The following story is my recollection of events from the fall of 1990 to the summer of 1993 , the chance meeting that changed my life and allowed to me to find strength in myself.  I don’t know how many posts this will be or how long it will take me to get through it all.   I would like to think that I could get through them one after another, but I might drop out for a while as some of the memories come back to me.

Saturday nights seem like a good time to write, but who knows…

This is all inspired by a group of three people, all bloggers, who have all made me take a step back and look at the part of my life that really brought me to where I am today.   Not the years of being a victim at the hands of the people I loved and trusted, but at the time of my life when I became accountable to myself and found a way to bury all of the pain. 

I’d like to think that I would move right into Part Two after this, but I have responsibilities…of course.

After coming out of the rain following a cancelled football practice, I opened the small, but heavy wooden door so the three other large Europeans could get through for their usual six to ten beers.  I sat down at the bar while the others threw their jackets over the stools and joined another member of the team at the Foosball table.

Sitting next to me at the bar was a small-ish Indonesian man.   He looked to be in his 50s and was finishing a cigarette and staring into his brandy sifter.  

Without looking up, he finished his drink and waved the glass to the young gel-haired bartender who turned to the wall and retrieved the bottle of what the tired looking man was drinking.  As the bartender poured him a double, the man reached for another cigarette, but the pack was empty.

Being in foreigner in Germany for almost a year, I knew enough to always carry cigarettes with me.   Whenever I found myself in an awkward situation where communication was difficult and frustrating, a cigarette seemed to always have the ability to break through most language barriers.    Although I didn’t actually smoke, I was sometimes forced to put away an odd cigarette with a foreigner during the confusion.

Pulling the unopened hard pack of Camels out of the breast pocket of my jacket,   I patted the box against my leg to pack the tobacco into the filtered end of the cigarette, removed the wrapper and foil from the inside of the box and silently offered the Indonesian man a cigarette.   He took the cigarette from the box without touching the box or another cigarette.  It felt like he willed the cigarette from the box itself.  I would not have known that actually had one, except he was already taking a drag from it while I was sitting there looking at the hole in the box where the cigarette used to be resting.

He finished the brandy and the cigarette at the same time, left two 5-mark pieces on the bar, looked confidently in my eyes, nodded to me as he slid past and walked into the night.

“Vieil homme idiot!”  whispered the bartender under his breath.

I had only been in Germany for about nine months, but I had absorbed enough German to know that was not impressed with the intellectual capabilities of this “old man”. 

This hole-in-the-wall bar was a place the members of the semi-pro American Football team I coached and played for in this small town frequented nightly and I accompanied them occasionally since my actual job was with the Department of Defense and more specifically, the U.S. Army.  I was a satellite/tropospheric communications specialist handling digital traffic to and from Berlin.  This small town was nestled on the border of the former East Germany and West Germany and this town had been flooded with Germans from the East since the borders were opened about a year earlier.

This bartender was one of those “Easties”

The bartender, like every German under 25, had about ten years of English in school, so I asked him this “old guy’s” story.

“I don’t know,”  said the bartender in his thick eastern European accent, “he come in every night at..er… zwanzig Uhr (8pm) has two cigarette und two glass weinbrand, leaves two funf-mark stucke and leaves…vieil homme idiot.”

There was no way that I could have known how drastically my life was going to change after a cancelled football practice that put us at this ”dive” two hours early and a chance, but brief, encounter with a stranger.

I ordered a round of beer for myself and the four members of the team.  As the bartender delivered the tray, I threw them the pack of the much stronger American cigarettes that they so coveted…except for the four that I Ieft for the bartender.

Part Two to follow.