The New Kings of Nonfiction

by Ira Glass

  Everyone was now very excited.

  And then: a rainbow. The streets, which had been getting tighter and tighter, opened, at last, on to a square: Piazza San Carlo. Light, air, the sky, and the bus slowly, undeniably, coming to rest. We had arrived.

  And so four coaches of supporters arrived to attend the match that they had been banned from attending only to discover that many people had gotten there before them. Where had they come from? The square was packed. As we pulled in, someone waved to us, one hand wild above his head, the other clinging to his penis, urinating into a fountain. There could be no doubt about his nationality, or, for that matter, any of the others’, familiar bloated examples of an island race who, sweltering under the warm Italian sun, had taken off their shirts, a great, fatty manifestation of the history of pub opening hours, of gallons and gallons of lager and incalculable quantities of bacon-flavored crisps. They were singing: “Manchester, la-la-la, Manchester, la-la-la.” They had the appearance of people who had been at the square, singing and drinking and urinating into the fountain, for many days. The pavement was covered with large empty bottles.

  I spotted Mick who, ever vigilant, had discovered the place to buy cheap beer very cheaply and who, ever generous, appeared with three two-liter bottles of lager, including one for me. Then Mick made for the middle of the throng, shouting “C‘mon, you Reds”—red for the red of Manchester United’s Red Devils—and he vanished, only his upturned two-liter bottle remaining visible above everyone’s heads.

  I wandered around the square. I was not uncomfortable, mainly because I had decided that I wasn’t going to allow myself to be uncomfortable. If I had allowed myself to be uncomfortable then it would follow that I would start to feel ridiculous and ask myself questions like: Why am I here? Now that the journey to Turin was properly completed, I had, I realized, done little more than gawk and drink. Mick had disappeared, although I thought I could pick out his bellowing amid the noise around me. Apart from him, however, I knew nobody. Here I was, my little black notebook hidden away in my back trouser pocket, hoping to come up with a way of ingratiating myself into a group that, from what I could see, was not looking for new members. For a moment I had the unpleasant experience of seeing myself as I must have appeared: as an American who had made a long journey to Italy that he shouldn’t have known about so that he could stand alone in the middle of what was by now several hundred Manchester United supporters who all knew each other, had probably known each other for years, were accustomed to traveling many miles to meet every week and who spoke with the same thick accent, drank the same thick beer, and wore many of the same preposterous, vaguely designed, High Street clothes.

  What was worse, word had got around that I was in Turin to write about the supporters—a piece of news that few had found particularly attractive. Two people came up and told me that they never read the Express (the Express?) and that when they did they found only rubbish in it. When I tried to explain that I wasn’t writing for the Express, I could see that they didn’t believe me or—a more unpleasant prospect—thought that, therefore, I must be writing for the Sun. Another, speaking sotto voce, tried to sell me his story (“The Star’s already offered me a thousand quid”). In its way this was a positive development, except that someone else appeared and started jabbing me vigorously in the chest: You don’t look like a reporter. Where was my notebook? Where was my camera? What’s an American doing here anyway?

  There had been other journalists. In Valencia, a Spanish television crew had offered ten pounds to any supporter who was prepared to throw stones, while jumping up and down and shouting dirty words. At Portsmouth, someone had appeared from the Daily Mail, working “undercover,” wearing a bomber jacket and Doc Marten boots, but he was chased away by the supporters: it was pointed out that no one had worn a bomber jacket and a pair of Doc Marten boots for about ten years, except for an isolated number of confused Chelsea fans. And last year in Barcelona there was a journalist from the Star. His was the story that I found most compelling. He had been accepted by most members of the group, but had then kept asking them about the violence. This, I was told, just wasn’t done. When is it going to go off? he would ask. Is it going to go off now? Will it go off tonight? No doubt he had a deadline and a features editor waiting for his copy. When the violence did occur, he ran, which was not unreasonable: he could get hurt. In the supporters’ eyes, however, he had done something very bad: he had—in their inimitable phrasing—“shitted himself.” When he returned to complete his story, he was set upon. But they didn’t stab him. He wasn’t disfigured in any lasting way.

  The story about the Star journalist was not particularly reassuring—so great, they didn’t stab him; lucky reporter—and I made a mental note not to shit myself under any circumstances. Even so, the story revealed an important piece of information.

  Until then, everyone I had spoken to went out of his way to establish that, while he might look like a hooligan, he was not one in fact. He was a football supporter. True: if someone was going to pick a fight, he wasn’t going to run—he was English, wasn’t he?—but he wouldn’t go looking for trouble. Everyone was there for the laugh and the trip abroad and the drink and the football.

  I did not want to hear this. And when I heard it, I refused to believe it. I had to. The fact was that I had come to Italy to see trouble. It was expensive and time-consuming, and that was why I was there. I didn’t encourage it—I wasn’t in the position to do so—and I wasn’t admitting my purpose to anyone I met. I may not have been admitting it to myself. But that was why I was there, prepared to stand on my own with five hundred people staring at me wondering what I was doing. I was waiting for them to be bad. I wanted to see violence. And the fact that the Star journalist had witnessed some, that it had finally “gone off,” suggested I might be in the right spot after all.

  Violence or no violence, mine was not an attractive moral position. It was, however, an easy one, and it consisted in this: not thinking. As I entered this experience, I made a point of removing moral judgment, like a coat. With all the drink and the luxurious Italian sun, I wouldn’t need it. Once or twice, facing the spectacle of the square, the thought occurred to me that I should be appalled. If I had been British I might have been. I might have felt the burden of that peculiar nationalist liability that assumes you are responsible for everyone from your own country (“I was ashamed to be British”—or French or German or American). But I’m not British. Mick and his friends and I were not of the same kind. And although I might have felt that I should be appalled, the fact was: I wasn’t. I was fascinated.

  And I wasn’t alone.

  A group of Italians had gathered near the square. I walked over to them. There were about a hundred, who, afraid of getting too close, had huddled together, staring and pointing. Their faces all had the same look of incredulity. They had never seen people act in this way. It was inconceivable that an Italian, visiting a foreign city, would spend hours in one of its principal squares, drinking and barking and peeing and shouting and sweating and slapping his belly. Could you imagine a bus-load from Milan parading around Trafalgar Square showing off their tattoos? “Why do you English behave like this?” one Italian asked me, believing that I was of the same nationality. “Is it something to do with being an island race? Is it because you don’t feel European?” He looked confused; he looked like he wanted to help. “Is it because you lost the Empire?”

  I didn’t know what to say. Why were these people behaving in this way? And who were they doing it for? It would make sense to think that they were performing for the benefit of the Italians looking on—the war dance of the invading barbarians from the north and all that—but it seemed to me that they were performing solely for themselves. Over the last hour or so, I could see that the afternoon was turning into a highly patterned thing.

  It looked something like this: once a supporter arrived, he wandered around, usually with a friend, periodically bellowing or bumping into things or joining in on
a song. Then a mate would be spotted and they would greet each other. The greeting was achieved through an exchange of loud, incomprehensible noises. A little later they would spot another mate (more noise) and another (more noise), until finally there were enough people—five, six, sometimes ten—to form a circle. Then, as though responding to a toast, they would all drink from a very large bottle of very cheap lager or a very large bottle of very cheap red wine. This was done at an exceptional speed, and the drink spilled down their faces and on to their necks and down their chests, which, already quite sticky and beading with perspiration, glistened in the sun. A song followed. From time to time, during a particularly important refrain, each member of the circle squatted slightly, clenching his fists at his sides, as if, poised so, he was able to sing the particular refrain with the extra oomph that it required. The posture was not unlike shitting in public. And then the very large bottle with its very cheap contents was drunk again.

  The circle broke up and the cycle was repeated. It was repeated again. And again. All around the square, little clusters of fat, sticky men were bellowing at each other.

  Mick reappeared and pointed to the far end of the square, where a silver Mercedes was moving slowly through a street crowded with supporters, Italian onlookers, and police. The driver, in a shiny purple track suit, was a black man with a round fleshy face and a succession of double chins. In the back seat were two others, both black. One, I would learn, was named Tony Roberts. The other was Roy Downes.

  No one had mentioned Tony to me before, but he was impossible to forget once you saw him. He was thin and tall—he towered above everyone else—and had an elaborate, highly styled haircut. The fact was Tony looked exactly like Michael Jackson. Even the color of his skin was Michael Jackson’s. For a brief electric instant—the silver Mercedes, the driver, the ceremony of the arrival—I thought Tony was Michael Jackson. What a discovery: to learn that Michael Jackson, that little red devil, was actually a fan of Manchester United. But, then, alas, yes, I could see that, no, Tony was not Michael Jackson. Tony was only someone who had spent a lot of time and money trying to look like Michael Jackson.

  There was Tony’s wardrobe. This is what I saw of it during his stay in Turin (approximately thirty hours):One: a pale yellow jump suit, light and casual and worn for comfort during the long hours in the Mercedes.

  Two: a pastel-blue T-shirt (was there silk in the mix?), a straw hat, and cotton trousers, his “early summer” costume, worn when he briefly appeared on the square around four o’clock.

  Three: his leather look (lots of studs), chosen for the match.

  Four: a light woolen jacket (chartreuse) with complementary olive-green trousers for later in the evening, when everyone gathered at a bar.

  Five: and finally, another travel outfit for the return trip (a pink cotton track suit with pink trainers).

  Later, during the leather phase, I asked Tony what he did for a living, and he said only that he sometimes “played the ticket game”: large-scale touting, buying up blocks of seats for pop concerts or the sporting events at Wimbledon and Wembley and selling them on at inflated prices. I heard also that he was, from time to time, a driver for Hurricane Higgins, the snooker star; that he was a jazz dancer, that he had “acted” in some porn films. His profession, I suspect, was the same as that of so many of the others, a highly lucrative career of doing “this and that,” and it wasn’t worth looking too deeply into what constituted either the “this” or the “that.”

  Roy Downes was different. Ever since Mick had mentioned Roy, I had been trying to find out as much about him as I could. I had learned that he had just finished a two-year prison sentence in Bulgaria, where he had been arrested before the match between Manchester United and Leviski Spartak (having just cracked the hotel safe) and that, ever since, people said he wasn’t the same: that Roy had become serious, that he never laughed, that he rarely spoke. I had heard that Roy always had money—rolls and rolls of twenty- and fifty-pound notes. That he had a flat in London, overlooking the river. That he saw his matches from the seats and never stood in the terraces with the other supporters, and that he got his tickets free from the players. That he was a lounge lizard: the best place to leave messages for Roy was Stringfellows, a basement bar and nightclub on Upper St. Martin’s Lane in London, with Bob Hoskins bouncers in dinner jackets and lots of chrome and mirrors and a small dance floor filled, on the wintry Tuesday night when I later went there (perhaps an off night), with sagging men who had had too much to drink and young secretaries in tight black skirts. (I was let in, stepping past the bouncers and into a bad black-and-white movie, having said—with a straight face—that Roy sent me.)

  I couldn’t get anybody to tell me what Roy did. Maybe they didn’t know or didn’t need to know. Or maybe they all knew and didn’t want to say. After all, how many of your friends can pick a safe?

  Actually I did know one other thing about Roy, but at the time I didn’t know that I knew it. I had told a friend about getting caught up in a football train in Wales, and he mentioned an incident he had witnessed that same month. He had been traveling from Manchester, in a train already filled with supporters. When it stopped at Stoke-on-Trent, more fans rushed into his carriage. They were from West Ham and, shouting, “Kill the nigger cunts,” they set upon two blacks who were sitting nearby. My friend could see only the backs of the West Ham supporters, their arms rising in the air and then crashing down again, the two blacks somewhere in the middle, when he heard: “They’ve got a stick, kill the bastards”—the stick evidently referring to a table leg that one of the blacks had managed to break off to defend himself. By the time my friend ran off to find a member of the Transport Police, there was blood on the floor and the seats and some was splattered across the windows. One of the blacks had had his face cut up. But it was the other one they were after. He was stabbed repeatedly—once in the lower chest, a few inches below his heart. A finger was broken, his forehead badly slashed and several of his ribs were fractured. The list of injuries is taken from the “Statement of Witness” that my friend prepared, and on it are the victims’ names, meaningful to me only when I returned from Italy. They were Anthony Roberts and Roy Downes. Roy had been the one they were after, the one who had been repeatedly stabbed.

  Roy’s car drove around the square, with him waving from the window like a politician, and disappeared. When I spotted him again, about an hour later, Roy was standing on one of the balconies, arms apart, leaning on the rail, surveying the supporters below. He was small but muscular—wiry, lean—and good-looking, with strong features and very black skin. He looked, as I had been led to expect, grim and serious. What he saw on the square below him seemed to make him especially grim and serious. In fact he was so grim and serious that I thought it might have been just a little overdone. He looked like he had chosen to be grim and serious in the way that you might pick out a particular article of clothing in the morning; it was what he had decided on instead of wearing red.

  It was not an opportunity to miss, and I bounced up the stairs and introduced myself. I was writing a book; I would love to chat. I babbled away—friendly, Californian, with a cheerful, gosh-isn’t-the-world-a-wonderful-place kind of attitude, until finally Roy, who did not look up from the square, asked me to shut up, please. There was, please, no need to talk so much: he already knew all about me.

  No one had told me to shut up before. How did he know whatever it was he knew? I suppose I was impressed. This was a person for whom style was no small thing.

  Roy, at any rate, wasn’t having a lot to do with me, despite my good efforts. These efforts, painful to recall, went something like this.

  After expressing my surprise that I was a person worth knowing anything about, I, bubbling and gurgling away, suggested that Roy and I get a drink.

  Roy, still surveying the square, pointed out that he didn’t drink.

  That was fine, I said, carrying on, cheerful to the end: then perhaps, after his long journey, he might be i
nterested in joining me for a bite to eat.

  No.

  Right, I said, a little tic I had developed for responding to a situation that was not right but manifestly wrong. I pulled out a pack of cigarettes—I wanted badly to smoke—while taking in the scene below us: there was Mick, standing by himself, a large bottle of something in one hand and a large bottle of something else in the other, singing “C’mon, you Reds,” bellowing it, unaccompanied, his face deeply colored, walking around and around in a circle.

  I offered Roy a cigarette.

  Roy didn’t smoke.

  Right, I said, scrutinizing the scene below us with more attention, pointing out how everyone was having such a jolly good time, to which Roy, of course, did not reply. In fact the scene below us was starting to look like a satanic Mardi Gras. There must have been about eight hundred people, and the noise they were making—the English with their songs; the Italians with their cars, horns blaring—was very loud. In normal circumstances, the noise was so loud it would have made conversation difficult. In my current circumstances, nothing could have made conversation any worse.

  I carried on. Whatever came into my head found itself leaving my mouth, with or without an exclamatory Right! I talked about football, Bryan Robson, the Continental style—in fact about many things I knew little about—until finally, after a brief aside about something completely inconsequential, I tried to talk to Roy about Roy. I don’t recall what I said next; actually I fear I do, which is worse, because I think it was something about Roy’s being both black and short and what a fine thing that was to be. And then I paused. The pause I remember precisely because at the end of it Roy looked at me for the first time. I thought he was going to spit. But he didn’t. What he did was this: he walked away.