by Ira Glass
SUZANNE: Okay, you’re saying some people were being silly about their bodies.
CHRISTIAN: Well, yeah, but it was more like they were being silly about their pants.
Colin’s bedroom is decorated simply. He has a cage with his pet parakeet, Dude, on his dresser, a lot of recently worn clothing piled haphazardly on the floor, and a husky brown teddy bear sitting upright in a chair near the foot of his bed. The walls are mostly bare, except for a Spiderman poster and a few ads torn out of magazines he has thumbtacked up. One of the ads is for a cologne, illustrated with several small photographs of cowboy hats; another, a feverish portrait of a woman on a horse, is an ad for blue jeans. These inspire him sometimes when he lies in bed and makes plans for the move to Wyoming. Also, he happens to like ads. He also likes television commercials. Generally speaking, he likes consumer products and popular culture. He partakes avidly but not indiscriminately. In fact, during the time we spent together, he provided a running commentary on merchandise, media, and entertainment:
“The only shoes anyone will wear are Reebok Pumps. Big T-shirts are cool, not the kind that are sticky and close to you, but big and baggy and long, not the kind that stop at your stomach.”
“The best food is Chicken McNuggets and Life cereal and Frosted Flakes.”
“Don’t go to Blimpie’s. They have the worst service.”
“I’m not into Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles anymore. I grew out of that. I like Donatello, but I’m not a fan. I don’t buy the figures anymore.”
“The best television shows are on Friday night on ABC. It’s called TGIF, and it’s Family Matters, Step by Step, Dinosaurs, and Perfect Strangers, where the guy has a funny accent.”
“The best candy is Skittles and Symphony bars and Crybabies and Warheads. Crybabies are great because if you eat a lot of them at once you feel so sour.”
“Hyundais are Korean cars. It’s the only Korean car. They’re not that good because Koreans don’t have a lot of experience building cars.”
“The best movie is City Slickers, and the best part was when he saved his little cow in the river.”
“The Giants really need to get rid of Ray Handley. They have to get somebody who has real coaching experience. He’s just no good.”
“My dog, Sally, costs seventy-two dollars. That sounds like a lot of money but it’s a really good price because you get a flea bath with your dog.”
“The best magazines are Nintendo Power, because they tell you how to do the secret moves in the video games, and also Mad magazine and Money Guide—I really like that one.”
“The best artist in the world is Jim Davis.”
“The most beautiful woman in the world is not Madonna! Only Wayne and Garth think that! She looks like maybe a . . . a . . . slut or something. Cindy Crawford looks like she would look good, but if you see her on an awards program on TV she doesn’t look that good. I think the most beautiful woman in the world probably is my mom.”
Colin thinks a lot about money. This started when he was about nine and a half, which is when a lot of other things started—a new way of walking that has a little macho hitch and swagger, a decision about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (con) and Eurythmics (pro), and a persistent curiosity about a certain girl whose name he will not reveal. He knows the price of everything he encounters. He knows how much college costs and what someone might earn performing different jobs. Once, he asked me what my husband did; when I answered that he was a lawyer, he snapped, “You must be a rich family. Lawyers make four hundred thousand dollars a year.” His preoccupation with money baffles his family. They are not struggling, so this is not the anxiety of deprivation; they are not rich, so he is not responding to an elegant, advantaged world. His allowance is five dollars a week. It seems sufficient for his needs, which consist chiefly of quarters for Nintendo and candy money. The remainder is put into his Wyoming fund. His fascination is not just specific to needing money or having plans for money: It is as if money itself, and the way it makes the world work, and the realization that almost everything in the world can be assigned a price, has possessed him. “I just pay attention to things like that,” Colin says. “It’s really very interesting.”
He is looking for a windfall. He tells me his mother has been notified that she is in the fourth and final round of the Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. This is not an ironic observation. He plays the New Jersey lottery every Thursday night. He knows the weekly jackpot; he knows the number to call to find out if he has won. I do not think this presages a future for Colin as a high-stakes gambler; I think it says more about the powerful grasp that money has on imagination and what a large percentage of a ten-year-old’s mind is made up of imaginings. One Friday, we were at school together, and one of his friends was asking him about the lottery, and he said, “This week it was four million dollars. That would be I forget how much every year for the rest of your life. It’s a lot, I think. You should play. All it takes is a dollar and a dream.”
Until the lottery comes through and he starts putting together the Wyoming land deal, Colin can be found most of the time in the backyard. Often, he will have friends come over. Regularly, children from the neighborhood will gravitate to the backyard, too. As a technical matter of real-property law, title to the house and yard belongs to Jim and Elaine Duffy, but Colin adversely possesses the backyard, at least from 4:00 each afternoon until it gets dark. As yet, the fixtures of teenage life—malls, video arcades, friends’ basements, automobiles—either hold little interest for him or are not his to have.
He is, at the moment, very content with his backyard. For most intents and purposes, it is as big as Wyoming. One day, certainly, he will grow and it will shrink, and it will become simply a suburban backyard and it won’t be big enough for him anymore. This will happen so fast that one night he will be in the backyard, believing it a perfect place, and by the next night he will have changed and the yard as he imagined it will be gone, and this era of his life will be behind him forever.
Most days, he spends his hours in the backyard building an Evil Spider-Web Trap. This entails running a spool of Jim’s fishing line from every surface in the yard until it forms a huge web. Once a garbageman picking up the Duffys’ trash got caught in the trap. Otherwise, the Evil Spider-Web Trap mostly has a deterrent effect, because the kids in the neighborhood who might roam over know that Colin builds it back there. “I do it all the time,” he says. “First I plan who I’d like to catch in it, and then we get started. Trespassers have to beware.”
One afternoon when I came over, after a few rounds of Street Fighter at Danny’s, Colin started building a trap. He selected a victim for inspiration—a boy in his class who had been pestering him—and began wrapping. He was entirely absorbed. He moved from tree to tree, wrapping; he laced fishing line through the railing of the deck and then back to the shed; he circled an old jungle gym, something he’d outgrown and abandoned a few years ago, and then crossed over to a bush at the back of the yard. Briefly, he contemplated making his dog, Sally, part of the web. Dusk fell. He kept wrapping, paying out fishing line an inch at a time. We could hear mothers up and down the block hooting for their kids; two tiny children from next door stood transfixed at the edge of the yard, uncertain whether they would end up inside or outside the web. After a while, the spool spun around in Colin’s hands one more time and then stopped; he was out of line.
It was almost too dark to see much of anything, although now and again the light from the deck would glance off a length of line, and it would glint and sparkle. “That’s the point,” he said. “You could do it with thread, but the fishing line is invisible. Now I have this perfect thing and the only one who knows about it is me.” With that, he dropped the spool, skipped up the stairs of the deck, threw open the screen door, and then bounded into the house, leaving me and Sally the dog trapped in his web.
AMONG THE THUGS
Bill Buford
This is excerpted from an early chapter of Among the Thug
s. Bill Buford’s story begins when he witnesses soccer hooligans on a violent spree in the British trains. As an American living in England, he’s astonished to learn just how common this is. “I had read about the violence and, to the extent that I thought about it, had assumed that it was an isolated thing or mysterious in the way that crowd violence is meant to be mysterious: unpredictable, spontaneous, the mob.” This, however, was a regular part of British life, a weekly occurrence. After matches, fans tore apart trains and smashed shop windows.
Buford starts attending matches and tries to get close to the “lads,” and at first he only manages to establish a rapport with one of them, an overweight, heavy-drinking fellow named Mick. Mick is not what Buford expected from the soccer fans at all. He’d figured that the violence was a protest of some sort, and that the fans would be guys on the dole. But Mick is neither unemployed, alienated nor disenfranchised. He’s a skilled electrician with his pockets full of twenty-pound notes. Which is handy because it’s expensive, never missing a soccer match. Some fans have money.
Others get to every game, Mick explains, by going “on the jib”—sneaking on trains, stealing food, swiping game tickets, doing everything possible so the whole venture will cost them nothing.
Mick’s team is Manchester United, whose fans were so unruly that they were banned from games outside of England—by the team itself. “I wanted to find out what these supporters were like,” Buford writes. “It seemed an extraordinary thing for the team’s management to ban its own fans.” Buford decides to travel to Italy on a charter flight with Mick and other Manchester United fans, a flight not sanctioned by the team of course, to watch a match against a squad called Juventus, in the city of Turin. When the fans’ plane touches down, there are soldiers waiting in formation and a police escort for their buses. The fans have been drinking for hours.
Clayton had a number of troubles but his greatest one was his trousers. In all likelihood Clayton will have trouble with his trousers for the rest of his life. His stomach was so soft and large—no adjective seems big enough to describe its girth—that his trousers, of impressive dimensions to begin with, were not quite large enough to be pulled up high enough to prevent them from slipping down again. Clayton emerged from the airplane and waddled down the ramp, clasping his belt buckle, wrestling with it, trying to wiggle it over his considerable bulk. He was singing, “We’re so proud to be British.” His eyes were closed, and his face was red, and he repeated his refrain over and over again, although nobody else was singing with him.
Mick was not far behind. He had finished his bottle of vodka and was drinking a can of Carlsberg Special Brew that he had snapped up from the drinks trolley as he bumped past it on his way out. Mick paused, started to utter something, in the puffy, considered way that characterizes the speech of a man who has consumed a liter of spirits in the span of ninety minutes. And then Mick belched. It was a spectacular belch, long and terrible, a brutal, slow bursting of innumerable noxious gastric bubbles.
The others followed. They were also singing—on their own or arm in arm with friends—and their songs, like Clayton’s, were all about being English and what a fine thing that was. Something had happened to the group shortly after landing; there had been a definitive change. As the plane approached the terminal, someone had spotted the army: it was waiting for them, standing in formation.
The army!
They wore strange uniforms and brightly colored berets; the soldiers were not English—that was the point; the soldiers were foreign.
The effect was immediate: these were no longer supporters of Manchester United; they were now defenders of the English nation. People stood up and, as if on cue, began changing their clothes, switching their urban, weekday dress for costumes whose principal design was the Union Jack. All at once, heads and limbs began poking through Union Jack T-shirts and Union Jack swimming suits, and one pair (worn unusually around the forehead) of Union Jack boxer shorts. The moment seemed curiously prepared for, as if it had been rehearsed. Meanwhile, everyone had started singing “Rule Britannia”—sharp, loud, spontaneous—and they sang it again, louder and louder, until finally, as the terminal grew near, it was not being sung but shouted.
A police escort is an exhilarating thing. I couldn’t deny that I was sharing the experience of those around me, who now felt themselves to be special people. After all, who is given a police escort? Prime ministers, presidents, the Pope—and English football supporters. By the time the buses reached the city—although there was little traffic, the sirens had been turned on the moment we left the parking lot—the status of their occupants had been enlarged immeasurably. Each intersection we passed was blocked with cars and onlookers. People had gathered on every street, wondering what all the fuss was about, wanting to get a look. The sound of twenty sirens is hard to miss. Who in the city of Turin could not have known that the English had arrived?
The English themselves, moved by the effect they were having, started to sing, which they managed to do more loudly than the brain-penetrating sirens that heralded their entrance into the city. To sing so powerfully was no small achievement, although to describe the noise that emerged from the bus as singing is to misrepresent it. One song was “England.” This was repeated over and over again. There were no more words. Another, more sophisticated, was based on the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Its words were:Glory, glory, Man United
Glory, glory, Man United
Glory, glory, Man United
Yours troops are marching on! on! on!
Each “on” was grunted a bit more emphatically than the one before, accompanied by a gesture involving the familiar upturned two fingers. There was an especially simple tune, “Fuck the Pope”—simple because the words consisted exclusively of the following: Fuck the Pope. “Fuck the Pope” was particularly popular, and, despite the sirens and speed, at least two buses (the one I was in and the one behind us) succeeded in chanting “Fuck the Pope” in some kind of unison.
I noticed Clayton. He was several rows in front. Somehow Clayton, like an unwieldy truck, had reversed himself into a position in which the opened window by his seat was filled by his suddenly exposed and very large buttocks—his trousers, this time, deliberately gathered around his knees, the cheeks of his suddenly exposed and very large buttocks clasped firmly in each hand and spread apart. Just behind him was a fellow who was urinating through his window. People were standing on the seats, jerking their fists up and down, while screaming profanities at pedestrians, police, children—any and all Italians.
Then someone lobbed a bottle.
It was bound to happen. There were bottles rolling around on the floor or being passed from person to person, and it was inevitable that, having tried everything else—obscene chants, abuse, peeing—someone would go that much further and pick up one of the empty bottles and hurl it at an Italian. Even so, the use of missiles of any kind was a significant escalation, and there was the sense, initially at least, that bottle throwing was “out of order.”
“What the fuck did you do that for?” someone shouted, angry, but not without a sense of humor. “What are you, some kind of hooligan?”
A meaningful threshold had been crossed. Moments later there was the sound of another bottle breaking. And a second, and a third, and then bottles started flying out of most windows—of each of the four buses.
I wondered: if I had been a citizen of Turin, what would I have made of all this?
After all, here I’d be, at the foot of the Alps, in one of the most northern regions of Italy, surrounded by an exquisite, historic brick architecture, a city of churches and squares and arcades and cafés, a civilized city, an intellectual city, the heart of the Communist Party, the home of Primo Levi and other writers and painters, and, during my lunch hour, when perhaps I, a Juventus supporter like everyone else, had gone out to pick up my ticket for the match that evening, I heard this powerful sound, the undulating whines of multiple sirens. Were they ambulances? Had th
ere been a disaster? All around me people would have stopped and would be craning their necks, shielding their eyes from the sun, until finally, in the distance we would have spotted the oscillating blue and white lights of the approaching police. And when they passed—one, two, three, four buses—would my response be nothing more than one of fascination, as in the window of each bus, I would see faces of such terrible aggression—remarkable aggression, intense, inexplicably vicious? Perhaps my face would be splattered by the spray of someone’s urine. Perhaps I would have to jump out of the way of a bottle being hurled at my head. And perhaps, finally, I would have responded in the manner chosen by one Italian lad, who, suddenly the target of an unforeseen missile, simply answered in kind: he hurled a stone back.
The effect on those inside the buses was immediate. To be, suddenly, the target came as a terrible shock. The incredulity was immense: “Those bastards,” one of the supporters exclaimed, “are throwing stones at the windows,” and the look on his face conveyed such urgent dismay that you could only agree that a stone-throwing Italian was a very bad person indeed. The presumption—after all a window could get broken and someone might get hurt—was deeply offensive, and everyone became very, very angry. Looking around me, I realized that I was no longer surrounded by raving, hysterically nationalistic social deviants; I was now surrounded by raving, hysterically nationalist social deviants in a frenzy. They were wild, and anything that came to hand—bottles, jars of peanuts, fruit, cartons of juice, anything—was summarily hurled through the windows. “Those bastards,” the lad next to me said, teeth clenched, lobbing an unopened beer can at a cluster of elderly men in dark jackets. “Those bastards.”
