THE KICKER:IN THE SUMMER of my 15th year my sister was to host a German exchange student. Thanks to some kind of administrative snafu, when he arrived Knut was six years younger than she was, and about two metres tall. He was a nice young man, but there was no way my sister was going to spend her evenings in the company of a 14-year-old German boy.
It is appropriate for me to use the passive voice when I say that it was decided that Knut and I were to hang out together, for three weeks. At this point I did not speak, nor ever wished to speak, German, and I'm pretty sure I wasn't Knut's ideal exchange friend, either, but, of all the children in my family, I was closest to Knut in age, and therefore it was settled.
The only thing Knut and I had in common was a love of hip hop. When I first heard the buzz-saw samples and incendiary lyrics of Public Enemy I felt like Mick Jagger must have done when he heard Delta bluesmen for the first time. Hip hop was dangerous and thrilling, profane, loud and totally modern. It was all I ever wanted in music. I had no idea what cold lampin' was, what a basehead was or who the Black Panthers were. I didn't even know what an Uzi was. I just knew I wanted one.
Knut also liked hip hop, but he liked the stupid stuff. Germans have a curious blind spot when it comes to pop music, probably because their English is not as good as ours and they may not spot all the absurdities inherent in the work of Whitesnake, or Hasselhoff, or Fat Boys.
I can still remember the disbelief on the face of the Dublin second-hand record-shop owner as Knut excitedly brought three Fat Boys 12 inches and a Fat Boys album to the counter, more than ready to palm over the full price. Knut had dug these worthless items from a dusty bargain bin, where they had been rightly buried beneath remaindered Nana Mouskouri and Starship cassettes.
I tried to warn Knut that Fat Boys were unlikely to survive the big critical shakedown that would occur years from then. I remember finding eye contact with the record-shop owner and he looking away as he rang up the sale. We both knew it was larceny, and he knew that I knew it was larceny - all his Christmases had come at once.
I could just see him in the pub that night, smoking rollies and enthralling his hipster friends - all of whom would look as if they were in The Waterboys - with the story of how he had managed to sell the entire back catalogue of . . . Fat Boys. How they would laugh.
Things only got really bad when we got home and Knut also wanted to play Fat Boys, and not just once but many hundreds of times. Their most famous track was a kind of mash-up of The Twist, with Chubby Checker on guest vocals. We may have listened to that song 200 times over the next week. In the darkest hour of my sleepless nights it still comes back, that song, Chubby Checker's adenoidal call to action, "C-c-come on everybody, c-c-come on everybody . . ."
Knut was destroying my enjoyment of hip hop. He was making a mockery of the most dangerous, most incendiary and darkest music ever. On the bus into town of an evening, he was wearing luminous green trouser braces that held his jeans impossibly high above the waist, revealing far too much sock. He talked too loudly, in a German accent. He wore a clip-on ear-ring and spoke about his belief in Jesus while my friends and I were trying to watch some band on stage at the Baggot Inn.
I would describe this as the first summer of my adulthood, and Knut was ruining everything with his love of Jesus, and Fat Boys. I also believed in Jesus, but I believed in Him to myself, and I certainly didn't bring Him up in conversation at the bar. Knut was a happy young guy with the ability to occupy the world unselfconsciously. What the hell was wrong with him?
Thank the Lord for Run DMC. In the second week of Knut's stay a friend loaned me their album Tougher than Leather, and it was manna from heaven. Unlike Fat Boys, Run DMC were the real deal, proper hip-hop innovators from Hollis, in Queens. When people accuse Germans of having no sense of humour I like to recall how Knut liked Run DMC because they were funny, and how I liked Run DMC because I thought they were serious, and how history has proved Knut right.
In my 24-hour-a-day whining and moaning like an infant about having to squire Knut around town, my parents had obviously detected a subtle sense of dissatisfaction in me, and they decided that what we all needed was a few days in the west. We packed the car and drove to Connemara, and we listened to Run DMC all the way down, all the way around and all the way back to Dublin.
To my shame I found it was much easier to get on with Knut there, without having to view him from the perspective of my friends, whom I imagined to be far more critical than they were. To this day I can't be in Eyre Square without hearing Run's House, and Clifden reminds me of Mary, Mary.
From my parents' perspective the only sound worse than the voices bellowing over the thudding kick drum and the ear-piercing snare was the deafening silence of a teenager sulking, again, about having to spend time with Knut.
John Butler blogs at http://lozenge.wordpress.com