I wore number five for most of my 12 years of Little League and high school baseball.

My Little Leaguer's impulse to imitate led naturally to Joe DiMaggio, a Yankee with whom I found it easy to identify. Or at least as easy as it can be for a black kid from Brooklyn to identify with a white man playing for the white flag-bearer of a segregated sport.

Given the charmed life I lived then and continue to live, the Yankee Clipper was a natural choice. DiMaggio and I shared an emotionless exterior and a curmudgeonly personality tempered, I hoped, by unparalleled grace on the baseball diamond.

The similarities did not end there. As a public figure, DiMaggio was made a representative of his entire Italian ethnicity and was patronized for filling that role so "ably."

Life magazine once said of DiMaggio, "Although he learned Italian first, Joe, now 24, speaks English without an accent, and is otherwise well adapted to most U.S. mores. Instead of olive oil or smelly bear grease he keeps his hair slick with water. He never reeks of garlic and prefers chicken chow mein to spaghetti."

I also speak English without an accent. Instead of an unruly Afro or dread locks, I wear my hair in a lowcropped fade. And I prefer chocolate and milk to gin and juice. Like DiMaggio for Italians, I am one of the "good blacks."

DiMaggio lived a charmed life. Or better yet, he symbolized one.

America used to be a helluva lot better. Or so some would like to believe.

Because of the welfare state, poor Americans were created and then had their ethics eroded by reliance on their undeserved biweekly government checks. We changed civil rights laws, enabling black people to catch up in the race race, but they stubbornly refused, choosing instead to remain in ghettos and speak their strange pidgin dialects.

Meanwhile, we stopped going to church so our values--whatever those are--disintegrated and our children started listening to rap and heavy metal and subsequently shot their schoolmates.

In days old, kids filled the sandlots and schools, not the jails and penitentiaries. It wasn't a neighborhood unless it had an old woman sticking her head out the window shouting at the cankickers. Your grandfather's memories were everyone's reality.

If you're nodding your head, you believe in Joe DiMaggio. Back when baseball was America, and everyone thought America was better than "Cats," DiMaggio was class incarnate.

And until now, I and most of my classmates have represented what America is supposed to be. Before I have my hair braided as you fire up Hendrix's "The Star-Spangled Banner," allow me to explain.

Life is good. My older brother and I grew up in Park Slope playing whiffle ball on President Street after school, thriving under the tutelage of Coach Dad in the local Catholic Little League and muscling our way through P.S. 282 (Our I.Q. was 282!).

I went to a specialized (read: white) high school on the Upper East Side and spent my teenage years hanging out with a fine group of mama's boys, hitting the books and trading baseball cards with equal aplomb. I swear I would have put them in my bicycle spokes if I had a bike.