Sputterpub's Blog

She had lined up eight interviews for a two hour period. Since she never completed a job interview in less than 20 minutes, she had as usual doomed herself to fall behind. She wasn’t able that morning to pay attention to the interviews anyway; by the time she got to the office her swollen knee was starting to throb, and even with her foot elevated on an open bottom drawer, the pain was too distracting to let her to listen to the pale responses.

An hour after Connie’s office morning started, Cafeen walked in her door as applicant number three. Cathleen Lewis, actually, but her baby brother crowed “Cafeen” at her with shiny teeth on his infant lip and the nickname stuck. Especially when she grew up to have a major coffee addiction. She drank a 10-cup pot of fresh ground before leaving the house each morning, and continued with mugs of coffee all day. Cafeen even drank espresso as a bedtime beverage: nightcap in a demi tasse. She loved to talk fast and move quickly. She adored a buzz.

She liked to turn an interview around, so she attempted to convert Connie’s first question into her own inquiry about the nature of the job. She had spent the better part of the commute rehearsing how to ask natural-sounding questions that would get the interviewer talking. But as soon as she really looked at Connie she noticed pain graying her face. Cafeen became interested, and Connie almost collapsed into her care.

It was a management assistant job for which Connie sought an employee, but Connie confused any people ability for management skill; it was inevitable that she would hire a counselor for the job. And Cafeen was a counselor. That day she gave Connie candy (“for the pain. Sugar for pain. Really. Natural anesthetic”) and coffee (“you need a pick-me-up, honey. This is harmless stuff. Try it. Come on…”). Within weeks she gave Connie a diagnosis (“You have ADD. Attention Deficit Disorder. It’s probably rife in Mormons, with that closed gene pool. I don’t care how many wives which man had; there just weren’t that many of you, and you had to marry in the church. Made for inbreeding. And ADD’s inherited. There’s even a test for it. You watch for how much glucose the brain takes up, and if the patient has ADD their brain doesn’t use as much glucose. Tired brain. Needs a little stimulant. That’s why Ritalin works on the kids. That’s why the anti-caffeine prohibition for Mormons is stupid and ironic. The original taboo was against booze. Some zealot just mindlessly expanded it to include all ‘spirits and stimulants.’ Thereby depriving his people of the natural medication most of their brains need. Leaving them only with sugar. Which is why so many Mormons make, manufacture, and gorge on good old sucrose candy. Which is why you, Boss, are going to keep drinking real coffee.”) And so on. That’s how Cafeen rapped.

She wasn’t a good manager, because she hated to confront anyone but a stranger with criticism (Cafeen could never have stopped speaking to folks with whom she lived). But she was a pretty good counselor, and she became Connie’s friend. While Connie recuperated they got her more awake, more what they called “upright.” Before Cafeen Connie was always leaning just a bit too far forward; it was as if she were compelled to keep moving her feet, fast and almost stumbling, lest she tumble headfirst and top-heavy to the ground. There was a frantic tempo about her. In speeding her up Cafeen slowed her down. Connie became a bit graceful.

She stayed with Bill. Even with improvement Connie was concerned that if she left him she might never have sex again. But she found herself a little less ordinary. She liked her life a little more.

She worried about Megan though. Maybe it was like Cafeen argued – all the hormones in the meat and milk, all the chemicals in the air – but Megan at 12 was physically as mature as Connie and Cafeen had been at 16. It seemed to Connie that Megan chattered too much or spoke not at all, and she was impulsive. Like she wanted an existence more exotic. Attention more eccentric. Bill said Megan needed discipline. Cafeen said Megan needed fun. Connie didn’t know what to think. She made a cup of ordinary coffee, and brought it with two sugar cubes and a small spoon to the door of her daughter’s room.

The winter when Connie was 47 (and Megan 12 and Bill 53) was a harsh one. They had almost twice the normal rainfall, and high winds. There were more power outages that season than in any of the ten years since the family moved to northern California. Connie temporarily crippled herself. And coincidentally met Cafeen. The two events together made it Connie’s best winter.

There was one particularly brutal Wednesday night. The wind howled, the rain pelted, and by 8 p.m. the lights were flickering. They lost electricity on and off for a couple of hours, and gave it up at 10. Connie plodded to her room with her head full of thoughts about her diet and the next day’s interviews. Try as she often did not to rate her day, it was always convenient to fall into her habit of judgment, and the monosyllables felt blunt and honest. She had a good day, or she had a bad day. Most of the days were bad. She was bad. She ate too many sweets. She tried forbidding and she rebelled. She tried limiting and she exceeded. Licorice. Candy corn. Spice drops. She was bad. She walked to her room slumped as usual, her uncolored hair hanging in lank sugar-and-chocolate waves by her cheeks, as she mapped out a morning of interviews for the morrow, and pictured her plate at the management luncheon afterwards.

Bill went to his room not tired enough for sleep. He had a business trip the next morning and he was nervous about it; he almost reached for the comfort of his magazines. He briefly considered a conjugal visit but his body remained quiescent, and he remained in his room.

Megan was the only one of the three of them who went immediately to sleep. She wasn’t particularly tired, and the storm noise freaked her out a little, but with nothing to do she soon inadvertently meditated, and slipped from trance to sleep.

Two trees came down that night in their neighborhood, but no houses were damaged. One big oak sprawled like a giant broccoli stalk across their normally busy street, and Public Works diverted traffic all morning. Everyone was a little edgy with excitement, Connie chatting and Bill not, Megan alternating between eager child and blasé pre-teen. Connie’s voice made Bill so irritable that he left on his trip without checking the house over, and Bill’s sulkiness made Connie not ask. When she ran out of hot water in the shower after he left, she went to the basement herself to determine the problem. She was reviewing her day’s menu intentions, so she didn’t realize that the sump pump had failed until she slipped in the slimy flood and wrenched her left knee a quarter way around.

She went to work anyway. Most people would have recognized the inevitability of recuperation and elevated that swelling knee at home, but Connie didn’t think once about altering her day’s plan. She just moved more slowly, less gracefully, into the rain and wind, and by the time she got to work she looked 60 and felt 80.

She was a very ordinary person. Five and a half feet tall if she stood up straight, Connie usually slumped to about 5’4″. She weighed 165, which on her frame looked like 20 pounds too much. Not enough for obese drama but too much for a dramatic diet. She had medium brown-and-gray medium-length hair, and her complexion was middle-white.

She was 47 years old. About halfway through adulthood. She had just enough gone wrong in her body that she knew her age, but not enough that she was challenged to effort. Increasing allergies, slower healing, hard periods, heartburn. A stiff neck, an aching back, a weak wrist from computer solitaire. A tendency, grown noteworthy of late, to forget what she was about to say or do. But no near-death encounters with heart attack or stroke.

Connie used to wish she were Catholic, or from the South, or had alcoholic parents. She thought any of those qualities would have made her life interesting. But she hailed from a boring Colorado family whose greatest dysfunction was a familiar silence, and if familiarity wasn’t ordinary in a family Connie didn’t know what was.

She flared with a little originality and passion in her early 20s. She spoke then about how she’d raise her children differently: open door and open mouth. But by the time she bore her only child at 35 she’d settled into boring. She’d grown almost as silent as her mother.

It wasn’t that Connie didn’t talk. Actually she and her mother were chatterers at times; Connie’s father learned early to tune them both out. It’s more that their talk was aimless. Each was totally unaware of her auditor’s response. Neither would even notice a big yawn. They threw words into the air with no intention of communicating, thinking aloud and out of a chaotic brain.

“Oh yeah,” Connie’s mother would say, apropos of nothing. And then words would issue from her mouth which were of interest to no one else, phrases which revealed nothing except the random thoughts then passing through her head. “I hope he makes it,” might be about her father getting home in time for dinner to be served without reheating, or a reference to Connie’s rebellious, delinquent youngest brother, or even a wish that Uncle Ethan would cook his famous potato soup for the Christmas Eve family get-together.

In Connie’s family, language was either meaningless or absent. Sometimes words filled the air and made ears nervous. But nothing important ever got said. Connie’s parents never spoke about birth or death or feelings. When her father became angry he stomped off to his garage and inserted his fury into turns of the vice clamp or rips with the table saw. When her mother was mad she stopped talking to them. Often for half a dozen hours and once even for two days, Connie’s mother ceased to speak.

When Connie was a kid she said she’d never be the way her mother was. She figured she’d be no more successful at giving others the silent treatment than she was at trying to lose her appetite. It was difficult, after all, not to speak when others were around. But Mormonism teaches nothing if not how to endure difficulty. Connie learned.

By the time she was 47, her daughter Megan was 12. Her husband Bill was as serious and dour as her father had been, and as distant. Although neither Connie nor Bill went to church or considered themselves Mormons any more, the heritage had stuck. They were both hard-working responsible people. They drank coffee but it was decaffeinated. They drank alcohol but not well. They didn’t like to dance. They had sleepy brains. They loved candy. Bill was generally quiet, getting fat as he aged, wanting sex twice a month, handy around the house. They slept in separate rooms because, as Connie explained to some, they had the space and Bill’s snoring disturbed her. Connie would smile with her mouth closed then, and murmur something about knowing the way to one another’s room, which information was deemed unwelcome by everyone to whom she gave it.

Connie chattered or sulked at home, and was always busy but never organized. As often as she recited her intentions to herself to accomplish one task, she distracted herself with thoughts about two others. Meanwhile, her daughter Megan spent as much time in her room as possible. She sneaked stale jelly beans or cellophane-wrapped caramels, and she entranced herself with her bookshelves of fables and folklore. Or she borrowed one of her father’s Playboy magazines, and fantasized to the pictures. Bill didn’t know about the borrowing; he didn’t even know that Megan knew he kept a stack of old magazines in his closet behind his gray suits and winter shoes. But Bill was a packrat and a masturbator, and his collection went back to 1961.

It took almost 40 years, but Kinsey’s brain blew up last week. I’m always going to wonder if that glass-smashing concussion weakened something in his head.

Anyway, he’s not dead yet. That’s why we’re gathered around him, although we’re kind of a second tier. Kinsey has had a pretty good run: enduring marriage, two grown kids who still like him, business success and social adequacy. His prognosis is not good, but most of the folks standing around his hospital bed are immediate family. A few of us old buddies see him for a bit in the afternoon.

We can’t share pot with him. Kinsey never liked edibles and his respiratory system can’t take even vaping. But we promised to bring him a peach.

It’s not impossible. We can find Frog Hollow produce and pay $3. But we thought the errand would be easy. A peach, in July, in California. Turns out they’re not so common, these days.

It turns out that, while demand for good pot drove the quality and prices upward in the last 40 years, demand for good peaches dropped. To keep prices from rising, quality was sacrificed, and apparently few realized this.

Why, I was in a small market a month ago, greedily popping Santa Rosa plums into a produce bag. They’re so sweet&sour delicious, and they’re never around for long. A fellow shopper edged up to my side and put her hand forth to choose plums. “Aren’t they wonderful?” I voiced. “Oh yes,” she replied, and her face lit up as she added “if you slice them, they make a fabulous fruit tart.”

“Really,” I remember replying. “I just eat them out of the bag.” A cloud of disconnection passed over her countenance as she turned her attention back to the plums.

The next fruit event that struck me was at my brother and sister-in-law’s house, two weeks ago. They have a productive organic garden in their backyard. My sister-in-law spends time working in it every day. I came for a home-grown dinner, and the salad and stir-fried veggies were just picked and excellent. But my sister-in-law harvested over a gallon of fresh berries right before I arrived, and she bragged to me about the quantity that she had immediately frozen, for morning smoothies. Not for a minute did she consider offering fresh berries as part of the meal.

And yesterday, behind a well-built young man who was paying for a large bag of loose carrots, the cashier smiled and said, “I guess someone’s going to make some juice.” The young customer didn’t agree. “I just like to eat carrots,” he stated to the then-uninterested clerk.

How the mighty has fallen. Not only have California highways and schools collapsed in our lifetimes, but the state managed to peak as a produce provider and then decline. I was surprised a few years ago to encounter much better fruit in Paris than in Berkeley. I was disoriented by the custom there of having the purveyor select and bag the items for the customer. Why was I surprised? Agribusiness toxins are not allowed in Europe. And who is better qualified than the merchant to know the best fruit? But most of us in the States won’t phone in a produce order, because we don’t trust the seller to send us the best. We are cynics. We expect our merchants to be interested only in a quick profit. And then we engineer our culture to make that cynicism justified.

We persisted. We splurged on a dozen peaches. We went early this morning to the farmers’ market and we asked the seller to help us find the best fruit for a significant event. Her face lit up. Her smile pushed her cheeks toward her eyes and made those orbs sparkle at us. We came away with some magnificent specimens.

And we shared the peaches with Kinsey this afternoon. He’s degenerated quite a bit since yesterday. He seemed to recognize us, but he wasn’t talking. And he opened his mouth when we held a peach slice to it, took it in, chewed a little and swallowed, but he didn’t act like it was his idea or like he wanted more.

Jeff Connor and Mary arrived while we were in the kitchen breaking the kilo into lids. As usual, Kinsey set aside one for the dealer. But it wasn’t until the decadents showed up that we decided to do the whole ounce at once. My dormmate Michelle and Matt her dark-minded boyfriend walked in at sunset with Red Mountain wine, French cigarettes, and a desire to deepen the bags under their eyes. Alan tagged along. Matt started baiting Michelle as he poured his first glass of wine. Michelle began shaking her finger at him. The rest of us agreed to get high.

Jeff Kinsey set up the hookah in the living room. The thing was three feet tall and had four working hose connections. A small metal cage, sufficient to contain a normal amount of smoking material, sat within its embellished six inch bowl. The two Jeffs soon figured out that if they removed the cage, a full ounce of pot would fit in the smoking bowl.

Ignition was a challenge. We figured we needed people at all four mouthpieces; the two Jeffs, Alan, and I each took up a hose. Rick wanted the fourth spot, but I always try to play with the big boys, so I kind of muscled him out, in a non-physical way. We each tried to stand at the cardinal points of the compass; if we got that right, I was north. We knew we’d need a big flame, so Connor rolled sheets of newspaper diagonally into a torch. All that was straightforward. The trick was going to lie in the steady, deep, simultaneous inhalation.

The Doors album played on the turntable. Connor lit the newspaper torch and held the flame half an inch above the pot. As one we toked. Smoothly. After about six seconds I knew this was going to turn into an endurance contest, and I wasn’t interested in competing.

But Alan dropped out first, coughing across from me. “Wow,” he gasped. “I am stoned.” I continued to inhale for another five or six seconds, and then I offered the hose behind me to Mary. Connor and Kinsey were watching each other across the bowl, west and east, going for it.

It didn’t last much longer. At around 25 seconds Kinsey got cute. Acting like he couldn’t take in any more sitting down, he rose to his feet while still trying to inhale. He shouldn’t have stood up.

None of us saw him actually pass out. I recall thinking he was continuing the joke as he started to fall backwards toward the plate glass window. That’s the thing about suddenly-unconscious people; your first idea is that they’re faking it.

Jeff didn’t bend. He didn’t stop. He broke the window with his head.

The cheap venetian blinds probably saved him. All the shards fell outward onto the front porch. He didn’t bleed, and he came to in a minute. We cared for him without a trip to Cowell Hospital or the Free Clinic. We even continued to smoke. But Kinsey definitely made us a memory.

Unfortunately, it may have made a medical consequence for him. The doctors say a cerebral aneurysm is a ticking bomb that was probably always there and can detonate any time, but what do they know? They told me that my herniated disk wasn’t related to the hard hard fall I took 15 months before the back symptoms started, but they weren’t there when my ass smacked those bricks. They didn’t hear the impact or feel the thud. I don’t think it’s a stretch to connect that trauma to a gradual inflammation or dislocation that finally resulted in me feeling it. They told me the hernia wouldn’t repair itself, but no doctor orders an MRI for a patient who’s feeling good…

I smoked pot before I came to Cal, but I don’t think I really felt it until that fall evening in 1967. Afterward I shared a big fresh peach with Alan, and it tasted more wonderful than any peach I’d ever eaten. Its skin was firm and gently fuzzy and its flesh was sweet without stickiness. I could feel my cells take it in. I remember marveling at nature’s perfect packaging.

Alan was an anti-beau. He was a year ahead of me and we met the day after I moved into the dorm. He wanted us to be a couple. I didn’t. He was a nice guy, and he had some intriguing theories about mathematics, but he was too besotted with me to be sexually interesting, and I was put off by his horrible acne and his stringy brown hair. I liked to visit him, talk about life and the universe, smoke with him. I met his friends and was soon involved with one of them. Even after Rick and I became a couple, a bunch of us tended to gather in Alan’s apartment those evenings, sometimes for most of the night.

I remember the time Alan took acid and I told him to write down the ideas as he had them. I wasn’t yet into hallucinogenics, but we were careful with the serious drugs; if one of us dropped acid at least another of us would stick around and act as escort. His face lit up at the writing suggestion, dilated eyes rounding, and he grabbed paper and pen and turned away from me to his desk. For the rest of the night he hunched over the paper, writing. When he gave me the finished work, he had covered the page in amazingly small print. Everywhere it read: “I am stoned. I am stoned. I am stoned.”

As that academic year progressed, our group of course evolved. Some drifted away. Others introduced new acquaintances. We spent more time in the Spaulding house than in Alan’s apartment. We picked up two Jeffs.

Jeff Connor was thin, with longish blonde hair in soft curls. He looked cherubic but he acted mischievous. He was the kind of guy who would regularly spearhead a prank, like group-dismantling and reconstructing a VW Bug in a dining hall, or the (unsuccessful) attempt to lead a horse up the stairs and into the dean’s office. He drank gallons of coffee and smoked pounds of pot. Connor had gone to the same high school as I, one year ahead of me, had even been a friend of a close friend’s brother, but we didn’t meet till I came to Cal. He cohabitated with a dull blonde named Mary. I never found her interesting, but Rick ultimately did, enough so that she was the catalyst for the hiatus that became our breakup. I don’t know what became of Mary after Cal, but Jeff was one of two friends who died in climbing accidents, the only people I lost in those years, which is odd when I think of how dangerously we lived.

Jeff Kinsey was a different type. Chubby, with lank black hair and a bad complexion, he was ever a businessman. He sold the Berkeley Barb, Fillmore posters, lots of pot and hash. During the summers, he was one of two individuals who could fix cherry-counting machines. On the north coast, where the canneries operate, fruit cocktail is assembled. The most expensive ingredient in fruit cocktail is the cherries. In order to be fruit cocktail, each can must have a minimum number of maraschino halves. In order to be profitable, each can must not have one cherry half more than required. So the cherry-counting machines are important tools. And finicky. I’m sure Jeff did what he could to keep them finicky.

The most memorable event that winter was the party in the Spaulding house. Rick and his old friend Carl rented the little place: a one-story house with a living room in front and a kitchen in back and two small bedrooms and a bathroom on the side. I shared Rick’s bedroom with him about half the time; I knew the place better than my dorm room.

Everyone had just returned from break, and the quarter’s classes hadn’t yet picked up the scary momentum that drove each 10-week academic session. Carl, Rick and I were sitting around the living room, expecting Jeff Connor and Mary to arrive, when Kinsey showed up with a key.

Jeff Kinsey could buy 2.2 pounds of marijuana for around $60. So could anyone. At that price, burns were common. More than one apparent brick was unwrapped after purchase only to find compressed sawdust behind an outer inch of herb. Kinsey specialized in product quality; he didn’t buy at lower prices, and he always acquired good stuff. He packaged manicured buds in small plastic bags, with a card inserted that described the variety of pot within. His bag-work was beautiful and foreshadowed dispensary products by almost 50 years.