knicks in five blocks

On Wednesday we’d been in Fort Greene, outside of Greenlight, watching a projector above the outdoor space at Habana Outpost. It was a close game, and I hadn’t had any idea what would happen, because I don’t know anything about basketball at all. Still, all night I’d been out and about, going from place to place before landing at the bookstore. We’d settled accidentally next to a makeshift headquarters for the block’s nutcrackers; a man who knew what he was doing selling them with two other people, still learning, whom he’d left in charge of the drinks’ wagon. “If it were me,” he said to his lackluster companions half way through the game, “I’d have these out, so you could see them,” and then he poured all the nutcrackers out of the plastic bags they’d been concealed in, and the other two nodded, not really taking it in - they were really just watching the game.

At some point a woman on our block tried and failed to lead the crowd in a version of the Kalshi chant that made no sense - “my mayor’s muslim, my bagel’s chive” - and while people wanted to help her, it wasn’t catching on, and I was annoyed, because there’s no such thing as a chive bagel. But then the game took a serious turn, and the bad chant was abandoned, and we all watched - even those of us who had pieced together whatever orange and blue we could from our wardrobes, having only become fans last week - as our team called us up. There was silence and gripping and oohs and ahhs, and I had no idea what to feel until, at 32 seconds, the nutcracker man sprung into action. “That’s it, they got it, they got it,” he said, to no one at all, and dutifully - as if it was his real, true calling, as if it was simply what had to be done - started a chant I had only heard from commercials and videos: Go New York go New York go, Go New York go New York go. And this took off immediately, much better than the Kalshi chant, and then when he’d had enough he switched us to Let’s Go Knicks, without even thinking, he was gathering up nutcrackers to hit the crowd while he did it, he said “they got this” one more time, and then he was gone, and I knew they had this, because I knew that this man knew what he was talking about. When they won we all hugged, all of us on the corner, strangers and friends and everyone, except the nutcracker man, because he was off, selling drinks in the victory.

There was a time, long ago, when I locked in everything I ever heard under someone’s breath, whispered to me discreetly, said so only I could hear. Now I’m so old, now I know everything, but when I was still learning to live here, wasn’t that the only way I did it? A man telling me where to stand to order a bagel, someone holding the subway gate open when I didn’t know how, a woman walking by in the middle of the night, when my sister and I were trying to push the square in Astor Place, who said you have to each have one corner without stopping, and then we did, we pushed it and it turned and we went back to the my dorm and I thought, now I’ve hosted my sister, now I’ve had a visitor. And that was another thing I had learned how to do.

Everything about youth has the capacity to make me sad now, but last year I noticed that on the internet young people kept calling the subway “the MTA subway,” and it struck me as so tragic, because this could only have happened, I realized, from seeking out how the subway works on your own. Were they not asking for directions, were they not complaining about their commutes, were they not speaking at all or being spoken to? Like the dropping of the the from the Lower East Side, it felt like a new wave of language that signaled a loss instead of a new peak. But it is true that trying to learn New York on your own is like a child trying to learn to read alone; the child must be read to, after all, by a real person, the child must hear the waves of the voice as the story progresses, feel the way emotion feels when it’s attached to a series of words. It is not enough to look blankly on, it is a process of engagement, and it is one that serves the ones teaching it just as much, because no one is as cold as an old person who hasn’t engaged with a young person in a very long time. Nothing keeps you young, but a lot of things keep you alive.

When the Knicks won on Saturday I was at Lafayette Grocery and Dairy, standing in a crowd of a hundred or so, among thousands of crowds of thousands of people, and everyone by now had settled into what we were doing. We all had warm beers and no one bothered to conceal them, and even those of us who had only just become fans knew all the players by name by now, and we were familiar with their dynamics, and we all hated Wemby, a petulant child who should go back to Texas and then from there back to France. It became obvious by the end that our projection was a few seconds behind, maybe even as much as twenty, and it became affirmative that we did not care. We would not be checking ahead, we would not even be affected by the woos happening a block away, well before ours. Anyone who pulled out a phone was ignored, only the weakest among us would have checked the score outside of our screen. We could tell, silently, that they’d won before they’d won, we’d heard the fireworks starting, the screaming. But we stayed rapt until the clock on our wall hit zero. And only then did we, on our corner, scream and wave and jump and hug, only then did we know truly what had happened. We waited, together, until we could tell each other.