Anarchist Soccer

I saw the ad a while ago on craigslist – America’s all purpose on line listing / loot service, and the ad said “Anarchist Soccer.” I’d been looking for a game and haven’t really penetrated the world of Columbia sport so I thought it sounded just right: football with a little twang, and it was downtown as well.

I said goodbye to Coco at the subway station and bought some trainers with extra padded heels that tip you forward and impel you to start running – just go!

The last email I had was from someone called Oksana and it told me to meet the anarchist footballers at 1pm at 156 Rivington street outside a place called ABC No Rio. The sun was glaring today. New York was overexposed when I walked east from the village and towards Rivington.

There were markets and bargains and the lower east side was full of brunches and various languages. The tenements in this part of town are extraordinary, pillars and curlicues and hobgoblins and Oxford colleges and wrought iron this and that and clouded dusted up oval windows that look like they came out on the wrong side of a revolution. The area has got an edge of arty ingenuity, of leftist colonies, of dirty hair, bicycles and inclusive dieting. As I walked the last couple of blocks towards number 156 there was a disabled man in a motorized wheelchair just speeding top-nip the wrong way down the middle of the street. When the lights changed to allow me to cross in front of him, he didn’t look like he was stopping so I let him whirr past, as he came close I saw he had a black-backed handheld mirror chained to one of his armrests. He sped on.

156 had no number. But 158 had. So I guessed 156 was the one with the iron gate bestudded with cogs and bicycle chains and spraypaint and the twisted portrait of a long limbed baby by the steps. People were coming and going with some authority but I hung back and noticed a woman leaning against the steel shutters of the next door shop. She was called Shawna, with 30’s brown hair mixed with grey. She was wearing jeans and walking boots and was here for the soccer. We were the first and we made conversation.

Oksana turned up about fifteen minutes later. Now with respect and football being what it normally is in England, I had expected Oksana to be a guy, and, to have everything on the table, I thought he would be a black guy with a football and probably some good tricks.

Oksana was about 21, a girl, plump in a nice way, with a meek manner, but nonetheless dressed all in black – jeans with a few chains on them, t-shirt and hoody. She was lightly pierced, nothing freaky, though one of her ears had a large ring right through the fleshiest, palmlike flap. She was a little apologetic, she thought she may have told some people it was two not one. Mike was going to bring the ball. She’d spoken to him yesterday, but now couldn’t seem to get him on the phone.

Anarchists seem to start their conversations asking about where you’re from. “Where are you from?” asked Oskana, nearly immediately. It struck me as a weird question. Shawna replied,
“Do you mean where am I from or where do I live?”
“Where do you live?”
“Oh, I live in New York.”

Oh right.

I gave a little London spiel and the conversation dropped off again. It was about 1:30.

“Do you want to play soccer at the RNC?” asked Oksana. The RNC is the Republican National Convention and it’s coming to New York at the end of August. “It’ll be fun. We’ll probably get arrested…”

Shawna was sort of non-committal. I think I shrugged.

Then a girl whose name I never really caught turned up. I think it was Susan. She was strong looking and she had a bleach stain across the flop of her hair. A few piercings, but not much, a light tattoo on her forearm, green combats, white levis t-shirt and, in general, a bit more anarchism to her than the friendly Oksana. She berated Oksana a little for the whole one o’clock two o’clock thing and didn’t seem to believe in Mike and the football at all. Susan drank from a tall can of ice tea. When conversation sagged she would say to anybody that went by – “Do you want to play soccer?” in quite a spunky way. Sometimes they ignored her, and she would say, plainly, “Snobs.” Anarchism baby.

All the while, more people were going into ABC No Rio with its mural of lopsided earth baby. They were young and off beat. Susan would ask them all about soccer but they all smiled or yelled. They were all going to cook food for homeless people in the area. There was a handout in Tompkins Park at 3. The activity was called “needanumbums” or something. People would come to us at the door and say, “needanumbums?” and we just jerked our thumb inside. Susan and Oksana were getting a bit pissed off at the needanumbums numbers.

“What the fuck is with the needanumbums?” asked Susan.
“I know,” said Oksana, “it’s insanity.”
“All these kids,” said Susan, as if the needanumbums had done some sort of sneaky advertising, like a tobacco company.
“Do you know what they’re cooking?” she asked.

There was a pause.
“And they give it to anybody right?” She sounded a bit hungry.

Susan and Oksana thought it would be good if they made a sign. I don’t know why. I didn’t think it would attract any more numbers. Oksana took out a piece of paper and I lent her my pen. She was thinking of what to write. Then Susan disappeared into 156 and came out a couple of minutes later with a flattened Starbucks cardboard box. No one else seemed to notice the irony of an anarchists advert on a Starbucks box. Susan scrawled “Who wants to * soccer?” in big letters. The * was a football that looked like a beachball. She rigged it up between the handlebars of a bike against the wall and leaped backwards, laughing, her two fists making waist level thumbs up signs. “Yeeeaaahhh,” she said.

About a minute later – or at least eerily soon after the sign had gone up, a big guy with a full, my god a papal, total mohican (bleached yellow, tipped spikes green) walked up with a slightly bilious looking girlfriend. Susan said, “You wanna play soccer?” They said, yeah, they’d heard about it through Alex. Oksana and Susan tried to place Alex. Alan, who was the mohican, said, “Big punk guy,” and Oksana clicked immediately, “Yeah, yeah, I know him.”

“Where are you from?” asked Susan, anarchically.
“California,” said Alan.
“Whooahh, you fucking serious?” Oksana and Susan seemed to say at once.

Conversation died again and Alan took his skateboard into the middle of the street and started going up and down and doing jumps. A big punk guy in a leather jacket, chains hanging off him in all sorts of directions, jagged hair glorious in that sun. His trick was to get up some speed and then lean forward, pushing the front of the board down and the letting the back come up, and then stagger along, arms waving hard, trying to keep his balance. When he ran out of speed he would fall over on to the street. When a car came, he just got off the board and let it go where it may. One time he fell over, a woman having coffee outside a café on the other side of the street, just howled with laughter. Just roared it out. It was brilliant.

It was about 2:02 when they started talking about the rules of football. “Shit, do we have enough people?” asked Susan, (one more had turned up, another girl, from Bed-Stuy, in Brooklyn). “We need a goalie,” said Susan, who I was disliking, hard.

“Shit,” she said, “we need two goalies.”

Everyone laughed, “Holy shit,” the anarchists seemed to be agreeing, “now this is getting heavy.” There was talk of offence and defence and maybe we would get a ball off a bookshop about 15 blocks away. Shawna left. Susan went into 156, I think to get some food, and I made some apologies and started to walk, then jog away. Jog, I thought, I’ll jog and make it back in time to see Arsenal beat Portsmouth in the cup, proper soccer.

I jogged away, enjoying the springy heels of my new shoes, full of light. Then I heard the anarchist scream, it was Susan, coming out of 156, hands full of vegan food I’m guessing, seeing her numbers drop from 7 to 5 over the course of a minute.

“Whhhhhhhhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaatttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt?????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

I was scared and thought, “Stop, keep running? stop, keep runni----???!”

Because my mobile phone, in my handy Velcro armpocket, had decided to ride my springy steps and leap out of my jacket, into that bright light.

Susan was still screaming something – I was scared she was coming after me – when my phone hit the pavement and broke into its requisite several pieces. The battery came to rest on the bars over a storm drain. I scrambled around, picking them up, suddenly hot, suddenly wanting to run so fast.

I yelled -- to say something -- “Well have you got a ball?”, down the street, back at the anarchists, as if, if they dramatically turned one up, I would stay. But I wouldn’t. No way. I put the phone into another pocket, took two steps of walking and then ran all the way home.