Auslanders Raus!                                      by Steve Kostecke                                                     [Foreigners Out!] The summer of eighty-nine I was living in a cubicle in a grunged-out basement a few blocks north of the University of Michigan main campus. In this cubicle I slept on the floor. There was a thin red carpet on this floor, but no padding, and I softened it with a sleeping bag unzipped and spread out on the rectangular area be-tween my dresser, my desk, my small couch, and my row of books in milk crates. Sleeping on the floor each night in this style was fine with me. I liked the floor. The floor was good. The way I saw it, a bed was an unnecessary luxury and could be done without. I was living in this cubicle because of the cost. $120 per month--which, as things went in Ann Arbor, was a very good price for having your own room near campus. But being scrunched into that little box as I was, with the walls slowly crushing in, had its effect on me. By the beginning of summer, a dreaded angsht set in. This dreaded angsht was due (in part) to those walls, but mostly due to the failure and consequent break-up of an eight-month relationship. She, the ex-girlfriend, quickly found someone new while I, the possessor of dreaded angsht, felt the walls crush me further. Aggravating this situation even more was the fact that I had just graduated with a BA in English from the "Harvard of the Midwest" yet had absolutely no future. I had the same variety of job opportunities available as I had had before willingly stepping into the higher education grinding machine. To prove this point I took a job as an entrance attendant at the university hospital. I assisted people who needed assistance and made certain there was always a nice row of available wheelchairs out front between the two automatic doors. A fellow attendant soon became my best friend that summer--a frizzy-haired thrasher in a local heavy metal band. He, the thrasher, had recently halted his lithium ingestions, I soon came to learn. By the end of summer I felt on route to lithium myself, or worse, since I was so clearly capable of perceiving the long stretch of nothingness ahead of me. I needed to do something drastic. A friend since fifth grade, Joe, was stationed in Stuttgart. He did not live on bar-racks; he had an apartment in Ludwigsburg, north of Stuttgart, which he cohabi-tated with his German wife, Kat. I had met Kat the previous Christmas when she and Joe visited the States to get married. To my amazement, she was a blond bombshell, in possession of genetically-superior Germanic babe-genes. How Joe had scored her was beyond me. He did tip me off, though, that in Europe he had gotten laid like crazy, whereas in the States the girls were so prissy and uptight it was ridiculous. An absence of deep-rooted and inherently perverse Puritanism ex-isted over there in that sophisticated continent. To illustrate this point: whenever Joe went to the public pool accompanied by Kat and her equally genetically-superior babe-gene'd friends, the girls all unstrung their bikini tops and exposed their breasts to the radiance of the sun like the natural act it should be. I bought a one-way ticket to West Germany. Joe had been ordered to go into the forest and play army the week I arrived. So Kat, his babe-gene'd wife, had the honors of picking me up at the airport and en-tertaining me a couple days solo. In the car after I arrived I discovered that Kat was what could be described as an offensive driver. She seemed to be in a race to get back to her apartment. And whenever she was prevented in her onward aggressions, terms like sheisse spilt from her lips. "You don't have to go so fast," I told her: "There's no rush." Though Kat did not reply verbally to this, I sensed an explosion rip through her innards. An explosion I had detonated. I immediately realized: this girl is a stick of dynamite, and I know nothing about handling such sticks. In an effort to find common ground, and defuse any further bursts, I asked Kat if she was into Schopenhauer or Nietszche, which I was at the time. I thought this inquiry innocuous enough, but she shot back at me with: "You like that shit?" The development of a lose-lose situation began to dawn on me. That night, after a bistro and few beers, Kat and I talked in the living room. I had earlier informed her that my plan was to find a job and my own apartment as soon as could be accomplished. I was expecting the classified ads sections in the Stutt-gart newspapers to be the same as in the States--packed with employment oppor-tunities and immediately available dwellings. Kat now thought it the appropriate time to set me straight. She informed me that there was, in fact, a horrible housing shortage in Western Germany, with at least a two-year wait for apartment open-ings. I could not believe this. Kat insisted. She told me to look in any newspaper, and a housing section would not be found. Her country, she explained, was already packed enough with Germans, let alone the overabundance of Turks who had come to Germany forty years ago to labor cheaply for the rebuilding of the country after the war. Kat explained that this housing shortage--caused so much by continual migration to West Germany by peoples of non-Germanic origins--provided the justification for current neo-Nazi movements. After spending an uneasy morning and afternoon the next day with Kat, Joe re-turned from his stint of army-playing in the early evening. What a relief. In search of dinner, the three of us drove to the base where Joe worked. My pre-conceived notion of what an American army base would be like was totally wrong. It was not Spartan. It abounded, in actuality, with everything an overseas American might desire. The barracks were apartment buildings. There was a large grocery store stocked with American goods, items reduced by approximately 30% from their cost in the States. There was a liquor store with goods similarly reduced. There was also a mall containing the very essentials of American mall culture: a pizza restaurant, a movie theater, fast food places, clothing shops, and even a bowling alley. It was a mini American city within the realm of a foreign country. Next day at the job placement office, I was informed that my tourist status gave me only one option for employment on the base: the Burger King. Due to how difficult it was to secure and retain workers for this fast food chain, the cabal ruling the barracks put in force the stipulation that Americans with tourist status had to commence their employment on base at the Burger King for three months, thereafter able to upgrade their daily labor to other positions within the shopping mall complex. That night I patronized a Ludwigsburg bistro with Joe and one of his army bud-dies, a black sergeant. Sarge was cool. He kept the command persona on base. Here among the three of us, we were simply three regular American joes hanging out and getting ripped. Me: too ripped. Sarge took pleasure in handing me shots of ouzo even though I did not truly know what ouzo was but liked for some reason the bitter taste of black licorice. While the three of us drank and chattered, my ouzo mixed with my beer, and I blacked out. Swirling back into consciousness, I discovered myself on the guest room bed. I was in agonizing pain. To combat this, I forced myself up and stumbled into the kitchen to obtain a large portion of water. I barged in on Kat, who was in the proc-ess of taking a very peaceful sip of tea. At my appearance she nearly spit that sip back into her cup. "What happened last night?" I asked and opened the fridge. Kat responded very calmly: "You don't want to know." I grabbed a bottle of water, took what she said in a barely coherent fashion, and limped back into the spare room. Due to the extreme pain, I was not able to fall back into blissful sleep. I had to suffer. To pass this torturous time, I strived to bring to light any undeleted images from the night before. I got as far as my fourth or fifth shot of ouzo, but that was all. I knew that Kat and the Sarge's wife were supposed to join us but had no memory of them. Joe walked into the room and solemnly sat on a chair next to the bed. "Dude," he said, in an undertone, "last night was too much." "What happened?" I asked. Joe looked at me blank. I told him: "I can't remember a thing after you, me, and Sarge downed all that ouzo." "You can't remember anything?" Joe asked in disbelief. "No." "You mean you don't remember when Kat came to the bistro?" "Did she?" "Dude, you don't remember calling her bitch and downing her drink and her slap-ping you in the face?" "No, I don't," I confessed. Joe looked at me in amazement. "And you don't remember throwing up all over our living room?" "My god. Did I?" Joe left me in the room with my new inner pain and dreaded angsht-ridden thoughts for the next couple hours. I heard muffled voices from the living room. Joe entered back into the room and, after lugubriously retaking his seat, informed me that I could no longer stay here. I could not even wait until he left to play army in the forest in a couple days: I had to be gone tonight. It was his wife, he ex-plained, as if the explanation were needed. The Fire Goddess had to be appeased. I made clear how incapable I was of lifting my lead-filled head off the pillow. If I were right now forced to arise and leave, I would only collapse into a contorted mass on the sidewalk in front of their apartment building. I could easily be gone if this could all wait till the following morning. Joe exited the room for a moment to confer with his wife. She gave a reluctant okay. Next morning Kat barricaded herself into her bedroom while Joe helped me out of the apartment with my duffel bag. He drove me to the nearest suburban rail station and told me to call and let him know how everything turned out. I said okay. I got out of the car and yanked out my bag. Joe drove away. I was now way on my own. Stuttgart, gigantic city that it was, had only one youth hostel. I took the train to the main bahnhof and asked at the information booth where it was located. I had never stayed at a hostel before but had heard many stories from people at the Uni-versity of Michigan who had backpacked through Europe. They all spoke of their experiences with such a pretentious romanticism, as if they had already achieved the ultimate in life. And this was where they stayed: at these cheap hostels, eight bodies to a room, communal showers and meals. I checked in then set off for my job interview at Burger King. A manager took me back to the employee break room. I showed him a recommendation from my entrance attendant job. He read it and nodded. Then I showed him my diploma. He smirked. All I had to do now was fill out some forms and bring them to an orienta-tion meeting for new mall employees tomorrow. I returned to the hostel in the early evening, well aware that I was about to expe-rience a rite of passage. My entrance into backpacker culture. I opened the dorm room door. On two bottom bunks I find two guys speaking in English together. They stop and ask: "Where are you coming from?" Perhaps I am supposed to give the name of a palace or festival or something else relevant to backpacker coolness and culture, but instead I blurt out: "I just got a job at Burger King!" Next morning I attend the orientation meeting for new employees. The woman in charge is a bit wary of me because I put no local address or telephone number on my personal information sheet. "I'll have that info for you soon," I tell her. She lets me pass. I meander towards Burger King--wondering if I should actually go through with this, then realizing that I have to--and am immediately given a tight maroon t-shirt and greasy cap. I put these on and am placed at the burger-making counter. How the routine works, I first place frozen burger patties into a patty-cooking machine with a slowly rotating treadmill grill. The burgers are carried through this machine where, as the commercials always tout, the patties are "flame-broiled". They come out the other end of the machine dripping with gunk and grease, fully cooked. It is revolting. With tongs I take these patties and place them inside of buns and set these patties-in-buns in a steamer bin to keep them warm while I prepare other burgers. Burger King's motto is "Have it Your Way!"--and seemingly every person that walks into the restaurant wants it his or her own special way. Nobody ever orders a regular Whopper. They each have a culinary preference for their polluteful discs of grease and gunk. On a screen above the counter their requests appear. WHOPPER NO ONIONS DOUBLE CHEESE. WHOPPER EXTRA PICKLES. WHOPPER NO KETCHUP NO ONIONS NO PICKLES EXTRA TOMATOES. WHOPPER PICKLES TOMATOES MUSTARD ONLY. WHOPPER THREE PATTIES. WHOPPER WITH BACON AND CHEESE BETWEEN PATTIES. WHOPPER NO PATTY ("vegetarian Whopper"). I crank these delicacies out and punch a large metallic button beneath the screen in order to clear the uppermost items off the list. The flow of soldiers and their dependents never seems to stop. The line nearly runs out the door. Next day I return to Burger King under the presumption that I will be creating Whoppers again. Instead I am given a mop. I spend the next several days cleaning the floors, the dining booths, the men's bathroom, and emptying the trash into a dumpster. I am given a name tag with the name Chris still on it. I tell the managers it is fine. I want to be Chris. I would rather be Chris. Chris Who Mops Up At Burger King. While mopping the floor around the dining tables one afternoon, I notice a blond burst in my periphery. It is Kat. She is eating at a table with a female friend. We are both shocked at this impromptu encounter. I am sure she had expected me to be working somewhere in back of the counter--not out here, performing the lowliest of Burger King duties. For some odd reason she acts polite to me. She says that she has come here in order to see if I am still alive. I tell her I am, but as Chris. At the Stuttgart youth hostel I converse with backpackers from a number of coun-tries. Netherlanders, Englanders, Americans, Italians, Germans, Japanese, Canadi-ans, Australians, South Africans, even a Thai girl. I learn from them the common anecdotes of the European traveler (phony Euro-rail Passes can be obtained; sleepers on trains in Spain/Italy will be robbed by Gypsies; more than one person has had passport, money, and tickets stolen while showering at a hostel), plus I become knowledgeable of possible backpacking routes and destinations and where to stay within these destinations. I find myself telling new backpackers I meet that I am working at a Burger King at a nearby American army base until I save enough money to move on towards Cairo where I will room at the Oxford Pension, study the local language, and perhaps deal hash for my livelihood. One morning I wake up at seven and walk out to the lobby to pay for and thereby reserve my bed again for the night. There is a rule at the Stuttgart youth hostel that a guest can only stay for five nights in a row. The guy who works at the desk has so far let me by-pass this limit. This morning, however--ten days after I first set foot into my room--the desk clerk tells me that I cannot get a bed here for this night. I ask him why. He says that 210 reservations have already been made by a group of German teenagers on a school trip. I do not believe it. Perhaps this is, I surmise, his way of telling me that I have overstayed my welcome. The clerk, sensing my doubt, points towards a sign on the hostel door. It has been there since the day before (though I had not noticed) and states clearly that all rooms are for one night only. I have no idea what to do now. I check out of the hostel and lug my duffel bag to Robinson Barracks. The head manager at Burger King, Mr. G, has been very open towards me since I started. He is just a few years older than me, from upstate New York, and living in a suburb of Stuttgart with his wife who also works on base. I explain to him my situation for the night. He already knows why I am not staying with Joe and tells me once again that my buddy's wife is a bitch and the source of all my problems. I slowly nod my head not fully in agreement. Then Mr. G surprisingly offers me the chance to stay at his house starting tonight through the next two weeks. He makes clear, however, they cannot put me up longer than that due to the head of mall security at Robinson Barracks living in the house directly behind them. It is against base policy for managers to allow their employees to stay with them. Whether or not this is actually true--the head of security living behind Mr. G, or the policy just stated--I do not care. Mr. G draws a map to explain how to get to his house in the hamlet of Hop-figheim. After my shift I journey there. Mr. and Mrs. G show me to their guest room and let me unpack. The room is much larger and more well-furnished than Joe's, with a full-sized bed. I take the cover off this bed and spread it on the carpeted floor. Mr. and Mrs. G walk back into the room and stare at the bedcover with pillow established on the floor at the foot of this spare bed. They look at me queerly. I tell them that the floor is good. One eve Mr. G and I drive to a Hopfigheim bistro and drink several steins of Ger-man wheat brew. He reveals to me that he and his wife have been hiding down in the basement each night taking puffs of hash out of fear of freaking me out. This is a laugh. I tell him I have been smoking pot since I was seventeen. After this revelation, the three of us spend our nights sitting in the living to-gether, gulping beer and smoking hash while watching the Armed Forces Network. The hash is potent, and mixed with the weizen beer it makes my brain reel. "You know why we put you up?" Mr. G asks me one of these spacey eves. I ask why. "Because what goes around comes around. We do this good thing for you now, and later some good thing will happen to us. That's exactly how it all works." In my stoned state of mind I suddenly perceive the interconnectedness of all hu-man actions--the karma with which this earthly realm is imbued--and I perceive that I am a causation of the absorption of good karma in others, which results, ulti-mately, in the absorption of good karma within my self. I am a vehicle through which positive cosmic energy flows. The two weeks at Mr. and Mrs. G's residence ends. They have to boot me out, they say, because of the head of mall security living directly behind them. If their neighbor sees me, Mr. G could lose his job. Or so the story goes. I load my duffel bag into Mr. G's car and get driven to the base. "You know what you should do?" Mr. G says on route. I ask what. "Get a tent and camp out some-where cheap. It's as easy as that." But camp out where, I ask myself. And where would I shower. And would it be safe. Plus the cold weather is coming. I work my shift then dash toward downtown Stuttgart to the youth hostel. As long as two hundred German teenagers have not reserved each and every bed, I have a very good chance of obtaining one for myself. But, to my amazement, they have. I am again informed that not only every bed in the Stuttgart hostel but also in the two hostels in suburbs of Stuttgart (both of which I had never looked into) were booked solid for the week due to a festival and an international student tennis tour-nament. I stand perplexed a few moments in the lobby. I happen to hear a few guys speaking English. They too have no place to stay now in Stuttgart. I ask them what they will do. "Well we've got tents," one of them tells me. "We're going to make use of a nearby park. You're free to join us--if you've got your own tent." That is twice today with the tent motif. Something is definitely happening deep within the fabric of the myth-story. I take the suburban rail to Ludwigsburg. I walk to Joe's apartment building and call him from a public phone at the corner. "Sorry to bug you, but I can't get a bed at the youth hostel and have absolutely no place to sleep tonight. Tomorrow night I'll have something arranged. So tell Kat it's just for one night." Joe--buddy of mine since fifth grade, and Appeaser of the Fire Goddess--talks to Kat. She acqui-esces. The two of us, though--Kat and myself--must remain in different rooms for the night. This is more than fine with me. I tell Joe I will merely shower and hit the sack and be gone early next morning. That works, he says. Then he asks how long it will take me to get to his place from wherever I'm at. I tell him approximately fifteen seconds. He laughs... [final half in Slush Pile #3] Buy it!