by Ira Glass
With a slight swagger, hands in his pockets, Clint Eastwood had just strolled off and disappeared down the stairs and walked out of my story.
I wasn’t cut out to be a journalist.
It was time I met more people. I hadn’t gotten through to Roy. Maybe I would later. Maybe it didn’t matter. I had had so many I-am-not-going-to-think-about-why-I-am-here lagers that I didn’t care if people were going to talk to me. The choices were not complicated: either I would find myself in conversation, or I would find myself not in conversation.
I found myself neither in conversation nor not in conversation but looking into a particularly ugly mouth. I can’t recall how I arrived before this mouth—zigzagging across the square—but once in its presence I couldn’t take my eyes off it.
In it, there were many gaps, the raw rim of the gums showing where once there must have been teeth. Of the teeth still intact, many were chipped or split; none was straight: they appeared to have grown up at odd, unconventional angles or (more likely) been redirected by a powerful physical influence at some point in their career. All of them were highly colored—deep brown or caked with yellow or, like a pea soup, mushy green and vegetable soft with decay. This was a mouth that had suffered many slings and arrows along with the occasional thrashing and several hundredweight of tobacco and Cadbury’s milk chocolate. This was a mouth through which a great deal of life had passed at, it would appear, an uncompromising speed.
The mouth belonged to Gurney. Mick had told me about Gurney. What he hadn’t told me about was the power of Gurney’s unmitigated ugliness. It was ugliness on a scale that elicited concern: I kept wanting to offer him things—the telephone number of my dentist or a blanket to cover his head. It was hard not to stare at Gurney. Gurney was one of the older supporters and was well into his thirties. He was looked up to, I discovered, by the younger lads. I never understood why they looked up to him or what they hoped to find when they did. Like Roy, Gurney didn’t trust me, at least initially, but I was getting used to not being trusted. His Cockney followers were less suspicious. When I came upon them, they were in the middle of singing one of those songs (squatting slightly). They were in good spirits and, straightaway, started questioning me.
No, I wasn’t from the Express—I had never read the Express.
Yes, I was here to write about football supporters.
Yes, I know you are not hooligans.
What was I doing here, then? Well, that was obvious, wasn’t it? I was here to get very, very pissed.
And, with that, I had become one of them, or enough of one of them for them to feel comfortable telling me stories. They wanted me to understand how they were organized; it was the “structure” that was important to understand.
There were, it was explained, different kinds of Manchester United supporters, and it was best to think of each kind as belonging to one of a series of concentric circles. The largest circle was very large: in it you would find all the supporters of Manchester United, which, as everyone kept telling me, was one of the best-supported teams in English football, with crowds regularly in excess of forty thousand.
Within that large circle, however, there were smaller ones. In the first were the members of the official Manchester United Supporters’ Club—at its peak more than twenty thousand. The official Manchester United Supporters’ Club, started in the seventies, hired trains from British Rail—“football specials”—for conveying fans to the matches, produced a regular magazine, required annual dues, and in general kept the “good” supporters informed of developments in the club and tried to keep the “bad” supporters from ever learning about them.
In the second circle was the unofficial supporters’ club, the “bad” supporters: the firm.
The firm was divided between those who lived in Manchester and those who did not. Those who did not came from just about everywhere in the British Isles—Newcastle, Bolton, Glasgow, Southampton, Sunderland: these people were the Inter-City Jibbers. Mick had mentioned them: they got their name from taking only the Inter-City fast commuter trains and never the football specials hired by the official supporters’ club.
The Inter-City Jibbers themselves were also divided, between those who were not from London and those who were: the Cockney Reds.
I remembered Mick’s account of being on the jib. I had much to learn, and most of it I would learn the next day on my return to England. But initially I was skeptical. How was it possible that so many people could travel on the jib? From what I understood about traveling on the jib, it meant not only not paying but actually making money as well.
Roars of laughter followed. Being on the jib was very simple, I was told, and involved no more than defeating the Hector. The Hector was the British Rail ticket collector, and at the mention of the Hector, everyone started singing the Hector song:Ha ha ha
He he he
The Hector’s coming
But he can’t catch me.
On the racks
Under the seats
Into the bogs
The Hector’s coming
But he can’t catch me.
Ha ha ha
He he he
The ICJ is on the jib again
Having a really g-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-d time.
There were tricks: passing one good ticket between members of a group, making the sound of endless vomiting while hiding in the loo, pretending not to understand English. It was Gurney’s ploy to engage the ticket collector in a battle of wills, giving him everything but a ticket: a sandwich, a cigarette, the ashtray, his shoe, a sock, then his other sock, bits of dirt scraped from beneath his toenails, his shirt, the darkly colored lint from his navel, his belt until—the final destination getting closer the longer the exchange went on—the ticket collector, fed up, got on with the rest of his job. The ICJ had learned two principles about human nature—especially human nature as it had evolved in Britain.
The first was that no public functionary, and certainly not one employed by British Rail or London Transport, wants a difficult confrontation—there is little pride in a job that the functionary believes to be underpaid and knows to be unrewarding and that he wants to finish so that he can go home.
The second principle was the more important: everyone—including the police—is powerless against a large number of people who have decided not to obey any rules. Or put another way: with numbers there are no laws.
It is easy to imagine the situation. You’re there, working by yourself at the ticket booth of an Underground station, and two hundred supporters walk past you without paying. What do you do? Or you’re working the cash register in a small food shop—one room, two refrigerators, three aisles—and you look up and see that, out of nowhere, hundreds of lads are crowding through your door, pushing and shoving and shouting, until there is no room to move, and that each one is filling his pockets with crisps, meat pies, beer, biscuits, nuts, dried fruit, eggs (for throwing), milk, sausage rolls, liter-bottles of Coke, red wine, butter (for throwing), white wine, Scotch eggs, bottles of retsina, apples, yogurt (for throwing), oranges, chocolates, bottles of cider, sliced ham, mayonnaise (for throwing) until there is very little remaining on your shelves. What do you do? Tell them to stop? Stand in the doorway? You call the police but as the supporters pour out through the door—eggs, butter, yogurt, and mayonnaise already flying through the air, splattering against your front window, the pavement outside, the cars in the parking lot, amid chants of “Food fight! Food fight!”—they split up, some going to the left, others to the right, everybody disappearing.
Gurney and his crew had arrived in Turin by a large minibus that they had hired in London. The bus was called Eddie; the group was called Eddie and the Forty Thieves.
Forty Thieves?
They explained. Their adventures began in Calais. At the first bar they entered, the cashier was on a lunch break, and they popped open a cash register with an umbrella and came away with four thousand francs. They carried on, traveling south and then along
the French coast, robbing a succession of small shops on the way, never paying for gas or food, entering and leaving restaurants en masse, always on the lookout “for a profit.” I noticed that each member of the Eddie-and-the-Forty-Thieves team was wearing sunglasses—filched, I was told, from a French gas station that had a sideline in tourist goods that, it would appear, also included brightly colored Marilyn Monroe T-shirts. All of them were wearing Rolex watches.
Most of the supporters on the square had not been on the plane. How had they gotten here?
They went through a list.
Daft Donald hadn’t made it. He had been arrested in Nice (stealing from a clothing shop), and, proving his nickname, was found to be in possession of one can of mace, eighteen Stanley knives (they fell out when he was searched), and a machete.
Robert the Sneak Thief had been delayed—his ferry had been turned back following a fight with Nottingham Forest fans—but he had gotten a flight to Nice and would be coming by taxi.
A taxi from Nice to Turin?
Robert, I was told, always had money (if you see what I mean), and, although I didn’t entirely (see what he meant), I didn’t have the chance to find out more because they were well down their list.
Sammy? (“Not here but he won’t miss Juventus.” “Sammy? Impossible.”)
Mad Harry? (“Getting too old.”)
Teapot? (“Been here since Friday.”)
Berlin Red? (“Anybody seen Berlin Red?”)
Scotty? (“Arrested last night.”)
Barmy Bernie? (“Inside.” “Barmy Bernie is inside again?”) Whereupon there followed the long, moving story of Barmy Bernie, who, with twenty-seven convictions, had such a bad record that he got six months for loitering. Everyone shook his head in commiseration for the sad, sad fate of Barmy Bernie.
Someone from another group appeared, showing me a map with an inky blue line tracing the route to Turin. It began in Manchester, then continued through London, Stockholm, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Lyon, Marseilles, and finally stopped here. A great adventure, not unlike, I reflected, the Grand Tour that young men had made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it had cost them—all eleven of them—a total of seven pounds.
Seven pounds, I exclaimed, understanding the principle. What went wrong?
They assured me they would be in profit on the return.
The circle of supporters who now surrounded me had grown to a considerable size, with one or two regularly disappearing and returning with cans of lager. I had ceased to be the CIA. I was no longer the hack from the Express. I appeared to have ended my tenure as an undercover officer of the British Special Branch. And I was starting to be accepted. I would learn later that I had earned a new status; I had become a “good geezer.” Yes, that’s what I was: a good geezer. What a thing.
I was also someone to whom people needed to tell their stories. There was an implicit responsibility emerging. I was being asked to set the record straight. I was the “repoyta.” I was given instructions, imperatives, admonitions. I was told:
That they weren’t hooligans.
That it was a disgrace that there were so many obstacles keeping them from supporting their team properly.
That they weren’t hooligans.
That the management of Manchester United was a disgrace.
That they weren’t hooligans.
Until finally I was telling them, yes, yes, I know, I know, I know: you’re just here for the drink and the laugh and the football, and, for the first time, despite myself, I wanted to believe it. I was starting to like them, if only because they were starting to like me (the irrational mechanism of the group at work, and I was feeling grateful just to be accepted by it). And it was true that no one had been violent. People had been loud, grotesque, disgusting, rude, uncivilized, unpleasant to look at and, in some instances, explicitly repellent—but not violent. And it was possible that they wouldn’t be. It didn’t suit my purposes that everyone here should be nothing more than a fanatical fan of the game, but it was conceivable that there really would be no violence, that this was simply how normal English males behaved. It was a terrifying notion, but not an impossible one.
The thing about reporting is that it is meant to be objective. It is meant to record and relay the truth of things, as if truth were out there, hanging around, waiting for the reporter to show up. Such is the premise of objective journalism. What this premise excludes, as any student of modern literature will tell you, is that slippery relative fact of the person doing the reporting, the modern notion that there is no such thing as the perceived without someone to do the perceiving, and that to exclude the circumstances surrounding the story is to tell an untruth. These circumstances might include the fact that you’ve rushed to an airplane, had too much to drink on it, arrived, realized that you are dressed for the tropics when in fact it is about to snow, that you have forgotten your socks, that you have only one contact lens, that you’re not going to get the interview anyway, and then, at four-thirty, that you’ve got to file your story, having had to make most of it up. It could be argued that the circumstances have more than a casual bearing on the truth reported.
I do not want to tell an untruth and feel compelled therefore to note that at this moment, the reporter was aware that the circumstances surrounding his story had become intrusive and significant and that, if unacknowledged, his account of the events that follow would be grossly incomplete. And his circumstances were these: the reporter was very, very drunk.
He could not, therefore, recall much about the bus ride apart from a dim, watery belief that there were fewer people in the bus this time. The other thing he remembers is that he arrived.
When the buses of United supporters pulled up into the cool evening shadow cast by the Stadio Comunale, a large crowd was already there. The fact of the crowd—that it would be waiting for the English—was hard to take in at first.
Thousands of Italian supporters converged on the bus. They surrounded it and were pounding on its sides—jeering, ugly, and angry.
The bus started to rock from side to side. The Italians were trying to push the bus, our bus—the bus that had me inside it—onto its side.
I had not appreciated the importance of the match that evening, the semifinals for the Cup-Winners Cup. It had sold out the day the tickets—seventy thousand of them—had gone on sale, and at that moment all seventy thousand ticket holders seemed to be in view. In my ignorance, I had also not expected to see the English supporters, who were meant to be the hooligans, confronted by Italians who, to my untutored eye, looked like hooligans: their conduct—rushing towards the buses, brandishing flags—was so exaggerated that it was like a caricature of a nineteenth-century mob. Was this how they normally greeted the supporters of visiting teams?
It took a long time for the buses to empty, and fill the area set aside for them outside the stadium, enclosed by a chain-link fence. At some point, during this long wait, the Italian supporters at the very top of the stadium—the top row that could overlook the grounds outside—realized that there was a gaggle of English below them. I remember the moment, looking up into the evening’s pink sky, and watching the long, long slow arc of an object hurled from far above as it came closer and closer, gaining speed as it approached, until finally, in those milliseconds before it disclosed its target, I could actually make out what it was—a beer bottle—and then crash: it shattered within three feet of one of the supporters.
Distant muted laughter from on high.
I feared what would follow. An English supporter went down, his forehead cut open. Eventually we all became targets, helpless underneath a barrage that consisted principally of beer bottles and oranges. There were so many bottles and so many oranges that the pavement, covered with juice and pulp and skins, was sticky to look at and sparkled from the shattered glass.
When finally we were ushered through a tunnel that led to the ground, police in front and police behind, it became apparent that, while the English supporters may have
been accommodated, their accommodation wasn’t in the most salubrious part of the stadium. We were heading for the bottom steps of the terraces, directly beneath the very people who had been hurling missiles at us while we waited outside.
I did not like the look of this.
I kept thinking of the journalist from the Daily Star, the one who ran off when things got violent. He emerged in my mind now as an unequivocally sympathetic figure. He had, the supporters said, shit himself, and it was worth noting that this phrase had now entered my vocabulary.
I was not, I found myself muttering, going to shit myself.
One by one, we walked from out of the darkness of the tunnel into the blinding light of the ground—the sun, though setting, was at an angle and still shining bright—and it was hard to make out the figures around us. There were not many police—I could see that—and it appeared that Italians had spilled onto the pitch in front of the terraces where we were meant to stand, separated only by a chain-link perimeter fence. Once again things were coming at us from the air: not just bottles and pieces of fruit but also long sticks—the staffs of Juventus flags—firecrackers, and smoke bombs. The first one out of the tunnel, drunk and arrogant and singing about his English pride, was hit on the back of the head by an eight-foot flagpole and he dropped to the concrete terrace. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a Union Jack had been set alight, its flames fanned as it was swirled in the air. I saw this only out of the corner of my eye because I was determined not to look up at the Italians above me, who were hurling things down, or down to the Italians below, who were hurling things up. I had the suspicion that if I happened to make eye contact with anybody I would be rewarded with a knock on the head. Also I didn’t want to lose my concentration. Looking straight ahead, I was concentrating very hard on chanting my new refrain.
I will not shit myself. I will not shit myself.
