Ramblings

Luckily when I returned in the early evening, Marius had left the hostel door unlocked this time. I walked in and met my new roommate, Klaus, an old and wizened German man with a severely mangled right hand.

I didn’t even notice until we shook hands, when I reflexively looked at his hand because it felt so weird. It was very hard, with all these misshapen lumps of bone sticking out all over the place, but it was also kind of swollen and squishy. I think it might have been the softest skin I’ve ever felt on a person; it was just so silky and smooth. Newborn asses are like 200-grit sandpaper compared to this guy’s hand. I recoiled in horror when I finally looked at his hand, to see it actually touching my own. I mean, he might as well have offered me a severed head on a platter, based on my reaction. It was embarrassing for me, to so directly call attention to someone else’s deformity, and in such an open and undeniably distasteful way, like a child pointing and laughing and throwing food at somebody in a wheelchair at the mall.

“Oh,” he said to me when we stopped shaking hands, clearly unoffended that I had flinched and backed away after touching him. I think he must have gotten it all the time, so he must be used to it by now. “You noticed my hand, uh? Best thing that ever happened to me.”

Klaus told me how he used to work in a factory until his hand got, as he put it, “caught and grinded into a machine” when he was 30 which, to me, might be one of the most horrible experiences that could happen to someone. I’d rather get my foot chopped off by a lawnmower.

“Boy, I really hated that job,” he reminisced. “I mean, even before the accident I hated it, you know?” he clarified. “But what else is a poor kid from Hamburg supposed to do?”

The ambulance took him to the hospital where he spent the next four days in a morphine-induced coma. In the meantime, the doctors—“good, German doctors, and maybe even an American”—had operated, sewing together that freakish mitt of his.

After that he let me look at his hand up close. He had maybe half of thumb; the rest of the flesh had been pieced together and assembled into a bizarrely-shaped flipper with an absurdly long pinky finger. He didn’t have anymore fingernails left to trim. I don’t know where all that skin came from, if you can even call it that since it was a web of criss-crossing scar tissue.

He wasn’t shy at all about his hand, opening and closing it like a crab, showing me that he could still write and use a fork and even build a house of cards. He was right-handed, and said it was easier to learn to use his new flipper than learn to do anything with his left hand. He said he still couldn’t feel very much with it, which he proved by pulling out a lighter and holding it underneath his palm long enough that I half-expected him to have a second-degree burn, but he said he’d learned to live without any feeling in his right hand.

“Besides,” he said holding up his left hand and looking at it, “there’s nothing wrong with the other one.”

Even so, his right hand was still an ugly hack-job. “What carpentry school did your doctors go to?” I wanted to ask, but didn’t. I’m surprised it hadn’t fallen apart a long time ago, like in the 80s. It just looked so haphazard and unplanned and unfortunate, like surgery that would have been done in the 1800s. It should be put in a museum next to a picture of a guy with a hole drilled in his head to let the demons out. It was hardly an example that most surgeons would be willing to put on their resume.

Now Klaus lived off a sizable pension and insurance payments that allowed him to travel—something he had never done before, having lived the first 30 years of his life without ever leaving Hamburg—provided he lived frugally and stayed in the kind of countries that most people couldn’t identify on a map.

Klaus was so happy about the hand and what his life had now become, and clearly loved telling his story, that it almost seemed appropriate to say, “That must be pretty nice, having a mutilated hand and everything.” Listening to him really made me jealous that I wasn’t as lucky as him. I was pretty envious, really, and getting kind of depressed just thinking about it. I mean, I don’t have a deformed anything.

A blizzard hit that night, and with nothing else to do, I was stuck inside the next day watching bad American movies with Klaus and Marius, the Romanian kid who ran the hostel. I was still kind of mad at Marius because he was kind of an idiot, and he had locked me out two nights before, on a night when I had almost been stabbed by a gang of teenagers.

We watched Dodgeball, the Ben Stiller movie, which features David Hasselhoff in a cameo.

“Hey, I met that guy once,” Klaus said when Hasselhoff appeared on screen for the first time.

“He’s really great!” He stood up and gave Hasselhoff a very lop-sided round of applause.

Man, Klaus, I really do miss you, wherever you are….98,098 out of 100,000.