It was a school day in 1996, and I was in the seventh grade at Tjørnely elementary in Hundige. I was chasing a ninth-grader through the schoolyard. He was called Arab Tommy because he was of both Danish and Arab ancestry. I had a baseball bat in my hands and was trying to hit him with it because he had kept my classmates from playing basketball on the court, and as always, my classmates had turned to me for help.
I was always ready whenever a classmate needed help. I would beat up boys, I would even bully and threaten teachers. I was both the clown and the protector of the class, and I did anything to be popular. When I acted the hero, I felt accepted.
However, Hussein needed my help the most. Hussein was a small, weak, Arab kid who was always getting beat up by the older boys. He had money and could afford to buy food in the school cafeteria. They sold freshly baked buns along with chicken and turkey meatballs. I loved the food from the cafeteria, but I could never afford it, so I made a deal with Hussein and his friend Buster: I got food in exchange for their protection.
There was something cool about being the seventh-grader who protected his peers from the older boys, and on this day, I had just told Arab Tommy to get lost so my classmates could finally play basketball. He had responded by picking up a handful of small, red pomegranates from the ground and throwing them at me full force. That was when I started chasing him with a bat. I had already hit him several times in the back and was trying to land a head blow.
Arab Tommy was terrified. “You’re crazy!” he yelled as he ran through the schoolyard and into the principal’s office.
The vice principal’s name was Harald, and when he saw me running toward his office with a bat, he managed to stop me. A few days earlier, I had thrown a rubber hammer at a teacher, and Harald had sent me to the school psychologist.
I felt condemned and I took it out on the psychologist. It wasn’t constructive, if you ask me. She was just there to tell me how lost I was and how everything I did was wrong. She brought me these weird, colored, shrink pictures and asked me to interpret them: “What is this? What do you see here? What does this mean?”
It was like she was trying to make me look dumber than I was. I was furious because I was fully aware of the shitty situation my mom, my siblings, and I were in. I wasn’t gonna let this shrink make me feel dumber or even more worthless than the world already did, so in the middle of the consultation, I pounded my fists on the table and shouted, “That’s it!”
The psychologist lost her temper. “You’ll become a murderer just like your father!” she yelled. I tuned her out immediately because I was determined to be nothing like him. Between Social Services, certain teachers that insisted I was a troublemaker, and a school psychologist who simply didn’t like me very much, I was failed at every turn during my time attending that school. The incidents piled up until they finally washed their hands of me.
I got expelled from Tjørnely after three years there and was instead enrolled at Hundige Elementary. There, I had two teachers, Keld and Ulrik, but I didn’t receive much education from them. We spent most of our time roller-skating or on Ulrik’s boat, where he would drink. After walking him to his boat, he usually just let me go home.
As time went on, I attended fewer and fewer classes, and even though I was banned from the local mall, I would still hang out there, being a general nuisance to shoppers and shop owners. In the fall of 1996, things got seriously out of hand. I was so fucked up that everybody had given up on me, and my friends. Plus, they had made these new police regulations, which made things even worse for us. We were fined every time we went to the mall, so that got quite expensive. In the end, I was 75,000 Krone ($11,400) in debt just for mall violations alone.
I had become too much to handle, and the municipality decided to take action.