Who Asked Me?

Merv Griffin, Burt Ward and Janet Leigh all share my birthday – as do Nancy Reagan, George W. Bush and Sly Stallone. Ned Beatty, Fred Dryer and the Dalai Lama were also born on July 6th, as were 50 Cent, Willie Randolph and Peter Singer. That last guy is an Australian philosopher about whom I know nothing, but I figure he can wax philosophic about kangaroos, beer, and Vegemite, which comes in handy. I’m not entirely displeased with this list of folks and would settle for an amalgamation of their various qualities. If you could combine Bush with the Dalai Lama, for instance, you’d have a revered holy man who could hold his own conversing with Nolan Ryan. I just watched a biography program on Merv Griffin the other night. He hit it big in 1950 with the song I’ve Got A Lovely Bunch Of Coconuts. What Merv was getting at with that tune is debatable, but he never looked back. Nor has 50 Cent who has sold 15 million rap albums while somehow managing to keep it real. He’s also patently refused to add an “s” to the non-numerical part of his name, which I think is good. If you combined 50 with Ned Beatty, you’d have a pleasant-faced, southern character actor who sure as shit wouldn’t stand for what those crackers did to him in Deliverance. When I look at my fellow birthday-sharers, I see myself staring back.

I don’t list my birthday on my Facebook profile. Among the many things I find distasteful about the site is how it reminds you when one of your “friends” has a birthday. This makes remembering someone’s birthday or receiving well-wishes on yours about as special as spotting a Denny’s on a long road trip. Six-hundred and seventy-three happy birthdays followed by the recipient inanely thanking “all those who remembered.” Yeah, they remembered. Remembered to check their email or go to their Facebook page. They remembered like Jiffy Lube, Jet Blue, or any other business or retailer requiring a birth date and email address does. I preferred the pre-Facebook system of prioritizing which birthdays you remembered. Typically it was those of family members, close personal relationships, or someone you wanted to fill one of these positions. Of course the old system meant forgetting a lot of birthdays, but I had no problem with this either. People hung up on their own birthdays either fall into the category of wanting everyone to remember or everyone to forget, and in either case qualify as pains in the ass.

As the previous paragraph undeniably proves, white guys who have enough birthdays eventually evolve in to Andy Rooney. You rarely see it coming; one minute you’re celebrating your ninth birthday by going to see Blazing Saddles with your mother, brother and Doug Boxer, and the next you’re decades older, grumpily bemoaning the impersonal emergence of social networks and wondering why nobody got you the Letha Weapons love doll you secretly hope for every year. But as my buddy John Spears used to observe “it only goes in one direction and is better than the alternative.” Which I suppose is true, but could also be said of north-bound traffic on the 405 freeway. Harry Callahan once noted “opinions are like a**holes – everybody’s got one,” and in the end (no pun intended) the same can be applied even more accurately to birthdays. If I’ve accomplished anything on mine this year it’s been combining both (opinion and birthday) exhaustively and without purpose. Thankfully, tomorrow’s just another day.

I was having a coffee with my buddy Denis at the Stewart Tower Dairy Farm a few weeks back. Stewart Tower is located off the A9 between Perth and Dunkeld, not far from Ardoch and Airntully. The place is supposed to have some of the best ice cream in Scotland, but we weren’t having any that day as it was blowing a gale. “Blowing a gale” might be putting it kindly – it was the sort of weather that results in lost toupees being found six towns over. On the way in to the place we happened upon an older woman who’d recovered an earring she’d dropped just outside the entrance. “Ach, I wis a’feard I’d lost it,” she told us, before launching in to a five-minute story about how she received the gift as a child from a kindly aunty. I didn’t follow most of it, as I was too busy concentrating on how she was staying afoot amid the hurricane force winds. They’re a hearty people, the Scottish.

Denis guided me to the farm shortly after I and the parents arrived in Scotland, as practice for my driving the rental car. I got used to it in fairly short order, despite the misplaced steering wheel and wrong-lane oncoming traffic. That stuff is all do or die straight out of the barrel; it’s the four-lane roundabouts and dual to single carriageways that take some getting used to. All considered, I did an admirable job with the carriageway adjustment, avoiding becoming one of the several fatality statistics logged each year. The roundabouts are a bit trickier, and if you find yourself stuck in the wrong lane or unsure of your exit, it’s best to resign to surrender and going in circles until the tank empties .. not unlike Charlie on the MTA. For a country not known for its loose grip on their wallet straps and with gas at ten bucks a gallon, you’d think they’d invent a more petrol-friendly exiting system. But it’s when you’re on foot in Scotland that things get even more interesting.

Denis is fond of quoting my use of the word “scary” to describe some of the goings-on around the High Street in Perth after the sun sets. It was with some curiosity and apprehension that I observed the cavorting packs of under-aged Scottish youths, shit-faced and obnoxiously loud to a lad and lass, when I lived there for a short while in 2004. I’d seen plenty of drunken scenes in America, but something about the red-faced, street-urinating males and puking, fifteen year-old girls dressed like tarted-up Halloween prostitutes separated these kids from the pack. Yeah, they drink plenty in Scotland – but they also seem to handle it poorly, if that’s the word for it. There’s something disturbingly provincial about the whole scene.

It was a Sunday night during this last trip that we exited Denis’s flat by St John’s Kirk, me grasping Mom’s hand to better sturdy her on the cobblestone and Dad and Denis to our left. The only notable activity was a wedding party breaking up at the Ring O’ Bells pub, rapidly receding to the background behind us. “You see, Rick,” Denis noted, “not much gallivanting going on tonight ..” With that a group of three young guys emerged, staggering from the pub and bellowing off-key Scottish football songs. “OY!” one of them yelled loudly, spotting us on a direct line about two blocks away. “YE AULD BASTARDS!!” He proceeded to pull his pants and underwear down to his ankles, his unit tucked away above knobby knees and between pale white legs. “LOOKIT! I’m a WOMAN!!” His mates laughed uproariously and offered a hearty back-slap as they helped him right his trousers.

A few nights later I stole away with Denis for a brief respite from chauffeuring the parents and to take in some post-dinner music at the Taybank pub in Dunkeld. A casual group of pluckers and strummers with acoustic instruments played a variety of traditional Scottish and American folk tunes – some Johnny Cash songs among them. I helped a guy with a guitar find his place again with Shel Silverstein’s lyrics to A Boy Named Sue. A stunningly beautiful young girl with nut-brown hair and perfect skin suited for a face soap advert pulled a graceful bow over fiddle strings. A stone’s throw outside, the River Tay ran deep and black in the night, a full Scottish moon reflecting shards of glittering white upon its surface. So yeah, there’s that stuff too ..

I ran in to my mailman two days ago, on the precipice of this brutal heat wave now fully enveloping Brooklyn. You get to know your mailman here whether you’re an introvert or extrovert, always in or always out. “Those the parents?” he asked with a wry grin, having seen me tuck them in to a cab on their way to JFK. I figured he must have had some too ..

It was an interesting few weeks with the folks, both at home (for me) and abroad. “Some day this will make a great book” – you hear people say that all the time, in the midst of both crises and celebrations. But the truth is those books never get written. Instead it’s some derivation, either more or less spectacular than the original but always different. Coming close with words is a feat in itself, reserved for those few capable – the skills to pay the bills, as the Beastie Boys say. Life is for those living it, and only they will ever know.

I will relate this small anecdote, however. I was sitting in my apartment with my dad, discussing the place’s relative charms and flaws, having lived here four years now. I noted that it’s put together in funky form; the covers on the electrical outlets are all slightly askew. “I remember,” he said “putting the cover plate on a plug outlet once while my father watched.” My dad is handy with tools and woodwork, but his old man was an engineer beyond reproach whose skills were the origins of a family business lasting three generations. “I was trying to make the damn thing perfectly straight,” Dad went on, “while my father looked over my shoulder. ‘Leave it a little crooked’, he said, ‘it’ll look like a professional did it ..’ ”

I’ve heard most of his stories at least three thousand times, but had no recollection of that one. I thought it was pretty good, and if my sense for people is still intact, I think my mailman would like it too.

Tim Lincecum and the Giants were in town last week, facing the Mets for a three game series and serving reminder that we don’t always need dead, middle-aged terrorists to make us feel good about this country. Lincecum, as my vast reading audience will attest, is a favorite subject of mine. He rekindled my interest in baseball back in 2007, shortly before he emerged from a remarkably brief stint in the minors to start pitching for the Giants. As a favorite local Mets blogger recently noted, “Lincecum was so good so quickly that nobody had a chance to fuck him up, and now he sits atop the pitching mountain, walking on his hands before games and not bothering to ice his arm after starts, happily out of reach of the ligament-shredding groupthink that Organized Baseball calls wisdom.” I thought this was a solid observation, but for me he’s meant something more.

That Lincecum was too good, too fast to enable being ruined by conventional wisdom speaks to the game as much as it does the athlete. Were this football or basketball, the window of opportunity would never have been there. The crawlspace is ever-narrowing for baseball too, and it isn’t immune to checklists of physical stature and rigid methodology, but within its framework there always remains a chance. And a chance is the most any of us can expect. Knee-jerk comparisons between America and baseball pander to the grandiose and nostalgic, noting that it’s a game of heart where ambition and determination can triumph over adversity. I prefer to think that the rules for both were constructed by people who knew a thing or two about how messed up things can get over the long haul. While it isn’t as sexy-sounding as the “pursuit of excellence,” allowing for and anticipating the idiots who will inevitably and eventually run the show is a lot like putting a new roof on your house every ten years. It comes in handy with time.

But back to The Kid, as I and my buddy Miller (a Cubs fan living in Chicago) call him. While his defying convention allows for more intriguing argument among enthusiasts and fosters a new strain of delusional hope for dads with undersized pee wee leaguers, this is secondary. Sure, his delivery inspires Koufax comparisons and caused Roger Angell to liken him to a “January commuter stepping over six feet of slush.” But what he’s really done, particularly in the case of the Giants, is to bring fun back to the game. He arrived, all five-eleven in spikes and a buck sixty-five of him, on the heels of the Steroid Era where behemoths like Bonds and McGwire roamed the grass. By the time Lincecum emerged the fates of his super-sized predecessors were starting to take shape, controlled largely by senatorial hearings and men who had never played the game on any competitive level. In short, the long-ball diversion that replaced the bad taste left by the bullshit Strike of ’94 had turned in to so much bullshit itself. And it was getting worse by the day.

Enter our man Big Time Timmy-Jim as he’s called in some circles, along with the “Freak” and “Franchise.” He was mistaken for a batboy on more than one occasion when he first came up, and asked for ID at various ballparks to prove he was a player. But stadium officials weren’t the only ones taking notice. Lincecum remained in the minors for only one month of the ’07 season, long enough for Rockies prospect Ian Stewart to note “He’s the toughest pitcher I’ve ever faced. I’m not really sure why he’s down here, but for a guy drafted last year .. that guy is filthy.” The sentiment only solidified with time, and as everyone knows The Kid went on to win Cy Young awards in his first two full major league seasons and led the Giants to their first San Francisco World Series title in 2010. Anyone doubting Ian Stewart’s eye for talent need only reference Lincecum’s 14 strikeout playoff debut vs Atlanta. These were, after all, major league ballplayers he was facing.

Lincecum has grown his hair out since his rookie season and his appearance is often likened to a “skater kid” (as in skateboarder.) He’s also packed a few much-needed pounds on to his slender frame, apparently (and to the chagrin of teammate Pablo Sandoval) through a steady diet of milkshakes and In-N-Out burgers. Low-key and somewhat shy, he still seems at ease with the attention his quirky style and success have attracted, and has a natural appeal in commercial spots and feature articles. Nowhere is the phenomenon of celebrity amplified quite like here in New York, and it was interesting to see the treatment he got while the team was in town last week. Two-page photo spreads covered the inside of the Post and Daily News, and the Mets post game broadcast dedicated a solid hour to Lincecum talk. His performance in the second game was fairly standard: 12 strikeouts including the last five batters he faced for a 2-0 win. I was at the game the next day, watching him through binoculars as he sat wearing a hoodie and shades, chatting with teammates on the edge of the dugout. Seemingly unaware or unaffected by how good he is this early in his career, he just looked to be having fun.

I wrote something for a UK-based website a long while back, and they changed my suggested title to “Make It Happen.” Anyone possessing remote familiarity with my take on things could tell you that I’m not a “make it happen” kind of guy. It isn’t the instinct that eludes me, but the phrasing. “See What Happens” would have been closer, but wouldn’t have fit this particular piece, which centered on the exhilarating challenges involved in adapting to New York City. I was going through a certain phase of brain chemistry back then – interesting, but neither more nor less insightful than those before or since. Steve Earle has a line in his song Fort Worth Blues – “they say Texas weather’s always changin’ / and one thing change will bring is somethin’ new.” This and Tony Soprano yelling “I get it!” to the dawn breaking on a Vegas desert gets close, but I’m obviously off on a tangent here. One thing that did result from that particular stretch was a tendency toward first-person prose in the present tense.

I’m crossing Atlantic Avenue this afternoon with the intention of walking all the way to the 42nd Street Library. Something in the ominous cloud formation over the Brooklyn Bridge tells me I might be swimming if I persist with pedestrian plans, so I retreat to the F stop on York Street. (Funny how “F stop” has come to mean something other than a camera setting this past near-decade.) A father and daughter, she maybe seven or eight, get on at East Broadway. She’s a cool-looking girl, well-behaved with a pretty but thoughtful face and dressed kid-appropriate but stylishly. I’m instantly envious of this guy, who’s about my age give or take a few years, and wonder how he can appear oblivious to his obvious good fortune. Why he isn’t smiling or taking advantage of this father-daughter bonding time is beyond me. Can’t he see that in a blink of an eye she’ll be married to some window insulation distributor and living in Seattle?

The flip-side boards at West Fourth Street. God (in whatever form you choose to interpret the word) is good with those flip sides. An empathic-looking but terminally tired mother enters the train with her own two daughters. The first is about the same age as the girl from the earlier stop, and she’s looking cautiously back at Mom wheeling her younger sister in via stroller. The other girl is about four and screaming in a manner that goes beyond anything identifiable with a human child of this or any other age. Her choleric outburst is near demonic and draws horrified glances from other passengers; cautious looks reserved for a problem that might go beyond a mere temper tantrum and cross over to darker territory. She’s flailing at the air with her fists and rising from the carriage to kick at it and her mother violently, punctuating each foot strike with shrill exclamation. Mom has a hollowed, soundly defeated look, clearly having been here before. Similar displays aren’t uncommon on the subway, but something is far wrong here .. so much so that the typical “can’t you control that child?” vibe is absent. It’s bad enough for most to move away and crowd the middle of the car. I pump the volume on my iPod, put my shades on and wait half a stop for 42nd Street, where I bolt.

At the library, I write this shit. Late April rain pours steadily outside the large windows just below the magnificent, raised ceiling of the Main Reading Room, much as it did on occasion back in ’03 and ’04. The same old guy, who must have been at least ninety back then, shuffles by in his dusty but formal suit, with an armful of hardcover volumes clutched near. A young, French-speaking couple sits beside me, both hunched over their laptop trying to solidify some sort of New York plan. I try to come up with a clever closing sentence but unzip my backpack instead, gathering my things and letting it go.