Sputterpub's Blog

We talked directly about suicide. We agreed it was the ultimate selfish act. But only because it was ultimate. Ginny said there were plenty of other equally selfish acts. I’d rolled a joint and handed it to her, and I was holding a match to the end of it when she said, “It’s selfish when someone is late for an arranged meeting and they don’t call. It says they don’t value my time. It’s rude.” Her speech blew out the flame. I struck another match.

“And what does it teach me?” she continued, but she was talking to some spot on the wall behind me. She wasn’t looking at me. “Only to disregard you. Only to be unconcerned. Is that what you want?” She took a deep hit on the joint and I shook out the short flame.

It turned out she was addressing her married old boyfriend, but she hadn’t tried to kill herself over him. She looked at me and she said wearily but convincingly that she had felt she just didn’t have the stamina to go on. There seemed to be nothing else for it. I invited her to stay with me for awhile.

My brother then lived close by. We were into one of our habitual competitions, and I happened to have the table, so he was over at my place most nights.

I guess we got into ping pong back in 1964. That’s when I remember playing every night; I think my parents bought us the table that summer. I was 14 and Paul was 12 and it may be that AM transistor radios were just getting popular then, because I remember a small black one that aired the same run of rock ‘n’ roll songs while we played ping pong, and that thrust “Satisfaction” at me when I held it by my pillow at night.

The evenings were warm. Our parents sat on matching floral cushions in matching redwood chairs on their Southern California patio, looking at us or at their iceplant-edged lawn (or was it dichondra? those were dichondra days…), sipping martinis made with very little vermouth. Mom kept telling us to turn the radio down, and we ignored her. Paul stood six feet away from his end of the green table, ready to power the little ball back at me every chance he got. That meant I had to stand farther away from the table than I wanted – about three feet – but close enough that I could slice the way I liked at the hollow white ball.

I hit that ball back to him almost every time. We were pretty well matched. But I usually managed to cut at it with my paddle at an angle, to skim at the edge of it or pull away slightly even as I was pushing, so the ball went back to him over the stiff white net, but it never bounced the way he expected it would, and sometimes it fooled him enough that he mistruck. I loved it when that happened.

Paul and I don’t consistently play ping pong; it’s like we have infections and then remissions. When we’re into it we tend to neglect regular duties. We were having a good bout of it when Ginny moved in. She got to know Paul by watching us play. I’m sure that skewed her vision.

They met, they mated, and they married. Some of it was plain old timing; she was 28 and he was 30 and marriage was an age-appropriate exercise. But I know a lot of it had to do with misplaced emotions about me. For both of them.

Hannah and I have talked about this, and I kind of wish Ginny would overhear it. We know from Ginny and I know even from Paul that Ginny and Paul don’t have sex. Maybe once a year they do it, when they’re drunk and away from home in a nice hotel, under the influence of adult movies and limitless towels, but never at home. Ginny says she’s really not interested any more and she might try a woman. Paul says he doesn’t particularly like intercourse; he likes to cuddle. Both statements are weird.

I think it may be that Ginny and Paul each got together with the other as a way of having sex of a sort with me. And when it didn’t work they stopped having sex. Something like that.

Hannah and I agreed long ago that that’s the way it is. At least, I said it a lot and she didn’t seem to disagree. I can usually count on Hannah to let me know when she disagrees. I’m surprised Ginny hasn’t overheard us. And kind of sorry.

So Ginny and Paul are married. And Ginny is having an affair with a septuagenarian. She’s not exactly having sex with him, although she tells me he’s getting some Viagra, and they expect to consummate their relationship soon. For now, she says he spends hours on her pleasure.

I think it’s just plain silly. Sometime I feel like pushing her. Push…pull. Flirt…finesse. Give her a little spin till she sees herself.

I’ve invited her over for a game of ping pong. I hauled the old table out of the attic and set it up on the back patio, under the drooping pods of wisteria. It’s still bright green, and its lines are as white as first-aid tape. It reminds me of playground markings on asphalt, for four-square or dodgeball, of white alphabets on the classroom greenboards that replaced old blackboards. I ran my thumb over the red-patterned surface of a paddle and I cupped a white ball in my hand.

If Ginny could confront me about hearing my telephone conversations, then she can face me over a table tennis net. I imagine she’ll start close to the edge of the table but it won’t surprise me if she turns out to be a power hitter. I’m flexing my wrists with anticipation. We’ll see about her angles.

“You know, I really don’t want to sleep with my father.”

I was so embarrassed. There we were, alone in the office that Friday afternoon, and Ginny had just let me know that she often overheard my telephone conversations. I was startled at that. I stammered out some sort of apology and told her I hoped she hadn’t heard anything upsetting, and that’s when she made the father statement. “Oh shit,” I thought: “Busted.” I talked daily to Hannah on the phone, and we discussed everyone we knew, so of course I described Ginny’s affair with the old man. Who wouldn’t? A relatively attractive 40ish woman in bed with a 75 year old guy…

The fact is, I never said Ginny wanted to sleep with her father. What Hannah and I had been discussing was Ginny’s track record with older men. This was not the first time she had sex with someone more than 30 years her senior. I’d known Ginny for two decades, and this one was at least her sixth. She was a patsy for any older, courteous gentleman who let her know he adored her. No, Ginny didn’t want to sleep with her father. But she seemed to want something from a man his age.

My dad was a great dad. Hannah’s dad was a great dad. Neither Hannah nor I would be charmed by a flirtatious older man. We would feel distinctly uncomfortable and get far away fast. But Ginny lapped up the attention. She found the old guys debonair. She took them seriously as men.

I should have said it then. Something like: “I don’t think you want to fuck your father; I never said you did. But the fact that you’re consistently attracted to men his age who treat you well: I think you’d better look at that.” But she stood before me, short and blocky, blonde and bosomy, almost vibrating with apparent determination to speak up to me. I don’t know. I think I didn’t want to quash that spirit.

Ginny hates everyone she loves, and I’m in her top five. Me, her mother, her two brothers, and her husband who happens to be my brother. I didn’t understand what “passive aggressive” meant till I met her. Ginny is almost always resenting someone, and you can tell who’s on the top of her shit list because she speaks the sweetest to that person. She’ll avoid the conversation if possible, but if not, she’ll be amazingly nice. Time and again I’ve stepped into her office and she has signaled that she’s trapped on a phone call but that I should wait. Then I’ve watched her, gushing good service with her voice into the mouthpiece while she’s flipping the client off with her hand or aiming her index finger toward her open mouth in that universal gag pantomime.

So I really think I was pleased, all in all, that Ginny confronted me about my telephone calls. The truth is, I didn’t mind that she overheard.

Hannah and I are best friends, and our friendship is sustained by telephone. Our schedules and locations are such that we only get together every six weeks or so, but we talk at least every other day. We know each other’s phone voices and mannerisms better than we’ll ever know our hand gestures or faces. I’m sure I’ll take her business telephone number to my grave.

We met in college, our first year, and that’s when we began telling each other our stories. We were constantly talking and sometimes analyzing. We keep each other honest; we both try not to rewrite. We’ve watched others revise their personal plots. We’re mystified by that process.

We wouldn’t have wanted Ginny to hear us discussing her weight, or her selection of those godawful polyester big blouses, under which her breasts protrude like the prow of a luxury liner. But we wouldn’t have minded if she heard our comments about her affairs.

When I met Ginny she was 25. I was 30. That was 20 years ago. She came to work in my office, assigned to assist me, and we got friendly. She was interesting and competent, but she was promiscuous when she drank. And she drank almost every night. She used to go to one of the many Marina bars and swallow her vodka in several arrangements, and then she left with some older fellow, and gave him head in his car. Ginny generally hated herself the next morning.

It wasn’t long before she tried to kill herself. Most of the folks who talked about it said it was a cry for help, but I thought she meant it. She took a full bottle of barbiturates with a fifth of her favorite vodka, and if she hadn’t been so experienced at drinking she would have passed out before calling her old friend Betty in Fresno, who called Ginny’s mother, who called the cops, who got there in time to bring her back.

Afterward I had to take care of her, because her mother and her brothers wouldn’t. For their various reasons, which they tried once, twice and more than thrice to justify to me, they just couldn’t be with Ginny right then. I had to be.

I have a picture of the whole family, plus Steve. That’s not fair to say – of course my brother-in-law is family – but since I predict Emily will leave him I only admit him as a temporary member. However, I have a picture of all eight of us, and I’ll try to describe it.

I remember when it was taken. Last Thanksgiving, after a contentious meal. Laney had done a lot to spoil it with her vegan lectures about animal cruelty. I tried to lighten it up with a metaphysical question, but that only served to further sour relations.

“Given an infinite number of coin tosses,” I prefaced, “must it come up tails at least once?” Laney and Liz have heard it before; they looked impatient. The others, all except Emily and Ned, mouthed various reasonings and declarations, like “Well, yeah, if there are infinite attempts;” and “A lot more than once; it would have to come up tails about half the infinite time;” and “No duh (what a stupid question…).”

Actually, the answer is no. It might never come up tails. I tried to explain that each coin toss is a discrete event. I even told them that if, given infinite attempts, any result that can happen will occur, then that means the proverbial monkeys will in fact accidentally duplicate, on their little word processors, the complete works of Shakespeare, given infinite time. In fact, they’ll do it not once but many times. An infinite many times. If the answer is not no, then we live in a multiverse where everything that can possibly happen does happen, repeatedly, and since that is manifestly not our situation, the answer must be no. It is possible to toss a coin an infinite number of times, and have it always come up heads.

They weren’t interested. That’s an understated way of describing how they received my words. So I stopped speaking. I didn’t tell them the truth about the material world. But we were in bad attitudes when we sat for the picture.

We’re grouped on and behind the couch. I don’t know if Dad meant it, but we’re arranged with the blondes seated and the dark heads standing. Left to right the couch holds Laney, Mom, me, and then Liz. I have my arms stretched out on the back of the couch, but I’m not touching anyone. Laney’s hair is her natural dark ash for a change, she’s dressed in raggedly mismatch, and she looks pouty. Her legs are crossed at the knee and although she’s thin, her flank is pocked above her fishnet hose. Cleaned up she could be a girl-next-door bubbly cheerleader; as she is, she’s just as common but less appealing.

Next comes Mom, looking frumpy. Her short arms are crossed above her humongous mammaries, and her thighs look like they expand infinitely from the point of her small knees pressed together at the bend of the couch, backwards to somewhere among the old popcorn husks and pencil stubs in the crevices of the upholstery. She wears a long white-on-black dotted top above a denim skirt and clogs; her bleached hair is teased away from her face.

They made me sit next to her but I look as disconnected as I remember feeling. My eyes appear half-closed but that was because I was looking down at the way the legs of the tripod so surely met the floor. I was not stoned. I recall wishing my family could be as stable as that tripod. I think I look pretty good. I’m wearing my black leather jacket. Even though I’m inside. I felt better then with the jacket always on – all my important things were in the pockets – but I know now I wore it as much to annoy Mom and Laney as anything else.

Liz is next to me, the last on the couch. The lost. She has her right hand on my left thigh, to annoy me. Liz is my decadent sib: the wild one, the one who has danced topless, shot heroin, sucked cock for money, starred in at least two low-budget neighborhood-made porno films. She likes to act like she’s coming on to me, but it’s a big-sister tease and no other kind of tease at all. She isn’t feeling well. In the picture she is dressed demurely, in jeans, turtleneck, socks. Her hair is very short and she is so thin that she reminds me of a young Mia Farrow.

Behind the couch, left to right and all brown-haired, are my father, Ned, Emily, and Steve. Dad looks unsettled, like he’s bothered about something, but it’s really just the fact that he got confused setting the timer and almost missed getting in place before the camera shutter clicked. He’s leaning a little over Laney and Mom, looking straight forward.

Ned’s next to him, as handsome and upstanding as ever. Ned is tall and dark and regular-featured. He is fastidious and exacting. He is very kind and caring. I’m certain he’s gay but he doesn’t seem to know it yet. He’s still dating girls, unsuccessfully. I don’t think he’s gone with anyone longer than two weeks.

I will not comment about Emily except to say that she looks beautiful in the picture and that it bothers me to see Steve’s hand on her neck like that. It seems like he is always touching her. I don’t like imagining them at it. Steve is dark-haired and handsome but he has a tendency to pudginess which will certainly mature into fat. I can easily envision him portly, with a perpetual cigar and perhaps gout.

Everyone in the picture is tall, except my mother. My blonde sisters measure over five and a half feet, and Emily is five nine. No one in the picture is fat, except my mother and, potentially, Steve.

I remember how after we took the picture we had desserts. Mom had made the usual pumpkin and mincemeat pies. Watching the bronze-orange pumpkin meat tremble on the plate, waiting satin glossy for its dollop of thick whipped cream, I tried to resume the discussion. I wanted to tell them that, sure, parallel lines meet at infinity. That’s also where Zeno’s paradox is true. At infinity. In the immaterial world. But as soon as the world becomes material (energy converting to matter to perceive itself), then dimension rears its measurable self. The material world is by definition gross, sloppy, imperfect.

I wanted to tell them, but they would not listen to me. Everyone except Laney ate pumpkin pie with whipped cream. Even I pushed the side of my fork into dense white fluff, smooth golden mousse, firm floury crust while I gazed at my family and tried, I don’t know why, to memorize the way they looked.

There’s physical description lacking. If this isn’t to be a movie then it better flesh with words. And I’ve probably got the best perspective for it.

I’m the point at infinity. It all orients to me. I’m the baby.

Once upon a time there were tribes or at least extended families. Each member wasn’t so rare and precious and loaded as today. Especially the baby…everybody else’s baby…the limit of the family wisdom.

I’m the focus at infinity. When you look at a picture, I’m the implied point toward which everything aims, the place where parallel lines like railroad tracks meet. Usually you look at a picture from outside, and you can see me suggested by everything. Imagine a view described from where I am. My vision is wide-angle, my lens telephoto.

I can see my great-great grandparents’ fingertips, my great-grandparents’ elbows, my grandparents’ noses. My parents and my older siblings and all their accoutrements weave in my immediate vision like dancers around a Maypole, like maggots on a turkey neck.

My folks are in their 50s now, but I can see them younger; all the slides and snapshots (tucked into odd white corners in scrapbooks or scabbed on their backs with the clots of old paste) have informed me, as well as the oral histories. My mother was some kind of beauty but to me my father is the one with the looks.

I’m not gay. I don’t find men more attractive than women. But I have an honest eye, and my father had classic handsome features and posture, while my mother offered little beyond cute roundness. She was a platinum Betty Boop, Dagwood’s Blondie, Mattel’s Barbie. I prefer dark hair, or something more sultry.

Mom was round-eyed, round-faced, curly-haired, buxom, slim-wasted. Her eyes are blue, her hair was originally pale blonde, her complexion was once small-pored. I understand she had a ready laugh; I’m sure she was bubbly. Based on what my sisters have told me, she was probably a stick in bed.

My father was tall, slim, straight-backed, with thick dark hair, hazel eyes, and large features like Nicholas Cage. His olive skin has aged better than Mom’s.

Now she’s fat. Her breasts enter the room before the rest of her and she has this unattractive habit of standing with her arms crossed above them, like they’re a shelf. When she sits they sag to where her waistline must be under her polyester tunic top.

She colors her hair herself, and it’s now thinning and strawlike. But she still has a good laugh. She’s a creative worrier. She’s easy to bait and nag. She’s a good woman and she’s boring.

Dad’s actually handsome. He stands up straight and he’s dignified about his hair: no combover. His face is getting a little craggy as he wrinkles. He exercises every day so he’s still fit. I have no way of knowing this, but I wouldn’t be surprised if old Dad is good in bed.

He’s romantic. Occasionally brilliant, he was apparently confused by an early exposure to Wordsworth and Blake and the influence of a military father (his dad was a real tyrant), and he now has strongly-held and possibly pre-verbal confusions about this country’s foreign policy. He can be repetitive and tiresome, but he’s passionate enough to be interesting.

I’m not sure why they got married. Then again, I have trouble seeing the marriage motivation in anyone; as much as I have loved and watched Emily I still don’t understand why she had to marry Steve.

I’m not sure why my folks got married but it probably had something to do with family. Parents and kids. There would have been pressure to marry instead of cohabitate, and then came us. Shit: five of us…what were they thinking?

My mother has two brothers and Dad has three older sisters, so there are a lot of cousins, but it’s mostly my siblings I see when I look around.

The twins are 27 and they’re dark-haired like Dad. They are fraternal of course, being of different gender, but they look as similar as a brother and sister can. Thick-haired, hazel-eyed, tall and graceful. Emily is beautiful. Ned is attractive.

My other two sisters and I take after our mother. We’re blonde and blue-eyed and we have to be careful not to appear cute.

Liz is 24 and has had a rebellious wild unhealthy life. She has many stories. She has AIDS. She’s in remission right now, very medicated, very thin.

Laney is 22 and a rabid ecologist. She used to be a selfish shellfish vegetarian and now she’s a devout vegan. She succeeds at looking so odd she’s unattractive. We’re closest in age and best understand one another.

I’m 19. My full name is Eric Gorman Essex, but I go by Rick. I’m mostly vegetarian but there’s violence in me. Six years ago I brought a gun to school and shot two schoolmates and a teacher. I wasn’t actually trying to kill them; I was trying to make the situation so bad that I’d kill myself.

Since then I’ve had a lot of therapy. I’ve learned to control myself. But I still hear the urge to violence in me. Mostly now it’s around sex. I have to allieve myself at least twice a day. Myself. I’m not sexually active. Good thing, too. Because there’s no one I want more than my sister Emily.

Got your attention? It gets mine. I find my other sisters unattractive. Oh, I know they’re goodlooking enough; they’re blonde and blue-eyed and young and not deformed. But I’ve always been put off by their feet, repelled by the way Laney tends to spit when she’s talking with excitement, disgusted by Liz’s fingernail-chewing. I wonder, even, if these minute irritations are Nature’s way of avoiding incest? I mean, I’m virile and motivated lately, and I do not want these siblings.

But Emily’s different. She and Ned are so much older that I didn’t grow up with them. Familiar strangers. And she’s so pretty. Her brown hair is glossy like satin ribbons. Her eyes are sometimes green, sometimes brown, always warm. She has a grin that looks like it’s going to go on forever, past the edges of her smooth cheeks, past the frame of my vision, splitting the world laterally to let in nothing but good humor. Her skin feels like silk. Her earlobes are exquisite. I can’t help it. I can’t keep her out of my imagination when I love myself.

Is she coming alive yet? I can see her in my head but I don’t know if she’s vivid on this page. Cancer survivors say you can’t know what it’s like unless you’ve been there. I guess all survivors claim that. But it can’t be true, or there’s no point in writing. I have to believe life’s describable. I’ll try some more.

Lulu knew she was an endorphin addict. She could remember the delicious sensation of collapsing on her bed after an all-day walk with her high-school best friend. Twelve hours of sauntering and striding, snacking on fresh rolls and fruit from the grocery stores they passed, discussing their schoolmates, explaining the cosmos, and they would return to her house with legs heavy as sandbags. They fell backwards onto her twin bed and it seemed that their bodies would continue to sink into the mattress, endlessly heavy at rest. Full-on gravity.

She recollected her three post-partum hours. With each birth she’d had that amazing time right afterwards, when her traumatized body anesthetized itself, and cold apple juice tasted better than divine nectar. Apple juice. Sweet, piss-colored child’s-drink, and it was finer than the best champagne. That was endorphins.

But shit: nine months of pregnancy (not to mention a lifetime of rearing/loving) is a big price to pay for an hour of incredible high. Twelve hours of walking is hard to arrange. Lulu once met a man who was amazingly well-preserved for his age. He was seventy-five when she knew Jim and he comported himself like a forty year old. She learned his secret, because he became the lover of a good friend of hers. Jim rose each morning at 5:30, and did two full hours of stretching before anything else. Those two hours set him up for the next fourteen: he could move like a man half his age. That was two hours a day, to achieve flexibility. It probably would take six hours a day for happiness.

She didn’t have six spare hours. She could steal a bit more from sleep, but two hours a day for exercise-type activities was her limit. She was almost-happy, almost-crazy, and motivated to get more.

Lulu didn’t want to win the lottery. She never dreamt of inheriting wealth. The truth is, when she imagined abundance she got nervous. It didn’t take much before she was envisioning herself in a pressure-cooker of philanthropy – if she had wealth she’d have to give some of it away. So a lot of money would mean a lot of giving. She’d hate to spend her life at that. Nah: she liked to earn money; she wanted to get high and laugh.

She didn’t want to live forever. Oh she appreciated existence (what were the odds, after all?) and she’d managed to mostly enjoy her life so far, but it was easy for her to imagine growing weary of it. She’d had moments of that already. And with every friend who succumbed to cancer, Lulu better understood the terrible chaos of immortality: that awful disorganized fecundity, the jungle-rot mutation that never dies… She did not want to live forever, but she wanted to select words to tell stories that would live longer than she.

And she certainly wasn’t looking for love&marriage. Not any more. She lusted for connection (of course), but she had come to see capital-L love with its adjunct capital-M marriage as a barrier to that connection. The marriage team was bound to be an advantage in a struggle for survival but in Lulu’s eyes, around Lulu’s life and among her acquaintances, the institution seemed to hold each member back. The arrangement always required some aspect of arrested development or deceit on the part of the participants, or else it evolved without control and into risk.

It seemed increasingly obvious to her that love&marriage was not making the world go ‘round. Laughter was. Thousands of saints and philosophers have tried to explain God in terms of love, and have foundered in the shoals of misfortune and injustice. The good die young. Nice guys finish last. You need the patience of Job (to even read the story of Job!). Those things made no sense, without carrying the majesty of mystery. But if you view God as a standup comic, smiting nomads with hemorrhoids and consumers with pollution, playing death as sarcasm and tragedy as trick endings, if you see yourself as created in God’s image in that you can see yourself, and laugh, then the cosmos begins to make sense.

Lulu’s fifty-second birthday was approaching when she first organized these ideas. She celebrated by taking on a bit of anorexia nervosa. Within a month she was ingesting less than eight hundred calories a day. Nothing too drastic, but enough to promote a little endorphin release. Which, when added to the gain from two hours of exercise, and mixed in with regular pot and occasional Vicodin and sometimes even sex, made for a gratifying maturity. She might just write a book.