All Gone to Look for America by Peter Millar Read Free Book Online

later – he might well be right.

    It seems only proper that before leaving New York, I remedy my ignorance about this vital part of American life and go to see ‘a ball game’. A ball game in America is only ever baseball. American football and basketball – the other two great, but lesser passions – may also be played with a ball, but a ‘ball game’only means baseball. It started out as the New York Game, first referred to in records from 1792 as being played just outside the city, on land that is today Greenwich Village.
    The most surprising thing to me is the fact that I can get a ticket at all, especially given that the two New York teams both had home games last night. Unlike our football – or theirs – baseball games are played in series, like cricket test matches, over several days. There’s a ‘ball game’ on virtually every day of the season, and for those teams that do well enough, on into post-season and the World Series. Today is officially the last day of the season and will decide which teams go through, but even so there’s no problem at all getting a ticket, I’m told on the phone. But then maybe it’s not all that strange when every game is also shown live on television.
    The game it’s easiest to get to is the Mets at Shea Stadium, the legendary venue where back in the sixties the Beatles pioneered the use of giant outdoor venues for pop concerts. They allegedly played only 25 minutes and the screams of adolescent American girls were so loud and their amplifiers so small nobody could hear them. But it’s one of those events in rock history that made the venue famous. Best of all, I can get there by boat, up the East River. The Mets Express leaves Pier 17 at 5:00 p.m., more than two hours before the game and has a scheduled return time of 10:30 or ‘20 minutes after the end of the game’. Tricky thing organising transport for an event that is open-ended.
    A brochure at the ‘Y’ lists Pier 17 as ‘the historic heart of New York’s seaport district offering fine views of the Brooklyn Bridge’. The latter at least is true, and the big old bridge, famous from a million movies and the longest suspension bridge in the world when it was completed back in 1870, is an impressive site seen from below, hanging there against an azure, almost tropical, sky that still seems wrong to me for early autumn. But South Street Seaport is a sorry disappointment; like so many ‘historic’ sites in America its preservation has meant its Disneyfication, old warehouses being transformed into bijou boutiques catering almost exclusively for tourists lured there – like me – by advertisements in brochures.
    The one consolation however is that it does have a branch of the Heartland Brewery, New York City’s new and so far only micro, which offers a welcoming place for late lunch and cold beer on a sweltering afternoon. I opt for their ‘taster’ tray of tiny glasses of half a dozen ales and something that calls itself ‘popcorn shrimp’: scampi you eat with your fingers. Coming soon to a franchise near you! It’s okay, but the beers are better, particularly one in thedistinctive dry, hoppy English IPA style called – with a better than average attempt at humour – India(na) Pale Ale.
    The meal is marked only by a moment of embarrassment when two Irishmen come in and sit up at the bar next to me. They order fish and chips and large cokes and wolf them down. But when it comes to paying, despite the waitress’s silken-tongued service manner and her obliging help in explaining how they needed to use a different area code to call Brooklyn on the younger one’s mobile phone, they make the classic foreigner’s error. As they hand over the $30 for their two meals and giant cokes, the older one, as if an afterthought, turns and adds a tip: a single dollar. To her everlasting credit, the waitress smiles and says, ‘Thank you,’ and the pair grunt and nod as if they’ve done her a service, both