By Angelique Pesce
Adam stops in front of Yankee Stadium– a towering circular ancient dinosaur, erected to celebrate baseball, America’s favorite past time. This would be one of its last years before it’s replaced by a bigger, brighter, newer surround sounds stadium. The blueprints drafted, contract signed and the ground broken. It’s in Highbridge, the poorest neighborhood in the United States and he wants to take it over. He wants to build the new stadium down the block by 2009.
Checking his watch, 30 minutes ’til game time.
Adam enters the Colosseum. As he strolls through the arched hallway he sees a stadium bar facing the dug-out. A red, white, and blue neon sign blinks over its doorway, Yankees, on and off, blinking on and off. With some time, Adam steps inside.
Visible are the remnants of decades past with memorabilia, like layers of a pastry cake, perfectly framed on the bar walls with autographed pictures on top of baseball cards of famous players long gone.
The patrons lined the bar like New York City pigeons on the ledge of a bridge suspended over a river of faces staring back at Adam as a stroll through space to grab a seat.
A female bartender, 40s, in a fringed cowhide leather vest, looks up from her cash register to see Adam reflected in the mirror in front of her, seated. She turns away from the mirror to see her new customer in the flesh waiting for a drink.
The bartender, “What’ll it be cowboy?”
Without looking up Adam talks to the brim of his black baseball cap, “A beer, whatever you have will be fine.” He places a $100 bill down. Living the dream but it was not too long ago when he wasn’t.
A Budweiser coaster is put under him, followed by a pint, the head lavas up over the brim and down the sides. He looks at pennies left on the bar next to him and ponders the value remaining. They’re stacked, like the green light at the end of the dock in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” like hope waiting to be earned. The only question is where is he going to put it?
Reaching for a pen sticking out of his back pocket Adam begins to write on his notepad… The words “American Pastime” recalling his own childhood baseball game where his life changed forever. At a time when a book titled “The Panda’s Thumb” taught him everything he knew to be true about evolution. It made him want to take over his own life, his neighborhood, and help it evolve. Adam writes for 30 minutes about that game:
Sitting at the edge of my bed and 1986 in a sparsely decorated room staring down at a hole in one of my cleats, the kind a poor kid would have, I poked my big toe through a tear a few times waiting to leave for my baseball game.
Only 12 years old, I felt like I was being watched, as I held my baseball glove and ball. The gloves lace was weathered down to a fray from the once oiled smooth skin it was threaded with.
God narrates, “For me even as far back as then, watching Adam was something of a job description. The thread. It’s always used to signify time fraying away, it’s linear, flexible, able to bend around back onto itself like a Mobius Circle, always connected, never future, always now, yet always aging to the person touching it. Time. It is relative. Time never ages. People age. Generations count it to organize. Why? Could only be progress. Time does not require counting it. People do.
“As far back as then Adam was somewhat of a work of art to me made of dirt and dust and binary code. His DNA was like a computer program to me and at this point he was very simple like C-Plot. He wanted his words to be shared with others if they could, something his own timeline would be too short to accomplish so he wanted to build into a space where even if he, the thinker, no longer existed his thoughts would remain and so he wanted to write a book and build a home, Beit. He wanted to write and build something that lasted forever like the alphabet. Alphabet means one home, Al’eph Beit. Language was created for people to communicate to one another, that kind of clarity causes world peace, one home, in unison for people to live. What are missiles built with physics saying? What are high school shootings saying? He hoped his book and home would reflect that. The fact that language exists is proof that peace is our future.”
He wanted his home to be a building for others to visit. His Taj Mahal to the community. So he set his heart on a rebuild of Yankee Stadium. A baseball game is a good analogy for life he thought.
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Related Feature: One Question: Angelique Pesce
As a legal analyst, historian, and pop culture ethicist, Angelique Pesce has taught western and eastern culture media and law ethics for twelve years. As an artist making documentary and narrative films, she is able to tell a story that interests audiences of all ages whether new to the topic or learned. Her prior writing experience is two children’s books, a legal blog, and several novels in authorship. She has worked in costume design and film production for productions released by United Artists, Discovery ID, and NBC Networks. She has managed several New York law firms.
You can order American Pastime here.