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

not, it was just the two of us in Mats’s room, listening to each of the album’s nine songs in order, following along with the lyrics printed on the album sleeve. Sometimes we’d just replay our favorite, “Detroit Rock City,” again and again and again. We played a lot of air guitar—Mats on lead and me on bass—and we thought Göteborg had never seen anything as fierce as us when we screamed out, “First I drink, then I smoke!” We were good Swedish boys, but we meant, when the time was right, to get into some serious trouble.
    Eventually, our tastes matured, and by seventh grade, we had progressed to … I hate to say it … Sweden’s own ABBA. Now, instead of wanting to strike poses, we wanted to dance. We held disco nights: We’d gather up all the candy we could find and invite a dozen neighborhood girls to dance with us in Mats’s basement to ABBA’s latest release. No other boys; just the girls and us. And Mats’s mom as DJ.
    For the fourteen years that we lived in Skattkärr, until I left Sweden for good, Mats and I spoke to or saw each other ninety-nine out of any hundred days. In our minds, we ruled the neighborhood; and since we were in the same class and went to the same school, we ruled there, too.
    I N S WEDEN , if you’re serious about a sport, you don’t waste your time with a school team: You join a club. The club teams in Sweden operate like a farm system for the pro leagues, and going pro was all Mats and I ever thought about. By the time we were eleven, we had outgrown the small neighborhood team we played for. We both tried out and were both accepted into GAIS, short for Göteborg Athletic andSports Association, our city’s premier football team. GAIS was Sweden’s answer to Leeds United, and its fans, including Mats’s dad, were legendary in their devotion. To be accepted into their youth program was a huge deal. It meant you had a shot at going pro.
    For the next four years, Mats and I lugged our bags to the practice field every day after school and every weekend, making the five-mile trek by bus, by tram, with our moms or in the backseat of my dad’s rattly old Volkswagen Beetle. And when we took the tram, we never waited for it to pull up to our stop. We always jumped out early and ran the four blocks to the stadium where our teammates were waiting.
    Until I joined GAIS, I was used to being the only outsider in any given room. At school, diversity took the form of one Finnish kid and one Indian girl who, like me, had been adopted young and spoke Swedish without an accent. But in GAIS, only six of the twenty-two team members were Swedish and almost all of them were from working-class homes. All of a sudden, I had friends from Yugoslavia, Turkey, Latvia, and Finland, friends who were not named Gunnar and Sven, but Mario and Tibor, friends with darker skin and darker hair. From my new teammates, I learned to speak a patois that blended foreign words with abbreviated Swedish sayings. Instead of saying
“Vad händer annars?”
—What’s going on?—we’d say
“Annars?”
To get someone’s attention, we would say
“Yalla,”
which meant “faster” in Arabic. And if we made a mistake, we used the English word
sorry
. It was, by our parents’ standards, a lazy and improper way of speaking. To us, it was the epitome of cool.
    My new teammates—even the white Swedes—all called themselves
blatte
, a historically derogatory term for immigrants that my generation claimed with pride.
Blatte
meant someone who was “dark” but, more, someone who was an outsider. It wasn’t quite as charged as the term
nigga
that was favored among hip-hop-loving black people, but it was a term that made liberal-minded Swedes deeply uncomfortable. I liked that
blatte
covered everyone from displaced Ugandan Indians to former Yugoslavians to someone like me.
    Unlike some of my team members, I’d been adopted as a toddler. Culturally and linguistically, I was Swedish. But as I got older, the more I