Must get on, lots to do, left my phone in a taxi cab but a man called Mike answered when I called. He's leaving it for me at reception desk on Madison Avenue, like some kind of spy. Two things -- a snippety story I wrote for the paper this weekend, and a new link on the right, to the good Corey Pein, a friend of mine. Nose for his article about trying to go tax free in the Caribbean.

Little Gees and Aaahs

It was no later than a quarter to eleven and my phone was ringing its Turkish game-show ring. Steven Chen. “Some eight-year-olds are playing Guns and Roses.”

I suppose we met twenty-five minutes later and climbed the stairs of 13, the bar where the children were playing. In the corner there was a steeped up crowd peering down at something, and from somewhere you could hear the patchy strains of Live and Let Die. It was hard to see them at first, the “Little G&R’s”, with their parents under dubious blond wigs, and the young whippets loosely shaking their guitars, leather bands round their gentle soft wrists. Axel was a girl, who just once in a while would hit that minor chord, that nasal “sweet child of mine”, and offer her microphone to the front row of sensitive hipsters that were standing far above her head. On a TV screen above and to the left, Conan the Barbarian was coming to an end, the Governor of California was being flogged by virgins on the steps of a high and mighty temple and James Earl Jones, with the kind of jet straight black hair that raises an uneasy fear, was laughing laughing. Back to the gees and the ahhs, Slash was nearly invisible, barely a child, by no means eight, a velvet top hat as long as his legs, nodding, with sunglasses too large by far for his freckled face, dabbing at the strings of his tiny guitar. The set ended with Paradise City and the Axel-girl freely screaming as the DJ abandoned her sensitive backing of the little band and just turned the volume right up, leaving little Slash spinning in the sound of the real thing.

We met some people on the roof, one of them, a friend of Steven’s called Mike was talking about a party. Mike was wearing a close fitting brown jumper covered in yellow flowers. It’s funny, sometimes, among the swooshes, crop tops and mismatched hair of the hip-set, you feel like you’re standing in a fashion exhibit of a decade that never happened.

“All I know is that it’s in Brooklyn, and that’s where I’m going,” Mike was saying. So we went, Steven hobbling because he had been hit by a car in the afternoon, not badly, but enough and slowly enough for him to have realised, “I’m being run over by a car, this is what being run over feels like,” as the silver SUV chomped and trampled his flatmate’s bike and Steven, improbably and unstylishly, one imagines, mounted the bonnet and rolled to safety, bruising his leg, rousing the emergency services and ending up on tarmac, looking up into the face of an old man who was not God or even a priest, just a bystander, who was telling him off for being such an idiot.

Earlier in the day, as Steven Chen was being mauled and flipped in a corner of Williamsburg, I’d been at the Yankees, watching them play the Baltimore Orioles, who played in grey and orange. The Yankees, on the other hand, play in white and blue, with little stripes. Looking down from high up, with Jeff VanDam, who writes for the NYT and is from Michigan, baseball looks very pleasing. With the Bronx stretching out over the Bleachers (the little abbreviated stand that directly faces the batter, at the top of the diamond), with its enormous courthouse and bleak housing estates reaching greyly up forever, the grass of Yankee stadium is a patch of bottled America. It’s little men with little rakes and then other little men in outfits, which, like the hipsters, no one ever really wore, hurling their baseballs flatly and fast. It’s a picture of something that never happened happening. Baseball was played first in stadiums and polluted cities, not in the corner of some golden field – that came later. But the beer and peanut throwing and the clapping, the clean fun, the booing, the thrilling smack of the hit and pummelling legs of the pinch hitter and the brown stain of the sliding runner, the brilliance of the double play, all that is real. It as if everyone held their breath: if we just do this for long enough, for twenty years, for thirty years, then we will grow our own roots, like lilies, between ourselves. We don’t need anything in the ground, in ancient rivalries or blood, we just need each other and if we keep coming to these little mown fields where there were never mown fields before, we will make a past-time and bring our sons.