The adventures of your Dirty Dog in Germany started off rather slow. I had to leave Mandi in the states and head for parts unknown, arriving in Frankfurt to be sent to the replacement detachment. Long lines, lots of paperwork, I get handed off to an idiot who, in turn, sends me to a Volkswagen passenger van that heads for Stuttgart, Germany.
Long trip, boring ride down the autobahn, jet lag slowly creeps in. I go all the way to Stuttgart just to turn around and catch another van back to Heilbronn, Germany. Finally get into my kaserne where I will spend my next three years. Damn I am tired!
I rode my motorcycle to Charleston, South Carolina and then had to catch a bus to the airport. It was a long, tedious ride and I hit the plane almost exhausted. I don't know about you but just when my head hit the back of the airplane seat my brain suddenly decided to go into overtime. So I got little sleep and arrived in Germany with a great case of fatigue and it was only 0500 in the morning.
I am in Heilbronn, Germany with little recognition of how I got there, and heaven knows I have been without sleep for about 36 hours. Someone from my new unit finally picks me up and takes me to my battalion headquarters. I sign in, and get a ride to my barracks where someone else shoves me into a temporary room for the night. I rip my uniform off and pass out without making the bunk up with sheets and blankets. I pull one blanket over me and immediately fall into a deep sleep.
This was my start in Germany. I still wasn't sure why I had ever decided that this was a good thing. But I finally got a chance to call Mandi for about 3 minutes and let her know I was safe and okay. She cried a bit, and told me she missed me already. I pooh-poohed her ramblings and told her I would talk to her again soon.
I did a bunch of in-processing, met my new boss, got my permanent (or so they alleged) room, and set about the difficult task of getting over jet lag. I went to the club on my kaserne that evening and with the assistance of a huge steak and a couple of good German beers, headed on a course of recovery. The steak was mediocre, the beer was excellent.
Over the course of the next month, I applied for housing for Mandi and me, and spent some time getting to know my surroundings. I attended a German language basic training, designed to teach you enough of the language to survive and maybe get into a little trouble. I took to German well, and actually looked forward to meeting the local folks and speak a new language.
Right off the bat, the first trip I took into Heilbronn was a wonder of new things. But something that wasn't new was the sight of so many really fine looking women. As I walked around a downtown shopping area, there were women out in the heat with little shorts, little skirts, hardly a bra to be seen. My first thought was that this could be very interesting. How little I knew then.
I did two things right from the start -- I applied for housing, and found out about a loan business that was rampant around this kaserne. The loan business piqued my interest immediately. It seems that there was a high demand for "pay day" loans, where soldiers would run out of money before pay day, and would borrow money from anyone who would loan it to them. Most often this meant paying an exorbitant rate of interest.
A good example was 10 for 20, where one would borrow $10.00 maybe 2 weeks before pay day and have to remit $20.00 to repay the loan on pay day. No one, though, had gotten into this loan situation as a true business. I filled the gap quite willingly.
Within two weeks of hitting ground in Germany, I found myself getting heavily in the loan business. Okay, I began loan sharking. Since I was being (at the time) quite the faithful spouse, I had to have some creative outlets. Becoming a loan shark kept me busy. It also made sending money back to the states to Mandi so much easier.
I cut the payback rates that most people charged so I could draw more customers, putting the casual lenders out of business. This wasn't that big a problem to the casual lenders. No one else had the assets to do a volume business anyway. When I began getting customers from other units in and out of my battalion, I soon had my hands full in my loan sideline. It wasn't long before I was making triple my money as a loan shark.
Since housing in the area was so tight, it took almost 4 months before I came up on the list for consideration to get a rental place out in the German community. By the time I got a shot at an apartment, it was almost 5 months. By then I almost had a monopoly on payday lending. I had ample cash.
I was offered a German apartment, a small, one bedroom place on the second floor of an old house in a village about 12 km from my kaserne. It was a quaint little place, with a history. It had suffered a direct hit from an American bomb during WWII that had not exploded. It merely knocked a hole in the roof and all three floors before coming to rest in the basement.
Still, I was desperate, and so was Mandi. The landlord was a nice, younger German man named Gerhardt, and his wife was Doris. They had a son who was four years old and they lived in a small village nearby. Gerhardt's mother lived in the small apartment at the top of the house. Gerhardt had sub-divided the place into 5 apartments.
After agreeing to a short term lease, we signed the papers with at the housing agency, and I started the papers necessary to move Mandi to our new digs in Germany. I also kept my room in the barracks so I could use both to my advantage. I couldn't let my loan sharking business fall to the wayside.
I arranged for some loaner furniture from the military to be delivered so we would have a rudimentary home when Mandi finally got approval to come to Germany with me. It took about 3 days before it was delivered, and I arranged to have Gerhardt there when it arrived so if the movers damaged anything he would be right there to work it out with the moving company without my being in the middle.
The day the furniture arrived, instead of Gerhardt being present, he had to work. He sent Doris as his proxy. Doris, as opposed to Gerhardt, actually spoke some English. And when she arrived, she was accompanied by another female.
Doris introduced me to her neighbor, Sigrid. She was a single, divorced mother of a 7-year old girl. She also spoke pretty good English. We sat around on an empty floor waiting for the furniture truck to arrive, and since I had brought some German beers, we all slowly sipped a beer and got acquainted.
The furniture movers apparently had no concept of time, because after two hours, they were still a no-show. Doris began to get irritated, and finally left to go upstairs to Gerhardt's mother's apartment to call them. While she was gone, Sigrid and I had the opportunity to carry on a private conversation. This turned out to be interesting.
Sigrid talked to me about some casual things like how I liked Germany so far, would I be buying a car soon, how long did I think I would stay in this apartment (it was rather small), and general stuff like that. But she looked at me in an off-handed sort of way and asked me if she could sit with me.
Now I had already found that Germans have a custom of sitting with even total strangers if a seat is free, but one must politely ask if the seat is free. I nodded my okay to her and she got up, grabbed another beer, and casually sat now next to me on the bare floor.
I guess I should describe her at this point. Sigrid was slender, blond, maybe in English measurements about 5'7" tall. She couldn't have weighed more than 110 pounds. She had maybe B-cup sized breasts hidden under a loose shirt and a bra that kept her breasts under tight wrap. For someone so slender, her bra appeared sorely tight and restrictive.
