Sputterpub's Blog

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.

Just because the planet was doomed didn’t mean life was bad. There were still a few centuries of degeneration to enjoy, and the adults in charge, the children of the baby boomers, were accustomed to issues of extinction.

Naturally they strove to record their culture. Every civilization must, from the feudal Vikings through the landed English gentry to the rambunctious children of the colonists.
Lulu was among the striving recorders. Her full name was Lourdes, which was too Catholic for her, but Lulu led people to expect someone dippy. No matter: she liked to destroy expectations.

She kept searching for higher wisdom. Drugs no longer had much effect. She meditated and exercised and lately she seldom ate. Occasionally she engaged in rampant sex. Anything to lose herself, to plunge into the currents of alteration.

She watched her cohorts hurrying to preserve what they valued – filling time capsules with popular mementos – and it cast the lost wisdom of the ages in a harsh light for her. Knowing how little of worth was contained in the whole Library of Congress, she concluded that not much of actual value could have been lost when the library at Alexandria burned. Glimmers of astrology. Catalogues of ritual. Nothing any wiser or truer than the stuff her own age agreed to esteem. Marketing material.

The 21st century didn’t even guarantee a woman’s right to choose! Christianity was still promoted as a means to spiritual salvation, competing with equally primitive other world views. The touchstones of the culture continued to be wealth dreams, itches for immortality, and the goal of love&marriage.

If Lulu were filling a capsule of her particular life and times she wouldn’t have included those ideas. She didn’t long for treasure, endless life, true love. She’d pick other items.

She looked then at her slim wrists and scarred legs, viewed turning gingko leaves through the down on her summer-mottled forearms. The leaves appeared like folded table grapes, pale green fading to lemon. Fallen liquidambar leaves, damply magenta, mounded in the gutters beneath her feet. It was too cold for bare legs. She went inside and waited for night.

Lulu walked later and wished she had a dog. The evening was misty with ground fog reaching up to a quarter moon that glowed like a pale lamp behind a Vaselined lens. She saw a plane rise in front of the moon, looping a big nighttime lasso of pearly fog. She squinted her eyes and the streetlights sparkled like fake gems. Her shoes crunched on shards of safety glass from unlucky autos.

She wanted not money but a dog. Not endless life but a little more health. Neither love nor marriage, but perfect words. Exquisitely appropriate syllables, slung like chains of sweat around her spinning self.

She wanted a cigarette.

She wandered another block and a half, searching out dry butts in the semi-darkness. She pocketed enough for a good dose of nicotine and headed back to her little place, to her word-processor, her bathroom, her phone. She smoked and she slept.

And woke to a feeling of sadness, hours before dawn. She tried to write but no words came. She tried to sleep but she was too wakeful. She did yoga. For three hours she put her body into poses, entranced herself. It worked.

Sometimes Lulu cut herself, to bring her pain to the surface. She never marked a part that would show; she tended to slice her inner thigh. The blade was very sharp; at first there was no sign, no pain. A quick white incision that only revealed itself as the blood welled up and streamed thinly from it. A cool numbness at first, then a sting and finally, lovingly, a throb.

In similar fashion, those hours of yoga pulled Lulu away from herself. She passed through muscle control and near numbness to a form of relaxed trance. She became pleasantly tired, and she felt clean and empty. Like when she used to play for hours in a neighbor’s pool, during the lazy southern California days when she was ten or twelve, cannonballing into the deep end, swimming all the long way underwater, without a breath, surfacing with water streaming down her back and snot running from her nose. She stayed in the water till some grownup made her come out for awhile, noticing her blue lips and white fingertips, tossing a towel to her and tsking at her while she stamped foot to foot, teeth chattering, nagging to swim some more, and then, finally, gracelessly, accepting the mandatory break, receiving the frozen Koolaid popsicle, savoring the clean feeling inside her belly and outside her skin.

After three hours of yoga, she felt good.

It isn’t pretty, acknowledging an old cow elephant, but there’s huge relief when it’s over. By the time Sandy confronts Jill, a week has passed and the matter has gone from shades of elephant gray to crisp black-and-white. She knows they can’t continue without a clean conversation.

“It’s time, Jill,” Sandy begins. “We have to clear the air about Rick. You know I’ve been seeing him again, and I know you don’t want to hear about it, and I’m confused about what the rules are here.” She pauses too briefly so Jill doesn’t talk in, and then Sandy rushes on. “It’s only in the last year I’ve realized that back when it first started, you weren’t done with Rick even though you told me you were. But now I’m hearing that you lied about me to Rick five years ago.”

“Lied?” Jill whisper-croaks the word as a question. Her face pales.

“Gaah! There’s so much murk around here…” Sandy moves her arms back and forth and looks around like she’s overwhelmed. “Look: one question. Why don’t you want me to spend time with Rick now?”

“It’s not about you spending time with Rick. Go ahead. All you want. I just don’t want to be included. And I’m not particularly interested in hearing about it.”

“There’s something going on that I don’t understand, Jill. Please explain it to me.”

Jill is silent for a moment. “Shit, San,” she says then. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry.”

“I did lie five years ago. I led Rick to believe that you and Keith were still together. More than that: I said you were happy.

“I told myself I did it because it was best for you. But I know now I was still jealous. I knew I shouldn’t but I still loved him back when you took him. Five years ago I was over it, but I didn’t want you to have him. I mean, I couldn’t imagine me visiting the two of you as a couple: no way. So I told him you were married and happy. And then I watched him act regretful that he wasn’t Keith, heard him talk about how he wished he’d left Peggy for you. Boy did I feel boxed in. I wanted so badly to say, ‘Hold on, asshole. Get a clue. She and Keith were torn apart by guilt at what they’d done to their first spouses. As you would have been. Idiot.’ But of course I couldn’t say that without telling him the truth, so I just had to swallow it.”

Sandy clears her throat and acts like she wants to say something, but Jill rolls over that. “So guess how I felt when you found each other again anyway? There I’d gone to all that trouble, lying and murking myself. I couldn’t stop it from happening. But I didn’t have to like it. That’s why I now object, or refuse, or act uninterested. The whole subject makes me feel ashamed.”

“Sweetheart, it’s okay.”

Jill stops talking, looks at Sandy.

“It was the wrong thing to do and don’t ever do it again, but it’s all right. Just as well he didn’t know. Rick and I would have been a mistake. Mostly, it’s great to be able to get this out.”

Jill and Sandy go back thirty years but they aren’t big huggers. Now they rise simultaneously and move into each other’s arms. The elephant moves as well. Jill and Sandy get a little weepy, feel a big catharsis. Without even a creak of the old oak floor, the elephant leaves the room.

***

Sandy brought in coffee for her and Chris the following afternoon. They brewed good stuff in the lab but appreciated the occasional addition of steamed milk and spice dusting. The current helmet was a thicker design than the last one they tested, but with a less regular shape. They stirred foam for a minute.

“I saw Rick last week,” Sandy started. “We had a fine time but it’s no grand passion. He’s getting romantic/corny in his dotage. Talking about the sum being greater than the parts. Shit, he’s about this close…” and she held her right hand up between them, thumb and forefinger about two inches apart, “to buying us matching leisure suits.”

Chris smiled below a milk mustache. “That’s not okay. You may have to end the relationship right now.”

“It’s crazy, but I’m more interested in how my friendship with Jill is affected than anything about actual Rick. I don’t want him, but I sure want to figure out what happened with her.”

They attached strain gauges to skulls for a few silent minutes. Walking to the trigger, Chris then said, “Go for it. You and Jill have been through so much and you’ve always found your way back to each other. Talk to her.”

“Oh I did.” And Sandy told all. “We cleared the air but I didn’t achieve clarity.”

Chris fired at the helmeted skulls. “Maybe the clue is ‘shame.’ Jill used the word herself. It sounds like she might have unacknowledged shame about her own early promiscuity. You know? Apparently there were repercussions.”

Sandy looked up with awe. She wondered how many roles Chris could fill in her future. “Well at least we made the elephant walk.”

They moved together to examine the targets.

“Oh honey,” Chris concluded, “there will always be elephants. The floor may crack, but I think your foundation can bear the stress. Like this helmet.”

Two days later, Rick and Sandy spent a rare hour in post-coital conversation. Usually they had no time; at fifty-nine Rick was finally uxorious, home by seven most nights.

Usually they had no place; Rick wasn’t rich and Sandy still had her daughters. But a rare window of opportunity had opened that afternoon, when the twins left town for a junior statesman conference and Rick and Sandy could both get away from work. They met and chatted over a couple of cocktails, grew warm toward each other, drove to her place. He kissed her hand, they worked elaborately on each other’s mouth, and then he ran his hands and mouth well but too quickly down her body, penetrated her well (at his age!) but too quickly (better than the reverse problem!), and gasped moaning into her ear.

Sandy was disappointed; it was better than nothing. Except for her first time, when it was worse than nothing, that’s how sex usually seemed to her. Actually, better than nothing was how it seemed to usually be for most folks, according to Sandy’s informal, unscientific, but consistent survey.

They relaxed under her down comforter, she in his boxers and he in his T-shirt. Rick kissed her shoulder and asked, “Do you know how much I like you?” He took Sandy’s hand in his before she phrased any answer. “I really really like you, and I always have.” Sandy considered how youthful he sounded – “like” – and how in his case “like” was probably a cleaner more descriptive word than “love.”

“You know, we’re soul mates.”

“What?!” That phrase was completely untypical of Rick. “Soul mates?”

“Well… yeah.” He grinned. “I don’t mean it in any sappy way. It’s just that you always said the things that made me feel best about myself. Still do. You make me happy. I think you understand me.” He bent his face to hers and nibbled her lower lip. “You may not agree, but I know I understand you.”

His ardor alarmed her. “Yeah?” she blurted. “If you’re so wise then explain to me why Jill is still so hostile about us?” She spat a little with her emphatic “still;” quickly she wiped his cheek with her forefinger.

“I’m not even sure about what set her off in the first place. I never understood her initial anger unless she still thought she and I had something, which is kind of flattering to me and all, but hardly based on reality if I remember correctly. I mean she was someone I fucked, but I was real restless then and did every woman I could. And I hate to tell you this, but your friend Jill was doing the same thing from a female perspective. Of my whole crowd only Bentley got turned down…and shit: I remember we all admired him for being honest about that, instead of admiring her for her chastity.”

“Hey! Talk about your double stand…” Rick interrupted her with a wrestle. “Shut up, woman,” he murmured when he had her confined against him. “I don’t often talk like this. Let me.”

“But I was sleeping around then too.”

He paused at that and thought. “Maybe. But you weren’t doing it all in the same group of guys. She asked for the reputation she got among us. Which wasn’t disrespectful, not really. But it was kind of humorous…”

Rick shifted and propped himself up on an elbow. “Anyway, what I do remember happened about five years ago. I ran into Jill and of course I asked about you. She told me you were still happily married to Keith.”

“Five years ago? I’ve been single for ten…”

“Yeah. Let me put it this way. I’m not sure what exactly I asked and she answered, but I’m pretty good at getting information, and I came away from that conversation with the distinct impression – no: knowledge – that you were still married to your second husband and very happily so.

“I remember saying to Jill: ‘Well, shit. Great. Now I know we could have been happy if I’d left Peggy then…’ and she got a funny look on her face but didn’t respond.

“So I don’t get her hostility, no. But that facial expression confirmed it. Whatever problem Jill has with us is more enduring than most relationships.” Sardonic grin.

Sandy flashed with anger at her friend, and immediately warmed as she realized how dreadful it would be to have married Rick. Inadvertently spared by her best friend’s calumny? Her emotions were powerful and confused. She tenderly squeezed Rick’s rubbery-cool penis while she stretched to fit her lips into his. Their goodnight hug was sincere.

There’s an elephant in the living room. Invisible to all except Sandy and Jill, a big old pachyderm is standing on the golden oak floor.

It’s a lonely cow elephant. She’s been awaiting acknowledgment for twenty slow years. She made a hairline crack in the foundation when she first stepped into the room, and though she hasn’t moved since then the crack slowly (undramatically) grew.

Lately Sandy has begun to talk to Chris about it. She did so partly in an attempt to defuse the weird sexual tension in their ambiguous friendship; she figured talking about her sex life could demystify the energy between them. But mostly she talked to Chris because the elephant began to shift her weight from leg to ponderous leg, enlarging the crack and demanding attention. Some sort of collapse seemed imminent, and Jill wasn’t talking.

“The story goes back twenty years,” Sandy explained in the lab one afternoon. Their work at UC is in vibration engineering, and they were reviewing the results of safety helmet tests. Reading strain gauges that were affixed to tiny human skulls that came from India, from small doomed adults.

She walked to the stainless steel counter and poured mugs of coffee. “Jill and I were in our late 20s and we failed at sharing a lover. Well, not quite,” she smiled the words, “but that was a grabber topic sentence, wasn’t it?”

Chris looked sideways at her and then back at the lab bench. They were trying to duplicate the results of one experiment, and attaching the tiny oblong gauges to the skulls was a delicate procedure. “I’m listening.”

Sandy continued. “Remember: it was that brief period of time between the advent of the pill and the outbreak of AIDS; at least on this coast, free sex wasn’t just a motto.

“Jill was married and divorced already, but I was still with my first husband. She had a lot of lovers, mostly married men, and I was stuck with boring old Jeff. Adam was eighteen months old and I felt trapped and bleak. I stepped out.” She delivered the coffee and spoke while Chris sipped. “Trouble was: I picked an ex of Jill’s to step out with.

“I thought I cleared it with both of them before I started.” She watched Chris attach the last strain gauge, strap the helmet onto the skull, and move to the gun that would send the shock at that puny cranium. “I remember she told me Rick and she were done before I met him. And I asked her that night, and she reassured me they were over.

“It was all confusing and kind of silly. There could be nothing significant about a relationship with Rick; he was married and insincere and lots of fun. I guess I justified my own involvement with him by saying that I really needed it right then, and that it leveled the playing field with both of us being married and parents and all. Seems a little facile, now.” Sandy smiled, slightly but sheepishly, into her coffee.

Chris checked the aim on the long shock gun.

“So anyway, Rick and I had an affair. It lasted almost two years. Jill acted pissed about it in the beginning, and disinterested in it as it continued, but I didn’t stop. I guess I was too needy, too enamored, too selfish throughout. I guess.” Sandy turned to the counter behind her and edged her hip up on a stool while setting her coffee mug aside. Chris pulled the gun lever, there was a percussive pop, and the helmet moved. Sandy got off the stool and both walked toward the skull.

“He lost interest after a couple of years. I was devastated. Bereft and lonely. I couldn’t talk about my loss with Jill, and my husband certainly didn’t want to hear about it. I normally ventilate all over the place and there was nowhere to go with this. It hurt a lot.

“And now,” Sandy concluded, as they reached the skull and Chris began to remove the helmet, “now twenty years later Rick has come back into my life, on a much less passionate basis, and the trouble with Jill is happening again. She doesn’t want to see us together. She doesn’t want to hear about him from me. After all this time. I don’t get it.”

“And no one should get this helmet either,” Chris said. “Look at that,” pointing to a visible crack in the skull. “This is a lousy helmet.”

Sandy had to agree.

Laura found Bonita exotic but Nancy kind of liked Chula Vista. Laura’s house was close to the school and felt almost metropolitan with traffic. Her brothers were younger and didn’t bait them like David did. Her parents rarely fought. But the girls agreed in preferring to have their overnights at Nancy’s.

There were several advantages. Her bedroom was isolated so they were unlikely to be disturbed by any brother or parent. Among other things they practiced kissing in there, pressing their mouths together like it looked in the movies, pushing their bodies against one another, eventually daring to touch tongues. (It wasn’t that they were homosexual, they understood; it was just that they wanted to be good at making out when the time came, and they could only go so far with their own pillows and forearms (in fact, wet kissing was icky-weird, like that trick when they put their index fingers together and then stroked the resulting double digit: they each perceived the other’s flesh but it felt dead.))

Then too, overnights always meant sneaking out, and the sneakout environment was vastly superior in Nancy’s territory. No traffic. Little light. Better cigarettes to swipe. Vodka less measured than the liquor in Laura’s parents’ cabinet.

They could venture into the cemetery at night, full or new moon, egged on by the vodka and also by taunts from bullying David and his friends, shrieking when discovered by the older boys, haunted and then tackled and finally wrestling for fun. They were nasty girls, and they never noticed that the boys were angling for them even more than they for the boys. Nancy was bothered by her own smell after a long tussle with David’s friend Gary. Laura first knew ambivalence when she started to carry erotic mental images of David along with clear recollections of his obnoxiousness as Nancy’s brother.

They could even edge out to the golf course and sometimes encounter boys from their own school, Ron and Doug who were almost popular and took golf seriously but also liked mischief, who would chase them and flirt a little. Once they found a herd of unharnessed horses there, nocturnal escapees from the adjacent livery stables.

They knew the animals. Although Nancy always rode Polopony, Laura took lessons at the stables, backbending in the saddle, posting to the trot, rocking to the canter. She got to know the horses by name and temperament and she had introduced them to Nancy when they hung out there. Boys learned how to ride but liked guns more than horses, and they never knew the animals as pets. Boys weren’t found much at the stables, but the love of horses brought Nancy and Laura there anyway.

Before the loose horses drew other adventurers, Nancy and Laura had sized up the herd. Deliberately then, each took the base of a coarse mane in her left hand, each swung her body, right leg leading, onto a broad back. Dingo was a sweet red quarterhorse, soft-mouthed and docile under Nancy. Bella was a beautiful bay mare, a little more spirited but a particular friend of Laura’s.

That’s when David and Gary arrived. They saw the girls mount the bare horses: momentary nymphs in the moonlight. Snorting they ran to ride as well, and Laura couldn’t resist. She didn’t have to work very hard to direct them toward dappled gray Casper and palomino Wasp. Ron and Doug got there in time to compound the humiliation, as Casper bucked off Gary’s mounting attempts. Wasp stood at first and then darted into a run and sudden halt, which threw David into the sand. Gary sprained an ankle. David broke his arm.

When the kids grew near driving age, or tall enough to see enough through the windshield, they hijacked the vehicles their parents didn’t care much about, and their playgrounds expanded to the fields and the unenforced roadways. Gary’s father owned a surplus Army weapons carrier, with a dozen forward gears and as many for reverse, and sometimes they mucked about in the fallow alfalfa fields, on that. Or they unilaterally borrowed Doug’s father’s Impala or Nancy’s and David’s dad’s old Caddy, and they took it up the straightaway beyond the country club to see what the car could do. The Impala shuddered at 105 but the Cadillac was good all the way up its speedometer.

They nearly crashed that car. They had it out trying for 120 when a small group of horses appeared on the verge of the dark county road. David twisted the steering wheel and put the car into a 720 degree skid. He held onto the wheel like it was the helm of a sloop at storm; the passengers were pressed against the starboard side of the car. The Caddie didn’t roll, but it stopped spinning six inches away from a big tree.

That evening, awash in goofball emotional storms of adrenaline high and sobering fear, was the last time they were nasty. They split up soon after – Laura to the university and David to the college, Gary to the 2-year community school and Nancy into a dull marriage – and learned to describe themselves with other adjectives. Each agreed it was a miracle most teenagers survive to adulthood.