Chapter 1: Clothing Optional

My name is Bond, Mark Bond.

Actually, my name would have been Mark Bondarenko, but my Great Grandfather, who had fled the Nazis from Ukraine and found a new home in California, had our family name shortened at the height of the McCarthy era. At a time when someone could be prosecuted as a Communist for looking at someone else cross-eyed, running around with a Slavic surname was not the best idea. That's how we ended up with a rather iconic name, way before Sean Connery started banging everyone who had a pair of breasts and didn't fight back too fiercely.

It was a good thing that World War II was 57 years in the past, because, while my ancestor had fled from the Germans, I was on the way to live with them. Having finished second in the World Karting Championship the year before, I had to decide what to do. It's a bit like deciding on College – stay home or go far away. The difference is, when you decide on College, you're usually eighteen or something, I was fourteen and had to decide whether to stay in the US of A or go to Europe.

In the end Europe won. My big dream was becoming a Formula One driver, and there is a reason why so few Americans had ever made it there in recent years. Two CART champions had successfully made it, Jacques Villeneuve and Juan Pablo Montoya, but both had gone through the junior formulae in Europe and CART was heading for the scrapheap after Tony George and his minions had thoroughly killed American openwheel racing by the split in 1996. The last attempt of someone, who had risen through the ranks in Americaland had been Michael Andretti in 1993 and that had ended in embarrassment.

Frankly, the decision had been a no-brainer. We had an offer from Team Eurospeedway Driver Academy to run in Formula-BMW alongside a young girl called Jenny Marx, who had just won the German Karting championship and was also graduating to 'proper cars' the next year. That in itself was enough reason to go there, because I also knew that she was drop-dead gorgeous. We'd been exchanging letters for over a year already, ever since my parents had become friends with her mother. That takes a bit of explaining.

My Grandfather had started an IT business at the time when computers were still weighing more than Mexico and filled entire building floors. My father later expanded it to Europe, mainly Her Majesty's Island and Germany. It's safe to say that we were stinking rich. Jenny's mother Regina was an English and arts teacher at a combined middle school and high school in Senftenberg, East Germany. My father's business had won the contract to install the entire IT infrastructure in that school and since mom often accompanied my dad on business trips they had met Regina and became friends through having the same 'problem' – their only child was at the height of puberty and a racing nut on top of it.

Theoretically I could have had it easy. If necessary, dad could have just bought a team for me and all would be well, but in hindsight I'm happy that he didn't. He didn't want me to become the next Esteban Tuero or Gaston Mazzacane, people who made their way through the ranks courtesy of their wallet instead of any talent worth mentioning. We had a simple deal. I was not allowed to accept any offer that depended on me paying for the seat. Once the deal was signed, dad would add some sponsorship to make sure I didn't end up running for a cash-strapped team that would save money by taking shortcuts with the material.

It had not been so easy for Jenny. Her parents were divorced and her father had buggered off to West Germany with a new mistress. Having seen a photo of Jenny and her mom, I could only conclude that the guy was either fucking Miss World, or he was a blithering idiot. Seriously, I couldn't even decide which of the two to have a massive crush on. From what mom had told me, Jenny's mother had her when she was fourteen, so she was exactly twice as old as Jenny and I – not even thirty. That guy must have been bat-shit crazy to leave a woman like that.

The only redeeming thing about the guy was, that he'd been foreman for a big construction business and had practically built the house on his own, back then before the fall of the wall, so there were no mortgages. Still, with only her mom's teacher salary to live off, Jenny's family wasn't very well off. Back when my parents met Jenny's mother for the fist time, Jenny's karting career was heading the same way as those of other promising girl talents – very far south. Senior level karting was expensive and with Swiss girl Cyndie Allemann tearing the males of the species a new one in the European Championship, there was no space for a second girl in a works contract.

Thank you, dad. He'd offered Jenny the same deal as me and with dad's logo on her kart and the accompanying money that came with it, her small team could expand to a proper operation, could buy top-notch material, and she was currently in the process of giving Mrs. Allemann a massive headache. The media had been buzzing about the two cuties who embarrassed the entire Y-chromosome brigade in the European Championship.

News about karting in Europe were almost impossible to come by in America and even on the Internet, but Jenny kept us well in the loop. Cyndie Allemann had won both races in Sarno-Napoli, Italy, Portimao, Portugal, and Zuera, Spain. Jenny had finished either second or third in all those races. In turn she won both races at Rye House, Great Britain. In Kristianstad, Sweden the two girls had won one race each with the opponent finishing second. The males of the species had exactly one race win – a non-championship invitational race at Oschersleben, Germany, won by a guy called Maximilian Götz.

Currently there was a summer break with the next race scheduled for the last September week in Brno, Czech Republic.

And thus I found myself at Burbank Airport on August 1st 2002, ready to fly to Germany. Although I was of course looking forward to racing in Europe and in proper cars on top of that, it was not easy to let go, especially not for mom and I. When I was ten I had developed a massive crush on my mom, which was not very difficult, considering that she was a very beautiful woman and unlike many other 'murricans, mom kept herself in shape. Of course with the social taboo and the little detail of mom being happily married to dad, it wasn't to be and we had a talk when I was eleven. It broke my heart, but with my racing career starting to take off, I eventually got over it, but the feelings for mom, the ones that went beyond those of a son, never really went away completely, so when the reality set in that I was soon to be two continents away, it opened a few old wounds, leaving mom and me crying for most of the way to the airport.

One thing that makes having lots of money a good thing, is that it can buy you comfort. Since I had to do four flights, the whole journey would take close to twenty-four hours and that would have been pure torture in Economy. I felt a bit like a prick, knowing that the combined tickets had cost more than what Jenny and her mom lived off for six months, but I wouldn't arrive half-crippled and in a way I was looking forward to a simpler life in Germany, without a housemaid, janitor, chauffeur, but instead with two drop-dead gorgeous females.

Being only fourteen, I had to live with an adult guardian, which left only two options. Either I'd be living in a dorm with a housemaster or with Jenny and her mom. Option two sounded much more alluring. They had a little bungalow in their backyard that was once meant to be rented out to summer guests, but despite the nearby Eurospeedway, tourism never caught on in the area, so they usually only had had guests on the big race weekends, like when the DTM dropped by, or the year before, during the US Memorial 500, the first CART race on European soil.

I'll never forget that race for two reasons. First, of course it was the week of the 9/11 attacks. The Germans had reacted quickly and renamed the race from German 500 to US Memorial 500 and even built a proper memorial in front of the main entrance in a matter of days. Sometimes you got to admire their no-nonsense approach. And the second reason is of course the horrible shunt of my big hero, Alex Zanardi, which cost him both legs and nearly his life. After the race Jenny and I had spoken on the phone for the first time, and we had spent almost an hour of long-distance crying together.

Once the tear-filled goodbye's were done, I made myself comfortable in the First class for the trans-continental flight to New York. To take my mind off leaving mom for the first time in my young life, I looked through my schedule. For the remaining year. I would start high school in September starting with 8th grade. School in Germany worked a bit different. They had something called Realschule, which is 1st through 10th grade. Then they have Abitur, which is 11th and 12th grade. That's comparable to high school graduation in America.

Ever wondered why Germany has had so many Nobel prize winners compared to how small it is? Their school system might have something to do with it. Starting from 5th grade you have to attend the following lessons: German, Math, Music, Arts, Russian (only in the east), Chemistry, Physics, Sports, Biology, Geography, History, Social Studies. Starting with 7th grade you have English lessons (from 5th grade in the West) and starting from 9th grade you have Astronomy. That were 13 subjects I had to look forward to and a 14th from the following year. And here's the kicker. Grades are given from 1 (very good) to 5 (failed). If you have a 5 in only one of those subjects, you'll have to repeat the entire year! It's called sitzen bleiben in German.

Of course they had made a bit of a concession for me. I wouldn't need to attend English lessons for obvious reasons, and German was accounted for as the mandatory foreign language. I would still have to take German lessons as if it was my native language, so I would probably struggle in that one. I have a knack for languages and I had a fair grasp of the language at the time, but reading Goethe's Faust and writing an essay about it, was a bit of a different caliber. That's why, when my class-mates had Russian or English lessons, I would get one-on-one crash-course lessons in German.

That was school. In terms of racing I would spend the entire August at the Eurospeedway getting to grips with cars and weeding out some karting habits, like leaning into a corner, which is a bit silly in an openwheel racing car. To gain some first experience the team had prepared a previous year's Formula-BMW car, which would be entered as the team's third car in the last three rounds at Spielberg, Austria, Zandvoort, Netherlands and the Hockenheimring in Germany. That would give me six races to gain some experience before embarking on my first full season. I would of course not be awfully competitive with a previous year's model, but that wasn't the point. The whole purpose of the exercise was to learn the tracks and gain some mileage and it was better to keep away from the business end as to not interfere with the championship battle.

On top of that I would do two last kart races. With the European Championship already decided in favor of Mrs. Allemann, and Jenny secure in second, there was no danger of interfering with the championship and I would get the team's second kart as Jenny's team mate had been rather mediocre throughout the year and had been unceremoniously sacked at the start of the summer break.

I put the whole reading material back in my backpack and reclined my seat to sleep through the red-eye flight across the continent.

When I finally walked off the Airbus at Dresden Airport, I had been through a veritable Odyssey. First the flight to New York, from there an intercontinental flight to Germany with Lufthansa to Frankfurt, a seventy-minute 200mph highspeed train-ride to Cologne airport and from there a Germanwings flight to Dresden. I was knackered and my biological clock was completely out of whack.

Since I had seen photos of Jenny's mom, it wasn't very hard to spot her in the small crowd waiting in the arrival area. Frankly, there was only one drop-dead gorgeous woman anyway, so it wasn't exactly a search for a needle in a haystack. She gave me a beaming smile when she saw me. Instead of taking my outstretched hand, she hugged me, which was surprising, because I had always labored under the assumption that Germans were all very controlled and overly disciplined people who weren't really into this kind of expressive behavior. I certainly didn't complain. Her body felt soft and her breasts were pressing against my chest, costing me a bit of effort not to show a reaction.

"Hi, I'm Regina, welcome to Germany, Mark," she said in flawless English and even without much of an accent, but that's something you would expect from an English teacher.

"Thank you," I answered in my much heavier accented German, which got me another of those incredibly beautiful smiles.

"You speak German quite well," she noted as we started to walk out of the small regional airport.

"I've spent three months at the Goethe Institute in San Francisco," I explained, feigning a headache. "Three-hundred sixty hours of crash-course lessons. At one point I even started to dream in German."

She laughed softly. It was a beautiful sound. "How was your flight?"

"Too long," I groaned tiredly. "To be honest, I'm dead tired."

"You can take a little nap when we come home, it's only forty miles," she said as we reached the car. "But we'll have to make a short stop at the shopping center. I need to buy swimsuits for Jenny and myself."

"Wow, new swimsuits, especially for me?" I said with a mischievous chuckle. "I feel like a celebrity."

Regina laughed back. "No, we actually don't have any. We normally swim in the nude, but I know things are a bit more reserved in America and we don't want to make you uncomfortable."

She was a bit stunned when I laughed out loud. "Just three months ago, mom had to collect me at the police station after I was arrested for indecent exposure. I'd gone skinny dipping in the bay and some old lady nearly had a heart attack and called the cops."