Yes, Chef (6 page)

I later learned that Mats’s parents had anticipated the racial taunts way before my own parents had and had instructed their son not to tolerate anyone picking on me. I wondered then about the boys who stood up for me and the ones who shied away from the fight. How had Team Marcus and Team Boje been formed? Was it boys who were raised right and boys who were not? Was it boys who were scared and boys who were not? The lines were split and it wasn’t about friendship. Inside the
negerboll
coliseum we were all gladiators. Outside of it, almost all of us were friends. It was puzzling. But I had gleaned—even without reading him—the lesson of Rilke. I learned to live the questions.

S
PORTS, IN MY CHILDHOOD
, was the great equalizer, the safe space. When skateboards came onto the scene, Mats and I practiced kick-turns for hours, wiping out, racing down our driveways. We’d race everything, including bikes, although on those we preferred to pedal full speed at each other just to see what a head-on collision would feel like. (Not so great.) We hiked around the woods in our backyards, playing hours of elaborate hide-and-seek games or pretending to be mountain men or survivors from a plane wreck, desperate enough to turn to cannibalism. When we were with other kids, we dared them to skateboard down hills with no padding or shoes; we ran tennis tournaments that blocked the street, using string for a net and chalked court lines; we never stopped.

The sport we most loved was soccer. Mats and I were equally obsessed with it, but like every other Swedish boy my age, he was taller and heavier than I was. By Swedish standards, he was an average height and somewhat thickly built, with powerful legs that he put to good use on the soccer field. I might have had speed and natural ability, but Mats had that, size,
and
a superstar dad. Rune Carestam was a much better player than the other dads. In scrimmages, he could take on any of us kids and outrun us, outscore us, outthink us. We’d lunge at him and before we landed, he’d be past
us, setting up a teammate with the perfect pass. My father was strong on defense, and in a neighborhood game he could hold his own, but he was also a good ten years older than Rune. Not to mention ten years slower.

When we’d play all-kid pickup games in the neighborhood or kick balls around during school recess, the only real competition Mats and I faced was each other. Instead of that making us jealous, it made us closer. Soccer was our bond. The first non-school book I ever read was one Mats lent to me, which he’d taken out from the local library.

“Du skulle gilla den här,”
he said as he chucked it in my direction. You might like this.

It was the autobiography of Edson Arantes do Nascimento, better known as Pelé, better known as the greatest soccer player in the world. I sat rock still as I read of Pelé coming to Göteborg (Göteborg!) at seventeen to play in the 1958 World Cup finals. Pelé described walking onto the field of Nya Ulleví Stadium, a few miles from my house, wearing his number 10 jersey: He knew the crowd was focused on him, wondering who “this skinny little black boy” was. Pelé was my first hero and my first black role model, and that book meant the world to me.

When Mats and I weren’t playing soccer, we were listening to music, to whatever new singles fell into the rotation on Göteborg’s pop radio station. One day, he called me over to his house to hear a new album that an older cousin had passed along, by a band called Kiss. We stared at the album cover, stunned by the men in outrageous makeup, kicking up their legs, sheathed in skin-tight silver and black leather costumes. Mats held the album up to his face and pouted, just like the guys in the band.

We ran into his parents’ bathroom and ransacked his mother’s makeup bag. Shouldering each other aside for the best spot in front of the mirror, Mats took the eyeliner and drew on the black star-shaped eye patch of lead singer Paul “Starchild” Stanley while I penciled in black flames around each eye to turn myself into bassist Gene “Demon” Simmons.

For a few months, playing Kiss was definitely among our favorite pastimes. Mats was taking a woodworking class at the time, and while the other kids made toolboxes and desk caddies, he built a wooden microphone and stand, complete with a leather “electric cord” that we could incorporate into our performances. When we wanted to perform as the whole band, we brought in other kids, but more often than not, it was just the two of us in Mats’s room, listening to each of the album’s nine songs in order, following along with the lyrics printed on the album sleeve. Sometimes we’d just replay our favorite, “Detroit Rock City,” again and again and again. We played a lot of air guitar—Mats on lead and me on bass—and we thought Göteborg had never seen anything as fierce as us when we screamed out, “First I drink, then I smoke!” We were good Swedish boys, but we meant, when the time was right, to get into some serious trouble.

Eventually, our tastes matured, and by seventh grade, we had progressed to … I hate to say it … Sweden’s own ABBA. Now, instead of wanting to strike poses, we wanted to dance. We held disco nights: We’d gather up all the candy we could find and invite a dozen neighborhood girls to dance with us in Mats’s basement to ABBA’s latest release. No other boys; just the girls and us. And Mats’s mom as DJ.

For the fourteen years that we lived in Skattkärr, until I left Sweden for good, Mats and I spoke to or saw each other ninety-nine out of any hundred days. In our minds, we ruled the neighborhood; and since we were in the same class and went to the same school, we ruled there, too.

I
N
S
WEDEN
, if you’re serious about a sport, you don’t waste your time with a school team: You join a club. The club teams in Sweden operate like a farm system for the pro leagues, and going pro was all Mats and I ever thought about. By the time we were eleven, we had outgrown the small neighborhood team we played for. We both tried out and were both accepted into GAIS, short for Göteborg Athletic and
Sports Association, our city’s premier football team. GAIS was Sweden’s answer to Leeds United, and its fans, including Mats’s dad, were legendary in their devotion. To be accepted into their youth program was a huge deal. It meant you had a shot at going pro.

For the next four years, Mats and I lugged our bags to the practice field every day after school and every weekend, making the five-mile trek by bus, by tram, with our moms or in the backseat of my dad’s rattly old Volkswagen Beetle. And when we took the tram, we never waited for it to pull up to our stop. We always jumped out early and ran the four blocks to the stadium where our teammates were waiting.

Until I joined GAIS, I was used to being the only outsider in any given room. At school, diversity took the form of one Finnish kid and one Indian girl who, like me, had been adopted young and spoke Swedish without an accent. But in GAIS, only six of the twenty-two team members were Swedish and almost all of them were from working-class homes. All of a sudden, I had friends from Yugoslavia, Turkey, Latvia, and Finland, friends who were not named Gunnar and Sven, but Mario and Tibor, friends with darker skin and darker hair. From my new teammates, I learned to speak a patois that blended foreign words with abbreviated Swedish sayings. Instead of saying
“Vad händer annars?”
—What’s going on?—we’d say
“Annars?”
To get someone’s attention, we would say
“Yalla,”
which meant “faster” in Arabic. And if we made a mistake, we used the English word
sorry
. It was, by our parents’ standards, a lazy and improper way of speaking. To us, it was the epitome of cool.

My new teammates—even the white Swedes—all called themselves
blatte
, a historically derogatory term for immigrants that my generation claimed with pride.
Blatte
meant someone who was “dark” but, more, someone who was an outsider. It wasn’t quite as charged as the term
nigga
that was favored among hip-hop-loving black people, but it was a term that made liberal-minded Swedes deeply uncomfortable. I liked that
blatte
covered everyone from displaced Ugandan Indians to former Yugoslavians to someone like me.

Unlike some of my team members, I’d been adopted as a toddler. Culturally and linguistically, I was Swedish. But as I got older, the more I could feel people respond to me as a young black man, instead of a cute little black kid. The subtle shift in the body language of strangers was something I never discussed with my parents, my sisters, or even Mats. But it was lucky for me that this deepening racial awareness happened at the same time I joined GAIS. While I was beginning to sense the ways that I didn’t fully belong to Swedish society as a whole, I had found a place and a group of people with whom I felt very much at home.

A
FTER PRACTICE
, my teammates and I usually walked over to McDonald’s, which was still relatively new in our city, and gorged on junk food. We were fascinated by how American it all seemed. Some of my school friends had gotten part-time jobs working the grill and fryers, and by the time I was in eighth grade, I decided I wanted to work at McDonald’s, too. Why not get paid to be where I was hanging out every day anyway?

One day before practice, I went in and asked for an application. When I had finished it, the kid behind the counter pointed me in the direction of his manager, who couldn’t have been older than twenty-one. I handed over my form, smiling and standing up straight the way my mother had taught me.

The manager held my application like something he’d picked up off the floor, touching it with only his thumb and his index finger.

“I’ll let you know,” he said.

I knew then and there I was not going to get a call. He hadn’t actually said anything racist, but I ricocheted, as I so often did in those teenage years, between trusting my gut and being afraid that I’d misread the entire situation. I walked out of the restaurant, not sure whether I wanted to cry or hit someone.

At practice the next day, when I told my teammates what had happened, they laughed. They thought the very notion of me, a
black kid, applying to work at a place like McDonald’s was hysterical.

“You applied
where
?” my teammates asked, incredulous.

“Of course you didn’t get a job!” they said. “Have you ever seen a
blatte
behind a McDonald’s counter?”

At home, when I told my mother about the way the manager treated me, she did what mothers do: She offered to fight my battles for me. “I’ll call him right now,” she said. “He can’t get away with that kind of treatment.”

“No, no, please,” I insisted. “I’ll work somewhere else. I’ll work somewhere better.”

“Bry dig inte om honom,”
my father said. Ignore them.

Soccer, then, became not only a beloved sport, but GAIS, with its
blatte
crew, became a reprieve from what felt like an increasingly white world. Everything about GAIS was a perfect fit for me, from the sense of identity it gave to the green-and-black-striped jersey that earned us the nickname “the Mackerels.” I wore that jersey, and that nickname, with an unbelievable amount of pride. I like to tell people that my hometown, Göteborg or Gburg, is like Pittsburgh by the sea. For me, wearing that jersey was like being on the kid’s version of the Steelers: It said I belonged in Gburg, even if my skin said I didn’t.

Shortly after Mats and I joined, the adult GAIS division signed its first black player, a Tunisian midfielder named Samir Bakaou. Bakaou was not olive-skinned, like so many North Africans; he was as black as I was and he made a point, whenever our paths would cross, of acknowledging me. He was a cool dude, never stressed on the field, always in control. The only other black males I ever saw were on TV—Carl Lewis, Michael Jackson, Desmond Tutu. They were all so far away. But Samir Bakaou trained where we trained. We didn’t speak the same languages—I spoke Swedish and English, he spoke Arabic and French—but he always nodded his head or winked at me, gestures that assured me that we were connected. Along with Pelé, Bakaou immediately joined the pantheon of my black male role models.

The Mackerels were good, better than good. We traveled all over Northern Europe during the seven-month season: up to Stockholm and over to Denmark, Holland, England, and Yugoslavia. We practiced two hours a day: dribbling, passing, jumping, shooting, and running wind sprints, blasting at top speed across our half of the practice field, touching the center line then an end line and back again as many times as we could in five-minute intervals. When the coach’s whistle finally blew, we fell down onto the ground wherever we were, sucking wind. Lying there with that feeling of having gone full out, staring up at the sky, blood and adrenaline pulsing through my body: I lived for that sensation.

In terms of philosophy, our coach Lars was influenced by the Brazilians—masters of the passing game. While many of the youth teams played one strategy—pass to the fastest guy and hope he can score—our coach wanted us to play with a mix of precision and poetry. Lars was just as proud of a fifty-yard sideline pass or of a perfectly executed cross as he was of any goals we scored. What he wanted to see on the field—the skills he taught us that are with me to this day—were the control and finesse that makes soccer both a joy to play and a joy to watch.

“I’d rather you lose than win ugly,” Lars said.

We weren’t the top team in the league, but we won more than we lost. Mats played center defender and I was center midfield, which made me the link between offense and defense. Lars typically put us both in his starting lineup, although we were on the young side. In our first year on GAIS, we were playing against boys who were three or four years older—which only added to the thrill whenever we were lucky enough to win.

By our second year on the team, scouts had begun to appear on the sideline, looking for talent they might siphon off for their semipro adult divisions or the all-out pro teams. When a sixteen-year-old Finnish boy we often played against got scooped up for his club’s pro team and became his team’s high scorer, we all dreamed of following his lead. I practiced harder than ever, and for the first time I felt a pull
between wanting to do the best for the team and wanting to stand out enough to be noticed.