All posts by Matthew Callan

NYC

Never Forget (The Condiments)

In my brief time working in the Wall Street area, I’ve discovered that the shortest route between two points is not always a straight line. Certain streets are completely choked with tourists and narrowed by incessant construction, and should be avoided at all costs unless you want some homicidal inspiration.

Broadway is particularly awful, so if I need to get somewhere on that street, I will often double back on a parallel avenue, walk as far up- or downtown as I need to go, then cut back to the main drag. Though this might seem unnecessarily complicated, it’s actually much faster than trying to wade through acres of gawking Midwesterners (no offense, Midwesterners).

On Tuesday, I ventured away from the office to grab some lunch, and on the way back, I walked uptown on Trinity Place. While not completely crowd free, you can actually move along this street faster than a snail’s pace. It runs behind Trinity Church, at a lower elevation than Broadway. A majestic stone wall marks the church’s western extremity, and a beautiful walkway connects it, mysteriously, to a much more modern office building across the street.

As I walked past the stone wall, I noticed one entrance–called Cherub’s Gate–was wide open. I realized that I’d never been to Trinity Church, somehow, and that nothing was stopping me from going now. So I climbed the stairs and found myself on a tiny little green island of the 18th century in the middle of downtown Manhattan, filled with crumbling headstones, most of which are more than 200 years old.

It was bizarre to walk among the dilapidated tombstones and read their somber, weirdly spelled inscriptions. (“Here lyes Goodye Price, ded of Consumption aged thirty-fyve yearf.”) It was even weirder to see people spending their lunch there, yapping on cell phones, chowing down on deli buffet food in clamshell trays. Though odd, this didn’t seem disrespectful, really. It was a surprisingly quiet, calm oasis in a very noisy part of the city, and one of the few spots in that neighborhood where a person could truly get away from it all for a little while.

I should also add that as I strolled between the graves, I was listening to a Jean Shepherd show from 1960 on my iPod. During that period, Shep’s shows were particularly philosophical and dark. The setting plus the soundtrack combined to give me an eerie, melancholy feeling.

And then I felt something else. Actually, I smelled something else. Something acrid and pungent. Such smells are not unusual in New York, of course, but this smell was not bad per se, just unwelcome. And yet also strongly familiar.

And then I remembered: There was a Subway franchise right next to Trinity on Broadway. I was smelling the unmistakable reek of pickled Subway vegetables wafting through the churchyard. I have smelled that smell many times, coming from my own hands, several hours after eating a six-inch Veggie Delight. I don’t know what they use to preserve those vegetables for longhaul truck travel, but you need auto mechanic-grade abrasive soap to remove that stench from your fingers.

This smell was not faint. The churchyard was drenched in it. The final resting place of Alexander Hamilton and Robert Fulton, overshadowed by the olfactory shadow of five-dollar foot-longs. If such great men can be overtaken by the thorny talons of Jared, what hope is there for a rest of us?

NYC

New York to GOP: Drop Dead

In the current political landscape, the Republican party is like a really bad prop comic. They reach into a trunk full of hut-button issues, pull one out, and rattle it in front of the crowd for laughs, because it’s a lot easier than having ideas.

The latest prop being used by the Blueberry Heads in the GOP is the Ground Zero Mosque. A more accurate name would be The Couple of Blocks from Ground Zero Muslim Cultural Center, but no good comedian lets the truth get in the way of a good punchline.

The joke, I mean, argument goes something like this: Ground Zero is hallowed ground and therefore can not abide the presence of a Muslim-y thing in its vicinity. My counterargument is this: Go fuck yourselves, you hypocritical human garbage.

The real prop here isn’t the mosque itself. It’s New York City. Neocons have used New York as a prop for the last nine years, and will doubtless continue to use it for as long as they can. The terrorist attacks were the rationale for everything on the Republican agenda during that entire time. Flash pictures of Twin Towers collapsing, then tell everyone we need to invade Iraq. We need to curtail civil liberties. We need to waterboard suspects. We need to shoot elderly men in the face. Why? Because LOOK WHAT HAPPENED TO NEW YORK IS WHY!

Of course, this concern over the fate of New York doesn’t extend to making sure the state gets its fair share of federal money, particularly when it comes to Homeland Security funds. Hey, why would we want to protect the city that’s already been attacked and will surely be the number one target for future attacks? And it certainly doesn’t extend to ensuring the health and well-being of first 9/11 responders.

The Republicans don’t give a shit about New York. They hate it, because it’s full of dirty foreigners and liberals, the kind of people who don’t really care if there’s a Muslim center two blocks from Ground Zero. They just recognize that this issue can galvanize people and maybe win a close election or two this November. If the GOP could gain one Senate seat by nuking all five boroughs, they’d do it this afternoon.

I was in Manhattan on September 12, while the streets were still filled with eye-stinging smoke as far north as 14th Street and you needed a face mask to breathe and I was more terrified than I’ve ever been since I was a child. And a Muslim community center near Ground Zero doesn’t bother me in any way.

If you lived in New York then and were directly affected by it, I won’t tell you how to feel. But people who don’t live in New York, and weren’t in New York on 9/11 have no right to dictate what happens here. Don’t tell me you have to stop this project from going forward because of some Magic Heroic Dreamspace that Ground Zero occupies in your brain. For most of the people who are upset by this news, downtown New York might as well be Narnia.

You’re like Star Wars nerds arguing over what George Lucas did in the prequels. Actually, you’re worse, because Star Wars nerds had to see the prequels. I don’t give a shit if you don’t like the idea of a mosque near Ground Zero when YOU WILL NEVER HAVE TO SEE IT.

Why don’t I pick a random construction project I don’t like and protest it? Boo, Waffle House being built in Charleston, South Carolina! There’s already a perfectly good Waffle House just up the road! I will probably never go to Charleston but this angers me deeply! My personal feelings trump your ability to decide what’s best for your own town!

And boo to Harry Reid, who’s apparently trying to win his election by kowtowing to these morons. If you’re trying to out-crazy Sharron Angle, don’t bother–it can’t be done.

Not to mention that the area immediately around Ground Zero is about as un-hallowed as New York gets. Fast food restaurants and OTBs and strip clubs, and all the other kind of garbage that litters the touristy areas of Giuliani’s Manhattan. The tourists who flock there are so humbled by the sacred ground that they buy cheap t-shirts and postcards and prints and coloring books about 9/11 sold within in its glowing aura.

I remember going to a printer’s conference in the Midwest. This was at least two years after 9/11. When I told other people on the conference that I worked in New York, they got all quiet and whispery. What was it like? they asked, low and conspiratorial, as if curious about some strange sex act they’d never tried before. It, in this case, was That Day, which they couldn’t even bring themselves to say.

They wanted all the gory details I could provide, just so I could assure them that living in some place safer was the correct way to live. Like I had chosen to live on some terrorist fault line. Oh you know, I could never live in New York, what with the traffic and the noise and the Islamo-fascists flying planes into things…

That’s all this “debate” is. A way to dredge up the Terror Envy that every other city felt in the early 2000s. Scare ourselves with the reflective horror of 9/11 one more time. And then forget that New York still has a huge gaping hole in the ground and thousands of people who died and became ill when that hole was made.

Pointless Nostalgia

Kill the Ump

umpire.jpgMy father was not a Sports Guy. He had almost no interest in athletic endeavors. In high school, he ran track, and he had a self-made mosaic of medals to prove it, the trophies glued to a field of black felt and hemmed in by a wooden frame. Once in a blue moon, he’d demand to watch some running event on The Wide World of Sports, as that sport still held a grip on him long after he was able to actually run, or even jog. But he could care less about the big, all-American team sports (my mom, a huge Mets fan, is solely responsible for that sickness).

But he did make an effort to get involved with his kids’ sporting endeavors. He told me his father–who was a legendary soccer player back in his hometown in Ireland, or so I was told–never went to any of his track meets, and that always bugged him. He rarely expressed any resentment about his father, so it was remarkable to hear him express something close to hurt about his upbringing.

He went along with family trips to far-flung outposts of the tri-state area and beyond, as my brothers played in an endless series of soccer tournaments, outdoor and indoor. Parsippany. Binghamton. Katonah. Danbury. We even went to Montreal once. Dad was delighted by the Quebecois translations in the local McDonalds.

He was willing to pitch in, especially when it impacted our pocketbooks. We could all get discounts on joining the CYO basketball league if a parent volunteered to work Bingo Night at St. Mary’s, so dad took one for the team. I don’t think it was a hardship for him, because he’d come home with harrowing tales of the sad sacks he encountered there. Like most comedians, he found other people’s misery almost as hilarious as his own.

At some point, he thought it might be fun to be a little league umpire. The reduced membership fee for three kids was a factor, too, but I think he honestly believed it would be enjoyable. Which was off because, as with most sports, baseball’s charms eluded him, and he’d grown up with immigrant parents who had a similar lack of interest in the Great American Pastime.

He told me he actually went to a game at Ebbets Field, not long after he first came to New York from Dublin. To Little Kid Me, that was like saying you’d been to Heaven itself. I was obsessed with old-timey, sepia-tone, classic Subway Series baseball. I was fascinated by the fact that Brooklyn–Brooklyn! our Ancestral Home!–once had its very own major league team. I was a ten-year-old Ken Burns.

What was it like? I asked.

Dirty, he said. Smelly. Loud. Full of drunks. Full of puking drunks. People screaming the most horrendous things at the top of their lungs. I had no idea people would go out in public and do things like that.

That wasn’t the answer I was looking for.

When my dad decided to do something, he did it. He studied the rules of the game. He went to the mandatory umpiring class. He brought home a handheld pitch counter, and often clicked through it with one hand while completing a crossword in the other, as if the balls and strikes were each another bead on a rosary.

Dad’s umpiring career started out fine. At first, he only had to man the amorphous middle infield position. Every now and then, he had to call a close slide at second base. Otherwise, it was as easy as summer work out in the sun could get.

The little league wouldn’t let parents umpire their own games, because, duh. So he would often be umpiring some other game, and mine would finish, and I’d have to wander over his field and wait for his shift to end before we could go home. It was very strange to sit in the bleachers and listen to him declare OUT and SAFE with extreme authority, in stark contrast to the backseat he took in most family affairs.

He certainly sounded like an umpire. He was an excellent mimic, and he knew having the right voice is half the battle. Sounding authoritative is 75 percent of being so.

Things began to change when he started umpiring behind home plate. Because that’s when he had to call balls and strikes, and as anyone who’s been to a baseball game can tell you, everyone in the stands thinks they can call a strike zone better than the man in blue behind the plate.

He started to get hassled by angry parents, which he did not enjoy. He was still adjusting to sobriety. He couldn’t handle simple annoyances like getting stuck in traffic or jostled in a crowd, and he certainly couldn’t handle being yelled at by angry parents who disagreed with the strike zone he called for their Precious Babies.

After each game, he became less and less enthusiastic, until he began to dread his work behind the plate. What happened was inevitable, really, but it was still horrible/awesome when it happened.

It was already a bad day in the household. Though I had played catcher for the vast majority of my little league career, I got it in my head that I wanted to pitch. I still don’t know why I thought I could do this. I still don’t know why I wanted to do this. I really enjoyed being a catcher. It didn’t matter to me that it was an unglamorous position. In fact, I liked doing a necessary but hard job no one else wanted. It made feel tougher than everybody else.

Whether it was a desire for the spotlight or the general delusion of Little Kid-Dom, I begged to take the mound, and my coach let me do it. My first start, I did okay, good enough to earn another shot. My second time out was disastrous. Several hits, several runs, and then walk after walk after walk. It was as if the ball was afraid to go near the strike zone, because it knew it would be smacked around.

The league had rules in place: each pitcher could only issue so many walks. After that point, he could run up an endless full count if the batter wasn’t willing to swing. It was supposed to save the poor pitcher some shame, but all it did was emphasize how terrible I was. I could feel my team becoming silently furious behind me. The coach finally, mercifully yanked me. I stalked back to the dugout, humiliated. The rest of my baseball life would be spent on the other side of the battery.

By the time my game ended, my dad had begun umpiring another one. I sat in the bleachers, not far from a ragged looking man who decided to make his life a living hell. Every single pitch, this guy bitched about it. His voice was high-pitched and ruined, either from years of smoking or drinking or both. No matter what decision my dad made, this man hated it. I was still ambivalent in my feelings towards my father, but I still didn’t want to see him slandered by this jerk. But I said nothing. I sat and seethed about my hideous pitching performance, and this loudmouth.

Finally, after a few innings, my father had had it. He pulled off his mask, dropped his chest protector to the ground, and stalked off to the fence that separated the field from the stands.

You think you can do better?! he yelled at his tormentor. The man was stunned. He hadn’t expected to be directly confronted, and he had no answer. I’ve always had it in my head that maybe dad knew this man, that perhaps he was a member of his Other Family. It was odd that the man would stop being such a jerk just because my dad, not an intimidating man in any sense, took of his umpire’s mask.

You think you can do better?! my dad repeated. The jerk looked around, as if my dad might be addressing someone else.

My father began walking up the foul line, and he kept on walking. Past third base. Past left field. All the way out into the gravel parking lot. You can’t leave! screamed one of the coaches, but my dad strenuously disagreed.

I ran after him because he was my ride. We didn’t say a word all the way home. My father never umpired again and, as far as I know, never willingly watched a baseball again for the rest of his life.