Sputterpub's Blog

The ruckus began around sunset. It was fake-springtime that evening, a mild day in late February, around 6:00. Most of the neighborhood was home from classes or work, although many planned to go out later. That’s the way of college towns, especially places like Berkeley, set as it is among a city, near the coast, diverse.

Frankie and Edie heard the noise and identified it as a raging human voice, adult male, but they couldn’t make out the words. Each behaved typically: Edie edged to the window and tried to peek outside without moving the curtain, while Frankie raced to the adjacent glass and did everything she could to see what was going on. That put her face, surrounded by its aura of blonde unruly curls, right in the middle of the lower pane, like an illuminated portrait. She was seen more than she saw.

The angry man was big, black, and not old. Now they could hear all the “fucks” and “muthafucks;” now Frankie could see that he was beyond angry. He moved his limbs like he was going to throw them at cars and buildings. He saw Frankie and headed for the door of their apartment.

The roommates had a few characteristics in common, but not many. Most of their crowd didn’t understand their close friendship. They were both female, first-borns around 20, white. Each was Jewish, and had spent at least adolescence in California. That was about where similarity stopped.

Frankie was born and raised in LA. Edie hailed from New York and moved to a suburb below San Diego when she was 10. Frankie was short and blonde and what’s now called apple-shaped: she had big boobs and tiny hands and feet. Edie was taller than average, dark haired, and of the pear variety, with little breasts and sturdy legs above feet so large her family mocked her about them. That may be because her younger siblings were brothers. Brothers are skilled at teasing. Frankie grew up with two little sisters; her family was so female that she never read Sunday comics or watched war movies, or learned how to fart and burp at will.

The roommates had been at Cal for two years. They both understood the local environment. Each knew the difference between gunfire and backfire: car exhaust noise didn’t make the windows rattle. They weren’t as good at distinguishing small bombs from earthquakes, except that earthquakes didn’t often occur. So neither was that surprised to have a crazy raging outside. But the last thing Edie wanted was a closer encounter. Frankie didn’t want the guy in their faces either, and didn’t seem to understand that her impulsive curiosity acted as a provocation.

For the next thing the young women knew, the rager was in their living room. They seldom locked their door before full dark, but the way he slammed it open made them think a lock wouldn’t have stopped him. They backed up as he stormed into the middle of the room.

He appeared to be around their age. He was well enough dressed and obviously well fed, and he was beyond enraged. His language was English but at first he was not articulate. They heard cursing they would have had trouble spelling. Rage rage rage and rant.

Edie and Frankie had retreated to the edge of the day bed they used as a couch, but neither sat. The backs of their knees were flat against the mattress and their eyes were locked on the madman. That’s when he leaned to his right, picked up the white curtain rod Frankie had meant to throw away, and started slapping his left palm with it, in emphatic cadence with his speech.

It was one of those cheap white metal rods, flat and bent at its corners. It was no more threatening than a yardstick in a teacher’s hand. But the dude was terrifying.

“I got as much right to this place as you,” he insisted, and both women, diehard liberals, silently agreed. They weren’t about to give the apartment up to him, but they didn’t have a counter argument.

“This should be my place. Fuck all. I should chase y’alls out o’ here. Fuckin’ shit. Aargh!”

Then something happened in Edie. Maybe it was connected to upbringing – her dad had modeled righteous indignation so well that she and her brothers took it in like nourishment, like father’s milk. Frankie’s pop was known for occasional raging too, but in general he was a softer man. Maybe it was all the daughters. Maybe it was the failure to earn the liberal arts degree he thought he was heading for before the Navy. Maybe it was the more decadent LA environment – Frankie had grown up around a lot of drinking, pills, and divorce. Each daughter had assumed some of the paternal bias, so Frankie shared her father’s satisfaction with wealth earned from real estate (the family business had been electrical parts distribution, which never did that well, but they purchased their own warehouse space when LA was cheap), and Edie joined her engineer father in revering professions and higher education and trying to conceal disdain for those in sales.

Whatever the cause, Edie started to get angry, and her ire overrode her fear. She straightened up, pulling her legs away from the day bed. “How dare you?” she enunciated with a growl in her rising tone. “That’s no way to speak to people! For shame!” and as she took a step and a half toward the intruder, he edged away. “Talk about rights! You have no right to speak to a person like that!” He was moving toward their door.

Edie felt bearish and protective. She seemed even to herself to grow taller. “You get out now!”

And he did. He even bent his head forward a little as he backed out of the front doorway. He murmured what was probably “I’m sorry” or “‘Scuse me.” He pulled the door closed as his face/belly/feet retreated through it.

Edie turned around to Frankie. Her roommate almost leaped into her embrace. The young women wrapped their arms around one another in a full frontal hug. They shuddered together; neither could tell whose body was leading the way in adrenaline dissipation.

Each has narrated the episode several times since it happened. Their recollections agree perfectly. Neither would ever recommend Edie’s way of handling such a situation. But both are heartily grateful that it worked then, and so impressed by the memory that they’ll never forget it.

(Fifteen years later, Edie’s son came home with an assignment to find words with one, two, three, and four of each vowel in it. They had no problem with As, Es, Is, and Os. It was U that challenged them. Edie tried to sell “unvacuumful,” but there were no takers. Ultimately the only words they could think of with four Us were unscrupulous and tumultuous.)

Maddy looked at her game stats a few days ago. She was shocked to see that she’s played over twenty thousand times. At an average of five minutes a game, that’s a hundred thousand minutes. Almost seventeen hundred hours. Over sixty-nine days.

She started a couple of years ago. Still, that’s a lot of time. She wonders if she’s been wasting her life.

But no. FreeCell has been good for her. It has no flash, no sound effects, but it’s challenging just enough. It engages her head but it leaves room for processing while playing. She knows that if she took the time, most games could be won. Unlike Spider. Hell, that one is just about unsolvable if you use all four card suits.

She read a book awhile ago, sci-fi she’s sure, and it was dedicated to the inventors of FreeCell, “without which this book would have been completed a year earlier” or some such. In fact, she just googled “books dedicated to FreeCell” and came up empty. Another example of shit NOT to be found on the Internet. Maddy knows that it’s a mis-information superhighway; every event about which she is knowledgeable is not reported or is misstated online.

Her googling did show her that she’s not alone in loving the game. It looks like folks of all ages and walks of life can fall into a FreeCell obsession that many characterize as addiction.

Just then she ended a deal. She’d been at it for several minutes and the layout was boring. Also, her wrist was acting up again. She’d better rest it.

Maddy chuckled to herself. She looked at her right wrist and flexed it. She isn’t fat but she has a large skeleton, so her bones are not birdlike. Seems to Maddy like there’s plenty of room in there; she doubts that she could have carpal tunnel syndrome. Then again, what can she tell from outside? Back in her contraceptive days she used a diaphragm for awhile. She was fitted with the smallest model and even that created a constipation-like pressure after a few hours. She gave up daytime sex because of the discomfort of keeping the thing in for the recommended time. Her sister-in-law used a diaphragm then too. Cindy was a tiny thing but her diaphragm was four sizes bigger than Maddy’s and never gave her any discomfort.

Okay: say it’s not carpal tunnel. It has to be some form of repetitive stress injury. And it’s not from office work.

That’s one of the lies of current culture, Maddy thinks. She knows several women with carpal tunnel, and two of them have had corrective surgery, but their symptoms were not triggered by their jobs. Both were solitaire-addicted introverts with online shopping habits that could rival a hoarder. As were all other sufferers of Maddy’s acquaintance. So blaming it on work wasn’t accurate. Especially since the blamers took to believing their own stories and continued to fan the flames of inaccuracy.

Oh well. That’s just one of the lies, Maddy thinks. How about the “agreement” that American soldiers are “our best and our brightest?” How tired she is of hearing folks thank the enlisted for their service.

Or what about the unspoken, never to be uttered, truth that when you see a mediocre-looking white man with an Asian mate you’re looking at a guy who couldn’t cut it with the girls he knew at home? Or the way everyone’s supposed to agree that teachers work full-time (no one would argue that they’re overpaid, but those hours? Who wouldn’t give a lot for those hours?)

Maddy shook her head then. She could feel grumpiness coming on, and she didn’t want to afford it any space. She decided to go for a walk.

Unfortunately, she had no errands and she has no dog. Maddy feels conspicuous when she walks alone without a destination. She gets into her own head and before she’s aware of it, she’s talking to herself. Not loudly, but with her lips moving, and in a volume that can be picked up by folks getting out of their cars or standing up suddenly from garden work behind a front yard hedge. She’s seen the looks; she knows she could be mistaken for a well-dressed crazy. She probably ought to wear ear buds, like a prop (she once saw a homeless dude on a muni bus, holding a dead cellphone to his ear and using it to make his rambling soliloquy acceptable). But it bothers Maddy to put equipment in or over her ears.

She came up with a need for avocados and did the round trip to the closest market. When she returned home thirty minutes later she felt less irritable. And ready for more FreeCell.

She was halfway into a good game when her phone rang. Maddy works from home two days a week but tries to be available for office questions. She was sitting at her computer in her atrium/home office, cards on green felt background in front of her, trees out the windows and landline by her right side, when the phone rang. She answered it: her partner Rob. His question was challenging and Maddy put her mind to it for the minute and a half their call lasted. Then she hung up and faced her game again.

And had no idea what the images on the screen meant. She saw colors she could have described, and she recognized the cards. She knew it was a computer solitaire game. But she had absolutely no concept of what the object was, how to make a move, or why the layout was shaped that way.

She was thoroughly disoriented. Too at sea even to be upset. Then she used her right hand to nudge the mouse. As soon as she moved the tool a millimeter, she slipped back into orientation. That’s exactly how it felt to her: a slip into reason. Her brain slotted back into cause-and-effect smoother than a key finding the wards in its lock.

She had her brain back. Smoothly she solved the game. Then she rose from her ergonomic chair and paced around. She was boggled by what had just occurred.

Was it a TIA? Maddy is 50 and has had no vascular mishaps. But her father had a mini-stroke five years ago, at the age of 75, and since then he’s experienced a series of small brain bleeds, to the extent of noticeable dementia (“It’s not Alzheimer’s,” her mother keeps insisting, as if that were good news, but dementia is dementia, as far as Maddy is concerned, whether it’s vascular or has a capitalized name).

Did she have a TIA in the moment between hanging up the phone and viewing her game on the screen?

She doesn’t think so. She’s never been successful at figuring out how her brain actually works, but it felt to her like one of those electrical events that make an appliance blink out for a moment and then resume. Like a mote of electronic dust on a wire, that gets dislodged by the very disturbance it creates. Every once in a while Maddy will exit a building during the day, going from artificial light to full sunshine, and have the impression that the world just tipped a little, that shapes are infinitesimally sharper. Her momentary loss of FreeCell felt like a stronger version of that phenomenon.

She isn’t worried about the event, but she is remembering it.