Who Asked Me?

“Don’t sweat the little things, and remember that everything is a little thing.”

This advice was doled out by a girlfriend’s mother a long while back, when I was going through a relatively rocky stretch. She wasn’t trying to pass it off as original; she’d heard someone say it on a talk show. The first part is as old as the hills, and the second just a clever addendum that doesn’t really pass close inspection. It’s the type of thing Dr. Phil puts in hardcover every three months to add a new wing to his joint in Palm Beach. On a certain level everything is a little thing. But sometimes the little things are the big things.

I got kicked off the roof of my building twice this weekend by a woman who’d installed a motion detector on her private deck just below. It had never happened before – there’s an official “curfew” posted in the lobby, but no one had ever enforced it, and it was only twenty minutes past this time. What was more distressing, though, was her manner. She was abrupt, authoritative, and unresponsive to my attempts to apologize and better understand why the situation had changed. She even waited behind until I’d left, like a warden at lockdown. I considered confronting her more forcefully, but something in her way made me think that this wasn’t a good idea.

On the surface, this incident falls squarely between the boundaries of the little things. You take people as they come, and let water roll off your back. I’ve been chastised for not letting things go in the past, but I’ve dismissed much larger deals with apt aplomb. Maybe it’s because I’ve really enjoyed that roof. I’ve been thinking of looking for a new place lately – given the shifting economy, I’m probably paying too much rent. But the view from up there is spectacular, and you can see most of Brooklyn, the Statue of Liberty, and all the way to midtown Manhattan. I’ve enjoyed going up there later in the evening, just for a quiet breath of fresh air. All the shit that doesn’t fit together during the day can seem irrelevant in those few minutes, and the world spread out in almost manageable order. Just a little thing.

My buddy Scott who was out here last weekend once noted that “you wouldn’t want to know the real number of people who are just hanging to a thread out there.” The comment stuck with me for some time, and I’d like to think that it caused me to walk a little more gently since. Sometimes it feels like you can just see it in someone’s eyes; like they might fall apart or explode if you make one wrong step in either direction. I don’t figure I’ve been there myself too often, and for this I’m thankful. I’m also thankful for all the great views I’ve had in my life – despite the many blessings I’ve taken for granted, this hasn’t been one.

The weather broke in New York City yesterday and a two week span of ninety degree days shifted in to something cooler and more palatable. This morning’s light rain and upper sixties temperatures felt like San Francisco – with an added boost of perspective, coming on the heels of everything that a Big Apple August can imply : stagnation, suffocation, and the kind of sweat you scrape off your body with the dull edge of a credit card.

I made a pasta meal Wednesday night for my long-time east coast acquaintance and Boom Operator To The Stars, Kelly. After dinner we went on a short digestion-facilitating walk that blossomed into an eight-mile test of endurance and included the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg bridges, an almost militantly separatist Hasidic neighborhood, and Steiner Studios by the Brooklyn Navy Yard.  Upon reaching the film lot, I queried Kelly as to whether he knew the guard at the front gate, and he responded in his always-caffeinated and nicotine tempered Mickey Rourke baritone “No! But I’m a card-carrying member of Local 52, and rest assured we will be acquainted in short order ..” Kelly has a kettle-drum quality to his vocal accentuation that makes his chosen vocation as boom operator more than appropriate. Sure enough, in no time we were traversing the cavernous, deserted enclave at one in the morning as he barked out a wandering narrative with violent emphasis on particular words: “Studio Six ! That’s where I boomed Flight of the Conchords ! ..”

Though he claimed that it was just an “average night’s walk” for him, and really no different from sitting in front of the TV, by the time we crossed Bushwick Ave he was more than amiable to my offer to buy him a cold drink, and we hoofed it another several miles from there, Gatorade and Lemonade in hand, to the Williamsburg G Train and back to my neighborhood. Kelly’s pointing himself in the direction of California soon, both for film work and a medicinal marijuana card to address some chronic pain issues. ( And, I suspect, to remain consistently and astronomically high. ) He appears and disappears at different points on my horizon, often punctuating some unconscious shift in my own mental and physical landscape.

As the cooler weather marks yet another September transition, my buddies Tom Myers and Scott Miller will be visiting in a few weeks. Scott changed his name to “Coleman” several years back, to better distinguish himself from the legions of Scott Millers out there keeping celluloid relevant in an experimental manner. He celebrated a significant birthday last month, and Tom and I purchased him a Wrigley Field seat back, autographed by the greatest of Cubs, Ernie Banks. Miller seemed appreciative, and noted that the seat came with a “letter of authentication” signed personally by Mr. Cub. “I was thinkin’ about those letters of authentication,” he remarked to me, “and wouldn’t it seem right that they’d come with a letter of authentication themselves? I mean, doesn’t a letter of authentication need a letter of authentication to be worth anything? And where does the cycle end ?”  I didn’t have an answer for him, but the speculation was pure Scott Miller, and nothing that anyone named Coleman could ever come up with.

I’m hot
and when I’m not
I’m cold as ice – Young, Young & Scott

Pervasive summer fog punctuates another longish San Francisco stay, and by trip’s end I find my condition mirroring the area’s meteorological state: low, even, and not letting up any time soon. The flight is always shorter west-east, and thankfully so. A late life first time father sitting across from me takes advantage of his infant son’s only non-screeching in-flight interval to pick the kid up and make raspberry sounds on his forehead. In seconds, Junior is again wailing and I’m about to deck a sexagenarian. But I restrain myself admirably, endure the rest of my air time, and am soon cabbing it home from Kennedy. My place is clean, left so by my landlord who was renting it back for a mid-summer stay. A warm, boxed slice awaits me, the air conditioning is on, and my eyes and brain readjust once more to the readjustment. Except this time the blur hangs a little longer and something in my brain feels funny – even funnier than usual. I chalk it up to geographical ambivalence, renter’s instability, barometric fluctuation, Eastern Daylight Time and thoughts of loved ones. Chalk it up to too many things to chalk it up to.

Wednesday rolls in – high eighties, sweaty and charcoal dark by mid afternoon. Foreboding skies eclipse threatening to the point of no return. An uneasy, day-long pressure builds inside of me and lodges in my chest with each held breath like a thumb over a cranked garden hose. A few large splatters of rain hit the window and a cold blue chunk of forked lighting touches down only blocks away, so close that I hear its throbbing, charged electric buzz a half second before a slam of punishing thunder sets off a half dozen car alarms. Soon the water is slashing down in vertical sheets, hard enough to pull leaves from branches and stinging the paved street on contact. As I observe, something inside of me adjusts accordingly and the thumb pops off the nozzle.

Friday night I’m waiting in an exceptionally long line at Penn Station, hundreds winding back from a ticket machine spitting passes for a new rail line to Jersey. There’s at least a dozen equally long lines twisting and stemming from identical machines, and I figure I’m screwed – won’t be getting to where I’m going ’til midnight. But things tend to move faster in this city, and people generally know what they’re doing when they get there. I make remarkable time to the front of the line and purchase a ticket to Secaucus where I and most of these folks will catch an adjunct rail to the Meadowlands and Giants Stadium. I’ve received birthday tickets for hard rocking, boogie-woogie madmen AC-DC, and seeing them here is akin to some sort of last chance rite of passage. Sure, I’m too old for this shit, but the irrelevance of this observation is staggering. I find myself shoulder to shoulder in a passenger car with an equal number of fans both twenty years my senior and junior. “Ladies and Gentleman,” the conductor’s voice cracks over speaker, tongue planted firmly in cheek, “welcome to the AC-DC rock ‘n’ roll train ..” Mayhem.

It’s ten pm, skies have parted and rain stopped, and there’s Angus Young, all fifty-four years and five foot one inches of him, selling it in his schoolboy uniform like there’s no tomorrow; jerking and kicking around the massive stage and hundred yard catwalk like an epileptic Red Bull pitchman on an especially jittery day. The young couple in front of me are ecstatic – he bolting for the aisle to join a Jersey muffler shop day worker, playing Beavis to the older dude’s Butthead with horned fingers thrust and heads thrashing in crazed syncopation to an anchored, driving backbeat. She hangs back above their seats, dancing purposefully and fluidly with her beautiful self, a pole-less untouchable stripper shattering the adage that youth is wasted on the young. And it occurs to me, the thing about this band – they’ve never taken themselves too seriously. The show rages on with relentless pace amid a stage decked with two huge, horned, inflatable schoolboy hats with capital “A’s” up front. A massive, wrecked, still-smoking locomotive protrudes above the drum kit, the numerals 666 across its nose. Hell has never been some serious, spooky metalhead stance for these dudes; just a metaphor for no tomorrow. Fireworks explode in rapid-fire succession after the midnight encore, spectacularly anticlimactic when held next to what Angus has left on stage: four gallons of sweat, two pints of blood, and every bit of himself. Rarely does one feel so compensated, putting down twenty-nine fifty on a ticket. House lights come on and a thick cloud of smoke hangs over the Jersey night. Another New York day ends.

It’s time I amended a May 17th posting and observation that I made below. After attending a Mets-Giants game in San Francisco earlier this season, I remarked “The Mets may not be favored to go all the way this year, but they’ve got a far better club than the Giants.” Less than two months later, the old adage “baseball is life” is holding up as well as ever. The Mets are three games under .500, the Giants ten over, and last week, much-maligned Giant starter Jonathan Sanchez threw a no-hitter. It was the first no-hitter for the franchise in thirty-three years, and Sanchez narrowly missed a perfect game by a single error at third base.

For those lacking a fundamental understanding of baseball, how all of this relates to life may still be unclear. To break it down: 1) You never know how it’s going to end up, so it’s best to keep your mouth shut until after the fact.  2) Even after the fact, it’s still best to keep your mouth shut.  3) If your focus in life, as in baseball, is on where things are going to “end up”, you’ll probably miss a few great games along the way. This last one is in reference to the fact that, at the halfway point, the Dodgers still maintain a seven game lead over the Giants despite San Francisco’s surprisingly solid performance thus far. If you’re a Giants fan and this small caveat prevents you from enjoying their first no-hitter in thirty-three years, you probably aren’t squeezing the most out of existence, either.

These brief observations only scratch the surface of the ways in which baseball resembles life. Jonathan Sanchez’ old man was in the park the other night to watch his son throw the no-hitter. He’d made the flight from Puerto Rico to San Francisco to support the kid, who’d recently been demoted to the minors. Sanchez is a pitcher with tremendous, but as yet unrealized potential. This was the only game the father had attended this season, and it took him about half a minute to get down to the field after the twenty-six year old got the final strikeout and sealed his place in history. There was joyous pandemonium all around, but you would have needed a jackhammer to separate the embrace between father and son. Jonathan Sanchez could very well go on to be a bust after this performance, but for anyone who’s ever played the game with an anxious father watching in the stands, this single moment was sublime. And nothing will ever change this, least of all the final standings in the National League West.

A neighbor watches the sunset following a particularly intense thunder and lightning storm.