Blauer Affe-Story: translated by Bob Thackway (High Society) & Ralf:
EVERYBODY UNDER 18 HAS TO LEAVE . . . . . . .
Sure, the announcement at 10 o`clock p.m. was always a part of every dance-night. It was ritual. Only a few really left and nobody in the audience interfered or took it seriously. But it was risky and could go wrong.
Once it happened. At about 1:00 o' clock in the morning. My mate and I left the club "Stadt Hamburg" - "Top Ten" in Deichstrasse and suddenly a Peterwagen (as police-cars were known at that time) stopped next to us. Two policemen got out of the car and asked for our ID cards.
As always, I' d left my ID at home and assured them in my deepest possible voice that I was already 18. My mate was holding an ID which said that the owner was 18, but he was not the owner. When he was on tour he borrowed it from a friend. Never before had it been a problem for him, because in this little, dark grey booklet with long hair in the photo, we all looked very similar. The police officer only took a quick look at the dates, and he was then normally given it back. But not on the night in question! We had to get into the VW-beetle police-car and were taken to the police-station at Friedrich-Karl-Strasse.
Beat-music and long-haired youths were not well looked upon at that time, especially not by the police. People had to look after youngsters' welfare, and law and order, in this well-kept North Sea coastal city.
In the basement at the police-station, they still kept a few effective mementos of the past decades, as I had already imagined. We were standing with our backs to the cellar-wall and our hands at our trouser-legs. I was dispatched very quickly and escorted home, because my parents had no telephone to be given information by.
But my mate was in deep trouble and still insisted on being the owner of the ID card. Unfortunately he was not sure of his friend' s birth date and so he tried to combine different days, months and years. Getting very angry, the police-officer asked him again and again and my mate corrected his answer over and over. He changed from January to April, from 5th to the 22nd of a month and from 1948 to 1946 and so on. The officer had a nasty suspicion. Is this young guy confused? lost? mad? HASH ! YES, HASH ! At that time they did not really know much about this stuff, but it had to be "a thing of the devil". The first idea, that it was due to alcohol, was discarded, because he was a tea-totaller. But the smell on his breath was exotic (a mixture of Coke, meat-balls with mustard and cigarettes). - We' ll stop this morality break down here immediately! - the officer shouted out at the top of his voice.
Because of all this confusion my mate could not remember his parents telephone no., or if they even had a telephone. After a very short time, the officer held up the local telephone-book, savouring his triumph over the number he had found.
He then asked the half-asleep man whether he knew that his son was in a most delicate position, and spelt out for him the various dire consequences and possible tragic endings, he also painted my mate' s future as being as black as night.
The stunned father promised to help out, and said he would see to everything straight away, in order to prevent its happening again. Having said this he quickly hung up. This of course he did, without forgetting to thank the "higher authorities" for all their trouble.
The whole matter did of course still have a nasty follow-up for both of us, and as my accomodating friend later informed me, he also had a traumatic experience, when at three in the morning he was torn from his bed and beaten black and blue. The rest of the night he spent racking his brains trying to work out how the police had found all this out, and which of his pot-smoking cronies had been unable to keep his mouth shut.
However, he would eventually find out . . .
On that (particular) evening, we would have been much better advised to have gone (straight) home at ten o' clock.
I wish you all a good summer and my warmest greetings to the "boys" from the High Society
Blue Monkey
Ralf Froehlich
12.09.2009 20:36 Uhr
#1