Sputterpub's Blog

Sandy became an actuary because he wanted to understand life/himself. Some folks follow a religious path, others are more comfortable with philosophy, and a few try the circuitous avenue of psychology, but Sandy was one of the rare ones who used the constructs of mathematics. He’d been a tall thin geeky boy, attracted to numbers and science, insecure around sports. There was some structure for him in Synanon and the successor groups, sure, but not nearly enough. He found perspective in statistics; he figured he’d always be able to interpret surveys and never be manipulated. Sandy understands how to expect certain results, provided a group is large enough, and he knows he isn’t acting as expected now.

He doesn’t get off the train at Civic Center. He may not go to work today. Young Karen will wonder where he is. So will Shelly.

He doesn’t detrain but a large group of commuters does. Seats are freed; it’s Sandy’s luck that his pair takes the bench across the aisle from him. His luck and also positioning; apparently the young couple appreciate the relative privacy of the back seat as much as Sandy does.

He tries to look as if he’s not watching them. He gazes out the train window and reads the destination sign. “Richmond.” It never mattered to him before where the train was going to end up; he just rides from Daly City to Civic Center, and all SF trains do that route. “Richmond,” Sandy thinks, as the train pulls into Powell Street Station and loses even more passengers.

The couple are now cuddling. He doesn’t want to look directly at them, but his peripheral vision tells him they’re very close together and moving a little. He would be able to watch if he had his sunglasses on, but there’s no reason to wear shades while the train’s underground. It won’t surface until it has crossed the bay.

He sneaks a peek at Montgomery Street Station. They’re kissing. Deeply kissing, and the young woman appears to be sitting on her boyfriend’s lap. Sandy can’t tell for sure, because her Raiders jacket is draped over them. His mind reels.

He envisions young Karen sitting like that on him, and he knows what would be going on under a jacket. Then he returns to himself. No way. Sandy believes it’s okay to think anything, but he guards his actions. He would no more grope a woman in public than he’d grope himself. Right now. Under the Chronicle. Or after the train leaves Embarcadero Station, almost empty, when he can watch them in the reflection of his window. No way.

He imagines nastiness with Karen, and he feels for a moment young again. He uses his window as a mirror to watch the young man obviously fingering his girlfriend squirming on his urgent lap, and Sandy for a dozen heartbeats feels as horny as a 19 year old.

In the four and a half minutes under the bay he snatches a number of window glances and screens a few ideas. At first as he watches the young couple nibble on each other’s face he wants a young face close for his own stimulation. He knows Karen has agreed to a Portals weekend, and he’s sure that if he’s there for the conclusion, opportunities for spontaneous intimacy will arise. He considers enrolling. At the transbay tube’s lowest depth he realizes with a rush that he isn’t lusting for sex but for his own damn irrecoverable youth. That would sound corny in the light of day but plays all right in the tube, under fluorescent light, when the only other play is a young couple trying to have actual and athletic intercourse under a Raiders jacket.

As the train pulls into West Oakland Station Sandy acknowledges that he never acts on his fantasies, that he has always been a faithful husband. He wonders if his middle-aged lust is actually nostalgia for vigor.

He who doesn’t think often in words begins an open prayer for his baby-boomer generation. “Let us age without delusion,” he intones in his head as the train arrows underground again, curving toward downtown Oakland. “Oh we’ve gotten nothing else right; let us grow old and be wise.”

He’s about to continue with his odd prayer when a cellphone rings. It belongs to one of the sexy couple, and its electronic tone is an all-around mood breaker. As the train slows into City Center Station, Sandy decides to get off and out. He wanders at first in the direction of the lake. He feels a little displaced. A little old. Then he falls into step behind a 20-something woman with a bouncing streaky blonde ponytail. He gazes at her melon-slice ass as he feels, walking young again.

He’s brought back to his commute by the ring of a nearby cellphone. As common as they are, neither Sandy nor his fellows are inured to them; he watches as several neighboring passengers join him in locating the instrument and paying discreet attention to the conversation. It’s a miniature black device pulled out of the suit pocket of a youngish white guy. As usual the conversation doesn’t sound important. As usual, the first question the passenger answers is where he is (“we’re just coming into Balboa Park now”), the next one is his ETA at some appointment, and the rest of the conversation is low fidelity blather. It’s obvious to everyone overhearing it that the call, like most cellphone calls, like most telephone calls in general, is unnecessary. But that way lies grumpiness. Sandy can feel himself becoming curmudgeonly. He decides to stay young. Think about sex instead.

He considers Karen. He sees her a hundred times a day at work. What is she: 24? She’d have to have at least a couple of years of graduate work to be where she is in the Service but that plump face looks 17… Some things he’d like to do with that face…

He has always admired young women. He was almost nine years old when the next door neighbor had a daughter, and Sandy was besotted with Tracy from birth. Her coltish friends started coming around as he entered full puberty. His earliest fantasies included visions of infant girls being handled a little brusquely on pediatric examining tables. As his libido developed his imagination was peopled with the angular limbs of growing girls.

When he met his wife she was young. They’ve known each other 15 years now – been married for nine – so Phyllis at first was 21. Looked younger, with her freckled pale skin, high breasts, flat belly. He practically ate her freckles back then: he was so into her. But that was in the Ridgecrest commune days, long ago and far from now. Phyllis matured in some undesirable way shortly after he married her, and since James’s birth… well, she’s become so maternal she’s practically bovine. Who’d have thought those firm breasts could grow so pendulous, so fast? That belly so pillowy?

Sandy realizes his thoughts have grown negative again as the train pulls into the 24th Street Station. He looks around and locates a mood elevator. Getting on the train, dressed inappropriately. Short skirt, cropped tank top under a baggy hooded Raiders jacket. Acres of smooth leg between those lace-up clunky boots and the black Lycra. Oh yes. A silver belly button ring in golden flesh. Sandy imagines taking that ring in his teeth – galvanic thrill in his fillings – cupping that ass… and remembers himself rockhard embarrassed behind his physics book, yearning unstoppable in his old Corvair, prevailing now and then, with skinny Gretchen and with his brother’s friend Claire. No finesse but an amazing amount of vigor. Youth is wasted on the young.

Sandy’s interest is at first dampened when he realizes the girl is with her boyfriend. Anyway, a guy gets on the train with her, and Sandy assumes he’s her boyfriend. Assumes any male would be. Yeah: her boyfriend. They can’t find seats but they’re standing in the aisle by Sandy, and the guy’s right up against her back with his hand on her hip. They’re very much a couple; she’s leaning into his hand in an unmistakable way now…

By the time they get to 16th Street, Sandy thinks he’s not going to get off the train at Civic Center. He’s having a strange day. He’s very interested in a young couple that is very interested in each other. He’s feeling not normal and he’s liking it.

He looks 30 but he’s really 49. He has dirty thoughts all the time; they keep him young.

He is 6’2″ and in good shape. He still has hair, and its dark blonde shade hides the gray rather well. His skin is tan and relatively unlined. His face is big and well-featured, and he doesn’t sag.

His name is Sandy.

He was the oldest child of the three his parents bore, and he was always bored with his parents. His mother was petulant and pretty; his father was pompous. Sandy left home for college and didn’t return for any but the most obligatory occasions. Aversion motivates him to earn enough so that he never has to sleep in his parents’ house again.

He works as an actuary for the Internal Revenue Service, and he lives with his wife Phyllis and one-plus children in Daly City, California. Phyllis is 36. They have a two-year old son named James, and Phyllis is seven months pregnant with their second child. Because she is over 35 and they have good health insurance she has had amniocentesis, but Sandy and Phyllis declined to learn the gender of their unborn babe.

Sandy wants a second son. He’s unfamiliar with girl-children, he claims. He says he wants an all-boy nuclear family like the one he left. He had a conversation with his friend Shelly about it.

“I don’t know anything about raising a girl, Shel,” he said.

“Don’t be silly,” she countered. “Girls are born adorable. They’ve been selectively bred for it; the ones who couldn’t charm their daddies tended to get left for the wolves. You’re guaranteed to love your daughter.”

“But you don’t understand. I was a teenage boy once. I won’t be able to handle it when my daughter…”

”Don’t give me that shit,” Shelly derided. “Yeah. You were a teenage boy once. Good with computers and everything, too. Now just think back to being that teenage boy.” Her face softened. “You’re in a car with a girl you like. You’ve just parked somewhere secluded and dark. Tell me: who’s in control of the situation?”

“Well, the girl of course.” Sandy said it automatically, and then Shelly just gazed at him, chin down, lower lip jutting out a little. Sandy grinned and figured he probably looked a way he’d read about but rarely seen: sheepish.

“So what’s that about?” Shelly asked. “Why do so many guys give this line about wanting to protect their daughters from the teenage boys that neither they nor their peers ever were??”

“I guess maybe we old guys are having thoughts about young women? Attributing those thoughts, dirty thoughts, to the teenage boys, who had the thoughts, oh yes indeed, but never in a million years would have acted on them?”

“I guess.”

“I doubt it’s that simple.” Sandy’s head was feeling a bit twisted.

“I’m sure it’s not simple. But I think there’s something to this. After all, we don’t use the expression: dirty young man.”

Shelly’s words resonate in Sandy’s brain now, riding BART from what used to be the end of the San Francisco line. Sandy vowed for his 48th birthday that he wouldn’t lie to himself any more, and he knows Shelly nailed him. He won’t deny it: he is a dirty old man. He looks around the crowded train car and counts five young women standing in his vicinity, no raving beauties but none with a deformity or even too much fat. Five firm midriffs, five high asses. Imagining peach breasts his hands curve and he stiffens beneath the Chronicle on his lap. Sandy almost feels young again. No way does his body act like this around Phyllis.

His vow about self-honesty came about as a way of settling a hassle with Shelly. She had then fallen into some EST-like program called Portals, and she was pestering everyone in the office about it. Her attempts to recruit Sandy were particularly obvious and very tiresome to him. He’d been too often on the other end of it.

Sandy has an addictive personality but he was clean when he joined Synanon. He discovered the organization when he was in ninth grade; a social studies term paper led him to it. He was fascinated by the people and the program. From the junkies he learned a certain loose way of sitting at a table, leg crossed on his knee, drinking milky sugared coffee and smoking Marlboros. From the drunks he adopted the cadence: “That’s STUpid.” There was something about the rigor and alienation of the program that distracted him from the depressive boredom of his suburban family life. Woke him up. Made him try to recruit his younger brothers. Made him ignore them when his proselytizing failed.

He stayed with Synanon for about five years, then graduated to some cult-like groups of Gurdjieffiens and splinters that vectored off that curve, until six years ago, when he fell out of the last group and not into another. But Sandy knows the drill. He’s been a participant in engineered group catharses; he understands the attraction. He refused to go with Shelly to the Portals program, even for a weekend, but he had to negotiate a peace by asserting his revelations and intentions about self-honesty.

He speaks to me. Normally I’d have a book open as protection against unwanted transit chats, but I’d forgotten this time. I’d been too interested in how the fat guy up front fits into the single seat, in the (academic) question about the sexual orientation of the black-haired creature diagonally across from me, in trying to plumb the nature of the relationship behind me (did she rock the cradle or rob it?) from conversation alone.

My seatmate speaks and I don’t understand him, but I have to glance at him. Thin face, clean greying frizzled hair radiating from his head and chin. He speaks again, and I can tell it’s about the silver-toned ring he’s showing me, but I still don’t understand him. It isn’t the lingo; it’s his lack of teeth.

I manage to indicate with a nod and a hand gesture that it’s a nice ring but I already have one and don’t want another. I turn away and hope the ensuing quiet will last. Unh uh.

He speaks again. I never saw the movement but now the ring has disappeared and he has a bent postcard in his hand. He’s showing it to me but growing excited and not holding it still; I have to pay some attention to see it.

“It’s a openin’ today,” I make out of his syllables. I look closer. The postcard is about some new affordable housing community … a few blocks south of where we’re passing, in the direction my seatmate is indicating with the card just as we pass, and sure enough, it says it’s opening today.

I look into his face and we smile. I see that he’s either not very bright or maybe damaged, but he isn’t dangerous. He’s going to be a member of the community on the card.

“I’m the first tenant,” he says clearly. His clean toothless gums are pink. Then he puts down the card and gropes at his waistband.

His T-shirt is dark green. He pulls up the hem an inch or so and cups the device that hangs from his belt loop. It’s the size of a Pez dispenser. “My key,” he says.

I heard a snippet of interview with my Representative on the radio recently. Asked what her prized possession was, she answered “my family.” I remember thinking that wasn’t a fair response; family isn’t a possession. I considered what my prized possession might be, and I admitted that I’m so fortunate I have a lot more than one. So does everyone I love. But this man, sitting beside me on the trolley, I think this guy has a prized possession.

He stands to exit the bus at Sanchez. The driver says to him, “Next time use the front door, okay bro?” He nods at the driver’s face in the mirror, he nods back at me. “Been sleepin’ out a long time,” he says to me.

“How long?”

“Fifteen years. 1990.” He steps down through the door to the street.

I ride two more stops. I thank the driver and walk the four blocks to Madie’s place. I’ve been looking forward to this dinner. It’s been almost three months since she and Phyllis and I have been able to mesh our schedules.

Phyllis opens the door. “My Lord, woman: you’re skinny! You look great! How much have you taken off? It’s like you’re ten years younger.” I grimace within but walk into her hug. Plusher than I remember. Madie too is looking plump.

I catch their shared look at me. Eyes slant down and lips sneer up. A part of my heart closes.

The street scene becomes distractingly lively at Fifth. Tourists waiting for the cable car, street vendors behind tables and street entertainers on tiny stages, gaggles of adolescent girls in low-cut jeans and too-small shirts, fine-pored puppy bellies belting their prance: nearly a 3-ring circus. From the high windows of the trolley I can almost ignore the cars.

I was a late bloomer. I didn’t start to menstruate until I was four months past my 14th birthday. I was old enough to keep a diary and I did. Keep it and keep it: white imitation leather on a middle shelf in my study. It records my very first diet. Exactly two weeks, fourteen days, a fortnight, half a lunar cycle, spans the time from my first diet to my first (at last!) period. Coincidence? Or a sudden flooding onslaught of diet-inducing hormone?

The doors of the club then opened. I began to fit into shared secrets about sweet foods and calorie counting, girdles that would evolve into lycra outfits, sympathetic dressing-room lies. I had never been comfortable with groups of girls, I had always been repelled by squealing jumping hugging creatures, but it seemed right and natural to back into the warm cuddling embrace of a dozen plump peers. Trying to diet was nearly as cool as trying to smoke.

Eventually I blundered into a bout of success. The one class I feared was P.E., and I tried out for the marching corps because my friends were, and the marching corps members had P.E. together, and P.E. alone would be intolerable. I joined the corps and started marching instead of munching after school, which unaccustomed activity and abstinence produced fast impressive results; I slimmed down at 15.

And was gently but thoroughly removed from the club.

It would have been remarkable how completely it happened, except I was too stunned to remark. Suddenly my best friend Norah didn’t want to tell me what she had for dinner. I overheard Cindy and Gail snickering about me after I told them how hard I was working to lose the last three pounds. Plump girls who formerly tried on underwear with me, now looked at me the way I used to glance at our bikini-clad summer neighbor at the lake: as if I had no idea what it was like to turn down a hot fudge sundae in favor of a dream about a dress.

We’re invaded at the Civic Center stop. Two shabbily-dressed black guys board by the rear door.

“Uh, hello fellas,” the driver says back to them, smiling the words into the mirror above his head. “Back door workin’ okay?” and one guy, the beefier one, ambles up toward the front of the bus. But the other one sits down next to me.

I’m not pleased but I’m not worried. Full bus, daylight, and I’m not frail. I’m dying to look at him but I don’t want to encourage anything. I can see blue jeans, loose but not too, clean and not old, medium-brown arms, hands older than young but not yet too veined. I test the air, gently, tentatively, and he doesn’t smell bad.

“Oh my God you look great … I can’t believe it’s you. Turn around: shit, girl: you’re a mere shadow of your former self.”

Yeah right. What am I supposed to say? Thanks? It’s so embarrassing. I smile and kind of giggle, and I stop Natalie’s viewing by reaching in to hug her. We say it’s been ages and I tell her I have to catch the bus.

I adore the admiring looks of strangers. So impulsive and honest. Their eyes say I’m looking good. But I hate the compliments of friends.

See, I’m likely to backslide. Of course I am. My name is Jill and I have an eating disorder. Currently it’s in remission. I’ve been dealing with it (I almost said “in control” – as if) for a year and a half and I’ve lost 40 pounds. But I can gain it back. I have before. And if I do, today’s sweet phrases will twist like daggers in my swelling belly. They’ll become sentences of reproach and self-contempt.

I cross the street next to a suited man on a cell phone, and I acknowledge his courtesy with a nod as he waits for me to step up to the bus stop ahead of him.

My name is Jill and I have a bad body image. My problem is so common it has no glamour. Go ahead: try to make me exotic. I’m not from the South, my parents are still together, nobody in my family even drinks too much. I’m just fat within. I hate puking too much to purge. Not that anorexia or bulimia would do it … any disorder that no one of color gets is not ill enough for words.

On the other side of the street an electric bus loses its connections. It’s just made the turn onto Market and both poles leave their wires. The driver has to get off and manipulate the pulleys into place by pulling on dusky black cords. The man at my side has finished his call and tries to start a conversation, but I’m saved by the approach of the trolley. The driver hands me a transfer with a smile. There aren’t any vacant single seats, so I take the best double: the one right behind the rear door. I settle in with my pack on my lap.

My name is Jill and I am a straight female, so I have an eating disorder. My problem is so common that when I succeed at overcoming it (no matter how temporarily), I get booted out of the club. You know the one I mean: it has no name; there’s a branch everywhere women gather; women gather everywhere.

It’s omnipresent and insidious. Researchers are just starting to notice how pre-adolescent girls police each other: none of that boyish violence – instead, the girls reform by sneer and rebuke by snub and, whether it’s innate compliance in the sex or the effectiveness of the facial gestures, girls succeed more than boys do at civilizing their group.

I joined in 1964 but I was prepped for years. I was apprenticed by my mother before I saw the sorting. Wise mistress, she showed me how to fix my physical flaws long before I understood I had any.

I knew not to wear horizontal stripes. To select a skirt length that would hide fat knees, a shoe that would make the foot look smaller. It’s not like I then had big legs or feet, but my mother was an instinctive geneticist and prognosticated body shape almost as well as eyesight (myopic) and hair (dark curly).