Winning, or the White Ball
If you introduce yourself as a writer or an artist, people assume it’s not just a hobby, but your profession. Lots of people have sex, for example, but until you’ve gotten paid for it, you’d be lying if you answered “prostitute” next time someone asked, “What do you do?”
Having whored my own talents to some fairly estimable publishing houses and magazines over the years, writer is a title I feel I’ve earned. And though I also draw cartoons, sleep, defecate, and even once played softball — last weekend, in fact — it would be misleading to call myself a cartoonist, somniac, shit manufacturer, or ball player.
I was thinking about this at last week’s Artists and Writers Celebrity Softball Game, as there seemed to be very few artists and writers present. While the tradition began 70 years ago with fine artists such as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock and grew to include novelists such as Saul Bellow and Joseph Heller, the artists’ team, headed now by Leif Hope, this year included a TV weatherman, Lonnie Quinn, and CBS2’s “News This Morning” co-anchor Chris Wragge (a former sports reporter), while the Writers, co-captained by the journalist Ken Auletta and the Daily News sportswriter Mike Lupica, included the sports commentators Marc Ernay and Mike Breen. I was the only novelist.
The word is that over the years, competition between the team captains, dueling Ahabs Auletta and Lupica of the Writers and Leif Hope of the Artists, grew so intense that they began stacking the roster with “ringers” they’d ship in solely to help them win, edging out the local and perhaps less athletic artists and writers on both sides. With the influx of fit lawyers whose writing credits included “legal briefs” and pro athletes who supposedly dabble in watercolors, the actual writers and artists all but abandoned the no longer fun but now fiercely competitive game. The audience, too, seems to have lost interest in the spectacle; few turned out last Saturday.
The term “celebrity” was also being used rather loosely, as the most famous among us, the actress Lori Singer, who threw out the first pitch for the Artists, was introduced by the announcers as having played Kevin Bacon’s love interest in 1984’s “Footloose.” An accomplishment, however notable, that pales next to an alumni list for a game that even in its decline once included Bill Clinton and Christie Brinkley — which was the artist and which was the writer?
The last vestige of the game as it was once played, foolishly if festively, with drinks amid an afternoon picnic, is a turnip painted to resemble a softball, which every year is pitched to an unwitting batter.
In it to win it — Ken Auletta, the Writers' co-coach, and David Baer, a onetime East Hampton Star intern.
Unaware of the game’s decline, I arrived at the field nervous and excited (like a tourist might arrive to modern-day Greece hoping to meet Socrates), ready to join the literary luminaries, artists, and even stars who would upstage them, but found instead a field full of hulking giants the likes of which I’d never seen at a literary party, a gallery opening, a movie premiere, or even, if we’re slumming, an inauguration.
Cindy Barshop, the former Real Housewife and vajazzling impresario, was the most recognizable face present, and she was only a spectator, there to support her boyfriend, a Writer (he penned “Bodyweight Strength Training”). The first and last time I’d seen both of them, I was waving goodbye from the back of a race car.
“Are you playing also?” I asked the tall man next to me, as I checked in.
“Billy Strong,” he said, not to me, but to the woman manning the T-shirt booth, where we were picking up our team shirts. “Artist.”
“I’m a writer,” I continued to Billy, smiling. “I guess that means we’re enemies!”
Billy, a sculptor, rolled his eyes. “It’s just a game,” he said, and walked away.
When I asked for my shirt, she came up empty-handed. “You had to order it in advance if you wanted your name on it,” she explained, handing me a blank one. Thus begins my favorite book: “Call me something-or-other.”
I didn’t know where to go next, so I wandered over toward the batting cage and addressed Leif Hope. “I’m here to play for the Writers,” I said cheerfully, holding back tears.
“What makes you think you’re on the team?”
“Ken Auletta said so in an email.”
Leif nodded, then studied me. “Well, you’ve got nice legs. A nice body. A good build for softball, I mean.”
“Thank you,” I said gratefully, for I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers.
Leif turned his attention elsewhere, and I was left again to fend for myself. I caught sight of Ken Auletta by the batters and ran over. “It’s so nice to meet you!” I said, which was the beginning and end of our conversation. This preceded an even shorter exchange with the journalist Carl Bernstein, best known for bringing down Nixon and cheating on Nora Ephron — he wrote “All the President’s Men” and she wrote “Heartburn” — whom I recognized as a teammate by his blue shirt. “Hello!” I said to the side of his face.
I introduced myself to a few more important cheeks, then headed out into the parking lot, where I ran into my editor, who asked me what was wrong.
“I don’t have a name,” I said, kicking at the ground. I told him about the shirt debacle.
“Easily fixed,” he answered, and led me to Khanh Graphics, where they personalize shirts on the spot in the shopping center behind the ball field.
“Everyone’s so unfriendly,” I confessed as we walked over, trying not to let my voice shake.
“They’re probably nervous just like you,” he said, as if I were a child facing the first day of summer camp.
“They don’t seem nervous. They just don’t want to be my friend.” I told him about all the cheeks. “I was just standing there like an idiot.”
“Don’t think about everyone. Just focus on individuals. You only have to make one friend.”
Alex Dunham at Khanh tried to help me approximate the font of the names printed on the team shirts. “What color are the letters?” she asked.
She stood up and showed me their color diagram, which featured sparkly golds and pinks and reds and silvers. She pointed to the blue and black at the bottom. “Which of these looks closest?”
“Gold!” I said, forgetting about blending in, but hooking instead into a tried-and-true mantra: If you can’t join ’em, beat ’em. “They’re gonna wish they had my shirt!”
Alex negotiated a dark blue font (for the sake of visibility) with a gold shadow (for the sake of style).
Hot off the presses, I put it on and looked in the mirror, thinking about the journalists. “Gentlemen, you won’t have Iris Smyles to kick around anymore!”
My confidence restored, I headed back out, ready to befriend the shit out them. “Fuck those hacks!”
“You think there’s more sciatica on the Writers side?” I opened. I’d lined up for batting practice behind a middle-aged Writer who told me he invented social media. The founder of MeWe, the next gen social network, was friendly as he told me he’d flown in for the game, which he’s been playing for at least 15 years, though he doubted Ken would put him in. “He mostly plays his friends,” another Writer added.
I met Erika Katz, a TV personality and parenting expert who wrote “Coach Parenting,” who told me and Gabrielle Bluestone, a writer and editor for Vice News, not to bother. Erika had played (not played) in last year’s game as well, and “they never let the girls play.”
“Ken thinks we’re the same blond,” Gabby added, motioning to her and Erika’s matching hair.
“But I’m good! I’ve been told I’m a ball magnet.” I told Erika, before she raised her eyebrows, making me doubt the nature of the compliment.
“You think he meant something else?”
“The Women’s Movement hasn’t arrived here yet,” Erika continued, referring to the Writers team. “The Artists are a little better, but only a little,” she explained, before Leif approached both of us and complimented Erika on her make-up.
He looked at Erika’s TV-ready face, then at mine, naked, and pointed to his own eyes. “You don’t have any mascara,” he said, as if I’d left my mitt at home.
I shrugged. “Neither do you.”
A few minutes later, Dan Rattiner of Dan’s Papers, in white fedora, white shirt, and white short pants, like a kid’s version of Tom Wolfe, was out in the field being thanked for his design of the program. I’d just picked up one of his books the previous week — collected columns from his paper about local personalities — and dipping in had read an article about the feminist Betty Friedan, whose primary contribution, so far as he could see, was inciting a lot of divorces.
The sportswriter Mike Lupica spoke to The Star's Jack Graves.
Things began to happen quickly after that, as rain clouds flirted with the briefly blue sky. Auletta read out who was playing what, leaving most of us writers and Writers to play spectator. Lupica gathered the Writers for a pregame huddle. Putting our right hands in, we counted quietly to three, then everyone coughed, as if all together they were being checked for hernias.
“What’d we just say?” I asked the guy next to me.
“Writers.”
The Choral Society of the Hamptons was on hand to sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" but at the last minute was bumped to make room for the recorded voice of the recently deceased Aretha Franklin, who never lived here.
I stayed close to the sidelines as the game progressed, trying to catch Auletta's eye, hoping he might put me in. But standing around is more tiring than running, so I retreated a few steps and dug into my stash of Big League Chew, figuring to try for some new friends in the meantime.
How many times in grade school had I given gum in exchange for the promise "I'll be your best friend"? Eagerly, I tried to work the formula in reverse, but nobody wanted my gum. I stuck a fat wad into my cheek and blew a bubble.
"You've got some schmutz," said Zach O'Malley Greenburg, a former child actor (Lorenzo in "Lorenzo's Oil") and current editor at Forbes who's written books about Dr. Dre, Michael Jackson, and Jay-Z. He pointed to green gum residue on my lips.
I thought of a conversation that appeared in the literary magazine Hampton Shorts between Kurt Vonnegut (a former Writer) and Robert Caro, in which Vonnegut said, "I've never written a biography . . . and you have never written a novel. Are we in the same trade?"
"It's Big League Chew, watermelon flavor. Want some?"
Greenburg not only accepted my gum, but also opted in when I suggested we put eye black on each other to block the glare of the lightning that was now threatening the sky. The Writers were ahead at this point, so if it rained, they'd call it in our favor, my new friend explained, as I noticed a small tattoo on his arm. "Probably not a good idea to keep running around an open field holding a metal stick," continued Queequeg, looking at the batter.
The one moment I stepped away was the one moment Auletta decided to run a token girl. Given the Writers’ sufficient lead, Gabby was not permitted to hit, but was given the chance to run some bases. I should have worn makeup.
"Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering softball; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee," said Lupica, right before he hit the turnip. Or maybe he just said, "Turnip," or maybe he said nothing at all. It smashed into little bits.
I watched Bill Collage, a screenwriter who penned the Olson twins' vehicle "New York Minute," run the bases.
When the Writers won, Lupica brought us all in for a final huddle. "This is the third year in a row the Writers have won!" he said, with Ahab's mad gleam. "Do you know how hard it is to win three years in a row?"
"Sorry I didn't put you in," Auletta said when I caught his eye one last time, before we began to disband and, in clusters, headed out across the field to the after-party at Dopo. I walked alone most of the way, like Ishmael floating among the wreckage.