I have no idea how much you care about the fact that I own up what led me to consider committing suicide. But as you’ll comprehend in Chapter 16—with a great sight of relieve, I guess—my brother Bubbles talked me off the ledge. What makes this somehow a bit weird is that in real life I have no brother. To make sure you believe that I’m not pulling your leg, I had to invent him. The moment I did, I kind of lucked out like a passenger who survived a plane crash on the runway of Kangerlussuaq Airport. So, what you are reading is my revelation of what almost caused me to get rid of myself. Nothing pseudo. All up front. To start from nothing, my name is Adolf Vincik. In a historical context of global events Adolf could be considered a cursed name. I’m talking about the coincidence that the same year I was born Adolf Hitler became Chancellor in neighboring Germany. The year was 1933 and my mother swears on a stack of Bibles I got my name to honor my grandpa, a.k.a. her father, who inherited his name Adolf from his father, and so on. Apparently, this first name inheritance goes on in our family for hundreds of years. To tell the truth I feel privileged to carry on the tradition. You bet some people don’t hide their opinion that names like mine makes them nauseated. At any rate, the part of my life I’m trying to convey took place five years after the war, in 1950. In March of that year I turned seventeen. But here comes the thing I have a hard time to swallow: although I can improvise blues and boogie-woogie on piano almost like Pete Johnson, if you happen to flip the pages of Encyclopedia Britannica—I do not exist. Not a single peanut-sized paragraph describing my life achievements. Not even a black and white photograph of Adolf Vincik staring into the lens of a Rolleiflex camera. That was when I received recognition from a subaquatic club for breaking a record for staying submerged in a bathtub for four minutes and three seconds. I remember once during my training session my mother found me lifeless in the bathroom and called on my father reading newspaper in the living room that I had drown. It took him a while to call back, advising her to drain the bathtub, turn me on my stomach so the water can splash out from my lungs. Of course, I jumped out from the bathtub before she removed the stopper. So here I am, alive, describing the event.