Colin Harrison - The Havana Room

I, on the other hand, knew nothing about him. Especially why it was he who controlled the schedule of the Havana Room's activities.

But I knew something else- I knew that when Robert Moses, the great, bullheaded architect of modern New York, builder of highways and parks and municipal swimming pools, insisted that the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway be constructed to facilitate the traffic flowing around New York City to and from the rapidly growing suburbs in Long Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey, the elevated highway was erected through and over the working-class neighborhoods of short brick row homes that used to house the men who serviced the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the docks on the East River. If any thought was given to what would happen to the buildings beneath the highway, it did not change their fate, which was to be subjected to the noise and pollution of the road, the constant shower of hubcaps, empty 10W40 oil cartons, milk shake cups, bags of vomit from carsick children, lost Yankees hats, used diapers, cigarette butts, beer bottles, discarded cassette tapes, condoms, watermelons, radiator caps, and God knows everything else that falls out of or is thrown from cars and trucks. Squatting within the shadows of this rusting, rushing superstructure are businesses that depend upon such a marginal location, where rents are lower, squalor ignored, parking ample and unpoliced: porn shops, taxi garages, car service offices, and so on. It's a bad zone; it was here, for example that a New York City policeman, drinking for twelve hours after his shift ended, some of that time in a strip joint, ran over a pregnant Latina woman and her two children with his van going seventy miles an hour, an event which, for those who believe in such places, sent four souls to heaven and one to the front page of the tabloids. The city has these fissures, deep crevices in the landscape that bad stuff falls into, and it was here that I went looking for Jay that same afternoon, based upon what Allison had told me.

The building in Red Hook that I wanted sat on Third Avenue. I pushed through the door in a mood of apprehension, because I remembered how much Timothy had liked the place when we'd been there a few years before, and returning now was a measure of my fall since then. But I kept going. The first room, a murky cave of pinball and video games, sold cheap sports memorabilia and junk food. Boys in mismatched Little League uniforms ran pell-mell. I could hear rock music and every few seconds a loud metallic clang. Through a doorway, a much larger room appeared, under this sign:

35 MPH: All Youngsters Under 9

45 MPH: Youngsters 9 and Older

55 MPH: Youngsters 10 and Older

65 MPH: Youngsters 11 and Older

75 MPH: Teenagers 13 and Older

85 MPH: Teenagers 17 and Older

95 MPH: Special Access, Mgt. Approval Required

Behind a high curtain of netting, the pitching machines were firing baseballs at the batters. I stood for a moment behind the 45 mph machine as a lanky boy of about ten swung at pitch after pitch with an aluminum bat. The balls seemed pretty fast, but he made contact with every third pitch or so. A middle-aged man in a green Jets cap stepped in and adjusted the boy's stance, the ball whizzing past his eyebrows. Baseball is still sacred in Brooklyn, in a way it never could be on the East Side of Manhattan, and the Red Hook cages are part of a world where forgotten old men sit in lawn chairs in the lumpy fields of public parks, eating unlit cigars and catching smoking rockets from young hurlers, boys whose mothers bleach the uniforms the night before a game, a game often as not umped by a cop or fireman and which, if played at the Ty Cobb Little League field near Avenue X, will be watched not only by the black residents of the housing project across the street and the mothers and fathers sitting on the cement bleachers, but by the men who run the maintenance train of the subway's N line, men who park the massive yellow-and-black engines on the elevated track that directly overlooks right field; on the rare occasion when a boy clanks a ball off the home run wall, one of the men climbs nonchalantly into the cab of the engine and yanks the horn as the boy circles the bases. That's Brooklyn, Brooklyn baseball.

I moved on. No sign of Jay. A knot of hollering, hot-dog-stuffing boys clustered behind each machine, and the noise was formidable. At the 75 mph cage, I watched one of the boys lean in too close over the plate and take a pitch right on the temple of his batting helmet; his coach reached inside the steel fence, hit the red stop button, and went to pick up his player, who shook off the injury. Of course I thought of Timothy, ten now, quite capable of swinging a bat as hard as many of these kids.

At the far end of the building lay the 95 mph cage and through the many layers of wire mesh I could see a large figure in T-shirt and shorts taking dramatic cuts at the ball. Others were watching him, and as I approached I realized it was Jay, with something made of green plastic sticking out of his mouth. He clanged an enormous shot. I got closer and saw that the device clenched in his mouth was an inhaler; between pitches he squeezed down on it, shooting whatever chemicals it contained into himself.

I melted in among the others, worried and fascinated. I knew Jay was a big man, of course, but his body had always been cloaked by a suit or heavy winter coat; here, now, I plainly saw a man about six foot three, two hundred and forty pounds, powerful in the arms and chest and back, with a little extra in the gut, and, most notably, heavily muscled legs that swelled below the knee into enormous, veined calves, large as a comic book superhero's, three times normal size, and oddly, even disturbingly, compelling- beautiful fruits of muscle that splayed widely from the downward line of his legs- legs that Allison had presumably had between her own. Jay and I were not sexual rivals, but we weren't exactly not, either. I wondered if Allison measured our deep but solitary kiss in the Havana Room only a few hours earlier against the ongoing pleasures Jay had provided her. The question was silly but the answer was yes, of course, and seeing Jay's obvious vitality, I thought it was possible that Allison would shrug off our brief intimacy as silly or wrong.

"Fuckin' freak," sniggered one of the teenage boys hanging their fingers through the wire fencing. "Sucking on that thing, fucking cocaine gas or something."

"It's brain steroids, like makes your bat speed faster. Major leaguers use them secretly before they come out of the dugout."

"That's totally fucked, man."

"No it's not! Every major league dugout has like this little bathroom next to it. Guys go in there, toke on that stuff, and come out and hit. Why you think the home run records keep getting broken? It wasn't all the muscle stuff, it was the brain stuff."

"You have like no fucking idea what you're talking about."

"Look, he's hitting it, you pussy."

Indeed he was, and not just dinging them back or popping them up but swinging his bat parallel to the ground and driving the ball straight back against the mesh at the far end, one after another. Then he missed, and the ball rocketed against the screen in front of me. He let out a muffled roar of frustration, then gave himself two shots of the drug, seemingly swelling up with them before the next pitch came.

Which it did, and Jay got a piece of the ball, clanking it hard against the screen fifteen feet up. He roared again, and slammed the bat into the earth.

"See?" said the boy, stroking what he hoped was a mustache. "Freakman. Steroids in the brain, making him crazy."

Jay dug his cleats in and took a practice swing, then pulled the bat back to the loaded position, knees bent, head up, right elbow high and a little jumpy. The mechanical arm lifted and Jay rocked and cocked, as the coaches say, and when the ball came he was ready and drilled it into the nets.