Damon doesn't throw well, his swings sometimes look awkward, and fly balls can be a bit of an adventure, but Damon is the kind of player the Yankees have to keep.

Hideki Matsui gets swan-song treatment from Mike Vaccaro under the headline "Godspeed, Godzilla." Vaccaro gives Matsui's career five graphs, and for a player who never mastered English--and who reporters have a hard time relating to--one has to wonder if that's as much he'll ever get. Vaccaro trots out his career numbers, but says the most impressive thing was "the humanity he brought to the role."

Alex Rodriguez steals quite a few stories after he broke a Series slump with the go-ahead RBI in the ninth. My favorite is the one David Wells pens for the Post. This morning's offering is about Kate Hudson, who Wells credits with A-Rod's success this postseason. It's not a novel claim at this point, but Wells brings some inside information.

She is the perfect complement to him. I know her a little bit and have talked to her quite a few times. She's just a really down-to-earth chick. She'll go to baseball games and have fun. She's just supportive of him, and that empowers him with an "I don't give a damn" attitude.

It wasn't an entirely glorious day for New York sports, though. Both the Jets and the Giants lost. The day-after stories are mostly summing up, so we'll have to wait until tomorrow for the real finger-pointing to start. But they're already tending in Rex Ryan's direction now that the 4-0 start is a distant memory. Gary Myers calls him green in the Daily News. And everyone seems to like this typically gracious post-game quote from Ryan about the 30-25 loss to the division rival Dolphins: "Sometimes, things just don't make sense."

A city marshal shuttered the onetime celebrity hotspot on April 9 over some $113,727 in unpaid rent, court records show.

In an affidavit, Mr. Ashman said he was "blind-sided" by the eviction. "We do owe money," he stated. "We need to be open for business to pay owed money."

A judge denied his plea for a stay of eviction earlier this week.

Opened with much fanfare in the former Nell's space in 2006, Mr. Ashman's club benefited from a star-studded support network, which included Yankees pitcher David Wells, model Petra Nemcova, and actors Chris Noth and Jesse Bradford, who "would contribute money and/or lend their name to the club in exchange for an ownership interest," according to court records.

Mr. Ashman also enlisted socialite Ann Dexter-Jones to help design the space and prominent scenester Samantha Ronson to help promote it.

Yet, the place seemed eternally mired in legal woes. The landlord filed suit against the club a total of six times since 2006, housing court records show.

In 2005, when the club was known as NA, investors unsuccessfully attempted to oust Mr. Ashman as managing partner for overspending "approximately 163% over the amount budgeted in the business plan," despite the fact the club was operating only three days a week, not seven, as originally planned, according to court papers.

In a subsequent settlement, Mr. Ashman was permitted to stay on as company president under the condition that the club would become profitable or else be sold to the highest bidder.

In the late spring of 2002, those of us who spend our time listening to sports radio while quietly questioning what's gone wrong with our lives heard perhaps a week's worth of rants, by everyone from Tony Kornheiser to Mike and the Mad Dog to Marcus, the 23-year-old who hosts the Sports and Grain Report in Iowa City, about a book being shopped around by former major leaguer Jose Canseco. Mr. Canseco-the famously buff, argumentative former slugger who once dated Madonna and had a ball bounce off his head for a home run, said he had something to say about steroids. Major leaguers used them, he said, and he was ready, in the spirit of Elia Kazan, to name names.

As it turned out, Mr. Canseco couldn't find the book deal he so desperately wanted, and now the yammering over his allegations has been drowned out by the uproar over pitcher David Wells and his memoir, Perfect I'm Not . Mr. Wells, currently a starting pitcher with the Yankees, was a presence on two of the team's championship runs, in 1998 and 1999, playing the good ol' no-nonsense fat boy who evoked invented memories of Babe Ruth. But after it was discovered that advance copies of Perfect I'm Not claimed that 25 to 40 percent of major leaguers use steroids and that Mr. Wells pitched his 1998 perfect game "half-drunk," good ol' Boomer Wells became the most hated player in spring training since Garrett Morris' fictional shortstop, Chico Escuela, showed up to camp after writing his tell-all Bad Stuff 'bout the Mets . Mr. Wells apologized to his Yankee teammates and toned down certain passages for the book's final version. His team fined him $100,000.

Now we're left with the book itself. And that's a problem. For starters, Mr. Wells doesn't point the finger at any steroid users besides Mr. Canseco and former San Diego and Houston third baseman Ken Caminiti, both of whom have come clean about their drug use. Mr. Wells still claims that steroids are being used (though he has revised his estimate down to something like 10 to 25 percent of players). Otherwise, this is a dry, season-by-season account of two decades in professional baseball, peppered with expletives and off-color adjectives. Like Mr. Wells himself, Perfect I'm Not hurtles hard but aimlessly through seasons, teammates and managers.

This should be an interesting story. Here's a man raised around a band of Hell's Angels, who struggled for years as a major leaguer-someone known only to the bespectacled men clutching Street & Smith annuals and crunching rotisserie statistics. Then he became a good pitcher with teams like Detroit, Baltimore and Cincinnati-and upon his arrival with the Yankees in 1997, became the brassy champion of every drunk, shirtless man sitting in the bleachers of the Bronx. But Mr. Wells is mostly interested in his own celebrity, and his public persona as the hard-charging everyman. It's typical that he starts off his book with a chapter on how he came to dress in drag on Saturday Night Live . Some players are desperate to keep their carousing a secret; Mr. Wells seems determined to exploit his after-hours hanky-panky for promotional use.

The offensive thing here isn't that Mr. Wells went out on an all-night bender with the cast of Saturday Night Live the night before he pitched the first perfect game for the Yankees since Don Larsen. It's that the whole book seems like a tedious mission of vindication for a boozing lifestyle occasionally broken up by drunken fistfights. And it's never Mr. Wells' fault-not the fisticuffs with the cops in Chicago, nor the bloody brawl with two men the night of his mother's funeral. Also not his fault: his release, early in his career, from the Toronto Blue Jays, or his public castigation of slugger Frank Thomas in 2001, his teammate at the time with the Chicago White Sox.

Presumably written in his own voice, Mr. Wells goes out of his way to insult the mental capacity of every reader over the age of 16. He writes that he hates being injured because "I LOVE pitching," but offers little help in understanding what-besides blaring Metallica-motivates the most important player on the field at any given time. He offers up a list of banal commandments for rookies ("Keep the beer cold and available") and, as an extra-special bonus, gives us the "David Wells 'Got-Balls-Star' Team" of his favorite players. He tells about one case of dysentery, and about a case of stomach flu cured by "one very brave trainer with a suppository gun." Oh, by the way, ballplayers have sex on road trips, and "stat sheets don't mean dick."

We know what Mr. Wells is trying to do. He's trying to shock and titillate, and at the same time make us love him. He wants his autobiography to be the muscle-shirted, loudmouthed, 21st-century version of Jim Bouton's Ball Four . But he can't pull it off. Even with the help of ghostwriter Chris Kreski, Mr. Wells can't do what Mr. Bouton was able to do all on his own: expose the frailties and moral failings of ballplayers while making us appreciate the greatest game ever invented.

Maybe that's too much to ask. With very few exceptions, the experience of reading any athlete's autobiography always feels a little like the scene late in Everybody's All-American , when a former football star forces his wife and cousin and the cousin's girlfriend to listen to his own cassette-recorded account of his playing days. The warm feelings of fans and competition, of winning, of being in the moment-they're all gone, replaced by this terrible, deflated retelling.

Of course, some ghostwriters can pull the best out of their subjects. They give order where typically there's none; they give new life to vanished emotion. But one gets the feeling that even Dick Schaap would have a hard time crafting a sensible story if he were working with David Wells. In the end, Boomer's just an ass.

Sridhar Pappu writes Off the Record for The Observer.

Surrounded by the fashion boutiques of Versace, Dolce & Gabbana and Tse, the Right Bank was one of those shabby semi-French places you don't see much of any more. The food was passable (if a little dull), the decor was French enough, there was a garden in back and the bill, when it came, was manageable. It wasn't a dive, but it wasn't La Goulue, either.

Tucked four feet below street level, the Right Bank was different things to different people. Elderly neighborhood people ate dinner there at 5:30 p.m. Then, after 7, the local lawyers and doctors stopped in, on their way home to their side-street brownstone apartments. One regular called it "better than Cheers." As the night wore on, it became a sort of threadbare pickup joint. Low-key celebrities came in for burgers and French onion soup and generally weren't bothered.

"It's going to be very difficult to replace it," said Kenneth Williams, a 30-year patron. "They have very good quality dishes. There's a lot of choice in the proteins and in the vegetables. Great roast chicken and pork chops. They have wonderful soups and perhaps the best gazpacho I've ever tasted, and I eat out a lot. Every night. And not just at the Right Bank.

"When Al Pacino was living on my block, on 68th between Fifth and Madison, he used to sneak in there late at night for a meal," Mr. Williams continued. "The owner would keep the place open after closing and people would stay listening to music and talking and drinking. Pacino and I were somewhat friends because an ex-girlfriend of mine was in Serpico ."

Bob Leighton was another longtime patron at the Right Bank. "The other night my girlfriend I were walking along Madison Avenue," Mr. Leighton said, "and we passed this other couple who used to live on 68th Street. 'Where are you going? There's no Right Bank.' We didn't know what to do. They didn't know either, so we all ended up at this place on 64th Street. They have these designer pizzas and pasta, but it's not the same."

Back in the 1970's and early 80's, Maureen Chatfield, who now runs a dating service in New Jersey, was a regular at the Right Bank. "That was my home," she said. "That was the greatest hangout in the city. I lived on 70th Street. I met Pacino there, and we became very good friends. He asked me out. I never ' liked him' liked him, but we went out a lot on dates. He had a crush on me, and he called me all the time. Of course, in some ways I wished I had gone out with him. I was studying to be an actor, and he was this great actor. But just physically, he didn't appeal to me. He's short, and there was no chemistry.

"I met Michael Nouri there, who was in Flashdance , and I dated him for a while," Ms. Chatfield said. (Reached for comment about the closing, Mr. Nouri exclaimed, "Naw! Shit, no! Burgers. They had great burgers. They had great chicken Kiev.")

Ms. Chatfield also met Mr. Leighton there. This is how it happened: She was in a telephone booth outside the restaurant, and he pounded on it. She asked him, "What do you want?" He said, "I want to take you to dinner." Then they went to the Right Bank together.

At Oilily, a boutique next to the Right Bank, saleswoman Cynthia Izoldi described the food as "good" and "O.K." She said the chocolate mud pie was "very dark and very rich" and "very fulfilling." She said she was sad to see it go.

"I'm not sad at all," chimed in Priscilla Lyons, another Oilily saleswoman standing nearby. "Aside from the cake, the rest of the food was mediocre."

Ms. Lyons recalled that she and some fellow neighborhood smokers used to take their cigarette breaks on the stoop of 822 Madison. Inevitably, she said, the manager of the Right Bank emerged from down below to yell at them: "He would go nuts. 'You effing creeps!' He was yelling and cursing. I was like, 'I'm ashing in a cup, big guy.'"

One man who lives in the neighborhood, but who would not give his name, recalled the service at Right Bank being "slow" and "not very good." He said the food was "fine."

One recent afternoon, Hillary Schaps was sitting on the stoop of 822 Madison eating a sandwich. She was about to make a call on her cell phone. Ms. Schaps ate dinner at Right Bank recently–French onion soup and a chef salad. "The food wasn't very good and the service wasn't very good," she recalled. "But it was kind of charming inside, I guess. Kind of French."

–William Berlind

Future Considerations

Now it is safe to say so. But why wasn't it safe before?

The Roger Clemens-David Wells trade really stank, and not just because Mr. Wells has turned out to be the better pitcher. In the wake of the Great Beaning, the trade has started to look like a karmic boomerang from baseball's most infamous curse, under which the Boston Red Sox, after selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1920, never won another World Series.

When the Yankees traded the burly Mr. Wells to Toronto for the surly Mr. Clemens in February 1999, it looked like a fine swap. Roger Clemens is a first-ballot Hall of Famer; David Wells is not. Mr. Clemens has five Cy Young Awards; Mr. Wells has none.

At the time, the New York media seriously speculated that the 1999 Yankees might be even better than the team that had won a record 125 games the year before, and the national media complained that baseball's rich were only getting richer. Everybody in the Yankee organization, from principal owner George Steinbrenner to general manager Brian Cashman to manager Joe Torre, agreed.

But since then, it is the Yankees who have gotten the short end of the deal. In Toronto, Mr. Wells has compiled a 32-12 record, and an earned-run average of 4.32. This year, he has a 15-2 record and was named the American League's starting pitcher in the July 11 All-Star Game.

Mr. Clemens, meanwhile, has been ordinary. His record in pinstripes is 20-16 with an ERA of 4.51, hardly Cy Young stuff. He was not selected to the All-Star team this year or last year. He has not even been the Yankees' second-best pitcher since he arrived in New York.

The fans have made their displeasure known, booing Mr. Clemens during his numerous rocky outings. Even Yankee manager Joe Torre has repeatedly characterized his pitcher's outings as inconsistent.

But the media was slow to echo what the fans had been saying all year. We have heard that Mr. Clemens has been trying too hard, that he's been overthrowing, that he has not been using his fastball enough and, until July 8's beaning of Mike Piazza, that he wasn't throwing inside enough. Only recently, however, have we heard that this seeming no-brainer of a trade has been a fiasco.

"Right now, Roger Clemens' mom wouldn't argue that he's a better pitcher than David Wells," Yankees radio announcer John Sterling told The Observer . "Right now, you can say that it was a terrible trade. If the Yankees haven't been knocked terribly, it's because they won last year. How much more can you do but win the championship?"

If the Yankees' prosperity obscured Mr. Clemens' poor performance in 1999, the team's mediocrity has overshadowed it in 2000. Mr. Clemens hasn't been the Bronx's worst overpaid 37-year-old pitcher this year. That distinction belongs to David Cone, who was 1-7 at the break, with an e.r.a. of 6.40 to go with his $12 million contract.

Before the Yankees gave up David Wells–a Babe Ruth man! He wore the hat!–they had a real good thing going. Not only were they winning, but they were winning with class . Yankee haters actually liked them. But now Joe Torre is stuck defending Roger Clemens, and the former perfectly gentlemanly Yankees are bullies again.

–John Rosenthal

Oh, the critics have called Mayor Rudolph Giuliani a philistine for cracking down on street artists and seeking budget cuts for cultural institutions. They've portrayed him as a workaholic, a despot with a utilitarian streak. But that was before he let everyone in on his little secret: Not only does he have a passion, but he has a passion for one of the fine arts.

The secret was unveiled at the Leica Gallery in the East Village. On his way to the podium, the Mayor noticed a crooked picture on the wall and paused to straighten it. A careless reporter had leaned against the picture moments before.

Mr. Giuliani's photo exhibit- View From the Capital of the World -offers sweeping shots of the bridges and the skyline. It's a tidy portrait of the city. The Mayor focused his lens on human beings for just a few of the 24 pictures on display-and those were mostly firefighters and rescue workers, testament to the photographer's empathy for embattled heroes.

Our Mayor just wanted to share the fruits of his hobby with his fellow New Yorkers, to show another side of himself. Alas, it only gave the critics more to snipe about. His sweeping shots of the skyline, they said, suggest a ruler with an aloof view of his empire, a leader with little feeling for his subjects.

So there was the Mayor at the Leica Gallery, defending himself once again during what was supposed to be a light press conference.

"Somebody wanted to know why I didn't take pictures of more people," he said, gripping the lectern. "O.K., I'm going to tell you why. I started doing that and they started running away."

Laughter. The Mayor grabbed someone's camera and lurched toward a guest. "What does it look like when the Mayor comes up to you?" he asked. "They started running away. That got to be a little difficult. And I'm sure it would have been a whole big thing about invading privacy or something else."

Mayor Giuliani's sudden aversion to thrusting cameras into people's faces was refreshing. After all, he has allowed his police force the unprecedented use of cameras for surveillance of public spaces. As part of his war on drugs, two cameras stand at the western end of Washington Square Park, spying on dog walkers and chess players. He has also expanded the use of security cameras in housing projects.

Mr. Giuliani may relax by taking photos of the city he loves, but he also seems to think cameras make a useful surveillance tool in the war on perverts. Just hours before appearing at Leica, the Mayor offered a suggestion on his call-in radio show to people looking to drive porn shops out of their neighborhood.

"You can take pictures of people going in there," he said. "Oh, boy, it really does cut down on business … You know the kind of people who go in there. They probably don't want other people to know that. You might be doing them a favor, because you might start getting them to deal with their problem."

Back at Leica on May 15, a reporter mentioned the street artists who were protesting outside the gallery, screaming about the Mayor's forbidding them to sell their works on the street without a license. Five of them had been arrested.

So did Mr. Giuliani have a message for his fellow artists?

"I don't consider myself an artist," said the Mayor. "Next question."

-Greg Sargent

A Folk Antihero

My friend Kurtis Bell flew in from Los Angeles for a visit. After spending the days slugging back Budweisers and popping the occasional Valium or Tylenol P.M., he found himself in Dorrian's Red Hand Restaurant, the Upper East Side dive, on the night New York Yankees pitcher David Wells was at the bar, celebrating his perfect game.

At the moment, David Wells is a folk hero, not only for retiring 27 Minnesota Twins in a row, but because he drinks a lot of beer and makes wise-guy remarks from time to time. At Dorrian's, he was having a decent time, despite the presence of about a dozen men staring at him. The New York Times reported that Mr. Wells was drinking champagne at Dorrian's, and that is probably true, but what kind of folk hero would he be if he was not doing shots and drinking beer, which he definitely was.

Kurtis went up to him, talked to him about Marv Albert for a minute, then told me it was time to go. "This is a sausage party," he said, gesturing toward all the men in the room.

We went back to my apartment, but Kurtis wasn't done yet. He took a Valium, then slipped out to get a six-pack at the deli. Kurtis Bell is no folk hero, but he's got to be as much of a party animal as David Wells. Something else you should know about Kurtis: He was actually fired from the MTV Beach House. He should be a folk hero for that alone. But the thing about being a folk hero is you've got to have some kind of accomplishment to go with the screw-ups and heavy drinking, and Kurtis is lacking in the accomplishment department, even if he is great to be around.

He's unusually lithe. He has curly hair and wears loose clothes. He's trying to be an actor in L.A., which means he's not doing much.

"Pretty much I wake up, I go get a newspaper, Variety or Hollywood Reporter , fax out a bunch of résumés, don't get any responses," Kurtis said into my tape recorder. "About 3 in the afternoon, I go get myself a 12-pack of Budweiser, sit down, watch Jerry Springer , drink a beer or two or three. Sometimes I drink too much and fall asleep around 5, wake up at 9, eat a little something, go back to sleep."

"What about going out at night?"

"Yeah, I do a lot of that. Life of the party wherever I go. Always doing the shock-value shit, talking about John Wayne Gacy and getting blood on the clown suit."

"Can you keep up with the partying?"

"I'm older now. I find my digestive system can't really hold up with the amount of drinking, can't handle the amount of beer you take in, and you have a lot of problems with your feces , and it doesn't stay together too well. And sometimes when you've been drunk all night, you can go home at 4 o'clock in the morning, but for some reason you wake up at 6 , and you're like, What the hell is this all about? There's a couple ways you can get around that. No. 1 doesn't always work, is you get up and get yourself another beer or two. Sometimes it doesn't work, and you keep drinking until the six-pack is gone, and you fall back asleep again. Another way is taking Tylenol P.M. or a Valium."

"Can't you just toss off?"

"No," said Kurtis. "Usually when you drink that much and you're hungover, you get whisky dick. You try, but you can't whack it."

"How you doing with the ladies?"

"Los Angeles is not a good place for me, but when I was living here last, I was getting lots and lots of girls. When I'm buzzed, I'm pretty suave and smooth."

One night during his visit, after Kurtis had been pounding beers all day, we went to the deli for some water and Gatorade-detox stuff. At the counter, Kurtis took a step back, lost his balance and fell onto the muffin table. Back at the apartment, he passed out with his shoes on.

Another time we found ourselves walking around in the daytime among all the hippies and rasta guys in a big drumming circle in Central Park. I asked Kurtis, "How many women have you slept with?"

"Fifty-six," he said. "But the only problem is, I've only had sex about 56 times."

Kurtis was drinking from a Budweiser tallboy. The drumming circle thing was really happening. Bubbles, smoke, beards, floppy reggae hats, bandannas, babies, bare feet. Kurtis approached a hippie chick and asked her, "Is there a connection here with a Grateful Dead type of situation?"

"This is more an offshoot of the 60's be-ins," she said, "but actually I wouldn't be grateful if I were dead, in spirit or mind."

"I have a joke for you," said Kurtis. "What do the Deadheads say when they run out of pot? 'God, this music sucks.'"

"I guess that would be appropriate in my mind, too," said the hippie chick.

Kurtis leaped into the middle of the circle and started pogo-ing up and down amid all the trippy dancers. He looked very serious as he danced like a maniac. He tried to move in on three barefoot girls, but they stepped away.

"Rejected!" he yelled in mock horror. Didn't bother him. He was drinking from his can as we strolled to Sheep Meadow.

"So you're a complete alcoholic?"

"Borderline, absolutely. Sometimes I go on the three-day binge, sometimes I can go without it, but, yeah."

"What's it like?"

"I call it being on . If I'm at a party, being an alcoholic, I'm entertaining everyone, pulling down my pants and showing my lily-white ass, that sort of stuff. And everyone loves it."

-George Gurley