Sputterpub's Blog

My father is a reactionary man. I don’t mean that politically – he’s quite unpolitical really, except that he’s obnoxiously cynical. I mean Dad is always expending his energy reacting to something; he never initiates a process or steps back and makes a plan for himself.

His wife, my cracker stepmother, is not really more high maintenance than anyone else. She’s transplanted so she doesn’t have the network of local friends and family that would take some domestic pressure off her spouse, but really, when I think of it amid unground axes, she’s no more demanding than most wives. The thing is that Dad can’t shine her on, won’t ignore her, always tries to do what she asks and even some of what she doesn’t ask, and I’m realizing as I say this that his curmudgeonly attitude can actually be ascribed to the sort of bitterness that accompanies a complaint about ingratitude. I wonder could his worldview be this infantile: I’m nice to you so you better be nice to me or else I’m going to pout and take my ball home?

Mom says Dad has a hole in his soul, and he tries to plug it with a mate. Any mate. Keeping the mate is the most important thing. And I have to admit his vital stats support that view. Dad is apparently very, very motivated to be married.

Maybe Mom and I are hitting at the same thing. He stays mated by being nice to his mate. This approach looks like a kindergarten survival strategy. When his mate is less than perfectly grateful, as has to occur, his resentment and bitterness begin.

What we seem to have here is a failure, on my father’s part, of imagination. He’s in his mid-50s. Clearly his old survival strategy could use a review.

(The odd thing in all this is my mother’s irrational belief that someday, somehow, Dad will get back on track and rediscover the creative path to self-fulfillment. She holds this romantic notion in spite of her fairly wide observation of half a century on this planet. She cherishes this idea even though she watched my paternal grandfather shuffle off his mortal coil without ever really speaking his mind…)

I visited a gigantic flea market last week and I went a little wild with purchases. Filled my trunk with old LPs and crammed the back seat with adornments and appliances that I just couldn’t resist. Most will go into found-object sculptures and collages, and I can use some for the interactive curtains I’m designing for my study, but there’s one little statuette I bought to keep intact.

It’s an ivory-colored resin object, plastic made to look like marble. It’s the blocky figure of a man, and the placard sloping against his lower legs says “World’s Greatest Dad.” The man is short but solid, a prototypical father-block of warm-looking protection. Mom says the style is of the type known as a “nebbish” in the late 50s/early 60s.

When I put down my $2, I thought I was buying an early Christmas gift. But I realized when I got home that I can’t give this thing to my father. It wouldn’t even be funny.

It’s a sturdy little block of resin. Built like a father. I can’t give it to mine. He’s not substantial enough. Too unhappy. I guess I can only hope. Not like my mother: I have no illusions that my dad will see the light and come around. I guess I hope I’ll do a good enough job selecting that, someday, my kid will want to give this little statue to hers.

Dad was warm and affectionate and easy to be with, and he always seemed glad to me. It’s a bit jarring for me to hear how unhappy he then was. I can’t exactly argue about it, since he agrees with Mom that he was miserable during those years, but I keep wanting to tell my parents it isn’t as simple as they describe. There’s no way he could have given me so many genuine-seeming smiles and never meant any of them.

Then he got married. He found his new wife on the other side of the country, where he often went on business trips, and he brought her west with him when I was eleven and a half.

My stepmother and I were not congenial. Maybe it was our different cultures; she was from a poor white Southern family and my heritage is antsy Jew mixed with diligent Mormon. Maybe it was the sexual competition I’ve heard about, between mother and daughter types; it didn’t feel that way to me, but I guess it wouldn’t feel that way, if that were what was happening. I don’t know how to count all the ways of our mutual contempt, but looking back I see unremitting quiet enmity. She greeted me with some kind of spiel about how, where she came from, children addressed their elders as “sir” and “ma’am.” I hadn’t done anything to merit that talk. I hadn’t shown any disrespect, yet. She no sooner moved in than she rearranged the kitchen where Dad and I had run all our “blue food” experiments with tuna and pasta and milk and food coloring. She pulled down the muslin curtains I’d worked so hard to hem, and she hung gross bright printed things in their place (“café curtains,” I learned they were called, with their scalloped tops riding on loud brass rings).

I had a room of my own in the old apartment, and I started with a bedroom when they moved to the house, but then my stepsister showed up. Candy is three years older than I am, and she was having trouble in school back east, where she lived with her dad, so she moved out here. She shared my room, but she was there all the time and I was only around every other weekend, so before long it was her room, and I was the trespasser.

I remember feeling like Cinderella. Dad was totally oblivious. He was happy then, so he walked around hunched over, not hearing us.

Mom tells a story about choosing a husband. She dated another guy during college but maintained some kind of relationship with Dad, and there came a time when she had to choose between Tim (the other guy) and my own father. She says she can even remember pacing around a circular drive on the kibbutz where she stayed in Israel, mentally listing the respective strengths and weaknesses of Tim and Dad. But that exercise didn’t help her decide.

She says she had to return home first. She had to actually spend some time with each of them. It was only after those visits, when she found herself considering how she loved Tim but didn’t want to be with him, and how she didn’t really love Dad but wanted to spend every second in his company and making plans together, it was only then, she says, that she got in touch with her own feelings. More like: got hit over the head with her own emotional reality, she asserts, but Mom is the first to admit that she always knows what she thinks and seldom has a clue about how she feels (her body sneaks up on her and tells her sometimes, by making her cry at silly love songs or sad ads, or making her stub her toe so bad she has to sit down for awhile, or making her downright ill).

Somehow, Mom figured out who she loved at 23, but Dad never seemed to figure out when he was happy. (It’s not that simple. I wonder if Mom agrees now that she figured it out correctly then?)

My mother swears my father used to be happy. She points at the old black-and-white photo on her picture wall, as evidence. She says they shot it about a year before I was born: probably in late 1975, right after purchasing their box of an old house. She and Dad are standing in the tiny back yard, in front of a tangle of whatever bushes were surviving the drought. Mom is wearing a dark turtleneck and light pants, crease-pulled across her hips and suggesting a flare below the frame of the picture. Her face is at three-quarters profile to the camera and she’s smiling at Dad. She’s holding a roll of what are probably the house plans. He is dressed in cords and a Henley shirt, in some dark color that was probably brown. His right leg is bent a bit forward and his arms are extended out from his sides. His hands aren’t in the picture but they must have been open, palms up. He’s looking straight at the camera. It’s obvious that he’s dancing a bit. And he’s grinning with every muscle in his face.

Really. His eyes sparkle behind wire-rimmed glasses. His teeth gleam from within his beard. In fact, Dad’s eyes are weak, pale blue, sparse-lashed, and skeptical. Not his best feature. He was never one for oral hygiene, and his teeth are soft and dull. But he’s radiant in that picture.

A year before I was born.

Mom catalogues his skills as a young man, but I don’t remember most of them. She says he rode a unicycle and could pilot a small plane. He was an untrained musician who could pick out a tune on anything, and he composed ditties on his concertina, his electric piano, or the cherrywood clavichord he lovingly built from a kit. He liked to laugh, and she says it was almost annoying how willing he was to help anyone with anything, how often he wasn’t available to play, because he was assisting his parents or neighbors or even a needy stranger by the side of the road. He answered so many questions his friends called him Mr. Science. He helped so many move that they called him Mr. Fixit. And he was always tinkering, with models or verses or dot-drawings inked all night with his Rapidograph pen. He made containers out of old cigarbox wood. He performed electronic miracles with speaker wire and old amplifiers. I don’t know if my father was ingeniously creative, but it certainly sounds like he was crafty.

They used to say, Mom recalls, that when they walked into a room she immediately thought of ways to improve it, while he was busy appreciating what worked in it. Apparently she’d describe her ideas and he’d winnow out the unfeasible ones, and what remained he often tried to build. That’s how they came to have the little mini-kitchen upstairs. And how they didn’t come to have the hot tub, which design idea was never practical enough to construct, never doomed enough to discard, and a source of some chronic strife between them, as I recall.

I was almost six when they split up, so I ought to have memories of him happy when they were together, but I don’t. I suspect there were some good times – I still have the activity box he built for me, with its bells and lights and all the lovely switches – but maybe there were too many bitter arguments between my parents then, drowning out the good moments and muting all of the memories to misty scenes I can handle. My first six years observed through sheer curtains. Pale yellow, they seem to me now.

I remember Dad happiest during the four years between his marriages. History insists he was then quite depressed, prone to drinking too much Jack Daniels and a practitioner of bizarre sleep habits, but I recall nothing but good times and sweet adventures from those years in his apartment.

We did everything together. Unlike Mom, he let me stay up late on Saturday nights, sitting by him on the couch watching TV, laughing at his sardonic comments. He was always ready to help me build forts, make kites, and buy toys. He liked to eat fast food. He liked to shop. Mom didn’t.

Juley was frustrated by the Sunday School debate and irked about Aaron’s harassment by Keith and Steve. He felt protective toward his friend and he stopped being as cooperative at school and at home. He became difficult. He waxed disruptive and funny in class. With increasing frequency he was sent to detention. Even there he cut up. He began to be friends with some other bad boys. With Billy who was fat and rather smart and always rocking back and forth in his chair. With Doug, red-haired like Keith but nicer, mischievous and hyperactive, a prankster.

Aaron and Juley lived in the northern, newer part of town. Billy and Doug came from neighborhoods on the other side of the transit tracks. It’s not at all certain they would have met but for the detention room. As it was, they formed an early posse.

Most of the time Juley did the deciding for them. They all helped with the thinking, but Juley had the strongest will. Aaron recorded, Billy protected, Doug sparked from indignation to chuckles, and Juley declared. For a number of years that delegation worked.

They weren’t bothered any more by Keith and Steve. Although they were never in classes all together and seldom even in pairs, Juley received courage for his convictions from his friendships with the other three, and the other three got their individual measures of support. Billy grew large and coarse-featured, but he never knew he was unattractive so his peers didn’t either. Aaron and Doug were appreciated even when they discovered their homosexuality, together at first, and then with their respective and individual domesticity and promiscuity. The four helped each other through the years of dead boredom in their suburban community, through the seasons of raging impatience awaiting their lives.

Usually Juley spurred them. Sometimes they all led others in reasoned acts of disobedience. The causes were often big, like saving the planet and ending world hunger, and occasionally as small as a personal experiment. Once Juley made a mess of his mother’s kitchen counter by trying to pour milk into three abutting glasses without righting the bottle between them. That was a simple physics experiment. Another time he threw a bowl of rice into his sister’s offending face. She had been arguing in favor of cars and corporations while he had just finished reading The Silent Spring. He grew indignant and wanted to see what his parents would do. His father smacked him and his mother made him clean up the mess. Juley amassed information and drew conclusions.

For a time he was almost uncivil in his disobedience. In his late twenties, consumed with dismay about the sprawl of suburbs and the metastasis of cars, Juley moved with his second wife Sharon, sister Ruth, Billy and four dogs to the backwoods of Colorado, retreated behind the thick walls of a bermed lab, and built a few bombs. But he veered from that course before any detonation; he got his revenge on the world like he did on his former wives, by doing nothing at all. Just as his exes tripped on their own nurtured delusions, so Juley got the dubious satisfaction of witnessing the world wobble as his predictions were realized. Of course he would rather have been wrong. He lived long enough to see his children sickened by the simian viruses that swam in required vaccines. He watched his olive-skinned grandchildren grow cataracts and melanomas in thin-filtered sunlight. But the phenomenon that really bothered him, the one that Juley always knew could have been fixed quickest, was the continuing tendency for suburban teens, emotionally abandoned by their parents and maddened by safety, to take automatic weapons to schoolyards and slaughter their peers.

Juley’s mother thought it was weird that he only wanted to eat, add and read when he came home from school. But he was happiest when she gave him columns of numbers to total or took him to the library for more books. He was never eager to play sports with the neighborhood boys. He and his friend Aaron took exploratory hikes sometimes, in the scrubby foothills behind the junior high. They tried to spot exotic birds and to avoid the older boys with BB guns. They talked about candy and planned to build a fort.

They never saw any birds rarer than sea gulls and sparrows but they usually avoided the bands of hunting boys. One April day when they were eight, though, Steve Mankiovitz managed to wing Juley with a BB; the pellet struck his upper right arm and left a small circular bruise. Juley and Aaron spotted Steve as soon as they figured out what happened; he was just up the hill from them, crouched behind some manzanita with his mentor Keith. They ran away as fast as they could while Steve aimed his BB gun at their backs. On adrenaline-fueled feet they flew toward home. With adrenaline-honed eyes Aaron spotted the irregularity in the eroded cut-away cliff by which they raced, and pulled Juley behind screening bushes, and so they found their secret cave.

It wasn’t very deep and it wasn’t very tall, but it opened enough to swallow the two of them cozily, and it hid them behind its shrub-shrouded entrance. They took to using it for reading sessions, smuggling in Greek or Norse myths or the small books of Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling, ahead of their class. They couldn’t manage the big dictionary. Juley’s home was where they finally found “authority” and, after a fruitless search of the Js, the epithet Keith gave them in the fall: “gigolo.”

It seemed like Steve and Keith existed then only to pick on them. They lived one block over. They were older than Juley and Aaron but seemed socially less mature. Keith was Steve’s neighbor, he had red hair, and he always seemed to have a fresh idea about how to make someone miserable. Steve hung out with Keith because their mothers were friendly and Keith always had weapons. Firecrackers at least. Often a knife or his BB gun.

When Juley was in fifth grade a few memorable events occurred. First he retired from Sunday School. That happened when he asked his teacher who created God. His teacher didn’t know how to answer and tried to dispense with the question. “I don’t know” might have worked, but “God was always there” certainly didn’t. Juley protested. The teacher objected. Juley was removed from the room. He didn’t go back.

His parents tried to get him to return to Sunday School. They even threatened to stop his allowance. But he was adamant; he wouldn’t waste his time there. This was especially his position because of what happened to Aaron the very hour Juley was arguing with his Sunday School teacher.

Aaron’s family was Jewish like Juley’s but didn’t belong to a synagogue. Aaron didn’t go to Sunday School. He had always been free to hang out alone in their cave on Sunday mornings, and it’s where he chose to be that day. Unfortunately, he ran into Keith and Steve on his way there. If Juley had been with him, they would have been bothered and chased and maybe even nicked with a rock or a BB. Alone, Aaron was quickly caught.

It wasn’t like they tied him up or anything. The coercion was purely social. They suggested Aaron tag along with them, and he just didn’t feel able to refuse the invitation. He worried that they would hurt him if he declined.

They led him some distance away from the secret cave. Together the three boys made their way into a thicket of pepper trees and manzanita, careful about the sharp mahogany-colored twigs that whipped stabbingly at their bare calves. Keith and Steve took Aaron to a clearing in the middle of the scrub-forest, and there Keith exposed himself and rubbed his penis until it discharged a substance Aaron described to Juley as shiny clear jelly.

Aaron didn’t have to stay to watch. Later he felt a bit ashamed that he did remain. But at the time he was mesmerized and curious about what would happen. He was tingly and reluctant to move, let alone exit.

Civil disobedience could have been Juley Brahnstein’s middle names. Should have been. He was born to rebel.

He cut his second day of kindergarten. He found his own class insufficiently fun the first day, so on the next he followed his friend Aaron. Sure enough, they did something his dull class hadn’t done. Aaron’s teacher read each kid’s name, and the kid got to say “Here.” When Juley told his mother about it, she said, “Except you.”

“Huh?”

“The teacher didn’t say ‘Julian Brahnstein,’ did she?” her mother asked him, holding the heavy door open as he climbed out of their green Buick.

“No.”

“And you didn’t get to say ‘here,’ did you?”

“No.”

“That’s because you were absent. Not there.” Juley would live another eighty years and never forget learning that word. “Your teacher was probably calling your name just about then. And you weren’t there to say ‘here.’ Don’t you think you should go back to your own class tomorrow, so you don’t have to be absent any more?”

It was one of those rare moments when Juley agreed with his mom. What she said made sense. He thought absent was a wonderful word.

In general Juley liked kindergarten. It was more fun than tagging along with his mother on her shopping trips and coffee visits. It was better than hanging around home with his mother and his cute stinky sister Ruth. But he never enjoyed rest time.

The kindergarten day was only four hours long. He didn’t understand why resting had to be part of it. But halfway through every day, in Aaron’s class as well as his own, all of the kids were expected to lie down on little mats for a time, as if they were napping. Juley never liked naps even when they made sense, at home on a bed after some hours of roughhousing, and he detested the little school exercise. As far as he could tell, no one (except maybe the teacher) got anything out of rest time. It didn’t make sense to him.

But what really made no sense, then or after, was the way the kids went along with it. Juley kept looking around. He was a good counter, and by his tally there were no less than nineteen other children. All of those kids to one teacher and Barbara, the Wednesday aide. Juley couldn’t figure out why all the kids did what Miss Adams said, even when none of them wanted to. It was obvious to him that they could simply tell her: no. What could Miss Adams do? He would have loved to find out. But the other nineteen didn’t seem to see it that way. In fact, as far as Juley could tell no one else even considered disobeying.

He asked his parents about it. His mother looked at him blankly over the bright cover of her McCall’s. His father spoke about “authority.” When Juley asked what that meant, his mother told his father he should stop using such big words and his father told his mother to shut up, which made her return to her magazine, paging fitfully, and made Juley leave the room. He was too young to look up the word in a dictionary.

He learned to read the next year. He was very bright and rather motivated. He wanted to decipher the big Funk & Wagnall’s that sat on the carved oak stand in the family room. He longed to read the text that accompanied the illustrations in his father’s slim volume of Candide. There was one picture especially, of a naked woman held spreadeagled by four soldiers, her round rump up and the side of one round breast down, that made Juley tingle warmly in the base of his young penis, made him want to stroke its underside slowly full length, and he needed to understand the words around that picture.

He paid attention to the alphabet and quickly learned to read. He paid attention to numbers and mastered arithmetic. He didn’t care much for the subjectivity of history. His prodigious capacity for numbers balked at remembering dates. This contrary condition stayed with him all his life. Even as an old man he remembered his childhood addresses, his wives’ Social Security numbers. But he never could recall the year of the Battle of Hastings, or when the Magna Carta was signed.