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

by Danny Wallace

  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.

  Here is how I managed to sum up the entire Iraq conflict in my school diary.

  I hope Saddam sees sense and pulls out. I do not want war.

  On a lighter note, it is not raining much at the moment.

  I was now rifling through the Box and finding more and more evidence of my time in Berlin. Tarek’s entry in the Book listed him as living in the former West Germany, and even had a phone number. I’d tried it, but to no avail. But there were clues elsewhere. A copy of the JFK Student Directory. An address of a mutual friend. And dozens of photos of the old gang in Berlin… photos of us on lunch breaks, when we’d walk down to Zehlendorf and buy curry-wursts and chips. Photos of us on a school trip to Brussels. A class photo, signed by everyone, on the last day of school—a sad day for me, because it indicated a return to Britain and an end to JFK. A sad day for my friends, too, because, with America pulling out of Germany, whole military families would now be saying goodbye to Berlin too. My friend Amy, whose dad was a diplomat, was heading back to Washington, DC. My friend Josh, whose dad had flown for Pan Am, was heading back to Boulder, Colorado, and had made me memorize his address as a sort of bizarre rhyme. Brian, whose dad was in the army, had his ticket for Buffalo, New York, and was packing up already. We’d all shared that time in Berlin… but for all of us, it had come to an end. But how about Tarek? Had he stayed on at JFK and graduated in the class of ’94? Would he still be in Berlin?

  The doorbell rang. I answered it.

  “So… been busy?” asked Paul the builder. He was halfway up his own ladder inspecting the location of the new canopy. I stood at the bottom with a mug of coffee. This made me look more like a boss.

  “Oh, you know…” I said. “Yes. Sort of. I’ve ordered some shopping online and varnished a table.”

  Paul looked over to the end of the garden and spotted my handiwork.

  “Christ—you did that?”

  I was mildly offended.

  “Yes,” I said. “With varnish and a brush.”

  I was sure that’s how you did it.

  “Bloody hell.”

  I looked over at the table, proudly. And then the pride sort of disappeared. It suddenly didn’t really look all that varnished. It just looked like a table someone had liberally dripped varnish over. I’d been in quite a rush to get it done—to prove to Lizzie that I would live up to the Desperados Pact—but really, I’d just wanted to get on and track down more of the names in the Book, and this streaky, patchy mess of a table was the result.

  “Well. It’s not quite finished,” I said, defensively. “I’ve been a bit distracted. With important work.”

  “You must’ve been,” said Paul. “You’ve not even done her legs.”

  I checked. He was right.

  “It’s an ongoing project,” I said. “I am taking my time with it. With her. With it.”

  “Well, I’d start again, if I were you… I could do that for you, if you like, for a bit extra…”

  Paul was undermining my confidence in the job. Plus, it was apparent that I still didn’t know when to correctly identify something as a lady. I resolved to do the legs myself before Lizzie got home, and left Paul to get on with building the canopy. But twenty minutes later, after receiving a phone call asking for a quote, he told me he’d brought the wrong screws and would have to return in a few days, when he’d ordered the right ones. I told him there was a DIY shop just down the road, but he frowned and shook his head and assured me they would not have the right screws, so I said okay, and told him to keep me updated. I was secretly pleased he was off. Being in charge of Paul was tiring. And besides, I had real work to do, and a can of varnish remover to buy a little later on…

  I sat down at my desk just as a text arrived. It was from Hanne.

  I think I should reiterate that I only use Facebook as a business utility and not as some kind of social networking site and the pointless Take That obsession is Guro’s, not mine. Understood?

  I suggested she go and cook an egg.

  I hit the Internet and tried to find the website of the John F. Kennedy International School… and it got me thinking…

  One of the strangest things about our move to Berlin was the day I’d had to fight off a renegade KGB agent who’d broken into our flat.

  Now, you might wonder why I’ve never mentioned this before. It is, after all, quite a nice sentence to say. It’s the kind of thing I have to stop myself from telling complete strangers at bus stops or in post office queues, as it has the effect of making me seem a little bit mental, like saying “My friend Simon has solved time travel” or “I know the German Chunk” would. It is, however, fact: I once fought off a renegade KGB agent who’d broken into our flat.

  Actually, “fought off” is probably a little strong. And I’ve no proof that he was “renegade”—he might’ve been a real stickler for the rules. But he was KGB. And he did break into our flat.

  I’ll explain.

  My dad is a very good friend of Britain. He pays his taxes, he picks up after himself, he never litters and he always observes the countryside code. The East Germans, on the other hand, thought of him slightly differently. According to official secret police files released as the Wall took its tumble, they’d decided my dad was an Enemy of the State. His official file brands him as feindlich negativ and a menace to East Germany, thanks to his work studying various exiled writers and vocal critics of the socialist government.

  It is something I had never realized about my dad, but it suddenly made him something just short of James Bond. And from the evening I stared the KGB in the eye, small events in my childhood slowly started to make sense. The fact that sometimes, in Dundee, when you picked up the phone and hadn’t even dialed a number yet, there’d be someone on the other end already waiting for you. I’d assumed that was just how phones worked. But no. It turned out this was MI5, possibly trying to see if my dad was a double agent. Which would have been weird, seeing as how he wasn’t even a single one. But sometimes, Dad would finish a conversation, put the phone down, then remember with a tut and a click of his fingers that he’d forgotten to mention the one vital thing he’d phoned up about. So he’d pick up the phone again, only to hear his own conversation being played back in a room with a couple of men commenting on it.

  “Hello!” he’d shout. “Can I use my phone again?”

  Whereupon you’d hear two men shouting “Shit!” and spilling their coffee while pressing various buttons.

  I remembered the day Special Branch turned up at our house in Loughborough. And the day we found out that a woman I’d always thought of as a mere busybody who was always turning up to our house and asking what we were up to was in fact a part-time spy for the East Germans. I wouldn’t have minded so much if she’d come up with a decent codename, like Hawkwind or Raven-tits. But the letters she sent the East German secret police were just signed “Anne”… which lent a potentially exciting situation a sort of beige tinge.

  But then there was Frederick. Frederick was brilliant. Frederick was the world’s most rubbish spy, sent over to Loughborough to infiltrate our small family and keep tabs on my dad. His brief was apparently simple: pretend to be a student, win my dad’s confidence and report back.

  Sadly for Frederick, his cover story involved pretending to be twenty-two, when he was a man quite clearly in his early forties. This was also in the days before Google, so when Frederick came to the business of his clever disguise, he couldn’t actually look up what students in the late 1980s in England were wearing. He had to guess. Which is why he turned up in the student bar looking like Doctor Who, with a huge Oxbridge scarf, hat, tweed jack
et and leather briefcase, in a futile attempt to blend in with people holding lagers, wearing stonewashed jeans and talking about whether the Smiths would ever get back together.

  His plan, however, was genius. He would use my middle name in order to strike up a rapport with my dad, and then claim to be Swiss, not East German, in order to fox us. The flaw in the plan was that he didn’t seem to have read the family file all the way through. He seemed to have stopped at my middle name. I believe the initial conversation with my dad went something like this.

  FREDERICK: Hello Professor Wallace! I am twenty-two but perhaps look older! Look at my clothes—I am undoubtedly a student! My name is Frederick!

  DAD: Frederick? Goodness! That’s my son’s middle name! You must join us for dinner and we can talk about this further!

  FREDERICK: Well, that would be wonderful! I am not from East Germany, by the way, so do not be suspicious of me. I am from Switzerland instead of that.

  DAD: Really? My wife is from Switzerland!

  [pause]

  FREDERICK: Oh.

  DAD: You must talk to her about being from Switzerland!

  FREDERICK: Yes.

  DAD: Where are you from in Switzerland?