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!