All Gone to Look for America (40 page)

The next two stops to Artesia are not reassuring. There is a fat black woman in the corner surrounded by black bags which I suspect contain all her worldly possessions. She has her hand over her mouth as if trying not to be sick. I move up the carriage and stare through the door into the pitch black of the outer LA suburbs. The guy standing by the door I am staring through is big and black and wearing excessively baggy clothing and I glimpse something in his hand which looks like a curved handle that I realise might easily be that of a flick knife. He snatches a glance at me, and pulls a length of cloth from his pocket with his other hand. The train pulls into Artesia station. It looks like we are both getting off here, except that I am having second thoughts.

Now, I pride myself as being pretty much colour blind when it comes to human beings, but you can’t ignore context. The one previous time I had been in Los Angeles, I was writing an article for
The Sunday Times
on racial attitudes between Simi Valley – home to the jurors who had just acquitted four white policemen of beating up black motorist Rodney King, even though there was clear video evidence of them doing so – and South Central LA, where I was
now. The verdict had led to rioting which caused $785 million in property damage, and in which 2,300 people were injured and 55 killed. They made the race riots in London’s Brixton or Liverpool’s Toxteth pale into insignificance in comparison. To put it bluntly, I’m nervous here, even though I’m fully aware that this young black man might be equally worried about some middle-aged white bloke with wild eyes peering over his shoulder in a dark station. After all, who’s to say I’m not carrying a gun? People do. Especially around here.

The station is a bleak, empty car park with lots of parking spaces for buses but no actual buses. The guy with the object in his hand that might have been a knife and might not melts into the dark. Central LA is awash with street
lighting
, so why not here? Maybe the mayor’s once-a-month ‘green’ initiative to get citizens to turn off non-essential lighting is applied permanently in South Central. Maybe it all depends on what you think is essential, and for whom. It certainly doesn’t look like level standards apply citywide.

By now it’s gone 7:35 and my attempt to reach the Galaxy ground by
half-time
has obviously drained into the dust and even getting there by the start of the second half is beginning to look bleak. As usual there are no cabs. On the other side of the station is a neon-lit casino, providing the only illumination in the car park, but a sharp fence has been erected to block off access even to its car park. I wander up and down aimlessly, all of a sudden completely at a loss and obviously looking it. Suddenly bright torches shine in my face from across the car park, and I hear: ‘Hey, you, come here.’

Terror mingles with the idea that armed muggers don’t usually carry torches, not in England at least.

‘You okay?’ sounds a less than threatening question. Certainly less
threatening
than they look. There are two of them, bulky, white 30-somethings in uniforms of some sort, not obviously police. Private security according to their shoulder badges, though security for whom is not clear.

‘I’m lost,’ I admit hopelessly.

‘Where you lookin’ for?’

‘The Home Depot? Do you know it? I mean the soccer stadium?’

‘You need to buy something, for your house?’

‘No!’ I almost scream, even if this is maybe a reasonable thing to assume about someone asking how to get to the ‘Home Depot’. Bizarrely, of course, we can all see the Home Depot itself, in big red letters on the side of a warehouse a few hundred yards away that seems to stretch for miles. Unfortunately it, like the casino, is on the other side of a high, sharp fence, and then again, even if it weren’t, there is always the possibility out here that it actually does stretch for
miles; and even if the stadium was next to it – which is by no means certain – the game would probably be over by the time I’ve walked its length. But these guys haven’t a clue what I’m talking about. I’m not dangerous or in danger – a little loopy maybe but that’s not their problem – so instead of giving me a lift, as I vaguely hope, they clamber back into their unmarked cruiser and cruise off, leaving me looking at their vanishing tail lights. And then a voice comes out of the dark, soft, quiet and uncertain: ‘Hey, señor.’

I look over and there’s a dark-skinned guy – so dark he might have been African but his features are Latino – leaning against a large stone pot
containing
some sort of semi-tropical tree; he’s beckoning me over. What have I got to lose? He’s about 70 – or maybe 35 and just had a hard life (which is how I’m feeling right now) – and making an instant value judgement from my
appearance
, switches to English: ‘You want futból?’ (the vital word is definitely said in Spanish). I nod, trying not to look too desperate. He smiles: ‘You need bus, it comes here,’ he points to one of the parking spaces with a sign next to it, ‘maybe five minutes. Goes near stadium, you ask driver. Okay?’

Okay? I could almost embrace him. I head for the stop, about 20 yards away, leaving him to smile and mutter something to a woman seated next to him whom I hadn’t even noticed, wrapped in a swathe of blankets like a Peruvian Indian. Who knows? Maybe they are. But after five minutes there’s still no bus. It’s nearly 8:00 p.m. now. At best, if I’m lucky, I’ll catch the last few minutes. Then it rolls up, out of nowhere, and the driver stops and opens the doors. And turns off the lights.

‘Uhh,’ I hardly dare ask him, knowing from south London that displaying the teensiest sign of impatience to a bus driver will encourage him to start reading the paper and open a flask of tea, ‘When does this bus leave?’ He’s black – I mention this because he’s clearly looking at me, thinking ‘he’s white’ – and after a pause of about nearly 30 seconds says, ‘You want to get on this bus?’ I nod, doubtfully: ‘It goes to the footb… soccer stadium?’ He thinks for a good minute, then nods: ‘I guess.’ By now a few more passengers have materialised, black or Mexican – Hispanic (funny how I’d never really thought of ‘Hispanic’ as a racial term before now, certainly not one I’d apply to the Spanish. I wonder if Americans ever do, and decide it’s a catch-all euphemism that implies mixed Native American – Inca or Mayan – blood). None of them are white. I’ve been a racial minority often before – on buses in southeast London, but I’ve never been looked at as if I shouldn’t be there. Until now.

We move off and I’m standing – which gets me more looks – hey, it’s what we do in England – up front, near the driver. I suggest it would be kind if he
could give me a nod when we reach the nearest stop to the ground, ‘I mean, stadium.’ And he just shakes his head and says, under his breath but meant for me to hear, ‘You people. You should use your cars.’ I’ve no answer to that. At least none that he would understand. And then eventually, after 15 minutes of trundling along mostly dark streets, the Home Depot’s red neon comes back into sight, from the other direction, and there’s a wash of white floodlights in the sky and the bus stops and the driver yells, not turning to look at me: ‘
Saaaccer
.’ And I get the message. And get off. I can hardly believe it. I’ve got there at last. Alive and in one piece. There’s still everything to play for, except that the game’s nearly over.

It still takes me a good five minutes to walk to the stadium – just across the car park, which must hold at least 15,000 vehicles, though it is probably more full during Home Depot shopping hours than for games. I look at my watch and reckon there can’t be more than 15 minutes at most left to play, but no one seems surprised to see a fan turn up near the end. There’s a complication when the security check – we don’t have those usually despite the English game’s bad reputation in the old days – uncovers my Swiss Army knife: ‘You can’t take a weapon in, sir.’ A what? Oh hell, never mind, I’ve had this happen at airports before. I reluctantly hand it over. ‘Oh no, it’s okay, sir,’ he says nodding over my shoulder towards the acres of parking space, ‘you can leave it in your car.’ I tell him I don’t have a car, and he looks hugely relieved to have taken the knife off me. I resign myself to its loss and go into the stadium.

And then there is – after all – the football. Down there on the floodlit pitch, the familiar sight of 22 lads in their team strip engaged in mortal combat. And suddenly it all seems surreal. The stadium is strange, as if the floodlights are directed as much at the people in the stands as on the pitch, which they are because there are people wandering up and down trying to sell stuff – baby blue and pink candy floss – or beers to people sitting in their seats (unheard of in English football grounds for decades). All this is incorrigibly alien, and yet somehow familiar: it reminds me of something I can’t quite put my finger on. And then immediately, I can: the baseball game at Shea Stadium.

But this isn’t baseball – or cricket – one of those drawn-out all-day rituals, that are more about being there than watching the game. This isn’t an
occasion
to share a glass and a chit-chat with chums, grabbing something to eat and occasionally glancing down at the pitch to applaud a particularly good
shot or up at the scoreboard to check some statistics. This is football, for God’s sake – even soccer if you must – the ‘beautiful game’, a taut, nerve-straining 90-minute conflation of chess, ballet and gladiatorial combat of which the great Bill Shankly once said, it isn’t a matter of life or death: ‘it’s far more important than that’. Except that hardly anyone seems to notice it. True there’s a Hispanic-looking bloke sitting near me, not next to – there are far too many empty seats for that – with his son, who both appear to be paying a fair bit of attention to the game, and even to understand the offside rule, as they alone don’t boo incredulously when the ref halts the game after some Red Bull
clodhopper
lobs a pass to a forward who’s so close to the Galaxy goalie he can
probably
share his deodorant. To make matters worse, Becks isn’t even playing. I can just make him out kicking his heels on the subs’ bench.

What sort of manager is this who doesn’t bring his best player on – the one they pay a daily wage enough to run a fleet of Hummers for a year – when the score’s 1–1 and there’s only a few minutes left to play. Isn’t there? And suddenly it dawns on me that the electronic timer which I thought had been counting the halves separately really does mean we’re just coming up to the 44th minute. I ask my nearest neighbour and he confirms the incredible, delicious truth – that the time on my ticket wasn’t kick-off but the time the stadium doors opened and we are indeed just approaching the end of the first half. I’ve got a full 45 minutes to go. The referee blows his whistle and I could almost sing for joy. Instead I celebrate by doing something totally unimaginable in England: I nip out to the concourse, negotiate the incredible number of fast-food and drink franchises touting for business – rather than just one overcrowded bar selling bad beer and Balti pies – and fetch myself a huge plastic beaker
containing
a pint, yes a full – well, full by American standards – pint of frozen
margarita
. And take it back to my seat.

Okay, so I’ve sold out already. But I haven’t. Not really. Because by instinct I’ve already swigged it down before the second half starts – can’t let anything spoil your focus on the game. To the extent that I’m still more tempted to stuff the candy floss down the vendor’s throat than buy one when he waves his noxious wares in front of my face five minutes after Becks has at last come on and is preparing to take his first corner. ‘Are you f***ing insane,’ I scream at him instead, causing a burst of near panic as he scuttles off. Becks hasn’t lost his touch. It’s a perfect cross but nobody has a clue what to do with it, on either side. It neither gets knocked decisively into the net, nor deftly cleared upfield; instead they sort of play keepie-uppie with it for a few minutes, before somehow or other it bobbles out of their midst and we’re back to the stages
where they all look at each other wondering whose turn it is to kick it and to whom.

I’m sorry, but this is the state of American ‘soccer’: woeful! I can see why nobody watches it. It’s no bloody good. Not that we don’t get games like this in England too. I’m painfully reminded of watching Charlton, losing to Wycombe Wanderers, a team two divisions lower while the away supporters gleefully chanted in our faces: ‘Premiership? You’re having a laugh!’

But that is what is missing here. Not only is there no segregation of home and away fans – a move some fans of the English game regret – but there are no away fans at all that I can see. It’s a long way from New York after all. There’s no feeling of tribal loyalty and camaraderie, emotions that in the cauldron of a British football stadium provide twenty-first century British men – and women – with the closest equivalent, I hope, they’ll ever get to the spirit of a Napoleonic army, that sentiment of which the Duke of Wellington said: ‘I don’t know what effect they have on the enemy but they scare the hell out of me’.