The Time of My Life by Rob Spillman

Author:Rob Spillman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780767929370
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2008-05-06T04:00:00+00:00

The Bunny Trip

SUSIE BRIGHT

I WAS A SWIM TEAM SCORE GIRL BEFORE I WAS A COMMUNIST. I’m glad things ended up that way, because otherwise I never would’ve been able to touch the Bunny and carry on my sensual, if guilty, disposition.

The swim team was my ticket to an almost-prom, to halcyon schooldays, to a bartended dress-up affair. The commies, the yippies, the lavender pinkos—they gave me guns and a good deal to think about, but nothing soft or fluffy.

I went to a school called University High, a white, mostly Jewish school in West Los Angeles. In the seventies, there was no truly integrated school in the district. A discreet number of black students from South Central L.A. (with neighborhood school names like Manual Arts) were bused into white schools from the time they were in kindergarten. It was not a two-way street. It was a cradle-to-cap affair. The neighborhood Chicano and Japanese American students at Uni were tracked, without exception, into blue- and pink-collar trades. They were all but banned from athletics.

Schools like Manual Arts beat University in every team sport on every occasion. Only boys competed, and the girls were either cheerleaders or “score girls.” When tenth-graders like me entered the school—and trailed the halls like lost lambs—we were asked by some clever opportunist if we’d like to “get involved.” I was signed up to keep stats on the boys’ lightest-weight basketball teams, and the swim team.

I came to Uni from Canada, where I’d gone to junior high. I wasn’t Canadian; I was simply the daughter of a woman who always thought the grass was greener on the other side of a five-hundred-mile marker. She’d get exasperated about once a year, and pack up our 1963 VW Bug with all our belongings. I didn’t get to know kids my own age very well, and my best friends were characters in library books. I wanted to be a movie star, a spy, Anne Frank, a dancing princess whose slippers wore out every night—anyone fantastical and romantic.

Canada’s classrooms were a relief, because I didn’t get beat up for being a bookish girl with glasses. Everyone read books in Canada, even the kids who were flunking out. There was no basketball team. You could swim outside maybe two months out of the year. I never saw anyone take stats for the hockey coach—maybe how many teeth they knocked out per period.

But now I was in L.A., living with my father for the first time and going to a new school that observed Jewish holidays. I was so sheltered from anything but the Irish Catholic fatalism of my mother that I didn’t know a single thing about Jewish stereotypes. My knowledge of bar mitzvahs came from reading All-of-a-Kind Family storybooks. The kids around me would rail about “JAPS” and my cheeks would turn red because I thought they were making anti-Asian slurs. I’d never heard of anyone getting a nose job, and I thought it was because they were having breathing problems. I just didn’t get it.

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