Philipp Winkler - Hooligan

“What’s going on?!“ yells a loud voice.

I push the guy away and look around for the source of the voice. There are two cars in the middle of the street between us and Lucky Luke. All the doors are wide open. Eight guys are coming our way. At first I can’t make out anything except their silhouettes. Till they come into the light cone from the streetlamp. I immediately recognize two of them as hooligans from Braunschweig. At least three have telescopic batons in their hands, snapping them out.

“Shit,” I whisper and then say out loud to Kai and Jojo, “get outta here!”

Kai and Jojo take a left at the T-intersection, I take a quick detour to the van. Keys already in hand. Somehow I manage to get it into the lock on my first try, and lock the doors. Then I pull it out and run off. The electric whoosh of a baton very close by. It grazes my jacket but doesn’t hit my back. I run. Look back. They’re right behind me. Gather momentum from my arms. I pump the air out in bursts and see the outlines of Jojo and Kai in front of me. Another glance back. Created some space. They yell at us, try to stay close. Kai’s the first who has the idea of running across the field and jumping over a barbed-wire fence. We follow him. Across an industrial ruin. Crumbling concrete under our feet. Don’t bite it now! We move away from the streetlights, running past loading ramps and under conveyer belts. My lungs are burning. I could puke. Keep on running. Until we can’t hear another sound. We collapse in exhaustion on the grounds of a trucking company and wheeze our guts out.

Jojo, who’s splayed out on the cold concrete next to me, asks if we think it’d be safe now to go back to the car.

“What do you think, Jojo? They’ll just leave the car alone? How stupid are you?! They’ll bash in a window, at least. If not with the telescopic batons, then they’ll get a couple of bats. They’re just waiting for us to come back.”

“Kai’s right,” I say.

“What’re we gonna do then?” Jojo asks and lifts his head.

I breathe the cool night air through my nose, in and out. Ponder. My skull is throbbing, as if it was stuck in a vice. I can feel my lungs so distinctly under my ribs, it’s as if they’re foreign objects implanted by someone.

“Ain’t no use,” I say in the end, “we have to call Ulf, have him come and pick us up.”

Kai screams a long, extended “Fuuuuuuuuck!” into the night sky.

We’d just gotten in deep shit in more than the metaphoric sense. I dial Ulf’s number.

Back then, we spent a lot of time at the Seidels’ house. Had given up on forcing Jojo to do something with us. He actually only left the house to go to work or go shopping with his mother at the discount supermarket. So we were constantly hanging out at his place. But it wasn’t cool, and we were relieved every time Jojo closed the front door behind us in the evening. This day, we were sitting as so often in Joel’s old room, which meanwhile had halfway become Jojo’s room. I thought it was spooky and somehow sick that he slept in his little brother’s bed. Of course, I’d have never said that to his face, and if it did something for him or made him feel better, well then he should do it anyway. We watched as he constantly sorted through photos and organized the reports of Joel’s games in folders. He hadn’t been to the barber in ages, and with his mop of curls he was beginning to look like the German version of the great midfielder Carlos Valderrama.

We went into Jojo’s room to smoke and leaned out the window. Jojo didn’t want us to smoke up his little brother’s room because it would yellow the football posters Joel had covered the slanted ceiling with. And Joel had never smoked. In contrast to us. Hadn’t even tried it. Never. We didn’t put any pressure on him. Knew why he did it. And he didn’t touch alcohol either. Except on birthdays or something. He couldn’t hold his liquor and was smashed after just one and a half beers.

So we spent the day hanging out on the sofa bed that had once been Joel’s bed, leafing through old issues of Kicker magazine, and watching action movies, the American Ninja stuff, or old Jackie Chan Easterns, from back when they were still cool. Joel’s jerseys hung on the clothes hangers next to the door. Jojo wanted to have them framed at some point. His father was constantly walking past the open doorway. I still remember he seemed vaguely busy without giving the impression he was doing anything in particular. He had really come unglued in the months following Joel’s death. Even more than Jojo and his mother. Hardly said a word, and within months Dieter looked like he’d aged years. Face fallen in. And even though he’d stopped smoking after the funeral. If he ever uttered a sound, his voice was as rough as it always had been. Comes from all those years of inhaling cigarillos. Gives you a voice like the vocal cords have been put through a cheese grater. So he wandered the corridors in his long, gray work coat like the resident ghost and occasionally glanced in the room while floating past.

Mrs. Seidel was down in the kitchen. That was her place. One of those real traditional housewives. Hair pulled up into a tennis-ball-sized knot at the back of her neck and always wearing an apron. She prepared coffee and cake. It was a firm tradition at the Seidel house. Nice in a way, I guess. I’d never really known it myself. I mean at my house. On the other hand, it also seemed really annoying you had to gather at the kitchen table at three thirty in the afternoon. Whether you wanted coffee and cake or not. The same thing applied for us visitors. The rule simply transferred to us. Besides myself, no one seemed to think it was strange, so I never said anything. Different house, different rules, I guess.

I think I was out smoking with Kai. We were debating where we should go drinking that evening, and with our phlegm we were spitting yellow holes in the thick layer of snow covering the Seidels’ garden and everywhere. It was already cold by early autumn, and snow soon followed. We closed the window. When we opened the door to Jojo’s room, the warm, sugary smell of cake was floating up the narrow staircase. Despite it all. I was looking forward to having my own place. Even though I was still in school, if you could even call it that with my infrequent attendance, I had moved out once already two years earlier. Simply hadn’t been able to take it anymore, just the three of us with my father and Mie. Manuela had left to study in Göttingen long before. At any rate, even if my place in the Barne residential tower was no bigger than a shoe box, living alone was a thousand times better than some pragmatic living accommodation with my family. You can’t pick your family, unlike your friends. And when it’s fucked up, then you just move out. Regardless of how old you are.

“Coffee is ready!” Mrs. Seidel called from below. Ulf and Jojo came out of Joel’s old room. Jojo’s mother was waiting down below on the landing and asked if we’d seen Dieter.

“He was walking around earlier,” Jojo said. “Maybe he’s taking a nap. I’ll go look.”

The rest of us followed his mother to the kitchen and took our seats at the table. There was steaming hot black coffee in our cups. A piece of poppy seed cake was waiting on each plate.

“You boys go ahead and start,” Mrs. Seidel said. “Otherwise it’ll get cold.”

We thanked her like nice, pleasant boys. Kai and Ulf relished these cake sessions considerably more than I did. Ulf most of all, that icebreaker. The way he shoveled it in obviously pleased Jojo’s mother and confirmed her in her housewifely pride.

There was a bang from outside. Mrs. Seidel got up and closed the kitchen window.

“Those neighbor boys with their fireworks again. But it’s still a ways until New Year’s Eve.”