Philipp Winkler - Hooligan

I’m standing on the fire escape of one of the residential towers in the Ihme complex. I can hear a helicopter circling in the distance. I guess they’re flying over the city center but can’t make out anything because of the foggy conditions. The view is just enough to see a hundred yards down the River Ihme. I have a hand in my pants pocket and I’m kneading my mouth guard. I left my phone in the car. I had to switch it to vibrate during the ride because Kai had called me four times in a row. Under me, in the middle of the meandering concrete paths and corridors, I can see the gang around Axel, standing around him like toy soldiers. It reminds me of the first Grand Theft Auto video game we used to play till we passed out at Ulf’s. As a change of pace between the hard-fought FIFA matches, where we more or less insulted each other to the max. With GTA you always saw the people and cars from above. As if you were looking down on them from a helicopter. I hold my hands in my field of vision in front of the play figures down there and act as if I could steer them from up here with a twitch of my fingers. Then all at once, something catches my attention on the fringes of my field of vision. I’m just barely able to see a group of some twenty to thirty men turning into the Ihme complex from the street. Then they disappear under the various levels and paths of the complex. I shove my fingers in my mouth and send a piercing whistle down the concrete walls. The figure I recognize as my uncle looks up at me and waves. I start to climb down the fire escape. It groans and squeaks under each of my steps. I swallow the mouth guard. Only in that moment do I notice something’s missing. What’s wrong about this situation? There’s nothing floating inside me. No helium feeling in the stomach area. No adrenaline shooting through my veins and nerves, or wherever it flows. Head, arms, legs, fists. All of these are objects attached to me as if repaired and screwed on, and they function automatically. I should actually be feeling something like joyful anticipation right now, but there’s simply nothing. The only thing in my head is what my eyes give my brain. My feet, which move down the grated rungs of the fire ladder, and the gray and sand-colored concrete that comes ever closer below.

Axel claps his hands and rubs them together. He smiles and calls out to the pack of mean, joint-cracking piles of flesh with eyes popping, “Get it done, men! History will be written today. They’ll be talking about this in twenty years. So we’d better win this thing.”

I remain standing where I came down from the ladder. Don’t make the effort to reposition myself. I know my target. A single shout rises and resonates through the loose rows of men. Braunschweig must be coming around the corner in a second. All the muscles in my body go tense, relax, and tighten again. The first shoulder shows from around the corner. Then another. Skinheads. Clenched fists. A slow-motion of legs in billowing jogging suits. They call out: “BTSV! BTSV!“ We respond. A deep thundering that carries the name of our city over the asphalt becomes a yell. The echo reflects off hundreds of concrete walls, making the names of the cities mix in the air. Braunschweig turns onto a straightaway, directly toward us. I roll on the soles of my feet, back and forth. I look at my uncle’s neck, shaved clean. Give the sign! Come on! He waves us forward. The group stomps forward as one. I search through the opponents. The faces on the bodies that seem to merge into one in front of my eyes. A thirty-headed monster. One kisser uglier than the next. Where’s the wart? The blond side part? Where’s the fucking son of a bitch? The air between us becomes thin. Becomes completely used up and drawn into the countless nostrils and comes back out of us, in huffs. I move to the side within the ground. Don’t step on anyone’s heel or bump into anyone. We’ve become an organic unit. Then I see the blond hair. The dirty smile and the red, blinking wart next to it. The tunnel vision sets in. I see only that one face in front of me. Everything around me disappears into a black cloud. Then there’s Axel’s voice again. He’s calling out something to us. But I only hear a dull rumble. I push off the ground. The sprinting heads in front of me rock back and forth, but I keep my eyes on the wart. Run around the others like trees. I think I’m yelling because air is streaming into my mouth. I don’t know. Nothing else matters. I run at the Braunschweig gang. My fingernails dig into my palms. I lock down fists with my thumbs. Before I get to him, I see Ulf’s and Jojo’s faces flash in the corner of my eye. I see them yelling and running forward at my side. Feel Kai’s hands on my back and how he screams in my ear, euphoric, “Go, go, go!” I close my eyes for a second and tell him it’s not necessary and we’ll get him. I open my eyes again and the wart is in front of me, dancing excitedly back and forth. I pull back. Way back and put everything into that first punch. From that moment on, when my fist reaches his dirty face and I feel bones and teeth give way beneath my bones, everything blurs into a jumble of sounds and images. The taste of blood under my tongue and how it sprays when I scream. The shiny, wounded, open skin of my finger bones that don’t stop slamming into that face. Axel’s voice from far away, in my head. Or is it penetrating my head from outside? He’s yelling something I can’t understand. A muffled explosion under my chest that steals my breath. The rough feeling of hair between my fingers and how I slam a head on the concrete. The useless flailing of the blocked arms under me. Blood-encrusted, throaty choking and the red-rooted teeth that are coughed out. Countless warm hands that reach for me and pull me away. The movements of my eyeballs that I feel underneath my palms. And underneath flickers all this rage. But also the satisfaction that shouldn’t be there, and despite the voices that rain down on me, but don’t reach me, and the feeling lets me know that everything else doesn’t matter.

I still remember how my father called me into his bedroom. How he took his treasured vest from the coat hook and slipped it on, looking perfectly happy and content. Then he bent down and held me tight and tapped a finger against one of the many patches sewn onto it. The big black 96. And he said, “That sure is something, you know. 96. Yep, Heiko. Sure is something.”

I nodded and looked at the patch under his yellow finger. We bid good-bye to Mama and Manuela, and I still remember how I hoped they’d be so jealous of me because I was a man now and going to the stadium, but they kept on watching television and weren’t even interested, and I was sure they were just pretending. Because what I was doing was something only grown-ups did, and only the men.

Uncle Axel picked us up. I’d hoped we would drive in his big car with the great seats the color of vanilla ice cream, but he picked us up on foot.

“What ya got there?” he asked me, and I held up the apple Mom had pressed in my hand. He took it and threw it away and said I wouldn’t need that, and that there’d be real food in the stadium, and he and my dad grabbed me by the hands and swung me back and forth. The streets were full of other men. Men like us. And all of them were walking in the same directions and clapping their hands and singing something about an old love. Many of them were wearing red and green scarves or had 96 jerseys on. Just a handful of men were wearing denim vests with frayed armholes instead of sleeves like my dad was, and these other men’s vests were also covered with patches like medals on a veteran’s parade uniform.

After we’d walked through the big gates at the bottom of Niedersachsen Stadium, my uncle bought me a hotdog and a Coke. Just for me. The bottle was ice-cold and wet, and I had to be careful it didn’t slip through my fingers. I was hardly ever allowed to drink Coke at home. And never when we were at Grandma and Grandpa’s. Grandma always said it’d give you black feet like a Negro and I wouldn’t want that, but I didn’t understand what was so bad about that. What I would have liked most of all was if we’d go to Grandma’s after the game, when I’d drunk the big Coke all alone. Then I would have proudly marched into her sitting room and taken off my socks and shown her my black feet, and I would have run off, laughing.