Poetry Night at the Ballpark and Other Scenes from an Alternative America. Bill Kauffman
UB had the worst program in college football until Turner Gill, a devout Christian gentleman and miracle worker, came to town three years ago. Gill vitalized the team with local products James Starks of Niagara Falls and Buffalo’s own Naaman Roosevelt, so that the Bulls of Buffalo are, in some sense, representative of Buffalo. This year UB played in a postseason game for the first time ever—the unfortunately named International Bowl in Toronto.
Bulls fans expected a bittersweet end: Gill would leave town at season’s conclusion, lured by a fat contract from a football factory. No one—well, almost no one—would have blamed him. In America, people are expected to move for money. Loyalty is penury. Immobility is for suckers and losers.
But Turner Gill is staying. Passed over for the Auburn job—reportedly for the stupid racist reason that the coach, who is black, has a white wife—Gill is casting down his bucket where he is, at least for now.
Stay is such an underrated word.
A Fan’s Notes
The American Conservative, 2013
I am writing this on a sunny and fragrant June morning, sitting in the bleachers off the Little League field on which I played all those summers ago. My Little League coach, Larry Lee, died last week, and it is a Kauffman family habit (not an eccentricity!) to revisit places associated with the recently deceased.
I can see myself out there at shortstop for the Cubs in the National League playoff game. Bottom of the sixth, tie game, bases loaded, grounder hit my way, I field it cleanly, throw home . . . and into the dirt, skipping it past the catcher. Game over, season over, Little League career over. Shucks.
Pretty much every male relative of mine—father, brother, cousin, uncles—was all-league in baseball or football, but as for me, well, they also serve who only sit and watch from the bench. I’m a quinquagenarian now, rather to my astonishment, and I still bring out the glove to toss the ball with our daughter, who humors the old man with a game of backyard catch in the high grass.
I don’t hold, however, with my Upstate landsman Frederick Exley’s morose conclusion that “it was my destiny—unlike my father, whose fate it was to hear the roar of the crowd—to sit in the stands with most men and acclaim others. It was my fate, my destiny, my end, to be a fan.” (Exley’s books belie any such shrinking violetism.)
This is the seventy-fifth year since professional baseball came to Batavia, and we are among the last of the train-whistle towns in the low minors. I sit in these bleachers, too, with friends and apparitions, conducting decades-long conversations and hearing ghostly echoes.
Even in the bushes, alas, those ghostly echoes can get lost in the din.
Each batter has his own “walk-up music,” which means that every time a home team lad strides to the plate we are treated to a ten-second snatch of his favorite song. Year in and year out, the boys’ collective taste is execrable. I’ve yet to hear, say, X or Neil Young, though what I really long for is the sound of silence.
Conversation is the casualty in the empire of noise. I am vice president of the team but I can’t get the damned decibelage turned down. John Nance Garner was right about the impuissance of VPs.
In minor-league baseball, the place, and not the players, is the thing. This place is: My old friend Donny Rock, the groundskeeper, lining the basepaths. Grande dame Catherine Roth, now ninety-two, refusing to stand for the vapid “God Bless America,” which since 9/11 has afflicted our ears during the seventh-inning stretch. My mom, who has lived her entire life in our Snow Belt county, putting on her jacket when the temperature dips below eighty. Yappy Yapperton, countless sheets to the wind, yelling inanities from the beer deck. (Scratch that: Yappy is either dead or in prison today.)
The boys of summer come and go; I prefer life in the bleachers. A fair number of big leaguers have passed this way, and I follow them in the box scores. Especially Phillies’ stars Ryan Howard and Chase Utley, who were, in successive years, very kind to our daughter during the Muckdogs v. Muckpuppies games. (These tilts required the boys to come to the park the Saturday morn after a Friday night game and presumed revelry. The guys who showed—Utley, Howard, and some very good-natured Latin American players—were saints.)
As for the majors: yawn.
Several years ago I had a free afternoon while visiting DC and thought I’d take in my first Nationals’ game. The Metro ride to the stadium, with its passengerial cargo of black and white ball-capped fans, was a rare and heartening sight in our segregated capital city.
As I neared the ticket booth I hesitated. Did I really want to spend three hours fidgeting through interminable TV timeouts, which make between-innings breaks and coaches’ trips to the mound foretastes of eternity? Nah. So attending a Nats’ game remains on my list of Things to Do in DC Before I Die (along with visiting the Frederick Douglass home and the gravesites of Gore Vidal and Clover Adams at Rock Creek Cemetery).
Back in the bleachers I think of William Cullen Bryant’s poetical wish that he die “in flowery June/When brooks sent up a cheerful tune.” Bryant got his wish. It’s the little victories that count.
Writing America
“I do not invent my literary ancestors. If anything, they invented me.”
—Gore Vidal
A Note from the Reagan Generation
Rolling Stock, 1987
The forgotten Frank Norris, realist poet of wheat, predicted the emergence of an earthy and true muse for American novelists of the future. “Believe me,” he declared, “she will lead you far from the studios and the aesthetes, the velvet jackets and the uncut hair, far from the sexless creatures who cultivate their little art of writing as the fancier cultivates his orchid. . . . She will lead you—if you are humble with her and honest with her—straight into a World of Working Men, crude of speech, swift of action, strong of passion, straight to the heart of a new life, on the borders of a new time.”
See the borders recede and fall ignominiously over the horizon! The tyranny of the upper-crust white literati and denigration of the populist vision continues today, virulent as in brash old Norris’s time. How I gag upon the “voice of a new generation” encomia that greet Ellis, Leavitt, Janowitz, McInerny, and the hive of detached young avatars, boldly sketching the generational angst, piquant in their tales of aimless youth, numbed by ludes, Alfa Romeos, and a surfeit of unfelt sex.
What is this Voice of a Generation bullshit? Did Hemingway and F. Scott and those fine old coxcombs speak for my grandfather, wiping his brow with axle grease while the Lost Generation drank from European carafes and got Parisian blowjobs? Did the Beats, sainted souls though they were, speak for my dad, surveying for the Iron Horse that Ginsberg rode first class to the Wichita love-in? Do our coke-besotted disaffected authors of Vintage paperbacks embody the dreams and aspirations of my pals, stocking shelves with Tide and chugging Twelve Horse ale to forget that it’s the 220-pound wife they’ll be banging tonight?
Hell no. With each cocaine contract and sale of movie rights to Judd Nelson we drift from Whitman’s noble admonition to speak of the “mass of men, so fresh and free, so loving and so proud.”
“Democracy is waiting for its poet,” Frederick Jackson Turner confidently told his classmates a millennium ago. She waits still, patiently, though poetry has long since discarded her democratic vistas.
Where in American letters are the authentic voices of the mass of men and women, so fresh, so free, so loving, so proud, who invigorate the heartland? Our cultural ruling class damns a generation for the sins of its affluent—those noxious coastal yuppies who compose the audience for the anointed Generational Voices. We are bombarded with smug attacks on Today’s Youth, delivered by paunchy old hypocrites who begrudge the children of the petty bourgeoisie the right to own a VCR.
I’m so bored with the antiyouth whining of the mildly discontented culturati: you know who you are, splitting grapefruit in bed with wifey, reading the elitist wedding page of the Sunday Times.