This Summer, We Can Hear the Drumming

Still, we've got a feeling that Summer 2000 is going to be a weird one. The city's primed for big events; there's a distinct end-of-an-era tension in the air. It's become possible, for instance, given this spring's NASDAQ crash, to foresee a real end to the economic good fortune that's defined life in New York City these last several years. The process of attrition has already begun, as the economy's winnowing the sickly from among the ranks of the young Silicon Alley hustlers and whiteboys who, for better or for worse, have recently set the tone for downtown Manhattan. Adios, twerps. We'll warm the stools at Botanica in your absence.

This summer might also find us bidding goodbye to that other defining phenomena in boom-era New York: Rudy Giuliani, at least as we've come to know him, with his aura of seemingly inexorable destiny. Giuliani's springtime travails, cruelties and idiocies may well enter the history books as, collectively, one of the great political freakouts in history, an unforeseen auto-destruction the implications of which will continue to play out as the season deepens.

Meanwhile, Gov. Pataki, of all people, huddles in Albany, possibly preparing to launch a spur-of-the-moment Senate race; a new man takes over the New York City archdiocese to minister to (if the funeral crowd outside St. Patrick's last week was any indication) more ancient, superstitious old Catholic women than anybody knew even existed in New York anymore; and Chelsea Clinton's sleazy mother awaits the estival unfolding of her fate?this deranged tourist stalking fat-assed through the hot canyons, praying for another cop to put another bullet in another Patrick Dorismond and help redeem her ambition.

Apocalypticists, moreover, will find comfort in the idea of a heavily medicated Giuliani, his ass killing him, prowling New York throughout the dog days of August, spouting insults and outrages as?in Brownsville and East New York and Washington Heights and Flatbush?tempers strain and the city erupts in the riots that, after several years' worth of controversial police violence, wouldn't surprise anybody.

Finally, as of this writing, the Red Sox have edged the Yankees to take first place in the American League East. If the Sox can't take it all during this strange summer that's revolving toward us through an unsettlingly portentous sky, then it's time to dig up the Fenway Park grass. They never will.