"Guys"

I was never the mover and shaker in high school or college. I was never the one who knew people, who could tell you “where the party was at.” In fact, I usually missed the party because I was in the library. In Argentina, however, a large part of the “work” I have come to do, involves going to soccer games. For which you must get tickets. And you don’t get tickets unless you have “a guy,” or two. And curiously enough, once you have a guy, and people find that out, you start to become other people’s guy. So it was that I received a small wave of phone calls mid week last week as other foreign students, hoping to catch a Boca game before the end of their semester abroad, called asking (and in one case, begging) me to help them get tickets. This game was especially difficult, being the last of the season for Argentina’s most popular team, which sat in a three-way tie for first place. I made calls, and bargained, and waited, and made more calls. I relayed semi-dubious promises from my guys to my friends. Ultimately, after prices did their filtering, I took two French kids and an Italian to the Bombonera. All three are huge soccer fans and know much more than I do about the game. But I have guys.

It was an odd experience for me. I very very rarely lead any sort of social activity. And it is not necessarily an experience I enjoy. I don’t like being responsible for others’ enjoying themselves. Basically, I’m not sure how “good” I am at “fun.” I suppose I knew that my friends would enjoy the game and that, if Boca and Colon failed to produce goals that could hardly be my fault. But I was afraid we wouldn’t arrive on time, or that one of them would get robbed. As we walked from the bus to the stadium, scalpers offered us tickets at about half the price we had paid. I had received several warnings not to buy on the street as the Boca houses a healthy ticket-counterfeiting industry. Still, I had my doubts, and assumed my friends would, too. They didn’t complain, however, and Benjamin, the Frenchman, mentioned that he, too, had been warned not to buy scalped tickets. I was relieved, but now that it was on my mind, I worried that our tickets might be fakes.

After almost an hour in line, we approached the stadium gates and were asked to have our tickets in hand. Anais, the other French friend, took out her ticket and let out a worried “ooo.” Perspiration from a water bottle jammed into the same pocket had stained and blurred the writing on the front of her ticket. Alessandro, the Italian, reasoned that the electronic bar on the back was the only part that really needed to be in good shape and we all hoped he was right. I had Anais go ahead of the rest of us in line, offering to give her my ticket if hers didn’t work. But it did, as did ours. We giggled, relieved, and the kid manning the scanner smirked with contempt at our apparent glee on entering a stadium in which he had grown up.

Once inside the stadium, we parted ways. I headed off to the liveliest section, to intrude on the hooligans, some of whom I know but none of whom can even be considered guys of mine. We cheered and jumped and, of course, sang. Boca scored three times in the first half, bringing as much relief as happiness to the home crowd. A few fans had brought radios to track the other games, and word of mouth brought the news that San Lorenzo and Tigre were both winning, obliging Boca to win or go home empty handed. Boca and Tigre had weak opponents, and no excuse not to win. San Lorenzo’s rival, Argentinos Juniors, was strong, coming off an impressive performance in the South American Cup. But Argentinos’ barra had offered the team cash to throw the game, and thereby cast an obstacle in Boca’s path. Such is the hatred felt for Boca by fans of all other Argentine clubs. It makes my feelings toward rivals of my favorite American teams look like mild bitterness, at worst. I will certainly chant “Yankees suck” in the 7th inning of a boring Orioles-Devil Rays game. But I doubt I would ever try to pay Baltimore to lose to Boston, just to keep the Yankees out of the playoffs. Another level indeed.

So Banfield was falling to Tigre and Argentinos (even having refused the bribe offers) was not standing up to San Lorenzo. The Bombonera grew tense in the second half as Colon scored two and brought Boca dangerously close to falling from the top. Tiago, the kid next to me whom I had met during half time, wrapped his arm around my waist and gripped the security rail behind me, leaning the rest of his body as far as it would reach over the row in front of us. He shrieked his encouragement, veins bulging and sweat dripping on the heads below. He knew as well as the rest of the grandstanders that the true fan must take his share of responsibility. As my interviewees regularly tell me, “in the cheap seats, you aren’t a spectator, you play every game.” In moments like these, we fans wish we were on the field. We know we aren’t good enough, but we also know that this championship, this game 7, this final, is too important to leave in the hands of others, no matter how talented. They can’t possibly want it as much as we do. But the best we can do is scream. So scream we did, me and my new brother in angst.

Our words asked the players for effort, and begged them to show that they felt what we felt. I always feel a bit fake singing these words, but I belt them out anyway, lest I be revealed as a tourist. A tourist taking a spot that would otherwise be filled by another voice; a voice trying to lose itself; a man offering to “give my heart for the cup.” Though I planned on leaving the stadium with all my bodily organs (metaphorical and actual), the least I could do was be loud. Thankfully, I knew the words.

In the final two minutes, the cheap seats at the other, calmer end of the stadium started to shoot off fireworks. Our end remained tense, but Tiago’s arm relaxed a bit. Smiles began to tug at lips and, as the final whistle blew, thousands of mouths let out sighs of relief, inhaled, and started to sing songs of victory.

But there is work left to do. The three leaders will play each other this coming week, one game with each opponent. I called my guys and reserved my place in the stadium. I will be there, and I will be loud, and maybe I will be able to hold Tiago up again. I pay, I sing, I try to earn my keep in the bleachers. But no number of connections, no amount of money, and no quantity of burst blood vessels will make me feel fully legitimate among the soccer faithful. I enjoy it more, but the role of hincha does not fit me much better than that of “guy.”

Advice, Luck, and Random Help

“You just need to make powerful friends,” said Diego, a Red Cross volunteer in San Martin square. “If you have friends high up, and they introduce you around, the rest can’t touch you.” I had explained that I was doing a study on soccer hooligans and he had readily offered his advice. Like most Argentines, he started with a warning: “you know, things are pretty f**ked up here, you should be careful.” He listed a few incidents, each ending with someone beaten (or worse) for being in the wrong place, at the wrong time, wearing the wrong jersey. Or for having money. But “you’ll be fine if you make friends with the bosses,” he assured me. “You know what you could do? You could go to jail,” Diego went on.

“You mean…” I knew I would have to prove myself, to some extent and in some way, to get access to the barrabravas. But Diego’s advice had running through my head images from a whole other level of manhood-demonstration. Images of me meticulously sharpening the back end of a toothbrush, before finally jamming it into the tattooed lower back of someone named Bruno. And then the more realistic images of Bruno and a gang of guys named Tony and Gordo stomping me relentlessly, my broken toothbrush kicked hopelessly far from my outstretched hand.

“I mean you could write a letter asking for permission to enter the jail where they’re holding Rafa Di Zeo.” Diego brought me back to a slightly more believable reality. “Seriously, you think they’d let me into the prison to interview him.”

“Well if he wants you to get in, you’ll get in.” Rafael Di Zeo, head of “La 12,” Boca Juniors’ barra, turned himself in a year and a half ago, after a couple of months in hiding. He is serving a 4+ year sentence for something called “aggravated coercion,” related to his role in an especially bad bout of football violence in 1999.

So my first plan for accessing “La 12” involved sending letters “up the river,” asking politely for permission to speak to a jailed head hooligan. Other thoughts have involved randomly introducing myself at game time, visiting a body shop in La Boca where some barras hang out, and buying a “tourist pass” to ride the bus and watch a game with the boys from “La 12.”

Still unsure what route to take, I spent my first week focused on finding an apartment and getting settled in. A few days later, I was sitting in a friend’s café trying, futilely, to convince him that 9-11 was not an inside job. He is Ukrainian, an avid internet reader, and much more-, if not better-, informed than I am about 9-11 theories. His Spanish is also much better than mine. So it was a welcome interruption to my frustration when two older locals walked in to start an afternoon of drinking. They greeted us coldly and Dmitri gave them their beers and went to the back to help his mother with something, leaving me alone with the less-than-friendly drinkers. A few minutes later one of them, apparently bored of his companion’s company, turned and asked me where I was from. “From the U.S.,” I said, “near the capital.” He immediately walked over and extended his hand to shake mine. “Let me congratulate you and your countrymen on your new president. We’re all expecting good things from him.”

The conversation was much warmer from then on. “What are you doing in Argentina? Anything I can help you with?”

“Working on my Spanish and, if you can believe it, studying football fans.”

“Wow,” he replied, “very interesting. You know, I have a friend who is part of ‘La 12.’ Actually, I’m his lawyer, he’s in jail. His name’s Rafael Di Zeo, you might have heard it before.”

I have learned never to lie or be vague about what I am doing. Dependent as I am on contacts in order to enter the relatively closed world of barrabravas, I make as many friends as I can, hoping that one or two will have friends with friends who can help me. In Paraguay it was “refreshments counter guy” and Julio from Club Olimpia, who gave me my most important contacts. Here, in my first week in Argentina, I had met the man in charge of getting Rafa out of prison and back running the streets of La Boca and the cheap seats of Boca’s stadium, “La Bombonera.” He promised to leave his number with Dmitri, and to ask Di Zeo if he would talk to me.

I took the subway back to my hostel marveling at my good fortune. My best project lead yet had come as I debated conspiracy politics with a Ukrainian, a friend of a friend’s boyfriend, in his small café on an out-of-the-way corner of one of Buenos Aires’ many middle class neighborhoods. And my good luck started with the lawyer’s high hopes for our President elect. I have no idea whether he would have offered to help me under other circumstances. But I like to think that I was one of the first Americans to benefit directly from the election of Barack Obama.