Still in the LOOP

I can remember flying into New York at about this time last year, just before the Subway Series between the Mets and the Yanks was set to begin. I remember paying little attention to Lower Manhattan, instead zeroing in on Shea Stadium during the descent and feeling an indescribable surge of electricity and anticipation of the coming games.

Now, twelve months, a World Series loss and an apocalypse later, I don’t feel much like taking the Delta Shuttle from Logan to LaGuardia. I take the train home instead. I can only imagine that Lower Manhattan looks smaller from above than it did, and assume that the “2000 National League Champs” banner still stubbornly hangs of the side of Shea.

Stubborn. It’s a good way to describe a lot of Met fans, especially at this time of year. Real Met fans have realized that the vast majority of Yankee fans are obnoxious jerks. We’ve realized that the presence of the Yankees makes finding counterfeit Met caps at the corner store impossible and that there is nothing fun about being treated like a second-class citizen in your own city because you wear the orange and blue. So we’ve learned to root against the Yanks in the postseason, and you can tell who the real diehards are because they’ve continued to root against the Bronx Bombers in this, the city’s darkest hour.

My friends and I fit into this category. We’re friends from way back who still go to a number of games together every summer, no matter how bad the Mets are, and rejoice as much when the scoreboard has the Yankees behind as we do when the Mets are winning. We’ve come to call ourselves The Loop, a group chiefly defined by the people who don’t show up. If Gil didn’t come out and join the guys in Flushing every so often, we’d all shrug and say things like, “I dunno, Gil’s outta the loop.” “Is he out of the loop, you think?” “I’m thinking he’s out of the loop.” Pretty soon, the loop became The Loop.

Every member of The Loop desperately wants the Yankees to lose the World Series, except for Scott, who has begun openly cheering for them. Scott’s realized that every team he’s rooted for in the World Series during the last decade and a half has lost, and he’s decided to take the Yankees down in his own special way. He has taken to writing poems about the Yankees to express his newfound “affection.” (“The Yankees fight for freedom/ And thus, they always win!/ The Mariners are evil / And lose ’cause they live in sin.”) But I’m sure he knows that he can’t fake it, that he’s a Met fan at heart and can’t bring himself to root for the Yankees, even if it will make them lose. He’s stubborn that way, like all of us.

After a visit to the dentist Saturday morning, I decide to take the train to City Hall and walk south to see how close to ground zero I can get. The subways are different. Last year at this time, the 4 trains were decorated with pinstripes, to match the orange and blue 7 trains that commemorated the Subway Series. Now, each train has little American flags on a couple of the cars. But they haven’t adjusted everything. There are still ads on the subway walls for courses at NYU, in which a happy, upwardly-mobile woman grins in front of the Twin Towers. In front of one of these, a woman reads El Diario, the Spanish daily. I glance at the headline and learn that in Spanish, “anthrax” is spelled “antrax.”

On the way downtown the train passes NYU, where Stango goes to school now. Stango’s been the author of a number of memorable Loop moments, including one that happened when we all showed up at a Met game one year and it happened to be Jewish Heritage Day at Shea. None of us are Jewish. We’re a couple of Irish guys, a couple of Italian guys, a Chinese kid and me, the black guy. We’re all Catholic.

They announced the Met starting lineups in Yiddish—“Shlomo Cedeno” for Roger Cedeno was a favorite—and then they asked us to stand for the American and Israeli national anthems. Stango, one of the few Brooklynites who actually says “youse,” wouldn’t get up. “I’m telling youse guys,” he said. “My ex-girlfriend was Jewish, and I’ve heard this anthem. It’s about a half-hour long. I’m not gettin’ up.”

Twenty seconds later, it was all over. We all sat down and put our caps back on. Stango shrugged sheepishly.

The moment conjures up a dozen thoughts in my head. How much more does the anthem at the beginning of each game mean now? Will they ever have a Jewish Heritage Day again, or would it be too much of a target? If we accidentally showed up at one by accident next year, would we get up and leave?

We’d probably stay. We’re a stubborn bunch.

The area around ground zero is an odd combination of makeshift shrine and museum. Each intersection going down Broadway has been blocked off by a fence covered with pictures and cards, and each provides a different glimpse into the Twin Towers wreck. Some views are better than others—John Street and Dey Street are particularly good—and hundreds of tourists move from block to block and stare as if they were moving from exhibit to exhibit at the Met. There are signs prohibiting video and photography but, just like at any NYC tourist attraction that forbids them, the violations are rampant.

The museum has gift shops, too. The vendors who usually sell incense, gold watches and fake Oakley sunglasses now peddle pictures of the World Trade Center, FDNY and NYPD caps, American flags. One or two still sell fake Oakley sunglasses. What are those guys thinking?

One out of every fifty or so people wears a facemask, and one out of every fifty people seems to have the right idea. The dust is everywhere. It’s ingrained in the sidewalks and the walls of the nearby businesses, many of which have reopened only within the past week. But it’s also in the air, and thick. Microscopic bits of concrete and metal and paper and presumably people swirl with every breath. It’s acrid for blocks in every direction.

I ask a nearby cop if we should be wearing masks. He shrugs. “I dunno,” he says. “I took my mask off days ago. It’s probably fine if you’re just passing through.”

The cop, who probably stands there directing traffic for hours each day, is not just passing through. He doesn’t wear a mask. Real stubborn.

Later that day I walk across the Brooklyn Bridge and stop midway, to look back at the skyline. There isn’t much to see from there unless you happen to remember exactly where the towers were two months ago. I stare out at the water and watch the ferries coming and going from Staten Island. The last time I took the ferry, I came out only to see a big minor league baseball banner calling Staten Island “The Home of the New York-Penn League Champion Staten Island Yankees.” That’s changed now. The Brooklyn Cyclones, the Mets’ minor league team, beat the Yankees to advance to the league championships. That series never got finished, though. Game 2 was scheduled for Sept. 12.

The Cyclones and some team from Pennsylvania were named co-champions. Everyone’s a winner!

It’s hard to think about whether that banner also still hangs stubbornly. I can only think about my friend Aileen’s dad, and what it was like for him to stand on the boat and look up and watch a plane hit the World Trade Center.

Eventually, I go home, have some dinner, and leave for Manhattan again, this time with my family to go see a Broadway show. Tickets are cheap these days. I’m missing the first game of the World Series, but then again, the Yankees win every game I watch. I figure that maybe I can pull a Scott and make a difference.

“Cabaret” is very good and I come home to find that the Yankees lost. I go to sleep smiling.

I remember a couple of summers ago when the big news around New York was encephalitis. There were apparently these mosquitoes spreading West Nile virus all over New York, and random people started dropping dead. Then the city started spraying the various neighborhoods with insecticides at night to get rid of the mosquitoes, and everyone feared that the spraying was more dangerous than the bugs.

During one of these nights, The Loop went to a game at Shea between the Mets and the Rockies. Aileen was there, too. We were all abuzz over the spraying going on in nearby Flushing Meadows Park. One member of our merry band, Brian, was particularly spooked. He feared that the row of bleacher seats beneath us that the Mets had blocked off had something to do with West Nile or the spraying. And, believe it or not, we all started to believe him.

Not like we left or anything.

It’s genuinely funny now that I find myself nostalgic for encephalitis and the not-too-distant days when being freaked out in New York wasn’t so goddamn scary. Come back, mosquitoes, come back.

Martin “Marty” S. Bell, a government concentrator in Winthrop House, is associate sports editor of The Crimson.