A bitterly cold German winters's morning on November 2, 1975 was witness to my birth in the suburb of Bergen Enkheim (Frankfurt-am-Main).

My mother, Betty Ruth Salazar was a young immigrant nursing student from sunny Santiago de Cali, Colombia and my dad Gerhard Weil was a lathe operator in one of the local steel mills. Needless to say, I abhor the cold and I love manual labour.

Differences in education (my mom was college-educated, my dad had only gone through secondary school), age and a husband who was an acoholic momma's boy (never let your mother-in-law live with you) ensured this marriage's quick demise.

Things were so bad at one point that Betty had to telephone her mother in New York to fly out to Frankfurt to help her out. After my four-year-old brother died of a tumor in 1979/1980, a bitter custody battle ensued (largely instigated by my paternal grandmother Katherine - a very domineering and manipulative bitch, it seemed)

During the court hearings were were no longer living at home, instead we had a room in a state-sponsored pension for battered and abused women. After they were done, my mom thought the worst was behind us, until one night she received a call from a friend warning that my dad and his mom had found out where we were and he was coming to collect me.

It was time to run again. We quickly packed what we had left (and could carry) and the three of us (mom, grandma and me) headed to the airport. From there, we somehow managed to obtain airplane tickets. None of us had papers (except for our passports) and my grandmother's US Residency card (green card) was also left behind and couldn't be retreived.

We arrived in New York City and settled in the neighborhood of Inwood (in the northern section of Manhattan). We lived there for a bit over a year until the decrepit conditions of the building (the ceiling falling down in chunks because of leaks in the roof) forced us to move.

The next stop for us was Long Island City (in the borough of Queens) - finding a nice large apartment in a rowhouse. Things seemed to be getting better