Memepark

"Second grade was first grade with math. Third grade was second grade with a period in the schoolyard to play kickball, a version of baseball with a giant blubbery ball, dull red and pebbled like a rubber bathmat, which was pitched along the ground toward home plate and that a better kick could get aloft. A fly ball was almost uncatchable, it was bigger than a kid when it was flying through the air. Positioning yourself under a fly was just stupid, and if you reasoned out what happened after the outfielder invariably stepped aside pretty much anything in the air was a home run. You just ran, you didn't look to see if they were throwing it in. More often, though, you didn't get it in the air. A mistimed kick scudded back idiotically to the pitcher and you were thrown out at first base.

Still, a home run. If you put the bloated thing in the air half the time everyone on the field fell down. There'd be a kid on his ass at every base as you went by."

- Jonathan Lethem, from The Fortress of Solitude

I began to feel at home in New York when I started playing kickball in McCarren Park. I had moved to Brooklyn from Cambridge, Massachusetts in April, 2002, fleeing a bad breakup, a dead-end job, and the same handful of hangouts in Central Square I'd been haunting since age 18. My plan was to move to San Francisco, establish California residence, and apply to law school at Berkeley. Instead, after a fruitless month-long cross-continental job search, I landed a position as a salesman-slash-consultant with a Scotland-based speech technology company, working out of New York. I moved into a place in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, displacing a beautiful, brilliant young woman named Molly and inheriting her broken husk of an ex-boyfriend, Zac. The next morning, as I sat in the kitchen of our railroad apartment drinking a cup of coffee before heading into the city to meet with my new boss, Zac clambered down from his loft and stood in his boxers, staring at me quizzically, scratching his chest, completely at sea. Finally: "You're in my apartment."

We spent the next several weeks adjusting to the new setup, bonding together over beer, karaoke, web programming, vegetarian cooking, world religions, and casual misogyny, staggering home drunk together several times a week, riffing off of each other's affected indifference to heartbreak along the 10-minute walk from the Bedford Avenue L stop. Our call and response was consistent, although we'd swap parts: a disgusted articulation of the eternal problem

"Women!"

Was answered by the solution:

"Fuck 'em!"

At 26 years and six feet, five and a half inches, Zac had a year and two inches on me. I latched onto him as my surrogate big brother.

One Sunday afternoon in June, Zac walked in the front door as I sat in my room trying to soak up the last little bit of weekend before another five days of demoralizing, hopeless sales calls from my office in the West Village.

"Some kids in the park want us to play kickball with them."

I pictured a gang of ten-year-old Puerto Rican kids, awed by Zac's towering frame.

"Not little kids. Kids our age. Hipsters. They have a big blue ball, like a Pilates ball."

We were both stoked. We'd talked about how all our friends lived in Manhattan -- we loved our neighborhood, but convincing people to come out to Brooklyn for drinks was nearly impossible. But now: the promise of local kids to hang out with, finally. We geared up and headed out to McCarren Park as the sun went down.

McCarren Park straddled Driggs Avenue a block from our apartment, a running track on one side and three baseball diamonds on the other. It marked the intersection of three neighborhoods: Polish Greenpoint to the north, Puerto Rican East Williamsburg to the east, and Northside/Williamsburg to the south, formerly Hassidic, now overrun by skinny white artistic types in their early 20's with Elvis Costello glasses, tattoos, and trucker caps: Paul Ford of Ftrain fits them into his universal taxonomy as GOSPLACs (Graduates Of Small Private Liberal Arts Colleges); the Hassidim being pushed out of their own neighborhood to the south grumble about the plague of "artisen"; but to the rest of us, they are simply Hipsters. Spores from their colony in Northside were scattered over Greenpoint: the Polish social club Warsaw hosted weekly indie-rock shows, the hipster bar Enid's squatted boldly one block north of the park, and young guys like Zac and me rented rooms from middle-aged guys whose last names contained lots of Y's and Z's and not enough vowels. East Williamsburg, closer to the L but more dilapidated than Greenpoint, also had its share of young white college grads in walk-ups. But the park was where the different cultures came together on weekends: Puerto Rican families holding barbeque parties on the grass by the track, setting up volleyball nets and calling to their kids in Spanish when they strayed too far on their bikes; Hassidic teenagers in skullcaps, sidecurls, black pants and short-sleeved white shirts playing baseball; Polish guys with crew-cuts kicking around soccer balls while their young wives, looking like runway models, strutted around the park with their painted-on jeans, blond ponytails, and designer sunglasses, pushing strollers; and finally, the hipsters, sunbathing in the grass or scouting around on bikes too small for their long, skinny bodies, butts high in the air as they stood on their pedals and coasted along the paths around the baseball diamonds.





Our new playmates had staked out a diamond in the middle of the park: the northernmost field was illuminated by the floodlights, but Hassids in serious baseball mode still occupied it. So we played in their castoff light and the dim shine of the streetlamps. The rest of our gang knew each other already: most of them were a few years out of Tufts and lived in Williamsburg, with a few die-hards like Nick and Ernie commuting from Park Slope and Harlem for this, their second Sunday game. They pulled us in enthusiastically, eager to share their discovery of this perfect piece of fun.

The game was everything we remembered from grade school. Team captains picked their players, and the enormous ball was as difficult to throw or kick as its little red counterpart had been for our eight-year-old selves. But there were a few key differences. First, the stakes had changed: talking trash, acting like an idiot, and getting drunk on Bud tall-boys had replaced whatever ambitions had driven us in gym class. We were all nerds, so getting picked last didn't mean the same thing it had then. Also, we quickly learned that 26-year-old bodies don't handle abuse as well as they had twenty years before: we racked up a few broken feet and a lot of bad scrapes that summer.

The casual violence of childhood also reared its head, once. Our rules allowed for throwing the ball at a runner to tag him out, and after Andy knocked the legs out from under an opponent, he got paid back with a punch in the face. The fight was broken up quickly, and Andy's antagonist pedalled away on his bike. We never had a fistfight again.

We invited passersby to join in, just as the group had recruited Zac on his walk home. Sometimes a few Hassids would join us after baseball, always sticklers for applying baseball logic to the game until they realized that the only rule strictly enforced was its essential chaos: kickers regularly rushed the mound, threw their half-full beer cans at approaching fielders, and ran far from the baseline to avoid the big bouncing blue ball. "Lazar the Leg" became a semi-regular. Little Puerto Rican kids, three feet tall and hyperactive, would join in for an inning before their mothers called them home. We had hipster bicyclists show up in little gangs over the course of the evening, bringing beer, cigarettes, and sometimes a bulldog named Sparky. Cop cars would periodically pull into the park, prompting us to stash our beer cans by the fence, but we eventually realized they only wanted a closer look at the crazy kids playing in the dark with their giant ball. One night, three squad cars coverged on the path next to our field, and the officers stepped out to watch a few innings and shake their heads. They retrieved a couple of foul balls from left field, and from then on we tastelessly referred to wide-left kicks as "cop shots" -- a reference to 1-800-COP-SHOT, a hotline for reporting tips related to cop shootings, whose publicity campaign had covered the sides of bus shelters that year.





Every night we would play a game until about eleven, then head over to Enid's for drinks. We would bust through the front doors like gunslingers, caked in McCarren Park's orange dust and bouncing our big blue ball, staring down clutches of hipsters crowded around tables with their pints of Brooklyn Lager and Guinness. After a few rounds, we'd bounce the ball over to a likely group of contenders and challenge them to a game. Many of our new recruits came from these confrontations, and our late games often continued past one in the morning.

Zac and I sometimes talked about the game, and what we were doing with that ball. Was this some kind of ironic hipster pose, the kitsch of grade-school gym class adopted in place of earnest athleticism? Our trash-talk, our cans of cheap beer, our wife-beater jerseys with spray-painted logos and nicknames were damning evidence that we had slipped into the kind of falseness we pretended to despise. We knew -- all of us knew who ever picked up that ball -- that we were not of Brooklyn although we were in Brooklyn, and that Brooklyn knew us only as hipsters, as GOSPLACs, as artisen. Was it inherent in the hipster pose to hate other hipsters, an integral part of the empty quest for authenticity? This is a discussion for elsewhere. The important fact, and the one that kept us loving the game and playing joyfully every Sunday night, was that the feeling of playing with the Big Blue Ball returned us to childhood. That big, unwieldy ball reminded us of being too small, too weak, too uncoordinated to play competently: a kick would send it lofting slowly through the air, and a throw was even slower; catching it involved fitting your entire body around it like a glove. When someone brought two friends from Germany to play, they invented a devastating new fielding technique using their soccer skills, kicking the ball to other fielders instead of picking it up and launching it ponderously through the air with your hips, your legs, your shoulders. But their invention -- "German style" from then on -- never caught on. It was too efficient. Half of the fun was the ineffectiveness of our play, which only got worse as we took in more Budweiser and dust and we lost more skin and blood to the ground in ill-considered slides.






[Read Part II.]