Based on a true story.
this reminds me of a story that’s kind of an ongoing joke in my family.
I’m half German, and my father’s side of the family is full blooded German. My father owns a business that deals with a lot of international calls, and during my early tween years he got a lot of business calls at all hours of the day and night from all over the world.
Now, when i first met my best friends, I had them sleeping over at my house, and we were watching TV. Every few minutes the phone would ring, and our caller ID would project at the top of the television screen.
I was bullied a lot as a kid, so my dad told me to tell people if they asked what my father did, that he was in the German Mafia.
So, naturally when my friends asked who was calling, I made the joke it was business cause my dad was in the German Mafia, and the joke stuck.
And it spread, too. Middle school was filled with jokes about my family and the mafia, but they were just jokes. That I was in the mafia, my dad was a mafia boss, etc. etc.
Those jokes continued into high school, where, in my junior year I was in a big depressive spell. I wore my hair tied back from my face a lot, and in my history class, these jokes were cracked a little more often as we began our European Studies. One day, my History teacher, the most amazing teacher I had in high school, walked between me and my best friend, as our desks were right next to each other, while we had been making one of these jokes.
He paused, and reached out, tapping my right temple twice while a huge, cheeky grin spread on his face and he just went.
“Good to see you finished your induction.” and walked away.
I was confused, my best friend and I were staring at each other for a solid ten minutes before we got back to work.
When I went home that night, I looked up a bunch of stuff about the German Mafia. The German Mafia would often do a tattoo of 3 dots on someone once they had finished their “trials” and were accepted. This was most often done in cases of murder, and other crimes. Where the tattoos were placed meant different things. Hands were the norm, but sometimes a tattoo would be placed on the face.
These tattoos are now mostly outdated, and are usually just prison tattoos done for years/crimes committed in prison, but some branches of Russian, Cuban, and German mafias still use the three dot tattoos.
I was flabbergasted for two reasons. One, that my teacher knew all of this about the German mafia, and, Two, that he pointed out the three freckles on my temple that make a perfect triangle.
For the rest of my Junior and Senior year, the mafia jokes dwindled less and less, because people actually believed I was in the mafia.
I never told them I wasn’t, either.