Curiosities at Bryant Park

I just donated a dollar in change to the Grand Central Neighborhood Social Services Corporation, which bought me a few moments with the haggard woman who hands out their publications (as she proceeds, I look more closely at her tired eyes and wonder if she, too, has a history of homelessness coupled with drug abuse. She does, however, have a daughter now).

After complimenting me on my ability to type without looking at the keys, she launches in to a mercifully brief and surprisingly informative precis of her group's involvement in the homeless community. Working Not Begging is their tagline, and a damn fine one if I say so myself, and their mission is to pick up for homeless adults and children (I think she led with the children part, which is wise, though little did she know I would have paid a much greater sum at this particular moment to be left alone with my computer) where state funding leaves off.

"Where does it leave off?" I ask, and she informs me that it leaves off very early in the month.

I guess it never struck me that corporations like this get checks on the first of the month like everyone else, and that they, too, "run out of money before they run out of month" [this is a phenomenon that I've become familiar with now on a more-than-anecdotal level].

A blanket, a warm bed, a place to shower, they say, and who can argue with that. Particularly when they gather around my table here like larger and more imposing pigeons...

But the funny thing of it is that they organize a soccer tourney, or, more accurately, a series of soccer tourneys. See the the current cover's headline: US Competes in 2nd Homeless Streetsoccer World Cup in Sweden! The exclamation point here is not editorial. It sounds kind of rad. The US, she tells me, is the defending cup holder. Even our homeless athletes are dominant.

I don't believe that the major networks (unsurprisingly) or ESPN (much more surprisingly) have sufficiently exploited the existence of a product with so much entertainment potential. For Christ's sake look what they did with poker. And many of the economic angles have got to be the same: it's a game, so the drama is reproducible and spontaneous; neither owners nor spectators have to deal actually or mentally with the looming spectre of escalating salaries or work stoppages; the contestants are, as in other reality-based programming, not so beautiful that they prevent the possibility of a viewer identifying with a player. Short of that one guy, perhaps, with the dreads and the tooth who everyone must admit looks really good in a uniform.

Obvious drawbacks to potential broadcasters being the quality of play, which is a legitimate concern, and of course the fact that, as a friend pointed out to me afterwards, they're fucking homeless. To the organizers, absenteeism is a concern. To the world, the potentially explosive mixture of having incredible media access and being completely insane. But you have to admit it has potential.

Someone, clearly, has recognized this as a quick perusal of the special section on street soccer reveals the prominently placed logo of the New York/New Jersey Metrostars, who have apparently signed on as promotional partners (not, it would appear, sponsors).

Sometime in the approaching fall, she tells me, they are organizing a tournament right here on the lawn in Bryant Park--a lawn which, incidentally, is not close to playing shape--in which homeless men from TWENTY DIFFERENT NATIONS will compete. You should see it when they brawl. Obviously, I'm there, but the question remains: is my 85 cents really going towards European travel expenses for American homeless? Normally I might say something about fiscal responsibility and the most efficacious appropriation of public funds... But that shit is cool, no doubt, and a European vacation, I know, can have profound effects on motivation and the psyche.