Sputterpub's Blog

I never really liked the block. Moving there in 1983 was a marital concession. I didn’t want to have it all my way; I tried give-and-take with my second spouse.

He was nine years older than I, born months before we got into WWII. I started five years after D-day. He was a Stanford grad, a Vietnam vet, and a Republican: about as opposite to me in those three areas as possible.

It seemed enough that he was willing to leave his first marriage and move to Berkeley. I understood his desire to get us out of my southside house (it was like he smelled the markings left by my first, and couldn’t abide them).

So I agreed to buy the house with him, on the other side of town. I was excited to move into it with him, even though it was a charmless edifice, on a too-quiet street, and the neighborhood was a bit yuppie for my taste. The block felt like a cul-de-sac even though it was a through street (with “traffic-calming” bumps). The neighborhood felt like a suburb in spite of its popular pedestrian shopping/dining corridor. I’ve lived in half a dozen Berkeley zones during my decades, and that one had the most strollers, station wagons, and birthday parties.

But like I said, I moved willingly. I even consented to the cold furnishing of the living room (the new house was almost a thousand square feet larger than the old, so we needed a couch, coordinating chairs, tables, lamps, all which we purchased one afternoon, upstairs at Macy’s, my beloved pointing at matching items as if he were choosing players for a pickup game of softball).

We and my two children moved in. My spouse fetched his two kids from Piedmont every other weekend and each Wednesday. We made a home.

Each of us had brought a baby into our blended family. Our younger children were four months apart in age and less than eighteen months old when we came to the neighborhood. So for my son and step-daughter that northside house was like a first residence.

The block was age-diverse, but all-white until we sold and moved away. We had a retired couple on one side of our house and an old woman with a live-in care provider on the other, but most of the other homes included kids. My daughter Allison immediately found a fellow seven year old diagonally across the street. She and Hannah would have an on and off intimacy for most of time we lived in the neighborhood. A year or so after we moved in, my son Sam became best friends with the boy who lived three houses west of us.

Nate was an odd little guy. So was Sam, but I was used to him. Both of them had anger issues. Neither was particularly coordinated or athletic. Each was probably gifted and maybe brighter than that. They were being raised by Jewish mothers. They were the babies in their families.

They were also different. Nate was demanding. He often acted imperious. He was clearly the apple of his mother’s eye, and he had Debra wrapped around his little fingers. Sam was more the sulky type. He could dig his heels in and refuse to behave the way I or Nate requested, but he wasn’t bossy. And he wasn’t the pet of an indulgent parent.

Sam and Nate palled around together from the time they were about three, now and then, in the neighborhood, through their K-3 years, when they were usually in the same class at school and sometimes in extra-curricular activities together, like afterschool carpentry class and summer day camp.

When they bused off to fourth grade their friendship fizzled. They were nine years old then. Sam found a new friend in runty mischievous Yoshi. As far as I could perceive, Nate didn’t replace Sam. Over the ensuing decade I’d spot him on the sidewalk now and then, always alone and growing fatter by the year. Unlike Sam he was below average in height. Nate had social challenges.

My daughter babysat Nate and his brother a few times. I think the Wineberg kids were about eleven and seven and Allison was thirteen when she took those jobs. One Sunday night there was a problem. Like other families, the Wineberg parents specified one bedtime for school nights and a later hour for nights before a leisure day. Allison had no problem with Nate’s brother; Eliot took himself off to bed promptly. Eliot was a bright, intense, cooperative child. Our household could not figure out why Debra doted so on Nate when Eliot was right there being more interesting and loving, but so it was.

Nate disputed Allison’s authority. He insisted that Sunday was a weekend night, and that he was entitled to the extra time. Allison disagreed, but Nate refused to go to bed. He created his own little sit-in, on the family couch, where he ranted about his rights and berated Allison. “Just you wait!” she reported him saying. “I’ll see to it that you never work in this neighborhood again!”

When Debra and Mark returned home from their date night, Nate was still awake, angry, and on the couch. In a fashion typical of Debra (this was years before the term “helicopter parent” was coined), as soon as she saw her boy, upset, still up, on the couch, she dashed from the doorway to his side, murmur-crying, “My baby! Oh sweetheart, what’s wrong? You can tell Mama.”

Allison’s babysitting career proceeded without interruption, but she never worked in that house again. I and my kids have retained the memory because it’s rare and entertaining. The child was so precociously indignant. Like a little actor on a comic stage. The only other time I’ve witnessed such attitude was when my oldest grandchild, Allison’s boy Roscoe, broke the overhead light in the stairway landing, and that occurred about two decades after Nate’s little fit. Roscoe was six at the time, and we’d given him one of those thick rubber balloon-type balls, the one with a little holder/handle for the kid to grab while he bounces around. We’d all told him to keep it low, on the floor. We’d even said it could break something if it bounced on walls where pictures hung, or against a light or overhead fan. But he was six. Within minutes he launched his ball from the top of the stairs. The shatter of the glass light globe was crazy-loud. Shards peppered the carpet below. Roscoe was alarmed, startled, incredulous. “I want that picked up!” he commanded. “ImMEEDiately!”

The little assholes. But their episodes had different endings. We all laughed at our Roscoe. He made a fast feeble attempt to object, but I remember being surprised and proud that he let us laugh. Young Nate didn’t get that useful negative feedback. As far as I could tell, and my knowledge of him grew less as he grew older, Nate matured from a freckled overweight bright demanding loner child into a freckled overweight bright demanding loner teen, attended an expensive college across the country, and then either earned enough or was subsidized enough that he got his own apartment.

He wasn’t a resident of Oakland’s Ghost Ship, when it burned down last December. But he was a casualty. I suspected I’d hear about someone I knew; it’s hard to lose three dozen local souls and not discover a connection. It took half a week before I received the text from Sam.

I dislike telephone. So do my kids. We tend to text and email and follow one another on social media instead. But sometimes we have to talk. In the last year, between Sam’s job change, the wedding, and now the pregnancy, we speak more often. We text-arrange it, like we’re about to enter a business conference call.

We spoke about an hour after his text.

“Hey, Mom,” Sam said, “was I once best friends with Nathan Wineberg?” Sam doesn’t have strong memories from that neighborhood. When my second husband and I divorced after seven years, Sam lost his step-sister; I think he managed his grief by blanking out on a lot of details from the era. And a year after the divorce, I moved my kids out of that house.

“You sure were,” I answered. “I don’t think you two were soulmates, but you were both challenging personalities and marginalized by your peers. It was like you collapsed into one another, for company. I think Nate was the kid you clobbered with the 2 x 4, that time you got kicked out of after-school carpentry.”

“I thought so. And I remember he threatened to blacklist Allison.” I could hear a smile in his tone. Then his voice deepened. “Nate Wineberg was one of the people killed in the Ghost Ship fire.”

“Oh shit,” I said, which seems to be my consistent first verbal response to death news.

“Yeah. It’s weird. I haven’t seen the guy in ages. Apparently he turned out all right. He was some big honcho in international film.”

“Hmmm.”

“I don’t know what to make of this. I mean, I’ve helped build warehouse spaces like that. I really believe in collaborative-type arrangements. What am I supposed to conclude?”

“Oh honey,” I blurted. “Don’t stop loving collaboration. Or warehouse spaces. I don’t want to encourage undue caution, let alone paranoia, but please please PLEASE tell me you’ll identify the exit path before you use any stairs.”

“Yeah.”

“You know, I never noticed till I listed the old house,” I said, referring to the home we shared after the Nate neighborhood, the funky creekside cottage where I settled as a single mother and finished raising my offspring. “One of the real estate reviews pointed out how odd it was that the staircase wasn’t visible from the front door.” (You entered that residence into the living room, and had to cross it and the centrally-located dining room before getting to the bottom of the redwood staircase). “I never realized till then that all other multi-floored homes show the stairs at the front door. Obviously this is not about appearance as much as it is about egress.”

“Wow,” said Sam, and I could hear his tone changing from sadness to interest. “I never realized that either. Huh.”

That was it for our phone call. Sam and I have not mentioned Nate since. But I read the obituary.

Now, of course I agree we should speak well of the dead. And I’m sure an obit is not supposed to equal a biography. But still…

The words reminded me of Facebook posts and real estate photos. The spin was so positive it made the encomia sail like frisbees. In the same way that no one’s life is as feel-good as it looks on social media, and no one’s microwave is as wide as it looks in a staged photo, there’s no way an internationally-acclaimed success could make such small ripples.

In every photo, Nate is alone. There’s no mention of where he lived or even what work he was engaged in when he died. The funeral was well-attended, by old neighbors and family friends.