Sputterpub's Blog

Well sure Mel has a split personality. Who doesn’t? It’s not a problem unless it’s a problem.

She’s always been bright. Very cerebral.

And she’s always been fascinated with sex.

So she has two strains of relationships: the deviants and the nerds. They never meet.

There was freckled Betty, who she taught to masturbate at five. Catholic Nora and their fifth grade theology debates. Then Candy, always into sex, who practiced deep kissing on her when they were ten, who joined Mel at eleven in shallow caves behind the school for sessions of self-molestation, and who had to drop out of tenth grade, pregnant with the first of her five odd-fathered babies. Mel’s brilliant careful best-friend Ellen, discovered in high school, multi-laterally religious and scientific too, with whom she sought the answers to the ultimate metaphysical questions. Dark Michelle in college. Mary, ingenious and distracted, deep in ADD, Mel’s first attempt at a business partnership at thirty. Vee, just Vee, for overdrinking and overdrugging, for groups and gropes and the death knell to the Mary venture.

It’s Michelle she’s remembering now. Michelle and Moe. He affected Frenchness and asked everyone to call him Maurice, but his birth certificate read Morris Zimmerman. Mel was struck when they declared to her that oral sex was better than genital. Their statement blew her away. Mel was a virgin then.

She met them when she first came to college. But the retrospective is a better view.

The memories formed in Berkeley. The year was 1967 and the cast of characters assembled in September. Mel had selected her dormitory site unseen, solely for its proximity to Telegraph Avenue. She and Ellen had been parentally prohibited from sharing a room, owing to a recent (chaste) misadventure involving a bonfire and older boys at Stinson Beach. Mel had no roommate preference other than her best friend. So she picked the residential obelisk closest to all the action, and she took her chances with random assignment. She got Michelle.

There was no sign of her when Mel’s parents delivered their first-born to room 312. Michelle made her appearance soon after they left.

“Are you my new roomie?” Her voice piped like a child’s, lilting on “room.”

Mel turned away from organizing her underwear drawer, to first sight. She felt no love and little interest. She intended to get along with her roommate of course, but Michelle was no Ellen. She sounded and looked a lot like what Mel was trying to escape.

Michelle was cute. Short, small, with sleek brown hair longer than Mel’s, round chocolatey eyes, a pert nose, big breasts, tiny feet. Her lips weren’t full but the upper one curled poutily. Her fingers were short and her palms were plump.

“Where you from?” she continued after Mel smiled and nodded greeting at her. That voice! High, thin and sweet. Mel wondered if Michelle’s vocal chords were shorter than her own.

“Oh, I just crossed the Bay. You?”

“West Virginia.”

Mel was floored. She’d heard of West Virginia but she didn’t know precisely where it was. West of Virginia, obviously, and she knew Virginia was somewhere near Washington, but she didn’t know U.S. geography then. She’s learned it since, through Internet games, and she thinks West Virginia has the funniest shape of the fifty.

Coal mines. Mountains. What they call mountains in the East anyway. Mountains with their tops shaved off, for coal. That’s what Mel had heard about West Virginia. What she asks now is: why was Michelle coming all the way to Cal?

For that matter, Mel wonders now and wonders why she didn’t then about the homes of all the other students she met during orientation. Half of them were from LA (Grant High School or Uni), but all the rest were out-of-state. There were kids from Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Montana. A clot of them from Washington, D.C. But the group of young men who became her friends were from Delaware.

Delaware. The state that makes Maryland look big. The place with Chancery Court and a reverence for corporations. Traveling all the way to UC…

No lifelong relationships came out of Room 6, but none of them forgot their time together. Melanie’s family moved out of the area at the beginning of her junior year in high school, but she corresponded with a few friends and later followed some lives on the Internet.

She was a little surprised about Keith’s success. She learned that he didn’t exhibit psychopathic or sociopathic qualities as an adult. He never became attractive or eloquent, but what started out as drug dealing in late high school morphed into a legitimate import business, and he took off as an entrepreneur. He’d been importing hashish from Pakistan and he got into rugs and carpets. He became acquainted with a small community of weavers and began supplying them with organic dyes instead of the chemically-fabricated tints that developed nations had furnished. His trade became so successful that he abandoned drugs and expanded his legitimate activities. He married, fathered two daughters, and tried to do right by them. One of the daughters was diagnosed as on the spectrum, and that led Keith to some serious financial and time involvement with an autism nonprofit.

Steve’s hyperactivity increased as he got older. It was not helped by his cocaine use. Probably the only thing that kept him from moving on to meth addiction was the gambling he took up at 25. He was good at cards but bad at poker face. He bottomed out five years later, after his second wife left him and he lost his sixth job. He joined Synanon, got clean and fanatic, and entered the trades. He became a fair electrician and a good stone mason. He liked construction because the career limited the number of appointments he had to make, and by then he was thoroughly sick of missing appointments. His third wife told him he had Attention Deficit Disorder but he argued about the “disorder” part of it. He said he was just fine. Before she left him she urged him to get help, but Kaiser told him he was too functional for therapy. They referred him to an ADD support group, but that didn’t work; the members kept forgetting to show up at meetings.

Patrick’s life was the sad surprise. He made it to adulthood, he received enough speech therapy that the stutter became socially acceptable, he married and produced a child of each gender. And then he killed himself. He pulled a drycleaning bag over his head and suffocated on the floor of his study. He left reams of personal journals, in some of which his old friend Melanie was mentioned. His widow then searched her out, and the two women got together for lunch. Patrick’s wife flooded the table with words. Melanie left that encounter convinced that her old pal had been gay and alcoholic and not happy at all.

Melanie married three times before she concluded that it wasn’t the right state for her. She had two children by her first husband, and raised them. She became a business consultant for a living and an unpublished writer from compulsion. She continued to take exception to most generalizations, headlines, and popular conclusions. She developed a precise and compelling way of expressing her ideas, but rarely acquires agreement from others. As far as Melanie’s concerned, everyone has a cognitive issue, and life is a process of discovering and accommodating one another. Her friends haven’t embraced that viewpoint, but they no longer challenge it.

Melanie didn’t forget Room 6. None of the core four did. Steve simplified his experience into an “I hate school” and “School is Jail” philosophy. If he’d had children, he probably would have homeschooled them. Keith ended up on the local school board and unable to sell any of his radical ideas. Patrick wrote some of his into his journals. Melanie was always ready to discuss the subject. All of them had learned that school as they experienced it didn’t work very well. The days were too long, the classes were too full, and the teacher had to pitch instruction to the middle, so the kids who didn’t live in the bulb of the bell curve were not well served.

The posse in Room 6 had come to agreement about what needed to be done. They knew the school day should be shortened – they liked the idea of four hours. They figured that school should run year-round. And they were certain that kids need to be taught by other kids and through narrative. They would have broken classrooms into small groups and had at least half of the lessons told by older student mentors.

No one listened to them, then or now.

Melanie was spending so much time in Room 6 that she was starting to think of it as her own. She had to share it with a few boys, but they weren’t objecting to her little acts of propriety, and they were even taking cues from her about where and when to sit.

All of the inhabitants were supposed to sit at all times – that was one of the purposes of Room 6 – but the group wasn’t very rowdy considering their outlaw status, and Mr. Peterson was starting to leave them unsupervised for quarter hours at a time.

Four of them were regulars. They made it to Room 6 just about every schoolday. Usually there was an additional student or two. Melanie can’t recall a time when there were more than seven kids in the room. She was always the only girl.

The core four came from the same classroom. Their teacher couldn’t handle them and requested their removal. Miss McDaniels wasn’t a strong personality and was a mediocre instructor. But she had 28 other students; she had to extract the bad four or she would have had chaos in the classroom and zero educational progress.

Four bad apples in a barrel of 32, Melanie thought much later. That seemed like a high percentage of unacceptable behavior. One-eighth, she calculated: 12.5%. Sometimes statistics astounded grown Melanie: like the time she counted up the excellent teachers she’d experienced (four), and divided by the number of the profession she’d had through high school (at least 67) and obtained the dismal 5.9% that made her challenge the cultural conclusion that teachers in general were unsung heroes.

The academic year of Room 6 was 1960-61. The place was Chula Vista. The grade was sixth. The students were members of the huge cohort that would be called baby boomers, and they were pioneers in crowding. They were blazing trails without vocabulary. When they became parents there would be words like detention and autism, acronyms like ADHD and DSM IV, phrases like “disruptive behavior” and “behavior contract” and “zero tolerance policy.” But in 1960, there wasn’t much more than “not working to potential.”

The core four delinquents in Room 6 were a mixed lot. Keith was ugly and truculent, Steve was handsome and dashing in an obnoxious way, Patrick was nondescript in appearance and distracting in speech, and Melanie was contentious. She argued with teachers, staff, students, textbooks, and test questions.

Physically the four were average. Keith was chubby, and to Melanie he looked like Fred Flintstone. Steve was athletic and could have been the son of Superman and Reggie. Patrick ran like a girl and reminded her of Dobie Gillis. Melanie aspired to Katy Keene and achieved Little Dot. But they were all in the acceptable range. It was their actions that set them apart from their classmates.

Her parents were at the front door when she got home. Melanie felt a sudden urge to go, possibly owing to all the beans.

“I need the bathroom.”

“I knew you wouldn’t use theirs,” said her mother as Melanie edged by. She didn’t understand the comment, and apparently neither did her dad. He looked a question at his wife.

“Their house is filthy.”

Melanie hadn’t noticed.

In bed a short while later and too stimulated to sleep, Melanie considered the Swansons. They’d only been in the neighborhood about a year, but they moved in with a splash and had never ceased being conspicuous. They were sparkly people, to Melanie’s eyes. Each was good looking and dressed well, and moved with a sharp edge, crisp and like a coloring book picture that has been outlined in dark crayon. They seemed to be always smiling or laughing. They had an awesome dog. Melanie wished she could have a dog or a cat, but her mother said animals are filthy and wouldn’t have one in the house. Her dad’s tropical fish aquarium was not the same thing.

Melanie didn’t like to be dirty herself, so she wasn’t longing for an unclean house. In fact, one of the conditions contributing to her wakefulness at that moment was the stickiness at the back of her knees when she bent her legs. She normally took a bath every night and got into her bed warm and clean, but the party had used up her bathtime that night. Still, she couldn’t see the Swanson house as sufficiently dirty to avoid it.

As it happened, she didn’t get the opportunity to decide. By the end of January the Swansons had sold their house and moved away. Their residence on the block lasted thirteen months. They had reason to move.

Christmas and Hanukah coincided that year. The festival of lights ran from the evening of Tuesday December 17th to Christmas day. It was a sociable week for the whole neighborhood. Everyone’s mood seemed good.

When Melanie came home from school the Friday after Christmas break, she headed straight to the kitchen for a snack. Her brother was already home – he only went half days – playing with his new Tonka truck in the living room. Melanie’s mother was at the sink, rings on the windowsill dish and hands in the soapy water. She knew Melanie had entered the room but she didn’t turn around. She kept washing dishes as she told Melanie that Dabney’s mother had killed herself. Then she turned off the water, wiped her hands on a towel, and lit a cigarette.

Melanie understood suicide. Her father had her sit with him and watch a television broadcast of “Madame Butterfly” two years earlier, and Melanie had accepted the idea of a person deciding to end her life. What she hadn’t understood was why a writer would choose to end a story with such a sad irrecoverable act, but that question had nothing to do with Dabney’s mother, or father, or Dabney.

Melanie felt solemn. And sorry. Of course she asked why, but her mother couldn’t answer. A week later, she noticed the For Sale sign stuck in the lawn in front of the Swanson house, and then she witnessed occasional traffic in and out. Within a month a big van pulled up and moved the furniture away. Melanie never saw Dabney or her father or Sheba leave. The next day when she woke up, their car was gone.

Sheba wasn’t invited to the Halloween birthday party. Nor were the neighborhood babies. The cut-off age was five. Melanie’s brother Brad didn’t get to attend. The status that exclusivity granted to Melanie more than made up for her inadequate costume.

The grownups wore regular clothes to the party. Dabney’s mama had chosen an orange shirtwaist dress, and “Halloween’d” it with a shiny black belt, black high heels, and black gloves. Her hair cascaded in waves around her shoulders, reflecting glints of lantern light and apparently matching her dress. She had sparkly earrings on that were mostly hidden by her hair, but her bracelets – several on each wrist and at least one heavy with charms – made tinkling music and more light when they flashed with her movements. Dabney’s mama seemed to be in constant motion, bringing platters to tables or her own ice-heavy glass to her orange lips, furthering the impression of glint, sparkle, music.

The food was good. The hot dogs tasted like home but Melanie only had one because she promised her mother she wouldn’t eat more. The beans were different and delicious, chewy and almost sweet, and her mother hadn’t issued any instructions about them, so Melanie kept serving herself from the big dish at the center of her table. The bowls of candy would have been like heaven except Melanie had just acquired her annual sack of Halloween goodies the night before. It was the birthday cakes that impressed her.

Each table had its own cake. Each cake was such dark chocolate inside that it looked black in the party light, and bore orange icing decorated with a jack o’ lantern face. Baked into the cake was a silver charm. The guests were told that the person at the table who got the charm would receive a prize.

A silver charm. Not plastic, not pot metal like a Monopoly token: real silver. Melanie’s next door neighbor was the lucky one at her table. As usual he ate so slowly that everyone else had already finished their cake and pushed the plate toward the table center. Barry was on about his third bite from last when he “yowch’d” and brought his left hand to his jaw. He cupped his palm beneath his own chin and spat out metal. The cleaned-off charm was a dainty little horse.

He had to give the charm to Dabney’s mama but he got a package of Sea-Monkeys for his prize. As did the winner at Dabney’s table, a boy who didn’t live in the neighborhood. Freddie’s father was the winner at the grownup table, and it looked to Melanie like his prize was a bottle of something.

Melanie didn’t care about not winning Sea-Monkeys but she would have loved to have the charm. She’d asked her parents for a charm bracelet for her last birthday but they told her that kind of jewelry lacked class. She didn’t understand the term – it meant school to her – but she gathered that her parents wanted her to wear simple, small ornaments, if any. She opted to go without, but she still liked charms.

The party ended soon after the cake ceremony. The grownup table got a little noisy and then Dabney’s father gently pushed her mama off his lap, stood up, and started the goodbyes. Melanie would have enjoyed the adventure of taking the backyard route home, climbing the low fence in the dark, but she behaved herself and went out through the Swanson house. She got to pet Sheba on the way. She was careful to keep her hands free of dog slobber. Behind her Freddie threw his arms around Sheba’s neck and kissed the dog’s ear. Freddie seemed to always have green snot in his left nostril. It reminded Melanie of a pistachio half. It was gross.