feel the very same way. I'd been looking at his photos of the green banks of the Mosel and his old VW, and hearing him wax nostalgic over places like Bernkastel-Kues and people like his Deutsche mutti (his buddy's mother-in-law) since I was five. His oddly ancient-looking, black-covered German language books all ended up in my hands, though I hardly put them to any more use than he did. It was always a good place to me, and I wanted to get there; after all, my father's sentimental streak is mine too. And then I wanted to get to many places.
He has never been back there. But I have several times. And I have made, sporadically at least, something like an international life. Thanks to him, and then spurred on by that fortunate trip.

In the middle of that Daimler-Benz adventure, we all got off the coaches and went for week-long homestays.
I remember feeling absolutely, wretchedly sick, overexhausted and coked-up (there were crates of it around all the time; I drank nothing but Coke, Fanta and good coffee for a month) the night my hosts took me back to a little, neat village in the fields north of Karlsruhe. And right into the middle of their once-a-decade street fair. Got pressed into service at their club's beer stand the next day, working along my year-younger host brother to wash glasses and pour all manner of bizarre German booze concoctions (Cola-wein? Cola-bier?!) And it just went on from there.
It was terrific. I've never forgotten it. And I've always had "friends in Germany," who I returned to visit a couple times.

This morning I decided to clean up my oldest, most spammed-up hotmail account. The one I hardly ever bother with anymore. Right at the top was a message with my host brother's name, Carsten H-------, in the heading.

You know that it's never good to get an email like that.

Carsten's sister was 12 or 13 when I first arrived, and couldn't speak much English then. But then, no one in the family besides Carsten could - a fact I happily noted when the two of them came to dinner wearing their G N'R "Get In The Ring Motherfucker" tour shirts, no one any the wiser. She couldn't speak much English the following year, when I came for a second visit, when I brought both of them back with me for a week. Like I walked right into the middle of their strassenfest, they arrived right in time for my high school graduation party.

She still doesn't have English much now, she notes in the email I opened today - an email she sent only last weekend. How glad I am it wasn't sunk down among the crap I haven't looked at since July. It's a little clumsy and broken and understandably short, this note, springing "some very bad news. Carsten is dead."

And she writes that it looks like he killed himself, though she cannot believe that. I haven't asked why, how, when, and I don't particularly want to know right now. He had a wife and now three children; my mother, baby-blanket knitter extraordinaire, had cranked out one for his first son a couple years ago, but she couldn't keep up.

No, it was us that didn't keep up. I hadn't even heard about the third child. In truth we haven't talked much for years; just an occasional email and attached pics back and forth at the holidays, or a cheeky text I got after the US got bounced out of the World Cup last year. Funny, I was in Germany when that happened, but pretty far away. I never got in touch.

I don't know exactly what happened to him yet, nor what happened in his life generally. Things happen to people no matter who and where they are, which I'm having to come to grips with nowadays. Without anything else to go on, this makes it the second jarring, sickening suicide in my extended circle in so many months. Like there's any other kind.

I really can't begin to contemplate the why of it. No doubt that's lucky for me. But if despair is deep down at the heart of it, then nothing in life pushes me towards despair like the fear of making no good impact on anyone else, of not being remembered, of not being thought of.

It's a totally irrational fear, you know? Of course you mark the world. But then, doing yourself in seems about as irrational as it gets.

I'll remember that he and his folks were part of something that had a massive impact on me, and so they continue to do so. I'll forever remember bicycling to his high school and sitting in on his classes (German high school seemed a lot better, what little I saw) bicycling on hot summer afternoons through sleepy villages to the Rhine and across it via a pokey ferry (idyllic). Biking across the farm fields to the big pool at Bellheim, past the stinking brewery where they made the excellent beer.

I think I may be - I must be - the first (and only?) American to practice with his handball club in the little village sports hall, and likely the only Ami in attendance at a friendly between his beloved Kaiserslautern and FC Basel at a village nearby, unless Tom Dooley was playing. I'll also remember his catastrophic bermuda shorts (but we can blame that on 90s German fashion and not him), his somewhat annoying penchant for whistling along poorly with the music I played, and that yes, thanks to him and his folks I have actually seen Kastelruther Spatzen live. I'd really like to remember the trip we took with him and his father's musikverein - a big oom-pah/folk band - to the Mosel valley. From the highway, I saw the defunct base my dad lived on all those years ago. Traipsing with his father around Bernkastel-Kues, I chanced upon my father's veritable second home, that house of his now-deceased "Deutsche mutti". It was nice. It was more than nice. It was toll toll toll toll, as we would have said once upon a time.

Labels: germany, goodbye, memories