"Are you going to wear that out?" the girlfriend asks. "You mean, like, outside?" I reply. "Yeah, I mean, half of the people in this building are . . . you know." I think about it. I say, "Well, I'm not." We're headed to Marcus Garvey Park, there to throw the football around
.P.S. We walked over to Marcus Garvey Park at 6:15 PM, still a beautiful, sunny day. It's just one block east of where I live on 123rd, and, no matter the weather, it's always populated if not teeming with locals: the homeless when it's cold, the rest of us when it's warm. Baby strollers with cargo and attendants criss-cross this almost mountainous terrain at every temperature.
On the way, I was greeted with animated reactions to my slogan-bearing T-shirt, not least from my companion, who worried all the while that I was identifying myself as the righteous, forgivable, white gentrifier by wearing it. My neighbor Glenn ("The Hammer") looked shocked, probably because he thinks I must be rich to occupy the new building that rose 14 years ago from the empty lot next door. "Ha!" he says. "Tax the rich? How you gonna do that, Jim?" Twenty feet later the homeless guy resting on the steps of the once-Dutch Reformed now Jehovah's Witness Church says, "Gravar a los ricos . . . Esta su nombre!" I think he said that. The girlfriend says, "Ahh jeez, see what I mean, you're a billboard, a walking provocation. And we're not even at the park yet."
The turned heads and quizzical looks multiply as we approach the greenery, where we find most of it closed off, labelled as "Passive Green" by the Parks Department, meaning the open, grassy areas of this public space--these are most of the acreage--can't be used for dancing or running or throwing, or just laying about with a book. But we find a grassy knoll around the bend of the mysterious concrete structure (was it a swimming pool?) at the base of the steep slate mini-mountain at the center of the park, atop which the 1840s fire tower, recently rebuilt with private funds and local effort, still rises. We take up our positions and begin our game of catch with the peewee football I bought for this glorious purpose, which is to do something with a certain discipline for no purpose whatsoever except the pointless feel of it, the smell and sound of the grass and the dirt and the ball and the sweat, most of all for the expenditure of effort that has no value or dividend outside the expense itself.
P.P.S. We acquired an audience of two after ten minutes of throwing spirals, probably because the girlfriend looked better at it than me, and I spent eight years playing the damn game, two of those at quarterback. She’s a natural even though she insists she lacks “ball sense,” a phrase she got from her Dad, a dedicated tennis player who was totally uninterested in any other sport. Me, I used to be a natural, but now I’m just clumsy when I throw the football because my legs are still so weak, almost worthless. Most of the speed and accuracy of your passes, no matter the strength of your arm, come from below your waist, from the thrust of the leg behind and beneath your throwing arm, and the torque of your hips as you turn and the arm follows (through). It ain’t rocket science. My right leg is especially weak, and my torso is constrained by the rigidity of the metal contraption—a little Eiffel Tower—that clamps my vertebrae together from the pelvis, where it’s anchored, to the upper thorax, ten levels of the spine in all. So I look kind of hapless out there; you might even say I “throw like a girl,” except that I don’t lead with the wrong foot, as girls were once taught to do. Our audience, now enlarged by kids playing tag on our field of play, reminded me of TV replays, where you’re supposed to be able to see the thing unfold according to plan but all you apprehend is spastic motion.
P.P.P.S. I thought about that “I’m not” on our return, as I was scanning faces for signs of surprise, dismay, distrust, or solidarity, and objecting to improvised instructions from the girlfriend as to where the T-shirt might be recognized as acceptable attire. “You could wear it under a sport coat at a book party,” she said. “Or at a Bernie event, or on a picket line, I suppose. But just out and about, I don’t know, aren’t you letting yourself off the hook, you know, like, ‘See, I’m one of the good guys,’?”
I said, “Well, I am one of the good guys, I’m with Bernie and AOC, right? And I’d be for taxing the rich even if I was rich, which I’m not.”
That’s what got me thinking. If I attached a footnote to the T-shirt explaining that I’d be for soaking myself even if I got rich, wouldn’t I be begging to be forgiven, anyway, for the good fortune of my tenured professorial position and the pension that came with it? Not to mention the accident of my color. But why should I be apologizing for circumstances I didn’t create? And as for the ones I did create, how would I calculate the opportunity costs my ambition and efforts imposed on others—in other words, how did my choices foreclose those others might have made? Or did they?
We got back to my apartment with no definitive answers in hand. To her questions or mine.
BTW, once the new lawn seedlings have taken root, they take those fences down. We will romp and dance yet on those grasses. BGW 2: gotta watch Summer of Soul. Those concerts happened right where the pool is now.
I don't have that metal apparatus in MY back, so what the hell explains MY pitiful spiral? Anyway, I want to see the girlfriend throw one.