Yes, Chef by Marcus Samuelsson Read Free Book Online Page A

us were friends. It was puzzling. But I had gleaned—even without reading him—the lesson of Rilke. I learned to live the questions.
    S PORTS, IN MY CHILDHOOD , was the great equalizer, the safe space. When skateboards came onto the scene, Mats and I practiced kick-turns for hours, wiping out, racing down our driveways. We’d race everything, including bikes, although on those we preferred to pedal full speed at each other just to see what a head-on collision would feel like. (Not so great.) We hiked around the woods in our backyards, playing hours of elaborate hide-and-seek games or pretending to be mountain men or survivors from a plane wreck, desperate enough to turn to cannibalism. When we were with other kids, we dared them to skateboard down hills with no padding or shoes; we ran tennis tournaments that blocked the street, using string for a net and chalked court lines; we never stopped.
    The sport we most loved was soccer. Mats and I were equally obsessed with it, but like every other Swedish boy my age, he was taller and heavier than I was. By Swedish standards, he was an average height and somewhat thickly built, with powerful legs that he put to good use on the soccer field. I might have had speed and natural ability, but Mats had that, size,
and
a superstar dad. Rune Carestam was a much better player than the other dads. In scrimmages, he could take on any of us kids and outrun us, outscore us, outthink us. We’d lunge at him and before we landed, he’d be pastus, setting up a teammate with the perfect pass. My father was strong on defense, and in a neighborhood game he could hold his own, but he was also a good ten years older than Rune. Not to mention ten years slower.
    When we’d play all-kid pickup games in the neighborhood or kick balls around during school recess, the only real competition Mats and I faced was each other. Instead of that making us jealous, it made us closer. Soccer was our bond. The first non-school book I ever read was one Mats lent to me, which he’d taken out from the local library.
    “Du skulle gilla den här,”
he said as he chucked it in my direction. You might like this.
    It was the autobiography of Edson Arantes do Nascimento, better known as Pelé, better known as the greatest soccer player in the world. I sat rock still as I read of Pelé coming to Göteborg (Göteborg!) at seventeen to play in the 1958 World Cup finals. Pelé described walking onto the field of Nya Ulleví Stadium, a few miles from my house, wearing his number 10 jersey: He knew the crowd was focused on him, wondering who “this skinny little black boy” was. Pelé was my first hero and my first black role model, and that book meant the world to me.
    When Mats and I weren’t playing soccer, we were listening to music, to whatever new singles fell into the rotation on Göteborg’s pop radio station. One day, he called me over to his house to hear a new album that an older cousin had passed along, by a band called Kiss. We stared at the album cover, stunned by the men in outrageous makeup, kicking up their legs, sheathed in skin-tight silver and black leather costumes. Mats held the album up to his face and pouted, just like the guys in the band.
    We ran into his parents’ bathroom and ransacked his mother’s makeup bag. Shouldering each other aside for the best spot in front of the mirror, Mats took the eyeliner and drew on the black star-shaped eye patch of lead singer Paul “Starchild” Stanley while I penciled in black flames around each eye to turn myself into bassist Gene “Demon” Simmons.
    For a few months, playing Kiss was definitely among our favorite pastimes. Mats was taking a woodworking class at the time, and while the other kids made toolboxes and desk caddies, he built a wooden microphone and stand, complete with a leather “electric cord” that we could incorporate into our performances. When we wanted to perform as the whole band, we brought in other kids, but more often than