Portrait of a German Father

My Father, a German Intellectual who went by the name of Deitrich Mahn, a Rocket scientist in the employment of the US postal service, who lived off a government hand out, in return for him never speaking of his experiment in rocket powered mail delivery system. The system resulted in half a dozen fatalities, though my father once told me no one got a delivery who didn’t deserve it, and then he laughed the laugh of a vengeful German. He moved to America from Dresden Germany were he was a Zeppelin captain on the Graf Zeppelin which he often said” Never even almost crashed and exploded and cause one of the worst Aerial catastrophe in the history of the world, Never...Never!!” then he would break down crying, and I had the sneaking suspicion that he felt guilty for never getting himself consumed in a massive hydrogen inferno.

He moved to Bismarck, North Dakota do to the cities name sake stating in a unusual moment of Crassness” Otto Van Bismarck was so tuff he fucked nails, nails for G-d sakes, he is so tuff he killed six men in Beer hall brawl and then impregnated every women in Bavaria”. One night I found my father tenderly kissing a portrait of Bismarck on horse back, when I asked him what he was doing, he furiously denied that he was kissing Bismarck and said he was kissing the horse, a fact I to this day doubt. My father by no means got along with the towns people, often goose-stepping down the Main street in his trench coat and a knee high boot, saluting a very German salute to any passer byes, and referring to our mayor as Mien Furor, which the mayor publicly denied but privately felt a warm fuzzy strangely angular feeling about.

My father wanted me to be a Government empath whose Psychokinetic powers would allow me to be the shadow leader of the United States while maintaining the veil of legitimacy, and then to be brutally Assassinated by a group of anarchists, when I asked him about that last part he would tell me that I deserved no better and I was only getting so far in his imagined life for me do to his connections. Do to his abrasive manner I rarely mentioned that I lacked the Psychokinetic powers to manage this feet of madness not to mention that my fathers ill manners left him with no connections to speak of, much less the kind to get me into a non-existent part of government services. None the less I found myself enthralled with the way he would often take me to the rocket exhibit in the local Museum and lose his sense of direction do to his revelry in the world of rocketry and in a extreme case of vertigo run into any stationary object, and his love of the science so extreme as to lead him to make soft swishing rocket noises in his sleep, interspersed with cries relating to his Zeppelin days, and in a Macabre crescendo he would scream oh, the humanity, oh, the humanity.. moof...ruf...[silence].

I once hoped my father for one brief moment would remove his ruff intellectual front, the nebulous animosity to closeness that he called the frethinzatt, or purple prickly feelings as my school psychologist would call it, and for that brief moment I could ask him in a moment of unadulterated truth” father I have been wanting to ask you this for so very long, ever since I could remember, dad, can you please tell me were did you hid my bunny Pajamas with the feet, I know you know were they are just give them to me and this ugly openness can end” but he never did and my hands and feet are cold, so very cold, and to this day I don’t have bunny ears and their whereabouts are only known in my fathers head behind his list of reasons why he was a reincarnation of Otto Van Bismarck and I had to but snatch the knowledge from him.

Alas,my father died when I was but eight, he died racing, he had a fondness for the track, he never knew his limits and on a bet from a 50 year old French prostitute he entered the race in his old model-t, after killing a hobo for good luck and smearing his chest with it’s blood, a trick he learned from a ancient savage priest of a extinct civilization. He entered , and after the initial crash his body was so damaged it looked as if his body had melded with his machine, I will forever remember my father with reverence, the kind that can only be forged in blood and deformed quality American workmanship.