The first of September was the last of my games. One final home game, and this time I’m really at home. I’ve seen 9 new stadiums, and meticulously combed over each one like an architect, or at least a prospective buyer. I’ve gone to the top decks and gotten as close as each stadium’s security allow. As many times as I’ve been to Yankee Stadium, I haven’t gotten to know it as well.
This time, I tried to see this ballpark as I saw all the others. Curiously, objectively, I try to use it as a clue to the way this city sees itself. I would see it absent my normal habits and new traditions. I would see it free of the entanglements of history and sentimentality. Have you ever tried to see your home the way a guest might see it? Have you ever looked at your home the way a thief will see it?
I never get to Yankee Stadium in time for batting practice. After work, getting there, meeting up, and a few rounds at Stan’s, I rarely make it to the seats in time for role call. This time I decide to be there as early as I’ve been to other stadiums. I like watching batting practice. Sometimes you can tell when a hitter is going to have a good or bad day by what they do in the cage. Many people show up with gloves to try to catch a ball. I’m not here for souvenirs (plus, Pittsburgh) so after a few minutes, I line up to see Monument Park for the first time.
This time, back home but looking like a visitor, I walked among the retired numbers and plaques, but I kept looking out at the active players, still tuning up for the game. More people should look at the field from there; it’s a great center field view. But they don’t, they’re looking at plaques of the past and the pictures they’ve just taken. The team puts up netting to protect the people from being hit by shots just like the one I saw one of the Oakland A’s crank out from the batter’s box. It looked and sounded like a no-doubt dead-center shot. It flew true, straight to where I was standing. The net caught the ball, and I caught the net and stopped it from dropping into the flowerbed at my feet. The kid next to me with his baseball glove—the obnoxious one with no parents and no manners who kept pushing—looked at me like I’d found a puppy. Or a porkchop. I said, “Get your glove ready,” and let the ball drop into it. I could have kept it, but that wasn’t the ball I wanted.
I had had the only ball I wanted for most of my life. When I was seven and a half, I was taken to Cooperstown to see Hank Aaron get inducted into the Hall of Fame. My father and uncle and I lined up to get autographs from some of those already in the hall. The scam was that they advertised all the old-timers that were there, but once you got close, you realized you could only go to one of the three tables. Stan Musial didn’t like that. He took his chair and his pen and set up in front to sign for all comers. I had gotten a ball that had his face and signature printed on it. I handed it to him, and he looked at it twice, and me once, and smiled and signed it. Stan the Man indeed.
I was put on the line with people I would only later come to know. And even later, on this road trip, I would see many of them memorialized (often posthumously) in their own cities. Bob Feller’s statue stands outside the main gate in Cleveland. Ralph Kiner’s number 4 is retired in Pittsburgh. Billy Herman is remembered in Wrigley. Bill Dickey is right there in Monument Park. That ball is one of the two things that survived every one of my moves, modes, and moods. In every one of my rooms, it has been on display, however subtly, in the plastic case made specially for keeping special baseballs. It connected me to my past—that first trip to Cooperstown—and baseball’s past—It was signed by players my grandfather looked up to. It was one of six items stolen from my home two years ago. It was the last of the six that I discovered gone, and the one that is irreplaceable. I looked at the clean black circle left in the dust by the deft thief, and for a while hoped that I had only misplaced it.
That was the one ball I wanted, and this ball was not that. I thought that it might be, though, for that little shithead. When I gave it to him, he looked at me with disbelief but no gratitude, as if I were the dumb one and he’d just gotten one over on me.
I thought for some time that I’d get the ball back. Something that unique must be traceable. It hasn’t been. I think I know I won’t ever see it again. When something like that is taken from you, it doesn’t ever come back. And something else gets taken from you too. You can’t come home from a long trip or a long day without wondering what’s still behind your door. There’s always a moment—a drawing in of breath that doesn’t get released until you see that this time your TV is right where you left it.
When you’re on the road for two weeks, every now and then you wonder if, at that moment, or the night before, or the next, you are being violated. You know there is nothing you can do about it but stay home. That’s no way to win. The object of the game is to run around so you can come home. And when you are home, you hear the same sounds but now you wonder if the thief has come back to see you again. In the dark, you turn your head toward your protection plan—A baseball bat, of course—that is being kept to be used nearer to the bed than the ball field.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Monday, August 30, 2010
So, Why DO You Like Baseball?
I've seen nine stadiums I had never seen before, and met a whole lot of people I would never have known if it weren't for having this game to bring us together. I like that about baseball. It's a team game that requires individual efforts. On the field and off, it brings us together. It's made meeting people easy, and I've loved learning what everyone comes up with as an answer to the question I asked everyone: "Why do you like baseball?"
I’ve discovered that the biggest fans of the game have the hardest time with this question. I’ve discovered that there is no such thing as a former baseball player. I’ve discovered that this question makes most men a bit wistful, and most women a bit flush. I’ve discovered that no matter where in this country a baseball fan lives, his affinity for the sport is about more than just the game. It’s about his past, his identity, his hopes, and his ability to always say, “Maybe Next Year.”
I’ve discovered that this is still America’s Pasttime, and that however complicated the intricacies of the game may be, people will always want to have a place where the object of the game is as simple as getting back to home.
A sample of the answers I’ve gotten from fans everywhere:
PLEASE ADD YOUR OWN ANSWER AS A COMMENT BELOW.
“I’ve played the game since I was a kid.” (By far the most popular answer)
“It was always a part of my life growing up.”
“It’s a thinking man’s game. You can’t be dumb and be good at it.”
“I just like to watch it. I like that baseball players, for the most part, are better citizens than other athletes, and it’s easier for me to root for them. I like that my grandsons look up to them.”
“Baseball players are hot.”
“I like that no matter how well you know the game, you can always learn more about it.”
“I like its continuity. It’s about playing well for an entire summer, but everything your team does one day affects what could happen the next day.”
"It's the only sport my wife will watch with me."
“It’s just a great game.”
“In any game, you can see something happen that you never saw before. Even Tim McCarver said the other day that he saw something new. How many games has he played in or seen as an announcer? And still, the game has surprises.”
“Well, it won me over slowly. I used to think it was boring, and I’d go to the games just to drink with my mates. But in the ten years that I’ve been in the U.S., I’ve learned more about it, and come to see that it’s a great game, and that it’s not just a lot of waiting for someone to get a hit. There are things happening with every pitch. You have to be looking for them to see them, but those things are what really make it great.”
“I like the battle between the pitcher and the batter. It’s a show-down every time, with the pitcher saying, “Take this,” and the batter responding, trying to take the upper hand.”
“It’s cool that the defense always has the ball. It’s the only sport that’s like that.”
"Wow, that's a great question. Do you want a beer?"
"It's the only game that matters. I don't care about football, but if my baseball team loses, it affects my mood until they turn it around."
“Baseball has always been the way my family has connected. I can watch a game with my grandmother and my father, and feel a connection to them and to the past.”
From Timothy B. Shutt, author of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame: A History of Baseball in America”
(I am a big fan of Shutt’s work. I sent Professor Shutt a message telling him about my trip, and that I was reading his book first on my trip. I was thrilled that he actually wrote back!)
“It’s had a unique and long-lasting impulse on American self-identity. Baseball is the game that we play, we made it up. All of those ideas have given it a peculiar resonance. Football and basketball now give baseball a run for its money, but in terms of long-term history, baseball stands first.”
From Ken Burns, Writer and Director of “Baseball” the nine (soon to be 10!) part documentary on the history of the game. (Ken Burns threw out the first pitch in Pittsburgh to promote the “10th Inning” installment, showing on PBS on September 28, 2010)
It is played everywhere. In parks and playgrounds and prison yards. In back alleys and farmers' fields. By small children and old men. Raw amateurs and millionaire professionals. It is a leisurely game that demands blinding speed. The only game in which the defense has the ball. It follows the seasons, beginning each year with the fond expectancy of springtime, and ending with the hard facts of autumn. It is a haunted game, in which every player is measured against the ghosts of all who have gone before. Most of all, it is about time and timelessness. Speed and grace. Failure and loss. Imperishable hope. And coming home.”
(Thank you Tommy for giving me that quote...By the way, I'm still waiting for your answer.)
I’ve discovered that the biggest fans of the game have the hardest time with this question. I’ve discovered that there is no such thing as a former baseball player. I’ve discovered that this question makes most men a bit wistful, and most women a bit flush. I’ve discovered that no matter where in this country a baseball fan lives, his affinity for the sport is about more than just the game. It’s about his past, his identity, his hopes, and his ability to always say, “Maybe Next Year.”
I’ve discovered that this is still America’s Pasttime, and that however complicated the intricacies of the game may be, people will always want to have a place where the object of the game is as simple as getting back to home.
A sample of the answers I’ve gotten from fans everywhere:
PLEASE ADD YOUR OWN ANSWER AS A COMMENT BELOW.
“I’ve played the game since I was a kid.” (By far the most popular answer)
“It was always a part of my life growing up.”
“It’s a thinking man’s game. You can’t be dumb and be good at it.”
“I just like to watch it. I like that baseball players, for the most part, are better citizens than other athletes, and it’s easier for me to root for them. I like that my grandsons look up to them.”
“Baseball players are hot.”
“I like that no matter how well you know the game, you can always learn more about it.”
“I like its continuity. It’s about playing well for an entire summer, but everything your team does one day affects what could happen the next day.”
"It's the only sport my wife will watch with me."
“It’s just a great game.”
“In any game, you can see something happen that you never saw before. Even Tim McCarver said the other day that he saw something new. How many games has he played in or seen as an announcer? And still, the game has surprises.”
“Well, it won me over slowly. I used to think it was boring, and I’d go to the games just to drink with my mates. But in the ten years that I’ve been in the U.S., I’ve learned more about it, and come to see that it’s a great game, and that it’s not just a lot of waiting for someone to get a hit. There are things happening with every pitch. You have to be looking for them to see them, but those things are what really make it great.”
“I like the battle between the pitcher and the batter. It’s a show-down every time, with the pitcher saying, “Take this,” and the batter responding, trying to take the upper hand.”
“It’s cool that the defense always has the ball. It’s the only sport that’s like that.”
"Wow, that's a great question. Do you want a beer?"
"It's the only game that matters. I don't care about football, but if my baseball team loses, it affects my mood until they turn it around."
“Baseball has always been the way my family has connected. I can watch a game with my grandmother and my father, and feel a connection to them and to the past.”
From Timothy B. Shutt, author of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame: A History of Baseball in America”
(I am a big fan of Shutt’s work. I sent Professor Shutt a message telling him about my trip, and that I was reading his book first on my trip. I was thrilled that he actually wrote back!)
“It’s had a unique and long-lasting impulse on American self-identity. Baseball is the game that we play, we made it up. All of those ideas have given it a peculiar resonance. Football and basketball now give baseball a run for its money, but in terms of long-term history, baseball stands first.”
From Ken Burns, Writer and Director of “Baseball” the nine (soon to be 10!) part documentary on the history of the game. (Ken Burns threw out the first pitch in Pittsburgh to promote the “10th Inning” installment, showing on PBS on September 28, 2010)
It is played everywhere. In parks and playgrounds and prison yards. In back alleys and farmers' fields. By small children and old men. Raw amateurs and millionaire professionals. It is a leisurely game that demands blinding speed. The only game in which the defense has the ball. It follows the seasons, beginning each year with the fond expectancy of springtime, and ending with the hard facts of autumn. It is a haunted game, in which every player is measured against the ghosts of all who have gone before. Most of all, it is about time and timelessness. Speed and grace. Failure and loss. Imperishable hope. And coming home.”
(Thank you Tommy for giving me that quote...By the way, I'm still waiting for your answer.)
Sunday, August 29, 2010
I do
I had already seen the best ballpark in America. I had already had two of the best bowls of chili I had ever eaten. I had already learned, once and for all that it’s spelled with three N’s, 3 I’s, 2 C’s, and a little T and A. I had learned that there actually is something redeeming about Ohio, and I had put in the paperwork to adopt the Reds as my national league team. How could I not? The city rolled out the Reds carpet for me...Jay Bruce hit three home runs, and the team put on a fireworks display after the game, all because this was the day I decided to visit. This city knows how to welcome someone to town. On the outside of its stadium it says in red neon, "Rounding Third and Heading Home..." and I realized that as far as my trip went, that's exactly what I was doing.
I wasn't ready for it to be over. I had fallen in love with Cincinnati. Not for what it is, to be sure, but for what it has the potential to be. This city is full of prime undeveloped riverside real estate. They have done nothing with the waterfront there, and I don’t understand why. Even Detroit built a nature walk on its river. I can’t imagine why Cincinnati has done so little, except that it might want to conceal from Kentucky the fact that there is anything good going on on the other side of the bridges.
I had already fallen for it. It didn’t need to do anything more to get me to go home with it. And then it did.
The game was over and I was hoping to find somewhere to get more chili and pass a few hours before my 1:45 bus to Washington. I passed up a few bars that were a little too close to the stadium, and too full of people who looked as if they hadn’t watched the game, let alone stayed for the fireworks.
I walked around the area with which I had familiarized myself that afternoon. A basic downtown that has some surprises here and there, like an open field surrounded by Doric columns when you turn one corner, and a gravel lot when you turn another. Its most central public square has a sculpture fountain, with a pool at the bottom, and multiple spouting fishes. It is topped by Jesus blessing all the sculptures below him with steady showers of water falling from his outstretched hands. In Cincinnati, even that worked somehow.
I was happy to find that at that very square there was a live band playing, a beer truck and a few food vendors. All because this was the day I decided to visit. I wasn’t much in the mood for talking that night. I had had a double header the night before, and if that wasn’t a social damper, then the bearded bald drunk guy that approached me and told me “They’re all going to love you,” put me off the rest of the way. I got a beer and sat at the fountain, not listening to the band. I had tired of talking about my trip. I had tired of asking my question.
And then a couple sat down next to me, and the man asked me to take their picture. Of course I would, and after having to ask so many people so recently to take my picture in front of something, I took care to get it right. With and without flash, focused on them, or squeezing in Jesus.
“Holy Shit,” he said. “This is an amazing picture.” He was wearing a Ryne Sandberg jersey, and she didn’t want to be there. They were more or less a couple of douche bags. “Have you found your special person?” The guy asked me. I stumbled on that question. It was another thing I didn’t want to talk about. He told me that he had, and that it was here, and that here they were, and that how could the two people in that photograph not be meant to be together?
And then he got down on one knee, pulled out a ring box, and proposed to her in front of me, in front of Jesus and everyone. She said yes, and it was then that I thought I might be getting waved in. It was time to be rounding third and heading for home.
I wasn't ready for it to be over. I had fallen in love with Cincinnati. Not for what it is, to be sure, but for what it has the potential to be. This city is full of prime undeveloped riverside real estate. They have done nothing with the waterfront there, and I don’t understand why. Even Detroit built a nature walk on its river. I can’t imagine why Cincinnati has done so little, except that it might want to conceal from Kentucky the fact that there is anything good going on on the other side of the bridges.
I had already fallen for it. It didn’t need to do anything more to get me to go home with it. And then it did.
The game was over and I was hoping to find somewhere to get more chili and pass a few hours before my 1:45 bus to Washington. I passed up a few bars that were a little too close to the stadium, and too full of people who looked as if they hadn’t watched the game, let alone stayed for the fireworks.
I walked around the area with which I had familiarized myself that afternoon. A basic downtown that has some surprises here and there, like an open field surrounded by Doric columns when you turn one corner, and a gravel lot when you turn another. Its most central public square has a sculpture fountain, with a pool at the bottom, and multiple spouting fishes. It is topped by Jesus blessing all the sculptures below him with steady showers of water falling from his outstretched hands. In Cincinnati, even that worked somehow.
I was happy to find that at that very square there was a live band playing, a beer truck and a few food vendors. All because this was the day I decided to visit. I wasn’t much in the mood for talking that night. I had had a double header the night before, and if that wasn’t a social damper, then the bearded bald drunk guy that approached me and told me “They’re all going to love you,” put me off the rest of the way. I got a beer and sat at the fountain, not listening to the band. I had tired of talking about my trip. I had tired of asking my question.
And then a couple sat down next to me, and the man asked me to take their picture. Of course I would, and after having to ask so many people so recently to take my picture in front of something, I took care to get it right. With and without flash, focused on them, or squeezing in Jesus.
“Holy Shit,” he said. “This is an amazing picture.” He was wearing a Ryne Sandberg jersey, and she didn’t want to be there. They were more or less a couple of douche bags. “Have you found your special person?” The guy asked me. I stumbled on that question. It was another thing I didn’t want to talk about. He told me that he had, and that it was here, and that here they were, and that how could the two people in that photograph not be meant to be together?
And then he got down on one knee, pulled out a ring box, and proposed to her in front of me, in front of Jesus and everyone. She said yes, and it was then that I thought I might be getting waved in. It was time to be rounding third and heading for home.
Friday, August 27, 2010
Double Header
Alex described himself to me as a lone wolf. The thing about a lone wolf, though, is that he's always happy when he thinks he's found a friend. That’s the way I felt when I met Vince on the way to the day game at Miller Park. He had flown in from L.A. just to see the Dodgers play the Brewers. He’s not even a Dodger fan. He just wanted to cross another park off his list.
He hears about your trip and tells you you’re as crazy as he is. You hope that’s half true. You’re also pretty sure you’ll be able to get him to go to Chicago with you. In order to do this double-header, you’ll have to leave Milwaukee at 4, and hope to get to Chicago by the 4th inning. Vince loves this plan, but he’s not sure. You’re sure all it will take is a little persuasion.
In the meantime, a Brewers fan has overheard and wants in. A self-described fun-loving party girl who had already scored, and offered you, free tickets to a game this weekend. A Brewers fan who buys you a beer (The 9th time this has happened on this trip. Oddly, you're keeping track) and tries to get you to buy her a shirt. You don’t bite, but you drink and you joke and you don’t imagine there is any way she will really go to Chicago with you. Although, it would be a hell of a story if you start out the day as a lone wolf and end it by taking a whole pack across state lines.
So by the time you realize that she’s serious, it’s gone too far for you to turn back. She bought beer. She offered Packers tickets. She is serious. You can already tell that it’s not going to go anywhere good, but you think if you can convince Vince, it will become a group thing, an epic tale, and not just a desperate girl and a man on the run.
Vince confesses that he can change his flight, but that he has to be back for a fantasy football draft. You can‘t argue with that. And you don’t want the Milwaukee mess to get the wrong idea. “Do you want me to go to Chicago with you?” she asks bluntly. My answer isn’t quite as clear. A clear, true answer at that point would have been, “No,” but that doesn’t seem to be in the spirit of double-header day. “okay,” I say. “I have to tell you some things before you really decide to do this. 1. Your friend is mad at you and I don’t to be the reason for that.” She starts to protest but I force her to listen to my whole list. “2. You need to go to work tomorrow and I can’t guarantee you’ll get back in time. 3. I can’t buy you anything. 4. I have a girlfriend, so nothing is going to happen between us, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
It was, but she said it wasn’t, and there it was. I had the chance to ditch her before her friends left, but I didn’t. There is a point at which doing something that is not so nice might turn out, in the end, to be the nicest thng you can do. A sort of a mercy killing might have done us both good. By the time we got the public transportation to the greyhound station, she had begun to complain about her feet hurting. Again, I thought about mercy killing.
Three hours later, we were outside of the White Sox’ stadium, and she was asking too many questions. “I’ve been here as long as you have, so I don’t know how you expect me to answer that,” Was the nicest thing I could come up with. I would get increasingly less nice when she asked where the bathrooms were, what teams were playing, and why we were headed to the wrong section, and whether we should ask someone who could show us to our real seats. When we got to some great seats, she started talking to the fun people in front of us about the Brewers in the middle of a RISP situation, and I wasn’t surprised when they didn’t come back from the bathroom.
She noticed it too and asked, “On the scale of 1 to 10, how sorry are you that you met me?”
“Before you asked that question, or after?”
“Well, you can’t leave me, because my bus ticket and my purse are in the locker and only you have the combination. So until the bus leaves, it’s like I’m a puppy and you have a pork chop tied to your ankle.”
Yeah. I’m getting that. I’m feeling the weight of unwanted responsibility and company that wants too much from me. I’m stuck and I’m going to make the best of it and I’m glad I’ve never told her about my blog because by that point I already knew what I would be writing. That if there comes another time on the trip that I wish I were with someone, I know where that wishing will get me. It’s a blessing to be able to do things on one’s own. It takes strength, independence and confidence.
I’ve always felt sad for people who stay in bad relationships. I think most of those people lack the skill of being alone. They’re afraid of it, and so they stay, and some of them wind up more lonely when they’re with that person than I am when I’m writing this blog on this bus. Like the daughter of the other New Jerseyan I met at the game, Maryann, I won’t stay with someone who isn’t worth me. Maryann’s daughter is going to be just fine, and so am I.
But in the meantime, I still have a puppy and a pork chop. I put her on as my personal photographer, and got some of the shots I wanted. Fewer than half as many as the other ballparks, but this one was about half as nice, and we were there for about half a game. So I guess it worked out. I would have gotten more pictures if Alex Rios hadn’t have hit that home run into the section in front of us. I walked closer to see who had caught it, and that‘s how we met Will, a short man from Omaha who had flown into town for three Sox games. Will was a lone wolf.
He loved the story of how we met. Despite my irritation with my extra baggage, I knew it was a great story. I was still convinced that the story would make the juice worth the squeeze. I’m writing this, so I guess I can’t argue that it wasn’t.
The game ended and our wolf pack went out to hunt for food. At the bar, Will told our story. He had become part of it, and wanted others to become part of it too. The waiter became more interested the closer it got to closing time. He asked us where we were from.
“Wisconsin” “Omaha, Nebraska” “New York.”
What part of New York?
“Manhattan.”
“He’s from New Jersey,” said the puppy, nipping at the pork chop.
“I know where the fuck I’m from, and I know I told you where I’m from. I like New Jersey and I’m proud of it, but I don’t want to have to defend it with every person that asks, because I know they’re going to ask me about Snooki and the Jersey shore, just like you did when I told you the truth and now I can see that that was a mistake.”
“Well, I guess I’m not getting any.”
Bitch, I told you.
One bar later, Will asked where the bathroom was. Will, the nice guy from Omaha, who was about peace, love, and the story of how we came together. Will who had offered us beers in his hotel room until we had to catch our busses. Will went to the bathroom, and he never came back.
“Do you think he’s dead? He doesn’t seem the type to just ditch us.”
Yes, he does, I thought. Will’s a lone wolf. Will knows when the story is supposed to end. Will, the mercy killer.
He hears about your trip and tells you you’re as crazy as he is. You hope that’s half true. You’re also pretty sure you’ll be able to get him to go to Chicago with you. In order to do this double-header, you’ll have to leave Milwaukee at 4, and hope to get to Chicago by the 4th inning. Vince loves this plan, but he’s not sure. You’re sure all it will take is a little persuasion.
In the meantime, a Brewers fan has overheard and wants in. A self-described fun-loving party girl who had already scored, and offered you, free tickets to a game this weekend. A Brewers fan who buys you a beer (The 9th time this has happened on this trip. Oddly, you're keeping track) and tries to get you to buy her a shirt. You don’t bite, but you drink and you joke and you don’t imagine there is any way she will really go to Chicago with you. Although, it would be a hell of a story if you start out the day as a lone wolf and end it by taking a whole pack across state lines.
So by the time you realize that she’s serious, it’s gone too far for you to turn back. She bought beer. She offered Packers tickets. She is serious. You can already tell that it’s not going to go anywhere good, but you think if you can convince Vince, it will become a group thing, an epic tale, and not just a desperate girl and a man on the run.
Vince confesses that he can change his flight, but that he has to be back for a fantasy football draft. You can‘t argue with that. And you don’t want the Milwaukee mess to get the wrong idea. “Do you want me to go to Chicago with you?” she asks bluntly. My answer isn’t quite as clear. A clear, true answer at that point would have been, “No,” but that doesn’t seem to be in the spirit of double-header day. “okay,” I say. “I have to tell you some things before you really decide to do this. 1. Your friend is mad at you and I don’t to be the reason for that.” She starts to protest but I force her to listen to my whole list. “2. You need to go to work tomorrow and I can’t guarantee you’ll get back in time. 3. I can’t buy you anything. 4. I have a girlfriend, so nothing is going to happen between us, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
It was, but she said it wasn’t, and there it was. I had the chance to ditch her before her friends left, but I didn’t. There is a point at which doing something that is not so nice might turn out, in the end, to be the nicest thng you can do. A sort of a mercy killing might have done us both good. By the time we got the public transportation to the greyhound station, she had begun to complain about her feet hurting. Again, I thought about mercy killing.
Three hours later, we were outside of the White Sox’ stadium, and she was asking too many questions. “I’ve been here as long as you have, so I don’t know how you expect me to answer that,” Was the nicest thing I could come up with. I would get increasingly less nice when she asked where the bathrooms were, what teams were playing, and why we were headed to the wrong section, and whether we should ask someone who could show us to our real seats. When we got to some great seats, she started talking to the fun people in front of us about the Brewers in the middle of a RISP situation, and I wasn’t surprised when they didn’t come back from the bathroom.
She noticed it too and asked, “On the scale of 1 to 10, how sorry are you that you met me?”
“Before you asked that question, or after?”
“Well, you can’t leave me, because my bus ticket and my purse are in the locker and only you have the combination. So until the bus leaves, it’s like I’m a puppy and you have a pork chop tied to your ankle.”
Yeah. I’m getting that. I’m feeling the weight of unwanted responsibility and company that wants too much from me. I’m stuck and I’m going to make the best of it and I’m glad I’ve never told her about my blog because by that point I already knew what I would be writing. That if there comes another time on the trip that I wish I were with someone, I know where that wishing will get me. It’s a blessing to be able to do things on one’s own. It takes strength, independence and confidence.
I’ve always felt sad for people who stay in bad relationships. I think most of those people lack the skill of being alone. They’re afraid of it, and so they stay, and some of them wind up more lonely when they’re with that person than I am when I’m writing this blog on this bus. Like the daughter of the other New Jerseyan I met at the game, Maryann, I won’t stay with someone who isn’t worth me. Maryann’s daughter is going to be just fine, and so am I.
But in the meantime, I still have a puppy and a pork chop. I put her on as my personal photographer, and got some of the shots I wanted. Fewer than half as many as the other ballparks, but this one was about half as nice, and we were there for about half a game. So I guess it worked out. I would have gotten more pictures if Alex Rios hadn’t have hit that home run into the section in front of us. I walked closer to see who had caught it, and that‘s how we met Will, a short man from Omaha who had flown into town for three Sox games. Will was a lone wolf.
He loved the story of how we met. Despite my irritation with my extra baggage, I knew it was a great story. I was still convinced that the story would make the juice worth the squeeze. I’m writing this, so I guess I can’t argue that it wasn’t.
The game ended and our wolf pack went out to hunt for food. At the bar, Will told our story. He had become part of it, and wanted others to become part of it too. The waiter became more interested the closer it got to closing time. He asked us where we were from.
“Wisconsin” “Omaha, Nebraska” “New York.”
What part of New York?
“Manhattan.”
“He’s from New Jersey,” said the puppy, nipping at the pork chop.
“I know where the fuck I’m from, and I know I told you where I’m from. I like New Jersey and I’m proud of it, but I don’t want to have to defend it with every person that asks, because I know they’re going to ask me about Snooki and the Jersey shore, just like you did when I told you the truth and now I can see that that was a mistake.”
“Well, I guess I’m not getting any.”
Bitch, I told you.
One bar later, Will asked where the bathroom was. Will, the nice guy from Omaha, who was about peace, love, and the story of how we came together. Will who had offered us beers in his hotel room until we had to catch our busses. Will went to the bathroom, and he never came back.
“Do you think he’s dead? He doesn’t seem the type to just ditch us.”
Yes, he does, I thought. Will’s a lone wolf. Will knows when the story is supposed to end. Will, the mercy killer.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Leave Land
Cleveland deserves everything it gets. LeBron James is a wise upstanding gentleman who has just become revered in my eyes not just as a martyr but as an instrument of justice and righteousness.
I almost skipped this city due to the fact that my trip has taken me through here twice, and never without frustration. I’m glad that I decided to make the trip because now I know that for the rest of my life if I ever feel that life has dealt me a bad blow, a raw deal, a short straw, I will be able to say to myself, “At least I’m not in Cleveland.”
The baseball stadium is a monument to unoriginality and fan-unfriendliness. In this toilet of a ball park, there is never less than three feet of concrete between the fan and the field. Unless you happen to be in one of the irritatingly distracting seats that is located behind the chicken wire behind home plate. The seats that put the fan, or personnel, or douche bag, at eye level with the umpire’s ass. It isn’t built with baseball or with fans in mind. It’s built to funnel money from this city’s hardworking douche bags into the pocket’s of this city’s lazy, unfeeling douchebags. Fuck you Cleveland. The best thing I can say about this stadium is that its bathrooms are clean. Check that. Were clean. I went on the floor just to give the midges another pool in which to reproduce.
I wish I could say that the fans deserve better than to have their talented team dismantled or disabled. But they don’t. They have one bad season, and there aren’t 10,000 people that will come to support them, or to even make fun of them. There are nine people that paid for $10 tickets and didn’t even bother to move to any of the 30,000 empty seats in front of them. I even heard one crosseyed cracker complain about all the stairs, and that was on the way down.
I once thought of the Indians as a storied franchise which deserved to be better than it currently is. Now I see that it has never been anything but a money grab, a franchise that sold off two Cy Young winners like it sold off the name of its ugly boring stadium like it sold its soul long ago. I think that the United States of America should give Cleveland to the actual Indians in a gesture of reparation. Native Americans should be given the entire city with the stipulation that they take their revenge and take out their frustrations on the city for defiling their good name and image for so long by forcing it to be associated with an embarrassing and apologetically insensitive baseball club for so many classless years. They would get their due while simultaneously destroying America’s most embarrassing city. The move would be a diplomatic win-win.
I almost skipped this city due to the fact that my trip has taken me through here twice, and never without frustration. I’m glad that I decided to make the trip because now I know that for the rest of my life if I ever feel that life has dealt me a bad blow, a raw deal, a short straw, I will be able to say to myself, “At least I’m not in Cleveland.”
The baseball stadium is a monument to unoriginality and fan-unfriendliness. In this toilet of a ball park, there is never less than three feet of concrete between the fan and the field. Unless you happen to be in one of the irritatingly distracting seats that is located behind the chicken wire behind home plate. The seats that put the fan, or personnel, or douche bag, at eye level with the umpire’s ass. It isn’t built with baseball or with fans in mind. It’s built to funnel money from this city’s hardworking douche bags into the pocket’s of this city’s lazy, unfeeling douchebags. Fuck you Cleveland. The best thing I can say about this stadium is that its bathrooms are clean. Check that. Were clean. I went on the floor just to give the midges another pool in which to reproduce.
I wish I could say that the fans deserve better than to have their talented team dismantled or disabled. But they don’t. They have one bad season, and there aren’t 10,000 people that will come to support them, or to even make fun of them. There are nine people that paid for $10 tickets and didn’t even bother to move to any of the 30,000 empty seats in front of them. I even heard one crosseyed cracker complain about all the stairs, and that was on the way down.
I once thought of the Indians as a storied franchise which deserved to be better than it currently is. Now I see that it has never been anything but a money grab, a franchise that sold off two Cy Young winners like it sold off the name of its ugly boring stadium like it sold its soul long ago. I think that the United States of America should give Cleveland to the actual Indians in a gesture of reparation. Native Americans should be given the entire city with the stipulation that they take their revenge and take out their frustrations on the city for defiling their good name and image for so long by forcing it to be associated with an embarrassing and apologetically insensitive baseball club for so many classless years. They would get their due while simultaneously destroying America’s most embarrassing city. The move would be a diplomatic win-win.
You Can't See Me
I’ve done well, so far, as far as sticking to my own rules. I’ve kept up with the reading, having so far completed Outliers, Tree Girl, A Mercy, The Poetry of Robert Penn Warren, and Brave New World. Three of those titles were read as audio books, but one of the books that I brought in hardcover, and have read sporadically throughout the trip, is Invisible Man. In addition to being absorbing and living up to its reputation in every way, it is the perfect size for tucking bus tickets into. For this reason I’ve made sure to have it handy at all times while traveling, whether I’ve been reading it or not.
It lives up to its reputation thus far, but more than that, it’s provided an unexpected parallel to my own identity in some of my stops on this trip. Much of what I’ve been doing has required that I become invisible.
I've always been able to blend. In order to live by my own rule number one, I must act and cheer as any other average fan in the stadium. This has proven to be easy and gratifying, whether the home team wins or loses. (My record is 3-3 at this point) We love sports as much for the communal celebration as we do for the commiseration, and grumbling about the Pirates losing another one was not as exciting as rejoicing over the Twins’ walk-off win, but it certainly led to better conversations.
Even outside of the parks, I’ve tried to remain invisible. A man who looks like he knows where he is going is rarely stopped, by either beggars or security guards. I’ve slipped into a forbidden ballroom at the top of the Walker Museum in Minneapolis to get my best view of that city (without a camera, unfortunately). In my unplanned stop in Des Moines, I slipped into what turned out to be a Masonic Temple on the top floor of the building occupied by Starbucks on the ground floor, and a theater on the third. I’ve got pictures of that, but I’m not sure what the Masons will do to me if I post them.
Invisibility has allowed me to see more. In Detroit, I poked past a curtain at the back of a the coffee shop at 1515 Broadway to find an empty theater. As it turns out, I would have been allowed to go there if I had asked. Usually, it’s better to just not ask, so that you’ve never told no. So I didn’t bother asking whether it would be okay for me to slip into a seat behind home plate at the start of last night’s Tigers game. I didn’t plan it ahead of time, I just saw that an usher was away from his post and went for it. While with my cousins in Pittsburgh, we tried something similar but were tossed right away. Four drew too many eyes, but one invisible man was able to stay in the ninth row for five innings. The seats’ owners never even came to claim them. I finally left, only out of curiosity about the rest of the park.
Before I left on the trip, my cousin Adam, a former military man, lent me his camouflage backpack. I liked it for being the perfect size and having the right number of compartments in which I could hide my travel essentials. Like a chameleon, I’ve taken on the characteristics of the backpack. I’ve learned to be camouflaged, as a Twin, as a Pirate, as a man who knows where he’s going, and as a man who belongs.
________________________________________________________
I wrote this post from the bus station in Detroit. It’s more pleasant than you would think, but it clearly wasn’t pleasant at all for Hope, a girl who asked to borrow my phone while I was writing. I let her, then let her try again when she didn’t get an answer at her halfway house. I asked a few more questions to find out that she had just been let out after a 15-month sentence in West Virginia for using counterfeit money in Battle Creek.
According to her story, she had missed her bus to Grand Rapids, and if she didn’t make it there on time, she would likely be sent back to prison. She tried the house again, and there was no answer. I don’t believe that she had a ticket for the morning bus and missed it, but she wasn‘t high, and she hadn‘t asked for anything but a phone call I realized that I hadn’t done anything nice for anyone in Detroit yet.
I decided to test my abilities as the invisible man. Although I had already bought my ticket to Cleveland, I went up to the counter and asked for one ticket to Grand Rapids on my Discovery Pass. No questions asked. Ticket granted by the same man who had given me a ticket to Cleveland twenty minutes earlier. I am the invisible man.
It lives up to its reputation thus far, but more than that, it’s provided an unexpected parallel to my own identity in some of my stops on this trip. Much of what I’ve been doing has required that I become invisible.
I've always been able to blend. In order to live by my own rule number one, I must act and cheer as any other average fan in the stadium. This has proven to be easy and gratifying, whether the home team wins or loses. (My record is 3-3 at this point) We love sports as much for the communal celebration as we do for the commiseration, and grumbling about the Pirates losing another one was not as exciting as rejoicing over the Twins’ walk-off win, but it certainly led to better conversations.
Even outside of the parks, I’ve tried to remain invisible. A man who looks like he knows where he is going is rarely stopped, by either beggars or security guards. I’ve slipped into a forbidden ballroom at the top of the Walker Museum in Minneapolis to get my best view of that city (without a camera, unfortunately). In my unplanned stop in Des Moines, I slipped into what turned out to be a Masonic Temple on the top floor of the building occupied by Starbucks on the ground floor, and a theater on the third. I’ve got pictures of that, but I’m not sure what the Masons will do to me if I post them.
Invisibility has allowed me to see more. In Detroit, I poked past a curtain at the back of a the coffee shop at 1515 Broadway to find an empty theater. As it turns out, I would have been allowed to go there if I had asked. Usually, it’s better to just not ask, so that you’ve never told no. So I didn’t bother asking whether it would be okay for me to slip into a seat behind home plate at the start of last night’s Tigers game. I didn’t plan it ahead of time, I just saw that an usher was away from his post and went for it. While with my cousins in Pittsburgh, we tried something similar but were tossed right away. Four drew too many eyes, but one invisible man was able to stay in the ninth row for five innings. The seats’ owners never even came to claim them. I finally left, only out of curiosity about the rest of the park.
Before I left on the trip, my cousin Adam, a former military man, lent me his camouflage backpack. I liked it for being the perfect size and having the right number of compartments in which I could hide my travel essentials. Like a chameleon, I’ve taken on the characteristics of the backpack. I’ve learned to be camouflaged, as a Twin, as a Pirate, as a man who knows where he’s going, and as a man who belongs.
________________________________________________________
I wrote this post from the bus station in Detroit. It’s more pleasant than you would think, but it clearly wasn’t pleasant at all for Hope, a girl who asked to borrow my phone while I was writing. I let her, then let her try again when she didn’t get an answer at her halfway house. I asked a few more questions to find out that she had just been let out after a 15-month sentence in West Virginia for using counterfeit money in Battle Creek.
According to her story, she had missed her bus to Grand Rapids, and if she didn’t make it there on time, she would likely be sent back to prison. She tried the house again, and there was no answer. I don’t believe that she had a ticket for the morning bus and missed it, but she wasn‘t high, and she hadn‘t asked for anything but a phone call I realized that I hadn’t done anything nice for anyone in Detroit yet.
I decided to test my abilities as the invisible man. Although I had already bought my ticket to Cleveland, I went up to the counter and asked for one ticket to Grand Rapids on my Discovery Pass. No questions asked. Ticket granted by the same man who had given me a ticket to Cleveland twenty minutes earlier. I am the invisible man.
Monday, August 23, 2010
E-10
I had my chance. Behind home plate, slightly toward the first base side. Lefty pitcher, righty batter. The foul came back towards us, and I was on the aisle. I stepped into the aisle, got my hands low to match the end of the ball’s trajectory, poised to snag my first major league foul ball.
You’ve been to this many games, and this has been your only shot. You may only ever get one. You see the ball get tipped off the hands of a girl a few rows in front of you. You see it happen, and you see it change paths. Instead of looking it into the hands, you see it of you in the arm. Your hands aren’t quick enough to get there, but when the ball skitters to the seats on the other side of the aisle, quick hands pick it up, and there you are. No ball. You missed it. And while it happened to you, it happens that there were a ton of TV cameras watching, with two east coast markets judging, I woulda-coulding. Alex, dutifully keeping a scorecard of the game, marked the play, E-10.
I eventually went to the centerfield barbeque stand. This one, Manny’s BBQ, is either owned or just promoted by Manny Sanguillen, a one time catcher of whom I had never heard. My cousins, though all younger than myself, had heard of him. They possess an encyclopedic knowledge of pre-1973 baseball players due to so many hours spent playing a baseball dice game, manufactured in 1974, featuring realistic probabilities related to actual player skill levels. Manny Sanguillen fielded with a 3, and ran with a 0, fairly typical for a catcher. On this date he was at the barbeque stand in person, signing autographs. I declined to get one, considering it near hypocritical to ask for an autograph from someone of whom I had never heard.
They had all had him sign their hats and ticket stubs earlier in the day. We weren’t sure if he signed them “God Bless, Manny Sanguillen,” or “God Bless Manny Sanguillen.”
I was far more interested in his pulled pork sandwich, and upon approaching the stand, I saw that Manny Sanguillen was still there, still signing autographs for fans even younger than my cousins. Who knows if or how they knew who he was, but god bless Manny Sanguillen for staying through the sixth inning. I was about to ask for his autograph on that basis alone when he stood up, took a bag that an employee had packed with pulled pork sliders, shook out his pockets and moved to leave.
“Heading out, Manny?” “Yeah” his response was brusque, he clearly feared that I would try to hook him in to signing one more god blessed autograph. An employee offered that he never stays as late as the sixth inning. “Thanks for the memories, Manny.”
I got the employee to give me one of the pens he used to sign his autographs. I then asked her to sign my receipt, pretending that I wouldn’t leave the booth until I got some autograph from someone.
After the game, I visited my dear old friend Gena, with whom I had become acquainted twelve years earlier when we were both starting out in New York City. She was a party girl fresh from Puerto Rico. Now she has dreadlocks and a daughter, both of which are beautiful. The five year old announced to me immediately that her name, Inaru, originated as the word for “girl” given by the Indio, the Indian tribe in Puerto Rico.
She said we could do whatever I wanted to do, but in the end we went where she wanted to take me. In this case it was the Hard Rock Café to see the band started by the son of her friends. The mother had been a singer for Rusted Root, the father a professional skateboarder. Their son is 14, and regaled his audience with tales of band camp and appreciative words for how special the night was, and how good the next song would be. Immediately upon walking in, we were accosted by several baby groupies asking us to buy Lighting Box T-shirts. It was surprisingly easy to refuse.
One of the groupies turned out to be, in truth, eleven years old and a boy. Furthermore, he was a member of the band, and according to the lead singer, it was impossible to look away from his drum solo. What was impressive about the drum solo was how self indulgent one can apparently become by the age of eleven. The solo, played to silence from the crowd, sounded remarkably like drum exercises assigned to students in their third year of playing a set. I’m not saying he was bad, I’m just saying I was surprised to see him throw his drumsticks into the crowd to punctuate the end of his roll. Diva.
He also threw his sticks at the end of the set. At this point, I was focused on both the drink in my hand and the sight of Inaru manipulating her Barbie dolls. In truth, about half the people were watching the band bow, and half were watching her. She was pulling focus. Diva. Good girl.
He threw a second pair of sticks. One went to the person I assume to be his mother. The other bounced off the hands of the person in front of me, ticked on our table, and hit me on the arm before skittering off to the next table. I continued to sip my drink. At least this time I hadn’t tried. At least this time no one was watching.
I had finished my drink, closed my tab, and was waiting at the table with Inaru while her mother and fat Man Dee, our ride and tour guide, said goodbyes. The eleven year old Pete Best appeared at the side of our table. His photo ops had ended, and he was offering his services. He had a fistful of Lightning Box stickers in one hand, and a sharpie in the other. “Do you want anything signed?”
I heard what he said but I asked him to repeat the question. “No. I’m good. You‘re supposed to let them come to you.” Yes, he’s eleven. No, I’m not sorry.
If I wasn’t going to beg an autograph from Manny Sanguillen, I sure as hell wasn’t going to indulge a boy begging to give me an autograph. The boy needs to learn that it’s better to leave in the sixth inning. The boy needs to learn that you can run with a 0 if you can learn to catch with a 3. The boy could learn a thing or two from Manny Sanguillen. So could we all.
God Bless Manny Sanguillen.
You’ve been to this many games, and this has been your only shot. You may only ever get one. You see the ball get tipped off the hands of a girl a few rows in front of you. You see it happen, and you see it change paths. Instead of looking it into the hands, you see it of you in the arm. Your hands aren’t quick enough to get there, but when the ball skitters to the seats on the other side of the aisle, quick hands pick it up, and there you are. No ball. You missed it. And while it happened to you, it happens that there were a ton of TV cameras watching, with two east coast markets judging, I woulda-coulding. Alex, dutifully keeping a scorecard of the game, marked the play, E-10.
I eventually went to the centerfield barbeque stand. This one, Manny’s BBQ, is either owned or just promoted by Manny Sanguillen, a one time catcher of whom I had never heard. My cousins, though all younger than myself, had heard of him. They possess an encyclopedic knowledge of pre-1973 baseball players due to so many hours spent playing a baseball dice game, manufactured in 1974, featuring realistic probabilities related to actual player skill levels. Manny Sanguillen fielded with a 3, and ran with a 0, fairly typical for a catcher. On this date he was at the barbeque stand in person, signing autographs. I declined to get one, considering it near hypocritical to ask for an autograph from someone of whom I had never heard.
They had all had him sign their hats and ticket stubs earlier in the day. We weren’t sure if he signed them “God Bless, Manny Sanguillen,” or “God Bless Manny Sanguillen.”
I was far more interested in his pulled pork sandwich, and upon approaching the stand, I saw that Manny Sanguillen was still there, still signing autographs for fans even younger than my cousins. Who knows if or how they knew who he was, but god bless Manny Sanguillen for staying through the sixth inning. I was about to ask for his autograph on that basis alone when he stood up, took a bag that an employee had packed with pulled pork sliders, shook out his pockets and moved to leave.
“Heading out, Manny?” “Yeah” his response was brusque, he clearly feared that I would try to hook him in to signing one more god blessed autograph. An employee offered that he never stays as late as the sixth inning. “Thanks for the memories, Manny.”
I got the employee to give me one of the pens he used to sign his autographs. I then asked her to sign my receipt, pretending that I wouldn’t leave the booth until I got some autograph from someone.
After the game, I visited my dear old friend Gena, with whom I had become acquainted twelve years earlier when we were both starting out in New York City. She was a party girl fresh from Puerto Rico. Now she has dreadlocks and a daughter, both of which are beautiful. The five year old announced to me immediately that her name, Inaru, originated as the word for “girl” given by the Indio, the Indian tribe in Puerto Rico.
She said we could do whatever I wanted to do, but in the end we went where she wanted to take me. In this case it was the Hard Rock Café to see the band started by the son of her friends. The mother had been a singer for Rusted Root, the father a professional skateboarder. Their son is 14, and regaled his audience with tales of band camp and appreciative words for how special the night was, and how good the next song would be. Immediately upon walking in, we were accosted by several baby groupies asking us to buy Lighting Box T-shirts. It was surprisingly easy to refuse.
One of the groupies turned out to be, in truth, eleven years old and a boy. Furthermore, he was a member of the band, and according to the lead singer, it was impossible to look away from his drum solo. What was impressive about the drum solo was how self indulgent one can apparently become by the age of eleven. The solo, played to silence from the crowd, sounded remarkably like drum exercises assigned to students in their third year of playing a set. I’m not saying he was bad, I’m just saying I was surprised to see him throw his drumsticks into the crowd to punctuate the end of his roll. Diva.
He also threw his sticks at the end of the set. At this point, I was focused on both the drink in my hand and the sight of Inaru manipulating her Barbie dolls. In truth, about half the people were watching the band bow, and half were watching her. She was pulling focus. Diva. Good girl.
He threw a second pair of sticks. One went to the person I assume to be his mother. The other bounced off the hands of the person in front of me, ticked on our table, and hit me on the arm before skittering off to the next table. I continued to sip my drink. At least this time I hadn’t tried. At least this time no one was watching.
I had finished my drink, closed my tab, and was waiting at the table with Inaru while her mother and fat Man Dee, our ride and tour guide, said goodbyes. The eleven year old Pete Best appeared at the side of our table. His photo ops had ended, and he was offering his services. He had a fistful of Lightning Box stickers in one hand, and a sharpie in the other. “Do you want anything signed?”
I heard what he said but I asked him to repeat the question. “No. I’m good. You‘re supposed to let them come to you.” Yes, he’s eleven. No, I’m not sorry.
If I wasn’t going to beg an autograph from Manny Sanguillen, I sure as hell wasn’t going to indulge a boy begging to give me an autograph. The boy needs to learn that it’s better to leave in the sixth inning. The boy needs to learn that you can run with a 0 if you can learn to catch with a 3. The boy could learn a thing or two from Manny Sanguillen. So could we all.
God Bless Manny Sanguillen.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Don't Embrace the Past...Give it a Great Big Bear Hug
I’ve been cursed with some streak that tells me to tend toward the contrary. If everyone is betting one way, I’m likely to back house against it. If all of my buddies are ogling one woman, I’m likely to point out her flaws and talk to her mother. If everyone goes to the beach, find me in the mountains.
It is because of this streak that I was prepared to hate Wrigley Field. The nation’s second-oldest stadium, the home of the long-suffering Cubs, the Mecca to which all baseball fans must make a pilgrimage. I was prepared to hate it. After having passed the hot mess that is Soldier Field earlier in the day, I had a blog post mentally written about how Chicago is stuck in the past and needs to let it go, and to prove the point they need look no further than the south side of town, where the White Sox tore down Comiskey, and won a championship in the soulless Cellular One Park soon after.
I was prepared to hate it. It took a trip up one ramp and down a flight of stairs to change my mind. The trend in stadium construction for the past 20 years has been to build an old-time stadium. Cities hoping to revitalize a business district would construct a brick ballpark hoping to send fans’ imaginations back to a time when baseball was (supposedly) more pure. Everything but the prices resemble the turn of the century.
Everyone is trying to capture the mystique that lives in Wrigley Field. I arrived for batting practice and was surprised to see that there was still a spot at the wall where I could reach down and touch the ivy. I knew I had to sit in the bleachers, the two concrete countries where home run balls are thrown back and beer is expensive, but still cheap enough to dump on an opposing player should the opportunity present itself.
I write this fully aware of the fact that I’m in danger of losing my reader to the cliché. The sound of the ball hitting the ivy on the wall on the fly gave me chills. Stay with me: Chills literally ran up my arms when I heard the batting practice ball hit the left field wall on the fly. Even from where I stood , above right center, the induplicable sound affected me to my core. It happened three times while Jason Heyward took his batting practice swings. Each time: chills. (And those were his weak shots. His good ones reached the top of the bleachers in right and left. That kid is good.)
I should feel ashamed for having wanted to hate this place. I don’t, but I probably should. I stepped into it and immediately appreciated it for all that it is and always has been: The best baseball stadium ever built. Its architects were so forward-thinking as to create a place wherein there were not only no bad seats, but where there are enough concessions to accommodate a modern club’s merchandising, and enough space for everyone to walk around the concourse and still see the game from every angle. It was built to be flexible enough to have additions put on it, allowing for luxury boxes and even, eventually, the tradition-killing lights. Thankfully, I got to a day game.
Don’t hate this place. Hate the people that populate it. While I have a full appreciation for all of its history, its relevance in the present, and its place in the future, now and forever as a must-see baseball destination, the people inside don’t seem to be able to get over how poorly their team plays. In Pittsburgh, I would see how fans can lovingly hate their team but love their park. The North Side Chicago fans seem to be so incapacitated by so much losing, that instead of appreciating the hallowed halls of Wrigley every chance they get, they never miss an opportunity to point out the ways in which their team ruins it for them. As if the Cubs as they see them aren’t good enough for the field on which they play.
So finally I say Chicago should live more in the past. Relish the curse of the billygoat. Tell loudly the tale of Steve Bartman. Appreciate all you have, for your 104 years of not winning the World Series will never be duplicated by any team. The Red Sox didn’t have the fortitude to make it past 86 years. The south side pansies bailed out after 84. The Diamondback babies weren’t able to make it 4 years without getting good enough to win it all. What the Cubs have is something that no other fans can claim. But the bitches on the North Side are too busy crying in their 8-dollar 12 ounce beers to see that each year that the Cubs graze the basement is one more tick on a record that no one will every break, in a baseball stadium that no one will ever replicate.
When the Cubs were up by a run with two innings left, it became noticeably more difficult to engage anyone in any type of conversation. Everyone became very nervous at the both the prospect of winning, and the possibility that they might throw it away. When their closer enevitably gave up three runs in the ninth, the stands emptied with practiced speed. They left quietly, and they left quickly. Cubs fans, wake up and love the fact that you've thrown away another W! You’re sitting in the stands at the end of DiMaggio’s 56 games. You have a ticket to Ripken’s 2,400th game. But you’re too busy feeling sorry for yourselves to come up with a way to embrace your unique gift. Start throwing back your own team’s home run balls. That will show them to try to mess with tradition.
It is because of this streak that I was prepared to hate Wrigley Field. The nation’s second-oldest stadium, the home of the long-suffering Cubs, the Mecca to which all baseball fans must make a pilgrimage. I was prepared to hate it. After having passed the hot mess that is Soldier Field earlier in the day, I had a blog post mentally written about how Chicago is stuck in the past and needs to let it go, and to prove the point they need look no further than the south side of town, where the White Sox tore down Comiskey, and won a championship in the soulless Cellular One Park soon after.
I was prepared to hate it. It took a trip up one ramp and down a flight of stairs to change my mind. The trend in stadium construction for the past 20 years has been to build an old-time stadium. Cities hoping to revitalize a business district would construct a brick ballpark hoping to send fans’ imaginations back to a time when baseball was (supposedly) more pure. Everything but the prices resemble the turn of the century.
Everyone is trying to capture the mystique that lives in Wrigley Field. I arrived for batting practice and was surprised to see that there was still a spot at the wall where I could reach down and touch the ivy. I knew I had to sit in the bleachers, the two concrete countries where home run balls are thrown back and beer is expensive, but still cheap enough to dump on an opposing player should the opportunity present itself.
I write this fully aware of the fact that I’m in danger of losing my reader to the cliché. The sound of the ball hitting the ivy on the wall on the fly gave me chills. Stay with me: Chills literally ran up my arms when I heard the batting practice ball hit the left field wall on the fly. Even from where I stood , above right center, the induplicable sound affected me to my core. It happened three times while Jason Heyward took his batting practice swings. Each time: chills. (And those were his weak shots. His good ones reached the top of the bleachers in right and left. That kid is good.)
I should feel ashamed for having wanted to hate this place. I don’t, but I probably should. I stepped into it and immediately appreciated it for all that it is and always has been: The best baseball stadium ever built. Its architects were so forward-thinking as to create a place wherein there were not only no bad seats, but where there are enough concessions to accommodate a modern club’s merchandising, and enough space for everyone to walk around the concourse and still see the game from every angle. It was built to be flexible enough to have additions put on it, allowing for luxury boxes and even, eventually, the tradition-killing lights. Thankfully, I got to a day game.
Don’t hate this place. Hate the people that populate it. While I have a full appreciation for all of its history, its relevance in the present, and its place in the future, now and forever as a must-see baseball destination, the people inside don’t seem to be able to get over how poorly their team plays. In Pittsburgh, I would see how fans can lovingly hate their team but love their park. The North Side Chicago fans seem to be so incapacitated by so much losing, that instead of appreciating the hallowed halls of Wrigley every chance they get, they never miss an opportunity to point out the ways in which their team ruins it for them. As if the Cubs as they see them aren’t good enough for the field on which they play.
So finally I say Chicago should live more in the past. Relish the curse of the billygoat. Tell loudly the tale of Steve Bartman. Appreciate all you have, for your 104 years of not winning the World Series will never be duplicated by any team. The Red Sox didn’t have the fortitude to make it past 86 years. The south side pansies bailed out after 84. The Diamondback babies weren’t able to make it 4 years without getting good enough to win it all. What the Cubs have is something that no other fans can claim. But the bitches on the North Side are too busy crying in their 8-dollar 12 ounce beers to see that each year that the Cubs graze the basement is one more tick on a record that no one will every break, in a baseball stadium that no one will ever replicate.
When the Cubs were up by a run with two innings left, it became noticeably more difficult to engage anyone in any type of conversation. Everyone became very nervous at the both the prospect of winning, and the possibility that they might throw it away. When their closer enevitably gave up three runs in the ninth, the stands emptied with practiced speed. They left quietly, and they left quickly. Cubs fans, wake up and love the fact that you've thrown away another W! You’re sitting in the stands at the end of DiMaggio’s 56 games. You have a ticket to Ripken’s 2,400th game. But you’re too busy feeling sorry for yourselves to come up with a way to embrace your unique gift. Start throwing back your own team’s home run balls. That will show them to try to mess with tradition.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Social Currency
A hostel tends to take on the demeanor of its staff. I use them whenever possible when traveling because of the ease with which one can meet people, because they promote things to see in the area that really appeal to me, and because they are cheap, which makes sense when you’re not going to be staying in your room.
The hostel in Minnesota was the most hostile place I’ve come across. It’s desk man gave me a cursory tour with instructions that came off more as admonishments, and with preemptive admonishments that made me wonder how many people had indeed used the staff fridge without asking.
Later, the only person in the common room commented that it must be great for him to get to live there and get paid for it, and he responded that that was why he drank. He apparently is always getting asked questions when he’s not on the clock, so when his shif is over, he hides and gets blitzed. His words. He was pretty tight with his social currency.
Minnesota and I didn’t get off to the best start. My private room was more like a closet. Not in terms of size, but in terms of location. It was situated so that I had to go through the large common room to get to it. Not that I mind, but I thought the people staying in the room might think it was obnoxious. That they might hold my ostentations display of wealth against me. I was sure they’d decide that I was an elitist, and therefore should not be invited out to drink. I thought I would be spending social currency I hadn’t intended to.
The idea of social currency comes to me from Alex. The hostile worker got me of to a poor start with Minneapolis, but my interaction with Alex made for a strong finish. Fast forward forty hours.
I had returned my bike, packed up and strapped on my bag, and was left with five hours to finish off Minneapolis. I passed several coffee shops before finding the right one in which to caffienate and finish writing my Minnesota blog post. In a seat by the window, I carefully chose words to express how superior the Walker Museum of Modern Art and Target Field are to their New York counterparts. (Yes, I said that.)
My eyes drifted toward the window though I was focused only on the correct word cyhoice to describe the effect of the evergreen trees growing beyond the center field fence when a young man with mutton chops walked--almost skipped---let’s just say flew past the window, either adjusting his jacket or dancing, wearing an expression of pure joy. It was beyond a smile, it it wasn’t a beam, it was a wave energy that was noticed, and commented on, by people in the café sitting further from the window than I was. It was unabated and easily mockable, but I instead thought I wouldn’t mind having some of whatever it was that he was riding on.
Wigh three and a half hours left, I packed up, not having satisfactorily completed the post, leaving it to be edited and finished at some point over the six hour bus trip that lay ahead. Ten blocks closer to the train station, I saw the grinning hipster smoking outside a restaurant I’d admired earlier. I had talked to enough people in Minnesota. I was going to let it go, when he started talking to me.
He explained how he is a lone wolf, how is boss complimented his vision, how he was really from St. Paul. I asked him how he wants to change the world. It’s not the type of question I’d even ask of a close friend, but it proved to be the right one. Alex, a teacher of math and chess, wants to reform education. I told him I was a teacher too. He told me he knew there was a reason he had needed to talk to me. He offered to buy me a drink. I had time to spare, and had I refused, I would have been being too frugal with my own social currency.
The reason he likes baseball is the duel between the pitcher and the hitter. He likes the meeting of minds, each trying to make the other make a mistake (This may be the most chess-like aspect of baseball. My words.) However, his favorite sports are football, MMA, and couples ice skating. He was not being funny or ironic. He explained himself and it makes sense. The place was trendy. It looked like it could have opened in New York a few years prior, but the bartender was lacking social currency. It was clear that she was interested in only one kind of currency.
I asked the bartender to put his next drink on my tab, and he refused to let there be a tab in my name. He was the host, he wanted to treat, and he didn’t think I should take away his opportunity to buy me a meal and some beers.
I told him that he didn’t understand. I had given myself rules for the trip, and that I still had not fulfilled my rule wherein I would do one nice thing for someone I didn’t know. I didn’t tell him at the time, but I was starting to feel like that wasn’t the case. I knew this guy. I know this guy.
At that point I decided to tell him that I had seen him earlier that evening. He just about fell out of his chair. He said he remembered waling by the café, happy about his new jacket, and thinking that he did not care what it looked like, he was going to smile as big as he could, because you know what, a smile is a windfall of social currency, and that he would smile that smile, because it would start a ripple effect that would make more people have as good a time as he was having.
I said he had just tested and proved his own theory. Someone said you don’t find friends, you recognize them. I had been lying all week. I had told everyone I talked to that I didn’t have any friends in Minneapolis, but that I wasn’t going to let that stop me from visiting. The natives all appreciated that comment. I think it just had a lot of the right kind of social currency.
The hostel in Minnesota was the most hostile place I’ve come across. It’s desk man gave me a cursory tour with instructions that came off more as admonishments, and with preemptive admonishments that made me wonder how many people had indeed used the staff fridge without asking.
Later, the only person in the common room commented that it must be great for him to get to live there and get paid for it, and he responded that that was why he drank. He apparently is always getting asked questions when he’s not on the clock, so when his shif is over, he hides and gets blitzed. His words. He was pretty tight with his social currency.
Minnesota and I didn’t get off to the best start. My private room was more like a closet. Not in terms of size, but in terms of location. It was situated so that I had to go through the large common room to get to it. Not that I mind, but I thought the people staying in the room might think it was obnoxious. That they might hold my ostentations display of wealth against me. I was sure they’d decide that I was an elitist, and therefore should not be invited out to drink. I thought I would be spending social currency I hadn’t intended to.
The idea of social currency comes to me from Alex. The hostile worker got me of to a poor start with Minneapolis, but my interaction with Alex made for a strong finish. Fast forward forty hours.
I had returned my bike, packed up and strapped on my bag, and was left with five hours to finish off Minneapolis. I passed several coffee shops before finding the right one in which to caffienate and finish writing my Minnesota blog post. In a seat by the window, I carefully chose words to express how superior the Walker Museum of Modern Art and Target Field are to their New York counterparts. (Yes, I said that.)
My eyes drifted toward the window though I was focused only on the correct word cyhoice to describe the effect of the evergreen trees growing beyond the center field fence when a young man with mutton chops walked--almost skipped---let’s just say flew past the window, either adjusting his jacket or dancing, wearing an expression of pure joy. It was beyond a smile, it it wasn’t a beam, it was a wave energy that was noticed, and commented on, by people in the café sitting further from the window than I was. It was unabated and easily mockable, but I instead thought I wouldn’t mind having some of whatever it was that he was riding on.
Wigh three and a half hours left, I packed up, not having satisfactorily completed the post, leaving it to be edited and finished at some point over the six hour bus trip that lay ahead. Ten blocks closer to the train station, I saw the grinning hipster smoking outside a restaurant I’d admired earlier. I had talked to enough people in Minnesota. I was going to let it go, when he started talking to me.
He explained how he is a lone wolf, how is boss complimented his vision, how he was really from St. Paul. I asked him how he wants to change the world. It’s not the type of question I’d even ask of a close friend, but it proved to be the right one. Alex, a teacher of math and chess, wants to reform education. I told him I was a teacher too. He told me he knew there was a reason he had needed to talk to me. He offered to buy me a drink. I had time to spare, and had I refused, I would have been being too frugal with my own social currency.
The reason he likes baseball is the duel between the pitcher and the hitter. He likes the meeting of minds, each trying to make the other make a mistake (This may be the most chess-like aspect of baseball. My words.) However, his favorite sports are football, MMA, and couples ice skating. He was not being funny or ironic. He explained himself and it makes sense. The place was trendy. It looked like it could have opened in New York a few years prior, but the bartender was lacking social currency. It was clear that she was interested in only one kind of currency.
I asked the bartender to put his next drink on my tab, and he refused to let there be a tab in my name. He was the host, he wanted to treat, and he didn’t think I should take away his opportunity to buy me a meal and some beers.
I told him that he didn’t understand. I had given myself rules for the trip, and that I still had not fulfilled my rule wherein I would do one nice thing for someone I didn’t know. I didn’t tell him at the time, but I was starting to feel like that wasn’t the case. I knew this guy. I know this guy.
At that point I decided to tell him that I had seen him earlier that evening. He just about fell out of his chair. He said he remembered waling by the café, happy about his new jacket, and thinking that he did not care what it looked like, he was going to smile as big as he could, because you know what, a smile is a windfall of social currency, and that he would smile that smile, because it would start a ripple effect that would make more people have as good a time as he was having.
I said he had just tested and proved his own theory. Someone said you don’t find friends, you recognize them. I had been lying all week. I had told everyone I talked to that I didn’t have any friends in Minneapolis, but that I wasn’t going to let that stop me from visiting. The natives all appreciated that comment. I think it just had a lot of the right kind of social currency.
Trees as High as a Batter's Eye
It’s a good thing this trip isn’t about baseball. If it were about baseball, It would have hit its peak on its first (second?) day. On this day, I found Target Field, which must be the best baseball stadium in use right now, and on this day, I saw a 10th inning walk-off home run. It was the first walk-off hit at Target Field, and for Jim Thome, it was the shot that tied Babe Ruth’s record for the most walk-off home runs in history. It’s a good thing this isn’t about baseball.
What it is about is meeting people in different places and learning more about them, and about their city, through baseball. Spending time in Minneapolis has shown me that this city is meticulously planned. It isn’t a large city, but its streets are spacious and it is easy to get around.
In New York, we tend to think that New York has the best of everything, in particular art, architecture, beauty, money, and fashion. The people of Minneapolis aren’t going to take fashion away from New York, but a visit to the Walker Museum of Modern Art has me thinking that all of the other categories are up for grabs. It is a more modern building than the MOMA, which commissions more artwork than anywhere else in the country, and displays it in a space that is as eye-catching as the Guggenheim, but which provides a perfect setting for installations to be appreciated. It has always seemed to me that the Guggenheim has overshadowed every piece of art I’ve ever seen there. The MOMA, even in its new space, hasn’t got enough space for everything it wants to hang. The Walker is more advanced, architecturally, technologically, and conceptually. It does not presume that its visitors know and love art when they enter. It ensures that they do by the time they leave.
I am surprised that I’m as impressed by Target Field. It manages to pay respect to the team’s past without trying to recapture it. It eschews the trend of building a stadium that looks and feels like a baseball stadium of the early 20th century. It is firmly planted in the 21st, and it indeed may come to define ballparks built in this era. Steel and glass live side by side with wood and concrete, and in center field, a row of evergreen trees incorporates the timber of Twins country. While ivy grows on the wall in Wrigley Field and Citizens’ Bank Park, These trees--which now stand ten feet taller than the center field fence, will eventually grow to be as high as the second-level concourse behind it.
What it is about is meeting people in different places and learning more about them, and about their city, through baseball. Spending time in Minneapolis has shown me that this city is meticulously planned. It isn’t a large city, but its streets are spacious and it is easy to get around.
In New York, we tend to think that New York has the best of everything, in particular art, architecture, beauty, money, and fashion. The people of Minneapolis aren’t going to take fashion away from New York, but a visit to the Walker Museum of Modern Art has me thinking that all of the other categories are up for grabs. It is a more modern building than the MOMA, which commissions more artwork than anywhere else in the country, and displays it in a space that is as eye-catching as the Guggenheim, but which provides a perfect setting for installations to be appreciated. It has always seemed to me that the Guggenheim has overshadowed every piece of art I’ve ever seen there. The MOMA, even in its new space, hasn’t got enough space for everything it wants to hang. The Walker is more advanced, architecturally, technologically, and conceptually. It does not presume that its visitors know and love art when they enter. It ensures that they do by the time they leave.
I am surprised that I’m as impressed by Target Field. It manages to pay respect to the team’s past without trying to recapture it. It eschews the trend of building a stadium that looks and feels like a baseball stadium of the early 20th century. It is firmly planted in the 21st, and it indeed may come to define ballparks built in this era. Steel and glass live side by side with wood and concrete, and in center field, a row of evergreen trees incorporates the timber of Twins country. While ivy grows on the wall in Wrigley Field and Citizens’ Bank Park, These trees--which now stand ten feet taller than the center field fence, will eventually grow to be as high as the second-level concourse behind it.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
The Ghosts are Out...For Now
Although the trip technically started last night, it still felt hypothetical. I've been to Yankee Stadium enough that it seems normal. I might as well have been going to work the next day. I was still trying to wrap my head around the fact that the following night I'd be seeing a different game in a different city, in an even newer stadium.
Cosmo from New York, in addition to having one of the best Yankee tattoos I've seen, agrees with me that the new Yankee Stadium feels like home. Neither of us were prepared to love it as much as we do. Having grown up in the old Yankee Stadium, I was prepared to miss it every time I stepped into the new one, feeling forlorn over lost youth and fading memories.
Cosmo, who I met at the game last night, but who happens to have grown up minutes away from me, said the reason he likes baseball is because it’s something that has united the generations of his family. He still watches games with his grandmother and his father, and it is something that has not only brought them closer together, but hearing them talk about the players they had seen in their youth has made him feel closer to, and better understand, the history of his family and his country.
As it turns out, It wasn’t hard to find people who think there are better places to watch baseball gaes than my beloved house of hardball, the new Yankee Stadium. I’m used to Mets fans comparing it unfavorably to Citi field. I wouldn’t expect any diferent from them. Mets fans hate. It’s not their fault. Most of them were born into it.
But last night, a Yankee fan wearing a Pittsburgh Pirates jersey (This may make him just a half a Yankee fan) told me that the Pittsburgh stadium is better. His explanation led me to believe that he's talking about the surrounding area, and not the stadium itself. His description had Alex and me looking forward to our visit there next weekend, but it didn't go so far as to persuade me that he truly believed the stadium itself is better. I'll see for myself soon enough. (He said the reason he likes baseball is because of its continuity.)
A Tigers fan said that Comerica park is more fan-friendly. His explanation led me to believe that it’s more non-fan friendly, as he cited the ferris wheel, the speed pitch game, and the kids’ zone as evidence. It seems to me that those things are there for the people that don’t want to watch the baseball game. In my eyes, it’s a credit to the house that George built that no matter where you are, the focus is on the game.
Both of them agreed that the White Sox’ stadium is the worst, though. I can believe that. I’ll get to see for myself soon enough.
As much as I love that stadium, I will allow all the others, and the fans therein, to persuade me otherwise. Last night’s game could be seen as a sign that it may be a good time to take a pause from the pinstripes. With no offense to speak of, two injuries sustained by all-stars and two double plays caused by our captain, it was evident that the ghosts were not in the house last night. Perhaps they’ve flown somewhere else for a while, just as I have.
Tonight’s game: Twins vs. White Sox, Target Field, Minneapolis
Current Book: The Poetry of Robert Penn Warren
Cosmo from New York, in addition to having one of the best Yankee tattoos I've seen, agrees with me that the new Yankee Stadium feels like home. Neither of us were prepared to love it as much as we do. Having grown up in the old Yankee Stadium, I was prepared to miss it every time I stepped into the new one, feeling forlorn over lost youth and fading memories.
Cosmo, who I met at the game last night, but who happens to have grown up minutes away from me, said the reason he likes baseball is because it’s something that has united the generations of his family. He still watches games with his grandmother and his father, and it is something that has not only brought them closer together, but hearing them talk about the players they had seen in their youth has made him feel closer to, and better understand, the history of his family and his country.
As it turns out, It wasn’t hard to find people who think there are better places to watch baseball gaes than my beloved house of hardball, the new Yankee Stadium. I’m used to Mets fans comparing it unfavorably to Citi field. I wouldn’t expect any diferent from them. Mets fans hate. It’s not their fault. Most of them were born into it.
But last night, a Yankee fan wearing a Pittsburgh Pirates jersey (This may make him just a half a Yankee fan) told me that the Pittsburgh stadium is better. His explanation led me to believe that he's talking about the surrounding area, and not the stadium itself. His description had Alex and me looking forward to our visit there next weekend, but it didn't go so far as to persuade me that he truly believed the stadium itself is better. I'll see for myself soon enough. (He said the reason he likes baseball is because of its continuity.)
A Tigers fan said that Comerica park is more fan-friendly. His explanation led me to believe that it’s more non-fan friendly, as he cited the ferris wheel, the speed pitch game, and the kids’ zone as evidence. It seems to me that those things are there for the people that don’t want to watch the baseball game. In my eyes, it’s a credit to the house that George built that no matter where you are, the focus is on the game.
Both of them agreed that the White Sox’ stadium is the worst, though. I can believe that. I’ll get to see for myself soon enough.
As much as I love that stadium, I will allow all the others, and the fans therein, to persuade me otherwise. Last night’s game could be seen as a sign that it may be a good time to take a pause from the pinstripes. With no offense to speak of, two injuries sustained by all-stars and two double plays caused by our captain, it was evident that the ghosts were not in the house last night. Perhaps they’ve flown somewhere else for a while, just as I have.
Tonight’s game: Twins vs. White Sox, Target Field, Minneapolis
Current Book: The Poetry of Robert Penn Warren
Monday, August 16, 2010
Why Do You Like Baseball?
I have never been able to answer this question in any satisfying way. Why ask? You might as well ask why one likes grass, or people, or wheels. Maybe the questions you can't answer are the ones that most need to be asked. Each time I've been a question like that, it has made me meaningfully consider a thing I had previously taken as an entitlement.
As a journalist and as a teacher, I have been shown that when one asks any question, one often finds the answers to many others.
Starting today, I’m setting out on a 9-city baseball road trip to ask the question, “Why do you like baseball?” While asking that question of people who root for different teams in different cities, I expect to find the answers to other questions too. (I suppose I could have called this trip “Eat, Play, Glove.”)
Once when asked the question, “Why is baseball your favorite sport?” I answered that I like how its rules haven’t changed in 37 years.** (To further this point, half of Major League Baseball teams don’t acknowledge that rule change.)
I like rules, and as a teacher, I like to make rules. As a teacher, I've learned that all rules must be established before the game begins.
Rules for this roadtrip:
1. I will root, root, root for the home team.
2. I will read one book for each city I visit. It may be in that city, or on the way to that city.
3. I will write one blog post for each city. You’re welcome.
4. I will do at least one thing other than see a baseball game in each city. I will determine what that thing will be by asking locals what I should do.
5. I will do one kind thing for one person I do not know in each city.
6. I will stick to my budget. I have never done this on any vacation. Ever.
7. I will not drive any cars. I will hail a cab only when safety is a concern (I’m looking at you, Detroit.)
8. I will not buy anything to bring back. My ticket stubs are my only mementos.
9. I will not make the third out at third base.
My first and last stops on this trip will be Yankee Stadium. I am aware that in other parts of the country, I will have to endure home team fans me for being a fan of the evil empire. I will try to defend my choice without being defensive. I will allow them to try to persuade me that the new Yankee Stadium is not the greatest place to watch a baseball game that has ever been built. Tonight I will try to find someone that doesn’t agree with that statement.
TONIGHT’S GAME: Yankees vs. Tigers, Yankee Stadium
Book: Take Me Out To the Ballgame: A History of Basebal in America by Timothy B. Shutt
_____________________________________
**In 1973, the American League adopted the DH. If that doesn‘t seem significant, compare it with our other major American sports. The NFL tweaks its rules yearly, changing definitions or interpretations of what is or isn’t a catch, where the goal line is or isn’t , and whether one type of contact is or isn’t a penalty. Three years ago, the NHL overhauled not just its rules, but the lines on its playing surface. This has changed the game in hopes that the American public would latch on more to a sport that is more has become more offensive, more exciting. It is more exciting, but the NHL is still waiting for the American public to realize that. My favorite rule change is that last year the NBA acknowledged something that had already been accepted by players, fans, and referees since 1989: that if a player is on his way to the basket with the ball, he can take more than one step without being called for traveling. I choose 1989 because that is the year after I was called for traveling on my way to scoring what would have been my first 2 points in a junior high basketball game. Some say I wasn’t a good player. I say I was ahead of my time. Here’s hoping that on this trip, I can stick to my own rules as written, and avoid being penalized for traveling.
As a journalist and as a teacher, I have been shown that when one asks any question, one often finds the answers to many others.
Starting today, I’m setting out on a 9-city baseball road trip to ask the question, “Why do you like baseball?” While asking that question of people who root for different teams in different cities, I expect to find the answers to other questions too. (I suppose I could have called this trip “Eat, Play, Glove.”)
Once when asked the question, “Why is baseball your favorite sport?” I answered that I like how its rules haven’t changed in 37 years.** (To further this point, half of Major League Baseball teams don’t acknowledge that rule change.)
I like rules, and as a teacher, I like to make rules. As a teacher, I've learned that all rules must be established before the game begins.
Rules for this roadtrip:
1. I will root, root, root for the home team.
2. I will read one book for each city I visit. It may be in that city, or on the way to that city.
3. I will write one blog post for each city. You’re welcome.
4. I will do at least one thing other than see a baseball game in each city. I will determine what that thing will be by asking locals what I should do.
5. I will do one kind thing for one person I do not know in each city.
6. I will stick to my budget. I have never done this on any vacation. Ever.
7. I will not drive any cars. I will hail a cab only when safety is a concern (I’m looking at you, Detroit.)
8. I will not buy anything to bring back. My ticket stubs are my only mementos.
9. I will not make the third out at third base.
My first and last stops on this trip will be Yankee Stadium. I am aware that in other parts of the country, I will have to endure home team fans me for being a fan of the evil empire. I will try to defend my choice without being defensive. I will allow them to try to persuade me that the new Yankee Stadium is not the greatest place to watch a baseball game that has ever been built. Tonight I will try to find someone that doesn’t agree with that statement.
TONIGHT’S GAME: Yankees vs. Tigers, Yankee Stadium
Book: Take Me Out To the Ballgame: A History of Basebal in America by Timothy B. Shutt
_____________________________________
**In 1973, the American League adopted the DH. If that doesn‘t seem significant, compare it with our other major American sports. The NFL tweaks its rules yearly, changing definitions or interpretations of what is or isn’t a catch, where the goal line is or isn’t , and whether one type of contact is or isn’t a penalty. Three years ago, the NHL overhauled not just its rules, but the lines on its playing surface. This has changed the game in hopes that the American public would latch on more to a sport that is more has become more offensive, more exciting. It is more exciting, but the NHL is still waiting for the American public to realize that. My favorite rule change is that last year the NBA acknowledged something that had already been accepted by players, fans, and referees since 1989: that if a player is on his way to the basket with the ball, he can take more than one step without being called for traveling. I choose 1989 because that is the year after I was called for traveling on my way to scoring what would have been my first 2 points in a junior high basketball game. Some say I wasn’t a good player. I say I was ahead of my time. Here’s hoping that on this trip, I can stick to my own rules as written, and avoid being penalized for traveling.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
iRony
It’s not a simple thing to teach the concept of irony to sixteen year olds at a struggling high school. I meet well-educated adults who aren’t able to wrap their heads around the idea. Still, I would try.
With a lesson on this complicated concept this early in the school year, though, I may have bitten off more than we all could chew. My first class on the topic did not hit home. I talked to a fellow teacher about it during common planning.
“What I do is play the Alanis Morissette song,” said Cara, a colleague who has one year of experience on me.
I have had a problem with this song since I first heard it. I was literally offended by the Canadian's crackerbarrel interpretation of my pet literary tool. What I found most disgusting about it was the fact that its popularity would cause a whole generation of pop music loving fans to misunderstand the definition of irony. I imagined my younger sisters (forced to rely on the radio as a role model due to my decision to live at college instead of at home) growing up thinking, “I was making an omelet and I dropped the eggs. Isn’t that ironic? Don’t you think?”
Who would even teach them how to make an omelet? Somehow, they made it through.
As far as the class went, I wasn‘t desperate yet, but another class like the previous one, and I would be. I found my copy of "Jagged Little Pill" and put it on my iPod touch.
In class I soldiered on. I announced, ”Alright, I’m going to play for you the corniest song in the world. You’re not going to believe that we used to listen to this crap. It was very popular about thirteen years ago. I mean, it was really popular. All over the place. MTV played it, and then played commercials that made fun of it. And you might make fun of it too. I did. Really, it’s the least cool song ever. But, it’s called ‘Ironic‘.”
As it played, I asked them to list things the song described, and we discussed why those things were or were not ironic. After third period, one student asked me to write down the artists’ name so he could find the song and put it on his own iPod. I wondered if he was being ironic.
After fourth period, I had to leave my classroom while another teacher taught a freshman health class in my space. This teacher had no control over his class. I would come back, and if the desks weren’t broken, they had been written on. I hid the speakers, put the iPod in my jacket along with my phone, and left to go to common planning, which was held in a large meeting room, Room 123.
Common planning ran late and when the bell rang, I left the room quickly. I didn’t realize until later that I had left my jacket in the room. The room was normally locked, so I didn't think it was very urgent. I waited until after school to retrieve it. When I got there, the jacket had been moved, and the pockets were empty. No phone. No iPod.
The next day I told my first few classes what had happened. I asked them to tell me what was ironic about my story.
“Aren’t you mad?”
“Of course I’m upset. Do you expect me to start yelling about it?”
“I’d be mad.”
“Well, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t any of you. You have a solid alibi.”
“So you want to know what’s alibi about it?”
“Ironic. Alibi is a story. Like an excuse that proves you weren’t at the scene of a crime. Ironic is…who can tell me?”
“It’s like when you being sarcastic.”
“Yes, that’s part of it, but that’s not the whole story.”
“That’s not the whole alibi?”
“Not exactly. Let’s talk about alibis in a few minutes. Let’s stick with irony now. What is ironic about the story I just told you?”
“Well, you took the iPod with you so it wouldn’t get stolen from this room, but it got stolen from the place you took it to.”
That is an example of the fourth best thing about being a teacher. The first is the benefits. The second is the summer months. The third is the large number of young females that become co-workers a yearly basis. And then comes the feeling of knowing that you can see the effects of your work helping people to get smarter and know more.
Not that that would bring back my fucking iPod Touch. Of course, I had brought that sweet piece of equipment to school in the first place so that I could teach my little darlings about irony. And for better or for worse, my students, if anyone cared to ask, would have one solid and unforgettable example of irony. So, I suppose, I had accomplished my goal.
Nine months later, I sat in the Denver International airport on a three-hour layover. My gate had no outlets, but I found one that did, plugged in, and finished writing a story that by this time you may have already read. Maybe you’ll read it next. You don’t have to go in order. While typing, I often look above my monitor to monitor my surroundings. I don't like to miss things.
Normally there is nothing to see anyway. But this time, I spotted a black video iPod on the ground near the next bank of seats. I saved my work, walked over and picked it up. 80 Gigs. If someone else had picked it up, they might not have done so with the benevolent intentions that I now had. I put it on the seat next to me so that when the owner inevitably came back to retrieve it, I could heroically show the worried traveler that I had found it and safely return it to her. Or him.
I resumed writing and looking around, but he or she never came back. Many people passed, and some people teased my by looking around in that area, but before a few seconds passed, each time, each person proved to be merely looking for a place to plug in too. A half hour passed and I wondered if there really would be any benefit to a lost and found at an airport. Its owner would now be 30,000 feet in the air and on his or her way to a place where iPods grew on trees.
The iPod told me that its name was Stacy’s iPod, and then it told me that she had eclectic and fantastic taste in music. She had Green Day and Tracy Chapman on that iPod, and I was just returning from a trip on which I saw each of those acts in concert. She had Sufjan Stevens, who I had always been curious about, and Me’shell N’dege Ocello, who I had forgotten about. She had 10.9 gigs still available, and the other 29 were taken up by mixes, including one specially for Volvo drivers, and one specially for women. She had three episodes of Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog, and three seasons of The Wire.
At this point it would be more accurate to say I had all these things. I would not try to find the lost and found, or the owner.
Once on my own plane and headed home, I saw that her contacts were mostly international, and that her calendar consisted of flight after flight, followed by daily reminders of what city she was scheduled to wake up in or travel to. There was no discernible home base, but she had clocks set for California, Amsterdam, and Melbourne. She kept track of birthdays, and would soon call make a call from Barcelona to a set of twins turning 47. At least, she probably would have done so if she had been more careful in Denver. I was certain, though, that Stacy would have all of this information backed up on her Macbook. She had International Talk Like A Pirate Day in her calendar, and that made me wish that I had met Stacy.
Not really, though, because if I had, she would have taken Stacy’s iPod back.
I had a simulacrum of Stacy’s life. I wanted Stacy’s life. I wanted to make her bi-weekly call to Stephanie. I wanted to go to the training session in San Diego and the sales conference in Brussels. Before Stacy’s video iPod fell near my lap, I had been happy with my two week trip to the Pacific Northwest and my replacement iPod. It was a Shuffle.
Stacy didn’t even watch movies. She had pod casts from The Economist, and took advice on how boomers should protect their retirement investments. Stacy would easily be able to replace her iPod and everything on it.
I wished that when I was younger, I had made the same careful choices Stacy had. She had worked hard and kept herself organized in college, had paid her dues, made her calls, and earned her place on the ladder. I could have been Stacy if I had had a mother like Stacy had had, who inculculated her with the value of savings and wise investments.
Stacy’s mom was not listed in her contacts. At least, she wasn’t listed as “Mom.” No Dad either. Perhaps her iCal was just for business. Perhaps they weren't close. After all, why would the twins’ birthdays be listed on a business calendar? Why didn’t Stacy have any photos? Why doesn’t Stacy have any appointments on any days, past or present, past 6 p.m. local time? Why is she spending Thanksgiving in Denmark?
Where are Stacy’s priorities, really? My parents showed me that what someone did when they went home was more important than what they did between their commutes. Why didn’t Stacy have a home? Why was she always commuting? Who the hell loses their iPod in the airport anyway? Why did she have 10.9 gigabytes left and why did she use none of it for photos of people that she cares about? Who cared about her? How many people had Stacy’s birthday on their iPods? Did Stephanie even look forward to those bi-weekly calls? I’ll bet she suffered through them then scoffed at them loudly with the co-workers in her Australian office as they all left a little early to get drinks and talk about things Stacy wished she was a part of.
I bet that Stacy had never taught anyone the definition of irony, and I was beginning to doubt whether she would even have been able to tell me what irony was. I would be able to teach her, if I were compelled to find her. She had lost her chance. I was compelled to find her for just a moment when I saw that she had Jagged Little Pill on her iPod.
Then I became sure that if I had found her to talk to her about irony, that Stacy would pretend to listen to me, and would then tell me irony was a black fly in her chardonnay. And soon after that, she would tell me that actually, she preferred shiraz. What she wouldn’t say is that she drank shiraz unapproached in hotel bar after hotel bar in cities she visited frequently enough that the bartenders would recognize her but would pretend not to so they could avoid the obligatory conversations that would come along with that type of acquaintanceship. I’ll bet all they wanted was Stacy’s tip. I wondered where she parks her Volvo.
And then I thought about the Touch. I wondered what had happened in that dark quiet room. It was supposed to have been locked. Had a student snuck out of class and into the room and found himself unexpectedly rewarded for his truancy? Or had it been a janitor who helped himself when he found his favorite secret break spot suddenly more interesting? Had he shuffled through my life? Had they liked the way I looked, smiling with my family at Thanksgiving? Had they bothered to find out what was on it, or had it gone straight to the fence?
With a lesson on this complicated concept this early in the school year, though, I may have bitten off more than we all could chew. My first class on the topic did not hit home. I talked to a fellow teacher about it during common planning.
“What I do is play the Alanis Morissette song,” said Cara, a colleague who has one year of experience on me.
I have had a problem with this song since I first heard it. I was literally offended by the Canadian's crackerbarrel interpretation of my pet literary tool. What I found most disgusting about it was the fact that its popularity would cause a whole generation of pop music loving fans to misunderstand the definition of irony. I imagined my younger sisters (forced to rely on the radio as a role model due to my decision to live at college instead of at home) growing up thinking, “I was making an omelet and I dropped the eggs. Isn’t that ironic? Don’t you think?”
Who would even teach them how to make an omelet? Somehow, they made it through.
As far as the class went, I wasn‘t desperate yet, but another class like the previous one, and I would be. I found my copy of "Jagged Little Pill" and put it on my iPod touch.
In class I soldiered on. I announced, ”Alright, I’m going to play for you the corniest song in the world. You’re not going to believe that we used to listen to this crap. It was very popular about thirteen years ago. I mean, it was really popular. All over the place. MTV played it, and then played commercials that made fun of it. And you might make fun of it too. I did. Really, it’s the least cool song ever. But, it’s called ‘Ironic‘.”
As it played, I asked them to list things the song described, and we discussed why those things were or were not ironic. After third period, one student asked me to write down the artists’ name so he could find the song and put it on his own iPod. I wondered if he was being ironic.
After fourth period, I had to leave my classroom while another teacher taught a freshman health class in my space. This teacher had no control over his class. I would come back, and if the desks weren’t broken, they had been written on. I hid the speakers, put the iPod in my jacket along with my phone, and left to go to common planning, which was held in a large meeting room, Room 123.
Common planning ran late and when the bell rang, I left the room quickly. I didn’t realize until later that I had left my jacket in the room. The room was normally locked, so I didn't think it was very urgent. I waited until after school to retrieve it. When I got there, the jacket had been moved, and the pockets were empty. No phone. No iPod.
The next day I told my first few classes what had happened. I asked them to tell me what was ironic about my story.
“Aren’t you mad?”
“Of course I’m upset. Do you expect me to start yelling about it?”
“I’d be mad.”
“Well, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t any of you. You have a solid alibi.”
“So you want to know what’s alibi about it?”
“Ironic. Alibi is a story. Like an excuse that proves you weren’t at the scene of a crime. Ironic is…who can tell me?”
“It’s like when you being sarcastic.”
“Yes, that’s part of it, but that’s not the whole story.”
“That’s not the whole alibi?”
“Not exactly. Let’s talk about alibis in a few minutes. Let’s stick with irony now. What is ironic about the story I just told you?”
“Well, you took the iPod with you so it wouldn’t get stolen from this room, but it got stolen from the place you took it to.”
That is an example of the fourth best thing about being a teacher. The first is the benefits. The second is the summer months. The third is the large number of young females that become co-workers a yearly basis. And then comes the feeling of knowing that you can see the effects of your work helping people to get smarter and know more.
Not that that would bring back my fucking iPod Touch. Of course, I had brought that sweet piece of equipment to school in the first place so that I could teach my little darlings about irony. And for better or for worse, my students, if anyone cared to ask, would have one solid and unforgettable example of irony. So, I suppose, I had accomplished my goal.
Nine months later, I sat in the Denver International airport on a three-hour layover. My gate had no outlets, but I found one that did, plugged in, and finished writing a story that by this time you may have already read. Maybe you’ll read it next. You don’t have to go in order. While typing, I often look above my monitor to monitor my surroundings. I don't like to miss things.
Normally there is nothing to see anyway. But this time, I spotted a black video iPod on the ground near the next bank of seats. I saved my work, walked over and picked it up. 80 Gigs. If someone else had picked it up, they might not have done so with the benevolent intentions that I now had. I put it on the seat next to me so that when the owner inevitably came back to retrieve it, I could heroically show the worried traveler that I had found it and safely return it to her. Or him.
I resumed writing and looking around, but he or she never came back. Many people passed, and some people teased my by looking around in that area, but before a few seconds passed, each time, each person proved to be merely looking for a place to plug in too. A half hour passed and I wondered if there really would be any benefit to a lost and found at an airport. Its owner would now be 30,000 feet in the air and on his or her way to a place where iPods grew on trees.
The iPod told me that its name was Stacy’s iPod, and then it told me that she had eclectic and fantastic taste in music. She had Green Day and Tracy Chapman on that iPod, and I was just returning from a trip on which I saw each of those acts in concert. She had Sufjan Stevens, who I had always been curious about, and Me’shell N’dege Ocello, who I had forgotten about. She had 10.9 gigs still available, and the other 29 were taken up by mixes, including one specially for Volvo drivers, and one specially for women. She had three episodes of Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog, and three seasons of The Wire.
At this point it would be more accurate to say I had all these things. I would not try to find the lost and found, or the owner.
Once on my own plane and headed home, I saw that her contacts were mostly international, and that her calendar consisted of flight after flight, followed by daily reminders of what city she was scheduled to wake up in or travel to. There was no discernible home base, but she had clocks set for California, Amsterdam, and Melbourne. She kept track of birthdays, and would soon call make a call from Barcelona to a set of twins turning 47. At least, she probably would have done so if she had been more careful in Denver. I was certain, though, that Stacy would have all of this information backed up on her Macbook. She had International Talk Like A Pirate Day in her calendar, and that made me wish that I had met Stacy.
Not really, though, because if I had, she would have taken Stacy’s iPod back.
I had a simulacrum of Stacy’s life. I wanted Stacy’s life. I wanted to make her bi-weekly call to Stephanie. I wanted to go to the training session in San Diego and the sales conference in Brussels. Before Stacy’s video iPod fell near my lap, I had been happy with my two week trip to the Pacific Northwest and my replacement iPod. It was a Shuffle.
Stacy didn’t even watch movies. She had pod casts from The Economist, and took advice on how boomers should protect their retirement investments. Stacy would easily be able to replace her iPod and everything on it.
I wished that when I was younger, I had made the same careful choices Stacy had. She had worked hard and kept herself organized in college, had paid her dues, made her calls, and earned her place on the ladder. I could have been Stacy if I had had a mother like Stacy had had, who inculculated her with the value of savings and wise investments.
Stacy’s mom was not listed in her contacts. At least, she wasn’t listed as “Mom.” No Dad either. Perhaps her iCal was just for business. Perhaps they weren't close. After all, why would the twins’ birthdays be listed on a business calendar? Why didn’t Stacy have any photos? Why doesn’t Stacy have any appointments on any days, past or present, past 6 p.m. local time? Why is she spending Thanksgiving in Denmark?
Where are Stacy’s priorities, really? My parents showed me that what someone did when they went home was more important than what they did between their commutes. Why didn’t Stacy have a home? Why was she always commuting? Who the hell loses their iPod in the airport anyway? Why did she have 10.9 gigabytes left and why did she use none of it for photos of people that she cares about? Who cared about her? How many people had Stacy’s birthday on their iPods? Did Stephanie even look forward to those bi-weekly calls? I’ll bet she suffered through them then scoffed at them loudly with the co-workers in her Australian office as they all left a little early to get drinks and talk about things Stacy wished she was a part of.
I bet that Stacy had never taught anyone the definition of irony, and I was beginning to doubt whether she would even have been able to tell me what irony was. I would be able to teach her, if I were compelled to find her. She had lost her chance. I was compelled to find her for just a moment when I saw that she had Jagged Little Pill on her iPod.
Then I became sure that if I had found her to talk to her about irony, that Stacy would pretend to listen to me, and would then tell me irony was a black fly in her chardonnay. And soon after that, she would tell me that actually, she preferred shiraz. What she wouldn’t say is that she drank shiraz unapproached in hotel bar after hotel bar in cities she visited frequently enough that the bartenders would recognize her but would pretend not to so they could avoid the obligatory conversations that would come along with that type of acquaintanceship. I’ll bet all they wanted was Stacy’s tip. I wondered where she parks her Volvo.
And then I thought about the Touch. I wondered what had happened in that dark quiet room. It was supposed to have been locked. Had a student snuck out of class and into the room and found himself unexpectedly rewarded for his truancy? Or had it been a janitor who helped himself when he found his favorite secret break spot suddenly more interesting? Had he shuffled through my life? Had they liked the way I looked, smiling with my family at Thanksgiving? Had they bothered to find out what was on it, or had it gone straight to the fence?
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Blah, blah, blog
I always saw writing for free as beneath me. I've been a writer by trade since the internet was the information superhighway. Why would I Blog?
More importantly, who would care? Why does it matter to you what I do on my vacation? What I eat for breakfast? What I think about Michael Jackson.
Then my agent suggested starting a blog as a way to promote the release of my upcoming book. Okay. I'm listening. Are you?
This is me jumping in. Cannonball. Corkscrew. Can Opener.
More importantly, who would care? Why does it matter to you what I do on my vacation? What I eat for breakfast? What I think about Michael Jackson.
Then my agent suggested starting a blog as a way to promote the release of my upcoming book. Okay. I'm listening. Are you?
This is me jumping in. Cannonball. Corkscrew. Can Opener.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Book-Chapter 3
Dana and I got to the elevator at the same time. He pushed the button. He was the only person I knew on the floor anymore, besides Old Willie down the hall, and Old Willie only acknowledges me about half the time. Dana was a good guy. We went to the same gym. We went to each other’s parties. I had first met him in the same spot two years earlier.
I had thought of him as something more than all the other elevator button buddies for the past year. At that time, we ran into each other in a crowd at the Seaport. I had gone to the Seaport for a free G. Love concert. He had gone because it was nice Sunday and he needed to wander and he just followed the music because he was still tweaked out on two hits of ecstasy from the night before. He mixed well with my friends. Someone said it was beautiful. I think it was him. At the time the coincidence seemed to be the universe nodding to us to tell us we should be friends, but we hadn’t yet realized that was just how things happen in this world. And it was by no means magical. But it did make us better friends. Ecstasy is a powerful drug. It makes you friends with other people.
It had been a while since we’d sought each other out for parties, but there we were at the elevator buttons. We both had an interest in keeping the friendship alive, and we both knew that, tired as we were, if we didn’t speak to one another, the friendship could spiral towards acquaintanceship. We would become each other’s Old Willies.
“Hey Dana.”
“Good Morning.”
“How you?”
“Alright. What you been up to?”
Ball in my court. Well played, man. I told him I was on my way to the second rehearsal of The Women. It was positively the theatrical event of the moment and I was hired to help out. The director, Scott Eliot, had been one of my favorite directors for a few years running. I admired him so much that I was willing to work for next to nothing to run his errands and was thoroughly convinced that I was experiencing a step forward in terms of the career. In the first day, I had already learned so much from him. I learned he liked his bagel before his banana and his coffee iced. He was willing to live with Starbucks. He was able to be vaguely specific when giving direction, and seem communicative and articulate with sentences that were punctuated by entire clauses: “You know what I mean? Does that make sense? You agree with me, right?
But Dana wasn’t gay, and therefore wouldn’t be impressed by Scot. I wasn’t either, so I told him something that might impress him while conveying the fact that although I was in fact working on Broadway, I was not, in fact homosexual. I gave up a few of the names of the actresses. It worked. Touche, my friend. Ball’s in your court, now.
“She’s so hot. You’re working with her? Like, you’re going to see her now?”
“Want me to give her your number?”
The elevator had arrived and taken us to the lobby, and we got to the corner and we had saved friendship. He went down the street, ostensibly to mail a letter. There was a closer mailbox in the other direction, but I didn’t tell him that. He probably knew. Good match, man.
I didn’t want to be late but I really didn’t want to be hungry. I stopped at the sidewalkside bagel and lox place. It didn't have a name, or a door, but the facing surrounding the opening had stickers on it. Large, cup-shaped stickers reading “Fresh Squeezed Orange Juice $2.99” I called it the breakfast store, and the previous year it had been the smallest Pomme Frites in New York City, and before that it had been a Belgian waffle stand. I never patronized in any of its incarnations but when I saw they were making lox and bagel sandwiches, I became a regular. It took me three weeks to realize that it was, in fact, operated by twins, and that I had not been flirting with the same girl every day. Apparently, only one flirted back, and it was not just one bipolar girl, as was understandably my assumption. I didn’t know their names, but I imagine them to start with the same letter.
The grumpy one didn’t have change for a twenty and she had to go to the shoeshine shop next door for smaller bills. I waited, though I knew I had no time for this. I looked down the street and up at the Twin Towers, and I was again struck by their size. Five years I’ve lived right down the street, and still I can't get over them. “If they were lain on their sides, would they reach my building?,” I had often wondered but had never sought evidence to bring about the unavoidably unexciting end to the wondering.
I think they’re just about tall enough to crush me if they were to fall. Some days I can walk through the Trade Center plaza without thinking about it, but if I let my eyes wander up, I’m done. I’m walking slow and gawking like a tourist.
She came back but not soon enough. By the time she handed me the money, Dana was there. He had mailed the letter, I guess, and sought a sandwich and coffee, just like me, and we talked about what a find the place was. Our whole breakfast for $3.25, after tax. We talked about the girl loud enough for her to hear, and she may or may not have had enough of a grasp of English to understand, but we both understood that we had the same flirting game with the girl, and now we’re all in on it. We’d now gone beyond saving the friendship; we’d reminded each other that we were neighbors, in this together. We New Yorkers love our neighborhood secrets. It was no longer new for us, so even and maybe especially at this time, we wanted something to help us feel at home.
Dana’s twin must have made his sandwich, and his eyes must have drifted down the block and up the towers. He’d been in the neighborhood as long as I had, but used to work in one of the towers, and was less enchanted by them since his company moved to Broad Street. That was even closer, and less of an elevator ride. And the money is better, even if the economy is for shit these days as compared to then. It’s just harder to make a dollar now. Fucking Millenium.
“Fuck the view, I have it better now.” And just as he re-thought that very though, he saw an airplane fly into the top of his former tower. And naturally, this took a moment to process. And, naturally, this moment felt like it lasted much longer than it, in actuality, did. He happened to be the only person in the immediate area looking up at the time. Most people heard the noise, but figured something backfired—Yeah right whateverthefuck we’re trained not to look up what do I look like a fucking tourist—The twin didn’t seem to have noticed the noise, sight, or his reaction to any of it. I guess it’s possible that that facing is blocking her view. He paid for the bagel, left a tip, and told the girl thanks. He almost mentioned it. But by this time he had the sense that this was no small thing for him or for her, and decided to let the girl have a few more moments fo life as she knew it now, tregarldess of how little she seemed to be enjoying that life, it was about to get much worse. He did not want to be forever remembered as the one to tell her this had happened. He wished he had a few more moments of living in the world where this had not happened. But it Happened, and he was moving.
He was really not thinking now, but was more like fixated on the hole and he began walking towards it, it was smoking, but it should have been smoking more, shouldn’t it? That was an airplane, for fuck’s sake! People on the street were catching on. If you live here you know how information spreads like cancer in this city and right now he was in a place and a position where he could see cancer cells multiply, and see what was happening to people in this moment, see the mitosis as city people going about their city lives became survivors, figuring out how to live through something they would never be able to forget. Every one on this street was experiencing something that they would be called on to recount again and again. If they lived, they would later tell other people, either complicating the jobs of their therapists, or trumping all other stories at a dinner party when someone brought up the question that would define this generation. It was no longer going to be, “Where were you when JFK got shot?” or “Where were you when JR got shot?” It was going to be this. “Where were you when this happened?” And Dana didn’t know this yet, and nobody knew what this was yet, but they all were aware that this was something.
The din was steadily rising, and people when they turned from normal cells to cancer cells, most just stood there, and some ran away, but dana walked toward it. He could not do a thing but walk towards it. He walked with the lox and bagel sandwich and the coffe, and walked toward the hole. Nothing was being done yet. There were no sirens or lights, no whistles, no announcements over loudspeakers, just the whiff and sound of human terror.
Then things converged and humans scattered. News vehicles were the first to get there. They opened and media spilled out. Cameras, interviewers getting made up and they looked up as they got their hair done, but when that was over they looked for subjects. Dana was three blocks away, not close enough to be interviewed, but close enough to see the scramble, see the camera crews. In every set, one was trained up, and one was on the street. He got to the Corner of Fulton and Church Street, where he could finally see both towers, and his timing had never been the best, but he was in luck today. As he got there, a pland flew in from the same direction as the other. It missed, thank godm but oh, my, it turned around and it twisted, and it put itself into the middle of the other building just as a flat cloud of fire leapt out of the tower around it.
The train took too long to get there, so my patience had already been tested when when came the announcement that we would switch to the local track. Given the patience deficit, I drank the coffee too soon and got a burn on my tongue. Fuckdog, that will ruin the sandwich. The doors closed and the train lurched, and I didn’t spill a drop. A girl close to me was talking about someone she knew who was traveling to New York from somewhere over there by train, and asked her boyfriend, why anyone would want to take Amtrak across the county. “Can you think of anything worse?” she asked.
I smiled because I had been waiting to fulfill my plan to take Amtrak across the country. I had quit my job three months hence, high on romance and experience. The train trip remained high on my list of things to do. I imagined that I would have been on an Amtrak heading in the opposite direction right then, had I not gotten the fabulous indentured servitude for which I was about to be late; The job that would earn me bragging rights to working with famous women, in close quarters with starlets. The job would last for the next few months. Stories that have lasted until 25 pages from now. The level of fame of these women was middling, but the sum of the parts…The independent film princess, the sitcom grand dame, the sitcom slut, the cable slut’s friend, the 10-year-old who was richer and more recognizable than each of them. It had gay men atwitter. And employed. I was the only straight man for miles around. Well, the Stage Manager was married, but everyone knew why he hired Jared, the Production assistant. And me, for all I knew, but if I continued to stare at the indie princess’ tits the way I had the first day, everyone would catch on soon enough that I was straight.
And sooner still, they’d catch on that I was okay with being late on the second day. I got there and the Stage manager wasn’t in yet, but Val the PSM was there, and as soon as I got into the room, she told me she heard that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.
What?
Then she went downstairs to find out more, and I got a call from someone I hadn’t heard from for months, asking if I was okay. I told him I was fine, and I told him where I was, and being a gay man, he said, “That’s fabulous! Congratulations!” I think he immediately regretted letting his excitement override the gravity of the situation, and he let me off the phone quickly. I tried to call my parents and couldn’t get through. Thanks Cliff. You ruin everything.
The actresses started showing up, the fourth one was in tears. She had been on the train behind mine on the red line, local track, and when hers stopped at the World Trade Center station, people started rushing in through the doors. They were telling this story with holes and horror, it was so much more frightening than the radio updates Val was getting from the doorman with the radio. One actress had a serenely blank look on her face, as she had had the whole day yesterday. She started stretching. Val asked her if she knew what was going on. She nodded and moved to grab her other leg behind her back. One of the above-the-titlers stormed in and announced that she would soon be storming out. “I’m not staying here. I mean, Times Square!!? This building could be next!” She invited another actress who lived downtown to go to her apartment with her, because she couldn’t go back home. That’s what made me realize that I had to go somewhere too and I had no fucking clue where I was going to go, and for that second, I thought about asking if I could go with them too. I stopped myself because I supposed it wouldn’t have been very professional, and because I didn’t know how it would be received. There was a question about whether a tragic situation would render irrelevant the invisible class lines, the very lines that neither of them would want to admit their awareness of and professional dependence on. I decided that it definitely would have been awkward, whether they asked me along or not. She was still who she was, and I was still who I was.
The Stage Manager had arrived, and I was sent to the deli to cancel the order for the Meet N Greet that was supposed to be that morning. At first I hated and nearly feared having to go out into the street. But then, what protection is this building going to give me? I was in a way just happy to have something to do. It was good to have a task and a purpose. Before I got to the deli, I saw what it had done to the streets, the looks on people’s faces. The looks defied everyone’s feeling of helplessness to control what might happen next, while still trying to figure out what had just happened. While keeping it all together. No one was coming unglued. I stopped by an incense stand because it had its radio on and a crowd was gathered. Speculations weren’t yet being made, they were still just reporting facts. Information. It wasn’t yet what we now know it to be. What it was was all we wanted to know. What the fuck it was. “What is this?”
I had swiped a cigarette from the prop table. That was a job perk, available exclusively to employees with high clearance, low moral character, and quick hands. There was an endless supply of cigarettes. I had no light. I mimed lighting up to another woman who was listening to the same radio. She held her cigarette out, and when I went to take it, she pulled it back. I was not to touch it. She was doing me a huge favor anyway, and she was only doing that because of what was going on, so I’d better not push it. I said “Thanks” out loud, and she looked like I had broken a sacred vow of silence.
Dana had moved toward the commotion. He didn’t remember consciously weighing the options and deciding to do so, but it happened when his body took him there. He now clearly and without a doubt wishes he had thought about the options, maybe considered them a little. He saw bodies falling from the towers. They were not being thown out. They were jumping. Were they, too, just acting as their bodies commanded? Did they think about the options and decide, yes, I must escape this heat, and then just jump. Did they think it was their only chance for survival? Or did their body just make the decision. Hey, If I stay here I’ll be ash. If I jump, I might be found and buried? Was Dana doing the same thing, following his body to certain death? He was closer than anyone could have wanted to be to this thing that was happening. It had happened. No, it was still happening, and he was here. He wished he had thought out moving toward the action. He didn’t think he would actually have done anything differently, he just though that if he had considered what to do, he might have given himself a clue about what to do now. Now that there was a noise that could not possibly have been made at any other time before or since. An unduplicable sound which would be duplicated a million times in his memory. He heard it and it was now and forever part of him. This sound was just what you might imagine it must sound like when a hundred story tower falls on itself. But why would you and how could you have ever imagined that sound. Why would you think about it, and now that you have lived it, how can you ever not think about what is happening right now?
How could it have fallen? How could it have fallen and how could he be here to see this?
If he had thought it all out, he might have considered what the best escape plan could be when you are faced with a cloud traveling faster than a car, not stopping at traffic lights or for anything, a cloud full of all things you don’t want destroyed and hurled at you, is on the same street as you. In YOUR neighborhood. In a moment of luck and clarity, you duck into a deli on Church Street. You are the first one in from the street, but then a hundred million people follow, and you are moved back to the back of the deli, and you camp out by the cold glass doors that you can see through when you are picking out what you want to drink. More people want to get inside, but it’s pretty much full up. You feel oddly safe back there by the Snapple. Isn’t a deli the best place to be trapped? No one will starve. I guess If I had a choice I’d take being trapped in Peter Luger’s, but you gotta do what you can with the hand you’re dealt.
I got to the Starlight Deli as they were wrapping up the order for 50 sandwiches. We were a regular client, and they were going to get that order to us, towers be damned. I didn’t even need to say anything about canceling. The guy wrapping it up saw me and knew right away who I was and what I was doing there. He just nodded and said, no problem. “Tomorrow, maybe.”
I nodded. What do you say to that? I left and walked around the block, this time towards Times Square. I wanted to see as much as I could, and as I got to the corner, a girl in a bad skirt in front of the MTV store had her phone to her ear, and she screamed and sat down on the ground. There she was. The first one just to lose it. How the hell did she have reception? I still can’t get my parents on the line to tell them I’m okay. I know my grandmother is crying right now. I looked up across the street, at the big TV on the ABC building, and, um, there was only one tower there. One tower and it was not doing very well. Everyone was just looking up at the TV, and you know me, I just had to get where I had to be, and I had to be at the rehearsal room. Maybe I just wanted to keep moving. It’s not that I wanted not to watch. I wanted not to be one of the people watching.
I got back to the New 42, the building entirely owned and operated by the Roundabout Theater, where we were rehearsing alongside other Broadway Shows. I saw that waiting for the elevator was an actor who had recently been nominated for an Oscar. He had lost, but everyone knew he was going to win the Tony for his show that hadn’t even opened yet. We exchanged slight nods of recognition. Not of each other, but of the situation. I wonder what would have happened if there were still two towers intact. His co-star came up behind me and passed me and started talking to him as the elevator doors opened, and we all got on as she talked to him about her morning yoga routine. I was last on, so I stood with my back to both of them. I did catch his expression of blank wonder as he realized that she wasn’t about to mention the tragedy. I imagine that the man, who had actually been Knighted by the Queen of England, was quite inwardly seeking a diplomatic way to tell her what was going on. If he had been, it was a fruitless search. No one mentioned it at all. Someone finally responded with a comment about yoga. God bless him. God bless the people that were with her when she finally did find out. I imagine she would be most concerned with how she had appeared to me that morning. She would be devastated to find out I had not been impressed.
When I did get back to the room all were gone except Peter Hansen, the Stage Manager, who was not so much keeping his shit together as he was in not acknowledging the fact that there was anything to fall apart over. Val and Jared were there too, and the bastard Peter Hansen sent me out again, this time to get him coffee. Val looked appalled, but I silently reasoned that it was better than staying there with him. I went. Back to the Starlight Deli. Nothing was different, but everything had changed.
I got back from my fucking errand and by that time Val and Jared weren’t there. Neither was the North Tower. I was not staying there with Peter Hansen. I couldn’t go home. I didn’t know if I still had one. I didn’t immediately know where to go. I would have called Kimmy. That was always my first thought, but she was staying with her mom these days because the place she was staying had roaches. Abe and Joanne were my next closes friends, but they lived even closer to the WTC than I did. I hoped they were okay. Somehow I knew they were. I called Emily. “Hi! Are you okay? Do you need to come here?”
I really did.
The walk from 42nd and Broadway to 66th and Madison was dotted by sur-. Surrreal, survival, surely some kind of state I’ll never communicate and I hope never to get back. I was trying to prepare myself for suicide bombers, car bombs, pipe bombs, bursting fire hydrants and exploding manhole covers—I didn’t have any idea what I should be afraid of, but I was for sure afraid. I felt whatever was going to happen next could happen at any moment but wouldn’t. maybe I felt it shouldn’t. If it did, I ddin’t know what I would do. I was trying to think rationally in a situation where your entire frame of reference and rationality has been blown apart. Collapsed. I looked at the other people, and we all had that same feeling. I imagined my face must have looked just like their faces. All of us scared and doing what we needed to do for ourselves together. Scared and keeping it together.
The TV’s in the electronics stores kept me up to date. On that route, I saw it all unfold on the worlds best TV’s. A flatpanel plasma screen in the window at Sony told me the Pentagon had been hit, and I got to Emily’s place and that’s when the fourth was downed in Pennsylvania. Emily lived with Robby, who I liked a lot, and Kaya, a big sweet dog. All three needed lots of attention, and as far as I could tell, everyone they came in contact with was happy to give it to them. Emily was Carrie Bradshaw, right down to the rent-controlled apartment. The apartment. A classic New York apartment, great for one person. Now with three grown people and a big dog it was getting a little tight. I was crowding them, but it didn’t feel like it that morning, though. I got the warm greetings I always got when I went there, and they seemed happy to have someone there to help. For the longest time we couldn’t’ take our eyes off the TV. Something more was going to happen, we thought. And if it did, we wanted to see it. We didn’t know what it would be but it was something. The channel we were watching called it “The Attack on America” before signing off for a commercial break. It had a name now. Robby turned off the TV. It gave me a strange feeling. I soon realized I was relieved.
Both of them. Two towers have fallen. What next? What more can happen? How do you know when it’s safe to come out? Will the news on the radio let you know you can go out of the deli without having to worry about having a building fall on you? You heard a rumor about there being a radio in the deli. Information is circulating, and someone said something about Bin Laden. What about us? What do we do? Who’s going to get us out? How could this happen to you? Wait, now wait, this didn’t happen to you. You are pretty sure many many people have died. You never for a second after that forget tha tyou are one of the lucky ones. And something happens to you. You don’ thtink you could die in here, but you’ll be damned if you’re going to die in a deli, or at least, you’ll hate it if you’re in a deli by the snapple while other people are out there dying. A piece of glass separated you from genuine danger, and you don’t want to be here anymore. You go through the door that leads to the back of the deli, and there’s nobody back there. There was so much more room to fit more people in, but nobody thought to go through that door. You find the door to the outside and unlock it and you’re gone. No one saw you leave. No one would have followed you if they had. They wouldn’t leave if they had a timeshare on a bomb shelter under the shoe store next door. You go because you can and you must. You are not them.
You are heading back to your apartment and the dust is strangling almost immediately. You loosen your tie and unbutton your top button and pull your shirt up over your nose and mouth. There is grey powder all over the ground, and you just start running like a Green Bay Packer past horrible, horrible things. Ambulances that were torn apart and have become just twisted metal. Buildings where all the glass got blown out. Ther is one side of a building where 40 panels were shattered, and in the middle of that, one mirrored panel is still there. How did that one manage to keep it together?
You have one thing on your mind and that’s everything and your luck holds out long enough for you to get home. You take the stairs though the lights arent out yet, but they go out while you’re in your apartment packing the essentials. You have an Amphibious hiking pack, which has a water compartment and tube and it’s a lifesaver. You will use it as such. You fill it. You put on your ski goggles and wrap a bandana around your mouth and nose, and you go back out. You saw what you needed to see, and knew you couldn’t stay inside. Not here, not in the deli. You saw a policeman under his car, crying. You saw a woman paralyzed by fear. She just collapsed and sat against the wall, eyes open, no movement, fear all over the face, trying to cough.
Emily’s phone rang a lot. I still couldn’t get through to my parents. I got through to Maggie at some point. My older sister worked at Sony, and she let everyone know I was okay through E-mail. I don’t know what they must have been thinking when they saw. I had walked right by sony and not even thought of whether she was in there or not. How could I not have even thought of it?
Robby’s message to his own sister: “Alyssa bin Laden! Just our brother calling to find out you’re okay. Call me back? How are you dealing with this? Because I know I’m cracking jokes!” I think I laughed at his jokes that day. I always did, funny or not. I wanted them to be funny, so I laughed. On a day like to day, you don'’ want to not laugh, you don't want to just let those jokes hang out there and make everyone uncomfortable. I wanted it to be okay to joke about this. I wanted something to be funny enough to make me laugh on this day. I remembered that I had half of the lox and bagel sandwich left, and earlier that morning. It didn’ toccur to me how different eating the second half would be from the first. Knowing was the difference. Before finishing it off, I realized that would be the last bite I’d ever eat of the last absolutely unique sandwich made for me by those two girls who looked exactly alike.
You go back, out. You look for the almost coughing woman, but she’s gone. You find people huddled. You pry them apart, wash their eyes, give them a drink, rinse their mouths. You tell them where to go to get out of here. You’re really just going on instinct. You figure the subways aren’t running, but the boats must be. You have no way of knowing that, but you just know. It’s common sense. Most of them act like you’re a genius because you thought of getting out of there. And a hero for not getting out yourself. You’re not trying to be a hero. You’re doing what you have to do because you can. A sense of urgency tells you you don’t have time to let them thank you.
Robby had a van and we were going to use it to help out. We decided the best way to be human right now would be to leave the apartment and give rides uptown to anyone who needed it. There were so many who needed it. No Subways, Busses were packed, Taxis were hard to find. Everyone in the city was just walking up. We could see out the window, people just streaming past on foot. We’d give rides. That’s how we could help. I didn’t have to go. In fact it would have been more of a help if I’d stayed. More room in the car for riders in need. But I couldn’t stay. What would I have done? I wanted to feel like I was doing something. I went downstairs first, and when I stepped outside, it was a minute before I made the conscious decision to turn and look downtown. I knew exactly what it looked like, I had been watching it for an hour. But for it to really be happening, I was going to have to turn south. And that naked eye view gave me proof, clarity, and punched me in the gut and in the face at the same time. It was so much more powerful than the bird’s eye view at 1080 lines of resolution. Was looking up at this flying, hanging, black arc of smoke tha was bigger than Woody Allen’s mother in New York Stories, and this her was the newest New York Story. When the hell was I going to go back there, and what was going to be left when I did? Did I leave the windows or balcony door open? How are the cats? Is my roommate still alive? I get in the van and look back again, and the back window frames the cloud and that makes it manageable again. I tried my cell phone and this time I got through and talked to my dad. It was good to actually personally let him know, really, I’m okay.
I’m okay. I’m consciously observing the differences in people today. Seeing through the frame of the window, through the lens of myself. We all have somehting in common about our faces. It’s a complicated common denominator, but it betrays confusion but not fear, and displays a desperate resolve to keep it together, if only on the outside. We’re New Yorkers, we only ask for help if we needit, and today anyone who needs it is going to get it.
We give rides. Moms and their kids get first priority. Uptown, downtown, we’re taking the temperature of the city through our random sample of people in need. Everyone’s speculating. Palestinians? Israelis? Isn’t today the anniversary of some treaty? Isn’t it strange that it’s 9/11 and if you dial 911 you can’t get through? One guy took a ride, and he said he worked in the WTC, and was supposed to be there that very day, but he went to his other job instead. We all decided he was definitely full of shit.
And you’re out of water again and now they’ve shut off the water in your place, and there wasn’t dust in your place before, but now lthere’s a lot of it, and you realiz you brought it in yourself. It was on you. So much of it was and so much of it still is on you. Despite having changed clothes every time you’ve come back to the apartment. How many trips was it now? You’re huffing, coughing and sweating, and th lights are still off,and you can’t turn on the TV to find out what’s going on if youwanted to, and then, at that moment, it occurs to you, you should be getting out of here yourself. And you grab what you packed before and you get another bag and throw in everything you see that seems you might need it and can fit. You get to the door before you realize you don’t know where to go to get out of there. It occurred to you when you got to the outside door. Like you walked down three flights of stairs, and past Reza the failthul doorman (Is he the only man in the world still working? He’s there passing out flashlights to anyone who’s staying here. Tip him well.) and out itno the greyness, and only then do you think about the fact that you don’t know where to go. You don’t want to go to Jersey, because you might not get back. Youhaven’t contacted anyone. You haven’t thought of using your cellphone all day, yet its’ been whith you the whole tim.e You gransferred it from one pair of pants to the next every time you changed clothes but you never tried to use it. You think. How strange. You don’t know what the fuck went down her. You know what the faces have looked like. You’re hearing the sounds, the sound of that towner falling down again and again, still you’re hearing it, you’re hearing the screams too baby, and you know you saw those fucking planes, and you guess somene meant for this to happen. It wasn’t an accident, but it’s time to consider the fact that as bad as this is this could be the best thing that’s happened in the city today. Is the park flooding? Is Chelsea in flames? You realize that right about now, you might want some fucking information, and your cellphone is on, and shows no signal, but you go ahead and dial anyway. You see a guy that lives on your floor. To yourself and your roommates, you call him black willie, but you don’t even know what his real name is. He’s sixty and seems to know you live there too, but he doesn’t acknowledge you as he walks past you into the building and he’s got a bag of provisions. He’s fucking staying, man. He went to the Korean grocery and thought about what he’s going to need for as long as this goes on, and he’s clutching his food and shuffling in, and he’s fucking staying.
You will not stay. You call and every time you try, you get a busy signal. You stand there for a while and let it get inside your head. And then you just walk. Uptown. It’s the only way to go. You’ll just stay in the middle of the island, and you’ll keep calling, and when you get in touch with someone, you’ll head in their direction. You walk and you are no longer all that affected by what’s around you. You want to get out of it. You’re covered in it. You are not affected, that is, until you look up. Not uptown, up above. What you see is blackness, a charcoal cloud. You can’t imagine how you’ve gone through the morning without looking over hour head, but you think, “No, I definitely didn’t. If I had, I would have seen that, and if I had seen that, I would remember seeing THAT.”
The whole fucking thing, whatever is left of it, is on fucking fire, and it is time to get out of here. I am walking. I need to know what’s going on. I can’t be scared, I must absolutely keep it together. I am the guy who was helping people and I was a hero, I am not falling apart here. I will walk, and I’m not talking to anyone. It’s like I’m just waiting to be given the information. I’ll find the right person, and they’ll just know they should tell me and then I’ll know what’s going on ,where to go, and what to do. They’ll tell me what Iwant to hear. I don’t know what I want to hear. Once I figure out what I want to hear, I’ll be able to be told. Then when I’m told, I’ll know how to react. I don’t know how I want to react. I’m just walking. Not asking, not listening, just walking, wondering what I want to hear. When I’m going to hear it, and how long I’m going to be walking before I hear it. But for now, I’m just walking.
One of Emily’s talents was making people feel comfortable. People in the van were really opening up. People offered us money for rides. We hadn’t really thought of that. But nobody was about to turn it down. We could buy more gas and help more people. So they took it,and it actually seemed to make people feel better to be able to pay us for doing what we did. Even the people we were helping wanted to help. Nobody wants charity that doesn’t need it. Everyone in the city wanted to help out, but nobody could really do much of anything. All those triage centers set up within an hour of the crashes. All those centers set up, and no victims to treat.
So people gave money, and Emily started asking people for money before they got in the van. Not anything too pushy, but I guess I was surprised. And Robby was mad. I think Robby and Emily might have just been primed to have a fight, because everyone deals with stress in a different way, and this was what they were going to fight about. So Robby thought she was asking for too much too soon, and she thought she was just helping him out so they could pay for gas for the van. The fight started on the second trip uptown, and by the time we made it back downtown again, and Emily asked Robby to let her out to get a snack from a deli, but Robby was in traffic he didn’t like and he snapped back and they snapped back and for a lot and I was glad I was the only person left in the car, but I really wished I wasn’t. We swung back uptown, and Emily said she’d get out at home, and Robby headed toward Madison, still looking for more people to pick up.
There was nothing to say right then. So we just looked out the windows at people on the sidewalks, streaming uptown. By now it was still constant, but it was orderly. Youd see this string of hundreds of people, and then every once in a while you’d see someone covered in grey dust. Right there, walking along with everyone else, not talking or wailing or crying, just getting where they were going the best way they could like everyone else. Looking like everything else was in color, and they were in black and white. And this was about the ninth dust person I’d seen,but this time the person who was covered was indeed Dana. A bag in one hand, and another over his shoulder, just walking. “That’s my friend Dana.”
That’s all I said but they figured it out. Robby started to pull over to the right lane, and Emily called out, “DANA!” He looked up and saw her, and started walking over like he knew here. He started smiling in that way that I knew he thought this was something other than it was. Can you imagine, getting hit on at a time like that, with the dust and everything? I opened the side door and asked where he was going. Robby asked Emily if she thought we still had to charge him the regular rate. He stepped in and said, “Peter, after you left this morning, the weirdest thing happened.”
I had thought of him as something more than all the other elevator button buddies for the past year. At that time, we ran into each other in a crowd at the Seaport. I had gone to the Seaport for a free G. Love concert. He had gone because it was nice Sunday and he needed to wander and he just followed the music because he was still tweaked out on two hits of ecstasy from the night before. He mixed well with my friends. Someone said it was beautiful. I think it was him. At the time the coincidence seemed to be the universe nodding to us to tell us we should be friends, but we hadn’t yet realized that was just how things happen in this world. And it was by no means magical. But it did make us better friends. Ecstasy is a powerful drug. It makes you friends with other people.
It had been a while since we’d sought each other out for parties, but there we were at the elevator buttons. We both had an interest in keeping the friendship alive, and we both knew that, tired as we were, if we didn’t speak to one another, the friendship could spiral towards acquaintanceship. We would become each other’s Old Willies.
“Hey Dana.”
“Good Morning.”
“How you?”
“Alright. What you been up to?”
Ball in my court. Well played, man. I told him I was on my way to the second rehearsal of The Women. It was positively the theatrical event of the moment and I was hired to help out. The director, Scott Eliot, had been one of my favorite directors for a few years running. I admired him so much that I was willing to work for next to nothing to run his errands and was thoroughly convinced that I was experiencing a step forward in terms of the career. In the first day, I had already learned so much from him. I learned he liked his bagel before his banana and his coffee iced. He was willing to live with Starbucks. He was able to be vaguely specific when giving direction, and seem communicative and articulate with sentences that were punctuated by entire clauses: “You know what I mean? Does that make sense? You agree with me, right?
But Dana wasn’t gay, and therefore wouldn’t be impressed by Scot. I wasn’t either, so I told him something that might impress him while conveying the fact that although I was in fact working on Broadway, I was not, in fact homosexual. I gave up a few of the names of the actresses. It worked. Touche, my friend. Ball’s in your court, now.
“She’s so hot. You’re working with her? Like, you’re going to see her now?”
“Want me to give her your number?”
The elevator had arrived and taken us to the lobby, and we got to the corner and we had saved friendship. He went down the street, ostensibly to mail a letter. There was a closer mailbox in the other direction, but I didn’t tell him that. He probably knew. Good match, man.
I didn’t want to be late but I really didn’t want to be hungry. I stopped at the sidewalkside bagel and lox place. It didn't have a name, or a door, but the facing surrounding the opening had stickers on it. Large, cup-shaped stickers reading “Fresh Squeezed Orange Juice $2.99” I called it the breakfast store, and the previous year it had been the smallest Pomme Frites in New York City, and before that it had been a Belgian waffle stand. I never patronized in any of its incarnations but when I saw they were making lox and bagel sandwiches, I became a regular. It took me three weeks to realize that it was, in fact, operated by twins, and that I had not been flirting with the same girl every day. Apparently, only one flirted back, and it was not just one bipolar girl, as was understandably my assumption. I didn’t know their names, but I imagine them to start with the same letter.
The grumpy one didn’t have change for a twenty and she had to go to the shoeshine shop next door for smaller bills. I waited, though I knew I had no time for this. I looked down the street and up at the Twin Towers, and I was again struck by their size. Five years I’ve lived right down the street, and still I can't get over them. “If they were lain on their sides, would they reach my building?,” I had often wondered but had never sought evidence to bring about the unavoidably unexciting end to the wondering.
I think they’re just about tall enough to crush me if they were to fall. Some days I can walk through the Trade Center plaza without thinking about it, but if I let my eyes wander up, I’m done. I’m walking slow and gawking like a tourist.
She came back but not soon enough. By the time she handed me the money, Dana was there. He had mailed the letter, I guess, and sought a sandwich and coffee, just like me, and we talked about what a find the place was. Our whole breakfast for $3.25, after tax. We talked about the girl loud enough for her to hear, and she may or may not have had enough of a grasp of English to understand, but we both understood that we had the same flirting game with the girl, and now we’re all in on it. We’d now gone beyond saving the friendship; we’d reminded each other that we were neighbors, in this together. We New Yorkers love our neighborhood secrets. It was no longer new for us, so even and maybe especially at this time, we wanted something to help us feel at home.
Dana’s twin must have made his sandwich, and his eyes must have drifted down the block and up the towers. He’d been in the neighborhood as long as I had, but used to work in one of the towers, and was less enchanted by them since his company moved to Broad Street. That was even closer, and less of an elevator ride. And the money is better, even if the economy is for shit these days as compared to then. It’s just harder to make a dollar now. Fucking Millenium.
“Fuck the view, I have it better now.” And just as he re-thought that very though, he saw an airplane fly into the top of his former tower. And naturally, this took a moment to process. And, naturally, this moment felt like it lasted much longer than it, in actuality, did. He happened to be the only person in the immediate area looking up at the time. Most people heard the noise, but figured something backfired—Yeah right whateverthefuck we’re trained not to look up what do I look like a fucking tourist—The twin didn’t seem to have noticed the noise, sight, or his reaction to any of it. I guess it’s possible that that facing is blocking her view. He paid for the bagel, left a tip, and told the girl thanks. He almost mentioned it. But by this time he had the sense that this was no small thing for him or for her, and decided to let the girl have a few more moments fo life as she knew it now, tregarldess of how little she seemed to be enjoying that life, it was about to get much worse. He did not want to be forever remembered as the one to tell her this had happened. He wished he had a few more moments of living in the world where this had not happened. But it Happened, and he was moving.
He was really not thinking now, but was more like fixated on the hole and he began walking towards it, it was smoking, but it should have been smoking more, shouldn’t it? That was an airplane, for fuck’s sake! People on the street were catching on. If you live here you know how information spreads like cancer in this city and right now he was in a place and a position where he could see cancer cells multiply, and see what was happening to people in this moment, see the mitosis as city people going about their city lives became survivors, figuring out how to live through something they would never be able to forget. Every one on this street was experiencing something that they would be called on to recount again and again. If they lived, they would later tell other people, either complicating the jobs of their therapists, or trumping all other stories at a dinner party when someone brought up the question that would define this generation. It was no longer going to be, “Where were you when JFK got shot?” or “Where were you when JR got shot?” It was going to be this. “Where were you when this happened?” And Dana didn’t know this yet, and nobody knew what this was yet, but they all were aware that this was something.
The din was steadily rising, and people when they turned from normal cells to cancer cells, most just stood there, and some ran away, but dana walked toward it. He could not do a thing but walk towards it. He walked with the lox and bagel sandwich and the coffe, and walked toward the hole. Nothing was being done yet. There were no sirens or lights, no whistles, no announcements over loudspeakers, just the whiff and sound of human terror.
Then things converged and humans scattered. News vehicles were the first to get there. They opened and media spilled out. Cameras, interviewers getting made up and they looked up as they got their hair done, but when that was over they looked for subjects. Dana was three blocks away, not close enough to be interviewed, but close enough to see the scramble, see the camera crews. In every set, one was trained up, and one was on the street. He got to the Corner of Fulton and Church Street, where he could finally see both towers, and his timing had never been the best, but he was in luck today. As he got there, a pland flew in from the same direction as the other. It missed, thank godm but oh, my, it turned around and it twisted, and it put itself into the middle of the other building just as a flat cloud of fire leapt out of the tower around it.
The train took too long to get there, so my patience had already been tested when when came the announcement that we would switch to the local track. Given the patience deficit, I drank the coffee too soon and got a burn on my tongue. Fuckdog, that will ruin the sandwich. The doors closed and the train lurched, and I didn’t spill a drop. A girl close to me was talking about someone she knew who was traveling to New York from somewhere over there by train, and asked her boyfriend, why anyone would want to take Amtrak across the county. “Can you think of anything worse?” she asked.
I smiled because I had been waiting to fulfill my plan to take Amtrak across the country. I had quit my job three months hence, high on romance and experience. The train trip remained high on my list of things to do. I imagined that I would have been on an Amtrak heading in the opposite direction right then, had I not gotten the fabulous indentured servitude for which I was about to be late; The job that would earn me bragging rights to working with famous women, in close quarters with starlets. The job would last for the next few months. Stories that have lasted until 25 pages from now. The level of fame of these women was middling, but the sum of the parts…The independent film princess, the sitcom grand dame, the sitcom slut, the cable slut’s friend, the 10-year-old who was richer and more recognizable than each of them. It had gay men atwitter. And employed. I was the only straight man for miles around. Well, the Stage Manager was married, but everyone knew why he hired Jared, the Production assistant. And me, for all I knew, but if I continued to stare at the indie princess’ tits the way I had the first day, everyone would catch on soon enough that I was straight.
And sooner still, they’d catch on that I was okay with being late on the second day. I got there and the Stage manager wasn’t in yet, but Val the PSM was there, and as soon as I got into the room, she told me she heard that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.
What?
Then she went downstairs to find out more, and I got a call from someone I hadn’t heard from for months, asking if I was okay. I told him I was fine, and I told him where I was, and being a gay man, he said, “That’s fabulous! Congratulations!” I think he immediately regretted letting his excitement override the gravity of the situation, and he let me off the phone quickly. I tried to call my parents and couldn’t get through. Thanks Cliff. You ruin everything.
The actresses started showing up, the fourth one was in tears. She had been on the train behind mine on the red line, local track, and when hers stopped at the World Trade Center station, people started rushing in through the doors. They were telling this story with holes and horror, it was so much more frightening than the radio updates Val was getting from the doorman with the radio. One actress had a serenely blank look on her face, as she had had the whole day yesterday. She started stretching. Val asked her if she knew what was going on. She nodded and moved to grab her other leg behind her back. One of the above-the-titlers stormed in and announced that she would soon be storming out. “I’m not staying here. I mean, Times Square!!? This building could be next!” She invited another actress who lived downtown to go to her apartment with her, because she couldn’t go back home. That’s what made me realize that I had to go somewhere too and I had no fucking clue where I was going to go, and for that second, I thought about asking if I could go with them too. I stopped myself because I supposed it wouldn’t have been very professional, and because I didn’t know how it would be received. There was a question about whether a tragic situation would render irrelevant the invisible class lines, the very lines that neither of them would want to admit their awareness of and professional dependence on. I decided that it definitely would have been awkward, whether they asked me along or not. She was still who she was, and I was still who I was.
The Stage Manager had arrived, and I was sent to the deli to cancel the order for the Meet N Greet that was supposed to be that morning. At first I hated and nearly feared having to go out into the street. But then, what protection is this building going to give me? I was in a way just happy to have something to do. It was good to have a task and a purpose. Before I got to the deli, I saw what it had done to the streets, the looks on people’s faces. The looks defied everyone’s feeling of helplessness to control what might happen next, while still trying to figure out what had just happened. While keeping it all together. No one was coming unglued. I stopped by an incense stand because it had its radio on and a crowd was gathered. Speculations weren’t yet being made, they were still just reporting facts. Information. It wasn’t yet what we now know it to be. What it was was all we wanted to know. What the fuck it was. “What is this?”
I had swiped a cigarette from the prop table. That was a job perk, available exclusively to employees with high clearance, low moral character, and quick hands. There was an endless supply of cigarettes. I had no light. I mimed lighting up to another woman who was listening to the same radio. She held her cigarette out, and when I went to take it, she pulled it back. I was not to touch it. She was doing me a huge favor anyway, and she was only doing that because of what was going on, so I’d better not push it. I said “Thanks” out loud, and she looked like I had broken a sacred vow of silence.
Dana had moved toward the commotion. He didn’t remember consciously weighing the options and deciding to do so, but it happened when his body took him there. He now clearly and without a doubt wishes he had thought about the options, maybe considered them a little. He saw bodies falling from the towers. They were not being thown out. They were jumping. Were they, too, just acting as their bodies commanded? Did they think about the options and decide, yes, I must escape this heat, and then just jump. Did they think it was their only chance for survival? Or did their body just make the decision. Hey, If I stay here I’ll be ash. If I jump, I might be found and buried? Was Dana doing the same thing, following his body to certain death? He was closer than anyone could have wanted to be to this thing that was happening. It had happened. No, it was still happening, and he was here. He wished he had thought out moving toward the action. He didn’t think he would actually have done anything differently, he just though that if he had considered what to do, he might have given himself a clue about what to do now. Now that there was a noise that could not possibly have been made at any other time before or since. An unduplicable sound which would be duplicated a million times in his memory. He heard it and it was now and forever part of him. This sound was just what you might imagine it must sound like when a hundred story tower falls on itself. But why would you and how could you have ever imagined that sound. Why would you think about it, and now that you have lived it, how can you ever not think about what is happening right now?
How could it have fallen? How could it have fallen and how could he be here to see this?
If he had thought it all out, he might have considered what the best escape plan could be when you are faced with a cloud traveling faster than a car, not stopping at traffic lights or for anything, a cloud full of all things you don’t want destroyed and hurled at you, is on the same street as you. In YOUR neighborhood. In a moment of luck and clarity, you duck into a deli on Church Street. You are the first one in from the street, but then a hundred million people follow, and you are moved back to the back of the deli, and you camp out by the cold glass doors that you can see through when you are picking out what you want to drink. More people want to get inside, but it’s pretty much full up. You feel oddly safe back there by the Snapple. Isn’t a deli the best place to be trapped? No one will starve. I guess If I had a choice I’d take being trapped in Peter Luger’s, but you gotta do what you can with the hand you’re dealt.
I got to the Starlight Deli as they were wrapping up the order for 50 sandwiches. We were a regular client, and they were going to get that order to us, towers be damned. I didn’t even need to say anything about canceling. The guy wrapping it up saw me and knew right away who I was and what I was doing there. He just nodded and said, no problem. “Tomorrow, maybe.”
I nodded. What do you say to that? I left and walked around the block, this time towards Times Square. I wanted to see as much as I could, and as I got to the corner, a girl in a bad skirt in front of the MTV store had her phone to her ear, and she screamed and sat down on the ground. There she was. The first one just to lose it. How the hell did she have reception? I still can’t get my parents on the line to tell them I’m okay. I know my grandmother is crying right now. I looked up across the street, at the big TV on the ABC building, and, um, there was only one tower there. One tower and it was not doing very well. Everyone was just looking up at the TV, and you know me, I just had to get where I had to be, and I had to be at the rehearsal room. Maybe I just wanted to keep moving. It’s not that I wanted not to watch. I wanted not to be one of the people watching.
I got back to the New 42, the building entirely owned and operated by the Roundabout Theater, where we were rehearsing alongside other Broadway Shows. I saw that waiting for the elevator was an actor who had recently been nominated for an Oscar. He had lost, but everyone knew he was going to win the Tony for his show that hadn’t even opened yet. We exchanged slight nods of recognition. Not of each other, but of the situation. I wonder what would have happened if there were still two towers intact. His co-star came up behind me and passed me and started talking to him as the elevator doors opened, and we all got on as she talked to him about her morning yoga routine. I was last on, so I stood with my back to both of them. I did catch his expression of blank wonder as he realized that she wasn’t about to mention the tragedy. I imagine that the man, who had actually been Knighted by the Queen of England, was quite inwardly seeking a diplomatic way to tell her what was going on. If he had been, it was a fruitless search. No one mentioned it at all. Someone finally responded with a comment about yoga. God bless him. God bless the people that were with her when she finally did find out. I imagine she would be most concerned with how she had appeared to me that morning. She would be devastated to find out I had not been impressed.
When I did get back to the room all were gone except Peter Hansen, the Stage Manager, who was not so much keeping his shit together as he was in not acknowledging the fact that there was anything to fall apart over. Val and Jared were there too, and the bastard Peter Hansen sent me out again, this time to get him coffee. Val looked appalled, but I silently reasoned that it was better than staying there with him. I went. Back to the Starlight Deli. Nothing was different, but everything had changed.
I got back from my fucking errand and by that time Val and Jared weren’t there. Neither was the North Tower. I was not staying there with Peter Hansen. I couldn’t go home. I didn’t know if I still had one. I didn’t immediately know where to go. I would have called Kimmy. That was always my first thought, but she was staying with her mom these days because the place she was staying had roaches. Abe and Joanne were my next closes friends, but they lived even closer to the WTC than I did. I hoped they were okay. Somehow I knew they were. I called Emily. “Hi! Are you okay? Do you need to come here?”
I really did.
The walk from 42nd and Broadway to 66th and Madison was dotted by sur-. Surrreal, survival, surely some kind of state I’ll never communicate and I hope never to get back. I was trying to prepare myself for suicide bombers, car bombs, pipe bombs, bursting fire hydrants and exploding manhole covers—I didn’t have any idea what I should be afraid of, but I was for sure afraid. I felt whatever was going to happen next could happen at any moment but wouldn’t. maybe I felt it shouldn’t. If it did, I ddin’t know what I would do. I was trying to think rationally in a situation where your entire frame of reference and rationality has been blown apart. Collapsed. I looked at the other people, and we all had that same feeling. I imagined my face must have looked just like their faces. All of us scared and doing what we needed to do for ourselves together. Scared and keeping it together.
The TV’s in the electronics stores kept me up to date. On that route, I saw it all unfold on the worlds best TV’s. A flatpanel plasma screen in the window at Sony told me the Pentagon had been hit, and I got to Emily’s place and that’s when the fourth was downed in Pennsylvania. Emily lived with Robby, who I liked a lot, and Kaya, a big sweet dog. All three needed lots of attention, and as far as I could tell, everyone they came in contact with was happy to give it to them. Emily was Carrie Bradshaw, right down to the rent-controlled apartment. The apartment. A classic New York apartment, great for one person. Now with three grown people and a big dog it was getting a little tight. I was crowding them, but it didn’t feel like it that morning, though. I got the warm greetings I always got when I went there, and they seemed happy to have someone there to help. For the longest time we couldn’t’ take our eyes off the TV. Something more was going to happen, we thought. And if it did, we wanted to see it. We didn’t know what it would be but it was something. The channel we were watching called it “The Attack on America” before signing off for a commercial break. It had a name now. Robby turned off the TV. It gave me a strange feeling. I soon realized I was relieved.
Both of them. Two towers have fallen. What next? What more can happen? How do you know when it’s safe to come out? Will the news on the radio let you know you can go out of the deli without having to worry about having a building fall on you? You heard a rumor about there being a radio in the deli. Information is circulating, and someone said something about Bin Laden. What about us? What do we do? Who’s going to get us out? How could this happen to you? Wait, now wait, this didn’t happen to you. You are pretty sure many many people have died. You never for a second after that forget tha tyou are one of the lucky ones. And something happens to you. You don’ thtink you could die in here, but you’ll be damned if you’re going to die in a deli, or at least, you’ll hate it if you’re in a deli by the snapple while other people are out there dying. A piece of glass separated you from genuine danger, and you don’t want to be here anymore. You go through the door that leads to the back of the deli, and there’s nobody back there. There was so much more room to fit more people in, but nobody thought to go through that door. You find the door to the outside and unlock it and you’re gone. No one saw you leave. No one would have followed you if they had. They wouldn’t leave if they had a timeshare on a bomb shelter under the shoe store next door. You go because you can and you must. You are not them.
You are heading back to your apartment and the dust is strangling almost immediately. You loosen your tie and unbutton your top button and pull your shirt up over your nose and mouth. There is grey powder all over the ground, and you just start running like a Green Bay Packer past horrible, horrible things. Ambulances that were torn apart and have become just twisted metal. Buildings where all the glass got blown out. Ther is one side of a building where 40 panels were shattered, and in the middle of that, one mirrored panel is still there. How did that one manage to keep it together?
You have one thing on your mind and that’s everything and your luck holds out long enough for you to get home. You take the stairs though the lights arent out yet, but they go out while you’re in your apartment packing the essentials. You have an Amphibious hiking pack, which has a water compartment and tube and it’s a lifesaver. You will use it as such. You fill it. You put on your ski goggles and wrap a bandana around your mouth and nose, and you go back out. You saw what you needed to see, and knew you couldn’t stay inside. Not here, not in the deli. You saw a policeman under his car, crying. You saw a woman paralyzed by fear. She just collapsed and sat against the wall, eyes open, no movement, fear all over the face, trying to cough.
Emily’s phone rang a lot. I still couldn’t get through to my parents. I got through to Maggie at some point. My older sister worked at Sony, and she let everyone know I was okay through E-mail. I don’t know what they must have been thinking when they saw. I had walked right by sony and not even thought of whether she was in there or not. How could I not have even thought of it?
Robby’s message to his own sister: “Alyssa bin Laden! Just our brother calling to find out you’re okay. Call me back? How are you dealing with this? Because I know I’m cracking jokes!” I think I laughed at his jokes that day. I always did, funny or not. I wanted them to be funny, so I laughed. On a day like to day, you don'’ want to not laugh, you don't want to just let those jokes hang out there and make everyone uncomfortable. I wanted it to be okay to joke about this. I wanted something to be funny enough to make me laugh on this day. I remembered that I had half of the lox and bagel sandwich left, and earlier that morning. It didn’ toccur to me how different eating the second half would be from the first. Knowing was the difference. Before finishing it off, I realized that would be the last bite I’d ever eat of the last absolutely unique sandwich made for me by those two girls who looked exactly alike.
You go back, out. You look for the almost coughing woman, but she’s gone. You find people huddled. You pry them apart, wash their eyes, give them a drink, rinse their mouths. You tell them where to go to get out of here. You’re really just going on instinct. You figure the subways aren’t running, but the boats must be. You have no way of knowing that, but you just know. It’s common sense. Most of them act like you’re a genius because you thought of getting out of there. And a hero for not getting out yourself. You’re not trying to be a hero. You’re doing what you have to do because you can. A sense of urgency tells you you don’t have time to let them thank you.
Robby had a van and we were going to use it to help out. We decided the best way to be human right now would be to leave the apartment and give rides uptown to anyone who needed it. There were so many who needed it. No Subways, Busses were packed, Taxis were hard to find. Everyone in the city was just walking up. We could see out the window, people just streaming past on foot. We’d give rides. That’s how we could help. I didn’t have to go. In fact it would have been more of a help if I’d stayed. More room in the car for riders in need. But I couldn’t stay. What would I have done? I wanted to feel like I was doing something. I went downstairs first, and when I stepped outside, it was a minute before I made the conscious decision to turn and look downtown. I knew exactly what it looked like, I had been watching it for an hour. But for it to really be happening, I was going to have to turn south. And that naked eye view gave me proof, clarity, and punched me in the gut and in the face at the same time. It was so much more powerful than the bird’s eye view at 1080 lines of resolution. Was looking up at this flying, hanging, black arc of smoke tha was bigger than Woody Allen’s mother in New York Stories, and this her was the newest New York Story. When the hell was I going to go back there, and what was going to be left when I did? Did I leave the windows or balcony door open? How are the cats? Is my roommate still alive? I get in the van and look back again, and the back window frames the cloud and that makes it manageable again. I tried my cell phone and this time I got through and talked to my dad. It was good to actually personally let him know, really, I’m okay.
I’m okay. I’m consciously observing the differences in people today. Seeing through the frame of the window, through the lens of myself. We all have somehting in common about our faces. It’s a complicated common denominator, but it betrays confusion but not fear, and displays a desperate resolve to keep it together, if only on the outside. We’re New Yorkers, we only ask for help if we needit, and today anyone who needs it is going to get it.
We give rides. Moms and their kids get first priority. Uptown, downtown, we’re taking the temperature of the city through our random sample of people in need. Everyone’s speculating. Palestinians? Israelis? Isn’t today the anniversary of some treaty? Isn’t it strange that it’s 9/11 and if you dial 911 you can’t get through? One guy took a ride, and he said he worked in the WTC, and was supposed to be there that very day, but he went to his other job instead. We all decided he was definitely full of shit.
And you’re out of water again and now they’ve shut off the water in your place, and there wasn’t dust in your place before, but now lthere’s a lot of it, and you realiz you brought it in yourself. It was on you. So much of it was and so much of it still is on you. Despite having changed clothes every time you’ve come back to the apartment. How many trips was it now? You’re huffing, coughing and sweating, and th lights are still off,and you can’t turn on the TV to find out what’s going on if youwanted to, and then, at that moment, it occurs to you, you should be getting out of here yourself. And you grab what you packed before and you get another bag and throw in everything you see that seems you might need it and can fit. You get to the door before you realize you don’t know where to go to get out of there. It occurred to you when you got to the outside door. Like you walked down three flights of stairs, and past Reza the failthul doorman (Is he the only man in the world still working? He’s there passing out flashlights to anyone who’s staying here. Tip him well.) and out itno the greyness, and only then do you think about the fact that you don’t know where to go. You don’t want to go to Jersey, because you might not get back. Youhaven’t contacted anyone. You haven’t thought of using your cellphone all day, yet its’ been whith you the whole tim.e You gransferred it from one pair of pants to the next every time you changed clothes but you never tried to use it. You think. How strange. You don’t know what the fuck went down her. You know what the faces have looked like. You’re hearing the sounds, the sound of that towner falling down again and again, still you’re hearing it, you’re hearing the screams too baby, and you know you saw those fucking planes, and you guess somene meant for this to happen. It wasn’t an accident, but it’s time to consider the fact that as bad as this is this could be the best thing that’s happened in the city today. Is the park flooding? Is Chelsea in flames? You realize that right about now, you might want some fucking information, and your cellphone is on, and shows no signal, but you go ahead and dial anyway. You see a guy that lives on your floor. To yourself and your roommates, you call him black willie, but you don’t even know what his real name is. He’s sixty and seems to know you live there too, but he doesn’t acknowledge you as he walks past you into the building and he’s got a bag of provisions. He’s fucking staying, man. He went to the Korean grocery and thought about what he’s going to need for as long as this goes on, and he’s clutching his food and shuffling in, and he’s fucking staying.
You will not stay. You call and every time you try, you get a busy signal. You stand there for a while and let it get inside your head. And then you just walk. Uptown. It’s the only way to go. You’ll just stay in the middle of the island, and you’ll keep calling, and when you get in touch with someone, you’ll head in their direction. You walk and you are no longer all that affected by what’s around you. You want to get out of it. You’re covered in it. You are not affected, that is, until you look up. Not uptown, up above. What you see is blackness, a charcoal cloud. You can’t imagine how you’ve gone through the morning without looking over hour head, but you think, “No, I definitely didn’t. If I had, I would have seen that, and if I had seen that, I would remember seeing THAT.”
The whole fucking thing, whatever is left of it, is on fucking fire, and it is time to get out of here. I am walking. I need to know what’s going on. I can’t be scared, I must absolutely keep it together. I am the guy who was helping people and I was a hero, I am not falling apart here. I will walk, and I’m not talking to anyone. It’s like I’m just waiting to be given the information. I’ll find the right person, and they’ll just know they should tell me and then I’ll know what’s going on ,where to go, and what to do. They’ll tell me what Iwant to hear. I don’t know what I want to hear. Once I figure out what I want to hear, I’ll be able to be told. Then when I’m told, I’ll know how to react. I don’t know how I want to react. I’m just walking. Not asking, not listening, just walking, wondering what I want to hear. When I’m going to hear it, and how long I’m going to be walking before I hear it. But for now, I’m just walking.
One of Emily’s talents was making people feel comfortable. People in the van were really opening up. People offered us money for rides. We hadn’t really thought of that. But nobody was about to turn it down. We could buy more gas and help more people. So they took it,and it actually seemed to make people feel better to be able to pay us for doing what we did. Even the people we were helping wanted to help. Nobody wants charity that doesn’t need it. Everyone in the city wanted to help out, but nobody could really do much of anything. All those triage centers set up within an hour of the crashes. All those centers set up, and no victims to treat.
So people gave money, and Emily started asking people for money before they got in the van. Not anything too pushy, but I guess I was surprised. And Robby was mad. I think Robby and Emily might have just been primed to have a fight, because everyone deals with stress in a different way, and this was what they were going to fight about. So Robby thought she was asking for too much too soon, and she thought she was just helping him out so they could pay for gas for the van. The fight started on the second trip uptown, and by the time we made it back downtown again, and Emily asked Robby to let her out to get a snack from a deli, but Robby was in traffic he didn’t like and he snapped back and they snapped back and for a lot and I was glad I was the only person left in the car, but I really wished I wasn’t. We swung back uptown, and Emily said she’d get out at home, and Robby headed toward Madison, still looking for more people to pick up.
There was nothing to say right then. So we just looked out the windows at people on the sidewalks, streaming uptown. By now it was still constant, but it was orderly. Youd see this string of hundreds of people, and then every once in a while you’d see someone covered in grey dust. Right there, walking along with everyone else, not talking or wailing or crying, just getting where they were going the best way they could like everyone else. Looking like everything else was in color, and they were in black and white. And this was about the ninth dust person I’d seen,but this time the person who was covered was indeed Dana. A bag in one hand, and another over his shoulder, just walking. “That’s my friend Dana.”
That’s all I said but they figured it out. Robby started to pull over to the right lane, and Emily called out, “DANA!” He looked up and saw her, and started walking over like he knew here. He started smiling in that way that I knew he thought this was something other than it was. Can you imagine, getting hit on at a time like that, with the dust and everything? I opened the side door and asked where he was going. Robby asked Emily if she thought we still had to charge him the regular rate. He stepped in and said, “Peter, after you left this morning, the weirdest thing happened.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
