A Shea Away

All I know is certain things will happen and certain things will come of it. Certain memories will fade, never materialize, others will pop up much later. And this is what the summer consists of. The summer consists of the constant drone of the air conditioning. Truly, I’ve forgotten what silence is. Silence now is the hum and buzzes of the air conditioning unit. If it’s not cooling it’s fanning, and if it’s not on and the window is open, consequently all I can hear is the larger air conditioning unit outside the window to the building next to mine. The summer consists of the buzz of the humidity, white clouds making developments into the air within the patch of sky I can see from my room, beset upon a varied sky the color blue. Blue is a color which is constantly in flux. There are various blues, but at its root they all are blue, the blue of the skies above. And today the blue is the absence of blue, there is no such thing as the opposite of blue there is just the absence of blue. Today the clouds are heavy and enceinte with some foreboding materials. They carry the blue of the rains that empty into the streets, where the blue of the self is reflected into the heavy puddle, especially the one just outside the church where a three-dimensional triangular slope in the sidewalk collects enough rain so quickly that as soon as it rains people are having to step around the sidewalk, sometimes are even briefly forced into the street so as to not completely submerge their shoes in the rainwater.

Upon my tongue I taste the hamburgers of the summer. The people feed off it, are fed on it, and enough burgers and you can put together some semblance of what a summer is supposed to taste like. Last night we journeyed far into Queens, farther than I have ever gone before, where the subway no longer is sub, but becomes within one fell, sweeping motion, a superway. On either side the city and the graffiti that decorates it. Below the superway deals are being made, rhymes are shouted, cadences observed quickly and then shifted from two-fourths to fifteen-sixteenths quickly like that back and forth between standard tempos and exotic tempos that you only hear in Middle Eastern or gypsy tunes. In the superway, here too glances are exchanged, and conversations follow a certain tempo, and words spoken upon quarter, eight and sixteenth notes. There is the beat of the track that is felt through the pulse which echoes through the bars where you put your hand, among other hands and the backs of people lying against them. Looking at the people I was conversing with who were sitting before me, something else was going through my head: the feeling of the very few strands of black hair of the girl standing next to me, looking out the window forlornly (she seemed so severe and unhappy that I was sure she was European), and occasionally her green long-sleeved shirt and imagined briefly the effect of those same slight exchanges of touch laying in bed with her on a lazy Saturday afternoon. Temporarily looking up from the faces of the people I was talking to, I saw her reflection in the scuffed chrome of the frame of the window and wanted to know if my hand touching her back now and then affected her in a way too, I sought some minor confirmation in a glance exchanged in the scuffed up chrome, although the metal was almost too dull to allow me any access to her blue eyes. I could never be sure if we made eye contact, but I could tell that her eyes were blue.

The superway gates opened up and we briefly walked in step but soon we were swallowed by the crowd. We were led through a series of backways and tunnels and elevators, having to produce a ticket now and then to be sure we were allowed access to these secret passages. The Shea stadium seemed smaller than most stadiums, but then it’s difficult to tell when you are led almost blindfolded through its intestines. It seemed fit that in a subterranean tunnel within the belly of the Shea we were given a brief history of the Mets institution, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the newly minted stadium. A man wearing a beige suit the color of peanut-butter taffy, a light blue shirt, and thick-rimmed prescription Ray Bans assured us that this was not only a baseball diamond, but, he was proud to say, a place where guys came to pick up girls and girls came to pick up guys on a Friday night, which made me think two things to myself: could guys pick up guys, and secondly, where could I pick up these girls? Finally we were led to our skybox suite, just behind homeplate, probably the best seat in the house as far as I could tell. There was food of all sorts and all kinds of drinks. As we went on a more thorough tour of the stadium while the game progressed slowly, we were offered various perspectives of the field. The green of the field called out to the eyes every time it popped up, whether from behind left field or on the screen of the thousands of TVs throughout the building. And then there I could see the hamburgers that made up the summer, the way the people at the Friday night baseball game carried them proudly to their seats. The food which churned a nation, gave it happiness and a feeling of success. I saw a girl lead her boyfriend to their seats and both their hands were filled with food, pretzels, drinks, a Mets-colored item of paraphernalia. And I saw on their faces the same glib sense of accomplishment that a cat wears as he carries a dead gopher that hangs limply from his mouth. It was the same dead thing that lingered in my mouth the next morning, today, when I woke up underneath the nonblue summer sky rainclouds.