Start with this:
I read
martha's blog the other day and it got me thinking about when I was drinking beer and a bomb went off, when I learned that collateral damage can make people puke, and when I discovered stuff about politics, global culture, berets, sex, and yogurt. All because I missed Jimi's concert.
Okay, let's connect the dots.
I was in Oberammergau at the NATO school, courtesy of the US government, and a newly minted survivor of the Mekong, where I'd managed for 358 days to neither get killed or kill anyone else, at least not directly. I thought my karmic bank account was at least a little bit, a tiny little bit in the black. Silly me. A civilian friend living in Garmisch-Partenkirchen wanted me to go with him to see Jimi Hendrix at Super Concert '70 in Berlin. Hell, it's not that far, but it didn't work out. It was a military thing. Nobody attached to that NATO post could go to Berlin. They never explained exactly why, but the rule was ironclad, although they were very nice about how they told me, the Major assuming the role of Big Brother with velvet gloves I guess.
My friend got to go see Jimi and of course I was miserable at being left behind so I went with plan-B, or rather plan BS&T. A few weeks later Blood, Sweat, and Tears was playing in Stuttgart and I got tickets and made the trip, my car loaded with fellow crazies. The atmosphere was electric and the crowd eclectic. One of every kind of human you can think of. Great stuff.
During a break we went outside for a smoke - yeah,
that kind of smoke
plus - and in the shuffle I got separated from my friends. Hell, I was practically separated from myself. Walking back toward the entrance I happened to follow a young man. I wasn't paying him much attention until he stopped dead in his tracks, staring at a newspaper held up by a weeping
Fräulein (you could still use that word then - we were so innocently stupid) for all to read. The headline was plain enough -
Jimi Tot - it said in large bold print. I managed to remember enough of my grandfather's German that I didn't need a translator. To be honest my first thought was "He can't be dead, I haven't seen him live yet." And in this instance you can pronounce 'live' in either of the two common ways - they both work. Then disbelieving shock set in, like when Janis died or the planes flew into the WTC or I lost my virginity. Icons destroyed, or maybe created. I stood there staring at the headline, mouth agape, numb.
The man turned to look at me, the same disbelief on his face. He was about my age, intense, coal dark eyes, thin to the point of gaunt, dressed in black and wearing a black beret with a red star pinned prominently to the front. You might think that we couldn't have been more different, his political language worn like a costume, mine still muddled by the cowardliness of war versus the courage of the expatriate. Hell, even the Champ had told me to stay alive but he had neglected to say how. The man simply said "scheiße" and then, to me, "He is gone. One of the best, I think." His going straight to English told me that I had been made; my attempt to to appear sufficiently disreputable a total failure.
Under other circumstances that might have been it, but unwanted news spreads quickly and the building was cast into a silent pall, the concert-goers into participants in a vigil. Someone from BS&T made an announcement. Nobody cared, there wasn't much happening after that. But this young German who fancied himself a Communist, a prime recruit for the then forming Baader-Meinhof Gang, just started talking. His name was Helmut, at least he said it was, and I think he eventually thought of me as a reclamation project.
I spent the rest of the weekend in his company, mostly in several very altered states at a flat he shared with another man and three women, all students at the University of Stuttgart. It was an interesting time, and a learning experience, but even that was overshadowed by the sadness we shared over Jimi's death. Americans loved Hendrix, but Germans loved loved loved him, and they told me how, and why. I think they
all thought of me as a reclamation project ... talking ... talking. I drove back ... thinking ... thinking.
A few weeks later I met Helmut and a couple of his housemates and went by train to Munich (traurig, München zu meinen deutschen freunden) the plan being for him to show me around his native city. On the way we walked to the dining car and Helmut and his friends introduced me to yogurt. I watched them ladle white creamy stuff over fresh blueberries and had no clue what it was - me, a farm raised free-range kind of person, no idea at all. It was love at first taste, a love affair I'm happy to say I carry on to this day.
That night in Munich we were getting pleasantly plastered drinking at an open air beer garden, talking and reveling in the cool night air, when there was an explosion about half a block away. Loud noises in the night, especiually sinister ones, have a way of grabbing your attention, and this did. I'm not sure why, but we all ran to the source of the noise at a full-on sprint. An entire store front had been reduced to rubble. Glass littered the sidewalk and street, and two injured passersby, a middle aged man and woman, lay together in a pool of their own blood, sacrifices gutted on the alter of a seemingly different war. Helmut, my new friend who had articulated a political philosophy where the selective use of violence was pardonable if the goal was righteous, looked stricken. "Nein, nein," he said, and turned away and vomited. It wasn't the beer. A crowd quickly gathered and several of us went to do what we could for the striken pair. To everyone's amazement, especially considering the copious amount of blood on the sidewalk, the couple was conscious and speaking. A man appeared from somewhere with a medical kit and placed dressings where they would do the most good, but he left the piece of glass sticking out of the woman's thigh alone. The glass itself seemed to be keeping the blood in. It seemed forever but it was probably only a minute or two when the
Polizei and an ambulance, sirens blaring in that ee-oo-ee-oo European way, arrived and took over.
I stood up, wiping bloodied bits of glass from my hands and knees, and looked for Helmut and his friends but they had disappeared. The police asked a few questions and I told them what I'd seen and then went to look for my friends some more. At some point I did what Helmut had done, only later; I found a grassy patch, bent over, and threw up. I looked for an hour but they were gone, evaporated, and I walked back to the train station alone and bought a return ticked to Oberammergau. I tried to contact Helmut a few times after that, but I never saw him or his friends again. I wondered about their flight. Perhaps they thought they'd be taken for who they were not, or perhaps for who they were. I didn't know.
But these guys got to make more music:
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February 2009 
kcidybom
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