Being physically disabled, I have a bitter distaste for professional sports. Watching people show off their functioning physiology and genetic luck just scrubs me the wrong way sometimes. It’s even worse when I consider that these professional athletes make more money then the doctors who treat their sport-related injuries. It sickens me to think that half a million dollars per week that could be used to push forward with cancer research or robotic limb replacement is instead going to a guy for running around in circles in an effort to make the average person look weak. I recently moved to Philadelphia to live my boyfriend, Jesse. We live in a small townhouse owned by our friend Rita, and although I love them both, they both love baseball. A friend of a friend cannot be my enemy. So when Rita purchased tickets for the three of us to all go out to a Philadelphia Phillies game together, I reluctantly agreed to go. At least I could take my camera and get candid shots of the fielders squatting down and wiping the dirt off their asses.
Jesse had work until five, so me and Rita had until then to estrogen out on outfit planning and lady-face painting. She decided she was going to wear a colorful bikini bathing suit top under a thin white “wife-beater”, that contradictory to the name, was printed on with peace signs. I was going to wear a black corset. I pinned up what the brain surgeons had left of my hair into a 1980’s giga-queen bouffant. Rita looked like a hygienic hippie in cowgirl boots.
“I’m gonna bring towels for us”
Rita was confusing sometimes. I inquired of her motives.
“Because we’re wearing mini-skirts, so we shouldn’t have our girl stuff touching up on the dirty seats.”
Rita was either a genius, or a paranoid hypochondriac. I made fun of her for being both. A costume chameleon, she quick-change modeled for me the outfits she had picked out and designed for characters in a movie that she’s been working on. It’s an independent film about stalker lesbians. I’m hoping to get some of our music in it.
Jesse came home grumpy as usual. He’s tired of his job, and this summer heat has really been blistering up his anxiety. He’s the only guy I know who’s fun to love even when he’s totally miserable. He caught me in the kitchen making out with a pineapple popsicle. We had a brief, intimate, three-some hello, and his mood instantly improved. Stepping back to be a bystander of my outfit, he commented
“Wow, you look beautiful.”
Little words that mean so much. I’m not crippled or disfigured when I’m in his eyes.
The three of us plotted out our strategic game plan: Rita would drop off Jesse and me at the Citizens Bank stadium, he would assist me to our seats, she would park the car and meet us there, and all would be breezy-cheese and dandy-ligers. As we arrived, we noticed the first problem: people. Swarming around the stadium hive, these city-drones were not the type to be conscientious of someone with a mobility problem. I lack balance, coordination, and nerve strength, as well as the back of a skull. One bump in the wrong spot, or a single fall, and it could very well be the end of my life. A photographer at the gate noticed us and took our picture for the phillies website. With Jesse being a Golem-built mass of masculinity and tattooed temperament, and me, a smiling skeleton with fire-dyed hair- we tend to stand out in conventional places like a partially-severed bleeding thumb. An attendant who saw how I was having to use Jesse for guided walking assistance asked if we were ok. We were fine, until he explained to us that our seats were forth row from the very top of the stadium, and also that no elevators went up there. As so began what would probably be the greatest fitness challenge of Jesse’s life, and the most precious one of mine.
I wasn’t counting the number of flights, or the rate at which he was climbing them while holding me up. I was too focused on the speed of his breath, and looking down to watch the world shrink in size. He had to stop at a few check points, and each time I felt like reassuring him like a wresling coach:
“C’mmon Babykillz, just a few more steps, you can take em’….just pretend they are the heads of pretentious wealthy hipsters.”
We finally made it up to Olympus and I licked the salt off his lips. Heights have an effect of my vertigo, but while it is noticeable, it is not uncomfortable. It’s an amusement parking-lot….just taking a slow ride to nowhere. We rocked in the sky. Rita met us up there and we marveled at the flea circus below.
“I used to play softball as a kid. I wasn’t any good at it…but I could run faster than anyone else on the team. They used me to get runs in and set me up in the outfield where I would sit on the ground and make braided bracelets with the grass.”
I was normal bodied as a child, however I did not have a normal childhood.
“The teams were all named after sponsors, like “Dominoes Pizza” or “Ritas water Ice.” Our team was “Orlando Chiropractic”; the name barely fit on the shirts and none of the girls could even pronounce it. We were like 10 years old then; all we knew was that Orlando Florida was where Disney world was.”
Jesse played football as a kid, but watching baseball was still special for him. Growing up, his dad would take him out to a ball game once every year. Something good to look forward to, that had become something great to look back on. Rita liked looking up at the players on the big stat board screens to figure out which one she’d be most compatible with. Chase Utley. She would gladly run the bases with him. He’s the reason her pet rabbit was named “Chase”, but not the reason that it humps her every chance its let out of the cage.
We observed the game like Physicists. Listening to clanks of the bat, and quantitatively comparing those sounds with the visual moments of impact, it struck out my mind. It’s high velocity action; I was glad to be sitting so far away that no foul balls could possibly be caught with my head. My camera zoom was not powerful enough for game photos, so me and Rita took segmented set pictures of random body parts instead. My favorite was a photo of our lady legs crossed in together with the captioned back of a woman’s shirt “CHOOCH”. Jesse left to go get food.
The wind started to wind up. I was taking blonde Pocahontas shots of Rita, when the sky turned completely bipolar. I watched through the viewscreen of my camera as the ominous forces greyed their way across the sky on cumulonimbus dragons. They growled at us with thunder. The knights of the field knew they had to delay the current tournament, and set their valiant efforts toward defending the diamond. The majority of our pictures were taken of them wrestling the wind, tarping over the field with goliath’s garbage bag. Rain had not arrived yet, and we were hoping that she would stand us up. There was no getting me back up those stairs, so we remained seated in our front row seating for the sky show. Jesse came back with snacks and soda for us to enjoy. He made the comment:
“This is my dad getting back at me from the beyond for going to a game without him.”
I didn’t see it happen, but the way he explained it later is how I remember it.
“It was like watching impending doom flung out at you so fast that you catch every moment of it getting closer.” The sky tore open and thousands of liquid arrows launched down at us like in the last scene of the movie 300, archered by the high altitude hurricane like winds. Their forces were so ferocious that we could not see or stand, something that I am quite used to by now, but for them it must’ve been absolutely terrifying. There were screams all around from the great masses of attack victims. Worried about the fresh incision wound on my head, Rita’s inner hero took the towel out from underneath her and threw it over me. I slid my damp lower half over to give her mine. I was so sorry for making fun of her bringing those towels, we now were wearing them like armor. Jesse valiantly protected the chicken fingers by storing them all safely in his mouth.
The sky stampede caused it to start hailing frantic bodies in search of an escape. Soaked red Phillies T-shirts rumbled around like boiling blood, nature can always bring out the true animal in people. If it were survival of the fittest, I would have been totally fucked. Thankfully I had my Golem with me, my lovely human plow truck. It was a double-decker moshpit for him, fending against the flailing bodies, as well as the insubordinate hail. I was not afraid. I laughed most of the way down encapsulated in his bombshelter arms. He told me later he was having a panic attack the entire time.
We made it down the mountain of steps to the holy refuge of the women’s bathroom. Leaving me and Rita to the sheltered safety of the convent, Jesse went on to brave the perilous battlefields of the parking area. We took more photos of ourselves looking sad and creepy. Drenched wenches in a saloon of sewage.
The rain stopped and the game started back up the moment we got home. We removed out waterlogged corsets and swim suits, and put on Phillies t-shirts and dry underwear. Jesse dried off in the shower, and Rita and I, after making hot tea and cocoa, watched the game on TV. Ironically enough, we got to see a lot more of the action that way.
The Phillies evidentially lost, but I wasn’t aware of that as we went off to bed. Cuddling up to my Gargoyle, I told him,
“Jesse- if that WAS your dad tonight- then he must have wanted us all to have a really memorable time…. ‘cause I never thought it could happen, but I just had some of the greatest moments of my life at a fucking baseball game.”
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