This episode is a continuation of part I. It’s still about my father, Robert Lightfeather, around the mid-1980s, in West Germany. It’s a study in how little decisions can cause the biggest catastrophes and how the biggest catastrophes are sometimes exactly what you need.

“Hallo.” “Hallo.” “Hallo.” A young woman wearing a blue vest was nudging him on the arm, waking him from a deep hash coma. He whipped his head towards the luggage rack. His stomach dropped and his head was spinning. It was gone. The train was empty and its door were wide open. He must have started an international incident, and the police and Interpol and the UN or whatever had sent in this small woman with an innocent face to lure him out to the platform where they were all waiting for him.

He thought about running, but how far could he get with the army of international police waiting for him. Besides, running would most certainly signal guilt. He could feign ignorance, which is, let’s face it, his strong suit. Yes, that’s his backpack, but he had no idea where the hash came from. He went to Amsterdam on vacation. He only went to the pot café one day. It wasn’t really his thing. He fell asleep so he doesn’t know what happened to his backpack.

The blue vest must have seen how confused he was because she went into an explanation. She must have also figured there was something wrong with him because she spoke slowly and supplemented each word with a pantomime, which was actually helpful but made the situation even stranger and more confusing. She said his backpack (rucksack) was in the office (buro) and the train (zug) was stopped for maintenance and another zug was coming soon to take him to Munich. She pointed at the door, and when he looked on the platform, it was also empty.

The buro was really just a booth, manned by a male blue vest, who was clearly chosen for the position based on his ability to fit behind the tiny desk. He nodded at the rucksack leaning against the wall. Alright, act normal, just for a bit until you could get out of the buro. He picked up the unbearably heavy rucksack and put it on his back, teetering a bit. Robert willed himself to walk naturally, but instead of walking naturally, he started walking like a broken robot. The attendant broke out into laughter, which was such a promising sound that Robert finally took a deep breath and exhaled.

Robert got on the next zug and soon he was back in Munich. Waiting for his train to Garmisch, with his rucksack next to him, it felt like he was returning home from a long war and he was already finding that the world had changed. He half expected the Lizard Boys to have all grown into Lizard Men, maybe having dispersed - back to Ohio, Michigan and Tennessee. Of course, he had smoked a lot of hash in the last 24 hours, and now there was a thick fog around reality, which muffled the various platform sounds and helped him meander around his hazy musings.

He had just relaxed a bit when the German Shepherds came through the station. Fuck. These were the same ones that he saw at Englischer Garten with their handlers. These Shepherds weren’t shepherds at all but trained cops with sharp fangs and a deafening, unrelenting bark. There were three dogs on long leashes held by three cops. Each cop and dog took a section of the station. The cop that had Robert’s section was short and dumpy, and his dog looked older than the others and was panting uncomfortably. It came up to his bag and sniffed. Robert practiced the reason he had drugs in his bag. He didn’t know anything about it. He didn’t have his bag for hours. But the excuse was running thin, even in his own mind. Why would anyone put 1500 dollars worth of hash in someone else’s bag.

Sweat poured out all over his body, soaking his clothes, from the neck of his t-shirt to the toes of his socks. He looked away from the dog in case it can see the desperation and fear in his eyes. The train was coming. So close. Just moments away. He braced himself and turned his head back to his bag, expecting to see all three shepherds baring their teeth and all three policemen standing with their guns drawn, one of them holding the hash.

But the dog had led the cop down the platform and Robert was already forgotten. The train came to a stop and the doors opened. He slowly stood up and boarded the train put his rucksack on the rack. He barely made it to the bathroom before he broke out into a sob. His shoulders shook out every tear he had been saving for three years. He cried as hard as he had that first night at his father’s house, maybe harder since his father wasn’t there screaming at him to stop. He didn’t care anymore if he got caught and went to jail for the rest of his life, like his mother foretold. He just wanted it to be over.

Crying apparently was a good way to make the time go by because before he was done, a blue vest was knocking on the door to let him know they were arriving in Garmisch. Robert put on the rucksack and walked out into the crisp, autumn, mountain air and took a deep breath. He had done it. He had gotten away with it. He had made it home.

This could be the end of the story, a somewhat happy story where he learns a life lesson and averts any real catastrophe. But that’s a lot to ask from an 18-year-old with no future to protect, and besides, he hadn’t really learned any life lessons yet.

When he pulled out the ball of hash and apprised to the Lizard Boys the adventures he had seen, Robert became the envy of the house and its resident hero. The ball of hash didn’t look as big as he remembered it – maybe a small coconut versus a large. Robert devised a plan to make it last longer - a lot of Englischer Garten pot and just the tiniest bit of Amsterdam hash, roll a joint, enjoy. They enjoyed alright – day and night. Robert says the Lizard Boys invented the phrase wake and bake. That’s probably not true, but they certainly exemplified it. The coconut turned into a peach and then a kiwi and then a pomegranate and then a house meeting.

It was a shame that the first ball of hash was so good because it seemed worth it for Robert to go back to Amsterdam, especially for everyone else. But this time, he wanted to bring back more than a coconut so he didn’t have to do it again in a couple of months. See, Robert was learning to look ahead. He had also learned a thing or two from his first trip. No rucksack. He was going with a small school backpack, which he can lay at his feet on the train. And this time, he’d stay just for one night. He bought all of his train tickets round-trip so he could be prepared and stick to the plan. He also bought two books from the PX for the train ride. He noticed reading passengers looked innocent and were largely ignored by everyone, including the blue vests. And this time, no smoking hash. If he was honest, the good hash often made him anxious, and that’s the last thing he needed.

The trip to get the drugs was relaxing. He was just another traveler on the train, sleeping in the dark car at night and in the morning, eating bee sting cake while watching Germany turn into the Netherlands through the window. Before he knew it, he was in the familiar Amsterdam station. He saw a man his age with a buzz cut and an Army-issue rucksack getting off the train and straight to a pot cafe. Why couldn’t the Lizard Boys travel to Amsterdam? It then occurred to him that he had never been asked for his passport, not even at the borders, and his mom’s story about getting lost in all those countries, she was never stopped for a passport. Any of the Lizard Boys could do this. He thought about turning around and just going home, remembering the terror of the German Shepherd incident in Munich, and he really might have, but he had purchased his train tickets ahead of time, which meant he had to stay at least one night.

Amsterdam was much colder than Garmisch and the sky was gray – a great day to hang out in a heated hotel. There was no TV in the room, so he picked up Catch-22, the bigger of the PX books. It had been a while since he read for recreation, but he used to do it a lot before he moved to Texas, maybe because they didn’t have cable TV. To his shock, Catch-22 was hilariously anti-war and anti-US military. He thought the PX would censor such books, but on second thought, nobody cared about books, not there anyway. He spent the whole day reading in his room and when he finished the book, he fell asleep. He slept for 12 hours. He didn’t know it that night, but it would be the only real sleep he would have for months.

Bob Marley’s was empty and looked the same – the same small tables, the same menus and the same waiter. Robert nodded at him, and he came over with a menu, as if they had never met.

“So, where’s Klaus?” Robert said.

“Who is Klaus?” the waiter said.

“Come on. We met in the back office, remember?”

The waiter shrugged but kept standing there. Oh. Got it. Robert pulled out a 25 guilder note and slid it toward him.

“Klaus has been sent to jail. How much do you need? I can call somebody.”

“300 grams for 2000 guilders,” Robert said, as rehearsed.

The waiter looked at him for a minute with a smirk and then nodded.

“What time is your train?”

“At 5.”

“Be here at 3. Oh, and leave a deposit, 1000 guilders. Just to guarantee your return, sir.”

“No way.”

“500 guilders.”

“No.”

“You’re going to have to leave something if I will take a risk.”

That actually made sense. The waiter thought for a minute and then asked for Robert’s train ticket, which also made sense. It’s not clear why he gave the waiter all his tickets, but he did. He was now in that awkward space of time when he can walk away and continue to live his life without the terror of smuggling drugs, but no matter how many times he ran over it in his head for the next 30 years, he just didn’t have it in him to walk away at that time.

At 3, when he got back to Bob Marley’s, it was a full house. The waiter pointed to the back office and Robert let himself in. A boy, maybe 13, was sitting in the office, his legs shaking furiously. He jumped when Robert walked in and almost knocked over the two coconuts of hash on the desk. The boy didn’t speak English and maybe not even Dutch, since he used only hand gestures to communicate. When Robert approached the desk to grab the coconuts, the boy pulled out a knife and made the international signal for money, rubbing his fingers together. Yet another easy chance to walk away.

Robert pulled out the money, split it in half and put one bundle in the boy’s right hand and took a coconut, while the boy held the knife tight in his left hand. He did the same with the other bundle and backed away from the boy who put the knife back in his pocket. The boy ran out the back door, and Robert wiped the sweat from his face and walked out the front door of Bob Marley’s for the last time. It wasn’t until he was at the train station that he remembered the waiter had his train tickets. Going back there was out of the question. He was relieved to find he had enough money left for new train tickets AND dinner.

Robert got on the train bound for Munich, with a sense of security and safety. He pulled out the second PX book Slaughterhouse Five and cracked the spine – yet another anti-war book, this time set in Germany. It was so short that he finished it before dinner. He was so affected by it that he read it again after dinner. The book gave him a sense of place, of a perspective. He had been living in the epicenter of a world war, two world wars, a country still split in two, but he had only thought about smuggling and smoking drugs. He was the worst kind of American abroad.

He closed his eyes and thought of Dresden and wondered how a city rebounded from being bombed by the good guys. And somewhere around Frankfurt, he fell asleep, wanting more from his experience in Germany.

He awoke to announcements, which were filled with words never uttered in the back of a schnitzel restaurant. The few passengers on the train looked as confused as he did. Robert had heard so much about German punctuality, but the train from Amsterdam was always stopping somewhere besides Munich. It was a small transfer station, and at first, Robert thought it was the blue vests’ headquarters, the place from which all blue vests were dispatched. There were hundreds of them, carrying big signs that said “Streik.” One of the other passengers asked Robert if he wanted to share a taxi. That’s when he remembered he had no money. The older man took pity on Robert and gave him a free ride to the Munich station.

Robert was stranded with nothing in his pocket, but at least he was in Munich. He found his way to Englischer Garten, just to be somewhere familiar, and there on the grass, he identified his first drug dealer. A young black man was seemingly minding his own business smoking a cigarette next to a bench when an older white man approached him with money. They shook hands, and Robert saw the little bag of pot switching places with the cash. That was it. All he had to do was sell a little bit of the hash to the drug dealer. He didn’t need a lot, just enough to pay for a cab to Garmisch. Robert walked up to the drug dealer, flashed a plum of hash and backed off to the next bench. The drug dealer studied the wad of cash he pulled from his pocket and finally pulled off a few bills, showing it to Robert – five 20 Deutsche Mark bills, fanned out. They both nodded. Robert approached him and handed him the plum. But before Robert could grab the money, someone screamed “Halt!” It was a policeman with a German Shepherd. The drug dealer and Robert simultaneous started running. It was a race against each other more than the cop.

They were evenly matched, running side by side, where? They didn’t know. Just run. From the volume of halts coming from the Polizei, they were making ground. Then, the drug dealer pushed Robert to the side on to the grass. The fall ripped the arm of his shirt and skinned him. The halts stopped and Robert heard one “Fass!” Attack. The dog was baring his teeth as he passed by Robert, the victim, and lunged at the drug dealer. Robert didn’t miss a moment, got up and ran out of Englischer Garten, down the street and into one of the giant buildings from some century before America. He ran up the stairs and down the corridor and into a bathroom, locking himself inside a stall.

Once his heart slowed down, he realized he almost had the money in his hand. He should have just grabbed it, then he could be on his way to Garmisch in a taxi. And he would never do this again. But as it were, he had to go back and find another drug dealer and then sell drugs to the drug dealer. This time, of course, he would look around for the Polizei. But first, he needed to sit on the toilet, stop shaking and summon the courage to leave the bathroom of what turned out to be the University of Munich.

When he got back to Englischer Garten, he decided to try the same spot, assuming the police wouldn’t look there again so soon. Sure enough, there was a black man standing against a bench, smoking a cigarette. Just one more time, Robert thought. Just one more time. He looked all around for the police, then he pulled out a plum and flashed it at the man, who walked toward him. Before he knew what was happening, the man had Robert’s arms behind his back and handcuffed. The man blew on a whistle, summoning two more policemen. Even without dogs, it was a terrifying sight.

How can you tell the difference between a drug dealer and a policeman? Well, if you have to ask, maybe you shouldn’t try buying drugs in Englischer Garten and you definitely shouldn’t try selling it.

The charges for Robert Lightfeather included possession of illegal substances and distribution of illegal substances. He was caught with a little over a 100 grams of low-grade hash. Ripped off by a 13 year old in Amsterdam. It was a good thing in this case since it delegitimized him as a serious drug dealer. Still, he was booked and sent to Stadelheim, a prison that once housed Adolph Hitler and then later executed over a 1000 people for him. Robert was given a room of his own. It was dingy and dark and wreaked of a thousand deaths, but there was a bed and a chair and all he really wanted was to rest.

The next day, a round man with round framed glasses named Hans came into his cell.

“I don’t usually act as an advocate, but I do speak great English. You have to get a lawyer, one that speaks great German, and that person will get you a court date and defend you against the charges. Until that happens, you live here. When the door is unlocked, you are free to come and go from this room, meal times are posted on the walls and served in the cafeteria. Where is the cafeteria? Follow the other inmates during meal times. There’s a yard, if you want to exercise. There’s a library, if you want to read. Oh, and the librarian wanted me to tell you that there are a few boxes of English books you can have. You’re allowed visitors, and you can use the phone. That’s all you really need to know, except of course, haha, don’t try to break out.”

Yes, haha. Stadelheim was more like a dilapidated 19th century spa than a modern prison. His only company was an endless supply of English books, which he devoured. He read Kafka and Dostoevsky and Gunter Grass all in English. Once he read a book, he could recite paragraphs from it. To this day, he can quote those books, books like Crime and Punishment, The Tin Drum and as fate would have it, Julie Min’s favorite book – The Trial.

It’s not that he wanted to stay there forever, but he didn’t mind staying. The trauma of getting caught and put behind bars had changed him, but it was the millions of words he was consuming that was growing him into a human being. Then, one day, Hans came in and announced that Robert was moving to another cell. Max, his new cellmate, was a short man with giant muscles who was fascinated by all things American, especially cars. He had heard there was an American at Stadelheim and requested him as a cellmate. When Robert walked into the cell, Max bolted up from his chair and shook Robert’s hand formally and enthusiastically, like he was meeting the Chancellor.
But once the novelty of a real life American wore out, Max seemed annoyed with Robert, who couldn’t answer even the most basic questions about cars. Robert finally called Wes.

“Oh, man. Oh, man. I thought you were dead. Shit. I’m so happy to hear your voice. Okay. How do we get you out of there?”

“Don’t worry about it for now, and don’t tell my mom. Can you bring me some stuff from the PX? Anything American with American cars on it. Oh, and American cigarettes.”

Wes looked nervous when he entered the visiting area. Before Stadelheim, they were both white 19 year-olds from the Midwest in a self-destructive spiral, but now Wes looked like a mammal from a different species, a familiar species but different nonetheless. Wes visited most weeks and brought Robert Hot Rod magazines and Marlboro cigarettes, which he handed straight over to Max. They weren’t bribes exactly, but they kept Max happy and the pictures in the magazines occupied him. It was nice to see Max light up with things so common, things so easy to acquire. In exchange, Max left him alone to read. Robert worked his way through boxes labeled Englisch.

Hans visited often to ask if Robert needed help with a lawyer, reminding him that without one, he could stay there forever. Yes, Robert was aware. If Max hadn’t pulled him from his single, he could have stayed at Stadelheim for years. The four months he had already done was easy, even with Max wanting English lessons every night. Sure, once in a while, he got a panic attack and had to breathe into a paper bag, but considering the circumstances, that seemed pretty normal.

Nothing at the prison was worse than his family finding out. He was used to disappointing everyone, but this, it couldn’t be captured by a word as trivial as disappointment. There was no way to explain the sequence of decisions he made to end up in prison, and Stadelheim itself was impossible to describe without sounding like he was locked up in a fairy tale. No, he would much rather live out the rest of his life in prison. They couldn’t kick him out. He didn’t even have a sentence. Wes could tell Sarah that Robert wanted to travel around Europe and just took off by himself. She would be relieved, they all would. Nobody would look for him, and nobody would know that he was there, except the Lizard Boys, who couldn’t be trusted to keep a secret but could be trusted to not care enough to say anything.

But you can’t lock yourself up forever, even in prison. Hans came by on a Saturday and informed Robert that his visa sponsor, Sarah Watkins, had be contacted.

“I didn’t give you permission to do that,” Robert said.

“If you don’t get a lawyer soon, they’ll set up a court date and you’ll have to defend yourself. And you know what they say about people who defend themselves.”

“No, what do they say?”

“Oh, never mind. Your mother’s here.”

The visiting room was packed with the weekend crowd, but Robert saw them right away. Sarah’s orange hair glowed like a radioactive beacon and Frank, her boyfriend and a Lieutenant, looked like a gorilla in a room full of lap dogs. He looked serious and angry and scowled at the people around him – criminals and their visitors, the worst of the lot.

“We’ll get you a lawyer,” Frank said.

“Thanks,” Robert said.

“But if and when you get out, you’re going to enroll in school and get a job. You’ll live with us on base, and if I so much as smell pot on your clothes, I’ll call the brig myself and have you arrested.”

Call the brig? Living with Frank and Sarah would be a much worse prison than Stadelheim, but he could go to college, which he didn’t even know was an option. His mother was quiet, which itself was unusual, but she also seemed distracted, like seeing her son imprisoned with Nazi war criminals wasn’t enough to hold her interest. She gave him a hug the way a cancer patient would – softly and profoundly. Robert had seen his mother in all stages of a relationship, and she was in the depression stage, which came right before rage, and the rage marked the end.

Hans was right. Once Frank got the lawyer, it only took a couple of days before they were in court. There wasn’t a jury, and later he found out it wasn’t even a trial. Neither the judge nor the lawyer spoke to Robert directly. The lawyer argued that American teenagers had a culture of consuming marijuana, day and night, and Robert particularly had been smoking since he was 13. The hash in his backpack was for his own personal use. The only reason he was trying to sell it was because he didn’t have any money and due to the transportation strike, he didn’t have a way home. The judge asked why he didn’t just wait for the strike to be over. They never lasted more than a few hours. Yeah, why didn’t he just wait for the strike to be over? He didn’t know the strike would be over so soon, but surely the strike would have been over at some point. He was glad nobody was asking him questions. How could he justify such stupidity, in any language. But the lawyer had a good answer. Because of years of marijuana consumption, Robert didn’t have the capacity to think clearly. He had damaged his young brain. The lawyer pointed at Robert, offering his physical appearance as evidence. The judge nodded. Robert also nodded. The judge looked bored while he scribbled something and dismissed the case. It was all over. Robert had been successfully kicked out of Stadelheim.

Predictably, Frank ran his house like an Army unit – everyone up at 5am, make your bed, eat breakfast, then jumping jacks, counted out by Frank himself. The first couple of days, Robert waited for Frank and Sarah to leave the house before going back to sleep, but Frank started demanding a daily report of what he was doing. Frank was all about rules, making lists and setting goals. Sarah had brought around a few father figures but none of this type. He brought Robert into the admissions office at the American college and introduced him to everyone. One of the admissions officers told Robert that Frank had helped dozens of young men enroll in college after the military. He even set up a job interview for Robert as a waiter in a steakhouse on base. He got Robert a suit and tie to wear to the interview, but Frank’s reputation was what got him the job – Frank had been the manager’s lieutenant.

For the first time in his life, he wanted to do well, to make Frank proud. To his great surprise, Robert liked waking up early, hell, to have any schedule. Even with a near full-time job, college came easy - school always had. And being a student turned out to be a blank pass. He was a young man paying his way through college, which was a rare category on base but one that got respect from the older set, like Frank. Overnight, he had transformed from useless waste of air to a hard-working young man.

Frank bought him all his books and nominated him for scholarships. They were small - couple of hundred dollars here and there - but there were so many that he had enough to save some. The older officers that came in for steaks looked at him like they wanted him to be their son.

But at home, things were deteriorating. Frank and Sarah were in their last days - Robert could feel it in his bones, like the coming of rain. He only went home to sleep and shower, but even then, he heard enough fights to know their complaints. Robert was brought up a lot, as he usually was in the last days of relationships.

“You can’t control me,” Sarah said.

“I’m not trying to control you. If I were controlling you, you’d do something with your life instead of being content with being a cashier.”

“You think I haven’t done anything? I’ve raised two children. I’m not content. I haven’t been content since I became a mother and had to drop out of college.”

“When are you going to stop using that as an excuse? You left your kids. And if you want to go back to school, who’s stopping you? Let’s go down to the school right now. I’ll help you enroll. Look at your boy.”

“Yeah, just look at my boy. You have no idea the hell I’ve gone through with him. If you think you can handle him, you take him.”

“I’m the one whose been helping him, not you. Maybe I should get the credit for being a parent.”

One day, when Robert came back from the library, it was over. There were broken dishes on the floor and a broken lamp too. His mother was stuffing things in a box. Robert chuckled out loud. Why did she always throw dishes in the last fight? Or maybe it’s that throwing the dishes made it the last fight. Robert grabbed a wastebasket and started picking up the pieces of Sarah’s rage.

“You don’t have to do that,” Frank said.

“Well, you shouldn’t have to,” Robert said.

“I’m going to Molly’s. She doesn’t have room for you. I’m sure you’ll be able to find a place. Maybe your friend Frank here can help you out,” Sarah said.

Robert kept picking up dish shards. He knew it was a long shot, but he hoped Frank would say something, say Robert could keep his room since he’d been doing so well, say he’d continue to help. But turns out, Frank was the same as the others. Robert was just an appendage of Sarah, and when Sarah went away, so did Robert.

It didn’t take long for Robert to pack all his things and bring it out in his matching luggage. Frank had picked up the rest of the carnage and his mother was gone.

“Thank you for everything you’ve done for me. It’s more than my own father ever did, and I owe you so much. I’ll never forget you,” Robert said.

Robert offered his hand. Frank shook it, then embraced him, patting him on the back.

“You really surprised me, kid.”

Robert walked off base and wondered what he needed, but it didn’t matter what he needed and certainly not what he wanted. It only mattered what he had, and after a year in Germany, he had something he didn’t have before – hope for a future. He roamed the cobbled streets of Garmisch-Partenkirchen until he ended up on Mueller Strasse, then halfway down the street to the rundown birdhouse on the right. He walked into a standing ovation by the Lizard Boys. Wes handed him a joint made with Englischer Garten pot. Robert took a long drag, sat down on the couch and opened his physics book. He had midterms the next day.