Welcome New Facebookers

Recently it has come to my attention that there are a number of new readers to this blog, thanks in no small part to the efforts of one NtC.

NtC, if you don’t know, is a kid that I used to teach who has grown up and somehow inseminated herself into the fertile egg of my family life now that she is no longer a kid.

She has babysat my kids.

She has made friends with my wife.

She has eaten meals at my house.

She has watched me do the dishes in my After School Suit, which includes dark socks and sandals (among other fashion crimes).

She came to Germany with Jenna to visit and made me take them on the fabulous Whores of Amsterdam Tour.

Now she has begun to press gang unsuspecting Facebookers into discovering the rich juices of my blog and I feel I should thank her.

However, seeing as she is blackmailing me with a series of compromising photographs, I will not.

Regardless, I welcome you, especially if you are a new reader who has only just discovered thelabcoatguy, and promise you that I would, if only I was somehow able to bridge the vast distance that separates us, reach out and cuddle you as I sang and rocked you to sleep. You would cry and beg to be nursed, but sadly, I am not lactating.

NtC + me = this pic

 

Auslanders: The List

I always assumed that it is just a stereotype that Germany is a land with an inordinate number of regulations and rules and I felt very guilty when I thought about how that stereotype most likely came from old war movies.

And then, upon first meeting some new German friends, you have a conversation something like this:

“Hi. I’m Randall, a Canadian man. It is very nice to meet you.” 

We shake hands.

“Hello. I am a German citizen named Thorsten and you must be careful. Here in Germany, there is a rule for everything. It is not like the freewheeling craziness of North America.” 

I chuckle politely at his little joke.

“Ha ha it is funny to speak of these things upon our first meeting. You make sport of your own country to welcome me.”

Thorsten shakes his head, leans close in and whispers.

“No chuckling before 19:00.”

He backs away carefully, his finger at his lips.

I was riding my bike through Krefeld, heading down Kolnerstrasse for Osterath on a sunny day in September, listening to a TWiT podcast and enjoying some Leo Laporty goodness when I saw a motorcyclist veer in my direction.

I wheeled over to the furthest edge of the bike path and readied myself to expel defensive hork onto the biker’s windshield.

That hork was never released.

In fact, I choked it down because there was a police officer getting off his motorbike and coming towards me.

Maybe you don’t know about German police officers.

They don’t smile, ever, and they wear green outfits that look more than a little military. It’s true that American police are more frightening because they finger their gun butts like they hope you’re thinking about trying something, but German police are scary perhaps because they don’t. They just know you aren’t thinking about anything but old war movies.

This particular German police officer came up to me bearing his dourest expression and rattled off an explosion of Deutsch that had a lot of punctuating finger movements.

I shrugged helplessly.

“Sprechen sie ein bisschen Englische?”

He sighed and somehow his face became even sterner.

“Little bit.”

I leapt into this opening. I had no idea what I had done wrong, but I hoped that he would pity me if I was an Auslander. I know. What was I thinking?

“Was I speeding, officer?”

He narrowed his eyes. Clearly he knew more than little bit of English. He knew at least enough to wonder if I was being a smart ass.

“No. This.”

He pointed at my head.

“This is dangerous.”

I have had people point at my head for a lot of reasons. Several times it was to laugh at the prehistoric shape of my Neanderskull, others to observe the growing patchiness of my once thick and luxuriant hair, but I had never once been accused of possessing a dangerous head. I found it strangely thrilling. 

“Are you saying my head is dangerou-“

Wait a minute. I wasn’t wearing a helmet. Of course.

 

“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you had a helmet law.”

He shook his head.

“It’s your ears.”

“My ears are dangerous?”

That wasn’t as thrilling.

He pointed again.

“You shouldn’t be wearing those.”

My earbuds.

I pulled them out.

“So it’s illegal to wear earbuds when you ride your bike?”

“No. But it’s not a good idea.”

We stood there a few moments, looking at each other uncomfortably.

Should I thank him?

Was he waiting for me to apologize?

Did he want to take me down to the station for a cavity search? And by cavity I mean my ears, of course. He was maybe worried that I might have been secreting a second pair of buds.

“Am I free to go, or…?”

He considered my request, eyed me up and down again and nodded.

“Fine. And perhaps one ear is okay.”

He got back on his motorbike and went out into the street while I stood there trying to come to grips with the fact that I had just been pulled over by a gun toting motocop for listening to an Ipod while riding my bike. On a bike path.

What if he had known I wasn’t wearing sunblock? Or that I was reducing my sperm count by wearing constrictive undergarments? And it is only sheer dumb luck that he didn’t notice that I hadn’t yet flossed that day. 

In a place where I have seen an old man chain smoking in a bar in the middle of a mall at 8:25 in the morning while he shares a five gallon pail of beer with the wiener dog on his lap, where children scream curse words in school without repercussion and where you have to make an effort to avoid eating cured pork for three meals a day, every day, my encounter with the strange regulations of a passing police officer may strike one as an odd inconsistency.

But then you get the list of specific materials that each of your children must have if they want to be allowed into the school and you suddenly realize that it is not an inconsistency and that Thorsten was not kidding and neither were the movies.

There are more bizarre rules here than in all the rest of the world combined, and that includes the county that made it illegal to eat an orange in the bathtub.

I won’t go into the entire school materials list, because it is too long and too German and I still don’t understand what more than half of these things are, but I will tell you that this list is ridiculous, and unless you enjoy measuring a pencil with a micrometer to see if it’s the precise width as per instructions, you will be forced to agree with me.

First of all, let me say that we were told by our very kind friends there that there was to be no deviation from these requirements. None at all. You must get exactly what is required, as listed.

I felt like a hostage negotiator trying to cope with a crazed kidnaper. You must have THIS kind of crayon and THAT type and width of pencil and THIS notepaper not THAT one and on and on for paint and scissors and a very specific small notepad for homework and a marginally larger one for Mathe and my wife was going crazy trying to figure out even what store would sell these supplies because, as you may remember, stores in Meerbusch sell the most random combinations of products such that you can’t tell what they have unless you go in and look through every bin and rack.

Another strange factor in all this is that the schools don’t provide all of the textbooks you need, but you can’t just go into a store and buy them.

Every parent of school children in this country must call up the bookstores in advance to order their books and then come and pick them up on a certain day, known in advance as that day when the textbooks come and the mothers crack into pieces from stress.

When you go to pick them up you will suddenly find out that everyone else is doing exactly the same thing as you and the store is jammed with panicking mothers and children, all terrified about getting the right stuff, all holding ransom notes like the one you’re clutching, all fighting for the same box of coloured pencils, because you can only use that exact kind, even though they have hundreds of boxes of other kinds. Kinds that you can’t use in school.   

I haven’t even touched on the most heinous item of offense on this list of supplies.

Schuleransen.

I can say that word out loud now, but several months back I couldn’t say that word without kicking something or having a seizure. And I don’t have epilepsy.   

If you lived in Canada or the U.S. or the U.K. you might use your translating software to find out that a schuleransen is basically another word for backpack and then you would think, no problem, everybody already has one of those.

You would feel pleased that there was one less thing on this list that you would have to go out and buy.

But then you would be out at a store and you would notice that, hey look. There are backpacks on display right here and beside them is a separate display of schuleransen and the backpacks are called backpacks and the schuleransen are called schuleransen, even though they look very much the same.

You will notice that they both have shoulder straps and a pouchy construction for placing objects and they both go on your back.

You shake your head with confusion at this strange bit of niggling distinction and you might then pick up a schuleransen to see if there is any other difference between it and a normal backpack and then you may glance at the price tag.

When you are awakened by the paramedics, you will be told that you have had a heart attack, and that you’re probably going to live, but you don’t believe the paramedics because they clearly didn’t notice that the price tag on the schuleransen read 150 Euros.

That is not a typo.

There is a little chain of logic here that I must line up, in the same way that I must constantly work away at a loose tooth no matter how much it hurts.

1. You cannot attend school without the schuleransen. This was made very clear to us.

2. A schuleransen costs 150 Euros.

3. The backpacks beside the schuleransen cost 29 Euros.

4. See 1.

5. You will spend 150 Euros on a backpack.

6. 150 Euros is something like seven hundred Canadian dollars.

7. Bite the nearest cashier.

Something that may be relevant to this conversation is that my wife thinks I am cheap.

I prefer the word frugal.

I’ll freely admit that I am the kind of guy who actively chooses Restaurant Meal Choice #2 over Restaurant Meal Choice #3 at Any Given Restaurant because he wants to save two Euros.

And sure, I am the kind of guy who badgered his wife to glean from her new German friends the wherabouts of a secondhand shop for clothes, and then immediately rode his bike there to buy a soccer shirt that only smelled a little bit like the guy who got rid of it.

But I got it for three Euros fifty.

However, I am NOT the kind of guy who will allow himself to be manipulated by what is obviously some kind of price fixing collusion between German school officials and the school supply industry.

It is obvious that there is no discernible difference between a schuleransen and a backpack beyond the name and the price gouging.

Either one will satisfy the requirements of book carrying with the same efficacy, so why do we have to get the one that costs as much as a pony?

Eventually, my toothgrinding must have alerted some of Nisa’s friends, because word began to filter into the house that there may be some schuleransen out there that didn’t cost quite so much.

We were informed that we could, with some careful searching, possibly find some deals out there, were we willing to spend some time and energy.

Thus began our quest.

We visited every store we thought might sell these overly specialized backpacks and in every case, we found the exact same models. They were called Scout and came in Girl (princesses or Barbies) and Boy (dinosaurs or soccer balls) and they were all expensive.

I decided to take to the streets on my own, cruising the low end strip malls on the industrial fringes of Dusseldorf, alert for danger, hoping to find some crackhead dealing hot schuleransens out of the back of an old VW van with duct taped windows.

I never found that crackhead, but I did find a huge Real store with a conveyor belt you could ride to the second floor where there was a small bunker of picked over school supplies.

Jammed underneath a wad of cheap backpacks was a squarish corner of canvas. It was maroon, and had no characters on it, no bright designs, no slogans or catchphrases splashed across the sides. No balls, no dinosaurs. It was simple, plain, uninteresting in every conceivable way, but it was a schuleransen. It was only 79 Euros.

Only.

I picked it up and thought about my son wearing it to school on his first day.

Every other kid would have the gender correct Scout in screaming fluorescent orange hanging off their backs. My boy would be the only Canadian, one of two or three who spoke English at all, the only one who couldn’t speak German. He would be the odd boy out, the one everybody looked at, whispered about, wondered about, noticed. He would be scrutinized and every aspect of his looks, his behaviour, everything about him would be regarded carefully.

And he would be the only one wearing a crappy, bland, generic dirtbag schuleransen.

Did I want to add to his difference by loading him down with that baggage? Did I want to give him something unlike what the other kids would use and set him up to stand out even more than he already would?

No. I didn’t want to.

But I did.

I bought the cheap one and wore it home myself, riding back to Strump in 36 degree heat with that schuleransen tight across my sweat-soaked back. Breaking it in, I told myself as I peddled across the Rhine. Worrying. Filled with shame and guilt.

What would he say?

Would he care? Would this add to his mounting pile of fears about being here? Would this be the camel straw that would send him into tears or rage? Would he even notice?

I pushed the door open and called him downstairs.

“I got you a schuleransen.”

He took it out of my hands.

He furrowed his brow at me, one eyebrow cocked up.

“How much was it?”

He had been there when we shopped, he had heard us talking about the price. He knew what we had been looking for.

“It was 79 Euros,” I said.

He absorbed that, hefted the sopping wet, low rent backpack and examined it with an unforced smile.

“I love it.”

Auslander: The Gerge - Part 2

The Life gym is not like the YMCA.

The most immediate difference one would find upon joining up is Wolfgang, the Three-Headed Guardian of the Gateway.

At the Y in Goderich, the staff is made up off an unusually high number of high school kids. This doesn’t bother me. As I have noted, I understand this tribe. I speak their simplistic language and have learned to interpret many of their primitive behaviours. I have even been heard to say LOL in real life.

There is very little about Wolfgang that reminds me of even one of the Y’s high school employees.

If you were an imaginative person who spent more than a few Saturday afternoons in the 70s watching Sir Graves Ghastly movies on the Detroit CBS affiliate, then you could hardly be at fault for assuming Wolfgang to be extravagantly hairy and have a taste for human flesh. But you would be wrong.

Instead, our Wolfgang has a shaven head and looks less like a human flesh eater than the kind who crushes his enemies, sees them driven before him, and hears the lamentations of their women.

Assuming I manage to claw my way into my late 50s or early 60s, I would congratulate myself if I were able to muster up even a reasonable facsimile of the guns he’s packing in his golf shirt. Sure, he’s getting older and he doesn’t get around like he used to, but he could still snap me like a day-old pretzel.

He is a hard looking, burly old Teuton, but he one of the few people in this country who will greet me when I greet them.

That’s something that small town Canadians would really have to work to get used to over here.

You know how you’re walking down a deserted bit of road or something and you approach another person, and you want to disarm that subtle tension that comes up, so you say “hi” or “good day” or “nice day, isn’t it?”

Especially if that other person is a woman, and you are a man, you might want to smile and take some of the unspoken concern out of the air by showing some friendliness, right?

Wrong.

Because now you live in Germany, and when you say “good morning” to a middle-aged woman walking by, she will look at you like you are a little retarded kid standing in your front yard, waving at birds.

And I don’t mean that to be a slight against the handicapped. I like those kids. They’re friendly. They like stuff. They would definitely wave and smile if I walked by.

But nobody does that here.

Even the old folks you see wandering around, the kind who hang around in the Tim Horton’s greet everybody back home only look up at me to frown, as if they can smell the North America all over me and they don’t like it.

Wolfgang is nothing like those people.

When I entered Life on the first day of my year long membership, he came over to the counter, shook my hand and nodded with great solemnity.

“You made the right choice. This is the best gym.”

I don’t know you if noticed, but that was English. He was speaking in English. Perfect, clear, barely accented English.

When Anja first took me in to check the place out, Wolfgang spoke only German. He stood there watching us talk, listening to everything we said in English, acting like he had no idea what we were talking about. Watching us discuss our options and run over the pros and cons of his gym.

I ran back through everything I had said. Had I made potentially misleading comments on the impressive thickness of his forearms? Had I hit on his wife? Had I met his wife? Was he even married? And if he was, what did she think of his forearms?

“You speak English?”

“Oh, I speak only a little. It’s most unimpressive.”

Liar!

“Most unimpressive?”

Most unimpressive would have been “Mein English ist teh suq” or “No speat Inlish” or a mute shrug and teary eyes.

But “Most unimpressive” was most impressive. I don’t think lifelong Canadian English speakers people even use the word unimpressive anymore.

“I’d say your English is excellent. It’s certainly better than my German. Look.”

I produced the tiny German I carry with me at all times, much to Wolfgang’s horror.

“He is hideous!”

“I warned you.”

I placed the repellent little homunculus back into my pouch and grimaced as Wolfgang took my photo for his records. I am pretty sure that he typed something in an info box and I will bet anything it was some variation of “this guy only speaks English and looks too soft and weak to be allowed in our gym”

“Wolfgang, does everyone here speak English so well?”

“You mean so poorly as I?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

He looked around, cautious.

“Yes.”

Then he told me to enjoy my workout.

I did.

The Life gym has a lot of equipment we wish we had at the Y, and it was nice to be able to change things up a bit. I went into a fierce circuit that had me racing all over the gym, thrilling the regulars with both my athletic performance and the historic amount of sweat I was splashing all over everything.

Naturally, I got thirsty, but after walking several laps around the interior circumference of the room, I realized there was no water fountain.

This didn’t seem possible.

Back to Wolfgang.

“Excuse me, sir. Have you not got a water fountain here?”

His expression did not change.

“A what?”

“A water fountain. For drinking.”

I remembered the term I was told – leitungswasser - “pipe water.”

“A fountain for leitungswasser.”

His eyes widened.

“Oh no no no. We have nothing like that here. We have good water.”

He turned around and pointed at the cooler behind him.

“See? Mineral water.”

“Mineral water? You don’t have a fountain with plain old water?”

He shook his head as though I was a clueless child.

“Of course not. We have good water right here.”

The bottles in the cooler.

“Oh. Okay.”

He grabbed a bottle out of the cooler and set it on the counter in front of me.

“One Euro thirty.”

Do you take money to the gym?

I don’t.

I take my bike, my Ipod, some gym clothes and a shank if shit goes down in the change room, but I never take money. Why would I? Certainly not to buy water, which flows freely from the water fountain that is hooked up to all the water pipes that feed safe, potable drinking water into every building in every civilized country in the world.

“Um, thanks, but I didn’t bring my wallet. It’s okay, I don’t need both kidneys anyway.”

I turned to go back to working out and concentrating my urine into fine crystalline powder.

Wolfgang’s face barely changed, I’ll give him that. I could almost not see the faint trace of distaste he covered with a thin smile.

“No problem. You can pay next day.”

I took the bottle with no small amount of concern.

Did I want to start my year at this gym known as the water moocher who already owed money?

I cracked open the cap on the bottle and heard a sound that I hadn’t heard in years. A sound of nightmares made real.

Many people know that I don’t drink many things.

I don’t drink wine or beer or alcohol of any sort, I don’t drink grape juice or strawberry fruity sweet tropical peach coloured lime flavoured this or that and I don’t drink anything from the cupboard under the sink. Well, you may not know that I also don’t drink pop. That’s soda if you’re from America.

I hate pop and all of the attendant members of the pop family.

Carbonation is the sworn enemy of all good fluids, in my estimation, and throughout the entirety of my life I haven’t had much more than a few thimblesful of carbonated anything get past my tongue.

But I know the sound of carbonation.

Just like a beaten cur fears the sound of a newspaper being rolled up, so too do I recoil from that fizzing burbulation of deadly gases being released from some sugary concoction.

When I was a child, I was afraid to tell anyone that I couldn’t drink pop. I didn’t want to be the only one who didn’t salivate when I heard a Coke jingle. I wanted in on the all the fun you could have with cream soda. I ached to be able to smell root beer without throwing up a little in my mouth.

I was afraid to reveal yet another aspect of myself that separated me from the rest of humanity. It wasn’t fair! Why did I have these damned superpowers?

So I asked for pop.

At my dad’s shop I would ask for money to buy a bottle of pop, and then I would go through the elaborate ritual of putting a coin in the machine, pressing a tab for Orange Crush, dragging it through the maze to the end, past the opened lock and extracting my very own bottle of pop.

I would crack into it with the opener on the side of the machine, flick the lid into the garbage, and then I would walk outside grinning, talking about how much I couldn’t wait to drink my delicious, cold pop.

And then I would sneak around to the back of the shop into the junk pile and pour it out.

Every drop.

Sometimes I would drown a few ants or make a pop river race down a slope or pretend I was taking a leak, but it all ended up the same. All over the ground. I would rather eat the dead ants I killed rather than drink the foul brew that I had been desperate to buy only moments earlier.

Even now, all those years later, there is nothing that I want to drink that comes in any container that produces the expulsion of pressurized carbon when you burst the seal.

Nothing.

So what would I do with that bottle of water and Wolfgang watching?

He stared, waiting until I took that first drink, so that he could say, “See? That’s good water. Not like the dangerous stuff that comes out of our taps that we spend millions of tax dollars on every day to guarantee its safety.”

But I could see the bubbles in the water.

Feel them bursting their deadly gases into the atmosphere under my nose.

Maybe I could play the allergy card.

I looked up at him.

“So this is just plain water?”

He nodded.

“Plain water.”

“With no gas?”

He shook his head.

“No gas.”

Was I dreaming these bubbles?

“No gas at all?”

“No gas. It’s just water. Natural water.”

I took a sip.

There is no word or sound I can write to capture what it was like to have that water in my mouth.

It was like electrified battery acid on my tongue, sparking deadly amperage into the soft pink meat of my inner mouth.

I had no choice but to swallow it.

If I had been back at home, in the Y, I would have spat it out, perhaps onto the fiend who served it up, but I couldn’t do that here. I was a guest in this country, in this very gym, and it was my first day working out. If I ruined this, I would be forced to go back to the supermodel gym or the gift shop restaurant sports bar athletic indoor multi acreage complex center.

If I had been back at home I wouldn’t have had to fight my throat muscles to relax enough to allow that brutal, gas-rich water down into the virgin territory of my guts.

I would have had to grit my teeth against that brutal, gas-rich water jetting back up with a flaming geyser of misery plus breakfast muesli.

And I wouldn’t have had to smile all the while.

It turns out that drinking bubbly mineral water during workouts is not only normal here, but minor compared with some of the more incredible workout behaviours I have seen.

There is one guy who is somewhere around sixty and looks like a grandpa who sings tenor in a barbershop quartet. His belly is huge, and he makes sure that everyone can see that by pulling his track pants up high enough to generate an enormous and tragic male camel toe. What we would call a self-induced atomic wedgie, he would call putting on his workout gear.

He has a thickly impressive World War I moustache that looks like it might be part of a disguise kit, and slicks his thinning hair down with some kind of greasy black substance that he must wipe off benches and machines where he is done using them.

I do not describe him in order for us to laugh at this man, although the opportunity to do so is hard to resist when you first see him. Rather, I describe him so that we may appreciate the fact that you can’t judge anybody over here by the way they look. It just doesn’t work the same way.

How many times has my Toronto honed, gay roommate trained Gaydar gone off around overtly effeminate guys in culottes over here only to see those guys walking along with hot women?

How many crew-cutted, army pant wearing diesel dykes walking pit bulls have I seen holding hands with their businessman husbands and kids?

How many leathery tanned, big shouldered trannies have I spotted with no Adam’s apples who turned out to actually be women?

Plenty.

And how many times did you see a mustachioed, round bellied old guy at the gym with pants high enough to be a push up bra powerlifting the stack on every machine. It turns out that old Wilhelm is a monstrously strong man who could fold me up and slip me into the pocket of his track pants for a post workout snack.

There are maybe three guys I have seen in that gym that make sense to me, that fit the stereotype of the testosterone swollen gym rat, and two of them broke the stereotype as soon as they opened their mouths to smile at me.

Where was their macho attitude? Where was the condescension, the mocking glances over to see how little I’m lifting on the squat rack?

You see, back home, a man with biceps the same size as his head wouldn’t smile shyly as he scooched past my bench.

Back home he wouldn’t deign to give helpful tips to a flabby little English teacher struggling with a dumbbell benchpress, arms shaking all the while.

Back home he wouldn’t give dainty little finger wave and say “Tschuss!” in a sing song high voice as he walked out, would he?

No he wouldn’t.

Back home you wouldn’t see people stop in the middle of a workout to go out for a smoke and a cup of coffee. You wouldn’t see the guy behind the counter dump a mini bottle of Jager into his coffee at 10:30 in the morning.

And back home you wouldn’t see me, because I would be here, in Germany, pushing up as much iron as I can stand, ear buds jammed in tight against the techno, half desperate to get home and half wondering how I can ever go back to the plain old Y after all this.

Black Santa

There have been racial tensions here in the past.

I’m not going to sugar coat it.

Germany has been through its share of turmoil.

And I’ll admit that, after being here awhile, I started to see some of that leaching out into conversations in the form of pointed comments about this or that group of immigrants.

But I want to say that I have seen something here that makes me realize that in some ways, Germany is WAY ahead of North America in terms of their cultural acceptance of new ideas. They appear to be much more willing to examine possibilities and open up to bold, post-modern interpretations of established traditions.

Or maybe they just got these from Holland.

So, here they are, just long enough after the pain for us to think about the Godfather of Soul without breaking down, my new favourite Christmas treats. I don’t mean for eating, I mean for looking at.

Say it loud, I’m Black Santa and proud.

.

Possible New Tattoo Ideas #1

I am putting this picture up here against my better judgment. Sure, I am just as ready to laugh at myself as the mean boys were back in Grade Five, but if my wife left me and I had to put an ad in the newspaper to find a new wife, I would be too scared to meet any of the women who might respond to this one.

Why do I have to look so old and creepy when I am trying to reach out with love?

/tear

Auslanders: The Gerge - Part 1

The day after I got to GermanyAnja drove me around to check out a few of the gyms in the area. It was one of the priorities of living here. There had to be a good place for me to lift weights.

I know what you’re thinking. Go ahead and say it.

“You lift weights?”

Yes I do.

A lot.

I know that I look more like a soft, pouchy little man who struggles just to keep his huge, misshapen head upright but there’s nothing more I can do about it. I lift weights four days a week and I never miss unless I have to go away to Paris for the weekend or if I’m sick enough that nobody will let me touch anything that they may later have to touch. I have a reasonably healthy diet and I do a lot of cardio. I have a decent weight program and I try to vary it from time to time. And yes, in spite of all that, I still look exactly like me, which is just sad.

My wife always tries to comfort me. “Imagine what you’d look like if you didn’t lift weights?”

I should point out that she actually thinks this will comfort me, but it just makes me scared.

What happens if I have to stop? What if I hurt myself and can’t work out? I’ll be even more hideous.

The first gym that Anja showed me was very close to Strump, 15 minutes on a bike. I knew immediately that I would become a member of this gym because it was run by a man named Wolfgang.

That is one of those names that I used to wish was my name when I was a kid. Hell, I wish it was my name right now. I can’t tell you how long I have been seriously thinking of starting my own wolf gang, assuming we could get a good deal on jackets. If I was any good at art, I would have already shown you the crest I designed.

Wolfgang’s gym is called Life, which is an acronym for something about good health and some other stuff in German. It is one long room that had every conceivable machine I needed and some I would never use. Like the spread your legs until you break open machine. I can’t even walk past it without gritting my teeth.

Anja told me that the Life gym was frequented by older people and housewives.

That was perfect.

Imagine how young and powerful and vigorous I would look grunting out triceps press-downs beside a wizened up grandmother? This would be the kind of ego building I would never get in a normal gym.

“This is perfect. We don’t need to see any other gyms.”

She didn’t agree. She thought I needed to see the other two.

I was in no position to disagree. This was her turf. Maybe she had a hot tip.

The second gym was on the second floor of a pastel coloured block of buildings in a suburban area much closer to Dusseldorf. I don’t remember the name of this gym, but it was immediately clear that I would never be allowed to work out there. In fact, it was incredible that I had been allowed in the front door at all.

This is the only gym I have ever seen that had a dress code and a bouncer out front.

It looked like the set of a futuristic movie about working out.

Everything in the gym was shiny enough to give headaches and every machine looked like alien technology. The guy behind the counter was wearing a uniform and smiling enough to be kind of scary. I wondered if this gym was a front for some kind of religious organization. Was he asking Anja if I wanted to take a personality test? I couldn’t tell.

While they discussed what I assumed was my possible joining, I turned to observe the other patrons.

They were all young, all inordinately good looking blonde women, all dressed in colour coordinated spandex. All taut.

Nobody was making any noise. Nobody was sweating. Nobody here even needed to be in this room. They didn’t need to work out because they were already perfect.

It looked like I had discovered the lab where German Super Models were created.

I pictured myself working out here with the supermodels, sweating on everything, wearing rank old shorts and black socks, matted back hair sticking out of the collars of my shirts, scrambled egg stains on my five o’clock shadow, even though I never have scrambled eggs for breakfast.

I would probably stink and grunt when I lifted something heavy.

I would be an infection. A virus.

Plus, it was a long bike ride.

“Anja, let’s not bother with this one. Really, I’ll just go to the Life gym.”

I lowered my voice and told her we had to go before they got out the E-meter. That scared her and we left.

“What’s an E-meter?” she said in the car.

“It doesn’t matter anymore. We’re safe. We can go back home now.”

She shook her head.

“We need to see the last gym. That was the plan.”

I will not at this point comment on any kind of obstinate Germanic adherence to plans, schedules or authorized restrictions of any kind.

You’re welcome.

That last gym was like no other fitness center I have ever seen.

It was built in what must have been a converted aircraft hangar. It was enormous.

But not at first.

When you enter, you walk into a sports bar and restaurant with a huge TV. It looks like a TGI Fridays. People are drinking, smoking, eating currywursts and pommes frites. Basically that makes it just like any other German bar, hotel, coffee shop, gas station or doctor’s office. The lighting is dim and there is no sign that anyone is, has been, or will ever be working out anywhere nearby.

Then you walk through to the back of the bar, literally directly across the front of the widescreen TV, and out into one huge gym space. Every conceivable form of workout device is strewn around in this massive environment. There were badminton courts, basketball hoops, ping pong, pool tables and more, all stretching out for miles. Maybe not miles, but feet. Stretching out for feet and feet.

You could easily get lost in there. It would take an hour just to find the free weight rack.

I turned to Anja. “I don’t think I would feel comfortable lifting weights in a gym where I need a GPS to get back to the front door.”

Anja laughed.

“You just have to follow the signs for the gift shop.”

The gift shop?

No.

Fricking.

Way.

I started at the Life gym the next day.