There is something that Croats and Irish have in
common: no party is a good party if it doesn't
end in a good, though senseless, fistfight. Probably, this is the way how we get rid of excess
calories accumulated by too much beer. D.J. and the local wedding band kept music upbeat
and contemporary until around midnight. Then they played some songs of Croatian rock
bands, and then, inavoidably, they played some Croatian nationaist folk songs (like "Evo
zore,
evo dana, evo Jure i Bobana"), knowledge of which is a kind of rite of passage to any
Croatian
teenager in the U.S. Those with more "guts" would climb the stage and grab
Croatian flag
(which of course is at hand in a Croatian Center), or if they want to show how high their
testosterone levels really are they'll give a stiff-armed salute. This is bound to piss-off
their
elders, who try hard to rid Croatia of its Nazi-past image. But also this makes their elders
proud, because it confirms that kids are defiant, ready to do anything for "the
cause", that they
belong to "the cause". And kids sense that ambivalence. That's why I call this a
rite of
passage.
Controversial songs and gestures however always produce upsetting situations. And now with Croatia winning the war "over there", a lot of people here started to believe that rite of passage is stupid, needless, useless, ultimately harmful for "the cause". This antagonism nevertheless just fuels the kids rebellion - because after all for a teenager this is a kind of rebellion against "the system" without an ulterior motive. This creates an absurd situation in which cool kids will fight to protect what they believe is their right to perform basically a disgusting ritual (a reverse example of the "message from the messenger dividing" from the Farrakhan-March).
At one point around 2 am some pushing started on the edge of the dance area, then a punch flew and one guy was suddenly lying on the floor, and the "all-out war" broke out, which resulted in dozens of bloody heads and some damaged property. I felt weird, surreal, standing in the middle of that fight, like in the eye of tornado. Nobody touched me. I guess those hours in the gym paid off. Nobody also seemed to have a grsp of the reason why the fight brought up. More they fought by inertia, you know, situation is heated, you say a wrong word, you get hit, then you have to punch back, and then your friends and his friends get involved and somebody fall on the floor and then the rest of the crowd gets involved to kick the shit out of him (this particularly cute habit has its own term in Croatian/Bosnian/Serbian: "cipelariti" - which means to kick somebody with your boots while he is lying on the floor; our language is full of very specific language to describe various fighting practices, God knows why).
The fight went on and off for about twenty minutes. Then finally adrenaline levels dropped and everybody calmed down. The original perpetrators disappeared (they got more bloodied, too). So, I went around to talk to kids who seemed to be the target of the original attack. The oldest was born in 1973. The one who got kicked first, Vanja, is a tall, lanky, kind of guy you'd not be afraid to hit. He thought I was on their side. Good for me. It seems that other side thought the same. So, I asked him what precisely was "his side", because I find hard to be on somebody's side if I don't know either who he is or which side is he on. He was the "ustasha" side, he said. Fantastic: here I have a regular American high school kid with his baseball cap turned backwards, baggy pants, zits, and all, slurring through consonant-intensive Croatian language, still hyped-up that he was the first guy to get hit, and he is an "ustasha." So, what were the other guys? "Chetnicks", he said. But they weren't. They were Croats, too. But they were the ones who started the fight. I told him that I was not exactly on his side, but I didn't get hit.
Vanja's friend, in process of tending to his fresh head bump, said that fight was over "ustashtvo", too. Another of his friends said that the other guys stepped on Croatian flag (I didn't have another side available at that point to cross-check, and I did not witness stepping on flag event). Finally I could see the core of the attacked group of kids. The actually fared better than attackers. Two punks, judging by haircut and dresscode, one guy with a joker hat and heavy make-up and few other kids. They were calmed and consoled by Hrvoje and Kreso and few other a little older guys there. The older guys actually tried to stop the fight and call to reason, but it simply did not work until the fighters exhausted their hormonal high. More interesting, girls fought, too. Trying to get their boyfriends out of the frying pan.
Hrvoje and Kreso did not fight. Which is highly unusual, particularly for Kreso, widely known to fight all the time and who even got in the fight on my birthday party. He eventually put his nature to "good" use by joining the Croatian Army. Now with the war over, he is back and he just put through the post-trauma disorder stuff, he got himself a beautiful wife and he seems to be much more tempered, now. He was never really a bad guy. Kind of raw and rowdy, though. Girlfriends of my girlfriend, p.c. Barnard college graduates, despised him, I remember. So, he found his wife in Croatia: actually in Zagreb few blocks away from the place where I lived when I went to college and worked on Radio 101 there.
Tanja is beautiful and two years younger than my younger brother. She said that she was relieved that she found Kreso. I bet. Green card and stuff, huh? But not only that. Kreso, who might be mucho macho for American college standards, is well bellow obnoxious machismo of contemporary post-war Croatia. She said that all of the cool guys of her generation from our city (Zagreb) either left the country or died (or lost a leg or something) in the war, and that all of the Zagreb downtown clubs are crowded by irritating guys, so-called refugees from Hercegovina, who somehow escaped the war while boys from Zagreb and Split were dying to liberate their villages, who have plenty of money from their relatives working in the Germany and in the U.S., and who behave, in her words, "primitive" and "intolerable".
Also, there are no more fistfights. They all carry guns. Zagreb kids are sometimes afraid to go out at night in their own clubs in their own capital city of their own free, independent and sovereign country, she said. My friend Sasa, just called me from Croatia a minute ago and confirmed that Hercegovci-bashing is talk of the city in Zagreb. He also said that they dominate the Zagreb's main square (Trg Bana Jelacica), while "real" Zagrebans meat at the south-west corner known as "Spica", which was a place where usually Dalmatians from Split would hang-out before the war. There are no more Dalmatians, now.
Curiously, there was a group of Bosnians at the party. Kids from Sarajevo. Muslims by names. Fortunately, nobody pointed to them when the fight brought up, and they did not fight. Good for the bad guys. Ibrahim, who came to the U.S. with his sister, still did not hear of his parents who were lost somewhere in the ethnic cleansing. He played waterpolo for his high-school and won a second place in sit-ups championship in Queens, being the only white kid in the first fifty. They figured out correctly that, since Bosnia and Croatia are now a con-federation, and since Croatian Center carries frescos of Sarajevo and Mostar (with the bridge, of course) on its walls, it is their center, too.