Friends Like These: My Worldwide Quest to Find My Best Childhood Friends, Knock on Their Doors, and Ask Them to Come Out and Play (29 page)

The men, though, quieted down as they saw two guys approach. They were tall, and broad, and they looked like trouble. One
was wearing a hoodie with his cap pulled down low. The other was wearing a basketball top over a T-shirt and a similar cap.
I could see a small spark of bling—nothing too flashy, just hints—but I looked away the second I thought I’d caught the eye
of one of them, choosing instead to find my Coke suddenly and profoundly fascinating.

A bad thing involving strangers has only ever happened to me once, on the night of my eighteenth birthday, when I’d been walking
happily through Bath, and a group of lads had caught my eye and strode confidently up to me.

“You called my name,” said the first and biggest of the three.

“Um… no, I didn’t,” I said, which was true. I didn’t even
know
his name.

“Well, you called me a twat, then,” he said.

There were so many things I
nearly
said at that point, but eventually settled on, “Nope,” which turned out, oddly, to be the
wrong
answer, as they started trying to hit me with their chubby fists, all at once. (Although a terrible experience, I did at
least manage to accidentally steal the biggest lad’s watch as, ten years too late, I finally did as Karate George had advised
and attempted to work on my block. Having worked at Argos, I knew this watch—a Seiko—was worth at least sixty-five quid, so
it wasn’t such a bad night, all told. Although I later destroyed the watch with a hammer and threw it off a bridge.)

The thing is, I’m a firm believer in the kindness of strangers—in the fact that strangers really can be friends you haven’t
met yet—and other things you might sometimes find on a bumper sticker. I relish the chance to meet new people, and I have
found that wherever you go on this strange little earth of ours, you will generally find that they are good. But rightly or
wrongly, sometimes you feel awkward. Sometimes you feel strange. Sometimes you feel nervous. You shouldn’t—there’s generally
no reason to. But as the two big lads in their hoods and their caps sat down next to me, I suddenly felt all three.

I shouldn’t have. Because one of these strangers
was
a friend.

“Danny?”

As soon as I’d realized it was him, Tarek and I had hugged, and shaken hands, and then slapped each other on the shoulders,
like men.

“So
cool
you came over here!” he said.

“A friend’s worth a flight!” I said. “I’ve
always
said that!”

We started to gabble incoherently about the old days and all the memories we shared, like two old women with too much to say.
It must have been slightly off-putting for his friend, a tall and handsome man known as Chris. Well, Chris to his pals—“BRD”
to everyone else.

“What does BRD mean?” I asked.

“Beste Rapper Deutschlands,”
said Tarek. “The Best Rapper in Germany.”

This was quite a confident name. How had his mother known that her baby would
be
the best rapper in Germany? It’d be terrible if he’d turned out to be
rubbish.

“It’s my artist name,” explained Chris.

“How do you mean?” I asked, and Tarek told me.

BRD!

BRD, in short the best rapper Germany’s, celebrates his new entry with a song that leaves no question unanswered. Those, who
do not know him will tremble and can go home. Those who listen to him will be part of a new era. He works knowledgeably with
the German language without appearing cheap. Battle? Yes of course, but finely chiseled, of high karate, he lets the whole
German scene splinter, like Glass. BRD is proud but does not glorify anything. The more one hears him, the more facets will
be opened. Statement meets announcement and become a powerful word tornado of images which are exploding in one’s brain. It
is difficult to explain BRD and his songs in words. What remains is complete bewilderment… “it is true. Life make me hard
and almost spiteful, I am like somebody working on an Oil-rig. Day and night occupied…”

Tarek, as you may have worked out by now, does not work in IT. Nor is he an architect, a Fijian chief, or a bloke who’s solved
one of the great human mysteries of all time. He is, instead, it turns out… one of Germany’s premier hip-hop artistes.

Yes.

I
couldn’t believe it, either. It was
brilliant.

He certainly looked the part. He’d gone from respectable and bespectacled to the kind of bloke you see in music videos holding
Uzis and shouting that life is terribly unfair, but it’s so
lovely
to have bitches and dough.

And the more he told me about his new career, the better it got. Tarek was one of the brains behind Hitmen Music, a collective
of German hip-hop figures with their own label, studios and a growing and glowing reputation… and BRD was one of its first
artists. I was rather impressed and deeply happy at the turn of events. I’d only been in Germany a matter of hours and already
I was sitting next to the country’s best rapper.

And here was Tarek. A little older, a little bigger, a little wiser. And very proud of
der Beste Rapper Deutschlands.

“We’re pressing the new single, right now. And we got a new distribution deal, so things are going well. Life’s good, man.
Company’s doing well, I’ve got a baby girl… I got married, to Anna-Re. I met her through hip-hop, she does it too. How about
you?”

“Married as well. Not to a rapper though. And no kids.”

“Do it—it’s the best thing in the world.”

“But the rapping,” I said, keen to know more. “How did that start?”

I was struggling to remember music class and whether rapping had been an option.

“You remember Marcus from school?” he asked.

“Yeah—Marcus the rapper?” suddenly realizing all the clues were there in his name. “Used to hang out with that big ginger
lad who called himself MC Quite White?”

“Marcus, yeah. Well, him and me, we were just rapping all the time, trying to get a deal, and eventually we signed to Warners,
signed to Universal, brought out lots of records…”

“Seriously?” I said, genuinely amazed. “You brought out
records?
”

This was incredible. My friend had brought out records. I shook my head, and swelled with pride. This made the whole Chunk
from
The Goonies
thing fade
right
into the background.

“But when the last group we had split in 2000, we thought, hey, maybe we should do our own thing. Try and start a label, try
and bring stuff out, so we hooked up with this guy we know called Axl, and we figured we could just make our own music and
use the money to make even
more
music…”

“But is there a big rap scene in Germany?”

“Yeah—and for ten years we were the number one English-speaking group in the country, and…”

“Ten years?”

“Yeah. We were bilingual—a lot of people would try rapping in En glish but it would sound ridiculous because they couldn’t
even speak it. We could do both. It’s just telling stories about how kids in Germany live, the only way we know how.”

It made complete sense. Tarek’s accent was a subtle blend of American and German—perfect for his job, and the kind of accent
I’d heard every day at JFK. So much so that by the time my year was over,
my
accent was mildly distorted too. We hadn’t gone back to Loughborough at the end of the year. We’d moved to Bath instead,
where I’d had to start making friends all over again, this time with a strange En glish-American accent. It had brought about
its own set of problems. Once, at a dinner party my parents had dragged me to, I’d spent three or four hours talking to the
same elderly woman, when, halfway through a story in which I was talking to her as I’m talking to you now, she’d put her hand
on my arm and said, very loudly, “YOU SPEAK VERY GOOD ENGLISH.” I hadn’t known what to say, so just thanked her, and continued
with the story. Only at the end of the evening did it turn out she’d thought I was Belgian.

Tarek and the Beste Rapper Deutschlands seemed to be very nice men indeed. They’d met on the scene, in dark and dingy hip-hop
clubs, when Tarek used to rap too.

“But then I stopped, and started producing instead.”

“Did
you
used to be the BRD?” I asked. “When you were an… R… D?”

Tarek looked at me blankly.

“Or were you called something else?”

“I go by Potna Pot.”

For a horrible moment there, I’d assumed Tarek had said he was off to buy some pot, but he was actually just telling me his
name.

“‘P.O.T.’ stands for Phat Overloadian Tarikh,” he said, and I’d closed my eyes and nodded, like I’d been about to jump in
and guess exactly that.

“I mean, I still MC. I’m a team with a DJ. He does the music, I do the mic. We have a couple of gigs every month. DJ Reaf
and Potna… we’re called Hit ’Em Up Sound…”

HIT ’EM UP SOUND!

At the beginning of 2002 Reaf and Potna got into contact via a common acquaintance and felt immediately that they got on with
each other! The two decided to tackle a new project. And as the two do not like to pay for entry tickets and like to drink
free of charge—they thought: “Why don’t we form a Soundsystem?”

Competition and battle is the butter on their bread, and Reaf and Potna did not wait to be asked and went to many clubs across
the whole republic, making many clubs unsafe! To the deepest north or the sunny south, Mr. Reaf and Mr. Potna bring their
monstrous sets to your clubs!

“But what would you rap about?” I asked.

I’d never really been into rap. Many at JFK had tried to get me into it, playing me dainty little ditties such as “A Bitch
Iz a Bitch” and “Fuck tha Police,” but it was never something I felt I could really relate to, particularly as I’d thought
the police did an admirable job under sometimes very difficult circumstances.

Tarek thought about how to answer the question, and I tried to think what stories
I
would tell if
I
could rap about
my
inner-city struggles, but stalled when I couldn’t think of a rhyme for “canopy.”

“You know, we’re just trying to portray stuff for the people that live here. BRD is trying to make music for people like him.
Normal kids, raised normal. Trying to live your life, trying to get by, getting into trouble—though nothing that bad…”

BRD nodded silently and then joined in.

“And then on the other side,” he said, “you’ve got the Turkish, Arab and African kids rapping about not being treated fair…
and knife stuff is big right now.”

“
Knife
stuff?”

“Yeah,” said Germany’s best rapper. “It’s dangerous ’cos the lyrics are nasty. On the one hand I don’t want no censorship,
but on the other a lot of kids pack knives now to look cool.”

Tarek agreed.

“Just like when I used to listen to NWA they used to say 80 percent of the people who listened were white suburban kids, it’s
the same here. Kids sitting in a mountain village somewhere listening and thinking, ‘That’s what Berlin is like.’ That’s the
way we used to think of Compton. But, yeah, Berlin’s at the center of it now… but a lot of it is wannabe gangsters, which
we’re totally not into…”

While he’d been talking, I’d noticed a middle-aged couple on another table glancing at Tarek and muttering something. They
didn’t really look like hip-hop fans. And then I realized—maybe the kids at school had been right. Maybe even after all these
years Tarek still got recognized from that sitcom. I asked him and he blushed slightly.

“Yeah, a couple of times a week I get recognized. The sitcom was pretty big. It can be frustrating because they want signed
photos, but all I’ve got is my rap pictures, and they don’t look so keen when they see them.”

I could see what he meant.

“I suppose,” I said, “it’d be like asking for a photo of the kid from Jerry Maguire and being given a picture of a big man
pointing a gun at you instead.”

And then a memory shot back to me. An autumn evening. On a bus.

“I remember once we were on the school bus, and you reached into your bag, and you… you showed me your
gun.
”

It sounded ridiculous, now I said it. Like it couldn’t possibly have happened. But things like this did. I refer you to my
KGB adventure.

“Can that be
possible?
” I said. “Did you have a
gun
at school?”

Tarek looked slightly awkward, but BRD laughed.

“Yeah. That was the same thing. I thought it was cool. No reason to have a gun in Berlin at all. It was the videos and the
music. I’m not proud of it.”

I
had been. I’d written about forty letters the next day to all my mates in Loughborough, basically just saying, “My mate Tarek
showed me his gun!”

“We were scared about our jackets being taken,” explained Tarek. “I did protect myself with that gun, too. Someone tried to
take my money and my shoes and I wasn’t gonna let that happen. I pulled the gun out and shot him twice.”

There was a silent moment as I took the information in, processed it, and then decided I’d better process it again, because
somewhere along the way I’d apparently gotten the impression that Tarek had just said he’d shot a man.

“Sorry, you did what?”

“I shot this guy.”

What?

“You shot someone?” I said, my eyes suddenly cartoon balls of terror. “You
shot
a guy?”

“Yeah. Twice.”

What?

“In the face, I think.”

WHAT?

“You shot someone
twice
IN THE FACE?” I said. Maybe if I just kept repeating what Tarek was telling me he’d realize he’d made a mistake and meant
“hugged,” not shot, but then, how often does someone hug you twice in the face?

“Yeah. And then I ran away.”

This was all too much.

“You shot someone TWICE and then RAN AWAY?”

Tarek just nodded.

I couldn’t quite believe it. My old friend, sitting in front of me like a gentle and respectable man, a pillar of the German
hip-hop community, this German Chunk… was
admitting a murder to me!
Just twenty-five minutes after having met him for the first time in sixteen years! Christ… maybe he’d just been waiting all
this time to tell me. Maybe that’s why he’d been so keen to meet up. I started to panic… what if I was now, by some weird
German law, somehow
in
on it? What if I’d broken the law just
listening?
Was I to blame now? Those forty letters might now be considered evidence!