Chapter 1

Greetings readers, welcome to my Bildungsroman journal. My name is Janus Paul Pulaski III, but everyone calls me Johnny. My grandfather uses Janus; my father took Paul. I became Johnny because my two-year older sister hung the moniker on me. I am a high school senior, and I just turned seventeen.

This story is a writing assignment for senior Honors English. The idea, according to Miss McElroy, is to write our life story ‘stream of consciousness,’ then edit and rewrite it later. I like the idea because, unlike many of my contemporaries, I have lived what I consider an interesting life. Of course that’s just my opinion, other people might be bored to oblivion by my story.

“Let your recollections flow onto the paper without regard to content,” she said.

Okay, Miss Mac! Just remember, you asked for this!

Before I can tell you about me, I need to tell you about my family. They, especially my grandfather, are amazing.

See, my grandfather, Janus Paul Pulaski, Senior, was born near Krakow, Poland in 1930. His father was a farmer tilling nine acres of beets, onions and carrots. Papa J remembers that his family was poor, but close-knit and happy. All that changed in the autumn of 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland from the west and Russia poured in from the east. The invading forces quickly routed the Polish Army, and the conquerors partitioned the country. The Krakow region became part of the German protectorate under the rule of a despot named Hans Frank. My grandfather’s family continued to farm their land, relatively undisturbed until 1941, when Germany invaded Russia. Shortly after, drunken German soldiers raided the Pulaski farm in November of 1941 — Janus believes they were after liquor and women — my grandfather, along with his older brother Viktor and his older sister Katrina managed to escape into the foothills. The farm was burned and their parents were killed.

Janus, Viktor, and Katrina made their way further into the Carpathian Mountains where they eventually joined a Polish resistance unit of the Free Polish Army. At the age of eleven, my grandfather became a soldier. Sixteen-year-old Viktor was killed in a failed attack on a troop train in 1942; Katrina died of pneumonia in the harsh winter of 1943. My grandfather fought on.

In 1945, my grandfather’s guerrilla band fled westward in front of the advancing Russians. Grandfather Janus ended up in a displaced persons camp in the American sector of Germany. My grandfather refused repatriation to a communist Poland. Instead, he traveled to France, where, in 1947, he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion. He was seventeen years old.

Janus Pulaski enlisted in the Legion under his own name and, ironically, served with some of the same former German soldiers he fought against in Poland. Grandfather spent six years in the Legion, serving with the 2^nd and 5^th Foreign Parachute Regiments in Indo-China and Algeria.

In 1953, Papa Janus immigrated to the United States. It took him a year to learn enough English to enlist in the US Army. Because of his years of prior military experience, and his ability to speak several foreign languages, he was chosen for Special Forces training and assigned to the 10^th Special Forces Group in Bad Tolz, Germany. In 1961 he was medically retired because of wounds sustained during his second combat tour in Vietnam. He retired as a Sergeant First Class at the age of 31. All told, he had spent twenty years in someone’s army.

My grandfather settled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, when he retired, lured to the city by its large and active Polish community. Trained as a combat engineer, he started working in the construction industry. It took him less than two years to become a construction superintendent supervising commercial building construction. In 1963 he met, fell in love with and married my grandmother, Nadia.

Nadia Kaminski was second generation, Polish American. Descended from Polish Royalty, she could trace her family back to King Kazimierz, King of Poland from 1447-1492. Nadia was the perfect wife for Janus Pulaski. She polished up his rough edges and supported him in all his endeavors. Janus and Nadia had two sons, Viktor, born in 1964 and my father, Janus Paul, Junior, born a year later.

My father grew up in a happy home, Nana Nadia made sure of that. My father and his brother, my Uncle Viktor, were complete opposites. Viktor was gregarious, outgoing and ambitious, my father was quiet, contemplative and happiest when working on something mechanical. Uncle Viktor was tall and slim, with aristocratic features. Victor seriously exploited the royal heritage passed down from my grandmother. He played it up in college as a means of connecting with the right crowd. After breezing through college, his growing list of connections landed him a job as a stock analyst in Chicago. Within a year he married his first heiress.

My dad was tall as well, but he had the heavily muscled build of my grandfather. After high school, my father eschewed college in favor of a full-time job as an auto mechanic. At twenty he had already earned a following for the small shop my grandfather helped him open. One July day in 1985, Sonia Krupchek pulled into Pulaski’s Auto Repair with a badly overheating engine. By the time my dad had finished replacing a split radiator hose on her Honda Accord, she had informed my grandfather that his son was going to be her husband and the father of her children. Janus Senior shook his head in wonder as the prim looking young woman left the garage. She seemed smart enough but with her dark blonde hair in a tight bun and her glasses perched on the tip of her nose, she seemed hardly the type to snag his son.

That was the last time my grandfather ever doubted anything my mother said. That afternoon at five, the Accord pulled back into the garage. He watched in wonder as the totally transformed woman took about five minutes to bewitch his son.

Sonia Krupchek was twenty-four years old when she met the Pulaskis. She was a graduate student at Marquette University, working towards a doctoral degree in physics. Yep, my mom is one smart woman. My grandfather was more than pleased that Sonia was attending a Jesuit school, you see, my grandparents were very devout Roman Catholics. Heck, you’d have to go to the Vatican to find their equals. Why my mom zeroed in on my dad is family lore. Dad claims that it was because he was irresistible. Mom says it was because he didn’t talk much. Whatever their reasons, they were meant for each other.

Anyway, Paul and Sonia were married in 1986. Mom finished her dissertation that summer and accepted a job with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. She was pregnant with my sister, Katrina, when they made the move from Milwaukee to Florida.

They decided to settle in Palmdale, a small town twenty-five miles north of the Kennedy Space Center. Janus Senior and Nadia sold everything they owned and moved down, too. No way were they going to be separated from their grandchildren. Future grandchildren were also the reason they gave for subsidizing a four bedroom, three-bath house in a nice neighborhood for my parents. My grandparents purchased a smaller house about a mile away.

Katrina Maria Pulaski was born in June of 1987. From the minute she departed the womb everyone knew she was something special. I swear, Katrina was born with a plan for her entire life mapped out in her head. By the time I was born in November of 1989, Katrina was talking, walking and reading. My parental units must have used up all the good genetic material making Katrina because I didn’t turn out nearly as well.

Hmm, as I read back over this I noticed I forgot a few family members. I also have maternal grandparents, Gustav and Sylvia Krupchek. The elder Krupcheks are both professors at The University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. Oh, and did I mention they were both hippies? Yep, card carrying throwbacks to the sixties era. Right down to their orange and white Volkswagen microbus with about a hundred Grateful Dead stickers in the rear window. Gus and Syl (even Mom calls them that) bought a condo on the beach in a clothing optional building. They visit every summer for at least two months. On the surface, you’d think that Janus Senior and my mom’s folks would be anathema to each other. After all, politically, Papa J is slightly to the right of Attila the Hun. But it’s not like that at all, mainly because my mother and father laid the law down to both sets of grandparents early on.

Now seems a good time to talk about my father. At first blush, Paul Pulaski seems as if he were the most ordinary guy in the family. Not so. Not so by a long shot. I’ll tell you right now, flat out, my dad is my hero. Sure, he doesn’t say much, but when he does talk, people listen. He has very little formal education, yet he is as smart as my mother in a lot of ways. Ask anyone who has ever met him, and they’ll all tell you, “Paul Pulaski is the most honest man I’ve ever met.” The longest speech I ever heard my father make was when I was twelve. I was in awe of how everyone looked up to him, so I asked him why.

He said, “Don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t steal, and don’t ever quit. Treat everyone with respect until they stop deserving it. Never hit a woman or a child. Your integrity is the only thing that can’t be taken away from you. To lose it, you have to give it away.”

So, now that you’ve met my family, it’s time for my story. Everything I’m about to tell you is true to the best of my recollection.

My life up until the start of the ninth grade was normal enough to bore you to tears. I have brown hair and hazel eyes, I’m not movie star handsome but at least my features fit my face. I was a happy kid, by and large, all through grade school and junior high. I earned good grades, had lots of friends, and didn’t have a care in the world. Man, oh man, did that ever change once I started high school. Ninth grade was my personal hell. The main reason my freshman year sucked so badly was because I hadn’t started puberty yet. I was the classic loser: scrawny, hairless and had a dick the size of a Vienna sausage. My slow development was compounded by my age. I was born on November first and the year I started kindergarten the first of November was the cutoff for starting school. I was four when I started school and forever after I was the youngest person in my class. My plight was not helped by my sister. Katrina was two grades ahead of me was effortlessly shattering every sports and academics record in the school. Katrina was six feet tall and a slim hundred and thirty-five pounds. I was a puny five foot six and one thirty. It was humiliating. My only refuge was my schoolwork.

After Christmas break, just as I was resigning myself to a life as a eunuch, I sprouted my first pube. Yes! I was as proud of that hair as one boy could ever be. By the end of February, I’d grown a nice little patch and had my first wet dream. Soon after that I discovered the joy of whacking off. For the next couple of months one of my hands was pretty much permanently attached to my dick. I became an expert wanker. I was so good I could change hands and gain a stroke! I was perpetually hard, regardless of how many times I choked that thing into submission.

It was not just my hormones and pubic hair growing either. All of the sudden my body hit a growth spurt and by March I was five-eight and one-fifty. Puberty that had eluded me for so long had arrived with a vengeance. Girls started to notice me about then but I was so shy around them I couldn’t marshal a coherent sentence if my life depended on it. After gurgling and mumbling like an idiot in front of Marcie Winters, a junior varsity cheerleader that I adored, I decided to ask my dad for some advice.

That evening when Dad came in from work, I buttonholed him in the garage. Dad heard me out then shook his head sadly.

“Johnny, I’m not the person you need helping you. Your mom is the only woman I ever seriously dated.”

At my crestfallen look he put his big meaty hand on my shoulder.

“I think the person you need to talk to is your Uncle Vik. If anyone knows how to talk to women, it’s gotta be him.”

Duh, Uncle Vik, of course! Viktor Pulaski could talk a hungry dog off of a meat truck. Vik was currently married to heiress number three, this one a billionaire thanks to breakfast foods and feminine hygiene products. Last we heard, Viktor and Alexandra were in Poland. Viktor had talked Alexandra into helping him regain my grandmother’s legacy. It cost ten million Euros in bribes to reestablish the Kaminski title and another fifteen million more to purchase part of the original land holdings including a forty-four-room castle. The new Count and Countess were in the process of restoring the ancestral manor in preparation for my grandparents visiting there that upcoming summer.

I called Uncle Vik the next day right after school. After some chitchat about the family, I got to the point. Uncle Vik chuckled when I finished my lament.

“Johnny, I don’t think I’ll be able to help you much because the only advice I can give you is: dazzle them with brilliance or baffle them with bullshit. Basically, that’s all I do and, if you are anything like you father, that won’t be your style. I think what you need is a female’s perspective, maybe Katrina can help you out.”