Eric the Hun

Eric The Hun

My dad owned a Shell station on University Avenue in San Diego and on his crew, there were three young men in their twenties, two old men in their fifties, Dad, and me.

Len, our mechanic, was a good friend of Dad’s and Eric Muller was a close second in things mechanical. It seemed to me that within Eric, logic, method, and execution were precisely balanced in one package and the package was labeled Made in Germany.

Eric’s Shell uniform was always crisp and clean, which wasn’t easy for a man who worked all day on and under cars. He was compact, about five foot seven, going grey at his temples, blessed with steely-blue eyes and a square jaw, which could have looked severe to some customers, but didn’t, because his serious look was tempered by his bright smile and playful demeanor.

When I saw his full name on a work-order I just had to ask:

“Eric, what are those two dots over the Ü in your name?”

He snapped to attention.

“That’s an umlaut,” he said, an umlaut! If I didn’t put it there, Americans would call me Muller, Muller!”

And he told me this last bit in the same way the X-Nazi soldier in the movie The Producers spat out his venom while fuming about Churchill.

“Ve vasen Naaazzees, ve vas NAZIS!!”

Eric took the same tone, and in a way I understood. I happened to grow up when there was a well-known news program on PBS called the Huntley-Brinkly Report. For years everybody gave the same shist.

Eric taught me some useful German too like hise,(hot) and ser hise, (real hot) for taking off radiator caps, because they were pressurized and could easily scald you if you weren’t careful.

Usually after 8 PM traffic on University Avenue slowed down and we’d sit in the office and talk. Eric would drink coffee from a Thermos, and I’d devour a Snicker’s bar and wash it down with a Coke, surrounded by cans of oil and brake fluid stacked in pyramids, batteries, windshield wipers, road flares, road maps, and spray cans of WD40.

Within a few weeks I found out more about Eric’s history. He’d been a Boy Scout until Hitler took power and dismantled the Boy Scouts and changed them to Hitler Youth. Same kind of scouting activities, tie a few knots, help a few ladies across the street, camp out, dig a trench, fire a Panzer Faust, march to the Russian front through the dead of Winter if Hitler feels like it. Swear fealty to Hitler in person instead of the German State.

Eric was drafted towards the end of the war, and when the army found out he was a farm-boy who knew how to drive a tractor, he was assigned to drive a Panzer 4 tank. The only battle he was in occurred in the Argonne Forest, where before the gun crew got off one shot, they ran out of gas and were captured by Americans during what was later called The Battle of the Bulge. They were sent to a prisoner of war camp where he learned English. After he was released, he returned home, but there was nothing left,0nly rubble, so he came here.

I’d seen the Battle of the Bulge movie, and many more WW2 and WW1 movies since my mother and I would watch movies picked out by Bob Dale on channel eight weekdays on summer afternoons. Charge of the Light Brigade with Errol Flinn, to Back to Battan with John Wayne. I was taking ROTC classes at San Diego High, preparing myself for the latest war. Turned out it didn’t happen. Turned out I got a student deferment at City College instead. Looks like my mother’s tender loving care and stressing a college education probably saved my ***.

And it’s finally occurred to me that I’d adopted an unrealistic attitude about German soldiers which was formed mainly by what I saw in movies and on TV. They weren’t all blond, tall, Arian muscle men with square jaws who were masters of warfare and bringers of chaos like The Terminator in Wehrmacht uniforms. Most were drafted and didn’t want to fight.

Hey! That was just like me. I was ready to spit-shine my shoes and follow my orders under my mother’s tutelage and ship out to a practically unknown south Asian country to do my duty just because France was tired of holding Vietnam’s corrupted bag. Took ROTC instead of normal Physical Education because when you enlisted you went in a pay-grade higher.

But by the time high school ended, and City College took its place, many waters had passed under my personal bridge. My transformation from ROTC to Mod Man to Certified Hippy required a social conscience which in turn required an anti-war attitude. There was a particular telling incident that brought this truth about Eric being a regular guy, not some kind of Aryan Superman, to me personally, by chance and fire with a tremendous boom.

Whoever had the nightshift had to close the station. Most all our business was cash and there had been a robbery just two blocks away at Joe’s Liquor. A man who interfered with the robber, Jackie Bright, who happened to be our next-door neighbor, was shot dead and died on the sidewalk on University Avenue.
One day after school, when I arrived for the night shift, I found Eric sitting down for a change in the office, next to the cigarette machine, and one of his hands looked like a mummified football.

“Eric, what’s up with your hand?”

He looked down at the cement floor and hesitated.

“Did I ever show you my Derringer?”

“You have a Derringer?”

“Yes, a single shot. I decided I might need protection.”

“I don’t blame you. I knew Jackie. But what happened?”

Eric looked at the floor again and gave out a great sigh.

“I’d just finished cleaning it and put my hand over the mussel and slammed it shut. The pistol went off and blasted a hole through my hand.”

Eric gazed again at the white gauze football that once was his hand and gave it a puzzled look, like it wasn’t supposed to be there.

I couldn’t understand how it happened; it was so unexpected and out of place. Eric survives a major battle in World War Two, but almost thirty years later he carelessly shoots himself in the hand like an ingénue.

“Does it hurt?”

“I had to call 911, and after they took my vital signs and bandaged me up, they asked a lot of stupid questions.”

“Questions?”

“They wanted to know if I’d ever attempted suicide.”
 
I couldn’t help it. I stood there, hands at my side, palms up, shrugging my shoulders, shaking my head in disbelief. Eric nodded his head in agreement, looking back at his white gauze football and gave out a great sigh.

Then somebody drove over the alarm bell, so we strolled out to the pumps to deliver a million gallons of Super Shell into the gas tank of huge Cadillac. I’d take the windows today and he’d pump the gas.

You can pump gas with one hand.

©StevenHunley2025


True story folks, I don't make them up, I just write them down.

Cool! I miss the old days of a real 'service station'... self-service is for the birds.

Enjoyed :)

Ta ! (short for tarradiddle),
tailor

It brought back so much of my own post war experiences with Germans, having been born during the Blitz. One visitor friend whose Dad had been in the SS. Great dry, dour sense of humour he had. And then there was Ingrid: Austrian, blonde hair, blue eyes I met in a coffee bar, ( all the rage those days). She worked as an au pair in London. I remember telling her once that I was an English gentleman. She retorted " You are a gentleman until you take your trousers off !!!" Adored her.

Good story buddy, especially where you change tack historically. Enjoyed.