I’m in over My Head; Won’t You Throw Me a Lifebuoy?!

“We’re taking you for a walk, Nick.”

That was my friend, Jay Gatch, the composer. The year was 1980, the place Tübingen, West Germany, the month probably October. Late October. It was one of those weekend autumn days that starts out beautiful, so you don’t dress warmly, but once the sun starts to sink, the wind kicks up, and it gets very cold.

We lived on a hill of ugly dorm silos, called Waldhäuser-Ost (Forest Houses-East—never thought about what it meant before), or at least I did.

We took our walk in Wanne, a parallel hill dominated by ugly dorm silos, but one with a park. (With the passing of time, I’m no longer sure we all lived in WHO, or if I had gone to Wanne to visit Jay and Ellen.)

Jay, his beautiful, longtime girlfriend, Ellen, and I were all in our first semester in Tübingen from SUNY Stony Brook. Jay was an official exchange student with a scholarship/fellowship/whatever from the Ph.D. Program in music, there to write the composition that would get him his Ph.D.; Ellen was there because she was his girl; and I was there because I’d had a hankering to learn to read Weber, Kant, and Nietzsche in the original German, to see the world and, at 22, I was running out of time.

Nobody had given me any money to go over there, and I’d run out of my life savings after two months, but had gotten a “gray market” job knocking the food off of steel eating trays, and placing the trays in a super-long Hobart dishwasher at the school cafeteria. (From 1979-1986, the Hobart Corporation played a huge role in my life.)

Jay and I were both from Long Beach, NY, where he was part of a large family of Italians who could pass for Jews. But Jay was much older than me (three or four years), and though he had a brother my age, I didn’t know him, either, though his name sounded familiar. Ellen was tall, slim, and Germanic-looking, because she was of Germanic descent. Ellen and I had met in an intensive, nine-hour-per-week German class given at das Neophilologikum (Modern Languages Building, known colloquially, among the communist students as “Bert Brecht Bau”), Herr Wolfgang Rug.

Jay didn’t take any German classes. His idea of “German” was to joke, “Kein sweat.” He also knew how to say “beer,” though probably not how to spell it.

I must have mentioned how I was struggling, to which Jay responded, “You’re in over your head.”

Heck, I was in over my head at birth.

No money, no connections, no nothing. When I was 14 months old, the old man went out for the proverbial pack of smokes.


In 1979, I was literally in over my head. I was working that summer in a tourist trap called Martha’s Vineyard at a restaurant called The Harborside as a “Hobart Engineer” (a dishwasher). Us “Hobies” would alternate day with night shifts. (See what I said?)

One day, at the end of the early shift, someone suggested we go swimming at a local, fresh-water lake. It was probably Chris, a 20-something cook who melted under pressure but who was good-looking, had long blonde hair like a rocker, and always had a supply of pot. There were four of us—a roly-poly 12-year-old fellow Hobie, yours truly, Chris, and a pretty, 18-year-old, blonde waitress with a splendid figure. (Not a working-class local “Islander,” but a rich “summer dink.”)

There’s a floating platform 20-30 feet from the shore. Everybody (but me) jumps off, and heads out for the deep water, something like 100 yards away. I tell ‘em I’ll be along.

The little roly-poly is bobbing up and down in the water like a lifebuoy, and Chris and the blonde are together in another part of the lake. She’s laughing her head off. That must have been the big day for her, although God only knows how they could do it at the deep end.

Finally, I jump in. I head out for 15-20 seconds before something occurs to me: I can’t swim!

I make a 180, slap furiously at the water for another 20-30 seconds, and just barely make it back to the platform. I lay there, sucking wind for about 45 minutes, before riding home. (My then-stepmother used to loan me her fancy bike summers. She avoided people during “the season.”)

None of the others ever asked what had happened to me.

Forty years later, although I’m on dry land, I’m still in over my head. Do me a favor and throw me something, will ya’?!

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I thank you, and your posterity will, too.

Sincerely,

Nicholas Stix