Lockdown Day 40: Friday 1st May, 2020
I was shitting myself.
We were deeply lost in the Bavarian wildlands. We’d just accidentally trashed a bar in the red-light district. We were completely wasted. We could barely speak the lingo. We were nicked. Not a lot going for us from what I could see.
I hated to think what was going through Dan’s mind. A Jewish son of improbable parents, now hand-cuffed at ground zero of the rally and the retribution. He couldn’t be comfortable as we marched towards the police station, an improbable reworking of a medieval subterranea entered through an impeccably Teutonic circular keep.
Sitting casually at the entrance of the station, shielded by the foot thick wall and with a field of vision covering the approaches, a Polizei perched on a pew with what appeared to my untrained eye to be a bazooka on his lap. A bloody bazooka. Dan nealy flipped out. He was really not enjoying this. With the Baader-Meinhof group actively murderous, the silent sentinel was understandable. Kidnapping, killing, torturing, maiming, murdering, bombing were still the bedrock of the unhinged Leftwaffe. Red Army kommunofascism sparing no innocents, your precious life of no concern to their sick certainty, leftards could always justify killing you for your own good. So naturally the police were prepared. A few men’s vigilance alone, as ever, enough to keep the cowards at bay.
We were escorted past the enquiring glance of the jaded guard, down the spiral staircase and deep into a cavernous room reeking of officiousness and blocked drainage.
Around the wall was the most impressive display of firepower I’d ever seen outside the cinema. Behind the counter, every cabinet housed a multitude of weaponry. This? This was real. These were cold grey weapons, bearers of hard tidings, dealers of death, a stone-cold killer Famous Five of Heckler and Koch, Smith and Wesson, Beretta. A latent orchestra of death and defense.
The polis marched us up to the bar. I couldn’t believe it. I really couldn’t believe it. I had spent my fifteenth birthday in a Norwegian jail with Kit and now I was spending my sixteenth in a German lockup with Dan. My folks were going to go ballistic. I could see their point. Being good parents, Kit had been the fall guy last time. That wouldn’t work again. I was doomed.
They started to process us. I couldn’t take my eyes off the Guns’R’Us gallery, so paid little attention to their waffle, retreating into my still-pleasant beer buzz, although beginning to feel the knocks. Dan was in a bad way. His frazzling was dazzling. Noting his discomfort, the desk-sergeant, suspecting he was carrying something more than a hangover-to-be, gestured to another colleague to help search him. While they began to frisk him, he booked me in.
„Nam?”
“Trick“
„Wirklich?“
“Wirklich“
„Woher kommen Sie?”
”Glasgow”
„ Woher?”
“Glasgow.”
„Glasgow? Sie sind Englisch?”
”Schottisch.”
„Schottisch.”
He eyed me out rather more carefully than he had up till then.
„ Wie alt sind Sie”
“Funfzehn. No, sorry, Sechszehn.”
„ Wie alt?”
“Sixteen. Today.”
„ Heute?”
“Ja.”
“And your friend?”
“He’s 17.”
„ Siebzehn…”
The desk-jockey abruptly called the two stooges off Beef.
“So, you are only sixteen, while you are seventeen?”
I could sense the ripples this soft-spoken statement cast through the gaol as they huddled. I heard only snippets of discussion, could translate little except the occasional world, “Er ist Schotte … sechzehn… heute… siebzehn…” but I quickly came to the conclusion that our youth was causing them some real concern. It was if they thought we were too young to be bad. Fine by me, but a very alien concept to two kids from Glasgow, middle-class as we might be.
In the Glasgow I grew up in the view was if you were old enough to do the crime, you were old enough to do the time. Eight was the age of criminal responsibility and that still let some vicious little bastards off the hook. Age eight, some kid a couple of years older had tried to stab me with a stone-whetted table knife while we were playing by the Forth and Clyde canal. I almost lost an eye to a Primary 7 bully and a cigarette when I was in P 6. Hell, we accidentally burnt down an old abandoned mansion when I made it into P7 and was eleven. Then I went to big school and the trouble started. Hitler would never have lived long enough to murder twenty million if he’d tried it on as a kid in Glasgow. Mao would have been Peking Ducked before he marched a mile. A hundred million people saved from the dogmatic dickheads of death simply by accepting what is, is, then dealing with it. Wir sind wir. Even as kids.
The desk-hand returned with a new attitude, “You are very drunk. Also you are not 18. Tonight it is not safe to let you out and you must sleep here. Excuse me please, but that is how it must be. In the morning, you may go. Now, can we telephone a, a … verantwortlich Erwachsene?”
“A what? An answering machine?”
I racked my brain, “A responsible adult?” I guessed, more from previous experience than from my rudimentary grasp of German. “Well that would be me now that I’m sixteen. Talk to the adult, cos the child isn’t listening.”
He looked bewildered.
I counted coup on my first Polizei, without fear of retribution, what would he do, take me to jail?
“There is no-one to call. In Scotland we are adults at sixteen. We can marry and multiply and even join the army. We are here ourselves and tomorrow we are travelling north. We will be gone from Nurnberg before you start your next shift.” I lied.
He looked rather relieved.
“Tonight then is settled. You remain here.”
I sensed hesitation, but for once I bit my insolent tongue and stayed silent as he turned to arrange our beds for the night. Now that was highly out of character. Maybe I was finally learning. Or perhaps I just couldn’t be cheeky in German fast enough.
Dan’s relief would have been visible to a CIA spy satellite. I could poker-face the outward emotions, but my internal intensity was the same. Heatseeker missiles would have found both of us before they struck a nuclear reactor.
Despite my perverse drive to bait sergeant Schultz I was vastly relieved at this neatly linear resolution to our Mandelbrot fractal night out. As it stood, I might not even have to explain to my parents. They might never know. Result!
We emptied our pockets, handed over our few belongings. I panicked momentarily before recalling I’d left the acid back in the room and Desperate had finished the speed.
The cell was well-appointed – as these things go – much more pleasant than the dank dingy recesses of the Partick Marine – but it just felt wrong being locked up with the door open. In Glasgow you got a cell to yourself (except on Old Firm weekends when there was never any room at the inn) and they always slammed the heavy doors shut. Here we were the only overnighters in a gaol that was more comfortable than many a Glasgow dosshouse.
My coping mechanisms generally cope, even if they are limited. They scale well, even in extremes so here I resorted to my usual jail ploy. I lay down to get some sleep. If there was no way out and nothing to be done I may as well get some kip.
Unfortunately, Dan was absolutely wired, pacing back and forth, side to side, exhausted but adrenalin-rushed, unusually reminding me more of Dennis Hopper’s manic easy rider where he normally had more of the Peter Fonda look. The beer and the fear were conspiring a car crash. He was really frazzled.
I’ve never been much of a people person. Everyone who has ever known me understands that. I do stuff. I can’t sit still. I make things happen. Touchy-feely? You’ve got the wrong guy. Despite Angel’s best endeavours. But even I could see I had to say something.
“Have you never been in jail before?” I croaked.
“Never. You should know that. If I haven’t been in jail with you, who would I have been in jail with?”
“Point taken. But can you not stop that pacing. It’s driving me daft.”
“It’s OK for you. You’re in and out the Partick Marine so much they’ve given you a space for your toothbrush. I heard that Stewart Street were thinking of naming a cell after you.”
“Ha fucking ha. A bit brutal that.”
“You think so. Look at us. I’m seventeen, you’re sixteen – just, maybe. We’re on holiday. Happy Birthday. Bevvies for your birthday. Out on the town. Now.
Now we’re in a German jail. This is not my idea of fun.”
“Me neither. Nae bar.”
He shot me a withering look.
“Ok. No more crap jokes. But you can’t blame me for this. It was an accident, bit of a misunderstanding.”
“Misunderstanding?
The guy thought you were going to stookie him with a bar stool. His mate thought you were going to stookie him with a bar stool. I thought you were going to stookie him with a bar stool. You were standing there steaming, waving a three foot lump of wood. The entire bar thought you were going to stookie him with a bar stool. What did you expect him to do?”
“Well, I really didn’t expect him to swing for me. I was just trying to stay on my feet. I’d no beef with the guy. Why would I want to start a square go with a random stranger in the middle of the night in the middle of the red-light district in the middle of a foreign city where I barely speak the lingo.”
“You never would. I know that. Everyone that knows you knows that. But Max didn’t know that. His mate didn’t know that. The bikers and pros in the bar didn’t know that. The police didn’t know that. And all the other people in the world who you haven’t met yet and don’t know you, and who you’re going to come into contact with, don’t know that either. You better get used to it. You’ve got a problem. Sort it out. Fast.
“What do you mean problem?”
“You’re too fucking smart for your own good at times. You don’t know when to shut up. You crack me up but you’ve got no boundaries. No, it’s worse than that, you get where the boundaries are but just step right over the fucking line anyway if you feel like it. And you worry people. I don’t know why, because you’re not very big, you’re very polite and you never go looking for trouble. But you never walk away when you should either. It’s like… the possibilities of pushing the boundaries, that risk of things getting out of hand, is always there floating around your head. You never actually start anything, but folk don’t know what to make of it. So they react.”
There didn’t seem to be much for me to say so I closed my eyes and counted to infinity.
Eventually I heard B wear himself out and lie down. He seemed to be getting a handle on it. My beer buzz relaxing to full mellow as the night’s dark adrenalin subsided, I turned over to go to sleep.
“Trick.”
“Aye”
“Happy sweet sixteen you mad bastard.”