White Skin, Black Heart

Here is the tale of my first real football game overseas. I attended last night with Fistpump, as I mentioned I would be doing in the previous posting. I don’t know if all European games are like this, but I am told that the team we went to see, Beşiktaş, has particularly rowdy and passionate fans. After last night, I can confirm this. Read on, but realize I cannot capture the true feeling with words. I would need many days, lots of props, and I would have to be far more acrobatic to convey the experience as it should be conveyed. So reader, here is but a taste:
Fistpump arrives on time at the hostel to pick me up, and is drunk as promised. I am popping parasetamol to stave off a headache and scrounging through the hostel lost and found to find a black and white something to wear–team colors. I find a nice monochromatic scarf and am ready to go. Excellent.
We hop out onto the tram to get to the stadium, and Fistpump can see I am tired and not fully energized as I really should be.
“Okay no problem. One Red Bull and two beers. You will feel great.”
And he is right. We exit the tram into a sea of fans bumping around the streets, grab some Efes and Red Bull at the gas station, and proceed to some street drinking. Fistpump is in his element, his mouth loosening into a smile as he starts screaming low octave chants, and then turns to me and says “before the game, NO RULES!” To demonstrate this, he crushes his can in his hand, throws it in the air and kicks it at the people in front of us. And so begins a stream of what I now consider, the funniest shit ever. After he litters his can, he pushes his hand towards it on the ground to flip it off and says “Fuck you, can. You are killing the Earth!”
It is about six in the evening at this point, so we have an hour before the game begins. We are hungry, so we stop to buy some flat Turkish meatballs that short boys are flipping on makeshift grills situated on top of their homemade carts that they wheel around the streets. They are wrapped up in paper, and as we open the happy package, orange grease and spices pooling in the bottom, Fistpump makes a bold declaration. “Oh sexy, look at these meatballs. I love my mother but I like meatballs more than my mom.” Keep’em coming brother.
Pushing through the black and white clad fans, we walk over to the window to pick up our tickets. After finishing our meatballs and beers, we line up for the pat down to get inside the stadium. Security is very tight—you cannot have loose change, lighters, or any other small object that you, as an angry fan, might throw onto the field or at opposing team fans, which tonight is Trapzonspor (the sons of bitches). We make it through the first line, then go through some spinning metal gates, get patted down again inside, and then we are in. My headache is dissipating and my excitement is growing.
Fistpump and I have two tickets for behind the goal, kind of shit seats, but he had told me a few days ago that his best friend from highschool is a stadium manager and we simply “go through a hole” and can get to the nice 100 Lira seats, no problem. I was unsure what he meant at the time, but we did indeed go into a storage area and belly crawl through a hole in the wall, to emerge on the other side, into another dark room, to open a big sliding door, and voila! Primo seats to stand, yell and jump on.
The game still won’t start for half an hour, but already the stands are packed and everyone is yelling chants. This will never stop, and will only accelerate in speed and intensity as time goes on.
Right about the time the sun sinks behind the stands, the game starts and so then, does the drumming. I don’t know where it comes from, but somewhere in the stands there is a huge bass drum that keeps things moving at a nice pace; 32,000 fans sing songs in unison, directing special insults at the Trapzon fans who are isolated in a small area without access to food or water, but who yell just as loud and long.
We stand on the chairs; I crush long white sunflower seed shells between the gap in my front teeth and suck out the seed, clapping along and yelling out the occasional “ole” when it comes up since I can’t say the chants (yet!). Fistpump is next to me with fire in his throat, fist-pumping his little heart out, grabbing the backs of the men in front of us and jumping up and down, occassionally swearing in English for my benefit, things like “I am your father!” and “I fuck all of your sisters you sardine eaters!” And then he gets real sweet and throws in some American stuff in between the Turkish ranting.
“Michael Jackson you are dead but your spirit is here right now!”
“We love you Montana, we love you Colorado, NEBRASKA NEBRASKA, we love holes!” (??)
And then as if to contradict his apparent love of the states, he throws in
“If I meet you Mickey Mouse, I will punch you twice!”
“Twice?” I ask.
“Yes twice. I went to Disneyland in Japan and I hate Mickey Mouse.”
Good enough for me.
Anyway, the first half proceeds more or less like this until halftime, and still neither team has scored.
Stepping out of the stands and into a back room with some stadium employees, we chug some tea (beer is forbidden in the stadium FOR GOOD REASON), sit down, take a breather for a few minutes and then go back out into what has crescendo’ed into a second half fury. Things are hot now. The players are really going for it, making bigger plays, and bigger mistakes. And this means bigger chants and bigger swears. Fistpump is almost bleeding from his eyes he is yelling so hard, and at one point, after a scuffle around the goal in which BJK players miss four shots or so, I think everyone is going to have a seizure. They squat down, hold their heads in their hands, and then bam! All start smoking at the same time. Its a collective reach to the jacket pocket for their packs, and those who have none pinch one out of any box in sight. Fistpump grabs his parliaments, biting down on the end like he is firing a machine gun, both hands punching the sky and both feet hopping madly on his chair.
But apparently all of the yelling and cheering isn’t enough. The final score is 0-0, but this was a big game and it means they have lost the championship. I didn’t realize this last bit until Fistpump grabs his heart, bows his head, and sadly informs me. I am unsure of what to expect next, but the fans don’t leave me wondering long. Within seconds, everyone turns at once to the small slice of the stadium that contains the Trapzon fans, sticks out their middle fingers high and proud, and starts yelling in Turkish a chant that is roughly translated like this: “We will fuck your moms and all of you are bitches.”
Over. And over. And over.
After several minutes the crowd finally clears out and takes to the streets. Fistpump claims that his child has died, and that he would commit suicide himself except that he is already dead as well. We encounter a cluster of Trapzon fans on the sidewalk and he turns and yells at them in English “your mother is here and we are walking on the highway!” I have no idea what it means, but he makes it sound very offensive. Then he turns to me and smiles, saying “Beşiktaş fans never care about the score, we just like the game.” Yes clearly.
Anyway, we decide to grab a last beer at the gas station, this time some MGD, naturally, because his grandfather founded the company (“His name was Miller. This is the beer he gave to the world and it is really gross.”), and then head over to the Bosphoros where we dangle our feet over the water, sitting in Europe and looking across the strait at the lights that twinkle in Asia (fun fact for the uninformed–Istanbul is the only metropolis that exists on two continents, separated by the Bosphoros strait–I live on the European side but am keen on going to Asia for cheap lunch). We end our evening by yelling at the water taxi drivers in the tune of Beşiktaş chants, things like “we are super rich, we are super rich” or “we think your boat is nice, we think your boat is nice.”
Sipping from our bottles, feeling the wind off the water, and each allowing the other a moment to think, we smile at each other. Our skin is white, our hearts are black, and because of this, WE BLEED FOR BEŞİKTAŞ!