SCENE 5
The seven game Value Pack is the cheapest season ticket set you can buy to see the New York Yankees over the course of a season. But if it’s only seven games how can it be called a season ticket? Acton wondered, sitting in the seat he chose earlier that spring with excruciating scrutiny. It's not the entire season, it's a series of tickets throughout a season, he reminded himself while surveying the stadium’s ring of stands surrounding the field. The distinction was important because it allowed him to say, “why yes, in fact I am a Yankees season ticket holder.” That is, if one should ask. The opportunity had yet to present itself.
It was a Monday afternoon in July, and the fourth time he had been to seat 3, row 14, section 118. His section. His seat. The price of which, Acton now realized, was within his means because nobody else wanted to be there at a time like that. All seven games were at the least attractive or unobtainable times to watch baseball. Games on a weekday afternoon, when most people were at work. Teams people had little interest in seeing, usually from Florida. To Acton, baseball in Florida made no sense. Who wants to see a “Devil Ray” in The Bronx after all? But, for reasons we’ll get into another time, maybe, Acton had all the time in the world to sit in Yankee Stadium and watch baseball.
The weather was pleasant, the view was a spectacular mix of green grass, blue sky, sandy stretches, and white bloused young men arranged like doric pillars across the expanse of a painted diamond. The upper deck above provided shade, the seats were wide and padded, and a small table in-between each once kept people as far away from each other as possible — one of the rare amenities of this particular area of the stadium discovered by Acton after hours of pre-purchase research. But most of all, Acton was now part of a great New York tradition. By technicality of a naming convention, he was a season ticket holder. It was a status he could only dream of long before he ever set foot into The Great Hall of Yankee Stadium for the first time.
Acton detested sports. He felt it brought him into contact with society’s lowest rungs. But one distant afternoon, both in time and geography from the seat he occupied at Yankee Stadium that afternoon, Acton was listening to the AM radio in the compact and fuel-efficient car he was driving when the host of the program began to discuss the opening of Dom DeLillo's 1997 book Underworld.
Underworld, a sprawling, multi-layered novel that spans several decades and delves into themes of Americana, history, and the impact of technology on culture opens with a prologue titled, The Triumph of Death, named after a Bruegel painting of the same name. It describes a day game at New York’s Polo Grounds in 1951 that blends fiction with real life events. Sinatra and Jackie Gleason are in attendance. So is J. Edgar Hoover who, while watching “The Shot Heard Round the World” leave the stadium from the bat of Bobby Thomson, is told that the first test of the Soviet hydrogen bomb has just taken place. Then a torn page from Life magazine with a reproduction of the Bruegel painting falls into his lap.
The radio in Acton’s car told him everything he needed to hear. From there on in, he was a fan of baseball. Not the actual game, but what the game could represent, and the things it could be used to interpret.
Midway through the 5th inning, Acton returned to his seat after navigating Yankee Stadium’s crowded concourse, with a glide in his step that only a connection to one’s inner myths can create, for a bottle of airport-priced water.
“Oh fuck, what?” Acton froze at the top of the row.
There was a large plastic pale of fried chicken sitting on the table connected to his seat. In the row behind his, leaning over the back of Acton’s chair, reaching into the plastic pail was a large man in an undershirt and shorts tediously eating each piece of chicken by methodically picking it apart until nothing but the bone was left, at which point he dropped it to his feet before getting another. The man chewed, oblivious to everything around him, including Acton, who was still standing there, staring at the grease on the fingers of this new and terrible entity, glistening in the sun. There was no joy on the man’s face. Absolutely none. Another man, much younger, in his late teens or early twenties sat with his foot up on the chair beside Acton’s looking at his phone.
Acton couldn’t just stand there. Perhaps another seat? No! He couldn’t. This was his seat. Besides, if he sat elsewhere, every time someone came down the aisle, he would only start to worry he was in their seat. No, Acton defiantly thought, he needed his seat. He moved in a slow and deliberate way toward seat 3, hoping the chicken eating menace practically leaning over it would suddenly react with an exaggerated display of cordial behavior to compensate for his rudeness and apologize profusely while relocating his food to his own table. But no such thing transpired.
So there Acton sat, with the sound of a man chewing chicken inches from his head, the smell replacing the romance of that baseball scene in Underworld with a harsh reality — except maybe the part where Gleason vomits on Sinatra’s feet.
The chicken. That poor chicken. At the mercy of a man seemingly having his first meal after being released from prison. Not even during a rendering of God Bless America at the 7th inning stretch did he or his younger counterpart bother to move. Acton was playing witness to his own Triumph of Death. The only relief came when the game ended. But the season was only half way through. The Value Pack would live on to fall.
‘That poor chicken.’ 😆