The Moonpie Chronicles

Following is a fantasy conversation with an old love -- my first love. The conversation never happened, but I'm including it here because it relates to the next post from me about how and why I wound up in Germany. The name of the woman, "Becky," is changed for reasons that may someday become apparent. Also, the conversation takes place in a rowboat on a lake in Austria. Not that that has anything to do with anything.

“When I was five years old,” he said, “we moved from Canada to Rochester. Total distance less than 300 miles. It might has well have been around the world.” He took a pull on the bottle.

“We were plunked down in the middle of the city, in a heavily Jewish neighborhood. The other kids thought I talked funny. I said ‘zed’ instead of ‘zee’. I said ‘running shoes’ instead of tennis shoes’. People couldn’t understand my accent. That and the fact that my mom and I were Baptists, and my dad was a German. Add to all that a name like Raab-Faber, and I just didn’t fit in. But after a couple of years, I started to make some friends. I learned to speak American. I was feeling comfortable.

“Then, one day when I was in third grade we packed up and moved to another part of town. A fairly suburban sort of area. I was the new kid again. And again, with that name that for some reason no one could ever pronounce. Some of the kids in the neighborhood had dads who’d been in World War II. This was twenty-some years after the war, but there was still a lot of anti-German sentiment. New things to deal with too. Like, I didn’t know how to play football or baseball. It took a couple of years, but eventually I started to fit in, started to feel comfortable, started to make friends. But then…

“In the summer after fifth grade, we moved again. Way out in the suburbs. It was a brand-new subdivision, which should have been a bonus. Most of the kids in my neighborhood had come from the tougher parts of Rochester. A lot of Italian kids. Not that there was anything wrong with that, but it was just different worlds.

“Almost all the kids in my sixth-grade class had grown up together right across from the school. Riding the bus was about the only thing that saved me from daily ass-whoopings. Again, the problem with lack of any sports abilities came up. And the name thing still. I was an outcast. I met a friend there though who was even newer than me. We became inseparable, and in the seventh grade, we began developing reputations as class clowns. In eighth-Grade we were actually popular — somewhat.

“Then came ninth-grade. We were the young punks in school. We didn’t have any classes together and we hardly knew anybody. Two months into ninth-grade, my friend moved back into the city. I was all alone. But I tried to make the best of it. I was growing my hair long. I actually got to wear some relatively fashionable clothes. I began to think it might be O.K. In fact, Bonnie Abrams, a girl I’d had a crush on in eighth-grade ran into me in the library one day. She seemed really interested in me. She wanted to get together! Wow! I went home that day on top of the world.

“That night my dad asked me how school was going. I said great! He said “Well don’t get too used to it, because we’re probably going to move. A month later, and we moved to Albuquerque. So, now not only was I a freshman in high-school, but I knew absolutely no one. My mom had made me cut my hair before we moved and bought me some ‘nice’ clothes so, now I looked like a major-league geek. The kids in New Mexico didn’t like people from back east and so I was a hopeless case for the first couple of years.

“By the time I was a senior I had made friends though. I hung out with the Freaks at school. We were the school rejects, but we were there for each other. I met my friend Vance and we got along really well. I was really, finally fitting in and things were looking good for me. But guess what?”

“Your dad was going to move again?” Becky responded, fiddling with an oar.

“No. No he wasn’t. My parents were very happy in New Mexico. About three months before graduation, I went downtown and joined the Army.”

“Why?” she asked. I sat back, put his hands in his pockets.

“Because, for all my life, whenever things got comfortable and I started to fit in, we moved. I’ve never learned how to deal with a relationship — friendship or otherwise — all the way through. Never learned how to cast seasons to the wind. Never learned how to progress. When graduation was looming, and we weren’t going anywhere I did to myself what I’d had done to me all my life — I moved.”

“The point being…?”

“I think that…” I paused “I think that when I met you, when we got together, that you made me feel comfortable, made me feel like I fit in, like I belonged with you. Instantly. And those other girls I hit on? Linda and Debbie and Laura and Shannon? They were because I kept expecting our relationship to end somehow and so I had to move on to new relationships. I obviously wasn’t moving anywhere. Not till Uncle Sam said so. But moving was the next logical step in the progression of fitting in.

“That’s why I’m having such a difficult time with this whole leaving thing. This is what comes next, and yet I know that I want to be with you.”
She looked at him and nodded. Something else came to his mind.

“Y’know, before we moved to Dachweiler, I was really heavy into speed. I was partying too much and having trouble staying awake at work. I had been wishing out loud that I had some whites, and this guy I knew turned me on to X-112. That shit Dave makes his Rocket Fuel with? I was getting maybe four hours of sleep a night. Just burnin’ non-stop.

“The barracks we were in were really old. None of the locks worked, so we had hasps on the doors. I had just hung a big old bicycle lock on the door and neglected to tell anyone the combination. We started getting a bunch of flak about room inspections and I rebelled a bit; refused to make my bed, or clean my room. Nobody knew the combination, so nobody could inspect it. We lived in somewhat subhuman conditions in the first place. There was nothing to take any pride in. I had a funky old gray metal bunk, a broken wall locker, my little refrigerator, and a bookshelf I'd made from stolen wood and cinder blocks. The walls were filthy. The whole place was suffering from about thirty years of nineteen-year-old boys living away from home. I had all this energy from the speed, but never applied it towards keeping my ‘A.O. squared away’ as they say.

“One day I just locked the room permanently from the outside and used the window. You know.... that could be analogous of my life if I took the time to work it out. Locked the door and used the window. Huh. That was it. That was about the time that I sort of checked out sanity-wise. Locked that door. Forgot the combination.

“I'd had that dabble with the whites when I was state-side. That was nothing. I was moving headlong into some deep territory, and it started with that X-112 crap, and went on to the Mandraax and the acid and even some heroin. It really fried my brain. It’s days like this. Moments like this with you, when I take that lock off the door and look in that ratty room of my life. It looks like the almighty shit-hammer of Thor came down in it, and I just have to shut the door and lock it again. Some days… some days it’s just a whole lot easier to use the window.