They checked our military IDs as they stood in camouflage outside our high school and slung M-16 machine guns around their shoulders. And their eyes lingered a little too long on shy, sophomore girls standing in line.
At night we dreamed of General Schwarzkopf and Baghdad explosions, rippling across television screens. From morning until twilight, the Persian Gulf War, broadcast on American Forces Network, played in every home, barbershop, and waiting room on base.
My father, stationed in Mannheim, Germany, descended from Pennsylvania’s rusty under belly. He moved my mother, sisters, and me to the barracks in Benjamin Franklin Village—a walled-in community apart from the European world. When the war began, more barbed wire went up, along with more checkpoints, and armed guards patrolled every building.
Despite the tight security, inside our high school existed a netherworld of violence. My classmates hid handguns in Starter jackets and sold stilettos and butterfly knives from lockers. Fights happened more consistently than sunrise. They broke out before school, during recess, and when the final bell rang. Across barren fields and basketball courts, fists bashed into teeth and noses in bloody rituals. For my freshmen football initiation, varsity players pepper sprayed our eyes and belted our bodies with helmets.
We were transplants from broken neighborhoods, and our parents, blue-collar refugees, enlisted in the Army to escape gang territory and the crack epidemic. But no one outran their past, and closed-door dysfunction took root in alcoholism and familial physical abuse. We were children, products of parental PTSD, bathed in the ethos of NWA gangsta rap, bone-ripping RoboCop movies, and the aftermath of the Rodney King beating. And we carried our merry-go-round trauma of relocating to different cities, states, and countries every three years, leaving everything familiar behind. Fenced into our own hostility, we were angry, rebellious youth.
But my group of friends, an alternative to the chaos, intervened in stopping more fights than starting them. We excelled at football, wrestling, and track, so bullies rarely targeted us. When not playing sports, we enjoyed laughing at TV shows like In Living Color and stayed up late every Saturday night to catch Dana Carvey on SNL. We spent our free time absorbed in Spiderman comic books and backyard baseball.
German swimming pools were the equivalent of Disneyland to us
My best friend Dale, a soft-spoken Black teenager, dressed in baggy ’90s fashion and showered his clothes in Obsession cologne. We played opposite cornerbacks on our football team and locked up rival receivers from neighboring Army bases. We constantly practiced, worked out, and dueled each other on Nintendo’s Tecmo Bowl.
Dale and I loved adventure, and the German world was a reprieve from high school drama and rigid military life. Europeans intrigued us.
Why did Germans wear bellbottoms? How come they loved Michael Jackson as much as we did? And how did their bakeries make Brötchen, delicious buttery rolls, the best bread in the world? Dale and I were addicted to strudel.
And German swimming pools, the equivalent of Disneyland to us, had indoor serpentine water slides and sky-high Olympic diving boards, putting US waterparks to shame. And we were drawn to German girls, frequenting these pools, who listened to Europop on Walkmans and spoke in sexy accents.
Dale didn’t know how to swim. He’d sit bored and jealous on the edge on the pool while my friends and I turned underwater cartwheels and somersaults. Dale wanted to learn, and for his birthday, I promised to give him lessons.
On a cool, October evening, we headed off base, without our parent’s permission, and journeyed to an indoor swimming pool.
The Hallenbad had large windows encasing the building, providing a pleasant view of distant Mannheim shops and neighborhoods. The facility had two pools, one with a deep end and diving board, and the other, a wading pool, perfect for swim lessons.
As the sun went down, we carried our gym bags into the building. We deposited francs into the turn stall, and on the other side, Hannah, a middle-aged woman who worked there, greeted us with smile. She wore a white uniform and folded towels at a table. Hannah often practiced her English on us, and on occasion and gave us Kinder chocolate eggs.
Once we changed into swimsuits, we headed to the pool. The Hallenbad held scents of chlorine, and children’s laughter echoed through the building. Groups of people gathered in both pools—parents monitoring their kids, adults doing water aerobics, and obnoxious middle schoolers cannonballing off the diving board.
Dale and I grabbed foam kickboards and waded into the lukewarm water. I demonstrated how to buoy on the board and how to kick.
My friend caught on quickly. He propelled himself down the pool, zigzagging as his feet splashed the water. I gazed over his shoulders. Outside the window, three teenagers, with shaved heads, pointed and laughed.
I ignored them and focused on my friend.
One of the boys drew a swastika with his finger along the steamy glass
While I showed Dale arm strokes, the boys laughed louder. The sky grew darker outside. Dale’s face turned to anger and disgust as one of the boys shouted the “n” word.
Pissed off, we gathered together and whispered a plan to retaliate. Breaking the huddle, we turned to the boys and raised our middle fingers.
Our gesture infuriated them. They slammed their fists against the glass and shouted racist slurs in broken English. One of the boys, with a sinister smile, drew a swastika with his finger along the steamy glass.
There were rumors that neo-Nazi cells existed in Mannheim, but the people we encountered off base were nice and gentle. Still, Germany had experienced recent changes. When the Berlin Wall came down in ’89, far-right ideologies manifested. A faction of Germans embraced nationalism, and with East and West unified, they wanted foreigners, like us, out.
But Dale and I were used to daily violence, and we knew how to fight. Plus, there were two of us and three of them. We convinced ourselves, if need be, we could take them. Instead of inciting them more, we ignored them, hoping they’d go away, and focused on the lesson.
Twenty minutes later, the sky grew darker, and small dots of blue stars shimmered through the windows. Four more boys joined the group and conversed with the others. Hearing what took place, one of the newcomers turned to us, raised his eyebrows, and shouted death threats. Another held his hand in the air and flicked open a switchblade.
Our hope that they’d go away had vanished. We moved to the other side of the pool to gain distance from them, but they followed use around the building. We kept a lookout on the men’s locker room in case they entered the pool, but they entrenched themselves outside and shouted insults and threats—racist slurs and “stupid Americans” delivered through harsh-sounding German vowels and consonants.
A half hour passed, and the group multiplied to a mob of ten. Some of the boys had shaved heads and looked like members of a radical punk band. Others looked like everyday teenagers with no visible signs of neo-Nazi indoctrination.
Dale and I scanned the pool for someone to help. Now later in the evening, only a few people remained. A handful of elderly people, impervious to our situation, swam laps.
Outside, two more boys joined the group. My wrinkled fingers trembled in the water, and the pool felt colder. Dale, always fearless on the football field, looked terrified. We had no cellphones back then, we didn’t speak German, and we had no way or no one to call for help.
We slipped into the locker room, grabbed our bags, and quickly changed. Afterward, we locked ourselves into a changing stall and huddled together on a bench. The mob outside relocated to the entrance and waited for us to come out. Their loud threats reverberated down the hallway. We wondered how long we could hide before they found us.
The longer we waited, the more maniacal they became.
A sudden knock on the door signaled our doom. We held our breath, hoping they’d leave.
But a woman’s voice spoke broken English. We slowly opened the door and found Hannah, biting her lip in concern. She waved her hand for us to follow her and brought us back to the pool, where the gang, waiting at the front, couldn’t see us.
Hannah reached into her pocket, retrieved a key ring, and unlocked a rear door that led to an open field.
“Run,” she whispered.
We sprinted into the dark night. I gasped for air as I ran beside my friend. I hoped the boys didn’t see us, but a loud roar thundered behind us, followed by thundering footsteps and curses.
But we had a head start, and we were faster.
We hurdled a waist-high fence, ran across gravel and railroad tracks, and broke through shrub and bushes until we stumbled into a quiet German neighborhood.
Darting down the sidewalk ahead of me, Dale spotted a house with an open garage, and we ducked inside. We knelt beside a Mercedes Benz with a warm engine and breathed in scents of gasoline. I clutched my gym bag against my chest, and my wet swimsuit seeped through the bag and dampened my arm. Crouching in the darkness, we feared the homeowner would enter the garage, or worse, the neo-Nazis would comb the area and find us.
But we heard nothing. After enough time had passed, we crept into the night and began our long journey back to base.
Once we reached the barrack checkpoint, a soldier with a machine gun shined a flashlight into our eyes.
“What were you doing out so late?” he asked.
Dale and I looked at each other and answered simultaneously.
“We were swimming.”
—
Brendan Praniewicz earned his MFA in creative writing from San Diego State in 2007 and has subsequently taught creative writing at San Diego colleges. He has had poetry published in “From Whispers to Roars,” “Tiny Seed Journal,” “That Literary Review,” and “The Dallas Review.” In addition, he received second place in a first-chapters competition in the Seven Hills Review Chapter Competition in 2019. He won first place in The Rilla Askew Short Fiction Contest in 2020. He was a Pushcart Nominee for poetry in 2023.
