All posts by Matthew Callan

Stories

58th Street, 6:18am

I’m coming down the home stretch of a morning run. On one side of 58th Street, there stands a long stretch of Calvary Cemetery. The stone wall that separates it from the outside world is dotted here and there with gin handles and beer cans. I even see an empty champagne bottle. There’s a lot of industry over here. It’s a neighborhood where dudes get off work and get right down to business, and the cemetery wall seems as good a place as any to party. I can’t imagine where the booze comes from, since there’s no liquor store nearby. Either they bring with for after work, or someone’s selling out the back door of the strip club 15 blocks away, next to the Coca Cola plant.

A staple-gunned sign on a telephone pole yells CHECKS CASHED as an alert for the guys who want to get peeled as fast as possible. There is no arrow on the sign. You’re supposed to read those words and just know, in your heart, where you must go.

On the other side of 58th Street stands a pair of huge, yellowy-brick buildings. One is the repair shop for Sanitation Department vehicles. Two wide ramps lead up to the garage, like something from an old movie about decadent ancient Babylon. Inside, an enormous banner declares WE KEEP THE CITY ON THE GO. Next to this building, a shorter, less imposing one that serves the same purpose for the NYPD, with a phalanx of squad cars sitting on a square of sidewalk free turf across the street, awaiting their check ups. On a side street behind these buildings, there’s also a repair shop for the Fire Department. Things get fixed here.

There are no subways within walking distance, and bus service is spotty at best, especially if you need to be on the job at this hour. So if you work here, you drive here, and when you get here, you park your car half on the street, half up on the unpaved curb littered with McDonald’s bags and potato chip bags and flattened beer cans. This poses a challenge for the runner. You can either run out in the street, which puts you in danger of being hit by a truck or one of the dudes who’s been partying at the cemetery all night and is finally staggering his way home. Or you can squeeze yourself between the parked cars and the jagged extremities of Calvary’s wall. In so doing, you may accidentally bump into a car belonging to a cop who has to be at work at 6am, which also holds many dangers.

I opt for the former and jog in the street. The sun is just starting to peek above the headstones. And as I jog past the half-parked cars, I notice two vanity license plates that fill me with sadness.

The first belongs to a banged-up Honda. It is adorned with a huge Jets helmet, and the license itself says RVIS24. This is clearly meant to honor Darrelle Revis. As you probably know, Revis was traded to Tampa Bay in the offseason. Keep in mind that currently, a Jets-themed plate with a personalized “number” will cost you $91.25 initially, and $62.50 to renew annually. So this poor slob has laid out, bare minimum, $153.75 already, and is on the hook for over 60 bucks a year, all to use his ’98 turtle-green Accord to pay tribute to a player who was sent packing from his favorite football team. And if he wants to switch back to something generic, that ain’t free neither.

But that’s only part of the reason this made me sad. The plate said RVIS24. There was plenty of room to fit REVIS. That means someone else beat this guy to the punch. Some other schmuck in some other crappy car is in the same boat with his REVIS24, trying to make a brutal choice between paying the price to keep it or enduring the hassle to change it. And there’s probably a RVS24 out there, too. And a 24REVIS, too, and another dozen variations on that, all of them kicking themselves for putting their faith in the Jets.

The second plate I saw came a few cars after RVIS24, bolted to a scarred blue Ford. It said KEPPRAYN.

This is an expression of a more conventional faith, but one that was probably best left unexpressed. This car’s owner was so dedicated to the spreading the idea of prayer that it never occurred to him his message was nigh incomprehensible. The lack of two E’s in “keep” is what really throws your brain off. You know what word it’s supposed to represent, but in your head you hear “kehp” instead. If you are a native English speaker, there is no way to force yourself to see KEP and pronounce it “keep.” There simply isn’t.

Since license plates are limited to seven characters, I honestly don’t know what this person could have done instead to better represent his idea. But I do feel that if he’d taken the time to write it down and look at it before ordering, he probably would have realized his error and ordered something else instead. So either he’s regretted his purchase ever since it arrived in the mail, or he’s deluded himself into thinking that even a mangled message of faith is better than none at all.

Stories

Citi Field, 4:12pm

citifield3Citi Field has a bad rap, I think, because people confuse the stadium with the mediocre (at best) team that’s played there for five seasons, and the hated ownership that pushed for the stadium’s construction. As far as I’m concerned, however, there are a few things to recommend the place.

I like that when I go to Citi Field, I see a New York that I recognize, and one I don’t see or hear about anywhere else. What this New York is, exactly, is difficult to express, which is part of the reason why you don’t hear about it. Another part comes from the fact that most people who write about New York are either transplants or move in lofty circles, and so they barely come into contact with this New York. And it would never occur to most of the people who are part of this New York to express what they are. As far as they’re concerned, there’s nothing to express. It would be like asking a fish to tell you about the ocean.

I see a New York I recognize at Citi Field because the crowd there has diversity, an overused word but one for which I can find no suitable substitute. But that diversity is only a very small part of what I mean. For all these surface differences they possess, there is something shared among those who make up the crowds at Citi Field. You saw it at Shea once upon a time, too. It’s not Mets fandom, really. That’s part of it, sure, but fandom is only a reflection of something deeper.

There is a feeling that I get when I go to Citi Field, surrounded by the kind of people who choose to go to Citi Field, the kind of people I come from. I get this feeling nowhere else. It is an odd mix of nostalgia for the past and a jaundiced eye at the present. In those stands, you hear grumbling when The Opposition goes deep, or a shortstop lets a grounder zip through his legs, but the grumbles are accompanied by smirks. It has the unspoken undercurrent of, Did you really think this would work out?

And yet, all you need to do is run a video of Piazza or Gooden or Seaver on the scoreboard and the fans begin to nod reverently. And they’ll tell each other, I was at that game, even if the guy next to you was with you at that game. They must speak these words aloud because they can scarcely believe that they of all people were allowed to witness such things. They are people who are willing to allow that great, impossible things can happen in their lives. They just don’t expect them to happen any time soon.

I attended the first Mets game ever played at Citi Field, an exhibition against the Red Sox. I wandered into the Caesar’s Club that night, an enclosed bar/restaurant area behind home plate. There I saw people who got what they thought they wanted, a first class modern facility to replace outmoded, crumbling Shea Stadium, only to feel immensely confused. They were people uncomfortable with comfort. One man lowered himself into a lounge chair slowly, as if he was afraid it would disappear if he moved too fast.

Some say the iconic phrase coined by Tug McGraw in 1973, Ya gotta believe!, was originally said in jest to mock an exec making a lame clubhouse pep talk, that it only became a rallying cry when the Mets went from worst to first at the tail end of that season. I’d like to think this is true. It says so much about the people who choose to follow the Mets. It is a joke always threatening to become serious.

I like that when I left Citi Field on Sunday, the last game of the season, readying myself for a long winter, I caught a brief glimpse of something over the Promenade roof. I could see the relics of the World’s Fair in the distance, the Unisphere and the NY State Pavilion and the cone of a spaceship that once circled this earth and came back again. Those structures rose alongside Shea Stadium, at a time when people—in Queens of all places—still believed in the future.

Stories

Jean Shepherd and the Dayak Curse

shep2On April 6, 1966, Jean Shepherd began his radio show by warning listeners that they were about to take part in an experiment of great scientific import in conjunction with a major university. It would be a potentially dangerous experiment, so if any listeners wanted out, they should switch to another radio station immediately.

As soon as his theme song was over, he played a recording of a flute. It sounded like a field recording. You could hear crickets chirping in the background. Once the music ended, Shep told his listeners this was an ancient, mystical flute played by the Dayak tribe of Borneo. This flute was intended to be used only in battle, as it had magical properties that would kill any male under the age of 18. Since the flute’s effects took 72 hours to fully take hold, he encouraged any teenage listeners to send their name to WOR on an index card with the word CURSES written on it, so that the university conducting this experiment could monitor their health.

It’s easy to say, in our more sophisticated age, that this was obviously a hoax. People were considerably more gullible back in 1966, particularly in regard to any sort of media. As you listen to this show, notice that Shep (who was not above laughing at his own jokes) does not crack in the least. He delivers all the details soberly and in as straightfaced a manner as he can. I can only imagine what kind of panic Shep’s “experiment” could have caused, or how many complaints it must have drawn to his radio station. Broadcasters don’t do things like this now, and they certainly didn’t do them in 1966.

Shep performed variations on the Dayak Curse “experiment” several times before and after this one, but the example from 1966 is by far the best version and the best recording. It’s also one of the best examples of exactly what he used to do on the radio. And though Shep rarely took calls on the air, he did so in this show to talk to young listeners, who invariably tell him they “feel kinda funny” in adorably thick Queens/Bronx accents.

If you stick with the whole show, you’ll hear Shep use a few news items on sea monsters, drunk sailors, and car-hating elephants, topped by ad copy for a tranquilizer disguised as a proto-feminist tract, all to comment on what he called The Human Comedy. You’ll also hear what radio commercials sounded like in 1966 for The New York Times (extremely pretentious) and Miller High Life (extremely brassy).

[audio:http://scratchbomb.com/media/1966%2004%2006%20Human%20Comedy.mp3]