Buffalo, Etc.

Editor’s Note: I drafted this in the Buffalo airport yesterday morning, but didn’t get a chance to post it until now.



Niagara Falls at night is beautiful because they train bright colorful spotlights on the falls and the mist swirls around uniquely, sort of like steam or smoke, but not quite, since parts of the cloud fall while others rise. In any case, it was also much too cold, for me anyway. It was 34 degrees nearing 10:00 PM, and as I stood on Goat Island overlooking Horseshoe Falls, the wind kicked up and sprayed me with mist that somehow felt colder than ice. I walked away from the edge a bit, and soon drove back to my motel in time to watch the end of the Cubs game on Sunday Night Baseball.

I was in Buffalo for work, if you could call it that, since work normally involves effort and I could hardly claim to have been expending any. It was more of a chance for Lenovo to show off their new laptops and get people like me, and companies like mine, on board. Lenovo, with a dominant European and Asian market share, bought part of IBM last year to charge at Dell head on in our market, and as they roll out their first new product lines I think that they might just pull it off.

Usually when I travel I can fit it into my framework, meaning for example that when I wake up in the morning I remember where I am, recalling that this is the morning I have to leave for somewhere else, knowing how long I’ll be there, and so on. This trip, however, did not feel like this. It came on unexpectedly and happened while I was thinking about so much else that on the morning I flew out I awoke and wondered why the hell my alarm was going off on a Sunday. It’s hard when your thoughts are in several places at once.

Buffalo is not prospering. Not even close. I have heard that it’s destitute and devoid and deteriorated and other depressing D-words, (downright disgusting), but having traveled a fair amount the last few years and having seen firsthand the renaissance that many cities are enjoying – even Pittsburgh! – I thought that maybe this report was overblown. It’s not. I have no idea as to the trend of downtown Buffalo, whether it’s getting better or worse or trudging along as it has and will the last fifty years, but as I drove around downtown looking for some sign of human life I was shocked. It’s hard to believe that this was once one of the grandest cities in the country.

A bar I read about called the Pearl Street Grill and Brewery was closed at 10:30 PM on a Monday night. This is unconscionable to me, and probably to the owners as well since brewpub owners are hardly the lax type about their business, so the forces of supply must really dwarf demand. Other bars and lounges within a mile and a half radius were all closed as well. I wondered how this was possible until I realized that I also did not see any pedestrians and very few cars, so apparently downtown is just that dead. Maybe it would have been different if the Sabres had been playing next door in HSBC Arena, but still.

This morning I awoke remembering that I had to fly back home, but when I checked in at the airport and the woman asked, I said that I was flying to Chicago. This was only partially true: I was flying to Chicago for a layover before flying to Austin. But that’s not what I meant. In my fog, I defaulted to saying that I was flying to Chicago as in home.

It’s strange, because I don’t think of Chicago as home anymore. The area has been home at various times in my life, and is probably the closest thing I have to a geographical base, but why, now, is my subconscious spending its time thinking about it? Is it only baseball?

This is what I was afraid of. All winter long I felt like I was getting away with something as I drove around town in January with the windows down, and here is my Midwestern Lutheran Protestant Guilt snapping up at me as if to say, “You are a climate scavenger. You moved down there to selfishly enjoy a setting which is not natively yours and which you did nothing to earn, and you should be ashamed of yourself for not having the fortitude to tough out northern winter. Gloom is good for you; no one should enjoy themselves all the time or they’re bound to become decadent.” Nonsense, of course, but there it is.

Still, the other part of it is that right this moment I miss downtown Chicago. The Cubs are 4-1 as I sit in the airport writing this, and in Wrigley Field they just swept the Cardinals for the first time in 5 years. It was my kind of party, and I missed it.

*Sigh* This is the bittersweetness of adventuring. More on that in a moment.

* * *I was catching up on some reading, and ran across another Roger Angell piece, ”Up Close and Not Personal, in the January 9, 2006 issue of the New Yorker. The opening captures quite well a struggle that many of us engage from time to time:

With the bowl games at hand, the N.B.A. and N.H.L. seasons in full flow, the N.F.L. playoffs just ahead, and pitchers-and-catchers a bare six weeks away, sports fans may be wondering once again why all this repletion isn’t more satisfying. Sports news abounds, with the talk shows easily outnumbering the games actually being played, but what’s missing still is the crazy, cozy old sense of identification that once tied the fan by the set or in the stands to the young athletes out on the field. The attachment was steady until a couple of decades ago, and what did it in wasn’t so much salaries or steroids or free agency as the astoundingly changed dimensions and reflexes of the modern player. Professional athletes once looked like somebody we knew, that friendly young fellow down the block who could run fast and dunk the ball or throw it a mile—not us exactly but close enough, and there in the games to represent if not always our town or our college then our species. This illusion waned when everyday N.B.A. players grew to six feet eight or better and N.F.L. linemen suddenly averaged two hundred and ninety pounds and could run forty yards in under six seconds. Well, O.K., there was still baseball, where the sweet connection first flourished. Our fathers or grandfathers, at ease in their good grandstand seats behind third base, could look out at Red Schoendienst or Bill Mazeroski or Tom Tresh and think, Well, with a little luck . . . The regulars took home each year just about what a pediatrician or a V.P. for sales or a steady C.P.A. earned. They were us, if we were doing well, in short, and chances were that we’d have succeeded at their game, too, if we’d taken a crack at it. Well, dream on, Gramps—or, as Hemingway’s Jake Barnes said, isn’t it pretty to think so? Now, in any case, all that’s gone. Try to get down near field level before your next ballgame and take a look at Derek Jeter or Jeff Kent or Dontrelle Willis as they stroll by: wow, these guys are enormous.

The dream of intimacy—it was always fantasy—is gone, and today’s players, so close to us on our plasma screens, are galaxies away from our own doings and capabilities. The loss hurts—no wonder the hosts and guests on the TV sports shows look so angry—and we are casting about to close the distance. If we can bring ourselves to think of professional athletes as rock stars, which they so resemble, we can find them on the wildly popular MTV program “Cribs,” which has taken viewers to the lush quarters of Snoop Dogg and Mariah Carey and Missy Elliott (a giant replica of her signature is set in the floor of her front hall), and also to Johnny Damon’s home in Tampa, where the dining room features an altered version of “The Last Supper,” with the heads of former fellow Red Sox players replacing the Apostles around the table. On various Web sites, we can also find Shaquille O’Neal’s lobby-size bed with its Superman-logo bedspread, and the heroic bronze statue of Pudge Rodriguez that decorates his own back yard. Roger Clemens, who has yet to appear on “Cribs,” has granted the occasional journalist a visit to his fifteen-thousand-square-foot home in the Piney Point area of Houston, with its Hall of Bats; its floor-to-ceiling golf-ball holders on either side of his study desk, containing three hundred and four golf balls each (one for each course he has played to date); and a bedroom that features lighted display cases and a wet bar. Gasping at the stars’ enormous pads and rolling acres and their outsized fridges (empty, for the most part, except for the obligatory bottle of Cristal) and snickering at such monumental garishness and infantile taste is all right for the sub-twenty age group that “Cribs” aims at, but it’s still not what we fans are after. What we yearn for may be contained in the question that every sportswriter keeps hearing from his readers: “What’s Willie Mays”—or Phil Mickelson or Andy Roddick—“really like?” Willie, as it happens, is cranky and private in person (he’s seventy-four years old) and passably complex, but this news, of course, is not what’s wanted. The desired, almost the demanded, answer is that he’s a great guy: he’s exactly like us.

Plenty of smart writers have written smart things about the nature of celebrity, especially in America. It’s our love-hate thing, how we want them to live the life we dream of so that there is evidence such a life is possible, while at the same time hating them for it and wanting to pull them back down to our own size.

Todd Walker got a bad rap for putting his foot in his mouth last month about the starting job he thought he had, but it all worked out as it should, I would argue. He is the best hitter at second base in a lineup that needs a good hitter more than the defense needs a great second baseman, so start him. Then, a few weeks ago, there was another quote, this time about Walker talking about the money he makes. I couldn’t find the exact quote anymore, but he said something to the effect that ‘I’ve made more than enough to support my family which gives me the opportunity to control my fate.’ It reminded me of what he said before 2005 when he returned to the Cubs:

“It was a longer deal [they offered]. Three years for about $8-9 million, vs. one year for $2.5 [to return with the Cubs]. But again, I've made enough money. You can get caught up in the money thing. The bottom line is that even bench players make more money than 99 percent of America. You got to be careful what you say about that. We're very blessed in all regards.”

This theme hits home with me, because I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that sort of thing the last few years, being very blessed and trying to decide what to do with my life. Todd wanted to control how his story went, and make it a good one. The turn was that good was not just about making money, but also environment, camaraderie and winning. It’s too bad that he sounds like a throwback.

The world sparkles more dazzlingly when you know that you are in the midst of doing something unquestioningly worthwhile, and at times the last year I’ve felt this. Worthwhile to me might be different than worthwhile to someone else and I do not think that I’ve done something better than what anyone else has done, especially if one has no regrets. I just happen to think that people who go out adventuring – or do anything else – for the spirit of it are on to something. Some of us are built to wonder what's going on back where we were, and some of us are built to wonder what else is out there. Sometimes we get caught in the middle. Hopefully we never stop wondering.* * *All of this is in my mind as I move back to Angell’s thoughts about celebrity athletes. I can’t say I relate exactly, but I don’t know if I’m the exception in this or not. I don’t follow along because I want to project myself into their world, they being celebrity athletes or actors or musicians or whomever. At least, not outside their work, where I feel like musicians and writers and actors and baseball players have something to tell me about Life. In fact, I would prefer that the inside access that contemporary culture provides was greatly diminished. I don’t care how they live; I care about how I live, and it’s not a competition for me in terms of anything they can get across on shows like Cribs. But I get it, inasmuch as stuff accumulation is a convenient way to keep score for someone who does want to compete with the famous in some sense.

And now there’s a girl sitting next to me in the terminal, a bubbly blonde bordering on chubby, chatting me up about flying to visit her boyfriend who’s on an Army base in Oklahoma. I don’t think she’s flirting. She's just chatty. She thinks that I look like someone named Scott Scanlon, a character in Beverly Hills 90210 it turns out. I drop the “Donna Martin Graduates!” bit on her – one of those anecdotes I can break out and weave into conversation to try impressing women; we all have them – and it works. At which point I smile inwardly, more because the bit worked at all (it's not one of my usual winners) and less because it worked on her, and then I move along with my life.

Turns out Scott Scanlon, I read now, was played by David Emerson, and I’ll admit there is some resemblance as I search on Google Images. But Scott killed himself accidentally while nonchalantly twirling his father’s gun, found in a drawer, a scene I would have never remembered but which now feels familiar, like I remember remembering it. Ahh, when TV had moral lessons. Don’t play with guns! Guns are bad, especially in the house! Tragedy ensues! – which can be true, of course, except that these days shows like these don’t have to have a message at all. There’s also some truth about our culture – or more specifically about how we perceive ourselves – in those changes somewhere.

It’s all changing. Maybe the paradox of the expanding world, where we can know so much so easily and quickly, is that in turn we shrink our personal worlds. I think that's what Angell was trying to get across. More is available so we spend our time less on what's relevant because relevant is not the same as interesting. Is it any better or worse trying to keep up with the celebrities rather than the Joneses? I don’t know, but my instinct is that there are better storylines afoot than whether a ballplayer drives a Lexus or a Cadillac... and that I don't have time to spend on both.