Being German...On the Road

I passed time on a recent flight with a lady from Germany going to see her brilliant engineer son in Ft. Collins – (10) hours from Berlin to Atlanta, (3) more to Denver, an hour’s drive to Ft. Collins + (5) years of his college...”long trip” she said to me.  Long indeed, I thought to myself. It was her first time in the states and she was less than impressed.  Her name was Eva.

Flying west always brings up Kerouacian visions that may or not be true or real other than in my faded memory. To be Dean Moriarty was my dream at seventeen years and I ventured west to realize that fantastic concept as soon as I was able. I could never be that 'mad, wild Dean’ though…

She saw my tattoo and immediately said something in German I didn't understand and I had to admit that I was pure American and the tat was a nod to my ancestry only. I was proud of my heritage and embarrassed of how little I actually knew of it at the same time in near equal measure.  Her first time in the U.S. and she speaks better English than many Americans that I know. I can say Deutschland and California uber alles because of the History Channel and Jello Biafra not because I understand what it truly means and certainly not because I understand what it is to be German, or even German-American for that matter. Embarrassing. I should drop the three bills and get Rosetta Stone already. It's an offense to my own sensibilities that I don't comprehend the words of my forefathers when they’re spoken to me. I haven't earned the right to have the German flag inked through my flesh, but I do nevertheless. That's just me.

I listened to this band Kik Tracee in the late ‘80s and they sang this song Big Western Sky...shitty song, shitty band through grown eyes but I thought it was the deal then.  It connected me to...I remember when...I remembered this song flying across the plains into the sun Wednesday night, throughout the exceptional glowing Thursday and again over (acceptable by even my standards) biscuits and gravy at DEN watching the sun rise and dance along the snow-capped tops of the Rockies Friday morning.  I sometimes forget how wide the world is open and I forget how big the world used to seem to me when this song was in my constant rotation.   I do remember lying on my back in the desert of Joshua Tree when I was eighteen watching airplanes silently streak slowly across the stark black night.  In my mind every one was going somewhere new and exciting and I told myself I was going there too someday.  I’ve increasingly allowed myself to dismiss that wonderment as the ‘hubris of the young’ or whatever but I’ve seen a need lately to find my way back to that notion.  Every time I’m west of the Mississippi, I start to remember the yester of my day and wonder if I had been as bad-ass as I thought I was then how different my life would be now.

I’ve been to the Holocaust Museum in D.C. a couple of times and I always feel a certain amount of shame based on nothing more than the spelling of my last name.  I find myself trying to hide that tattoo when I’m there.  Why?  My family had emigrated long before the horrors of the Third Reich but because I’ve attached myself to that heritage now I can’t help but wonder.  How do I really know my ancestors weren’t goose stepping right behind that consummate lunatic maniacal asshole?  I read Tearing the Silence – On Being German in America recently.  The book is a series of interviews with German immigrants who were alive during the Holocaust and how and what they remember and feel about their native country and the atrocities perpetuated in its name during this dark time.   The overwhelming sentiment of all is shame, even though most of those interviewed were children during WWII and many remember no country other than the United States.  Some of their fathers had been a part of the Nazi machine and were forced to “work” in the camps.  These were the hardest stories to read and internalize.  Can you imagine your father being a party to these unspeakable acts, whether against his will or not?  I cannot imagine the shackles of guilt they must have bore especially during an immediate post-war America. Not knowing the full German history of my family past my great-grandfather has always troubled me.  There’s always been a bit of a “what if” shrouded in my vocal pride.   For the record, there is nothing sinister about the German flag that I have – it’s my heritage whether I know enough about it or not.  The pride I feel is more familial than national and has nothing to do with…all of that.

I suspect Kerouac’s Denver is different from what I experienced but I understand the pull to it he had.  It’s the underlying unspoken theme of On the Road…that Jeffersonian, ‘Go West young man’, manifest destiny thing.  It’s the idea that we can, as Americans, do whatever the hell we feel like doing.  I have certainly lived my life against a different philosophical backdrop than the mid-century America his characters and he himself lived but the message is still the same.  It may have been the Bible to the Beats but it is still relevant today – it might even be more relevant now.  If ever there was a time to see America in all its glorious vitality before it all goes to hell it hasn’t been in my lifetime.  It’s not even that so much as it is the ability to understand and recognize the limits of one’s own time on this earth and to have the foresight to take full advantage of every fleeting moment before it is gone forever.  It’s possibly the ultimate cliché for me to espouse the ‘wisdom’ of Jack Kerouac and I realize that by doing so I subject myself to the potential criticism of being labeled a hipster douche bag and I’m okay with that.  I’ve read that book (20) + times in the last (20) + years and I see it through a different theoretical and emotional prism every time.  Dean’s and my Central City and dark street don’t occupy the same universe much less the same reality.  But I get it.  In spite of “progress”, I see what Dean saw.  However faint, I can still see that wide open world.

What Eva had said to me was, “Woher kommst du?”  She was kind enough to explain to me that it meant, “Where are you from?”  The truth is that I had no concrete idea where my family had lived in Germany.  I vaguely remember someone mentioning the Black Forest once, but I don’t know anything about it.  She could see that I was uncomfortable when I didn’t know how to respond and gripped my hand with both of hers in the way only a mother could and said, “Schon gut.” – “It’s okay.”

Later, after we’d helped each other navigate a new airport we were standing outside in the blistering wind waiting.  I couldn’t think of anything to say.  I’d learned more from her in (3) hours about Germans than I had in my whole life prior and I felt like there must be some way for me to repay her.  As I statued against the night lost in my thought, Eva disappeared into the back of a taxi.  As the door closed I heard her shout, “Dankeschön. Gute reise!” – “Thank you.  Enjoy your travels!”  My phone was ringing, and I was cold and I didn’t have any cigarettes and I finally realized that I’m not all that German but I felt full in spirit for the first time in a long time.  Thank you, Eva. 

I bummed a smoke from a cabbie, sat down on the curb and thought about learning how to play the piano or hitchhiking to Nicaragua or...

“…they danced down the streets…, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’…”

I could pack a lot, most everything that matters, in my truck and I could take a left and I could take another shot and head west again. I could be west of the big dirty before dawn.  I’d be lying if I said it hasn’t crossed my mind more than a stitch the last (48) hours.

"…somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me…”

The only thing keeping me here now is me.