On a bleak, gray day, I was walking down a path when two Turkish kids and a Danish boy walked straight toward me. The boys in Askerød had a habit of bumping into one another in order to provoke a fight, and one of them deliberately bumped into me.
“What the fuck are doing? Watch where you’re going,” one of them said.
“What are you talking about? He bumped into me!”
Then one of them punched me in the face, and I immediately felt my eye swell up. I fought back, but it was three against one and one of them held me as the other two beat me up. When they finally let up, I was staring at the pavement with my hands on my knees. I felt the growing knot above my eye and looked up at them, fighting off tears.
“I’m gonna fuck you up!” I shouted as they walked away, and I swore to myself I would take revenge.
I waited two months until I found out where the boy who had thrown the first punch lived. I waited for him in the stairway of his home and attacked him, but the boy managed to flee into another building but I chased him down and confronted him.
“Why did the three of you jump me?”
“Stop. I don’t want to fight. Can’t we be friends?”
An elder man who lived in the building appealed to me. “Stop it now. Can’t you see the boy just wants to be friends? He doesn’t want to fight.”
“But I do!” I blurted out in anger.
“Forget about it. It doesn’t matter now. Shake on it, and move on” the man said.
In order to appease the man, the boy and I did as we were told. The boy’s name was Hamza, and he became my first friend in Askerød. That was the beginning of a violent friendship.
The two other boys who had attacked me eventually befriended me as well, and shortly thereafter, I found my first real sense of community. Meanwhile, it became one of those communities that no society wants, and we became the kind of children who our parents just couldn’t reach.
I started to resent my mother’s goodness because I didn’t feel that the world was consistent with what she told me. I didn’t feel like we had anything to be thankful for, and I hate that part of my life because that’s when I started being mean to her for not properly preparing me for the environment I was presently living in.
Hamza was fifteen. At home, he was beaten, and when he left the house, he loved to destroy things. He destroyed things when he was angry, when he was sad, when he was bored, and if you refused to join him on his destruction sprees, you were a wuss. I wasn’t going to accept being called a wuss after enduring years of being berated by my father, so together, we wrecked and destroyed things. We smashed the store windows at the mall, we broke lampposts, and we trashed the youth clubs that denied us access.
We went on robbery sprees around the western suburbs of Copenhagen and used knives to cut up train seats. This was a daily operation. Ballerup, Rødovre, Glostrup, Hellerup, Lyngby—no town in the vicinity was spared. We simply went into a store, and while one of us distracted the shop assistant, our friends emptied the shelves and dumped the loot into their backpacks. We stole MiniDiscs, radios, LEVI’s jeans, cameras. My boys learned how to use the pull tab of a can to break into most stores. At night, we broke into electronics stores and stole even more.
Even as teenagers, we were stone cold and devoid of mercy. Conscience was something other people had, and we convinced ourselves that because the world had dealt us all such an unfair hand, we had the right to do whatever the hell we wanted. The other kids in my class had nice clothes and cool stuff. They had MiniDiscs and listened to music when we went on field trips. I didn’t have any of those things because we were poor, so I stole the things I wanted. We also just wanted to ruin things for the rest of the world. We wanted the system to pay. We felt that everybody was racist and that no one took care of us.
Sometimes, we got caught, and the shop assistants tried to chase us. But my boys and I were fast, willing and able to fight, below the age of criminal liability, and quite frankly, we didn’t even care if we got caught. The first time it ever happened was at a mall in a neighboring town.
We were riding the trains and robbing shops. That day, we had been to Ballerup and all sorts of other places, and I thought to myself, Why not go to Rødovre and steal some jeans? Back then, these 501 jeans had just come out. I wanted a Champion jersey too because a guy named Peter had just stolen a green one. We thought it was dope, and we wanted a gray one. The police arrested us and took us to the station. But we were young boys, so they just drove us back home again.
I also went to visit my father at my mother’s request. She wanted her children to remain in contact with him. In prison, my father had grown a big, bushy beard like a Taliban soldier, and he was bald. The first time I went to see him, I didn’t utter a word. My hatred for the man was simply too intense. I thought about killing him like he had killed my family. We would never be able to celebrate Eid together, and I would never have his protection. I had already had my first beatings, but who was going to protect me when the person whose protection I desired the most was my own oppressor and abuser?
The second time, I finally spoke my piece. I asked: “How could you do it? Why did you do it?” I never got an answer. My father has never apologized or shown remorse for his actions on that day, and I have never forgiven him.