(A love-hate-farewell letter to NYC and NYC sports fans. xox )
Brooklyn, NYC, 2017 AD –
Bay Ridge NY Rangers Fan number 10,732 ran over someone else on 4th Ave and there’s a 25-minute soliloquy on racial purity and eugenics. The 68th precinct NYPD slithers over and they pin it on the old woman who just got squashed and bloodied crossing the street and had the light. 68th precinct said she should’ve known better. For good measure, the coppers write in their report that the old woman had a “weapon” and they felt their “lives were threatened”, that they “felt unsafe”. Then the cops from the 68 and the Rangers fan who ran her over talk about Lundquist and the Rangers chances this year and how they hate Subban on the Montreal Canadiens for unspecified black reasons.
Burst blood vessels in drunkards with O-positive bloodstreams. 3 local yokels drown in beer urine and leftover Killarney powdered doughnut 8-ball speed rails.
The Golem living in the Black Forest gets off the bus and hears another extreme cultural diatribe. Another 17 locals officially anointed as alcoholic that night. A racial march posing as a cultural parade just before the sheets are made holy and pointy.
… three more Irishmen, all local, keep walking down Fifth Avenue… one discarded paper bag. An empty plastic bottle of Smirnoff.
True story: Ted Nugent’s son owns that Cebu restaurant in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where local Democratic fundraisers are held by cronies and political succubi. Nugent’s son discovered 6 years ago that the actual Ted Nugent was his real father. He got a call early one morning. They said they had good news and bad news. The good news was that they had found his father. The bad news was that it turned out his father was… um…
Ted Nugent on his internationally available white supremacy radio show says that what we need to do is kill all the Liberals to solve the problems that he says he knows damn well he didn’t start. He has his own radio show. He actually has his own radio show. He thinks we need to reduce the world’s population to 10,000 chosen ones through a lottery system.
Mike Ditka said last year he was voting for the Donnie Daisy David Dumpty Duke entity and somehow it made the news.
Venal & leering Bay Ridge state senator Marty Golden, a retired & waning NYPD pensioneer, shows up with freshly capped teeth and the brand new shiney-white blinding rictus grin. The latest grin. Best grin ever, Marty thinks, definitely the best grin, definitely. John Q., the loyal Marty lackey, comes in from mid-morning smiling exercises and snacking and says “Definitely, Marty. Definitely.” Three ribbon cuttings and 12 promises that morning.
Ex-con(gress)man Michael Grimm, yet another low-IQ Republican, now “broken-in like a boy”, is a free man again, after finally being released from state prison, planning a new strategy from across the bridge. Freshly turned-out. Planning, scheming. He’s staying at his Mom’s place in Staten Island to save money. His Mom still loves him and thinks he’s a good boy.
The election kept claiming victims and those same mistakes from 4 + 8 + 12 + 16 years ago persist like Tuesday morning or like Budweiser.
Sports is the tonic of culturally and economically ruined countries, what they sometimes pejoratively call “3rd world countries”. They become sports-addicted, obsessed, and religious about it… and in the end mentally ill. Umpires and goalies are murdered. The extremist sportsfans are sometimes seen in public dressed in fully authorized sports paraphernalia from head to toe. And there are pajamas, too. But no one thinks to pull them out of the line at the airport for some reason. (cont.)
Rangers fans live nearby here. You can see their Ranger flags sometimes on the outside of their houses, on the porches. You can smell the fervent mediocrity and the wandering spirits and the lack of books. Hungry ghosts, lost souls…
Tattered ghosts of deceased sports fans drift lost on Ridge Road near 73rd Street, moaning about not getting a championship since ’94 or looking for their lost baseball caps left behind at bars when they still inhabited a body – at 3 Jolly Pigeons, the erstwhile and non-salty Brooklyn Dodger, the Haven, The Drunken Nativist sports shithole with 199 screens of nothing to watch, whatever coke hole being protected by the 68th precinct is able to get away with. The Haven has ESPN and bourbon and all of the rest of it at 5 or 6 in the morning for some reason. Eightballs are also still a thing there.
There are moans and gentle wails, from those wispy, lamenting, spectral voices of the dead, the wandering sports fans after the final beef & pork alcoholic coronary, their bodies in the morgue still so saturated in booze that they can easily burst into flame… relieved of their mortal coil you can hear them still, drifting over to Colonial and beyond… the king of the spectator sportsfan ghosts…
“Rangers…”
“Yankees…”
Spectator sports cleaned him out.
“#1… #1… ” audibly and spectrally whispers down the side streets on quiet evenings.
“Yankees… kick your ass… kill you… the best… 27 world championships… fucking Boston faggot… Jeter… I fucking love Tino…”
He left his family a bobblehead collection… all the cash went to the bookies. His family is lucky that the credit card debts died with him.
Dead. Dead and still without one more championship or one more ring.
Charles Barkley never got a ring. Nor did Pat Ewing. Or Karl Malone. Or Dan Marino. Or Don Mattingly. Or old Barry Bonds. Or…
You wasted a lot of fucking time. You know Jorge Posada’s waist size but you forgot your youngest nephew’s name.
You can hear that ghostly call over by Shore Road and 79th sometimes: “I want one more ring.”
His widow hawks the wedding ring at a place she knows in Queens. She actually feels better when she walks out of the pawn shop with $350 dollars more in her purse. It helps heal the wounds.
One ring to rule them all.
***
