Lugging a Baseball Bat Through the Blackout of 2003
Everyone else was outside, too, the way it must have been before air conditioners and cable television—on stoops and in folding chairs, flooding the sidewalks and streets and corner stores. We went down to the pier in Bay Ridge and it was SRO. We wedged through the crowds, glad-handed, and bemoaned the peace, our neighbors’ good behavior. It was like I’d brought out the bat for nothing. (Though it did eventually make it into the title of Brian Bonz’s song “Flashlights and Baseball Bats,” which is something.)
We lugged it back to 65th Street and sat across the street from the police precinct on a low concrete ledge, drinking beers in full view of the constabulary. They had bigger things to worry about. Or did they? Cop cars cut turns off Fourth Avenue; others zoomed off the street, sirens flashing. Not everyone, I guess, was calmly sipping cans of beer with friends, discussing the implicit Communist sympathies of Finding Nemo. But most of us did just fine, filing the night away as a classic New York story, even if it wasn’t the New York we had heard about and were expecting—more 1965 than 1977.
At the time, I owned a buttonmaker, and the next day I made a simple white button that read BLACKOUT 2003. I wore it during my next shift at the store, and one of the customers laughed. “That was quick,” he said. Nostalgia always is.
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