Return To Riverside Green

"I never realized," Bark said as he got out of his Flex, "how small this place is."

"You were small too, then," I reminded him. There was trash on the ground, painted-over graffiti on the brown brick wall behind us. Some sullen-looking teenager, maybe black, maybe just one of the dark-skinned East Indians who own most of the homes in the neighborhood nowadays, was idly loitering on the playground at the far end of the asphalt lot, observing us intently while pretending to be completely disinterested. The basketball hoops had been removed a while back and a heavy-duty fence had been installed to prevent cars from driving behind the school where we stood: small signs of a change in the local character, perhaps. Or a recognition that some unfortunate things had happened here in the late nights, even twenty years ago when we were all young.

Carrying his Easton Ultra Lite from high school, Bark walked to the gravel-strewn area that had once served as home plate. I had my old outfielder's glove, an expensive present from my father in 1989 or thereabouts, and a few cans of Penn rough-surface tennis balls. "I was here the year this school opened," he noted. "First grade." But I knew that; I used to meet him after school and walk him home, hoping to catch a glimpse of his teacher. I thought she looked like Sybil Danning. As class let out, I would sit nonchalantly on my Redline BMX bike, trying to look moody and mysterious. On the rare occasions when Bark's teacher said anything to me, I would grunt nonchalantly and shrug my shoulders. To no one's surprise but mine, we did not end up having sex.

As Bark took a couple of practice cuts, I toed the crack in the asphalt that we had long ago identified as the "pitching line". Both of our sons stood in the "outfield", ready to chase down whatever Bark might hit their way. I briefly hefted the yellow Penn in my right hand to get a sense of what it weighed. A sense of calm descended on us. Viewed against the brick, Bark didn't seem so different from the fifteen-year-old he'd been when he stood there last. And I, too, felt young, ready to throw, the sky blue above us and time temporarily suspended, both of us returning to the Long Now where we were forever children, forever friends, untouched by tragedy or circumstance. My pitching motion was exaggerated, rough, approximately effective. We saw the ball frozen between us, then with a a low-pitched pong Bark connected and for the first time since 1992, we had ourselves a game of Home Run Derby.

With the benefits of hindsight and distance, I can see how idyllic my childhood truly was. Yes, I spent a lot of it injured in one bone-breaking incident or another, and I never had the kind of money my classmates had, and I did scrub dishes after midnight at the age of fourteen so I could afford new pedals for my race bike, but compared to the current generation of children Bark and I had the singular luxury of time. We didn't have any place to be. It was a gift that is not given to children today. We simply hung out, every day, sun up to past sun set. For seven years we roamed the neighborhood together, endlessly retracing the same paths, intimately woven into the social fabric like lions on the savannah. Beset in the early years by thuggish industrial-tech students and lowbrow truant thieves, we eventually came to our ascendancy as I outgrew my peers. Moreover, by the time I was seventeen all of my friends had effectively disappeared from the neighborhood, sleeping in the afternoons or working jobs so they could attend parties at night. I was committed to my bicycle. I did not drink or smoke. I rode six hours a day and I ate cheaply at the local United Dairy Farmers. I was the only adult-sized kid in our square mile, shy and angry by turns, but rarely involved in conflict.

Bark, too, was well-liked and well respected by most of the locals. We had enemies, kids we despised, but we all had to live together in the neighborhood so it never went too far. You'd curse someone in their absence and then agree to be on their side in a game of touch football. We were not age-conscious like children are today; six-year-olds and sixteen-year-olds would hang out at the BMX jump together. At the local park, the trampy local girls would moon us and smoke cigarettes under the shelter buildings while elementary-school kids played on in the mulched playground and the scumbag teenagers from the multi-families would try to sell stolen Walkman tape players to anyone walking by.

Somewhere far away from us, kids went to Vail to ski or restored vintage sports cars with their mechanically-gifted fathers or attended rigorous schedules of sports and music or made love to their high-school sweethearts late at night on the rooftop of abandoned factories while the beer and marijuana passed from hand to hand and the music played. But those things were not for us. We didn't have that. We never left the neighborhood, never aspired to or achieved that John Hughes fantasy of cars and girls and parties. We ate eighty-nine cent meals at the United Dairy Farmers. We sweated through sprinting practice or digging a new jump or, in the last year of the Eighties, playing Home Run Derby.

I don't know if Bark had the idea first or I did. But it came from watching reruns of Home Run Derby on ESPN. We could have used the baseball field at Bark's school but instead we decided to use the brick wall and the asphalt lot. The playground on the other side of the lot was the home run line. Google Maps measures the distance between the wall and the old playground (it was moved in the last decade) as about 135 feet. That's not a bad distance for a teenager to hit a worn-out tennis ball, which is what we used in lieu of baseballs. The reasons for our choices were simple: Baseballs cost money, but tennis balls could be found in the weeds around our local tennis courts. And pitching against a brick wall instead of a backstop meant that any pitch that didn't get hit would bounce off the wall and come back to the pitcher.

I got a bunch of the local kids involved and many summer days we'd have six or seven people playing with us, rotating through being outfielders and pitchers and hitters. My brother was predictably outstanding but I hit more than my share of home runs despite the fact that I had a titanium rod in my right leg and weighed all of 140 pounds at the time. We played off and on for years. The last time was probably between my junior and senior years of college, when I was twenty and Bark was fourteen. More than half our lives ago.

This past Saturday, we returned to the school, and we brought our children. As Bark and I nailed a bunch of deep fly balls into the yard to deep left field (220-230 feet), they fearlessly trespassed to snag and return as many as they could. We took a break so my son could hit. He'd been at his baseball game that morning and had led the first pitch of the first inning off like this:

I was eager for Bark to work with John a bit so he could hit even better, so I had the kid park his motorcycle and pick up his DeMarini Uprising to take some swings. Bark came up with an easy motion for John to use so he'd set his back elbow high every time. Like his father, John is a lazy elbow-dropper and hitch-swinger.

Uncle Bark continued to drill him in the fundamentals and he ended up sending a tennis ball pretty far over our heads.

But he wanted to ride his motorcycle a bit more, and I couldn't blame him, so I released him from his duties and stepped to the plate myself. Bark was fresh from an amusement-park weekend where he'd tripped a pitching radar gun at 85mph, a fact of which he repeatedly reminded me, but in due consideration to his tired old brother he slowed it down to the speed we'd all throw at back on those long summer days when you might be called on for five hundred pitches over the course of a few hours before riding your bike home at dark. My back was still sore from that big hit at Laguna Seca but nothing felt like it was grinding or catching. I knocked a few into the backyard and then put one over the top of the new playground, out about 210 feet straight to center.

Then Bark tossed me a fast one to the middle of my swing zone and I put everything I had into it. My scraped-up Carl Rose Powercell caught the ball right on the letters and it seemed to leap up into the air. Back, back, back it went to left field, up over the backyard we'd been hitting into, over the roof of the house, hitting the far side and bouncing up. Call it three hundred and fifteen feet to the ground. I'd basically hit a fucking tennis ball to the Green Monster at Fenway, at the age of forty-three, tired and many times broken but absolutely willing still to dig in and swing the bat.

Well, I felt very good about myself. Nobody in our little Home Run Derby club had ever done that before. I'd handily out-hit my teen self. But even as I smiled at the sky and felt the stirrings of reimagined youth in my arms I thought about this: Back in the day, we used thrown-away tennis balls, ones that had been abandoned and rain-soaked and sun-baked. But the ball that Bark had pitched to me was fresh out of the can. In other words: we'd juiced the ball, the same way they did in the major leagues. Surely the loose-limbed twenty-year-old me, weighing in at just 180 pounds and capable of doing the whole stack on a Nautilus lower-back machine thirty times before bunny-hopping a twenty-eight inch bar on a BMX bike, would have hit that same ball all the way across Brock Street.

The kids were tired and wanted to do something that didn't involve standing around in ninety-degree weather. We loaded the cars, found eleven of the fifteen tennis balls I'd bought, loaded John's motorcycle up. Then I drove behind Bark as he gave his wife a tour of our old neighborhood. The homes were smaller than I'd remembered, the lawns dirtier, the cars in the driveways dingy and in need of repairs more often than they weren't. But every sidewalk and street held the old memories, the endless miles ridden, the smiles and practical jokes and memorable jumps and painful crashes.

When Bark and I relaunched this website, I got a text from someone: "Why would you name your blog after a shitty neighborhood like Riverside Green?" I didn't send an answer. But the answer is the same one that Wallace gave to D'Angelo in season one of The Wire, and you can watch it here if you aren't at work, but if you are, I'll tell you here what he's saying: This shit? This is me yo, right here. And for an hour on Saturday, it was like nothing had happened between 1991 and today. I envy your childhoods, dear readers, your precocious love affairs and European travel and splendid wealth and glossy high-school yearbooks full of accomplishments, but that belongs to you and this belongs to me. This shit? This is me right here. Riverside Green, home of the $149,900 single-family split-level home, for life.