Philipp Winkler - Hooligan

I’d finally fell asleep at the “boom” part, but I’d already heard the story a dozen times, so I knew it in my sleep.

My second week in the Neustadt hospital. But even after one day, they’d shown me unmistakably that, as someone doing voluntary service, I was just their slave. Go there and mop up the puke! Come here and scrub the blood off the walls! Dig the pieces out of the bone saw blade! Not that the tasks themselves were annoying. After all, someone had to do the dirty work, and if I’d been the doctor or nurse, I’d have made the volunteer do it too. It was the way they talked to us. As if we were the worst of the tards. It wasn’t much help either that at twenty-one I already looked like I could pound all of the head physicians into the ground. I almost regretted not having listened to my father’s bitching and moaning and just done the mandatory military service. Almost, but didn’t. ’Cause first of all, then I’d have been doing far worse, and second, I would’ve had to put up with all the fatherland patriots, and third, I’d have done anything to avoid giving Hans the satisfaction of heeding his sniping. Like, what a little fag you are, doing voluntary service. Go to the army, they’ll make a real man outta ya. What a pushover! I’d already had to hear it when I got kicked outta school for the second time and could forget about getting a normal degree. My teachers were a bunch of snobbish assholes and frigid old cunts. All of them! And the worst was our principal, the old jerk-off. Put ’em in a sack and beat ’em. You won’t hit anyone who doesn’t deserve it. But the fact that I didn’t even go into the army, which was what was expected for a straight-shooting young guy, that really made Hans even more livid. Such bullshit. Whatever. At any rate, all that changed in week two, when I was called to the room of some senile geriatric who was only clinging on the threshold of death with his little toe. He’d almost croaked three times during my first week, but then he came around every time. So I went into the room and heard the doctors and nurses yelling at each other. Saw everyone fussing over him. I wanted to scream they should let him die in peace. Then I noticed her. She was standing at the edge of the group. She seemed completely uninvolved, as if she’d done this a thousand times before. But Yvonne was still in training, as I later found out. So she couldn’t have done it that often yet. If at all. She was holding something. I don’t even want to know exactly what. It was obscured by the back of a doctor and a chubby male nurse. But it was more about her face. So fucking beautiful! Her cheeks were so smooth your hand would slip if you stroked them. They narrowed as they approached her mouth. A cute, small mouth. Not one of those big old frog mouths like so many others. Her nose was so narrow and delicate. Hardly had nostrils. Everything about her is slender in the first place. Seems so delicate. And then when she opened her mouth, I was left gaping and just thought, kudos, girl, I wouldn’t have had the balls to say that. And her little eyes, those blue eyes. Like ice cubes with a fly frozen in the middle. So sharp and precise, but at the same time so open and free-floating. But the best thing about her, I noticed in that moment, was her brow. Free of eyebrows. Two perfectly formed crests I immediately wanted to kiss, one after the other. Or wanted to trace with the tip of my tongue. Simply smooth skin, without pores.

All at once, the whole group around the bed jumped back. When the old man started hacking. He had one of those thumb-sized tubes sticking out of or into a hole in his throat. For breathing and all, I think. They’d pulled out the tube because of complications, and now he started rattling and squirting bile and puke and even some blood. And after the first big torrent, all of them went back to the man, and the resident there cracked some kind of joke. I didn’t understand it because of the acoustics, glued as I was to the doorway and ogling Yvonne, and then she started laughing. Her laughter sounded like one of those wind chimes or whatever they’re called. Like a rainstorm in summer, sprinkling down on my exposed brain, calming me and giving the feeling that this miserable life was somehow bearable. As long as I could listen to her laughter. Yvonne’s laugh is actually more like a choppy cackle if you take a sober look at it, yet I’d never heard anything more beautiful. In that moment I wished I’d made the joke and not the asshole resident, and she was laughing at my joke.

Nobody there called out for me to help. No one even noticed I was there because they were so busy with the bag of bones in the bed. The geezer died. The doctor recorded the time of death, and they joked they’d all have to change their clothes now. I’d snuck out into the corridor. By the door. I didn’t want to stand there completely useless. Later that day, smoking outside, I saw Yvonne again and I talked to her.

“Here it is. In there,” Kai says, following the Google Maps route on his display.

Everything had to go superfast. Kai called me right after he spotted the Braunschweig son of a bitch’s Facebook post. I was sitting on the crapper, and as always when you have to take a dump in a hurry, the shit turns out messy and horrible, not one of those nice, slick turds that glide out your anus just like that, so all you have to do is wipe and you’re good. Nope, of course, first I had to rip off what felt like fifty sheets’ worth of paper from the roll. Then I got up to speed. Packed my mouth guard, jumped into a comfortable jogging suit. While I was doing that, Kai called Jojo and Ulf. Ulf had to cancel because he was eating with Saskia and her parents. Jojo immediately said yes. I picked him up and we drove over to Kai in Hannover. Only then did I realize that under no circumstance did I want to drive into Braunschweig with my own beater. Hannover tags. We might as well have sprayed a big fat 96 on the hood. So I went back and forth on it. Taxis are too expensive and unreliable. Trains unreliable and have set departure times. Stealing a car would have taken too long because none of us knew how to get into one of those new things with electronic locks. And then I thought of the VW van from my uncle’s gym, which we also use to drive to the battles. A simple, black thing. Can’t be pegged. Besides, it didn’t have Hannover plates because Axel had it registered with some loser stooge because of some illegal shit he’d done with it. So we go to the gym and thank God the van was parked there. Grabbed the keys and race off.

We’re on the west expressway from the Braunschweig North interchange, and now take a left from the highway into an industrial area. A garden allotment area emerges behind the yellow glow of the streetlights.

“Still can’t believe you stole the van from the gym,” Jojo says and grabs my backrest again.

“Jojo, man, get your paw off right now before I hack it off. I just told you it makes me nervous”—he pulls his hand back—“and I didn’t steal it, of course. Just borrowed it.”

Kai giggles. “Yeah, for extra-ordinary off-duty activities.”

“So to speak.”

“Shouldn’t we at least let him know we—”

“Are you nuts, Jojo?! Then we should just climb right into the casket. Axel can’t know anything about it. At least not right away.”

“Okay, okay, drive a little slower,” Kai says and licks his upper lip. “We should be there any minute. Over on the left.”

I take my foot off the gas, letting us putter along without being too slow. After all, we aren’t here for some damn drive-by shooting. We look anxiously out the side window. There’s a small gap on the sidewalk where the pink neon light of a sign between two long factory or storage buildings reflects in the puddles on the street. It slowly glides into view. The neon sign shines in cursive writing: Lucky Luke .