Sputterpub's Blog

Jason is a jerk. He has been angry all his life (I’m only five years older than him, and I remember him rearing back in anger as a babe-in-arms, trying to bite us when he got frustrated, throwing his ever-fattening short body into tantrums even as a young adult). He blames any personal failure on “the man” or on his father my uncle Sam. He’s probably bright enough to do okay, but he’s managed to flunk out of two state colleges (hard to do), and he’s been busted three times for pot.

He moved away from the family, ostensibly because he sought a more rural setting but probably because he couldn’t stand having us know how unsuccessful he is. He took his wife Leilani (they met while eradicating kudzu in Hawaii, when he did a volunteer service gig as part of a pot conviction) and moved to Jamul, which is a hot dry “census-designated place” a few miles north of Baja California. Jase works when he can at coffee shops, tries to get a tattoo business off the ground, and probably runs a fair amount of weed (Lani is attending junior college – there’s no way those two are supporting themselves, even in Jamul, on Jase’s taxable wages).

David picked up details when he called Jase back with the motel arrangements. Lani ran out of birth control pills. She didn’t have money for a refill for about a week. Did they call their clinic to learn how they should handle that lapse? Of course not. Did they take action or even make inquiries when Lani missed her first period? Her second? Her third? Jeez…

It’s all hard to believe. I wonder if the abortion is a Jase idea/obsession, and it took him this long to talk Lani into it? I’m thinking about his temper. Suddenly I have questions about their home life. But Lani doesn’t open up to any of us. She and Jase have this intense one-on-one relationship, and it’s like he forms a perimeter between her and anyone who might care.

David listened, and of course he tried to help. He countered Jase’s “It’s no big deal” with a gentle “Yes, it is, dude. You have to stop treating it like it’s a one-day job. Have you talked to your father about this?”

He didn’t expect Jase to clue in his mother. Aunt Bobbie is a flaming narcissist, and the last person anyone would turn to for advice or help. She describes Lani as the perfect daughter-in-law, the girl she never had, but clearly Lani hasn’t called Bobbie. Jase told David there was no way he’d tell his father – said Sam would “hold it against him” for godsakes, and when David said he was going to talk to me, Jase bleated like a baby “he’ll tell Grandma!” which was so far out of whack David didn’t even comment. All David could do, he told me, was arrange a couple of nights of accommodation for them, so at least Lani would have a chance at comfort and recovery.

We’d lost our appetite for uncle pizza during this talk. We poured a couple of beers and had a few hits off the protopipe (David gets much better stuff at the Harborside than Jase ever brings) and even got into David’s expensive tequila, but our moods didn’t lighten. We couldn’t get over how many bad choices Jase (and Lani) had made.

Even after we got comfortable (“dropped trou” is David’s phrase, and it perfectly captures how good it feels to get out of the jeans at the end of the day, especially for guys like David and me, who carry a bit of extra insulation), even after all of that we were still talking about the situation.

We agreed that David had to tell Sam. We were pretty sure that wouldn’t result in anything – Sam was sure to say “it’s Jase’s problem” and maybe even act uncomfortable about hearing the news – but we both knew we’d want to know, if we were in Sam’s place, and we agreed that David didn’t owe Jase confidentiality. (As I later learned, Sam acted exactly as we predicted when David told him. See, my mother is a confronter, but she’s the oldest of my grandparents’ kids. And David is such a stand-up guy that he’ll sometimes speak up too. But my Uncles Sam and Nate are total avoiders – middle children who learned early how to shine Grandma on and let all stress just roll off their backs).

We got onto the subject of Jase’s so-called business. It’s really pathetic if you ask me. He thinks he’s a tattoo artist, and he has a handful of customers who seem to agree with him. He’s always talking about expanding the business but he never has an actual plan: just ambitious wishes and grudges against anyone he perceives as not supporting him. He even has dreams of forming some sort of club or army – the Ja-Mules, he wants to call it, for location and stubborn determination – but we can’t figure out who the enemy is (I’m always reminded of that “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” question).

David gave a little lecture. “A business plan is like a military campaign,” he said. “Or a political campaign. Or any plan to make a big change in your personal habits.” He started to mulch some weed for the pipe. “They all take strategy and tactics. Strategy is the part the generals plan, in the war room with all the maps. It’s literally the big picture. But tactics are for the field of battle. They are the little moves the sergeants choose, in response to the actual conditions they experience. The problem with Jase (one problem anyway) is he has no strategy. I think he and Lani are pretty good with tactics, but they have no overall plan.”

Those words struck me. I like words and I love it when they grab me so hard I look them up. After David went to bed I went to the dictionary. Strategy comes from “strategos,” which is classical Greek for “general.” And tactics means “touch,” from the same language. It made total sense. It was as satisfying as when I looked up “ichthyology” and learned it was from the Greek “ik-thuse” which means “fish” and that the religious ΙΧΘΥΣ is an acronym for a Greek phrase which translates “Jesus Christ Son of God Savior.” Sweet.

I went to bed.

My uncle David is the nicest guy I know. Mom says that’s because Grandma was depressed when he was little, and David could make her smile by acting cute and lovable, but all of that took place 50 years ago, and Mom’s always quick and loud about analyzing the behavior of those around her, so I haven’t necessarily adopted her view. What I know is that David loves to make people happy, apologizes for bad weather or traffic, and is the person to call when you need a favor.

I know David pretty well. He’s been around all my life. After my mom and dad divorced and Dad moved half a state away with his new wife, it was David who came to my games and took me mini-golfing and bought me the stuff I really wanted. I can’t remember ever calling him “uncle” – he’s always been “David” to me.

I’m not his only nephew. Mom’s two other brothers have supplied me with four cousins and David with a niece and another three nephews. But I always lived closest and spent the most time with him. He’s been more of a father to me than my own, and I guess I’m the closest he’s had to a child of his own.

I’ve stayed at his house a lot. I spent the whole summer here last year, and I’m angling to do it again in four months. As I’ve been telling him, the pond we built together needs work, and I need another break from Mom.

The pond is almost natural. There’s a small year-round creek that runs through David’s back yard, and we dredged a channel from it to the low spot near the side of the redwood deck. It was a challenge to make the thing water-tight because we opted for a plastic liner instead of the recommended concrete pour, but we managed to construct a container almost six feet in diameter, and we stocked it with half a dozen carp.

We didn’t know then how individual fish can be. We had no idea that the big fellow – presciently named Brutus by David – would outgrow all the others and be so dominant and hungry. We suspect he ate his co-residents; within two months he was the only fish in the water. I suggested we restock and watch Brutus more closely. David didn’t disagree but decided we’d wait till spring or even summer to try again.

So Brutus has had the pond to himself this winter. That fish just kept circling, growing fat on David’s fish food and whatever else he could find, and before the end of last month he had finned out so much mud that the connection to the creek clogged. David cleared it a few times – I helped during weekends when I stayed over – but a fish has to keep moving to breathe, and Brutus’s fin action kept clogging the connection.

I arrived last night for a long weekend. Even by the deck light I could see the fresh damage. The pond was measurably smaller.

And Brutus was bigger. As he grows his fin action gets stronger, and he stirs up the mud the pond has acquired since it was dug. The muck settles around the encroaching circumference; the more Brutus swims around the less room he has.

I was pondering the erosive situation when David called me inside for pizza, and I was about to bite into my first wedge of what we call “uncle pie” (pepperoni, sausage, bacon, and peanut butter) when he starting telling me about my cousin Jason.

He wasn’t talking out of school. David and I have no secrets about Jase.

The call had come the night before.

“Funny thing, Uncle D,” was Jase’s opening line. “Well, not exactly funny …”

Lani is pregnant. On the surface that’s not bad news: Jase and Lani are in their late 20s, married, apparently happy, within a family that loves them and loves babies. But Jase said they don’t want to bring kids into this sick world (Lani is a quiet one, new to the country and without friends or family here, so no one knows what she thinks), certainly not now when Lani is in school, probably not ever. They aim to terminate this pregnancy. Not only that, but they just found out that Lani is farther along than they thought. Jase said 16 weeks. (Isn’t a whole pregnancy like 40? Did they really let her get halfway there without doing anything?)

Yes. And now they learn that the San Diego clinic can’t handle an abortion at this stage. They have to come to Oakland for the procedure.

It turns out Jase was calling because he and Lani need a place to crash for a couple of nights. They were driving up today, but I’m using the spare room here. And the living room won’t work for them.

Funny? What’s funny? I’m all for reproductive rights, but I don’t think this is what Mom had in mind when she marched with Planned Parenthood.

David booked a motel room for them. He and his estranged spouse have like a million Starwood points and could get them a room with those. Idiot Jase thought they could drive up, have the procedure done, and then get back in the car for a 10-hour haul home. He even wondered if they could bring the dogs! “Like it’s a field trip,” commented David. He had a look of disapproval on his face that I’ve never witnessed.

“I get it now. I know she wasn’t a virgin. But I have no idea why she lied to me.”

“Come on. For the same reason a man would lie about sex. More or less. To create or avoid reputation.”

“No, I don’t mean that. Although I did think Cindy and I were friends, and that she would have told me if she and Bruce were going all the way, I’m not all that surprised that she kept it from me. But that she went out of her way to advocate virginity as if it were her aim: that’s what I resent as a lie.”

“Is it possible her advocacy was rueful? Like, she knew from experience why virginity is valuable? That’s a common sort of testimony…”

“No, no. It was nothing like that. Picture us: it’s fall, late 1966, and Cindy and I are seniors at Redwood High. She’s cute; looking back on it, I’m probably attractive, but I sure didn’t appreciate that then. We’re in the college-track classes, and we’re neither popular nor pariahs.”

“Pari-ah-h-h-h-hs.”

“Be good, or go to your room. And I’ll take a little more of that coffee. Thanks. Where was I?”

“High school winter, I think.”

“Yeah. We used to take walks. My parents wouldn’t let me go out alone at night. It didn’t matter how safe it was outside; I was their only daughter and their oldest kid, and there was no way they were letting me out. So I had to find friends to walk with. And there was Cindy. I can’t say I really liked her. I mean, there was nothing not to like, but she wasn’t very interesting. I guess maybe I used her as a prop. Judy and Janet and Stephanie too. Greg and Wayne. They were all people who lived near enough, fellow walkers at night in Corte Madera. Not close friends. Available.

“During our junior year we’d sometimes meet in the sanctuary of the Presbyterian Church. Especially when it was cold or rainy. But starting in the fall of 1966 they began locking that church at night. I don’t know why; I never heard about any incident.”

“Fall of ‘66? Weren’t we into the thick of generational distrust then? Weren’t we erecting that wall around age 30?”

“Not quite. Not if I remember right. We were into Simon and Garfunkel and Paul Revere & the Raiders. The Beatles and the Stones, sure, but the Beach Boys too. Some of us were dealing a little acid, cutting white powder with Accent and shoveling the mix into clear capsules in front of my romantic eyes, but none of us were doing the drug, and pot wouldn’t be prevalent for another six months … We were starting to irritate our parents with clothing and hair then. The girls wore homemade cotton print smocks over black leotards and tights and crafted sandals. The boys stopped visiting barbers.

“We irritated our folks but we didn’t rebel. There weren’t any teen centers for us. So when they started locking the church we were forced to stay outside. I would take a walk with whoever was willing, and we’d talk about life, the universe, and other things. Sometimes the other person wouldn’t have anything to say on the subject. As you can imagine, that was never my problem. In fact, often it was kind of like talking aloud to myself, except I was ‘covered,’ if you know what I mean, by the presence of the other person.”

“I know, I know. The best example of that I ever saw – oh, I’m sure I must have told you about it – I was on the #15 Muni, and this crazy guy got on, and he carried an undoubtedly-broken cellphone. But he held the phone up to his ear the whole ride, conversing into and with it, sharing his cockeyed thoughts with it so all of us could hear. I never saw a cellphone put to better use.”

“Exactly. In our culture it is not okay to talk aloud to oneself when walking or dining in public, so we sometimes need prop people. Preople? But here’s the thing. Cindy was an actual interlocutor when it came to a couple of subjects, and it happened that premarital sex was one of them.

“I can see us in memory, walking south along Magnolia toward the S-curve at the old 7-Eleven …”

“How come there? You and Cindy must have taken other walks that year.”

“I know we did, and I’m sure we talked about guys, but I think I’m remembering this walk so vividly because it’s when we put the virginity subject to bed, so to speak. When we agreed to disagree about it. I remember where we were, our orientation, the same way I remember where on a book page I’ll find some text I recollect. There’s a spatial cue that gets connected to the words. In this case, Cindy and I are walking south, just after dark, probably around 7 o’clock on a fall night. She’s on the traffic side, to my left, and she’s just enough shorter so that I glance slightly downward when I look sideways at her. But most of the time we don’t look at each other; we’re walking briskly and we’re looking straight ahead. She’s wearing her hair down – I remember she had very thick light brown hair, shoulder-length and a little wavy – and I detect its swinging movement out of the corner of my eye. She says – ”

“ – You mean, ‘she goes.’”

“Huh?”

“She goes, you go: that’s how the young people report dialogue nowadays. You’ve gotta say, ‘first she goes … and then I go …’ and so on.”

“Young people? Nowadays?”

“Well …”

“Calling them ‘young people’ makes me feel older than ‘ma’am.’ And actually, I think you’re a bit behind the times with your colloquialisms. The young I hear lately, on the local buses and around the bike messenger wall, are using ‘like.’ Thusly:

“Cindy is like: I think there’s no sweeter gift you can give your husband than your maidenhood.

“And I’m like: You mean ‘maidenhead.’ And I think the idea is overly romantic. The man that I marry will want an experienced woman. We’ll want to know that the sexual part of our union works too.

“And Cindy is like: But of course it will work. When two people love one another …

“And I’m like: Get out of here! Now you sound like our mothers! I may not have any experience, but I’ve read as much as I could get my hands on and I’ve thought about it a lot. I think there’s four ingredients necessary to make a good lover. Ready? They’re consideration, imagination, coordination and practice. Maybe in that order. I want to bring all of that to my love, including the practice part.

“And she’s like: But think what a gift you could bring to your beloved. To assure him that no other man had ever been there; I think it’s romantic. It’s like a thoroughbred horse that will only allow one rider.

“And I’m like: Listen to you! You’re talking about yourself as if you’re property or livestock. That is not romantic. I think it’s more romantic to aim to be some kind of femme fatale: you know, get to be so good at sex that you can control men with it … That will take practice.

“And she’s like: Well, I intend to save myself.

“While I’m like: Lots and lots of practice …

“I can replay that, or something very close to that, like a movie. I swear she asserted her intention to be a virgin bride. And right about then, Bruce pulled up in his little Austin. Rick was with him. We piled in the back seat and drove to the headlands.”

“Wasn’t that your and Rick’s big moment?”

“Yeah, if you count three kisses and a fumble. We started that night and we ended when I removed his left palm from my right breast. And the tragic thing, when I look back on that evening, was that I had no objection to that sort of groping. But I was so self-conscious about my breasts then. I thought they were too small and I knew my nipples were neither prominent enough nor sufficiently reactive. I actually removed his hand to spare him disappointment! If I had even an inkling then of what I now understand of adolescent male libido (talk about fishing in a barrel!) …”

“And Bruce and Cindy?”

“Oh I discovered nothing that night. They made out, sure. We were all used to that. No. Cindy and I didn’t revisit the sex subject the rest of our senior year, and then I went off to Cal and she to Sac State. The other half of the conversation didn’t occur until December of 1967, when we were home for our first winter break from college. And she didn’t even participate in it.”

“Come again? And shall we walk?”

“Yes, let’s. If I have any more coffee my teeth will float.

“Cindy didn’t participate in the conversation because she wasn’t in the room. By then I was smoking pot, and I think we drank mulled wine that night too, so my memory is a little foggy. We were at Stephanie’s house. She and Janet and I were in the basement family room and Cindy and Judy were upstairs in Stephanie’s bedroom. The basement talk turned to sex. I was still a virgin but had almost immediate expectations with regard to my new college boyfriend. Stephanie was headed for be(maiden)heading too, but Janet had succumbed to Greg’s chronic complaints about blue balls and done the deed.

“We were full of questions for her. She left us with a favorable impression of the sport. But I’ll never forget laughing with her and telling her she’d have to fill Cindy in on the advantages; then Cindy might change her mind about preserving her hymen. Janet gaped at me. ‘What are you talking about?’ she asked. ‘Cindy lost her virginity back in Hawaii, before she even moved here. Didn’t you realize that she and Bruce were having sex regularly even when we were juniors?’

“I remember feeling foolish. I wondered aloud why Cindy hadn’t told me. Stephanie said something about me thinking I had to be in on everything, how the world went on without me, you know. I was even more confused. I sensed her resentment and I didn’t understand its basis.”

“Oh you poor baby; I hope you got out of there soon.”

“I think so. I can’t remember anything about the evening after that, and I don’t think I’ve seen Cindy or Stephanie or Janet since. Not that I’ve avoided them or anything. I just lost interest. It was a confusing conversation though. Like they were trying to shame me. And I never knew why. It left a bad taste.”

“Want a mint?”

“Sure. Why the …? oh, the new case.”

“Yes. Wintergreen. But tell me, isn’t it delightful to be a fool sometimes?”

“Positively a privilege, nowadays. Good mint.”

I guess the crisis with my cousins came when I was twelve. That’s when they really got into scrubland hunting, and I became a pacifist. They’d take their air guns and hike behind their houses to the undeveloped low mesa. There among the dust and tumbleweeds and sage and manzanita they would shoot at rabbits and birds. They never brought anything home. They rarely sought the victims they managed to hit. I know they left countless small creatures to die under dry bushes of bloody wounds.

I was horrified. I began debating about it with them (they literally turned deaf ears and walked away from me, brown guns slung dangerously over their shoulders). I wrote protest poetry. I gave them another way to make me the object of family mockery.

Nancy and Debbie didn’t show them disapproval. Even my brother went along with it; we didn’t have any guns at home, and he was eager to learn how to shoot. Now that I think about it, there were some small set fires then too (one in the schoolyard on a Saturday evening kind of got out of hand), and my brother actively participated in the arsonettes.

One ally emerged for me out of the mess. My cousin Lloyd began to drop back and walk with me, to talk with me earnestly, to listen with what started out as sympathy and became empathy. It meant a lot to me, especially because he was three years older than I and the best-looking of the cousins. Maybe he was different from the others because he was an only child and they all had siblings. Or perhaps it was the fact that his father died when he was seven, so he lived alone with his mother and became more feminized/sensitized. Probably it was both of those, but mostly I think it was because he was smart.

I’ve talked to many children of divorce (of course!) and I guess the saddest part of it to me is the surprise. Just about everyone really thought their family was a happy one, no matter how much arguing they heard, until the split came. It rocked their world to lose the ballast of that assumed-happy foundation.

That didn’t happen to me. My parents are still married and probably happy. But I grew up assuming my whole family was smart. My parents are intelligent, there are books everywhere in their home, and our mealtime discussions and excursions were often laced with history, astronomy or mathematical puzzles. We’re Jews, and I thought we valued justice, education, and the rights of the underdog. I just assumed my father’s siblings would have IQs like his. And maybe they did (I think not). Maybe they were subsumed under marital behavior and maternal worries. It doesn’t matter. They acted stupid. And my cousins, except for Lloyd, were moronic.

“Don’t go getting intellectual on us,” my oldest cousin Bruce would warn. Or: “Eeeww, she’s getting all heavy again” I’d hear from Mitch.

My cousins are grown now, and have mostly reproduced themselves. The next generation seems even duller to me, which is probably the combined effects of low genetic intelligence, poor parenting, and the increasingly toxic environment in the LA basin. I have an old friend named Peter, brilliant and funny and difficult, whose parents were born in Greece. He visited the old country (Sparta) a few years ago, and he reported that his cousins were nice but stupid. Peter conjectured that the smart ones had come to the new world, and that made sense to me at first. But Peter has three younger brothers who are illiterate idiots. He’s a doctor who decided at 23 that he couldn’t risk reproducing any of his siblings, and who used his medical connections to arrange his own vasectomy at 25. I think Peter’s brothers disprove his theory. I think new immigrants have bustle and energy and challenge, and the vigor wanes for each succeeding generation in this great land of ours. My grandparents were heroic, my parents were energetic, my cousins are morons. I almost never see them.

Except for Lloyd. We remained close. We were a couple for awhile and shocked them all by planning to marry. But we each fell for another after college. We’re like best friends though. And as childless as we would have been if we’d gone ahead with it.

We weren’t ever worried about the cousin thing. It’s more that we’ve both gone from thinking we came from intelligent stock to concluding the opposite. We know we’re smart, but we think that’s a fluke or a throwback or something. We’re not confident that we’d pass genes for intelligence on to our offspring. And neither of us could bear to bear a kid like one of our cousins.