I was walking through Little Italy Saturday, during the San Gennaro Feast, which runs along Mulberry Street for about six or eight blocks over ten days in September. There are food vendors running along both sides of the street, selling all sorts of Italian delicacies: meatballs, sodas, espressos, smoked meats, even clams and lobsters.
At the end of the street, I happened upon a 'Dunk the Clown' game, run by the Bozo Brothers. It's pretty much your standard dunk talk, except the clown on the seat is like an evil, insult comic clown. When I arrived, he was laughing into the microphone and demeaning the hell out of this short, grey-haired guy.
"Hey, what do you want to be when you grow up? Five-feet tall," the clown said in his Danny DeVito voice, before giving his scratchy, demented, DeVito-esque laugh.
He puts on the Lollipop Kids song from Wizard of Oz to further humiliate this man.
"Come on, ya mental midget, ya," he says and laughs.
The guy misses his five shots and takes off, while the clown wails away.
Being a baseball player, I immediately reached for the bill in my pocket, but before walking up, I waited to see if anyone else would try their hand. Also, as there were nearly 50 people gathered around the booth, laughing as the clown heckled passer-bys, I was kind of reluctant because when I went up, I'd be the centre of attention and the receptacle for his words. I racked my brain for what he would insult me about and centred on maybe skinniness, or my nose.
Well, I hand in the cash and immediately I hear...
"Oh, look at this guy. Look at the size of that nose..."
I start laughing.
"Hey, why don't you roll the ball off your nose. We'll call it a slider. Mwhahahahaha."
I throw my first ball, it sails about four feet above the target. As does the next. And the next. And the next.
The clown is in my head.
"Hey pal, where'd you get that shirt? You make it out of a table cloth? This ain"t the great depression. Mwahahahah."
I start taking a little off, and put some right beside the target. But still nothing.
He keeps up with the nose jokes.
Finally, I hit the target, but he doesn't dunk, since the ball hit a piece of the adjacent tarp beside the steel before and it took some speed off and didn't hit directly. The crowd starts to yell.
"Hey, did he hit it? Did you get it, pal? Do you feel cheated?"
I nod.
"Well now you know how your parents felt Mwahahaha."
Damn.
I didn't manage to dunk him in ten shots.
Luckily, some guy went up while I was throwing and hit it and he fell in.
("Hey chubby, you'll only get lucky once in life. Too bad you're wastin' it on a clown. Mwahahahah.")
So I took a quantum of solace.
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I walked down Wall Street Friday. The night before, I joked that I wanted to bring a bag of tomatoes and throw one at each of the thousand-dollar suit wearers, for their ineptitude, which led to the swindling away of all that bailout cash. (A friend I met from Cleveland responded that these guys would probably catch the tomatoes and bring them home to make soup with them, these days.) I thought about marching down the street with a clothespin on my nose at least, in protest. But my foot was too sore to go searching for a clothespin on Wall Street. I wanted to find that Market Bull that is always displayed with pride about the spirit of Wall Street and then break some tea cups around it or later photoshop a China Shop into the shot to portary the recklessness they showed with our money, but I couldn't find the bull. So instead, I meekly walked the strip, stopping only to take a shot of two police guys armed with assault rifles on the steps of Federal Hill. (Oh yeah, when one particularly smarmy guy was about to walk past me, I let a silent one go. What else would you expect?)
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On Thursday night, me and a friend visited a Columbia University party, where I was told -- for the first time in my life -- I was old. I was further likened to one of the two old Muppet guys in the balcony, who levels wisecracks upon the general populace.
I did feel old there, to tell you the truth. And poor. And ugly. Christ, the girls walking around that spot were unexplainably, incredulously gorgeous. Like genetic freaks, down to the perfectly placed mole. And all the guys there looked like Jonas Bros. And probably were nearly as loaded. And I began imagining that they each had a sailboat out somewhere in Mass., where they were taking all these broads to, and there was gate you had to get through, where commoners like me would either be working at, or turned away from. (One kid was wearing like a tailored suit with croc shoes. He didn't look older than 19 -- although I'll guess he was 21, what with the drinking age and all. Either way, I don't think I wore a suit until Cheryl got married two summers ago.)
These Columbia kids are going to make some cybernetically good looking offspring.
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New York has to be home to the most beautiful women on the planet (East Village especially). New York or London, actually.
Naturally, I'm wearing my shades a lot.
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Times Square is blah. I don't understand the appeal of the place. I think the warm-up comic at the Late Show put it best when he said there is this great city here and then someone decided to plop Orlando down in the middle of it.
Really, Times Square is just an explosion and magnification of all the brand name, big chain store crap that you can find anywhere in the world. It's just bigger and flashier. And the only reason it's an attraction, I guess, is because lots of people go there -- like moths with wallets to a flame.
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I checked out Ground Zero on Friday, Sept. 11, amid a day-long downpour and heavy winds, perhaps fitting considering the tone of the day. The whole area is fenced off, with about a 10 foot tall banner outlining the work to be done on the new structures replacing the Twin Towers. I couldn't really get a scope of how big the buildings were, although the fenced-off area was immense.
A line of police officers stood on the West side of the area, as hundreds of 9/11 conspiracy people shouted obsenities about government, suggested it was an inside job and handed out pamphlets calling for an investigation. I've watched some of the movies on the internet and, considering the whole JFK assassination, I do think the US is possible of anything. But it just seemed a little insensitive, with all the firefighters and police and family members walking past to honour their loved ones. Or perhaps, it was exactly the opposite, and the right thing to do -- to honour those who died that day with a proper and thorough investigation that leaves no doubt as to what happened and who is to blame for the attacks. That's probably right, but it was just a little unsettling being down there around it.
Even more insensitive though was what I witnessed in St. Paul's Cathedral. Located across the street from where the World Trade Center towers stood Sept. 10, 2001, it was a haven for emergency workers during the rescue and relief efforts. On Friday, it opened its doors to the public, holidng day-long ceremonies for those who died in the attacks. The church displayed many of the flags and shows of support it had received following 9/11 and I found it incredibly moving -- especially accompanied by melodramatic violin and piano music. (I was kind of a sap on Friday.)
But as I made my way from display to display, I found myself partially disgusted with people being led around by their camera lens, feet away from a person being blessed by a pastor, or standing in front of a display of pictures of people who passed away, snapping away photos -- while a man who obviously had seen a picture of a loved one, was stuck beside a pillar, behind the flashing throng, trying to hold back tears. I looked around and nearly half of the people visiting the church, were either manically taking a picture or posing for one.
It got me thinking why we take so many pictures. I mean, really. Why do we stand in front of the Brooklyn Bridge say, or in Times Square, pose and then walk away? Is it because we want to record memories of the places we've been? Well, I'd argue that the more obsessive the picture taking is, the less actual synthesis and processing the brain is doing over what exactly it is looking at and there is actually very little thinking about what it all actually means. Standing in front of object after object, waiting for the flash to go off and then moving to the next item, the situation, the attraction, is meaningless and there is nothing but the act of the picture-taking to remember. Basically, the photograph is all that there is to the memory -- it's a two-dimensional representation of a two-dimensional moment. "I was there. See." I'm sure there were recreational photographers around, and I appreciate that. But a lot of it just seems trivial and goofy. It's like emptily capturing another landmark and then another and another, with the camera.
I don't know. It was just a weird moment and it didn't feel very appropriate, like people greedily capturing other peoples' grief. I'm not talking about all people here, but there are some who just pose and then move a couple feet and pose and then mark it off the checklist almost and move on. (If I sound a little cynical or hoity toity, let me just explain that I've just finished The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test -- the book, not the test. It's surely a perspective altering book. I definitely recommend you read it.)
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I should probably knock on wood right now, but the New York I imagined is far from what it is. It's not the dangerous, don't walk around at night, constant hustle city I had pictured. In fact, I've not once felt uncomfortable in the subway or on the streets at night, regardless of whether I'm in Harlem or Manhattan or Brooklyn. It's definitely not the NYC in Serpico.
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I've had to book it from hostel to hostel every morning, because I did little advanced planning and each time I find the new one, it's like a small victory. This morning as I was walking through the East Village, a cab honked as it approached an intersection people were walking through, which he had the right-away. As the car passed through it, an old man in a raincoat and a newspaper runs to the side of the road and yells "HONNNNNNKKKK!!!" right up as the cab cruises past.
Then he walks into a bank.
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You would not believe the love still being heaped upon Michael Jackson from some in Harlem. His likeness is painted into a block of sidewalk outside the Apollo Theater -- like a Star in Hollywood -- panhandlers play his music on saxophones and pianos in the subway or along the street and there is even a temple (of junk) set up near one of the hostels I stayed at on Lenox, under constant watch by some guy.
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I only saw rats once in New York, on a walk home late Thursday night, Friday morning. Saw five of them run into a hardware shop, freaked out. They were pretty small.
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There is nothing I love more when visiting a city than mastering the subway system and, when someone asks how to get to such-and-such place, you can actually help them. It's kind of like the graduating from pre-school of city exploring.
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I went back to Central Park to watch baseball Sunday (with a pounding head after a very, very late Saturday night). While I thought the games earlier in the week were particularly intense, it turns out they all are, and I watched a league championship series best of five. It was just as silly.
Even better were the pick-up slo-pitch games being played on adjacent fields. (Nice New York analogy, the place is so crowded and resourceful that they have four diamonds on the same field, with the infields on all four corners. With three games being played at once, the outfielders set up in the fields of the other diamonds and stand there with their backs to the other games.) One guy, a catcher on this brutal team that could barely catch the ball, was SO LOUD! For anyone who watches Yk fastball, he was like a bigger, blacker version of Sub Arctic's catcher, Johnny. He'd yell things out during this horribly unskilled slo-pitch game with a 'TONIGHT WE DIE FOR SPAAARRRRTAAAAA!" intensity.
"INFIELD, LOOK AT ME FOR THE FORCE!!!!" -- with the bases loaded at some point.
"...AND WE ROLL BOYS!!!" -- after scoring a run.
"YES GENTLEMEN" -- after scoring a run.
I was crying. Seriously. Imagine these guys falling all over the place, dropping balls, striking out at slo-pitches, and this guy yelling with such intensity. Beautiful.
And the funny part, in Yellowknife, we make fun of everything. Everything. This guy would have been laughed out of the park. But here? This intensity is the norm. It's bizarre.
And note to self (and others): next time you're in NYC during the summer, bring a ball glove, because they have pick-up games in the park all day long. As my hang-over wore off, I became more and more inclined to jump in.
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I spent five nights in Harlem, with most of them just of Lenox Ave. I couldn't put my finger on where I had heard about Lenox, until I arrived in Boston.
Big 'mothafuckin' L.
Unfortunately, I never once ventured into the 'Dangerzone' -- no, not talking Kenny Loggins here people -- which I think was 139 st. and Lenox Ave.
Or as Big L said: "139 and Lenox is the Dangerzone/where we quick to put a bullet in a stranger's dome"
Maybe it's a good thing I never ventured that far North.
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These musings were compiled over the week I spent in Manhattan.
I sit now in a makeshift internet cafe in Boston, on another beautiful day.
2 comments:
always a pleasure to read...
Sounds rad.
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