My First Kiss

Things were going nowhere with Anke. The two of us were elected class presidents every year, so we shared some responsibility in school. She sat next to me in computer class and I showed her the ropes. She even came to my place for tutoring. We liked each other a lot, but nothing ever happened, because none of us ever made the first move. She admitted it years later, then got so embarrassed about it that she didn't even talk to me anymore. But that's a story for a different entry. For the time being, I was lonely, I whacked it 20 times a day like any normal teenager and girls simply didn't like me very much.
On the plus side, I was also getting old enough to make my license for one of these bad boys:

My first bike!

I had long hair, an earring, a leather jacket and eventually, my parents bought me a Kawasaki Eliminator. It wasn't the Aprilia RS that I wanted, but heyho, first world problems of spoiled rich kids and all that. Funny how at that time I was much more like my biological mother's new guy than my own dad. At that point, I had not even spoken to my real mothers in years, because she freaked me out too much with all that talk about how I should contact social services.

The other kids in school had to use the bus for another year. I had my bike. Freedom. Coolness. Still didn't know how to talk to girls, though. So thank fuck for the power of the internet! I met this girl in the PC Games chatroom. I think her handle was Dragonheart or something. My favourite movie at the time! We used to chat a lot, then we realized that we lived really close to each other, chat sessions turned into phone calls and we were really attracted to one another.

Dragonheart's real name was Sara and she was smoking hot! She also pretended to be an aggressive inline skater on the internet, because even two decades ago, everybody was awesome when talking to strangers online. At that time she was the closest thing to a girlfriend I ever had. But she was shy about meeting in real life and her overprotective parents didn't exactly make things any less complicated. So things were nice, but they weren't getting serious.

So I still didn't have a girlfriend, but I had a nerdy buddy with a secret stash of porn magazines under his bed. And that friend's mother had just booked a holiday trip to Tunisia and asked if I wanted to tag along. My parents were rich and all too happy to have me out of the house, so I was put on an airplane faster than I could say, " ".

Until that trip, Christian and I thought that nothing could ever hurt our friendship. Nothing could come between us. Though neither one of us considered girls a serious threat at the time - bad mistake!
For the first week or so, Christian and I would always hang out together. But by some unforeseen circumstances, both of us ended up with lady friends. Christian ended up with this creepy fat chick, who was incredibly soft-spoken and chilled out and wise. She wasn't that much older than us, but she talked like she had lived for a million years. Knew everything. No idea what she saw in an idiot like him. Don't get me wrong, he was my friend and I loved the guy to bits, but we were young and dumber than shit. She was a grown-ass woman.

Meanwhile, I started hanging out with this crazy punk chick, Sabrina. One day her hair was pink, then it was blue, only to turn green the next. Tomboy, about my age. We got off on the completely wrong foot. We just casually talked at some point and this absolute whale of a woman walked past. She wasn't just big. She was Peter Griffin levels of fat. So I did what all judgmental kids do at that age and made a nasty remark. Sabrina was super pissed off at me. "What the fuck, man, that's my mother you're talking about!" I just stood there and laughed in her face, because I thought that was the funniest, most epic comeback, ever. Problem was, she wasn't joking. I just insulted her mother.

A couple days went by and then something really bad happened. Have you ever been in a hotel where they have a warning siren or some sort of signal that tells people to stay the fuck out of the ocean? Because our hotel had one of those and one guy ignored the signal. And drowned. Sabrina rushed to help the guy, she tried to save him, tried to bring him back to life. Her dream was to become a nurse. Heck, back then she told me she was a nurse, which was about as true as Sara's career as an aggressive skater. A guy just died right in front of her and she was in absolute shock.

Sabrina asked me to stay with her that night. So I came to her room, we both slept in her bed and I was the perfect gentleman. I didn't touch her, didn't even peek at her boobs when she fell asleep. I just watched over her, spent the night by her side, was the nicest guy on earth. She woke up the next day and said she couldn't believe I didn't try anything, because every other guy she had ever known definitely would have done. Yeah well, maybe she was hanging out with the wrong guys. Or maybe there was something wrong with me.

I left her to do her own stuff and went to the arcade machines. They had this King of Fighters machine in the hotel lobby and since I had spent the biggest part of my childhood hiding from people and playing videogames, I was basically god at this game. Nobody could beat me. People put money in the machine, just so I would show them special moves or show them how to beat certain enemies. One guy threw a ton of coins at me so I'd spend some time playing the game with his kid. I had small crowds gathering around the machine who would watch me play every night. Local kids from Tunisia, too, because they sure as fuck didn't have a games console at home. Back in school I was always the very last pick in football and just about every other physical activity. But in front of this arcade machine I was a rockstar!

Sabrina came to watch me play. She held my drink, cheered me on, kinda stood in my corner like we were re-enacting Rocky. And when Geese Howard flew out the window after that final boss fight and people lost their shit over it, she wrapped herself around me and kissed me.
My first kiss. It tasted like stale beer, served in a heavily-used ash tray.
Christian was supposed to get lucky that same night. He was in our room with that creepy wise woman. But I banged against the door, trying to save him from... heck, I don't even know. I guess I thought it was wrong? She was too old and too weird for him? Maybe I was jealous, because some creepy chick wanted to bone my best friend? I wasn't into him in that way. Ever. But for some reason I simply couldn't stand the idea that the two of them would do it.

He was absolutely furious. We shouted at each other, got seriously pissed off, came within an inch of actually fighting each other. We never fought before, but that shit was serious. Fortunately, we made up the next day, because we simply couldn't stay mad at each other. But he got back at me just a few days later. When we went back to Germany I decided to spend a few days at Sabrina's place. So Christian went and met Sara. Which was only fair - after all, I figured things weren't going anywhere with her and Sabrina was my quasi-girlfriend now.

The Wooden Penis

Southern France sucks. Seriously, fuck north Korea. Bomb France! We were at a "beach", which was pitch black and rock-hard. The sand looked all oily and messed up and felt like concrete. And we were all awkward, self-conscious teenagers, so there was a lot of swimming with clothes on happening. It was great! The kids didn't want to be there (they weren't super religious, either), the folks running the event didn't really want to be there and only guy who was actually religious and gave some sort of a shit was the ancient bloke who watched over the folks watching us kids.

It was super fucking hot. The food was shit. The toilet was a hole in the ground. We had to sing stupid religious songs that nobody cared about. We went on trips that everybody hated. We were all a bunch of spoiled rich kids. We went "sightseeing" through town and most of the kids just started stealing random shit. One guy threw up on the way home and was sick for days, because he stole a bottle that said it contained a very high amount of alcohol. The dumbass drank perfume.

The first day that didn't actually suck was when a small group of us got in a van with a tape deck. And I brought my music. Nothing brings awkward teenagers together like Bohemian Rhapsody! Suddenly we had something to talk about. Some of us lightened up a little and we actually talked. There was this one kid, Christian, who sat next to me and explained the Enterprise's warp drive to me in staggering detail. Biggest fucking Trek nerd I have met in my life! We started hanging out around camp together, because that was better than being by myself or hanging with my sister, who was so much more interested in the other boys at that time.

And then, one sunny, glorious day, we found it. The waves had brought a majestic, wooden phallus to the beach. Somebody must have carved it with a knife with so much detail, it looked more real than my own wang! It was a sign! A sign from God! This was bible camp, after all! The wooden penis would become the symbol of our friendship. We got hammered that night, we howled at the moon like idiots, then we shone a light at the old guy's tent and pretended to do horrible things to each other with the help of our new friend, Mr. Woodcock. Those were some scary shadows!

The next morning, when we were doing the dishes, the old guy walked up on Christian, moved really close to his ear and whispered: "You're a filthy, disgusting pig to the environment. Among other things." And then he walked away. This only encouraged Christian. He could imitate the Colonial Marine pulse rifle from Aliens using only his mouth. It was uncanny! There's be gun noises every breakfast, dinner and lunch. And they'd always send him off, force him to say a hundred Hail Marys or some shit. Good times.

When camp was finally over, we remained friends and eventually I visited Christian at his mother's place. That's when I realized he was the only poor kid at camp. They lived in a shappy little council apartment. I had two maids, my own tv, stereo, vcr, computer, a laptop, this guy had a computer from the stone age, a filthy mattress and an NES. All the more reason for me to bring my NES, two controllers and Secret of Mana.

This was the beginning of an incredibly nerdy friendship. We'd get together every weekend to play Secret of Mana. We didn't sleep, we didn't shower, we stayed up all weekend to play. We were completely in there! That game was our adventure! We fought boss monsters together, looked for treasure, upgraded our weapons and magic, came up with strategies and plans of attack. This wasn't just some stupid little game that we played to wind down after school. This was life! Serious business!

Sadly, we beat the game all too quickly and needed to find something new, because Christian was getting a little too nerdy for me. First of all, he was absolutely crazy about the Spice Girls. And the only difference between a Spice Girls music video and a porno is how some pornos these days feature some surprisingly good music. What's worse, he was completely nuts about Sailor Moon. I know that in this day and age, being into anime for little girls is socially acceptable. I know grown-ass men, who use little anime girls as their profile pictures. I know adults using fucking cartoon pony avatars. I'm trying to be tolerant and understanding, so I don't call them out on that shit, but this shit will never stop being dumb to me.

Being into completely different weird, dumb stuff, I went and got into tabletop roleplaying. Das Schwarze Auge. The Dark Eye. German D&D, if you will. It was just like my favourite computer RPGs, but now I could roll a character using real dice, writing down numbers with a pen and playing pretend adventures with my friend. There was only  the two of us, we were too nerdy to be cool and we didn't have anyone else to play with. Look, I get it. Every serious tabletop group would have laughed us out of the room. But we took turns writing adventures for one another, being the DM, while the other one had to survive the adventure. Whoever played the DM was allowed to use their character to help out in battle.

This may be the most pathetic way anyone has ever played tabletop RPG. But we took this shit seriously. We'd spend all week writing new adventures, coming up with crazy stories and twists, then print them out to have them ready for the weekend. We wrote some pretty awesome stories back then, came up with characters, villains, all the good stuff you needed for a fun adventure. We'd play medieval music on the stereo, buy fun, colourful dice sets and buy expansion packs and rule books for each other for birthdays and Christmas. We might have been cringey and nerdy as fuck, but we were as close as friends could get.

Back at my parents's place, my old man did what all rich people do - make everyone's lives a little worse, because he could never be happy. He decided that our house was too small and too shabby. Three floors and a huge basement with a massive office room inside, giant living room and dining area, all four kids had their own room with a tv, computer, games consoles, everything we could ever wish for. My dad decided he wanted to move to Königstein, which is one of the richest places in all of Germany. People there would only use a BMW or a Mercedes as a secondary car to do their shopping. It also happened to be countless miles away from my school, so I had to get up at 5am every morning and catch several buses to make it to school by 8am. It was either that or find yet another school. Just when I had finally found a school where I fit in, where the other kids liked me and I didn't get bullied.

What's worse, our new house was exactly opposite to a cemetary. Every single window in each of the kid's rooms looked right over the rows of graves. We'd see people get buried and other people crying over them every goddamn week. To me, that was just seriously depressing. To my new stepsiblings, it was a nightmare, because they had just lost their father to cancer. None of us wanted to move there, but my dad didn't care. Just another one of those moments, which he later apologized by saying that he was raised in a day where the kids' opinions and needs simply didn't matter.

Our new house was a rich guy's wet dream. That's what it was all about. My dad was all about showing off. Invite the family over and show off his car, show of the comically oversized tv, the new surround setup. The house would be the best damn thing he'd ever show off to anyone! We had a couple of engineers customize every single room of the house for our parents. The floor in the hallway was made from black granite, full of sparkly blue veins. The lamps were shaped like seagulls, exactly six of them, which were supposed to stand for our family members. The stairs which lead to the top floor had tiny LED lights built right into them and they'd light up at night. There were lamps on the outside walls shaped like torches. Lots of cameras, too! We had security doors, security keys, people had to show their faces to the camera before we were allowed to let anyone inside.

Every window was bulletproof. I'm not making this up. My parents went to a presentation where they let people swing a sledge hammer at these windows. They promised a cash prize to anyone stong enough to break one of the windows. Nobody won anything, these windwos were the stuff of legend. Just the right thing for paranoid rich people with more money than common sense. My second stepmother would later tell me that my dad had completely ruined her, like he had ruined his two wives before her. Weeeell, I see her point, but to be perfectly honest, he didn't exactly force her to spend all of her inheritance on the world's most expensive house. You coulda said no!

There was a traffic light outside the guest bathroom. It showed a little green man when it was empty. If you went inside and locked the door, the light would show the red man, instead. The light was hand-made by our architects. It didn't show any ordinary red and green people, either. It had Gaston Lagaffe in it.

This guy.

There were other parts, which were also decorated with art by André Franquin. My dad absolutely loved comics and Franquin's stuff is amazing. I could go on and on and on about all the crazy shit we had in this house. Let's just say we had people from all sorts of magazines showing up to take pictures of the place, the whole thing cost more than any normal person could earn in ten lifetimes and we absolutely fucking hated everything about the place, the only exception being my dad. My 2nd stepmother kinda liked it at the time, since she went along with all this nonsense, but... yeah.

We had four cars. One of these cars was for the maids. They bought a Ford. For the cleaning lady. I lived in the world's dumbest palace right opposite the graveyard. I hated every moment I had to spend in this house. On the plus side, I could watch Cartoon Network at our new place. Cow and Chicken. Johnny Bravo. At this point my English had become so good, I could have packed my shit and left the country. Heh. If only!

Aromageddon

Essays were my favourite new thing in school. My classmates would write about how they spent a week in summer at their grandmother's. I wrote ridiculous stories about how all the vegetables in our garden came to life, ate my family and I had to fight them off with only a whip. I acted out the whole thing in front of the class, humming the theme from Indiana Jones and everything. It was completely stupid and they loved it. This is how I learned that you have to be brave enough to try crazy nonsense. Or as Weird Al would say, "Dare to be stupid." Break the rules, ignore the assignment, do the exact opposite and for as long as you're having fun and everyone is entertained, they'll let you get away with it.

Of course none of that helped me with classes, which didn't encourage creativity. Maths, anything sciency, shit where you have to follow the rules. I just can't do it. I always got the trick questions and bonus questions right. Name 12 male characters who live in Asterix' village. An electric train is going from one place to another, at this and that speed, the wind speed is suchandsuch and blows in this and that direction. Which way does the smoke go? Nowhere, obviously, since it was an electric train. I couldn't tell you what X, was, or what one Werner Karl Heisenberg's greatest achievement was. It had nothing to do with methamphetamine, though!

I was juuuuuuust smart enough to pass all of the science crap. I wasn't great at it, but I was a language genius and I wrote killer essays, so that was more than enough to get me through school. I never studied for any exams, I just winged it. I put in zero effort and always managed to do just well enough to pass. My tutor called me the human three liter engine. As in, put three liters in the tank and keep going for a hundred miles.

I was finally starting to build up some confidence. I had friends! We started hanging out after school, doing stuff, normal kids do. My life was normal and I liked it. The one thing I absolutely couldn't handle, though, was the ladies.
I was hopelessly crushing on Anke. She had developed a lot faster than the other girls in class and had some serious boobies. Not tiny little bumps like my sister, but actual knockers. I saw her in her swimwear in PE and ho-lee fawk, dem tetays! I know, that's no way to talk about a lady, but I was a horny teenager and to me, she was the most beautiful thing I had seen in my life! I had never been so much in love before!
Naturally, she ignored the crap outta me. All the girls did. We didn't have any actual couples in class, back then. Everyone was still a bit young. I was a year older than most of them and naturally horny, so that didn't help. It also didn't help when I released the fart of dooom (yes, triple-o) in class one day. Girls don't like that.

Now, before you judge me - you've been in that situation, right? You don't really want to, but you could totally do a really good one and you figure if you're being sneaky then nobody will hear it and then it'll smell bad for a moment, but nobody is gonna say anything and if anyone does, then you'll deflect everything and point at the guy next to you. I can't be the only one, because people fart in elevators, on the bus and just about everywhere all the fucking time. That day was my day, I couldn't hold it in, I figured I'd be sneaky about it and, well, that was that.

The guy next to me started laughing uncontrollably. Everyone looked at him, trying to figure out what the fuck... and then they smelled it. The most rancid, rotten, disgusting eggy fart in the history of buttholes. All the boys laughed. At that point it was too awesome not to take credit. It was so bad, the teacher opened all windows and evacuated the classroom. We literally left the room for five minutes and waited for my fart to go away. If Anke didn't hate me before, she definitely did now. But to the boys I was a legend. My ass was legendary.

My best buddy back then was a Japanese kid called Timo Ernst. He had the most German name you could think of. His dad was German and one fine day he went to Japan, boned a Japanese lady and that was the beginning of Timo's story. His mother just ironed clothes and watched soap operas whenever I came to their house. Didn't speak or understand a word of German. Timo would sent her miles into town to bring us kebabs. He treated her like personnel, but not like his mother. Weirdest shit I had ever seen.

Timo had a business sense similar to my brother's. Just on a much more modern scale. Timo had the power of the internet. And he had a CD writer. Be burned all the internet porn he could find on CDs and sold them in school. When I finally had my first modem, all I managed to find was a bunch of horny old men on AOL. I used to hang around in some weird chatroom for teenagers and every so often I'd get private messages popping up, usually older guys asking for dick pix. They told me stories about how that's perfectly normal and so not gay and how they all whip it out in front of their friends to see who's got the biggest one and all sorts of weird shit I don't remember doing with any of my friends. It was creepy as fuck! And that was in the nineties! I dread to think what kind of crap my kid has to deal with when he goes online. I doubt he's telling me everything. I know I wouldn't talk about these things to my parents. "My day? Oh, nothing special. Played some Half-Life, spent 38 minutes downloading a 5 MB update for Diablo and some sixty year old guy asked to see my cock. Pass the potatoes?"

Our old Mega Drive didn't really get any new games at that time, the Sega CD, 32X and Saturn all sucked. I had a PC now and got into computer games. My brother got himself a PlayStation. That's when I felt PC master race superiority for the first time, because PSX games were a blocky, pixellated mess and most of the games he had on there I could also play on my PC. Tomb Raider, Need for Speed... we did kill the shit out of each other on Soul Edge (or Soul Blade, depending on where you are), but for the most part, I was done with consoles. I started reading pc gaming magazines and started hanging out in pc gaming chatrooms. Little did I know that I was chatting with some of my future colleagues and employers back then. Or my future girlfriend.

All I knew is that my parents were horny and wanted the kids out of the house, so they sent us to bible camp in France, of all things. And I didn't believe in god, I didn't believe in camp and I sure as fuck didn't believe in going to France! Meanwhile, my parents believed in getting rid of us and running around the house naked. So before I knew it I was on a coach to France with my stepsister and two dozen strange kids. No internet, no computer, net cafés weren't a thing back then and portable devices like a Game Boy weren't allowed. Welcome to hell!

School of Hard Knocks

My dad's new flame went with the whole 'hard but fair' approach. Basically, my life went back to doing chores for some strange woman. She asked me to sort the laundry, vacuum the house, do all the things that "build character". She was never satisfied and criticized everything I did. I wasn't thorough enough with the vacuum cleaner. My hair still looked greasy, I should have washed it twice. I walk funny, we should go to a doctor and have him look at my feet. She meant well in her own fucked-up way, but to me it felt like the very fact I existed was a problem in her eyes. We didn't really get along very well and never grew too close.

Having learned absolutely nothing from his past mistakes, my dad couldn't wait to divorce my stepmother and get married to the neighbour. So the weird old lady who lived next door was suddenly my new stepmother. What's worse, Mona, who was about my age, concerned with the size of her tits and ran around the house wearing nothing but a nightshirt, was suddenly my stepsister. We weren't actual relatives, of course. My biological dad just happened to get married to her biological mom. Thing is, whatever attraction might have been there when we were just teens living next door to each other, died pretty much instantly when she was constantly referred to as my "sister". I was the horniest kid in town, but I wasn't gonna Lannister her.

It was the weirdest thing. My family has always been really open about anything sexual, about nudity, nothing was a big deal. People walked around the house naked all the time. My sister openly asked how big my wang was, which just didn't seem weird to me or anything. One night we pissed off of the balcony together. At some point she got her nipples pierced and showed the result to everyone around the dining table. We were discussing my sister's exposed tits over dinner. In a way, I guess we were... hippies? Nothing ever happened. Wasn't even considered or brought up. Wouldn't have felt normal.

Things with my newest family weren't all bad. My new stopmother's ex was rich. And I mean stupid rich. The guy made a killing at the stock exchange market and suddenly I had my own room, which was bigger than most apartments I had when I started to live on my own. I had my own TV and I had a satellite receiver. That's where I discovered my two favourite things in life next to gaming: Cartoons and standup comedy.

Nickelodeon was the coolest thing to have happened in my childood. Ren and Stimpy. Rocko's Modern Life. Not only were these shows hilarious, but they were so full of really adult humor, which most kids watching Nickelodeon would never understand. Then there was RTL Samstag Nacht, which I'm guessing was the German attempt at creating something like Saturday Night Live. These guys made fun of the news, pop culture, famous tv shows, everything people cared about at the time. Satire. Comedy. And it was all live on tape, so you could see when they messed up a line, lost their shit and started laughing and had to start over. These guys were my heroes, man! I would have loved to do the stuff they do someday when I grow up!

One of the guys from Samstag Nacht is a faithful GameStar reader. I saw him on Facebook and sent him a friend request. He accepted and sometimes he likes some of the crap I post. I idolize that guy and the idea that he may occasionally read one of my articles is so crazy, I have difficulty processing it. I watched everything he did when I was a teenager. Now he knows me through GameStar. This may sound completely stupid to you, but to me it's one of my biggest RL achievements, ever.

At this point in my life I knew that I totally wanted to voice-act for a cartoon someday. And that I'd love to do standup comedy. I don't think I  will ever be brave enough to do either. I'd probably get nervous and die right there. But it's on my bucket list for sure. If nothing else, I learned a lot about jokes back then. Humor and videogames were fun. I spent most of my time up in my room watching cartoons and playing videogames.

Another thing I had discovered was soctcore pornography. German tv, after midnight. They'd show all the classic, cringeworthy softcore garbage. Emanuelle. A girl slid her hand down her pants and pretend-rubbed one out. Or in. Or whatever it is girls do. I couldn't get it out of my head. It was a problem, because I'd dream about it at night and mess up my bed in my sleep. This may not sound like a big deal to you, but we had maids. We had two cleaning ladies, who made our beds, dumped our clothes in the washing machine... yeah. I woke up that morning and hid my pants under the bed. When the maid came out of my room, they were gone! She knew! She never said or did anything, but back then it completely freaked me out and I had no idea how to deal with it.

I tried to stick a bunch of tissues to my dick with a fistful of rubber bands. I tried taping a little plastic bag to the tip. I considered sleeping naked and just dangling it over the edge of my bed while I slept. My family made no big deal out of nudity or talking about our bodies, but we never talked about... this.
While I had discovered the awkward side effects of tv nudity, my brother had his first business idea. Because we didn't just have tvs in our rooms. We had VCRs. Those were weird machines, which people used to record tv shows in the olden days. Ask your parents! So while I was trying to hide the fact that I couldn't stop creaming my pants, my brother was helping other kids do the same - and cashed in on it.

He recorded all the porn, took it to school and sold it. That was probably the weirdest call my dad ever got from school about one of his kids. Because, you know... somebody catches little Timmy whacking it to a boobie tape and questions will be asked. My brother was ratted out in no time and that was the end of his business. But he made a killing in the meanwhile and had all the coolest toys!

Things were looking up for me. I finally got my parents to take me to a doctor, so I could get glasses. Then they put me in a new school. A private catholic school for rich kids. Some of my teachers were actual nuns! You know, ninja costume and everything! There was a cross in every classroom, we had a little church inside the building and don't you dare use the Lord's name in vain. Heck, don't you dare wear inappropriate clothing or pick up a bit of snow to throw it at some other kid in the winter! I know, sounds like hell, but it was actually one of the happiest times in my life.

You see, in order to even be accepted into that school I had to repeat a year. I was bigger and stronger than all the other kids, so nobody bullied me. And since we were all spoiled weirdos, most of us were socially awkward. We were too insecure to pick on each other. Most importantly, though, cartoons and comedy shows taught me how to make the other kids laugh. Laughter was my weapon. It was my armor. All I had to do was make sarcastic remarks in class, be a smartass, the other kids loved it and nobody picked on me.

Better still - I no longer had to run a household with my brother, so I was actually awake in school and managed to keep up. Suddenly, school was easy! At that point in time I was 14 and had played so much Ultima, Might & Magic, Phantasy Star and other stuff, they no longer gave me any English homework, because I knew more than my teacher. If the other kids had a question, they turned to me, not the teacher. For the first time in a long while, life was good.

13 And All Grown-Up

Life was hard when my stepmother treated me like a slave. Life got considerably worse when I no longer had a stepmother to order me around. I was 13, my dad was out looking for a job and I had to figure out how to cook dinner. Sure, I had helped my stepmother cook dinner before, but I didn't know how to cook a whole meal on my own! My dad would just give me money, send me to the supermarket and get whatever. Being raised a snob, I didn't just want to get frozen shit or toast. I bought fresh meat and vegetables and pasta. I tried to cook real food!

My first meals barely qualified as edible. But when you're the only one in the house who cooks and your only other option is starving to death, you'll turn into a really quick learner! My brother and I did everything. Clean the dishes, clean the house, take care of the shopping, do the laundry, iron our clothes and so on and so forth. And our house was massive. Three floors, a basement, four bathrooms. I'm not making this up. The guest bathroom was on the bottom floor, the floor above had two bathrooms, one with a tub, the other one with a shower. The top floor was basically a massive bedroom with its own bar, counter, stools and everything, as well as a luxurious bathroom. I think the house used to belong to some rich dentist or something and he really liked bathrooms. I don't understand what the three of us wanted with such a place, but maybe my dad was hoping for my stepmother to move back in. She never did.

I spent the following year in a new school and it scarred me for life. First of all, we moved to an entirely new province, whole different part of Germany, where kids were taught different things in school at a different pace. I fucking sucked. I had no idea what the hell they were teaching. I may as well have attended school in China. What's worse, I was constantly tired, because I had to cook, shop, clean the house and do the laundry. I simply didn't have the energy to catch up on all the new crap I had to learn in my new school. And since I was the new kid, the other kids would mock me relentlessly. If you think getting bullied by one kid in school is bad, imagine being mocked by everyone you go to school with, including your teachers. My English teacher would fail me because of my shitty handwriting. I handed in perfect vocabulary tests and she'd highlight mistakes which weren't any. And it's not like I could have talked to anybody. What was I supposed to say? "I didn't do my homework, because I had to run to the shops, buy food, cook for my dad and my brother, iron his shirts for work and then I fell asleep, because I was exhausted?" Yeah, right.

I had exactly one friend back then. He was the kid they used to beat up before I showed up. He took pity on me and I spent as much time over at his place as I could after school. We played Street Fighter II: Turbo. All the damn time. I'm fucking awesome at Street Fighter until this day and it's all thanks to him. All we did was try to beat the game on the default difficulty setting, which was hard as balls at the time. We sucked. We lost. Sometimes we'd lose a fight 20 times in a row. But we didn't quit, we didn't start over on easy mode. We kept losing, kept sucking it up, kept getting better until we managed to get all the way to the end. Nowadays I can beat that game in a few minutes I spend on the shitter. I bet most people who enjoy fighting games can.

Too bad being good at Street Fighter doesn't teach you any real fighting skills. I was pale, I was chubby and if I had low self-esteem and crappy social skills before, then my year in that school has ruined me for life. I remember when one girl got up after class, walked up to me out of nowhere and tried to slap me in the face. Just like that. I had never seen anything like that before. I caught her hand and there's a whole lot of stuff I would have loved to do to her at the time, but what was the point? It didn't help that even my own father would make fun of me for being fat. Yeah well, turns out that all of this "clean your plate or there'll be no sunshine tomorrow" and "if you don't eat your dinner, then you can't have ice cream" nonsense is the perfect way to raise somebody into developing an eating disorder. I can't throw away leftovers until this day and I'm fucking 35!

I was terrified of school. I tried to make myself throw up, so my dad would let me stay at home. I tried to skip class, but my brother went to the same school on the same bus, so there was nothing I could do. Strangely enough, he transitioned into the new school just fine and never had any problems making friends or dividing his time between school and chores. I just couldn't fucking cope. And at that point, not even my beloved videogames seemed to help much. I knew I had to go back to school and face the mobbing. I knew I hadn't done my homework. I knew I was too stupid to even understand half of the shit they were teaching in class. I just didn't want to be there.

Of course the people looking for my dad didn't stop showing up. By then I was so used to telling them my dad wasn't there, I wasn't even nervous anymore. Friends and family had to ring three or four times and hang up again to signalize they weren't debt collectors. My dad said he didn't really know what to do about the situation and that he might apply for social benefits. The fucking snob. How about going to a job center, signing up for unemployment support and, I dunno, actually looking for a job? He was out most of the day saying he was looking for work or whatever, but I honestly don't know what he did or where he went. All I knew was that I couldn't open the door or answer the phone or talk to anyone about how school was completely destroying me.

And that's when the guy next door died of cancer. They were a family of four. Mom, dad, a girl about my age and a boy, bit younger than my brother. Their dad had been in the final stages of his cancer, they looked after him and eventually he passed away. During his lifetime, he was a lying, cheating, violent bastard, who fucked around, got hammered and threatened his family with a gun. How and why the mom decided to look after him when he was terminally ill, I'll never understand. She said he remained an asshole till the very end, only asking for forgiveness a few moments before it was all over. Suffice to say, the kids were even more fucked up than my brother and I. Compared to what they had to go through, my life was a total cakewalk!

I really liked the girl next door, Mona. She thought my brother and I were weirdos for playing videogames all day and she was right. But I liked talking to her. She asked me if I thought her breasts were too small. We were teenagers. I'm male. I have a pulse. I like breasts. I had female friends before, but none of them had breasts. Because we were kids. So that was nice and new. Looking back, I think we're very different and things never would have worked out. Also, she ultimately made out with my brother, years later. But whatever may or may not have happened all came to an end, when the widow next door made a move on my dad. Of all things.

They were both on a rebound, so naturally, my dad spent lots of time over at their house. He turned into a complete stranger. I saw him fucking cook dinner! He has never done that when he was with my mom or my stepmother! He sucked in his gut. He spent time with her kids and listened to her shit when he couldn't even stand to listen to my problems in school. He listened to Mona's stupid Kelly Family albums! I had been incredibly near-sighted for over a year and begged him to buy me some glasses, because I couldn't read the blackboard in school and he fucking ignored me!
It didn't take long and my dad informed us that we'd all move in together. All of us living together in their house. Good thing her late husband was filthy rich, because the day my dad hooked up with the neighbour was also the day the debt collectors stopped showing up.

Suddenly Poverty

My stepmother hated videogames. She was convinced that, whenever my brother and I had a fight, it was because we spent too much time playing violent games. Looking back, I think she was just miserable and hated her life and she couldn't stand it when anyone near her was having fun. So she limited our daily videogame time to one lousy hour. You can beat Golden Axe in an hour if you're good. Try and finish more than two battles on Shining Force in an hour! Bitch.

Since I wasn't allowed to play games, I went and read about them. We had all the videogame magazines in the house. Power Play, the official Sega Magazine, I bought C64 magazines with my own allowance when I got my first computer for Christmas. I read this review of Shining Force by some mighty bearded dude named Michael Hengst. The guy was my hero. It was the coolest thing anyone had ever written. He joked about how you should stock on life-saving chips and coke before you even consider getting started with this game. As a kid I loved that line so much, I used it in one of my own reviews many years later.

A while back I actually found some gaming-related Facebook, where Michael Hengst himself was involved. I posted a comment and he liked it. This may not sound like a big deal to you, but he was a fucking rockstar to me when I was a kid. Kids my age grew up worshipping Stallone or Schwarzenegger or Michael Jackson or whatever. I wanted to be like those videogame critics, who get to play all the cool new shit, then write about how awesome it is. Back then, games journalism was a lot less serious, too! What I mean is, if I write a review today and use the word 'fart', there's a pretty high chance it'll get edited out. I'm not allowed to swear or be silly with my stuff. Granted, they're letting me get away with a lot more shit than other writers, because I've established a bit of a fan base, but it's insanely difficult in this day and age to write goofy articles.

Back when I was a kid, the reviewers would make funny faces and put them underneath the article, depending on how much they liked a game. They'd have a big idiot grin on their face if a game was really great. Underneath a really terrible game you'd see the writer screaming for help and there's be a facehugger making love to his oral cavity. Good times! If anyone had asked me what I wanted to be in life back then, I would have wanted to be a games journalist. Heck, when my daily hour of videogames was over, I'd just sit down and write my own reviews! I didn't show them to anyone, I didn't think they were all that great, but if I couldn't play or read about games, I'd write about them. Still better than having to deal with my frustrated stepmother.

It was around that time when my real mother got in touch with me again. She had remarried. Really cool guy, had long hair, an earring, a cool apartment in the city and he had Predator and Police Academy on tape. My dad didn't raise the bar very high, so my mother's new guy was my new personal hero. He'd take my mom, my brother and my lazy ass and go to the park. He was insane about table tennis for some reason, so that's what we played all day. Heck, the guy didn't even mind hopping on a bus with us to go places. I haven't seen my father step into a bus or a subway train in my entire life. If he couldn't drive there in his Range Rover or book a flight, it wasn't worth his time. If at all possible, he would have used the car to pick up the milk and the newspaper on our doorstep in the morning. So we never went anywhere, unless we could drive there.

Going places with my dad was never fun, because he was a snob. We went to McDonald's once and he ordered a Big Mac, some fries and a coke. The cashier was nice enough to rind him up a Big Mac meal to save him some money. My dad flipped and said he didn't want a meal. He wanted a Big Mac, some fries and a coke. Which is literally what a Big Mac Meal is, but there was a principle involved. He threw a massive fit, they had to get the manager and then rang him up his order, which was twice as expensive as the meal containing the exact same items. I'd rather not know what they did to his food after he put up a show like that.

He once bit a server's head off in Pizza Hut when we had to wait 40 minutes to get our food. We were all starving, but he decided he had waited too long and we were going home. The fucking pizza was right there! He may have won his imaginary argument, but sometimes dinner is more important than winning. But not to him.
Meanwhile, my mother's new guy made his own pizza. Back then I thought that's because he was awesome. Today I'm broke enought to understand the guy just couldn't afford ordering stuff. We lived in a palace, his apartment was tiny. He had a tiny, shitty tv, no games consoles apart from a classic Game Boy and he didn't even have a car. And the guy was fucking awesome, because he simply spent time with us, he listened, joked around and put up with our shit. He also hated our father with a passion and said he'd murder him if they ever met somewhere in the street. I was trying to picture whoose side I'd pick if that ever happened while I was around.

Back at home, my dad started developing some weird habits. He slept on the couch. The phone would ring in the morning to wake him up and he just ignored it. I don't even know if this service is still a thing nowadays, but back then you could just call a number and ask them to wake you up at a specific time. So he stayed on the sofa and slept. My stepmother asked me to buy more beer than ever. The guy at the gas station let me buy it even though I was only eleven years old, because he knew my stepmother. She also let me try my first bottle of beer. My parents were weird with this shit. They encouraged me to drink and smoke, figuring it would gross me out so much that I'd stay off the stuff by myself. And yeah, I hated beer and I refused to even touch a cigarette. Until this day I've never smoked anything. I'll admit you look fucking cool with a cigarette, but I never saw the appeal of actually inhaling something that smelled so nasty.

When the phone rang I had to answer it. I had to repeat the name of the caller. "Hello Mister Suchandsuch." Then my dad would signal to me whether he was in or not. He usually wasn't. Eventually, I had to answer the door in pretty much the same fashion. People would ask to see my dad, I'd tell them he's out. They'd say they can see the car in the garage and I'd panic and cry and tell them to just leave me alone, because I was a kid and I was scared and I was too stupid to say he was picked up or used a taxi or something. My dad and my stepmother were fighting all the time. Meanwhile, my real mother was making me paranoid, telling me I should call social services if my dad wouldn't allow me to see her. Why would she say that? Was something gonna happen? Where was this coming from? For fuck's sake, I finally got over the stupid court drama and the custody fight, where I had to tell people that my mother would leave us alone all day, come home drunk or bring home random strangers and now you're talking to me like that. Thanks, mom!

The people looking for my dad got more aggressive over time. One morning they walked around the house, banged on our windows and shouted his name. My siblings completely freaked out and started to cry. The guys outside seemed genuinely shocked. They didn't want to scare us, they apologized a million times, but damn! What had my father done to make them do this in the first place?
A few months later and random strangers would regularly come into our house and start looking at the place. My dad told me not to worry about it. What he didn't tell me was that we were gonna lose the house and those strangers were potential buyers! So I had some rich assholes and their stupid kids running around my room, trying to figure out where they'd place the bed. Wonderful.

When my dad broke the bad news to me and told me we had to move, he said he got ripped off by a business partner. My dad said he had paid for the house, but his partner had never put my dad's name on the property, so legally it was still his and he wanted my dad out. God knows what really happened, but if I had to guess, I'd say it had something to do with him not showing up for work anymore. Like, ever.
So we moved to a new town, into a new house. Without the fancy cars, without my stepmother and stepsister, in to a place, which was way above the paygrade of a guy who sleeps on the couch and doesn't have a job. I have no idea how he managed to rent that place. But my dad continued to sleep on the couch and my brother and I continued to play videogames. I thought life sucked with my stepmother around, but it got so much worse when she was gone.

New Family

Videogames turned into an addiction, when life outside my games became unbearable. One morning, my dad just packed his shit, walked out the door and didn't come back. My brother and I had no idea what the hell was going on. And my mother had no idea how to deal with two kids. So we went straight back to being alone all day, while our mother was gone. She'd disappear all day, then come home with some random stranger, telling us he was an uncle we've never heard of. One of these uncles broke the bed. Another uncle invited us over to his place, popped a tape in the VCR and disappeared with my mother for the rest of the night. One day my mother came home so incredibly drunk, she forgot to cook dinner, shouted random nonsense and my brother spent the rest of the day hiding from her, because he was scared shitless.
So you can either sit and think about how your mother is losing your mind, why you have well over a dozen uncles you've never met before, and how you're alone and hungry all day and how everyone hates you in school. Or you can blow up one-eyed mammoths in Space Harrier. Be a hero, save the galaxy, do all sorts of cool shit when life is too soul-crushingly depressing for you to face it.

I saw my dad again after what may have been a year. Maybe it was just a few months. I don't know, I was six, I was trying my hardest to ignore life and the fucker just left me without saying a word. My brother and I went to his new place for a weekend. Or rather, his new family. He introduced us to his new girlfriend, who also had a daughter. She was just a little younger than my brother. They stuck all three of us in the bath tub together, because we were in Germany and this is how you introduce your kids to basic anatomy where I'm from.

I felt uneasy the entire time. We were at a stranger's house with this strange new family. But my dad would keep taking us over there for the weekends and eventually he started to prepare us for a court battle. You know, for custody. And if I say 'battle', I'm really not exaggerating. My dad and his new mistress would scare the crap out of us with insane bullshit. "You have to tell the judge that you want to live with us or you will never be allowed to see us again." Pretty sure that's not how custody works, but I didn't know that at the time. I didn't care much for my dad's new family, but I was terrified at the thought that I'd never see him again after he had just fucked off for a year.

On the plus side, it was now 1988 and my dad had just imported a Sega Mega Drive and a Nec PC-Engine from Japan. My brother and I played Golden Axe all day and it was the most amazing thing I had ever seen! The characters were massive, there was no annoying sprite-flicker like on the Master System and holy shit was it brutal! By today's standards, the violence is cartoony at best, but I was seven years old and I could whack a guy over the head with a battle axe. Fuck everything else!

Divorce? Custody? Court? New family? Whatever man, Death Adder ain't gonna slay himself!

And don't get me started on the PC-Engine! You could connect five controllers to the damn thing! We didn't even have that many players in the house! My dad, my brother and I woul spend all day playing Tennis, Moto Roader, Dungeon Explorer, just crazy fun multiplayer shit. My dad sucked at spending time with us, he never showed that he actually gave a shit, so playing videogames with him was the best we got. So we fucking took it!

I escaped into videogames more and more while our parents were trying to manipulate us into saying whatever they needed us to say in court. They even sent a psychologist to our place, who watched and interviewed me for... look, I was seven, I had no idea what the fuck that was all about. And it didn't matter, because I had Phantasy Star. It's quite possibly the number one reason why you're reading this blog right now. It was my first ever RPG. The game was in English. I only understood German. In order to progress, to figure out what the hell was even going on, to do anything in this game, you had to understand the language. So I grabbed a dictionary.

While most other kids my age could barely read or write in their own language, I could already say things like 'Alys attacks Skeleton with Short Sword' and 'Odin uses Burger on Myau'. I could have moved to the UK right there and then! I was ready!
Of course I was helped by the fact that we had magazines full of walkthroughs and cheats for all our games. My dad also drew lots of maps for the dungeons, because automaps weren't a thing back then. So I didn't figure out the entire game on my own, but I got in touch with the English language through the power of videogames.

After a traumatizing court battle, my brother and I ended up with our dad and our new stepmother and stepsister. We didn't see or talk to our mother again until I was around ten or eleven. In the meanwhile, we moved in to a nice, big house and my stepmother quickly begun to realize that children are awesome for slave labour. I would polish my dad's shoes every other week or so. All 40 pairs of them, Italian, leather, super expensive shit. And boy would I get it if I used the wrong colour polish on any of them! Mistakes were common, because I dad to be quick. After all, I had to make time to do the dishes, help cook dinner, run to the supermarket (which was nearly 20 minutes away and she had a damn car!), secretly buy smokes and beer for my stepmother (she didn't want dad to know) and do just about every other damn chore she didn't want to do around the house. Don't get me wrong, I think it's perfectly cool for kids to help around the house. But she was constantly 'on strike' and let my brother and I do all the work.

Meanwhile, my stepsister didn't have to do anything. She simply refused to do her chores. Worst case scenario, she'd be grounded or she wouldn't be allowed to watch tv. But my parents would have to leave the house at some point, so she watched tv anyway. She'd annoy the shit out of them when she was grounded, so they'd let her out of the house, anyway. When I was a kid, I thought she was the meanest, most spoiled, most annoying brat on the planet. Looking back, I think she was just smarter than the rest of us and immediately figured out that our parents never had any real power over us. I looked her up on Facebook the other day and today she only has one arm and she has a daughter who looks exactly like she did when she was five.

I bet she's a writer for a soap opera now or something. I watched her play with her Barbie dolls once. One of them got hit the pink Barbie convertible and ended up in a coma. While she was in hospital, Ken would cheat on her with her sister. That shit was more exciting than anything I've seen on Coronation Street and my stepsister was only five years old when she came up with these things. That kid had seen some shit! Her mother came from an abusive relationship, more fighting, alcohol, the usual shit. If there's one thing I've learned in life, it's that asshole parents raise asshole children. We were all fucked up in more ways than I dare count.

My dad had to work hard to support his new family. He joined some big real estate company and won all sorts of awards, concert tickets, luxury cruises and shit, because he outperformed everyone else. He was a born salesman, a baby boomer, a self-made success story. And a manipulative con artist. He didn't just read the books on how to read a person's face and eyes, how to phrase questions to manipulate people into thinking it's their own decision to buy something they really don't need. He wrote books about it, too! 'The sale before the sale'. It was basically about how you have to become your client's friend. They have to like you, they have to want to like you, you gotta have things in common, relate to each other, make them crave to be friends with you. I think they're calling that the Columbo method now.

This also meant that we never saw him, because he was working all day and was too fucking tired to put up with us when he was at home. Or he'd go on these cool vacations he'd won with our stepmother and us kids stayed back at home with our uncle. Eventually, he didn't even play videogames with us anymore. If we wanted to get any time with our dad at all, we'd have to watch him play. He'd sit in the living room and play Phantasy Star 2 or Shining Force and if things weren't going well or we were too noisy, he'd send us to our rooms, so he could play in peace. Then came Ultima VII, so he hid in the basement all day and played on the computer instead.

The only thing I had in common with him apart from videogames was our massive fish tank. He'd take me to the pet shop, we'd buy a bunch of new fish, put them in the tank and watch them for hours. At some point he even bought me my own tiny fish tank, which was placed right next to his. My first own pets! The whole thing meant the world to me, because we were doing something together and he trusted me enough to let me take care of my own fish. This was big!

For my tenth birthday I asked for a day out with my dad. I didn't want any presents. All I asked was for my father to spend some time with me. I think we spent half a day or so walking around the park. They also had some fish there, lizards and other fun critters for people to look at. So that's what we did. Went to the park, looked at animals. Went home after a few hours when my dad got tired. That was my birthday gift.
I guess my dad just never knew how to show he cared. Or maybe he really didn't. My uncle always told me that our father loved us more than we'd ever know. That's another thing he repeated at the funeral. I asked my dad why he never gave a shit before I moved to the UK. And he basically just blamed his dad. He said he was raised by parents, who never cared about what the kids wanted, him and his siblings never had any say in anything. So that was simply normal to him. Great.