Philipp Winkler - Hooligan

I kick against the driver-side door. One dent more won’t make much of a difference. Then I make my way back to the train station. Just get out of this shit town.

We’d been riding a fucking wave of success since Joel had taken the offer from Hannover. At the time, everything we did seemed to succeed. We couldn’t do anything wrong. Well, if you don’t count flaming out in school, but who cares about that?

It was perfect weather that day. Hazy and gray. Visibility of less than five hundred meters. It was the second-to-last match of the season, and 96 was hosting Borussia Mönchengladbach. Jiri Stajner, our lucky Czech ace, equalized for the Reds in injury time with a shot on the turn in the penalty area. It was perfect. There was no way Hannover could be relegated to a lower league again. Uncle Axel had placed a lot of calls that day and had managed to organize a spontaneous match with a group from Gladbach. The whole thing was supposed to take place on the grounds of the trade fair. Where Hannover had had its fifteen minutes of international fame with the Expo in 2000.

The men were waiting on the west side of the broad parking lot. It was my job to coordinate the guys. Axel wanted to finish the season with a bang and gave me free reign positioning the scouts after I’d worked hours to convince him.

We were firmly expecting the Gladbach gang to come from the Trade Fair/Laatzen train station. My uncle had given the station as a final orientation point for the rumble. Ulf was waiting in the hall that stretches across the tracks like a bridge. He was supposed to watch the incoming trains. Anyway, you wouldn’t be able to miss a group of muscle-bound meatheads. When they arrived, he calmly strolled to the entrance and gave a sign to Kai, who was waiting in the pedestrian tunnel leading from the station to the fairgrounds. Me and Kai had already taken the entry doors off their hinges. Even back then, Kai was the fastest of us by far, maybe aside from Joel. He sprinted down the long glass corridor. Jojo was supposed to be hidden with his Airsoft gun at the corner to Nuremberg Street, where the tunnel ends, and make sure not to miss Kai when he ran past and waved at him as went by. Axel impressed this on him.

“If you’re picking your fucking nose and miss Kai, then I will personally kick your nads back into your torso.”

“Take it easy, Heiko, don’t piss yourself. I’ll pay attention.”

I was waiting at the end of the tunnel and could see Kai running toward me through the long, straight glass tube.

He was yelling something like: “They’re coming! The cocksuckers from Gladbach! They’re here!”

I took the stairs down to street level in a couple leaps, twisting my ankle, and ran against the pain. Over to the parking lot, where the whole gang was already waiting and rubbing their hands.

“All right. Good job, Heiko,” and then Axel turned to Tomek, who was supposed to lead the splinter group. “You’ll come out in front of Kaufland supermarket.”

Tomek and the others ran across some company’s grounds to position themselves in an alleyway that came out at about where the corridor did, in order to attack the flanks of the Gladbach group. Axel and the larger group of men followed me back to the end of the sidewalk. Until we arrived, Jojo was supposed to try to pin down some of the Gladbach bastards from the hiding spot he’d taken up on the roof, in typical sniper fashion. He was our best marksman with the Airsoft. A true fucking ace with the gun. His rifle packed a punch, but nothing that could really harm anyone from that distance. It was just supposed to provide some distraction. It was such an awesome feeling, I can still remember how the phalanx of hooligans was running behind me. I kept on looking back and felt like the leader of a horde of rhinos or something. Even if I once heard, I think, that they’re loners. Regardless. It’s all about that feeling. All of them on the double. And I’m out in front of them. Even if I wasn’t allowed to participate in the actual clash. At any rate, we turned onto the sidewalk and could already see the group from Gladbach bellowing, and heard the dull shots of Jojo’s air rifle. Then Axel resumed the leadership. Like in fucking Jumanji , when Robin Williams yells, “It’s a stampede!” Galloping toward the guys from Gladbach, who are still totally preoccupied with dodging Jojo’s BBs. Just before Axel and the others reached them, Tomek and his group came out of the alleyway between Kaufland and the factory grounds and had just knocked a couple of them over. Then Axel and Hinkel, who was a little more fit than he is today, and Töller and the rest of them reached the opponents. Unfortunately, the four of us had to watch from a safe distance, but I still felt like I was in the middle of it and would catch some punches, but dodge even more, and dish it out myself. My heart nearly jumped out of my chest. That’s how much it was thumping inside me.

I almost feel like a salt-of-the-earth working man when the alarm makes me roll out of bed at four thirty in the morning, to knock back a quick cup of coffee and then roll down the highway, half asleep, to my construction job. But that’s where the comparison breaks down. I don’t work in construction but rather a knucklehead gym, and it was my uncle calling, not the alarm, that yanked me out of my hammock.

“Heiko, get up. You need to come to the gym right now. You have to give me a hand with something. Get your ass up and don’t fall back asleep!”

He personally meets me up at the driver-side door and pulls on my arm, tugging me inside. There’s a pile of cigarette butts next to the back door, smoked down to the filter.

“What’s going on?” I ask, and notice that the thing that had been scratching my neck the whole way was the label of my sweatshirt. It’s on backwards. While I slip out of the sleeves and rotate it around my body till it’s right, Axel explains the situation: “Check it out, it’s like this. One of the Angels called me earlier. Said he had a tip from a friend in the drug squad—”

“The rockers have pals in the police department?” I ask.

“Pals, friends, informants. Doesn’t make a fucking difference right now. Listen to me, for fuck’s sake! Anyway, they’re really worked up right now. Reason for existence or some sort of bullshit. There’ll be raids conducted all over the state today. Don’t know who they have it from. Maybe it has something to do with the van. Fuck!” My legs suddenly start to tingle. As if they’re telling me to run. “Anyway. We’re on the list too. You have to help me get rid of a couple things before they come over.”

“And when is that?” I look at the clock on the wall. Five twenty.

“He couldn’t say exactly, but before eight for sure. Come on!”

He pulls stacks of paper from the file cabinet, and just when I think that’s all of it, he goes somewhere else and gets just as much paper as before. And plastic bags full of vials and pills.

“Fuck, where was all that?”

“Stop asking retarded questions. Run that shredder!” He points to the big office shredder, a massive white block, as big as a copy machine that dominates a corner of the office. I’d always asked myself why he needed such a huge paper shredder. Well, there you have it, I think to myself, and start pushing stacks of paper through. The machine is running at top speed. Rattling like a tractor or a mower whose blades kept hitting rocks. I don’t have much time to look over the contents of the papers. Seems more like scratch paper. Bullshit scrawled all over. Most of it looks like some sort of lists of names and corresponding numbers or sums of money. Some of them, this much I could gather, not peanuts. Once a bucket is full, I take it to the showers and dump it out on the tiles there, sloped down toward the drain in the middle. Then I douse it with lighter fluid and light it up. When the scraps of paper have burned down, I turn on the showers. My uncle says we don’t have to worry about clogging the drain right now, but the drain is nothing more than a big pipe in the ground with a large grill attached. It’s not going to clog that fast.