TUCKERED OUT IN ASCHAFFENBURG
60 years ago, after graduating from Wooster College with a selective service number in my wallet, I understood that I would have to serve my country for two years and therefore thought that I might as well get it over with. That is what I tell people, but it isn’t the truth. I was copping out. I didn’t want to go to graduate school, I didn’t want to look for a job, I was entirely at loose ends, so I thought I might as well go into the Army and get it over with.
But before I was led through the center of Ithaca, NY, behind the American flag with three other recruits, after a celebratory breakfast honoring the three of us with speeches by town fathers and the gift of a
Bible, I spent the summer of 1959 hitchhiking a great circle around the United States from Ithaca to San Francisco with all kinds of rides ranging from ranchers of ranches so enormous that the cows were lost in them (I didn’t see a cow the entire way through cattle country), to a ride by a threesome, a guy and two young women who were changing their blouses in the front seat and saying they were on their way to an orgy as they tossed apples out the window of their car on a six lane thruway (I wasn’t invited to participate) to a ride by a Canadian man who was racing abjectly home to his wife, who had gotten sick and couldn’t come, to Vancouver after gambling away all his money during his first night in Las Vegas who needed me to drive while he slept. I hitch-hiked up to Seattle, Washington in giant lumber trucks past leaping wild fires and back through the Dakotas to New Hampshire being stopped in the upper Michigan peninsula by State Troopers with guns drawn— seen any hitchhikers?, no, answered the guy who had picked me up—to New Hampshire where I saw Thornton Wilder as the stage manager in Our Town and then back home to march down State Street to the bus station and Fort Dix. I don’t know what I expected when my mother dropped me off at the New York Thruway, or if she had considered whether she might never see me again. The first ride was with Cleveland honeymooners ecstatic after their honeymoon at Niagara Falls. I think I was under the spell of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. But what I discovered was that I felt a wonderful floating feeling because I didn’t know if or when I might get picked up, didn’t know my route, didn’t know what stories I would hear and was free to float along and see what happened. And so far on this trip I have felt the same feeling of every day being the unexpected with experiences I had no idea I would be having. That has happened again in Aschaffenburg.
I also soon discovered that floating free while hitchhiking was completely the opposite of having a serial number, US51433638, in the US Army. Here drill instructors were determined to shave my head, dress me in a uniform, teach me to march in unison, prescribe exactly what I should do at every moment to fit in and generally tried to grind every element of individuality out of me so that when they shouted at me, “What is a bayonet for?” I would answer as loudly as I could, “To kill, to kill” without actually having a bayonet to kill anyone with. I was being trained to mindlessly die for my country when ordered to.
I was even asked once what duty I would prefer as a soldier. I chose the military police because in Naples when I was coming back from India I saw MP’s driving around in Jeeps, in a lively Italian town and I wanted to do the same. But then I noticed an MP standing in the hot sun all day long in front of Fort Benning, Georgia, in August directing traffic and I changed my mind, realizing I would be the world’s worst military policeman and for some reason I was asked again and said that I wanted to become a Medic and wanted to serve overseas. And for some reason, that is what happened.
And that is how I ended up in Aschaffenburg, Germany.
This is a long, long leadup to my visit to Aschaffenburg for three days, the town where I served as a Medic without ever performing the life saving functions I had been taught, without even emptying a bedpan. In my Medical Battalion one half of the battlion cleaned ambulances and medical tents, the other half polished surgical instruments so that they shone for inspections and with their protective coatings gone would probably have poisoned anyone they were sliced into. We had no doctors and my hope was that if the Russians, who were only minutes away, ever attacked that we would get in our ambulances and try to stay our required ten miles our behind our front lines as we retreated at top speed to some port in France.
Because I could type I did clerical work in the morning, taking long bathroom breaks during which I tried to learn German. But the smartest thing I did, or the dumbest if I had been caught (our battalion kept a chart on the wall of court martials, at least 3 a month to demonstrate good discipline), was to steal 50 pass forms, keep one, and throw the rest away so that there wouldn’t be one missing. I then filled out the form so that it would enable me to leave our Jaeger Kaserne every evening rather than every other day as everyone else was constrained to do so that half of us would be ready in case we were attacked. I signed it Robert J. Hobbes, Jr, a ficticious name, with the two bb’s being an indication of authencity.
And this allowed me to rent a room not far away at Scharnhorst Strasse 7, which was also not allowed by the Army, where I could have a table and chair and bookcase of books and a typewriter and could hide out every evening at 5 until due back to the Jaeger Kaserne at 11 while my compatriots spent their every other night out at the Mississippi Bar or the Dixie Bar drinking beer and getting fleeced by wily prostitutes.
And it was there that I got to know Jussy Van Wurzbach, his wife Maria, a dentist, and their two children Margit and Dorothee. On this trip the reason that I was coming to Aschaffenburg was to visit Dorothee and Margit whom I remembered as being 8 and 10 years old. I had stopped to see the family again 30 years ago with my son on a very short hour long visit, but I still thought of the girls, now in near 70 as being 8 and 10. But I had no way of getting in touch with them. My plan was to visit Scharnhorst Strasse 7 and see if anyone knew where either of them were. Since I knew that they had both married, it turns out each of them twice, I guessed that their last names would have changed. I actually had no real hope of finding them. But I was going to try. It seemed a forlorn hope until Wolfgang told me to try Google, which revealed nothing and then Facebook, where Dorothee Van Wurzbach popped up immediately.
But still I was nervous. Partly because when Dorothee answered my query of whether she remembered me I discovered that she was proudly not vaccinated, but even more unsettling was the fear that 60 years was a rather long time to continue a relationship with two little girls, now near 70. What connection could we make after all that time, how would we pass the time? And as I walked through Aschaffenburg in the rain without recognizing a thing, I wondered if my visit might be a gigantic and excruciating mistake. I might end up walking in the rain for two days without recognizing a thing.
I arrived at the Athens airport exhausted from my hour long walk up to Syntagma Square. I had been pestered by Aegean Airlines for days to choose a seat for 30 euros or to make a bid to elevate myself to business class, starting at 100 euros more but on the plane I walked past business class, with seats the same size as mine, with the only distinction being a curtain between the two classes and I was again assigned a window seat, as I had been earlier in the trip, the seat I would have chosen, and was able when the clouds opened for ten minutes to photograph the Alps.
When we landed in Frankfurt I walked miles, it seemed, in the Frankfurt airport bought a train ticket, ate at McDonalds, I confess, through an automated system that almost baffled me as if were in a 22nd century McDonalds (everything I have encountered in Germany seems years ahead of us) and caught the silky smooth fast train to Aschaffenburg (no trains to Asheville, yet). When I got here I had to walk in the rain under an umbrella with my iPhone with Google maps in one hand, pulling my red carryon bag with the other hand and trying to balance an umbrella over my head, fogged up and blind because of my mask, when the Google GPS apparently failed me. Google insisted that the Novum Hotel was supposed to be 30 yards away and nothing with that name was in sight. But after circling and circling and exploring every alley way and divergent street and not seeing the Novum Hotel anywhere, I discovered that Google Maps wasn’t at fault, but that the real name of the Novum Hotel was the Hotel Post which stood in front of me in purple lights, which I walked back and forth in front of again and again. When I finally went into the Hotel Post to ask for directions I saw etched in the glass door, Novum Hotel Post, in tiny letters. Novum was the chain name, not the hotel name.
My 84 year old body had caught up with me. After sleeping only five hours in Athens, and walking for an hour up hill to Syntagma Square at 4:30 a.m. to the subway, and walking forever in the Frankfurt Airport and then walking in the rain through Aschaffenburg where I didn’t recognize a thing, I was so tuckered out that I couldn’t see straight and wanted only to sleep for three hours. I ached from head to toe. Then as I slumped in my bed Dorothee called and invited me for Kaffee and Kuchen, coffee and cake. I begged off for an hour and rested. And then I was picked up by Margit and a man, Bolko, whom I assumed to be her husband, noticing in my near comatose state that although he was driving he seemed completely helpless to find his way with Margit in the back seat telling him just how to drive, and wondered at his thorough submission.
And then, out of this chaos, began a wonderful evening of fun and sharing and laughing and having a really good time as if the 60 years since I had known Dorothee 8 or so and Margit 10 or so had vanished and I was among friends again and could relax completely. Yesterday and again today were a warm and a wonderful time.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 