Sputterpub's Blog

Chris offered “Coffee? Tea? Water? Wine?” and I asked if there was any beer. There was. I had an Anchor Steam and hoped for analgesic effect. We discussed aging and the attraction to comfort. Agreed one had to resist that. One had to be willing to fall. The sun found the spots on the window glass while we talked.

After awhile I began to wonder what it would be like to have sex with Chris. The idea surprised me. It would be totally inappropriate. But still…watching Chris’s mouth instead of hearing the words…

“I have to get going,” I said as I set the empty beer bottle on the small glass-topped table to my right.

“Are you sure you’re up to walking? I can drive you down the hill…”

“I’ll be fine. I probably should walk. Keep this thing from stiffening up.” I shook my left leg. “Thanks for letting me recover here.”

“Will you let me know you got home all right?”

I smiled at the concern. I took Chris’s number with me. Headed down the hill to my own house, telling myself my knee would be okay.

I made it home and called. We agreed to get together again, but we weren’t specific. I filled the bathtub with very hot water. I rolled a big joint and got into the tub with a new magazine. I soaked my knee and back till the water cooled.

My knee seemed to be no worse than it ever was: stiff in the morning, stiff in the evening, stiff after sitting still. But my lower back grew tighter and more tentative with each hour, and by the afternoon of the next day I had trouble straightening up. I tried aspirin, acetaminophen, ibuprofen, and naproxen. I tried brandy and mooched a Vicodin from a neighbor. I tried rest, but I lacked the patience. Eventually I even called the doctor.

That’s how I was sent to bed for New Year’s Eve. I told Chris, with whom I’d made some unorganized plan, that I was sorry but I didn’t even want to see anyone. I meant to stay down and be quiet.

I bought myself three quarters of a pound of tiger prawns and a bottle of good brut champagne. I ate early because I love prawns and couldn’t stand having them in the house without eating them. I love champagne too, but not by myself. I wasn’t in the mood for it when I ate the prawns, and I didn’t really want to wait till midnight. I opened the bottle shortly before 9, and I toasted the new year with New York.

My back hurt. While most computer-users shut their systems down, and the extremely cautious unplugged their machines and tallied their water bottles, I tried to get comfortable on my bed. While the Internet didn’t begin the anticipated usage interruption that would send ripples of glitch in and out of the network and make loggers-on evaluate their connect times, I glugged champagne and pushed pillows around my torso in a search for spinal support. I was quiet, perforce, but less contemplative than I intended. Even so, some ideas became clear.

“The most important thing is to feel better,” I thought, and I smiled as I committed myself to giving my 50 year-old frame more care. I lay on my side with one pillow beneath my right cheek and one against my lower back. I thought the words and subordinate goals fell into place like marbles percolating through holes in a plastic cube. Clarity like a map.

Body (kids) painting (kids) work (kids) friends (kids). My children are no longer dependently young enough to be first. And friends (sex?) are admittedly last. Adrift in modulated discomfort on my king-size bed, I didn’t reach for a tether. Coming to rest against my own pillows, I understood myself to want, for then, attention to my body, and noticed joy.

The phone rang. I would have had to twist around and almost sit up to answer. The machine was downstairs and I could hear Chris’s voice, checking up on me and wishing me well. I wasn’t sure what Chris and I wanted of each other, but I knew it could wait. I settled my face into my pillow, aimed my eyes at the television, and paid attention to myself.

I walked up Spruce Street that Saturday, inadvertently stressing my lower back and wondering about the fault. It runs beneath Spruce or Euclid or the Arlington in my part of Berkeley, and I figured I was pacing along on top of it, near the end of an arbitrary millennium.

It would have been too weird if the earth had chosen one of those moments to quake. If a week before the big party the plates of Hayward ground against one another, epicentered.

It would have been so weird it was corny.

It didn’t happen. There was no quake, big or little, while I took my long Christmas walk. There were strange windstorms in Paris the following week, but no cataclysm or apocalypse as the cultural world rotated into its two thousands. Not even an Internet implosion.

Those non-events wouldn’t occur after the news of show cancellations and empty airline flights, when it began to be clear that most people simply didn’t want the pressure of trying to have a party-of-the-millennium, and therefore opted to just stay home. All the Y2K attention diluted the festivity and created a tsunami of anticlimax.

No, those wouldn’t not happen till the following week. On Christmas day I took a long hilly walk. I tried to forget all my tasks. I strode with my customary ground-eating gait, and the force from my heels’ impact on the sidewalk sailed up my skeleton and dislodged my lower back a little. As I wondered what it would be like to have the street wrench and yawn, the disks in my own spine grated against surrounding tissue, slipped to ease intolerable pressure, commenced an inflammation that would soon more than irk. And while that spinal event occurred there was an insistence coiling around my heart as well. I was alone and walking to try to hear myself, sensing nothing yet, but within my moods were eddying into a cyclone. There was a lot going on in me that day.

I tripped on uneven pavement. Berkeley is old enough to have charming small-block sidewalks, gardened enough to have mature tree roots that dislodge those small blocks, seismic enough to shift the sidewalk blocks like miniature tectonic plates. There are many cracks and misalignments. Usually the pedestrian just stumbles (gracelessly) and recovers to walk on (embarrassed), turning back with an accusing glare at the sidewalk. But sometimes the stumbler falls. I tripped on Christmas day when I bumped the toes of my right foot against the edge of an uptilted sidewalk block. I tried to catch myself, running forward to get my feet under my shoulders, jarring my 50 year-old self with each thudding step. I went down with dread. What flashed before my eyes as the ground rushed to meet me was the certainty that I was about to get injured.

“Oh shit,” were the thoughts that can be articulated. “This is going to hurt. This is going to shake up my insides. I won’t even know the full extent of the damage for days. Oh shit.”

I fell forward and took the impact on my left knee and the heels of both palms. I ripped my jeans and the skin on my hands, and I wrenched my left elbow. The next morning I would discover I had badly jarred my spine.

Instead of standing immediately and walking on, I rolled from my fall to sit on the sidewalk, knees up, examining damage. The tear in my pants. Blood beginning to seep along the whorls of exposed dermis. Flecks of sycamore twigs on flayed palms. Deep quivering.

“Are you okay?” The question came from above. I looked up and wondered how I had missed seeing this pedestrian: a bit above medium height, dark-haired, not inconspicuous.

“Sure,” I said, embarrassed, trying to get up before I was ready. Wishing I could just be alone, to nurse my knee with it raised to my face, to press my tender palms against my thighs.

“Let me help you,” and there was a hand extended, so I took it and rose a little shakily to my feet. “Thanks.”

“Really: are you okay? Would you like to sit for a minute? I live right here,” with a gesture down the slope from the sidewalk, toward the view.

“No. No,” I said and said again. “I’ll be all right. Really. I’m fine. Thanks for the assist,” and I looked into blue eyes below dark hair. “I tripped on the bad old sidewalk,” I explained, trying to laugh it off. “I feel incredibly clumsy.”

“Oh, we’ve all done it.” Reassuring smile. “I love it when the person doesn’t actually fall, when they just stumble and do that running forward deal, you know? And then they always look back as if blaming the sidewalk…”

I smiled. “Yeah. Look: maybe I will take you up on that seat. I’m a little shook up.”

“Good. Come in. My name’s Chris,” holding out that hand again, leading me down the brick walkway to the windowed front door, into a small living room and an upholstered armchair. There was a large window at the back of the room, looking out over the clear cold afternoon.

Claude had been kind of a wild guy in college. When he had a car he drove it fast. When he got the chance he climbed fences, buildings, once even, at 3:30 in the morning, the cables of the Golden Gate Bridge. His political ideas were outlandish, but he wrote like an angel. They thought his fantasy about bombing the ROTC building a bit strange, but no more so than Angie’s unwillingness to walk in the shadow of the campanile, or Mal’s aversion to long-haired dogs.

Although Angie and Mal and Winnie formed a perfect triangle and needed no one else, when Angie and Claude became an item the others were glad. They tried to expand to a rectangle. Claude probably would have gone with them to Israel if he hadn’t had gotten a good job right out of college.

But nothing Claude did would have stopped his mother from killing herself. He just would have heard about it in Israel instead of in Berkeley. And no matter where he heard of it, the news probably would have pushed him the way it did push him, over the edge into his mental illness.

He lost the job. He bounced up, down, and sideways while the doctors fiddled with his medications. He forsook the meds for a combination of strict diet and Catholicism but by then Angie had married him. She’d gotten those desperate letters and wires from him when she and Mal and Winnie were on the kibbutz. His agony had powered her home, had pulled her arms around him, had made her into a nurturing care-giver for twenty-nine years. While Claude became more Catholic, more aesthete, more rigorous and self-denying. While wild Claude turned into a hunched-over timid opinionated man, who drove annoyingly slowly with his lights always on. While Claude turned increasingly to prayer.

Twenty-nine years. She might have continued till death did them part. But recently Claude began to have visions. He concluded that he must jettison his earthly possessions, and he started the process without informing her. She returned from work a week ago to find him negotiating with some couple to take their living room furniture. A few days later he told her they must leave the Bay Area and become missionaries. That night, just four nights ago, she saw the scabby X’s from self-flagellation on his back. She called Winnie and Mal.

They flew in from Atlanta and Ann Arbor. They each had to endure delays at their airports but once in the air they crossed most of the continent in four skyblue hours. The Mississippi River appeared to each like a creek in Berkeley. They were only aware of the Rocky Mountains because the updrafts produced some turbulence.

The three old friends were together at last again, and not because any of them was dying. They sat in Angie’s study, confident that Claude would be in church for at least another two hours, and they took the measure of their adult lives.

“Who knows how much more time we have,” mused Mal.

“So let’s go for it,” said Winnie. The other two looked questions at her.

“You know I have enough to take care of us,” she said. “Let’s go measure the earth like we always meant to do. Let’s turn away from that Jordan River culvert, that drainage ditch, and visit the Sierras, the high desert, our wild coastline. Let’s go together and measure South America, and Africa.” These were amazing words from Winnie. Winnie was not impulsive.

“Anyway, let’s get you out of here,” Winnie said to Angie, and Mal nodded in agreement.

Then they rose from their seats as one, still in triangle formation, each shocked at how old the other two faces had become, each warmed by the way those old faces still bore the lineaments of youth. When they met they had two decades behind them, and every year seemed an age. Now they had two decades before them, and a year seemed like months. They each reached out two ways, and clasped a friend’s arm. They couldn’t believe it.

But I could. They all think I’m a Luddite but I can use tech when I’m called to. By God. Spycams are so widely available now. I heard their blasphemy and I witnessed what can only be deviant attraction between them.

I’ve had my suspicions for awhile. The first real trigger was when Angie came in that day last August and announced she had to be a good Muslim and wash her feet. She tried to cover that statement with a laugh and a comment about how dusty her toes got in sandals all day, but it made me watch her more. Then I caught her reading the Koran. Sure it was an intellectual exercise. Sure.

My old friends have warped. We were all iffy in college and I’ve been deluding myself that they are more like me than is actually the truth.

I can do tech and I can do weapons. The old ROTC fantasies were not just academic (hah!); they didn’t lack research. And now that the house is almost empty, only an old structure, really four corrupt old structures, will be laid waste. I just have to detonate soon.

“It’s not like the sex is any good, or he’s the father of your kids, or anything,” Mal said.

“Malcolm!” Winnie made like she was going to toss her water at him.

“No, Winnie. He’s right.” Angie used her hands on the wooden chair arms to scoot herself back, and she crossed her right leg over her left at the knee. She shook her auburn-dyed curls back and realized that she was the only one of the three who crossed her legs closed and open. Mal had crossed his legs the square way when they met him, but over the years he gave that posture up for the legs-together position. Winnie had gone the other way, from a knee-on-knee woman to Fred, who usually sat legs splayed, but who when she decided to cross always opted to rest her right ankle on her knee and hold it there with her left hand.

“The sex never has been spectacular,” Angie continued, referring to Claude’s unwillingness to experiment. “And you know he got himself sterilized at twenty-three.” Claude’s mother, grandfather, and two of his aunts had been alcoholic suicides. His father’s brother had MS. Claude was convinced his genes were defective, and he took steps to avoid reproduction. Later on, after his commitment to Catholicism, he had the vasectomy reversed, but by then his dad had been through so many recovery programs that Angie didn’t want to take the genetic chance; she used birth control pills till her hysterectomy.

“It’s all so surprising,” Winnie blurted. Mal and Angie turned toward her simultaneously. “Life, I mean,” she added, and blushed. “I know it sounds corny, but I really thought it would be more, more… momentous, I guess. One day follows another, mostly the same, and they add up to years and before you know it decades…”

“Sometimes there’s a spike of surprise, though,” Mal added. “Like when you came out. Or the Jordan River… Remember how amazed we were at its tininess? Fuckin’ culvert…”

“Or how about Mt. Sinai? About as ‘mountainous’ as Tamalpais.” Angie leaned back and grinned. “Funny you should mention it. I’ve been reading the Bible lately and remembering that trip. I’m still in the Old Testament and the book seems small to me. So obviously written by these nomadic types who thought their little plot of grazing land as big as the universe.”

“Why are you reading the Bible?” Mal’s tone was suspicious.

“Oh just because I haven’t. I figured it was time. I mean, it seems to be some source of contention between Claude and me, and I never have read it… Actually, I’m starting to think almost no one has read it all. Especially when I got to 1 Samuel.”

“What’s it about?”

“Nothing less than God smiting the Philistines with hemorrhoids! Tell me that’s not funny!”

“More evidence that Jehovah is homophobic if you ask me.”

“Oh lighten up, Mal. You’re almost as obsessed with anti-religion as Claude is with his church.”

Winnie stopped rocking and held both hands up for attention. Like she was signaling a touchdown. It was a habit she developed in the beginning with her forceful friends; she had to, or she never would have been heard. “Back to surprises: isn’t it weird that none of us had any kids? That surprise kind of crept up on us. Isn’t it surprising that no one managed a decent long-term relationship? Even you,” she added, with a meaningful look at Angie.

“And another crept-up surprise is that you and I didn’t come back to the Bay Area,” said Mal. “But a spike surprise was your success at business.” Winnie had always thought she was going to be a ceramicist. She did throw pots when she was married and continued part-time while working to support Kim, but after Kim left, all the debt propelled her into opening a co-op gallery in Atlanta, which grew to a franchise-type operation nationwide. Winnie was set for life. Mal did okay as a periodontist but he was bored with it. Angie wanted to write but had a career in San Francisco office administration; between that and Claude rarely working, they could never get ahead of the Bay Area cost-of-living.
“The biggest surprise is Claude’s disability,” said Angie. She looked sad, and Winnie rocked forward to pat her knee. “Who’d a thought it?”

“He was always weird.”

“Sure, Mal, but you never warned us how weird.”

“Hey I’ve been as blown away as anyone.”

They couldn’t believe they’d let so much time pass. They were shocked at how quickly it went. The three of them had been inseparable in college, incorrigible in Israel, and full of plans when they returned home, twenty-two and immortal.

That was twenty-nine years ago.

Then Malcolm went to Michigan for grad school. Winnie made the mistake of marriage, and moved to Atlanta with her husband. Angie remained in Berkeley, with Claude, near her parents.

They stayed in touch but the touch loosened over time; long-distance calls were expensive and writing letters was tiresome. Both Mal and Winnie visited the Bay Area every so often, at least while their respective parents lived, and Angie always saw them, but their visits never coincided till now.

Lately it seemed there was too much catastrophe. Mal didn’t have AIDS, and neither woman had pancreatic or ovarian cancer, but each of them had plenty of sick peers. Angie had spent the last four months helping a neighbor die. All three were feeling softly sad, slowly sentimental, sensitive. When Winnie and Mal learned of Angie’s latest Claude-crisis, each decided to visit her. That’s how they came to be gathered in her small study, marveling mostly at how old they’d become: grownups with traces of youth in their rippling faces.

Any witness could have seen the triangle they made. They were positioned at equidistant points from each other in the small room. Angie sat on the squeaky swivel chair in front of her old oak desk, Winnie went back and forth in the cane-and-oak rocking chair, and Mal draped himself variously over Angie’s stationary bicycle. The way they conversed made a triangle too; it had only taken them three hugs and five minutes to resume the old pattern. Angie swivelled, Winnie rocked, Mal pedaled, they all talked.

“You have to leave him, girlfriend,” Mal stated in no uncertain terms. He flailed his arms upward in an emphatic vee. He and Angie had always been more definite than Winnie, but Mal was the expressive one. They’d all known he was gay when they met as Cal freshmen, and he’d only become more so over the years. Winnie, on the other hand, presented herself as straight until a year into her marriage to Jack, when she blew everyone away by running off with Kim and changing her nickname to Fred. In time and after Kim she returned to her old name, but she never returned to heterosexuality. “This is the last straw,” Mal continued, “and we are not going to sit around and watch it break your back or any other part of you.”

“I kind of know it, Mal,” Angie sighed. She turned the chair to him, lopsiding the triangle. “But after all this time…shit: it just seems like a big deal to leave him. You realize we’ve been together over thirty years?”

“Yeah. And how many of them have been good years?” Mal asked the question with a sardonic tone, pedaling a few times and nodding his handsome head. His hair was still thick and wavy, but it had gone from darkest brown to streaky silver.

Angie swivelled toward Winnie and gave her an exasperated smile. “What do you say?”

“About good years?” Winnie smiled back. Her hair had grayed too, but she’d started out a blonde so her gray looked dull. Angie had been trying for years to get her to color it, but Winifred was one of those lesbians who believed that any cosmetic beyond hand lotion was a capitulation to the male-dominated commercial world. She was pleasantly plump, sweetly serene, and had the softest hands in the county, but above the neck she looked older than her fifty-one years. “Normally I’d stay out of it and say I wasn’t sure,” Winnie answered more seriously, “but really, Ange, you’ve done it long enough. I think it’s time for you to get out.”

It was serious advice, coming from those two. Mal had been Claude’s accidental roommate in the dorm, just as Winnie and Angie had been fortuitously paired. The four of them spent a lot of time together, and Mal and Winnie had loved Claude, who was then crazy- brilliant. He was the only one not from the Bay Area, having come to Cal from Delaware of all places; that was one of the small things that alienated him from the other three, and made a triangle instead of a square. But they knew Claude, they accepted him as Angie’s mate, and they thought they understood him as well as anyone alive: theirs was a dire recommendation.