Sputterpub's Blog

Your thoughts almost lulled you to inattention, but you were walking your dog then, and you’re programmed to look around when she squats. Where you live, failure to scoop the poop is as anti-social as vandalism; you’re sensitive to the looks of other people like a smoker is to their coughs. So when your retriever pushed her crotch toward the parkway grass, you took note of the white Saab sedan that was slowly moving up the street. You checked out the shape of your pet’s tail and determined she was only going to pee even as you observed that the car had little wipers for its headlights and a light-haired woman driver. Your dog lifted her rump again and turned to continue the walk as the car passed you.

You don’t often see a white Saab. Maybe they’re common around Sweden, but you’ve never noticed one before. That morning, which was yesterday, you saw one three times. The same one.

You’d only passed two houses when the white Saab came down the street the other way. It moved in your direction that time, so you could see the driver more clearly, through the side window. The hair was almost white. The face was middle-aged. The car moved at only a few miles an hour. You began to wonder what it was doing there.

You watched the back of the car as it pulled slightly ahead of you. There were no For Sale signs on the street. It was Wednesday, which was never a day for a realtor open house…
The driver of the white Saab got almost to the corner and made a three-point turnaround in a driveway. For at least a third time, she cruised the silent street.

You walked on and you wondered what the woman in the white Saab was doing. It occurred to you that if the driver were a man, you might think he was casing the neighborhood. Up to no good. Especially if he were black. Or Latino. Or Arabic. Especially if he appeared under 30. For that matter, you might even suspect nefarious behavior of a woman, if she were young and of color…

That stopped you, literally, in your tracks. Your dog looked back at you curiously as the leash went taut. You had been engaged in racial profiling! It appeared that this was not okay. So you tried to suspect the Saab driver of unsociable intent. And you just couldn’t. She looked too normal. Unthreatening.

You spent a bit of time trying to come up with a reason for the Saab driver’s cruising. You used up some moments admitting your own racism, admiring your quick admission, attempting to flush it, and accepting its permanent but evolving presence. You resolved to be more conscious, of your surroundings and of your assumptions. You hoped you’d try to be less fearful.

You got to the bottom of the sloping street and turned left for home. You never saw the driver speed up and away.

You might have asked her what she was doing there, but her windows were up and her attention wasn’t on you. You might have called the police and reported a strange vehicle repeatedly cruising the residential block. But you would have felt foolish and conspicuous if you acted. And the truth is, the driver wouldn’t have welcomed your questions and the police wouldn’t have welcomed your report.

It happened yesterday but it might as well have occurred a thousand years ago, for all the answers you think you’ll get about it. Consider:

Maybe the driver had inside information about the house four in from the corner on the west side, the one that’s been recently painted and hurriedly landscaped: that it’s going on the market, so she was previewing its exterior.

Maybe she used to live in that derelict place two down from the northeast corner, and she’s revisiting the site of her disastrous second marriage and the Meyer lemon tree she planted.
Perhaps she was early for an appointment, and filled time by checking out the persistent rattle she hears when she drives her relatively new car at low speeds.

Maybe she’s new to driving, and what you saw was just practice.

If there were a reference book about people, you could look her up. Then you’d learn she was casing the neighborhood. Her grown son works in the delivery department for the newspaper, and he lets her know when customers request any interruption in home delivery. That accounts for the rash of recent break-ins; every one of them occurred while the residents were away on trips.

There’s always something to chew on.

You were advised to look it up and you did so in the dining room. In a real book called a dictionary. A literal weighty tome. It had a picture you could examine while you recited the names: rumen, reticulum, omasum, abomasum.

You don’t like to look things up. You appreciate new information, but you’ve always found reference books uninviting. So heavy. Not built to be hand-held or lap-mounted, let alone folded back on itself, paperback cover curling around a glued spine. Dictionaries and encyclopedias are always hardbound and table-needy. They want to be propped open on bookstands. No one ever reads them on the bus.

When you were young, your father always made you look words up in the dictionary. He’d use one, you’d ask its meaning, and he’d give you that face so you knew what he was going to say even before he said it. You’d always flounce off to the family room, somewhat exasperated but acting it more than you felt, pull down heavy Volume I or II, depending on whether the word started with A – Mi or Mn – Z, and find it, its derivation and its meaning. You didn’t like the exercise, but the alternative was not knowing what your father’s word meant, and that was worse than looking up the word. Besides, your dad was fair enough to clue you if the spelling was aberrant, like when he told you “psychology” started with a “p” (unlike your friend Karen’s older sister, who called you whores on purpose to make you suffer its spelling).

The fact is, you think the dictionary ought to be broken down into smaller parts. Make it more hand-friendly. Turn it into ten or twelve slim volumes, softcover even, and people will begin to carry them around and browse through them. Those big old dictionaries are holdovers from the days of large scrolls, and the whole subject needs reconsideration.

For that matter, you think we should eliminate all thick paperback books. They make no sense. The whole reason to do paperback is to make the thing portable, and a one-volume Gone with the Wind or War and Peace is completely unwieldy. Break them up into one- or two-inch books!

But this isn’t rumination. Ruminations don’t carry exclamation marks…

You looked up “rumination” and were directly led to “ruminant,” and there was an illustration of a four-chambered digestive system. Rumen, reticulum, omasum, abomasum.

The dictionary informed you that a ruminant’s stomach has four parts. An animal like a cow takes in grass unchewed, sends it to the rumen or reticulum for a little processing, and then regurgitates it back up into the mouth. There it’s chewed (masticated, really) with saliva, and then it proceeds back down to the omasum and abomasum, the stomach parts that are more like people’s, before entering the intestines on the way to make manure. You did a little more research, and learned that cows can’t even chew the grass; they lack upper teeth, so they tear and scoop the forage into their mouths and down to their rumen, and then they mash the ensuing cud against their ridgy upper gums.

It occurred to you then, that people don’t really ruminate. Cows ruminate for people, turning grass into nourishment. Human rumination is done second-hand, like these words.

It later occurred to you that the cud must taste good to the cow. It can’t be like chewing human vomit, or the cow wouldn’t do it. And according to what you read, the cow spends most of her day at it: pulling grass for six hours, and chewing cud for eight. The process must be deeply satisfying, fundamental, anesthetic, rhythmic:

Hum thunder
Shine lightning
And rain
On my head
Saliva
Is butter
And forage
Is bread

No matter
The weather
I chew
And digest
No question
I answer
I couldn’t
Care less

Linda thought she had extensive language skills, but she felt humbled when she started conversing with John. The man had a doctorate in English literature, a career in law, a background rich in Latin and rooted in Catholicism. He knew how to pronounce desultory. He never confused affect with effect. She learned from him.

She also resented. John couldn’t resist correcting when Linda misspoke. Sometimes she used the wrong pronoun after a preposition. Linda would never say “John and me went to the store,” but John made her realize that she did pronounce phrases like “I wonder what the situation will be with Susan and I.”

Of course that’s incorrect. One would never say “come along with I.” She’d been taught before she was ten to play the phrase without the other name – just with me or I – to let her ear show her the correct form of the pronoun.

But apparently she forgot that in conversation. Until John mentioned it. At first she appreciated the correction, kind of. She wanted to get it right. But it was annoying too. She wished John would just smile and indulge her error. She wondered if the correcting was some compulsion of his. After all, he had been a teacher before he turned to law.

Linda and John were not a couple. Each had considered that, but at different times. And the truth is, John wasn’t lusty enough and Linda wasn’t lonely enough, so after a few uncoordinated attempts at flirtation, attempts taken more to appease the friends who introduced them to one another than to explore actual romantic territory, they settled into platonic acquaintance. Each was well into middle-age, comfortable enough financially, and with loose weekend hours they could put to shared walks, meals, and cultural events. They saw one another once or twice a month.

It wasn’t sexism that led them to the activities John suggested. Linda was a home-body; when she wasn’t at work or walking to or from a meal with a friend, she was at home, reading and writing and letting the television run. John’s habits were different. He held season tickets to opera, symphony and ballet. He used his TV to run movies only; the man leased neither dish nor cable. He cooked himself full meals and sat alone at his dining room table to ingest them; Linda took her evening food off the ottoman in front of her couch, in small courses no one would mistake for a meal.

So they tended to go to cultural events for which John held tickets. Or to his house for a five course meal totally prepared by him. Where John always knew more than Linda. Where John held forth on subjects.

And truly, Linda appreciated learning from him. He didn’t turn her into a cook or even a purchaser of theatre tickets, but she knew she was acquiring knowledge about wines and sauces and productions, and she liked those acquisitions. But it irked her when he corrected her speech.

John had a sad final phase. Like so many aging people, he lost some of his mind. In his case the part he lost enables language.

It seemed like no big deal at first. Linda will never forget that time in Santa Fe, when John misplaced the word “usher.” “You know,” he blurted then in frustration, “the person who seats you?”

Linda noticed that. She herself sometimes thought one word and said another – heading to brush her teeth she might mumble something like “time to brush hands,” instead. That sort of mess amused her, let her realize it was nouns she and her cohort were misplacing, and nouns were the first words acquired by babies, and maybe it was a first-in-first-out kind of thing about words and the brain. So she thought little then about John’s word loss, except she saw how much it bothered him, and she wondered why he didn’t just roll with it.

A few days later their friendship shattered. They were in the car, driving to visit an acquaintance as long as they were in New Mexico, and John was demonstrating his new phone’s features to search for the address and telephone number of the residence they sought. He would try the app and then ask Linda if the answer he got was correct. She had the phone number and a sketch of a map in her purse and she repeatedly offered to retrieve the paper data, but John grew more and more pissy as he persisted in his guessing game. He became waspish. He snarled at Linda.

“Oh fuck yourself,” she blurted.

Well that was it. John tightened up immediately. As far as Linda knows, he never loosened.

Neither apologized. They completed that little trip, civilly, and they didn’t see one another after that. John kind of meant to stay in touch. But he slipped fast. Linda learned from their mutual acquaintances that the first diagnosis was acute progressive aphasia; John was losing language. By the time Linda had a twinge of desire to see him again, she didn’t know the way back. He wasn’t answering the old phone number or email address any more. Their mutual acquaintances, the couple who had often traveled with them and even been with them in New Mexico, “sided” with John, stayed friendly with him in his dotage, and protected him from stresses; they didn’t return Linda’s two calls.

It’s been four years, and Linda doesn’t know if John is in the area any more. She doesn’t even know if he’s alive. But she’s noticing something about herself that makes her think of him. Lately Linda’s attention has been grabbed when she hears certain grammatical errors. Just last week, her brother said “I wonder if anyone like her or you will notice the difference,” about his wife and a new workshop arrangement. Linda corrected him. “You mean ‘like she or you’” she said. “You’d never say ‘I wonder if her will notice,’ so you can’t say ‘I wonder if her and you will’ either.”

Linda’s brother smiled at her, but she could tell he didn’t appreciate the correction. She just couldn’t stop herself.

I had my hair cut. Ten years of old growth, swept away. I loved my dreads, but they were heavy in the heat. And I got the cue last week. I don’t want to bow to appearance, but I got the message: gray dreadlocks looked like affectation to the others. My hair’s short and clean and curling now, and my scalp feels free. I like this.

Three days have passed since the last entry, but it feels like a month in me. I’ve gone from solo saboteur to tyro-conspirator to propagandist. And I have a date with Jane. The colors today are acid-bright; the shapes are so sharp, they’re almost distorted. The world is an alien, miraculous place.

A crew of us committed miscellaneous mischief at the park Saturday night. Small rocks in accommodating hubcaps. Dilutions of paint in windshield washing liquids. If neither of those were possible, there was always the tiny message, etched with a key into the paint on a fender. We let some air out of tires. We bonded a bit. It was less focused than my old work, but it may have more future. In the course of it, Jane and I interacted some. We began to have eye contact. Even on that moonless night, I could see her eyes. I guess they’re hazel, but they looked green to me. Olive green rims, bright green inside, with a squiggle of copper running around them. Awesome eyes.

I was early to the wall today. Something about my new light head: I woke up on my own and with energy, and that put me on my bike, and that took me to the wall. Janie happened to be the next to arrive; she took off her helmet and her hair was brown. I guess the red and green were temporary and she washed them out, but all of a sudden the woman had shiny dark hair. And I had new hair too. So we laughed about that and acknowledged the coincidence, and both of us smiled a lot and acted awkward. Then Bert and Spot arrived.

Things peaked for me around 3:30 this afternoon. Joe and I were talking about Saturday’s escapades when Janie joined us. Ike arrived a minute later. As it happened, we had over half an hour before any of us got a call. We had an erudite discussion.

It began with Ike complaining about dangerous driver courtesy. He’d just seen another near accident, when a driver in the curb lane stopped inappropriately for a pedestrian. You know what I mean: the stopping broke the flow and even startled the ped, who was kind of forced by politeness to walk into the intersection, in front of the pausing car. No surprise: the inner lane driver did not stop; luckily the ped was experienced enough to anticipate the misunderstanding. But the event brought Ike’s sister’s death back for him. Five years ago she was mowed down by a guy in a black Pontiac, after she’d gotten off and then crossed in front of a bus. That’s why Ike hates cars.

“So you’re a practical autophobe,” I said as a bulb lit invisibly above me, “and I’m more theoretical.”

“Autophobe?” This came from Janie with a grin.

“It’s not accurate. It’s just what came to my muddling mind.” I hoisted myself onto the wall and held my bike with my right foot on the seat, my knee up. “Car-razed?” We laughed all around, but then I got my words together.

“When I was finishing college, over a quarter century ago, I did a thesis on misanthropy. This was the English department across the bay, so it was of course lit-based. I compared Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens to the old man on the hill in Tom Jones to Gulliver in the fourth book of the Travels. The first two were typical misanthropes; formerly wealthy and popular, they’d lost their money and their so-called friends, and they retired in bitter disappointment. Prototypical hermits. But Gulliver was a different sort. He’d never actually been injured or disappointed by his fellows. His misanthropy was objective; he became convinced of mankind’s inferiority by comparison to a better creature.

“I’m not putting you down, Ike, because what you’ve been through is awesome and I respect it. But my hatred of cars is more like Gulliver’s misanthropy. It’s not based on any bad experience I’ve had. It’s based on knowing, through history and imagination, something much much better.” At that point the bike wobbled under my foot, and it started to keel over. Janie caught it for me; as she righted the bike I put a bit more holding pressure on it with my heel, and she and I looked in each other’s face.

We all talked about subjective and objective car hatred for awhile then, until calls started coming in for deliveries. Ike and Joey got jobs first. When my radio chirped, Jane said she’d like to continue the discussion some time. It was easy for me to invite her to dinner tonight. It seemed easy for her to agree.

So I’m no longer a solo car terrorist. I don’t even think I’m part of an anti-auto conspiracy. That’s all looking like petty vandalism to me right now. I’m thinking about it, and it seems to me that the Loma Prieta quake taught us all that the only sure way to move around here is on the water. But that lesson didn’t lead to any real plans for more ferries. The stop-the-traffic bridge prank didn’t make anyone realize how vulnerable we are to these freeways and bridges. Those are much bigger deals than I can bring off, even with my new posse.

Nah.  I’m not pessimistic – in fact, with tonight to look forward to, I’m as optimistic as I’ve ever been – it’s just that I’m realizing that I can be most effective as a propagandist. I can do more, and like it more, if I write it.  Somehow I forgot about that.

I think I’m getting into this now. I just reread yesterday’s entry, and it made me want to continue writing. Old English majors don’t die?

It’s Friday. I’m naming this journal “twig,” because it’s a little log. I’m locking it with the password “woodpeck,” cause that’s the closest I can take an 8-character name to an invader of logs, and because the word reminds me of my generative organ, especially when I think of Jane.

Last night’s rain passed, so we all gathered at the wall as usual today. When I showed up, Joe and Janie were together, talking about Ike’s new tattoo. As usual, I asked her to party (I see her, I blurt); as usual, she shined me on. Joe watched with obvious contempt. I wasn’t getting anywhere, so I moved over to the chess game for a smoke.

I’d like to say that acting the sleazy old asshole is my cover, and maybe I can justify a little bit of it that way, but it’s really my social ineptitude. Fuck, I never even understood what went wrong with Jenny and me (and I really expected some kind of clarity to emerge in the last 17 years); how can I begin to figure Jane?

Joe got a call and left right away, but Janie and I, Ike and Bert, Minna, Keith and Spot hung out most of the morning. I told a few jokes (all politically un, apparently) and then retreated to watching from the wall. The sun felt great on my face. I looked at Jane from behind my shades. She was wearing super short cut-offs over biking shorts. The front pockets of the cut-offs extended below their frayed leg openings; without the bike shorts, she would have been almost exposed. It was grungy provocative. She has big legs, and the calf girth is emphasized with her red-and-green tattoos, but I like those legs. They’re sturdy, like her soul. They’d make a fine embrace around me. Anyway, I did learn that most of them were going to meet at Carlos’s place to work on their ‘zine. I figured I could be there too.

It’s 1 in the morning now. I spent from 6 till 10 with them, and then I went for a few beers with Joe. Not bad for a day’s work.

I broke the ice with anecdotes of mischief.

“It’s corny, I know,” I started, after I poured the Negro Modelo into my glass and watched it foam, gold on brown, “but I’ve always thought it’s elegant to lace the gasoline with sugar. After all, one of the big offenses is the damn internal combustion engine, which is powered off the violent combustion of fossil fuel, so gumming up the works with carbon seems like a fitting consequence. But it has been overdone.”

Joe chuckled. He sipped his Beck’s, and said, “I hate cars. No, that’s not accurate. Actually, I kind of love them. But I hate what they’re doing to us. People get in these metal things, and they stop being people. They become creatures in the metal things. And their world is filled with other creatures in the metal things, and most of them are kind of enemies. You know what I mean?” I nodded and he continued. “I’m into individualism, but cars lead to the most insidious form of isolationism…So I’m all for a bit of sabotage. But I don’t want to start sniping at them or anything.”

“No, no. Sniping is stupid. It’s uncontrolled, violent, and ineffective. The drivers aren’t the problem. They’re a symptom. I mean, their behavior is a symptom. Not a cause.”

Right then, I recollected the adventure of the car keys. Before Joe responded, I resumed. “But the most satisfying little number I ever did, I did to a driver,” I said. “I was bike commuting one spring day, and a guy who looked like a Marin commuter started bothering me. First he honked at me unnecessarily. Then he passed me fast and close, only to slow down just ahead of me before he made a right turn. I had to jump the sidewalk, narrowly missing a collision with some startled then angry pedestrians. I ended up passing him again, and again he honked! I flipped him off. He pulled ahead of me, stopped, and wanted to hassle me. Out of shape rude dude. I got to fulfill a fantasy. I reached into his crate, grabbed his keys, and took off on my bike. He actually tried to waddle after me, but he didn’t last long. I think he saw me throw his keys into the grate, but it didn’t matter. I could hear the storm creek below and knew they’d be irretrievable.”

Joe was sitting back, grinning as I narrated the story. He told me one, about kicking a big dent in the passenger-side door of an orange Toyota pickup. The driver hopped out and demanded ID and insurance, and Joey (then a freshman at Cal) got to explain that, in America, pedestrians don’t have to carry ID. Joe walked away from the guy, who was really upset because it was his brother-in-law’s truck after all, and who was helpless to follow Joe through his pedestrian escape, because the guy couldn’t abandon the truck.

About then, Janie and Spot joined us. Maybe something’s starting to happen there. I was telling Joe how my anti-car bias seems to go way back. I remember detesting my high school driver ed teacher. He was a prototypical macho military-type, cop-type asshole, but he particularly irritated me by mispronouncing the word ‘vehicle.’ The moron didn’t seem to get the silent ‘h’ concept, so he kept saying ‘vee-híc-kul,’ with the accent on the ‘híc.’ It drove me nuts.”

Jane spoke up. She looked at me with her hard face and said with her soft voice, “I don’t know, Jake. Maybe the guy had a speech impediment?” I gave her some kind of facial expression, because she said, “No wait. Listen. I had a best friend in high school, named Nora, who was the brightest girl I’d ever met. But she had a weird speech impediment; strangers often thought it was some kind of eastern accent. She couldn’t say ‘r’ unless it was at the beginning of a word or a syllable. She couldn’t even say her own name right. She’d either say ‘Naw-wa’ or ‘No-Ra.’ I remember once, she had to give a report on the Delphic oracle. I helped her prepare. We got absolutely giddy about saying ‘o-Ríc-kul’ to get in that ‘r.’

“So maybe your driver ed teacher had an impediment? Maybe ‘vehicle’ would come out of his mouth a mess if he didn’t pause and put in that ‘h.’ It’s an idea, anyway.”

I looked at her and said, “It’s a generous idea, but that asshole does not deserve your generosity, Jane. He could have just said ‘car.’”

I don’t think Jane realized until then that I know what a generous idea is. I think she looked at me like I might be human.

I don’t know where I’m going with this, talking after decades of silence. But it does feel right.

I went after my first vehicle when I was 22 years old. I was just starting to work in the City then, for the model shop of a big engineering company. I spent my time building Plexiglas miniatures of power plants and refineries. I started to pull my hair back, out of range of the power tools, and to give the machines less purchase I didn’t wear a tie. I avoided inhaling the solvents, which was a challenge in that basement shop; the ventilation system was old and not always in order. I did chew on the small plastic pieces, but I selected clean ones, and I figured plastic-chewing was no less healthy than nibbling on my own fingernails.

I was married then. Jenny and I commuted to work on bicycles. We’d start our morning in the coastal fog, layered in outerwear, and shed cover as we topped each of the hills between home and work. By the time we hit the flat financial district, we were warm, damp, and coated with vehicle soot.

One memorable Monday morning, we rode disrobing as usual until we came around the Embarcadero, and we encountered stalled traffic a few blocks from my shop. A jitney driver honked behind us, for no reason other than frustration, and the noise startled Jenny into turning toward it. The traffic ahead of her stopped at that moment, and she plowed into the back of a car. The incident infuriated me. Without thinking of consequences I grabbed the first protrusion I could find on the jitney, and I wrenched. The driver-side wiper came off in my fist.

By then Jenny had pulled her banged bike up onto the curb, so she witnessed first-hand the jitney driver’s attempt to run me down. I was just nimble enough to get me and my machine onto the sidewalk and behind a sign pole before the driver could reach me.

The asshole wouldn’t leave well enough alone. His jitney was new, his wipers hadn’t been used, and he was pissed. He insisted on involving the cop who was trying to direct traffic through the intersection a half block ahead of us.

Of course the cop had other things on his mind. A car had fallen into a sinkhole an hour earlier, and the resulting crater was cobbing the intersection and attracting rubberneckers. He had enough to do managing the grouchy traffic. He made us wait a bit, and then settled our dispute by agreeing that yeah, of course the driver could charge me with malicious mischief if he wanted, but if the driver did that, then the cop felt he’d have to advise me to counter-charge for felony assault with a deadly weapon. The driver retreated, obviously irked, while I held onto the mangled wiper. I had my first real taste of power.

I’ve told the jitney story to scads of people, at parties, meetings and parades. It gets chuckles of appreciation, even from the auto addicts. But I haven’t told anyone what that heady experience led me to.

I don’t have Jenny any more, but I still have the wiper. It moves whenever I do, so it has managed to stay put for the last eight years in my small Mission district carriage house (I like to call it that, and that’s how my landlord first described it to me over the phone, but it’s really just an apartment built above a detached garage).

I’m the lone ranger of malicious car mischief. I’ve nurtured this calling in silence for 26 years. I’m ready to take a chance on conspiracy now.

I’m not naïve. I know that the only way to keep a secret is to tell no one. I remember the old joke about the golf-addicted priest. It’s really a fable. The guy can’t resist golfing on Sunday even though it would be a Sabbath sin. He sneaks onto the links. He gets a hole in one. He can’t tell anyone. Yeah.

This is weird, writing it down. But I figure if I’m going to start talking, I ought to practice. My computer’s old, but the word processing program is usable. I can lock this file with a password; I can delete it or trash the machine if I get uncomfortable. It’s a lot less risky than taking on a cohort, and I plan to start that tomorrow.

Shit. It’s raining right now. If this goes on, I won’t even see Joe tomorrow; we show up and shelter near the Citicorp building if the weather is showery, but full rain on a Friday pretty much cancels us. I still have some good hooch. It’s time to fire up the pipe and catch The Three Stooges on the Family channel.