The Queens Comet

Opening Day at Fenway Park, the kids were lined up hours before the gate opened, and by noon or one o'clock, the mood was starting to turn ugly. "Like refugees at Da Nang," a friend still mutters balefully.

"Like The Day of the Locust, Worse than the movie of The Day of the Locust," No hopes for Tony C. could hold this crowd much longer--school was out, as far as they were concerned, and even in the year of busing and boycotts I guess that called for something special. Admission to the ballpark, at least...no pretzel vendor, not even the sunniest Opening Day sky, was going to hold them out in the street much longer.

"Asshole--get off my car!" someone said, pulling at the three 14-year-olds. Beer cans danced in their upraised hands and they were more amused than surprised by him, I guess. By the time the crowd shoved and mauled its way through the gates 90 minutes later ("Hope no one has a heart attack," the aging man in front of me said humorously, his woman companion trying mournfully to smile) the car would have more dents than Cleon Jones's wallet, and the angry man would have gone off crying, hopeless, forlorn, hanging his once-proud head in shame, like Shoeless Joe Jackson at the Black Sox trial. Why--who--how could he have left the car there, this of all days? After a while the kids started throwing rocks at passing trucks, but since it wasn't a demonstration the cops stood by benignly and only the car got hurt.

I wasn't used to this stuff--I grew up a couple of miles from Shea Stadium, named for a hotshot New York lawyer, ultramodern, no bleachers. General Admission filled with clean-cut cheerful-looking kids whose mothers encouraged them to play at Little League, but just so it didn't interfere with their schoolwork. I got my wallet stolen, once, and my program lots of times--but after all I never really scored properly, S's for singles and O's for outs, so that seemed only fair, apart from the thieves' being bigger and stronger than I was. Maybe things are changing in New York too--the Times reported a couple weeks back that stadiums across the country wouldn't sell beer any more because the fans were bashing each other's heads in afterwards. Maybe there's a new kind of baseball fan abroad even in the city where saintly Christy Mathewson once held court. Maybe so--but that's not how I think of Shea. I'd feel as lost there in an ugly or furious crowd as the old-timers in The Glory of Their Times, some of them--maybe I'd get accustomed, as they did, but the way things seem to be going the city would probably be closed for bankruptcy too soon.

Fenway Park is something else. Later in the year, I heard, high up in the bleachers someone stood up midway through a late inning of a dull game, dropped his pants and underwear, stuck out his tongue, and started screaming the Sox encouragement. The cops led him away, as I guess was only to be expected--no one tried to stop them, but everyone cheered the dude. When the games get dull--American League baseball seems sloppy and unspirited to me, though maybe that is just my prejudice, taught from infancy to hate the Yankees and worship Willie Mays--you can sit around waiting for a fight. Pick out a Yankee game. In the proper season, the half of the crowd that's not rowdy kids or their grown-up counterparts will be B.U. students from Long Island, heavily into New York--they would never think of booing Yastrzemski if he were a Yankee. No wonder there's an edge to the Bostonians' insults--it's like the American track team in China, last week, impressed in spite of themselves because the Chinese fans seemed to really mean it about friendship, not competition, but dubious deep down inside--"Americans like to win," one runner told reporters firmly, as though it was an indictment of the Chinese. (Then at the final banquet half the team got drunk and walked on tables--the Chinese were polite about it.) But the Bostonian reaction has different nuances, because the Yankees' whole dignified tradition depended on half a century of winning, even if that seemed gone forever for a while. The Boston fans were angry with the smugness of the Yankee equanimity--one I knew, transplanted to the heartland of the enemy, used to say fiercely that Dom had been the only real DiMaggio. Joe could hit a little better, he conceded grimly, but Dom had him beat by miles in the field.

At least, Yankee fans wouldn't have booed a New York Yastrzemski a few years back--who knows what things are like now?

It must signify something that the mean enthusiastic crowd that only goes to hockey games in New York comes out to Fenway sunny afternoons. Here in Boston, Abbie Hoffman's Cradle of Liberty ("Whose hand will cradle a rock," Abbie used to say, like those kids at Opening Day, the tough kids still come out for baseball--the last liberal game, each person making his unique, separate contribution to the whole, no time limits, just the open spaces, no brute strength or monstrous size, just skill and smartness and talent. The analysis breaks down some when you start breaking down the crowds. These kids are Democrats by birth, all right, but they're not exactly the folks who manned McGovern buses or turn out for liberal caucuses in the suburbs--but that's okay, maybe when McGovern told America to come home he wasn't talking to suburbia anyway, even if that's partly who listened.

Halfway through the eighth, my third game out this year--I think the Sox were behind, but with a nice night and a couple of beers, maybe passing around a joint, even the Ford City sky-writing planes, let alone the Fenway Frank ones, can seem friendly and informal--these two kids ran out into right field, opposite the green wall dividing Fenway from the city. The wall's thinness is something else I can't get used to. You take the subway out to Shea, too, all right, the elevated IRT jammed with happy kids and determined teenagers, but when you get there you're half a green mile from the Unisphere, at the end of Flushing Meadow Park. Fenway's just the opposite--all narrow streets and factories and warehouses. But the kids were on the field. They eluded the cops for four, five minutes--it was beautiful just to watch--and the angry cops chased them over into the stands and up toward the exit signs. I think they got away.

Weird things go on at Fenway--not really weird. I guess, just if you think about them long enough. These drunks get into shouting matches and smart-ass college kids tell them to ennunciate, and when the drunks do the smart-ass college kids stare at the field in triumph and say. "Let's hear it for ennunciation!" "If this were some other country," someone asked me at my last game's seventh-inning stretch, "do you think the Bicentennial banner would seem okay?"

Between the warehouses and the Fenway Franks, it seemed okay to me there at Fenway--where even under the skywriting planes' lights, they couldn't catch the kids.