Friends Like These: My Worldwide Quest to Find My Best Childhood Friends, Knock on Their Doors, and Ask Them to Come Out and Play (24 page)

I
woke up, the next morning, with a smile on my face as wide as a cat.

I’d had a great night. With a great old friend. Yeah, so I knew that, thanks to the Desperados Pact, I now owed Lizzie for
my night out at the ambassadors’ disco. But that was fine. I knew precisely what to do. Finish varnishing that table. That
was roughly equal to a night out, surely? Well, getting the bus there, anyway. And, when I rolled over to check the time,
I found a note…

Hey baby… didn’t want to wake you. All going crazy at work. Could you do me a favor? Could you get some shopping in? I’m going
to be back too late to do anything… L x

Excellent. Easy MPs. Duly noted.

I turned my phone on and thought about the night before. That had been my first “cold” meeting with an old friend. And it
had gone well. Me and Cameron were reunited. There was definitely something in this. In reconnecting. Rewiring friendships.
Buffing them up. Giving them a polish. Returning them to their former glory. Cameron had proved that. I only hoped he felt
the same way.

Bzzzz.

I looked at the screen. I had a voicemail.

I dialed it up.

“You… have
… nine
… new messages.”

Eh?
Nine?
It was only quarter to ten!

I listened to the first one.

Silence.

A crackle.

And then…

“POTAAAATOOOOOOOO!”

I laughed, and flicked to the next one.

“POTAAAATOOOOOOO!”

And then…

“POTAATOOOO!”

Plus six more “Potaatooo!”s, each of them delivered with enthusiasm, gusto and power. Either Cameron was amusing himself on
his way to work, or Mrs. Adams had really been biding her time before wreaking her revenge.

Which suddenly made me think of Ben Ives and giggle again. If my plan was working, he would now be starting to worry that
ManGriff the Beast Warrior and his oddball girlfriend really would be turning up to his offices near LA in order to perform
a selection of poetry and wisdom for him and his colleagues. He’d said no, of course, and that it wouldn’t be appropriate,
but I’d ignored him… or, rather, the
Stormy Leopard
had…

But had he replied to my slightly drunken email?

I checked.

He
had.

To: The Stormy Leopard

From: Ben Ives

Subject: RE: My performance

Hello “Stormy Leopard,”

Um… I’m slightly dubious about this now… I think there has been a misunderstanding. I told ManGriff that a performance would
not be appropriate. I had a very quick look at your poem and it seems very personal and heartfelt. It is also clear and succinct,
which always appeals to me. But to be honest, I am more of a prose man—I very rarely read poetry. Anyway, I have to get on.

B.

Oh, joy!

This was
working!
Okay, so Ben was dubious, but he was saying he didn’t want it to get out of hand, which just proved all the more that he
thought it
was
going to happen. The old Ben would have been on to me in an instant… he’d have
encouraged
the poetry, made it bigger, odder, shown he was in on the joke… but that was the suspicious Ben.
This
was
grown-up
Ben. And I was getting him right where I wanted him.

Life was…
fun!

I got up, whistled a bit, thought about watching Iran versus Angola, put some music on, jumped online, did the weekly shopping,
and went and found my varnishing brush. I wanted to finish that table off quick-smart. Because I was happy, and I was charged,
and also… I’d sneaked a look at the Book and I knew
exactly
who I wanted to meet up with next… someone I’d been reminded of when talking about little sandwiches and spies with Cameron…

*   *   *

Me and my mum and dad moved to Berlin in 1990, just a few months after the Wall had been pushed over and a new sense of excitement
had rushed through Europe. I’m sure if I had properly understood all the political goings-on,
I
would have been very excited, too. But for me, the mere fact that we were in 1990 was enough to have me almost giddy with
delight. It was a new decade! And we were only ten years off the year 2000! And in the year 2000,
everything
would be different. I knew this, because of all the comics I was reading. There was the
Beano,
sure, and the
Dandy,
as well, but there were also the dozens of ancient comics my cousin had thrown my way—comics with names like
Eagle, Boy’s World
and
Fury.
These were the comics that painted the way I thought the future would be going. A future of robot servants, and silver home
pods, and personal aluminum jetpacks. I’d lose myself in copies of
Action, Tiger
and
Millennium,
but remember feeling particularly dispirited in 1989, when I picked up a comic from the late 1960s to see a group of glamorous
travelers from a sexless future, wearing one-piece body suits and carrying rayguns, startling a group of Earthlings by jumping
from a silver disc and shouting “WE ARE FROM THE YEAR 1989!” I’d looked out of my window at that point. Dad was mowing the
lawn. Suddenly it looked like the future would be a long time coming. But for the Germans, the future they never thought they’d
see was happening right now. For the East Germans, especially. They didn’t need personal aluminum jetpacks. The idea of a
well-stocked supermarket was as alien as any alien.

For Dad, whose academic work centered almost entirely on East and West Germany, being where the future and the history were
happening was vital. So it was decided. We were off. But then—the
really
good news: I would be going to an American school. An
American
one!

Like every boy who’d grown up in the 1980s, I knew that America was the most exciting and incredible place known to man. It
was a giant McDonald’s-sponsored adventure playground, where the kids divided their time between summer camp and Disneyland.
It was huge and vast and neon, and, for all I knew, people really
did
live in silver home pods, and have personal jetpacks, and travel through time scaring Earthlings. What was
absolutely
for sure was that they wore wicked jackets, and played American football, and had names like TJ and JT, and ate hamburgers
and caught bad guys and played basketball and baseball and looked coooool. They’d tell people to “hold the rye” and they were
always talking about their “ass”! They’d say “You ass!,” or “Look at my ass!,” or if they were
really
angry, “Ass you!” They had the best flag and the proudest people and they were never afraid of having a war or doing explosions
and
everyone
had a gun. People were
always
getting shot, or shooting people. Plus, all the
best
and most
trusted
and
nicest
people were Americans—Michael Jackson! O. J. Simpson! Pee-wee Herman!—and I, Danny Wallace, would be going to the John F.
Kennedy International School for Cool Kids Who Rock Out! I would play baseball and hold someone’s rye and talk constantly
about my ass! I literally could not believe my luck. I immediately packed the tape I’d made of all the American TV theme tunes
I’d recorded, knowing that this would be a brilliant ice-breaker when it came to making friends. Or “buddies,” as I’d now
have to call them. Brilliant! I’d have
buddies!

Four months later, we’d sold our Honda Civic and bought a VW Camper van in British racing green. This would be the shonky,
backfiring van that would take us out of Britain, through France and into Germany, piled high with suitcases, boxes and backpacks
and never more than a minute away from the threat of a breakdown. It would stutter and splutter, and every hour or so a new
and foreign symbol would light up on the dashboard and Dad would get the manual out and say, “Now what does
that
mean?” We’d spend light, summer nights in ill-equipped camping grounds on the way, driving up mountains and through valleys,
with our rickety, farting van put-put-putting a trail of oil all the way from Spinney Hill Drive to—at long last—Berlin.

Over the course of the next year in Berlin I would make some incredible friends. Amy. Brian. Josh. And, of course, Tarek…

*   *   *

The first thing I’d learned about Tarek was that he was a former child star in one of Germany’s biggest sitcoms. He hadn’t
told me this himself—this was before I’d even met him. It was a boy called Jan who’d told me, in hushed, reverent tones, while
pointing Tarek out on the playing field during PE.

PE was the only lesson I had that was taught in German. Even German was taught in En glish—although I suppose that makes sense,
now that I think about it. Basketball, baseball, football—all of it was accompanied by a grumpy man with a beard shouting
instructions at you in German. For the first few months I had no idea what was being shouted at me, and so would panic and
simply give the ball to someone else as quickly as I could. As it turned out, that was actually all I was ever being told
to do. Sport wasn’t really my thing. But it
was
Tarek’s. He was a big lad, muscular and powerful, and “in” with the bigger boys in our year. Tarek would play American football
as the star quarterback, and he’d knock baseballs for miles, and, despite being German, he looked like the all-American kid.
He kept his child-star past quiet, but it was something that everyone knew, and rumor had it he still got asked for autographs
when traveling on the U-Bahn or walking through Berlin. I didn’t know how people recognized him. He’d been small when he was
on telly, with huge round glasses, playing Tom—the cute, smart-talking son—in the top-rated comedy hit
I Married My Family!

Here is the synopsis that will greet you, if ever you decided to look it up on the German side of the Internet…

I Married My Family!

The divorced Angi lives with their three children Tanja, Markus and Tom in Berlin and possesses a small fashion shop. Over
its, friends Bille and Alfons Vonhoff become acquainted with it in a party, the advertising commercial artist Werner Schumann
originating or ganized by Bille specially for it from Vienna and conceal to it also after several appointments first the existence
of their children. When it experiences from them, it decides nevertheless to marry and draw with it and the lady housekeeper
Mrs. Rabe into a large house the whole family! In the course of the series Angi and Werner get still another baby, Franziska.

A stark slap in the face for anyone who has ever dared to doubt German humor.

But not only that—now for the
really
cool bit. Tarek had also been in
The Goonies
—one of the defining films of my childhood! Well, not “in” it, exactly. But his
voice
was. Well, not in the En glish version. But his voice played a huge part in the translated
German
version. Audiences ever since have heard him bring to life one of the finest comedy roles in American cinema of all time…
that of Chunk.

Chunk!

Tarek was
Chunk!
The funny fat kid off of
The Goonies
!

How impossibly glamorous was my new life? No one in Loughborough had
ever
been in a translated version of
The Goonies
!

Bearing all this in mind, I think it’s fair to say that Tarek had me at the Truffle Shuffle.

My first day at the John F. Kennedy International School had been nerve-racking. Dad was already hard at work in Berlin, and
Mum had landed a job as a translator with the American Military Police, working alongside tough-talking New Yorkers with guns.
But I was a thirteen-year-old boy at a new school, in a new country, where, thanks to the differences in the two education
systems, I was in a class where everybody was an entire year older than me. And these were mainly Americans; these were
big
kids. One of them had a mustache. I would not have been surprised if several of them had wives.

But I found the whole thing unutterably brilliant. It was like landing a part in
Degrassi Junior High.
People talked about “recess,” and said “math” instead of “maths.” Intercoms went “bong” and loud American accents talked
about band practice and psychology class. The only American thing we were missing was a spelling bee, which I’d have loved,
being
excellent
at spelling, and
especially
excellent at spelling the word “bee.” All the kids wore Nike Airs and Reebok Pumps and drank sodas, and everyone had their
own locker. And best of all were the jackets. The coolest jackets in the world. JFK jackets. Dark blue, with leather arms,
and your own name sewn into the front in silver thread; $115 and worth every penny. There was a large “B” on the front to
indicate you were from Berlin, and on the side you proudly proclaimed you were destined to graduate in the Class of ’94.

Plus, Berlin was at the center of world events. The Wall had fallen. Germany had held its first free elections. America, Britain,
France and Russia were preparing to pull out all military presence. Germany would be a fully independent, unified state. On
October 3rd of that year, I’d be swept along in a crowd of West Germans at midnight, through the Brandenburg Gate and towards
the hugs and embraces of East Germans. In my mind it is as romanticized as any historical moment. Although I do remember there
was a bloke peeing on the side of a police van, and another bloke having a fistfight with a bicycle, so perhaps it wasn’t
quite as romantic as I’d have liked.

Every morning as I walked to catch the 7:37 bus to school—which I was always careful to point out was
continental
time—I’d pass fifty or so American soldiers running past me singing their army songs. Tanks would regularly roll by our flat.
One morning, during a history lesson with Herr Camp, we were told we’d suddenly become a terrorist target. Iraq had invaded
Kuwait and kicked off the first Gulf War, and our American school bus was now to be constantly flanked by two jeeps full of
armed soldiers. Bags were checked as you boarded by two mountainous black guards with assault weaponry. You had to get up
extra early to tune in to the Armed Forces Network to see if school was on a “Charlie” or a “Delta” alert. I think “Delta”
was the best one because it meant two days off school, and jeeps with roof-mounted machine guns would patrol the streets outside.
Every week we’d practice a bomb evacuation, which means I am now better at avoiding bombs than I am fire. I suppose that makes
me about average at avoiding firebombs.