The Clancys of Queens (12 page)

We're down by one, two outs, no men on, no men anywhere: this is bantam-division softball, and we're eleven-year-old girls. I am in the dugout, wringing my hands, nervous as hell, watching as our best player, Michelle, approaches the plate, helicoptering the bat over her head as if this is the World Series and not just another Catholic Youth Organization game on a garbage-strewn blacktop in Queens.

We aren't the Bulldogs or Tomcats or even the Lady Bulldogs or Lady Tomcats. We are St. Gregory the Great. The teams in the CYO didn't have any nicknames or mascots; they were just named after their church. The more colorful ones in our division in the early '90s were Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, and St. Pancras, named for the fourteen-year-old martyr beheaded by Emperor Diocletian. And on this day, we are playing our rivals, the Immaculate Conception Youth Program. In other words, it was us versus the greatest miracle of all time.

This being New York City, not every team in our league had access to cars, and any given Saturday you'd see two girls tag-teaming a duffel bag of equipment the size of a sixth-grader up the subway stairs, sweat-soaked before the game even began. Most others crisscrossed the borough in a caravan of tiny sedans smashed full of girls, a floral arrangement of arms, bats, and banners poking out the windows as they flew down the Van Wyck Expressway. The league represented what seemed like every neighborhood and ethnic group, regardless of creed. I remember a Muslim girl who wore a ball cap over her hijab and a long-sleeve shirt under her St. Something-or-Other jersey.

My team, St. Greg's, from Bellerose, was made up of Clancys, Kellys, and Donaghues, with a sprinkling of Colacis and Nascimentos, too. Most of our fathers were cops or construction workers, but come Saturday, they became coaches and cheerleaders, sipping beers concealed in those refillable, bendy straw, sports bottles between shouts of “Eh! You gonna take a swing sometime this year?” and “Atta girl! Drive that ball right through her!”

Michelle scans the handful of dads behind the backstop, gets a couple of “you can do it” fist pumps, then stamps into the box, curls her lip, and smacks the first pitch into left field for a double. As the pitcher winds up again facing the next batter, she sprints off to steal third. After just two strides the catcher eyes her and rockets the ball to the third baseman. It should be over. But then Michelle does something that no one on our team, or the other team, has ever done (or seen) before. She slides. On asphalt.

Time stops, the clouds freeze in the sky, the whole planet comes to a grinding halt, and then every single person in sight gasps, in unison,
“Huhhhh!!!”

The third baseman is just standing there looking down at Michelle, ball in her glove, still way up high, frozen in shock. At long last, the gobsmacked umpire goes, “Uh…? Safe?!” And—
ka-bam
—all the girls on my team go off the rails! We let out primal screams, “RAHHH!!!!” I fling myself up onto the dugout fence, my fingers through the chain-link, and I shake it and shake it, roaring at the top of my lungs.

Meanwhile, one by one, the girls of the Immaculate Conception start throwing their gloves to the ground and join the chorus of their mothers screaming, “You can't do that!!” Some dad yells, “Disgusting! Who the hell tells a young girl to slide on concrete?!” Somebody's grandma even screamed, “God will punish you for this!” Our tough-ass dads, for the first time ever, are shocked silent.

Finally the umpire and coaches meet out on the mound, and they are out there for what feels like forever until, ultimately, they all agreed—as it turned out, there was no written rule against sliding on asphalt, so the call stayed. The move, however, was officially deemed “a pretty stupid idea,” and they gave us all some shit about never doing it again. Little did they know, it was too late—right then and there, we had rechristened ourselves Our Lady of Perpetual Scrapes. The revolution had begun.

As it turns out, sliding on asphalt doesn't really involve much sliding. Done perfectly, you travel a couple of inches, tearing a hole in your pants as you go and skidding to a stop with only the first layer of skin removed. Done wrong, you either need a dozen stitches or you hit the ground with such impact that you instantly stop dead, then crab-walk the rest of the way in shame. In either case, you're left with a bruise the size of Connecticut, but if you are an eleven-year-old girl in the CYO bantam division of 1991 playing on asphalt, you succeed time after time, because no one expects you to care enough to try—99 percent of the time, they never even see you coming! And I know because, following this game, damn near every girl on my team would go on to do it.

My first time was a few games later. I was rounding toward home, head down in a full-tilt sprint, just a few steps away from the plate, when I looked up, just in time to see the throw come in. The catcher was ready to tag me, so I did a swan dive right up and over her. And then I came down, headfirst.

My lights went out for a few seconds, and then—
blink, blink, blink
—Dad is standing above me, waving two fingers in front of my face, steam coming out of his ears. The first thing I say is, “So!?” And he says, “I don't think it's a concussion.” And I say, “No! Not that!” He doesn't get it. I say again, “SO???” And his head keeps shaking, but it goes from signaling confusion to you-gotta-be-kiddin'-me astonishment. “OH, FOR PETE's—Safe! You were safe, ya nut!”

We girls of the Catholic Youth Organization fast-pitch softball league played on “hardtop” for no other reason than that we were girls. Even the nine-year-old boys' baseball teams—whose pitchers' 45-mph fastballs barely matched ours—outranked us and were given dominion over the city's few dirt fields. And we were relegated to New York's least desirable playing fields—and the most dangerous. This fateful Sliding on Asphalt year, we were eleven—little but not too little to know that this was seriously fucked up. And so we were easily possessed by the spirit of the desperation play: to win, to shock the grandmas and piss off the moms, to impress the dads, to prove that we could play as hard as the boys, but more than anything to prove that we could play as hard as one another.

As it turned out, the timing couldn't have been better. Just a few months after the end of that softball season, I started middle school, where knowing how to play hard and being prepared to face-plant onto asphalt was not an option but a necessity.

I'm looking down, minding my own business, kicking up pebbles in the middle of the gray concrete yard at Middle School 172, when a pair of running, screaming girls clip my arm. My eyes shoot up—these girls are not so much holding hands as damn near ripping each other's arms out of the sockets as they pass, chanting, “FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!” I bounce onto my tiptoes to watch as they clothesline their way through the crowd in front of me and then jump, arms wide, into a huddle of kids I hadn't noticed before in a far corner of the yard.
“FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!”
I spin around. The other three-hundred-some-odd sixth-graders playing in the yard behind me are now just a sea of planted feet and perked heads, dead still for a solid second, until—
whoosh!
—they stampede.

Cartons of cafeteria milk and candy wrappers blow back behind them, and basketballs and handballs bounce away on their own, as the entire tidal wave speeds straight in my direction, hurtling a growing minefield of chucked backpacks in its wake.
Oh, shit.
I backpedal away, then pivot and dip into a full sprint, heading for the knee-high concrete wall that anchors the twenty-foot chain-link fence along the perimeter of the yard. Another dozen kids have the same idea, and some perch on the concrete base, necks straining to see what's going on, while others scale the fence sideways, Spider-Man style, for an even better view.

The fight chant is peppered with screams of pain and a chorus of “Fuck you, bitch!” The heads of the massive circle of kids surrounding whoever's fighting windshield-wipe at mach speed, letting out louder and louder “oohs” and “aahs
.
” I can't see anything until the swarm moves all the way to the fence, and then, just ten feet ahead of me, I see a girl lift the loose bottom end of the chain-link with her left hand and shove the head of another girl underneath it with her right. The standing girl pummels the body of the trapped-by-the-neck, nearly guillotined girl for as long as it takes the team of security guards, blowing their whistles and spreading the crowd with their batons, to push through and wrestle the aggressor to the ground.

It is my first day of sixth grade, my first year in middle school. I am eleven. So are those two girls.

There are about a thousand kids in MS 172, from the sixth to the eighth grade, but only half of them actually want to beat the shit out of one another. The other half just look like they do.

Our school's population contains at least one member of nearly every ethnic and religious group, native New Yorkers and recent immigrants alike, with no clear majority, though the Indian kids were the newest addition to the neighborhood. Their official arrival was marked by one of my favorite, distinctly New York City phenomena—the sudden appearance of their favorite snack food, alongside that of the next most recent immigrant group, in the Key Food specialty section.

I still remember shopping there with Grandma, back when I was in PS 133, when she spotted a box of jelly candies, technically Bhagat's Keshar Badam Halwa with Saffron, sitting next to the red tin cubes of Lazzaroni Amaretti di Saronno cookies. Grandma flagged down a lady in a sari. “Eh! These any good?” The lady nodded and smiled. “They are sweet.”

“I like sweet,” Grandma said, throwing a box into her cart.

“And these?” the woman in the sari asked, pointing at the tin boxes of cookies.

“Sweet,” Grandma said. So the lady took a box of those, as well—two people from very different parts of the world, brought together, if only for a second, by an exchange of their ridiculously cumbersomely named desserts.