Why We Took the Car (3 page)

CHAPTER 6

I guess I never explained why they called me Psycho. Because, as I mentioned, I was known as Psycho for a while. No idea what the point was. I mean, obviously I know it was supposed to suggest that I had a screw loose. But as far as I'm concerned, there were several other people who deserved the name more than I did. Frank could have been called Psycho, or Stobke, with his lighter. They're both way crazier than I am. Or the Nazi. But then again, the Nazi was already called Nazi, so he didn't need another name. And of course there was a reason that I got the name instead of anyone else. It was the result of an assignment in Mr. Schuermann's German class, sixth grade, a word prompt story. In case you don't know what a word prompt story is, it goes like this: You get four words, like “zoo,” “ape,” “zookeeper,” and “hat,” and you have to write a story that includes all of the words. Real original. Totally moronic. The words Mr. Schuermann thought up were “vacation,” “water,” “rescue,” and “God.” Which was definitely more difficult than zoo and ape. The main difficulty was God, obviously. We only had ethics classes, not religion, and there were sixteen kids registered as atheists in the class, including me. Even the Protestants in the class didn't really believe in God. I don't think. At least, not the way people who
really
believe in God believe. People who don't want to harm even an ant, or who are happy when someone dies because that person is going to heaven. Or people who crash a plane into the World Trade Center. Those people really believe in God. That's why the writing assignment was tough. Most of the students grabbed on to the word “vacation.” A little family is paddling around off the Côte d'Azur and are taken totally by surprise by a terrible storm and yell “oh, God” and are then rescued or whatever. And I could have written something like that too. But as I sat down to write the story, the first thing that occurred to me was the fact that we hadn't been on vacation for three years because my father had been preparing for bankruptcy. Which didn't bother me — I never particularly liked going on vacation with my parents anyway.

Instead, I spent last summer squatting in our basement carving boomerangs. One of my elementary school teachers taught me how to do it. He was an expert in the boomerang department. Bretfeld was his name, Wilhelm Bretfeld. He'd even written a book about boomerangs. Two books actually. But I didn't realize that until after I'd finished elementary school. I ran into old Bretfeld in a field. He was basically standing right behind our house in the cow pasture throwing his boomerangs, homemade boomerangs he'd carved himself. It was yet another thing I had never realized really worked. I thought the things only came back to you in the movies. But Bretfeld was a pro, and he showed me how to do it. I was blown away. Also because he'd made them himself. “Anything that's round in front and sharp at the back will fly,” said Bretfeld. Then he looked at me over the frames of his glasses and asked, “What's your name again? I can't remember you.” The thing that most blew my mind was the long-distance boomerang. He'd developed it himself. It could fly for ages — and he had
invented
it. All over the world today, when someone throws a boomerang and it stays in the air for five minutes, setting some record, and a picture is taken of it, it's always there:
based on a design by Wilhelm Bretfeld
. He's world renowned, Bretfeld. And he was standing in the field behind our house last summer and showed me how to do it. A really good teacher. Though I never noticed it in elementary school.

In any event, I spent the entire summer break sitting in the basement whittling. And it was a great summer break, much better than going somewhere on vacation. My parents were almost never home. My father drove around from creditor to creditor and my mother was at the beauty farm. And that's what I wrote the assignment about:
Mother and the Beauty Farm
, a word prompt story by Mike Klingenberg.

The next class, I got to read it aloud. Or I had to. I didn't want to. Svenja was first up, and she had written one of those nonsense stories about the Côte d'Azur, which Schuermann thought was great. Then Kevin read basically the same story except that instead of the Côte d'Azur it was the Baltic coast. Then it was my turn. Mother at the beauty farm. It's not really a beauty farm. Though my mother does always look better when she comes back from it. It's actually a clinic. She's an alcoholic. She's drunk booze for as long as I can remember, but the difference is that it used to be funnier. Everyone is normally funny when they drink, but when a certain line is crossed people get tired or aggressive. And when my mother started walking around our place with a kitchen knife again, I was standing upstairs with my father as he called down, “How about another trip to the beauty farm?” That's how the summer started at the end of sixth grade.

I like my mother. I have to add that, because what I'm about to say might not cast her in the best light. But I always liked her, and still do. She's not like other moms. That's what I've always liked best about her. She can be really funny, for instance, and you can't say that about most mothers. Calling the clinic the beauty farm was one of her jokes.

My mother used to play a lot of tennis. My father too, but not very well. The ace in our family was my mother. When she was still in shape, she won the tennis club championship every year. She even won it with a bottle of vodka in her system, but that's another story. Anyway, as a kid I was always at the courts with her. My mother sat on the terrace at the tennis club and drank cocktails with Frau Weber and Frau Osterthun and Herr Schuback and the rest of them. And I sat under the table and played with Matchbox cars as the sun shone down. In my mind the sun was always shining at the tennis club. I looked at the red clay dust on five sets of white tennis shoes and collected bottle caps — you could draw on the insides of the caps with a ballpoint pen. I was allowed to have five ice creams a day and ten cans of Coke and could just tell the waiter to add it to our tab. And then Frau Weber said, “Next week at seven again, Frau Klingenberg?”

And my mother: “Sure.”

And Frau Weber: “I'll bring the balls next time.”

My mother: “Sure.”

And so on and so forth. Always the same conversation. Though the joke was that Frau Weber never brought balls — she was too cheap.

Once in a while there was another version. It went like this:

“Again next Saturday, Frau Klingenberg?”

“Can't do it. I'll be away.”

“But doesn't your husband's team have a league match?”

“Yes, but he's not going to be away. I am.”

“Aha. Where are you going?”

“To the beauty farm.”

And then somebody at the table who didn't know the phrase yet always, always, always, threw out the unbelievably clever quip, “You certainly don't need any help in that department, Frau Klingenberg.”

Then my mother would knock back the rest of her Brandy Alexander and say, “That was only a joke, Herr Schuback. It's actually a rehab facility.”

Then we would walk home hand in hand because my mother was no longer capable of driving. I carried her heavy racquet bag and she said to me, “You can't learn much from your mother. But two things you can learn: First, you can talk about anything. Second, what people think doesn't mean shit.” That was enlightening. Talk openly. Screw what other people think.

My doubts crept in only later. Not doubts about the ideas in principle. But doubts about whether my mother really didn't care what other people thought.

Anyway, the beauty farm. I don't know exactly what went on there. Because I was never allowed to visit my mother. She didn't want me to. But whenever she came home from the place she told the craziest stories. The therapy apparently consisted of talking a lot and not drinking. And sometimes exercise as well. But most of them couldn't really do much exercise. For the most part they talked while tossing a ball of yarn around in a circle. The person allowed to speak was the person with the ball of yarn. I had to ask about the ball of yarn five times because I wasn't sure whether I'd heard it right or whether maybe it was a joke. But it was no joke. My mother didn't think this detail was so funny or fascinating, but to be honest I found it incredibly fascinating. Just try to imagine it: ten adults sitting in a circle and throwing a ball of yarn around. Afterward, the entire room was full of yarn, but that wasn't the point of the whole thing, even if it's fair to think so at first. The point was to create a
web of communication
. Which tells you that my mother wasn't the craziest person in the place. There must have been considerably crazier ones too.

But anyone who thinks the ball of yarn must be the strangest thing at the clinic hasn't heard about the cardboard boxes. Every patient had a cardboard box. It hung from the ceiling in each room, with the open side facing up. You had to throw notes into the box, basketball style. Notes where you wrote your aspirations, wishes, resolutions, prayers, or whatever. Whenever my mother wished for something, made a resolution, or scolded herself, she wrote it down on a piece of paper, folded it up, and then basically did a Dirk Nowitzki and slam-dunked it in the cardboard box. And the insane thing about it was that nobody ever read them. That wasn't the point. The point was just writing it down so it was there and you could see it —
my desires and wishes and all that crap are hanging right there in that box
. And because the cardboard boxes were so important, you had to give them names. The name was written on the box with a felt-tip marker, so basically every drunkard had a box named “God” hanging from the ceiling with all his or her aspirations inside it. Because most people just called their box God. That's what the therapists suggested — just call it God. But you were allowed to call it whatever you wanted. Some old lady called hers “Osiris” and somebody else “Great Spirit.”

My mother named her box “Karl-Heinz,” and as a result a therapist came and peppered her with questions. The first thing he wanted to know was whether it was her father. “Who?” she asked, and the therapist pointed at the box hanging from the ceiling. My mother shook her head. Then the therapist asked just who he was, this Karl-Heinz. And my mother said, “That cardboard box.” So then the therapist asked what the name of her father was. “Gottlieb,” she said, to which the therapist said, “Aha!” It was supposed to sound clever, as if the therapist had just figured something out. Gottlieb, aha! My mother had no idea what the therapist had figured out, and he never said. And that's the way it went the entire time. They all tried like crazy to act as if they had things figured out, but they never gave away what they knew. When my father heard about it — the thing with the cardboard box — he nearly fell out of his chair laughing. He kept saying, “My God that's sad,” though he was laughing. So I had to laugh too, and my mother decided it was funny as well, at least in retrospect.

And I put all of that into my school essay. And in order to get the word “rescue” in, I added the scene with the kitchen knife. And since I was on a roll, I even added a bit about how she mistook me for my father when she came down the stairs one morning. It was the longest assignment I'd ever written — at least eight pages long — and still I could have written a Part Two, a Part Three, and a Part Four if I'd felt like it. Though as I found out, Part One was more than enough.

The class totally lost it while I was reading it aloud. Schuermann told everyone to quiet down and then said, “Nice, very nice. How much longer is it? Still so much to go? That'll do for now, I'd say.” I didn't have to read the rest. Schuermann had me stay after class so he could read the rest of it on his own, and I stood there next to him feeling very proud — first because it had been such a success and second because Schuermann wanted to read the whole thing personally. Mike Klingenberg, author. And then Schuermann closed the notebook I'd written my assignment in and shook his head. I took it as an appreciative shake of the head, the kind that signals,
How can a sixth grader write such an incredibly great essay?
But then he said, “Why are you grinning like an idiot? Do you think this is funny?” And it slowly dawned on me that it hadn't been such a success after all. At least not as far as Schuermann was concerned.

He got up from his desk, walked over to the window, and stood there looking out at the schoolyard. “Mike,” he said, turning around again to face me. “That's your
mother
. Did you ever stop to think about that?”

Obviously I'd made a huge mistake. I just didn't know what it was. But it was clear from Schuermann's reaction that I'd committed an absolutely massive error with my assignment. And that he thought it was the most embarrassing essay the world had ever witnessed. But I couldn't figure out why this was the case — he never said, and to be honest I don't know why to this day. He just kept repeating that it was my
mother
, until he suddenly started getting very loud and said my assignment was the most sickening, unsavory, and shameless one he'd encountered in fifteen years of teaching — blah, blah, blah — and that I should immediately rip the pages out of my notebook. I was totally devastated, and of course I reached straight for my notebook, like a moron, to rip out the pages. But Schuermann grabbed my hand and shouted, “I don't mean literally rip it out. Don't you understand anything? What you need to do is think hard about what you've done. Really think!” I thought for a minute about it, but to be honest I just didn't get it. I still don't get it. I mean, it's not as if I made any of it up or anything.