COMMIE GIRL: LOOKING FOR THE PRETTY PEOPLE AT THE DODGERS GAME
By Rebecca Schoenkopf
We didn’t find them. It was my little brother Cakeyboy’s idea (so many good ideas are): “Hey, let’s play ‘Who’s attractive in the crowd’”! Every five minutes or so, we’d get excited and start to point one out … but then we’d get a better look and have to, with great disappointment, withdraw our nascent claims. The pretty people, we finally decided, were at the bottom of Dodger Stadium, their good looks and general sexiness having brought them great wealth or proximity to it, and not all the way at the top.
We liked the top, and our $4 tickets: the only preening and bragging going on around us came directly from us. We (I, my brother Cakeyboy, my son Jimmy, and his sister Amanda) were there with a small chunk of my department at USC, who keep sending out mass e-mails inviting everybody to join them in doin’ stuff! Like baseball games! And one woman’s invited everyone to train for a marathon, and a surprising number of people said yes! And when one of my new friends complimented me for having such a swell-looking family, whom I’d introduced as “my brother, my son, and his sister,” only later to amend it to “we are all brother and sister” without clarification, I forgot to explain that my dad’s married an awful lot of fine-looking women. Oh well. I’ve explained it now!
“Do you think Leslie would have been in Piranha 3D?” Jimmy asks me after seeing a commercial for what looks like a high-budget new flick, 30 years after his first mama survived Piranha 2. She’d been the underage ingénue who lies sexily around in the boat, and one of only four people who kept their throats whole from the marauding flying fish. It was a really stupid movie. But when he saw it—saw and heard his mother speaking and moving, for the first time since he was a baby, we having sourced a copy on VHS—he couldn’t tear his eyes away. “Hell yeah probably!” I tell him. After all, she ended the movie alive.
And so this weekend Amanda came down from Oregon, and they and my father spread Leslie’s ashes in Malibu. It’s 15 years since she died: younger then than I am now. And her baby son is a man, and her daughter is a beautiful woman. The people in my grad department said so.
The Dodger game was boring, and we left at the half (that’s what you call the seventh inning, yes?), because I for one was looking at the clear and beautiful mountain view instead of the game, and two hours of beautiful mountains was just about right.
It has been such a wonderful few weeks since I left my living room and started school. Every single day on the bus, I have some wonderful encounter with humanity. One day, my boyfriend left his bike on the rack, and when he realized it and ran after the bus to stop it, the two old black ladies who’d gotten off with us ran into the street and started banging their canes to get the driver’s attention. The whole community came together to stop that bus! I talk to children, and gangsters, and nice ladies on their way to work, and they talk to me, and we are all together for a moment in this world. Every day my day is made.
And then there are my new friends in grad school, who are all interesting and brilliant and have their shit together and apparently even run marathons, and only one of them is really obvious in not being able to stand me.
