Pete Hamill - Piecework

Of course, it is the nature of all bridges that they travel in two directions. I know dozens of people who traveled west on The Bridge, wandered the world, and then made the long, wide circle home to Brooklyn. I don’t know anybody who ever did that from the Bronx. From the Manhattan shore, The Bridge still seems to whisper: “Come, travel across me. It’s only 1,562 feet across the river, and over here, and beyond, lies Oz, or Camelot, or Yoknapatawpha County.” And from the Brooklyn side it speaks in plain, bourgeois tones, with a plain, simple message: “Come home.”

When I went home to live in Brooklyn, many things had changed, but The Bridge remained. Every day for years, I would drive across it in the morning and feel that combination of intensity and serenity that Manhattan always evoked. It is in the nature of journalism that no day is like any other; your life’s work is shaped by events. One result is that you come to cherish those things that do not change. They provide stability of place in a world that insists upon altering its look, its cast, and its rules. The Bridge never changed.

What has changed is the way we see The Bridge. For many, it remains simply a grand fact. But for Hart Crane, John Marin, Joseph Stella, Georgia O’Keeffe, Walker Evans, and hundreds of other writers, painters, and photographers, The Bridge is a symbol, at once permanent and evolving, its image changing with the times. Today it reminds us that there were once men in this country, many of them quite young, who believed that anything was possible. They believed that if you could dream a suspension bridge over the East River, you could build one. And they did. They did it with an eye for beauty, and a love of craft, and the thing they made has endured. In New York, fads and fashions come and go. Architects inflict novelties upon us that rise, are written about and soon torn down. Politicians make careers, lead millions, and end up as statues in a park. Scoundrels dominate the newspapers, actresses and dancers take their turns in the spotlight, writers and singers bow to acclaim. And soon all of them are gone. A few things remain. And one of them is The Bridge. It stands there, every day of our lives, and it is oddly comforting to think that it will be there long after most of us are gone.

NEW YORK,

May 30, 1983

Summer, when I was a boy in Brooklyn, was a string of intimacies, a sum of small knowings, and almost none of them cost money. Nobody ever figured out a way to charge us for morning, and morning then was the beginning of everything. I was an altar boy in the years after the war, up in the morning before most other people for the long walk to the church on the hill. And I would watch the sun rise in Prospect Park — at first a rumor, then a heightened light, something unseen and immense melting the hard early darkness; then suddenly there was a molten ball, screened by the trees, about to climb to a scalding noon. The sun would dry the dew on the grass of the park, soften the tar, bake the rooftops, brown us on the beaches, make us sweat, force us out of the tight, small flats of the tenements.

And if dawn was a tremendous overture, endlessly repeated, the days were always improvisations. How did we decide what to do with our time? We didn’t; the day decided. The day had its own rhythms. I don’t remember ever drawing up plans, or waiting for some agent of the state to arrive and direct us. Usually, the day would tell us to meet on the corner, with a pink spaldeen and a stickball bat. All through the war, there had been no spaldeens, and the few survivors had been treasured or replaced with those gray furry tennis balls we all despised, because we had never seen tennis played, had no idea what it was about, worshiped no tennis players. When spaldeens returned, stickball entered a golden age. Two blocks away, on 14th Street beside the Minerva Theater, the Tigers played gigantic money games, with pots as large as $300 and audiences jamming the sidewalks. Our games were smaller. We were still amateurs. Literally lovers. Lovers of that simple game with its swift variations on baseball: one strike and you were out, no bases on balls, six men on a team, sewer tops for bases, scoreboards chalked on tar. We made bats from broom handles, and there was an elaborate ritual of transforming broom to bat: clawing away the wire that held the straw by jamming the broom on a picket fence; then burning away the end of the straw; then sanding off splinters and taping the handle. Those brooms made beautiful bats, thin at the handle, thicker at the end. Today, commercially made stickball bats are sold in stores, products of Super Glut; they are terrible bats, as straight and untapered as poles. Playing with them is like playing with a mop handle.

Stickball wasn’t always a team game. We played variations called catchaflyerup (or, more literally, catch a fly, you’re up), in which a batter kept hitting until someone caught a batted ball on the fly; roly-poly, where you rolled the spaldeen, after it was hit, toward the bat, which lay flat across home plate (if the ball hit the bat, bounced, and the batter missed it, the player who rolled it became the new hitter); and, most simply, tenhitsapiece, in which each batter was allowed to hit ten times. The simpler variations were played early in the morning, before everybody showed up on the court. When there were enough players, we started the full games, with their elaborate, specific ground rules: Off the factory wall was a home run, off the diner was a hindoo (a do-over). Around the city there were dozens of other variations.

We didn’t play much baseball because the equipment cost too much money, but we lived and breathed the game. Most of us were Dodger fans, from territorial loyalty, but also because it was one of the greatest of all baseball teams. In all of that neighborhood, I knew one Giant fan and one guy who unaccountably rooted for the Cincinnati Reds. Nobody rooted for the Yankees.

That was before television’s triumph, before so many children were turned into passive slugs, before the relentless tides of Super Glut had jammed or pacified so many imaginations. We didn’t have those giant $350 radios you see everywhere now (the radio in our house was shaped like a cathedral, and you had to hold the aerial in the back to hear clearly). But somehow we always knew The Score. Red Barber narrated the Dodger games on WHN, and we would shout into the bars — into Rattigan’s, Fitzgerald’s, Quigley’s, Unbeatable Joe’s — “Who’s winnin’ and who’s pitchin’ and who got the hits?” We knew; we always knew. The Score was like some insistent melody being played in another room, parallel to our own lives and our own scores.

But we also saw a lot of games at Ebbets Field. The Police Athletic League gave away Knothole Club tickets, and so — reluctantly, fearful of the taint of betrayal — we would go into the 72nd Precinct each spring and sign up for the PAL so we could get Dodger tickets. They were almost always in the bleachers, when the worst teams (and poorest draws) were in town against the Dodgers, but we didn’t care. There was Dixie Walker, over in right field, and Pete Reiser, playing out the shattered autumn of his career, his brilliant talent broken against the walls of the great ballpark. And on different days in different summers, Reese, Snider, Billy Cox, Stanky, Furillo, Hodges, and the rest, HIT SIGN WIN SUIT, said Abe Stark’s sign under the Scoreboard in center; the sign was three feet off the ground, and it would have required three simultaneous outfield coronaries for any batter to bounce a baseball off that sign, but it was a crucial part of the furnishings. And there, jittery and wonderful, dancing off third base, ready to steal home, rattling the pitchers, was Jackie Robinson. That was part of being a Dodger fan then: You were forced to take a moral position. To be a Dodger fan in those days was to endorse the idea that a black man had a right to steal home in the major leagues.