The seeds for my risk-taking, and frenetic adulthood were planted when I was just a toddler, living in a foster home on the outskirts of Manassas, Virginia. My father, who had grown up in Berlin under Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime immigrated to the United States in 1953 and married my natural mother several years later. She, an American, gave birth to my sister in 1959 and to yours truly in 1962—shortly before she was committed to a mental institution.

           In an effort to regain his footing and create a stable home for our future, my father placed my sister and me in an orphanage, until we were transferred to a foster home when I was two.

           My foster parents, who had four children of their own, cared for an additional seven to ten transient foster kids at any given time. Short on patience and long on corporal punishment, my foster father often resorted to belt whippings, followed by long stints in the corner as his preferred method for doling out disciplinary action.
For most of my three-year tenure, I was one of the youngest and smallest on the totem pole; as such, I was faced with a lot of physical abuse and sporadically molested by the older boys. As a result, I quickly learned two unwritten rules: first, it was impossible for anyone to monitor everything and everyone at all times; and, second, tattling was not a solution—to our foster parents, tattling was as bad as committing the crime itself. That knowledge led me into my first no-win situations, where life became survival of the fiercest.

           Since indoors was pretty much off-limits except during meals and after sunset, the majority of our time was spent outside. The estate, which included a hundred year old farm house that had a wood-burning stove and a single bathroom, had plenty of acreage on which to get into trouble, a fact that I knew all too well because the teenaged kids would often chase me down and drag me into the old barn or the evergreen woods—that’s where they would sexually molest me or physically torture me.

           My most vivid memory of being physically abused is an instance in which I was held against my will while the older boys who smoked cigarettes flicked embers on my body. Restrained by my arms and legs, the inability to escape the excruciating pain produced a soaking sweat, which caused the embers to sizzle into ash before they could burn a hole through my skin. In a valiant attempt to prove my machismo, I held back any tears—until one day, when I had a cigarette snuffed out on my face. I was reminded of that particular incident every time I looked in a mirror for the rest of my childhood—as it left a perfectly shaped cylindrical scar below my right eye that wouldn’t fade until my teenaged years.

           The pain and the ensuing rage from being physically abused was nothing however, compared to the paralyzing fear and anxiety over whom I would have to bathe with in the evenings. With only one bathroom—located off the kitchen where the wood-burning stove and picnic table were also located—we had to share a single tub of water and pair up two at a time. As the little man on the totem pole, by the time it was my turn, the water—topped with a thick layer of soap scum and pubic hairs—was so rancid, at times it looked like a septic tank. Adding insult to injury, the other half of my pair was usually an older boy—entrusted with my care—that would invariably molest me.

           In the heat of summer, we would spend our days hanging out in the apple tree in the front yard where we tortured slugs and ate sour apples—at least those that were not infested with worms. Although we had a fresh-water well, we were prohibited from hanging around it. Besides, I was too tiny to pump it fast enough to get it flowing. Even though our foster mother would supply us with Kool-Aid and ice-tea, it never quenched my thirst or sufficiently hydrated me. I remember being so thirsty one scorching afternoon, that I used the excuse of needing to go potty just so I could sneak a few sips of water. At the time, I was too short to reach the bathroom sink since my fingertips could barely reach the spigot. So, I grabbed the soap tray that was sitting on the edge, scrubbed off the scum, flushed the toilet, and scooped some much needed water to quench my thirst.

           As luck would have it though, my foster mother caught me red-handed. Oddly, instead of rewarding my ingenuity or showing concern over my state of dehydration, she punished me. She filled a potato pot full of water, sat me down at the kitchen picnic table, and said, “Drink.” I was only too happy to oblige her until she forced me to keep drinking long after I was full. “Drink some more!” she said. “I can’t—my tummy wants to pop,” I replied. When I couldn’t hold another drop, I puked on the red and white vinyl tablecloth; from there, it oozed to the edge and dripped to the floor.

           “Lick it up!” she insisted. Thinking she wasn’t serious, I refused. “I said, eat it!” she commanded more emphatically. Pouting, I replied, “I can’t. I don’t want to eat it.” She then placed her hand on the back of my head and forced me to lick it up. I ate what I could until I hurled again from the stench of consuming my own vomit.

           Experiencing such intense emotions: anger, guilt, shame, abandonment, humiliation, and despair as a toddler just increased my threshold for pain and forced me to persevere at a very early age. The abuse also created a torrent of anger and rage that gave rise to a tsunami of defiance and rebellion, which, in addition to shaping my character, I sublimated into the rocket fuel that drove my intense desire for autonomy and my entrepreneurial aspirations.

           In fact, I was already exhibiting a proclivity toward risk-taking behavior in foster care. For example, perched on top of the old china cabinet one day was a bowl of malted milk balls. I was already tormented that night over the fact that I wasn’t allowed to have any—punishment for some sort of bad behavior—when another of the kids dared me to sneak downstairs and grab a handful. Never one to back down from a challenge—even at that age, I gingerly tiptoed down the rickety staircase and held my breath as I walked right past the bedroom door of my foster parents.

           In the kitchen, I placed a chair at the base of the cabinet, stepped up onto it, and reached for that bowl—not unlike the bathroom sink, however, I had to stretch my four-foot, forty-pound frame to its limits—and, just as I felt those mouth-watering chocolate morsels of malt right at my fingertips, my worst nightmare came true. The chair fell out from under me, and faster than I could say, “Uh-oh,” I found myself sprawled out on the linoleum floor and surrounded by chocolate malt balls. Knowing my impending fate wouldn’t be good, I just laid there stuffing my little cheeks faster than a chipmunk about to go on a hunger strike. But, before I could even swallow them, I found myself back on the chair, only this time I was draped across my foster mother’s lap, receiving a drubbing that would have made a piñata cringe. To add insult to injury, the next day I was relegated to the corner. Only, the corner I was sent to was the same china cabinet that stood against the kitchen wall. As I nuzzled my little nose in the one-inch crack, caught in a maze of cobwebs and other debris were a couple of those malted milk balls that had rolled off the top of the cabinet the night before. Just beyond the tip of my tongue, all I could do was salivate.

           My saving grace during those topsy-turvy years was my father. Little did he know that it was his two-hour visitations every second Saturday that served to replenish my source of strength and hope. On those mornings, I woke up at the crack of dawn and sat on the porch swing that faced the country road he would travel down. I knew my father wasn’t due until noon, but like a child eagerly waiting for the ice cream man, I kept swinging until I heard the sound of that 1963 Volkswagen Bug making its way down the long dirt road.

           I could hear it coming from a mile away—that’s how eager and finely tuned my ears were to the distinct sound of that rotary engine. When I saw the white curved dome just over the horizon, I jumped for joy—bigger than life itself he was, my father, my knight in shining armor, coming to take me away for his allotted two hours. He usually took my sister and I into old town Manassas or Bull Run where we would fly kites and propeller airplanes. Whereas two hours felt like two days for most of my time in foster care . . . that was the only time that two hours felt like two minutes. In fact, knowing it would be another two weeks before I saw my father again—a time table set by Virginia state law and social services, every time we made the final turn onto the dirt road that led back to the old country farm house, tears would stream down my face as I begged and pleaded with my father not to drop me off. “Please, Daddy . . . please, don’t leave me here. I’ll be good, I promise,” I would often tell him before exiting the car. My assumption at that age was that I must have done something terribly wrong to be thrust into an abusive environment where my father would leave me for another two weeks. When he brought me into the house, as a show of deceptive compassion, the same older kids who beat me and molested me would often barrage me with hugs and kisses. “It’s okay Kevin,” they would often say, followed by something like, “I’ll play a game or watch TV with you after your father leaves.” Not a second after he walked out than I would press my little face and hands firmly against the screen door and scream, “Don’t leave me Daddy, please don’t leave me!” Like clockwork, just as soon as he was out of sight their demeanor quickly changed from compassion to antagonism.

           My most memorable birthday during that time was my fourth. Just the day before, my sister had reminded me that my birthday was the following day. Since it would be Saturday, I anticipated having hotcakes for breakfast instead of the usual cold cereal during the week. When I woke up the next morning, I quickly changed out of my urine soaked pajamas and scurried to the kitchen. Only instead of having hot cakes, it was another morning of puffed rice cereal with powdered milk. Far from Kellogg’s Super Sugar Crisp, it was the tasteless generic kind that came stuffed in a huge plastic bag with a twisty tie at the top. Low on powdered milk that morning my foster mother recycled what was left in the bowls of the kids who ate the picnic table before me. Sometimes when there was no powdered milk at all, we ate cereal with plain well water. Hoping to receive a piece of birthday cake and a toy of some sort—that was the norm for the foster kids—I became increasingly bummed as the day wore on. To make matters worse, someone lifted the access hatch to the basement and coaxed me into climbing down into the pitch-black hole where my birthday cake was supposedly sitting. As I did, he slammed the hatch closed. I couldn’t see a thing and all I could smell was that musty, clay dirt. Unable to locate the string that turned on a small light bulb, I started to panic as I envisioned snakes and bats about to attack me. When he finally opened it back up, I was so freaked out it triggered an asthma attack—I had chronic asthma until I was ten— as I wailed on the bigger kid with everything I had. Only instead of punishing him, because I was caught throwing a temper tantrum and punching the snot out of a bigger kid, after being treated for my asthma attack, I got a belt lashing and was sent to bed early for the rest of the night—no birthday cake, no gift, and not even a happy birthday hymn.

           In moments of despair like that, I would often lie in my crib—I slept in a crib until I was four—and pick my nose. If my nostrils were dry, I would peel the paint chips off the old plaster wall that the crib stood against and eat them. Shortly after I was sent to bed, an older boy who had just returned from a church function—my foster parents children and a few of the older foster kids went to church—came in the room chanting, “You’re gonna burn in hell . . . you’re gonna burn in hell.” “What’s hell?” I asked him as I sat up in my crib. “It’s a big fire where you go when you die and you’re gonna burn, burn, burn.” “But I don’t want to burn. Do you want to burn?” I asked him. “I’m saved, so I’m not gonna burn . . . nah . . . nah . . . nah, nah, nah” “How do I get saved?” I asked him. “Jesus has to bring you to Heaven.” “Who is Jesus and where is Heaven,” I asked, as I stood against the crib rail digging for a fresh batch of boogers. “He’s in charge of the whole world and he’s way up in the sky with all the angels and that’s where I’m going too,” he said. “I wanna go there.” I replied. “You can’t because you wet the bed and eat your boogers.” “You do too!” I hollered back. “I do not.” “Yes, you do. You ate your boogers when we watched ‘Tarzan, last night.’” “I did not!” he yelled, as he stormed out of the room. Be it from molestation, physical abuse, taunting, or teasing, I was wrought with rage and anger on a daily basis. That crib was my only place of solitude and where I spent a lot of time reflecting—to the extent that a toddler could—on my life, my surroundings, and even my future. Struggling to make sense out of chaos and confusion, self talk became a ritual at that early age as I would constantly say things like: “When I grow up, I’m going to have a son and I’m going to love him and hug him, and kiss him, and squeeze him. I’m gonna give him brown new toys (I always thought “brand” was brown until I was a teenager) and I’m never gonna hit him or let anyone else grab his wee wee or burn him.” As if God decreed it at that very moment, I would have my only child in 1989, and not once did he ever experience a belt, a switch, a hose, or even a real spanking. Yet, he was a remarkably well behaved child.

           The only thing that soothed my soul during those turbulent years was a wind–up, tick-tock clock that played the same nursery song over and over again. I would rewind it repeatedly until my heartbeat slowed to the rhythm of the nursery song and I was eventually lulled to sleep. Later that same night, my sister, Claudia, came into my room and gave me her Teddy Bear as a birthday present. My father had given it to her for her birthday just a few months earlier. I named him Andy and he’s been with me ever since. He’s one of those European Teddy Bears that burrs when you tilt him backwards. In his old age he’s developed pulmonary disease and now his burrs sound more like he’s gasping for breath. To say that Andy’s been through some shit both literally and figuratively would be putting it mildly. He’s tolerated everything from field trips, play grounds and show and tell, to colossal colon explosions, bedwetting catastrophes, projectile puking and occasional canine attacks. He’s a trooper to say the least. Not unlike my Jack Russell Terrier, “Miss P”, if he could talk, he could blackmail me for the rest of my life. During my foster home years I was too young to know the difference between a blood sister and a foster sister. All I knew was that Claudia, my real sister, was different from all the other boys and girls in that she always seemed to be the one that came to my rescue whenever she could. Plus, unlike the other children, she called my father Daddy and came with me for those couple of hours every two weeks.

           Although I’ve cast a disparaging light on my foster parents, I hold no animosity, nor am I antipathetic toward them in the least. In fact, I still stay in touch and visit them periodically. On several occasions my sister and I stayed with them after we rejoined my father and new stepmother. Even though I was a chronic bed wetter, they were always willing to keep my sister and me when my father and stepmother vacationed or traveled. The decade of the sixties was tough on many levels: Vietnam, the civil rights movement, the Cold War, etc., etc. That, and the fact that they were extremely young to care for so many foster kids in addition to their own children. I would be remiss not to admit that there were also moments of fleeting joy. Tying a spool of thread to the back legs of a June bug and flying it like a kite was pretty fun, not to mention, hanging out under the mulberry bushes, putting pennies on the train track, and catching fireflies in a jar—they served as a night lamp until they were all dead the next morning. Occasional trips in the back of the truck to Kline’s Freeze were always a special treat. Sometimes my foster mother would break out the big penny jar and send us—pennies in hand—on the mile and a half journey to King’s grocery. There, I would make a beeline straight for the candy isle. Without fail, those over-sized, caramel Sugar Daddies were always stacked on the right-hand corner of the bottom shelf. Knowing those candy trips were few and far between, the challenge was not to give into the temptation of chewing the caramel and swallowing the whole thing. If I wanted to savor it the next day, I sucked on it until it turned gooey and then I smushed the wrapper back on it and stored it in a safe place. The next day, because of the heat and humidity, the wrapper was glued to the caramel and required painstaking patience to rip it off in tiny little slivers. Sometimes the ants beat me to the punch, depending on where I hid it, but that was no deterrent for a kid with a humongous sweet tooth. Still, nothing compared to the joy and happiness I would experience with my Daddy for those two hours every two Saturdays.

           My father was a unique man with an extraordinary story of his own. In fact, he had planned on writing his autobiography before passing away suddenly from an aggressive attack of liver and lung cancer in June 2005. Perhaps he would have received a measure of joy in sharing a small piece of my autobiography. So, with that hope in mind, I dedicate these next few paragraphs to the loving memory of my father.

           When you met Claudius Marbod Lehmann, you never forgot him. He was garrulous and jovial, and he never met a stranger. He left a lasting impression, one that was, at times, bigger than life itself, whether you liked him or not. My father was the only man I knew that, other than myself perhaps, could crawl under your skin at times, yet leave you liking him for the experience. Born in 1935, he grew up in Berlin, came to the States at the age of eighteen, and served as a “brown boot trooper” MP in the army during the last days of brown leather boots, in the 1950s. After that, he became an insurance agent, launching a career that spanned twenty-five years. Following his disability in 1985, from a degenerative spine that would require five surgeries, he developed a new hobby—a hobby that helped me define him as one of the proudest, most patriotic Americans I ever knew. Go figure that a German immigrant would show more respect, reverence, and patriotism for the sovereignty and freedom of the United States than most of our citizens that were born and bred on American soil. For the ten years prior to his death, Dad donned vintage WW II army uniforms and visited the war memorials in Washington, D.C. During those treks, he spoke with senators and congressmen, mounting a one-man crusade for a bill that would provide coverage of all health care related costs for our wounded veterans for life. His program would have provided a “Purple Card,” aptly named after the Purple Heart that is conferred on soldiers who are wounded or killed in combat.

           Although my father fell short of the needed signatures, he led a gallant effort. His attempt to raise money and collect signatures for a WW II memorial proved much more fruitful.

           While wearing historic uniforms on these expeditions, my father often sported a fake wooden pistol in his brown leather holster, a habit that led the Capitol Police and the Secret Service to conduct full-scale investigations into his background. The Washington Post once ran a piece about him and called me to validate his history, his identity, and—his sanity! Making a jest of his disdain for President Bill Clinton, the reporter wittingly asked, “Is this a clever scheme to knock off the president?”

           In fact, my father could have done so on one occasion. Talk about guts, this stunt took some serious cojones! The occasion was a Memorial Day celebration at the Tomb of the Unknowns. Dad showed up early, dressed in complete dress attire—his vintage MP uniform with white helmet, white gloves, and parachute-laced, spit-shined brown leather boots.

           Clinton, who was to lay the traditional wreath at the tomb, was accompanied by various world dignitaries and an A-list of who’s whos—members of his cabinet, Supreme Court justices, congressmen, and senators alike. Because various members of the armed detail assigned to guard duty, along with members of the Capitol Police, knew my father, they assumed that he was part of the ceremony and allowed him to stand smack in the middle of the V.I.P. section. Looking like a vintage WW II dignitary in historic military garb, he socialized with all the justices, with Bill Cohen (then Secretary of Defense), and with Helmut Kohl (then Chancellor of Germany), whom he spoke with at length in German!

           During the wreath-laying ceremony, he was standing front and center as Clinton, after laying the wreath, walked right past him. “President Clinton!” he shouted in a 3-T moment.

           Clinton looked him right in the eyes.

           “The Brown Boot Troopers,” my father announced with a snappy salute. After a cursory acknowledgement, the president then turned his head forward and proceeded to exit the ceremony. It’s one of the few occasions I have my father on video—and I have it thanks to C-Span.

           In reality, my father was a German-speaking lance corporal, who served as a proud MP at Ft. Belvoir, Virginia, during the Korean Conflict. When someone discovered, shortly after that scene, that he was just a regular Joe, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who had been standing right beside him, inquired, “You’re not a war hero?” My father replied, “Oh, no, ma’am. I’m a retired insurance agent with John Hancock. But I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night!”

           When he wasn’t paying his respects to fallen soldiers by placing flowers at the base of a monument or making a rubbing from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall for an out-of-state family member, he loved to give visiting children history lessons, American military history that is, with a particular focus on “the greatest generation.”

           Few people understood or appreciated the underlying reason behind his fastidious, and outspoken, behavior. The reason was based in his respect and appreciation for the freedom of America, the freedom that American liberators had so valiantly given him as a child in Berlin, where he had lived under the tyranny of Nazi repression. The right to free speech and individual expression—be they religious, political, social, or philosophical—were honors and privileges that to be fully appreciated, were to be fully expressed. This was a prevailing belief held not only by my father, but also by many European-Americans of his generation.

           Although we had our philosophical differences as I grew older, and the fact that my father too was physically abusive at times, I nevertheless loved him deeply and unconditionally. After all, he was my father. In a selfless act of compassion, he transitioned from his temporal existence in a moment of solitude, preferring to spare the overwhelming anguish and grief that would consume my mother. True to his character, he remained fiercely independent and somewhat anomalous until his very last breath. Like the song of his beloved Frank Sinatra, he did it his way. If only I could have danced with my father one last time—he passed away one day before my son and I were scheduled to visit him in hospice.

           He may be gone, but far from forgotten by the people whose lives he touched in such a wide myriad of ways. Etched in the annals of my own memories, will be the top of that white Bug, appearing on the horizon of a long dirt road that—not unlike the feelings he experienced, as American GIs tossed him candy in the streets of Berlin—led to the liberation of his son from a different kind of tyranny.

           My wishes eventually came true as my father would remarry a gorgeous German woman, whom he had met while visiting Germany, and pull my sister and I out of foster care and start a new family. But, moving from an overpopulated big old country farmhouse to a tiny air-conditioned apartment in the heart of Alexandria, Virginia, was a culture shock of a different kind. With underdeveloped linguistics and a vernacular all my own, I was still struggling to speak normal English, let alone, German. For the first year, my father had to translate everything my new German mother was saying while my sister had to translate much of what I was saying. Moreover, in contrast to an American foster care environment, European culture with its many formalities proved daunting in other ways.

           But, who was I to complain? Compared to where I had come from, German legalism and Gestapo-style parenting, at times, were a welcome change. After overcoming the language and culture barriers, I entered kindergarten the following year. A few weeks later, I was expelled for rowdy and rambunctious behavior. The following school year, I entered first grade, which I managed to sail through, along with the second, third, and fourth grades. Fifth grade, however, proved much more challenging.

           Having German parents, I had been bombarded with hateful names like “Kraut” and “Nazi” going all the way back to foster care. Now, because of my squared-off bangs and big forehead, I was also referred to as Frankenstein by some of the other school kids. Until then, having come from a foster home where life was about day-to-day survival, I barely knew the differences between cats and dogs, much less anything about different countries and cultures or the fact that my parents were German. To me, they were just “Mommy” and “Daddy.”

           In fifth grade, however, I suddenly understood cultural racism—and when the antagonism rose to the level of calling my father “Adolf Hitler,” I unleashed a fury of retaliation that landed me in the principal’s office. My poor classmates had no idea what they were up against.

           By that time, after nearly six years as an orphan and foster home hostage, I was on a level battlefield, complete with an itchy trigger finger that was just begging to go Rambo. The arsenal inside my pencil box was evidence that, given the right provocation, ballistic retaliation was not a matter of if, but when. That arsenal contained far more than pencil sharpeners, erasers, crayons, rubber bands, and Gumby. It was also equipped with a full complement of straws, ready-to-fire spitballs, tiny razor blades from disassembled pencil sharpeners, rock-hard erasers, rounds of paper clip ammunition, and an assortment of rubber bands, including one howitzer-strength rubber band that I kept on standby for maximum velocity and the infliction of searing pain.

           The type of rubber band I used was determined by whether I would shoot from point-blank range or needed to fall back to sniper range. Likewise, I made two types of paper clip ammunition whose use was dictated by the degree of pain I wanted to inflict. My technique was simply designed, but highly effective: I stretched a rubber band between my thumb and index finger, creating a slingshot, then positioned the paper clip on it, pulled back until it was perfectly taut, and let it rip. Like a camouflaged sniper, I could blend into a crowd of kids at recess and nail my enemies from fifty feet away with pinpoint accuracy.

           For a short-range shot that felt like a snakebite, I folded a paper clip in half, creating in effect, two fangs. For deeper penetration and more excruciating pain, I used the razor blades I extracted from my pencil sharpeners to whittle the prongs into pointed barbs.

           For long-range sniper fire, I used a pair of pliers to shape my heavy-duty paper clips. Instead of bending them end over end, I unfolded the wire to stabilize flight trajectory, creating a sleek, razor-thin fishhook shape that darted through the air at maximum velocity. Getting hit by that bad boy was like being stung by an angry hornet.

           Slurs and defensive strategies aside, the fifth grade was also the time when my gargantuan sweet tooth yielded to unquenchable cravings for cookies, cake, and candy. As it turned out, Germans, thank God, love their sweets and chocolate and, before long, I developed an all-out addiction to sugar. In foster care, I’d had limited access to sweets and been forced to satisfy myself by hanging out in the mulberry and blackberry bushes that grew down by the train tracks, where I often played chicken with the oncoming train.

           Breakfast with my parents, however, in spite of that love for sweets, was a whole different ball game—instead of some sweet and syrupy pastry, like pancakes or waffles, in the early days my mother frequently made another European staple while she packed my lunch box for school: plain bread and butter. Staple or not, a slab of cold, hard butter broken up and plowed across a slice of Wonder bread just wasn’t appetizing to a little kid. So, as I headed for the bus stop, no sooner than I walked out the door, I was rummaging through my Woody Woodpecker lunch box to see what kind of dessert it contained.

           If I had a Twinkie and a banana, they were down the hatch before I even got to the bus stop. By lunchtime, then, I had no sweets—and no trading leverage, since I’d eaten my bartering tools long before I even got to the negotiating table. Sometimes I could trade off my sandwich, provided it was something decent like peanut butter and jelly or egg salad made with Hellmann’s, for cookies or a box of Cracker Jack, but not my Zungenwurst-and-butter sandwich. Zungenwurst is a German blood sausage that incorporates pickled pig’s tongue, cow tongue, ox tongue, suet, oatmeal, and breadcrumbs. Also referred to as blood pudding, the entire concoction is congealed in gelatinous pig’s blood. Yes, I agree: Whatever German butcher came up with that concoction should have been butchered himself and added to his own recipe!

           Sitting at the lunch table one day, I held my sandwich up in an attempt to auction it off. But, with both slices of bread soaked in blood, it looked more like a vampires’ delicacy. After someone yelled, “Gross—his sandwich is bleeding!” a little girl hurled her lunch right on the spot. I doubt Donald Trump himself, could have negotiated a trade for that bad boy.

           On another occasion, I traded my Woody Woodpecker lunch box for a pack of pink snowballs. When my mother asked me what happened to it, I told her the truth: my lunch box had been stolen—after all, the other kid did get a “steal.” When she asked me if I knew what a lie was, I said, “Yeah—a good friend in a time of trouble.”

           Perhaps the biggest break I got in fifth grade was that my father gave the principal permission to paddle me—yes, to call that a “break” sounds odd, but you’ll understand when I finish the story. My inauguration came quickly, the next day in fact, but was purely accidental, after I’d been barraged with a hail of spitballs, and anti-Germanic slurs. In retaliation, I emptied my entire cache of ammunition in a fury of rage that had all my classmates and the teacher ducking for cover. After that day, or more appropriately, after that day’s spanking, a trip to the principal’s office became a weekly ritual.

           What no one could figure out was . . . why? Week after week, I journeyed to the office . . . I eventually went, and got paddled, so many times that I started running out of ideas for getting into trouble. At one point, I was sent to an initial evaluation by a mental health therapist, who then referred me to a shrink.

           “Look at these pictures of multi-colored dots and tell me the first thing that comes to your mind,” the psychiatrist instructed me one day.

           “Two Twinkies . . . a stack of Ho Hos . . . butterscotch pudding . . . and a melted Sugar Daddy . . .” were my typical responses as I played him like a fiddle.

           Regardless of similar answers throughout the comprehensive evaluation, I managed to receive a clean bill of health without any of them putting the right pieces together. The result was that, by the end of the school year, my reputed behavior had gotten so bad that my parents were told I couldn’t return to public school. If only the principal or a teacher or my parents or the shrink or the school board of Springfield, Virginia, had seen the big picture: every time the principal whacked my rear end with his wooden paddle, he offered me a fresh-baked chocolate chip cookie. That was all it took! I sacrificed my tiny tush for one of those cookies, as often as I could think of something to get into trouble over.

           They were soft, chewy, and gooey—the kind your grandmother makes that turn out perfect every time. And, since they were homemade, I could smell them before I even entered his office. Suddenly, not trading my Zungenwurst sandwich at lunchtime didn’t matter. As sure as the sun rose and set, after each paddling, he offered them to show that punishing me wasn’t personal and that he was just fulfilling my parents’ orders.

           “Oh, no problem, Mr. Jones,” I would tell him. “I understand. I’ll try to be better this week. I promise.” But the temptation, my craving for sugar, was too great. Once in a while, he threw a change up and offered me Tootsie Rolls. While not as fulfilling as those chocolate chip cookies, with a sweet tooth the size of the Grand Canyon, they still sufficed.

           One day, he surprised me in a different way and pulled out a new paddle with a hole at the end of it. “This is going to hurt real bad, Kevin,” he warned, no doubt while thinking, Surely, this will keep him from ever shooting spitballs and paper clips again! Little did he realize, by the age of six, I had forgotten more about pain than he could ever dispense with a paddle, hole or no hole.

           Toward the end of fifth grade—at the suggestion of the Superintendent of schools after being barred from returning to public school—we hopped in the car for a day trip to a reformatory boarding school that was located in Berryville, Virginia. On the drive, I realized I was frightened at the notion of being placed into another abusive environment. Granted, while rigid parenting and being immersed in a German culture was not exactly Brady Bunch motif, at least I didn’t have to worry about being sexually molested, or physically tortured by my parents.

           To counter my fear, I tried to put a positive spin on the impending experience and remain optimistic, a spin I based on the fact that the place was less than two hours from home. Unfortunately, my fragile optimism rapidly waned as we pulled up to the school and into a world that was eerily reminiscent of the movie Deliverance—Burt Reynolds and Ned Beatty may have been missing, but a retarded looking kid strumming a banjo on the front porch more than made up for their absence. This ain’t lookin’ too promising, I remember telling myself at the time.

           And promising, it was not—as soon as we walked into the admissions office, I thought, ” Oh my God, please tell me I don’t look like them or act like them.” There, in front of me, was a boatload of kids. But these kids were not fellow disciplinary degenerates—they were handicapped, physically and mentally. Whoa! I thought as my fears multiplied. I may have been a pickle or two short of a Big Mac, but retarded I was not! Come on, Dad, I silently urged. You’re smarter than this. You know I don’t belong here. I hoped with all of my normal brain cells that my message was getting through to him.

           But, he continued listening, patiently, to the school moderator wax poetic about how wonderful her school was.

           “We would love to have Kevin join our family,” she stated at the end of her long-winded sales pitch.

           Yeah, your family of half-wits and hair brains, I thought. Sure, you would love to have me—my name’s not Bubba, I don’t play the banjo, I have all my teeth, and my mother’s not my cousin, too!

           Kudos to Dad for seeing the light on that one. Instead, I was off to military school. Only, little did I know that the abuse I encountered during foster care would be a cakewalk compared to the impending atrocities that awaited me at Miller School of Albemarle.

Continue to Chapter 3 »