I have a book, Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend: Women Writers on Baseball, that I pulled off the shelf recently when I espied it while looking for something else. It's how I came to know about a poem, by Linda Pastan—
Baseball
When you tried to tell me
baseball was a metaphor
for life: the long, dusty travail
around the bases, for instance,
to try to go home again;
the Sacrifice for which you win
approval but not applause;
the way the light closes down
in the last days of the season—
I didn't believe you.
It's just a way of passing
the time, I said.
And you said: that's it.
Yes.
—that I've mentioned before, here and here. This time I reread an essay, "Dodger Stadium," by Eve Babitz, who is identified in the Contributor Notes section only as "a novelist and short story writer who hails from Los Angeles." Were the essay to arouse your curiosity about the author, a distinct possibility, you would soon find, having googled "Eve Babitz," the above photograph of her, at age 20, playing chess with the French artist Marcel Duchamp. Wikipedia describes the photograph, by Julian Wasser, as "her first brush with notoriety" and explains that the occasion for the "iconic" image was a retrospective of Duchamp's work, at the Pasadena Art Museum, curated by Walter Hopps, "with whom Babitz was having an affair at the time." Very LA: girls from my hometown might have been a little reckless at the age of 20—nothing beats fun for a good time—but few of them played chess or had their pictures taken, in any state of dress, with artists of the French avant garde.
To say that Babitz "hails from Los Angeles" feels like a different kind of statement than, say, "Bob Dylan hails from Hibbing." She was born in Hollywood and went to Hollywood High. Her mother was an artist and her father a violinist under contract with 20th Century Fox. Her godfather was Igor Stravinsky, a family friend. Before she became a writer, she was, like her mother, a visual artist: she worked in the music industry designing album covers, including for Linda Ronstadt, the Byrds, and Buffalo Springfield. Besides the aforementioned Hopps, boyfriends included Jim Morrison—yes, that Jim Morrison—Harrison Ford, and Steve Martin. As a writer, almost her only subject is Los Angeles: it's predictable that one might be introduced to her by happening upon an essay called "Dodger Stadium," which is ostensibly "about" how a quiet evening at home, scrambled eggs for supper, was interrupted by a phone call from an occasional beau, some kind of entertainment industry exec who split his time between coasts. He's seeking relief from excruciating studio meetings. Would she go with him to the Dodger game tonight? Yes, she would. You can tell it's not her usual pastime by the way she, for example, calls a "run" a "point," but she's enthusiastic about her companion:
I remember the first time I saw him. It was at a reception for a nouveau-wave actress in a bungalow behind the Beverly Hills Hotel, and everyone was making faded, jaded little French remarks at each other and being tiresome because the toast for the caviar wasn't buttered enough—when in he came, dressed like Johnny Carson and asking for Scotch.
I pounced on him and lured him off to the sidelines.
Satire aimed at a certain kind of life achieves a heightened effect when delivered by someone sunk in the life. I put "about" in quotes above because I think Babitz's real subject in "Dodger Stadium" is the gulf, never stated explicitly but implied by almost every detail, between the baseball game and the LA milieu with which she's familiar. Well, she comes close to an explicit statement:
We got our tickets and strolled inside the gates where music was playing and hawkers hawking, and he bought himself a scorecard and became downright cheerful. The blissfully festive smell of mustard cut through the air dissolving any residual anger, and zillions of little kids with pennants and blue plastic Dodger caps raced through the young couples as we all gave ourselves up to the setting sun. The tempo of the organ music inflicted the reality so that everything belonged inside of these Vatican Stadium walls, and the studios, and phones, and death, and rented cars belonged outside if they wanted any claims on time or space.
Just want to call attention to the smell of mustard (which a reader might connect to the caviar that's the subject of "faded, jaded" complaints at the Beverly Hills bungalow party) and the way in which the terminal emphasis of the last sentence's list falls not on "death" but "rented cars." The essay is about half over before Babitz drops the detail that her date has a wife back in New York. After the game, which the Dodgers win 3-2, they drive in his rented car to "a hidden little French restaurant," where, despite the hiddenness, he's recognized by an agent who joins them for "movie-deal talk" while, under the table, in the essay's last sentence, she felt a hand "come to rest some place just above my knee."
More about Eve Babitz here.
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