In a High School Gym, Community Springs Eternal
Southern California is famously un-famous for its sense of community. The place is notorious for disappointing poor saps who think they can just move here and feel at home. It’s not New York, where you can set up housekeeping, step onto the sidewalk, ba-da-bing, ba-da-boom, you’re a New Yorker. You can’t depend on this metropolis to supply a sense of being involved.
And yet, its reputation notwithstanding, community is rampant in Southern California, if you know where to look. “Keep tonight open,” my husband called from the office the other day. “There’s a basketball game over at the high school.”
There is something eternal about a high school sporting event, something that hasn’t changed since, like, the days of early man. Teenage drivers zinged around the darkened school parking lot like so many pinballs. Someone had scrawled initials on the ticket booth plexiglass.
Inside, there was that smell of gym socks and Pine-Sol. The squeak of rubber soles on hardwood. The thunk of the backboard, the swish of the net. Those hand-lettered signs (“We’re #1!”) on the walls above the bleachers. A skinny kid with acne leading the band.
A tuba. You forget that, somewhere out there, kids still are learning the tuba. Cheerleaders, doing that pyramid where the short girl gets to pose on top. It could have been any gym, anywhere, but it was a high school gym in big, tinsel-hearted Southern California, full of kids and parents and grandparents and that unimaginable commodity, neighbors.
The ref blew a whistle. The cheerleaders stomped: WHO ROCKS THE HOUSE?
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It’s maybe not surprising that people don’t expect community in Southern California--that they don’t expect community anywhere, in fact. These are nasty times, if you go by the headlines and cable back-channels. In race, in politics, in culture, we are said to have turned Darwinian, gone tribal. Extremists hog the public stage.
Sports ought to be different, but--again, famously--it isn’t, at least not in the sports the masses see on TV and read about. Any beauty to be found in the joy of pure athletics has been corroded by the money, the moguls, the millionaire jocks.
Can you build a community around some store-bought dream team? Or hitch your heart to a barefoot basketball star with emotional problems and a ring in his nose? Not truly. Not deeply. And with these sad facts, people tend to think no more on the question, as if things began and ended with the public realm.
But the public stage is only part of the story. Down below the radar, there is the rest of it, the day-to-day. And here as elsewhere--more so than elsewhere--there is a surprising disconnect between reputation and reality.
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We sat in the bleachers, about halfway up. Our teenager’s favorite substitute teacher sat just above us; our preschooler’s pal, Nicholas, high-fived his mommy below. There was a time, though it’s hard to remember now, when these people were no more than familiar strangers. But this is how community works; like so many things--time, marriage--it’s subtle and cumulative.
We had no children on the team. We knew the players only as acquaintances of our children, acquaintances who--in this land of divisions--came, incidentally, in all skin tones, creeds and national origins. With lightning speed, the ball flew--WHO ROCKS THE HOUSE?--from Chicano to Mormon to Thai to Armenian to African American.
You notice things: How beautiful the teenagers are in this blessed place. How long it’s been since you full-on stomped and cheered. How little the differences, the tribes suddenly matter when your hometown tribe takes over and you’re up by one basket and there are 19 seconds to play. How far we’ve come. How hard we’re working. How those fight songs haven’t changed in, like, 25 years.
How good it feels to know the secret answer to the question. WHO ROCKS THE HOUSE? To holler back: We do.
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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com