Philipp Winkler - Hooligan

“What’s going on? What are you doing here?” I ask Hans. He lifts his head. Searches the room for the source of my voice. The hairs of his mustache are standing up like wires. His pupils floating in a milky whiteness.

“Pa?” I say and lift the chair onto its stubby wooden legs. Push it back onto its indentations in the carpet.

“Yes. Heiko. My boy.” He belches.

“Why are you here and not in rehab?”

“Don’t give a shit anymore. All those fags! Was supposed to put my dreams in a wish box. Supposed to build something myself. Out of a shoe box. Fucking fairies. They’ll read through the scraps of paper when we’re off at lunch. Laugh their asses off.”

I say I don’t understand a word of what he’s rambling on about. He makes a sweeping gesture with his free hand.

“They’re fucking each other up the ass!” he screams. “Couldn’t take that shit. Who here has a problem? Huh?” He looks in my direction, but isn’t really looking at me. It seems like he’s arguing with some imaginary person. “ They have the problem! Fucking fags! Can’t kick me out. I’ll leave on my own free will, if I want to. Don’t need it!”

I crouch down in front of him. His gaze follows me, staggering. I reach for the can in his hand and say it’s enough. He reacts immediately. When his beer’s in danger. He pulls his hand back. Shakes his head. Like a sulky kid when you want to take away the scissors because he can’t handle it yet.

“No. Nooooo!” he screams, drawing it out.

I grab his forearms.

“Pull yourself together now, man!”

He pushes away from me. Scoots backward across the sheets and bumps up against the wall with his back and head.

“Everyone thinks they need to tell me what I should and shouldn’t do. Not a kid, damn it!”

I get up again, righting the nightstand, and say, “Then stop acting like one.” He looks away, taking another sip. “Seriously. Have you completely drunk your brain to smithereens or what?”

“Just stop it,” he says, without looking at me, rubbing his hand over his mouth and chin. “Now you’re starting in on it too. Why don’t you all just leave me alone?”

“At the Bremen match, you didn’t act like the biggest asshole around,” I say, “but as soon as you’re back here, there’s only trouble.”

“Huh?” he says and looks at me, flaring his right nostril and making his nose hairs stick out.

“Don’t remember anymore, do you?” I smile ironically and can only shake my head. I drop down onto the chair. “You’re such a loser, Hans.” Somewhere inside a switch has been flipped. The give-a-fuck switch. No way back. “Manuela’s sitting downstairs in the kitchen bawling. And why? Because she can’t handle it anymore, with a father like this! Who never gets his shit together! Who was never there. Who was always hanging out at the local bar with all the other losers instead and getting blind drunk!” I had to pause for a second because I was irritated by the beating of my own heart and the way my fingernails were digging into the covers of the armchair. “No wonder mom fucked off!”

Hans is instantly on his feet. Is swaying, but on his feet. He didn’t even expect it himself.

He straightens up in front of me so his knees are almost bumping into mine. That intimidation shit might have worked when I was still a twerp, but that’s been over with at least since I turned fifteen.

“She just ran off and left me all alone!” he yells and sprays a shower of spittle at me, which I take without moving an inch.

“ You . She left you alone?” I hiss through gritted teeth.

“What was I supposed to do?” He holds his right arm as if it didn’t belong to his body. “You think I wanted it that way? That I fell off the roof on purpose?! Unemployed. What’s a man then? All you can do is start to drink. She left me behind, the old bitch!”

I take a step forward and before I can control anything or pull myself together, I’ve smacked him one. He staggers back and crumbles. Something red streams through his fingers, covering his nose, falling drip by drip onto the sheets. I look down at him. He’s shaking. My father’s crying.

I go down the stairs and stomp past the kitchen. Someone yells something. I don’t listen. Slam the front door behind me, shakily remove the keys from my pocket, start the car, scream curses against the windshield because I can’t take it anymore, and just get the hell out of there. Just leave.

I come into the gym and the first thing I do is go to the lavatory to hold my face under the cold water faucet and lap it up like a dog. I still haven’t showered. I stink of old sweat, and the alc seeps out of my pores. After I’d locked myself in my room with two cases of beer and didn’t respond to Arnim’s calls from downstairs, I staggered to my car. The firm conviction that it was impossible to arrive in Hannover without an accident. And yet, here I am now. Because if my uncle says jump, then I jump. Fuck it! I sit on the toilet and take a couple deep breaths.

“Pull yourself together,” I tell myself several times, and then I propel myself up from the toilet seat. I knock on Axel’s door.

“Come in!”

I take a seat on the chair without being bidden because I can hardly stand for more than a couple seconds. The lamps on the ceiling seem like floodlights directed at me. I try to blink away the splotches of light in my vision. Somewhere behind them Axel is staring at me and spinning a pen between his fingers.

“Looks like someone vomited you out, Heiko,” he says with an indifferent voice.

I take a pass and say he’d wanted to talk to me. He leans over and folds his hands on the desktop.

“We have problems.”

Instead of posing a question, I simply wait for him to continue speaking.

“Your collective tomfoolery in Braunschweig makes us look really shitty. You know that?”

“Just my own stupidity,” I try to correct him.

Axel’s head swerves to the side, as if he has a spastic twitch. “Stop blowing smoke, Heiko. I know that Kai and Joachim were along. And that Ulf got you out of there.”

Fuck, that idiot! But maybe it’s my fault. Like everything is my fault. Should have told Ulf he should keep his trap shut about Kai and Jojo’s participation in the Braunschweig action.

“We can’t count on Ulf anymore”—he sniffs impatiently and continues to stare at me—“and it can’t be put any other way than that’s also your fault.”

“Was his decision,” I say. But there’s something to that. We should’ve. Could’ve. If I hadn’t fucked it up so bad, then Ulf wouldn’t have had to get us and Saskia wouldn’t have been forced to choose.

“By the way, the thing with the VW van has been fixed,” he says and shuffles some kind of papers on the desk. It sounds like he’s talking about something dry like balance sheets or something. “Gave the guy from Hildesheim some compensation for the… unpleasantness that Tomek showed him based on the incorrect assumptions. And because the whole thing is mostly your fault, you can forget about a couple months’ pay.”

“But I never claimed he had anything to do with it,” I burst out.

“Be quiet!” he barks at me, and I sink a bit deeper in my chair. “Next item. The day after tomorrow we’re going to Frankfurt. Eight against eight. Because of the stack of shit that’s piled up under your name, I wanted you to come along and just take pictures at most. But because we happen to have the absence of Ulf and Kai to compensate for”— my eyes go wide and my mouth opens, but I can’t produce a sound—“yep, I also heard about the thing with Kai. Because of the casualties, I have no other option than to bring you along. On probation, so to speak.”