Sputterpub's Blog

I didn’t expect to be living alone my senior year but so it goes. Ronnie and I already faced our domestic incompatibility, and Chaz and I still aren’t ready to share a home. Or Chaz isn’t ready. His reluctance about the next step has me looking seriously at our relationship now. Or maybe it’s the imminence of all the next steps – “real life” or whatever they turn out to be – that has me reassessing everything.

I like my little studio apartment. It’s on the quiet side of campus. I read Swift and Austen. I enjoy my time alone but I have to get out once a day at least, interact with others even if I don’t know them, or I’ll go batty.

I have a heavy writing assignment this weekend, so I’m not getting out much. But sometimes it doesn’t take much.

I worked all day yesterday and finally got myself shod and out of my apartment around dusk. I figured I’d walk across campus, find food, maybe see Chaz later.

As I was entering the campus I ran into Peter Pelham.

I recognized him this time. His hair was shorter, like when I first met him, and there was something so familiar about his posture that I felt my heart jerk and my face flush.

“I think we met when I first came here,” I blurted.

“I know we did,” he answered. “But that was a lifetime and a half ago, for me.” He was unlocking his car as he spoke. It was a clean yellow roadster and it looked new to me. “Can I give you a lift anywhere?”

“I’m out for a walk,” I said without considering alternatives. “I needed a break from a day of writing.”

“Well I’m still good at that,” he said. “Care for company?”

I think I smiled. He put his bag in the front seat of his car, relocked the machine and began to match his stride to mine.

It didn’t even surprise me, the way we connected again. There’s some kind of chemistry between Peter and me, but I’m older and wiser now, and I don’t think we can be a couple. There’s something about him that’s flighty.

But there’s also something interesting. Peter seems to be an example of crime that paid. After we walked for an hour or so, finding food as we wandered, we ended up back at his car, and I accepted that lift. He took me to his place.

Wow. He’s perched near the top of the hills, with a great view. His sound system is peerless. In the course of the night he confided in me some. There’s no way he’s as candid now as he was then, but I guess that makes sense. One of the lessons Peter says he learned is discretion.

He reported that those prison weekends left him with nothing to do but homework. He pulled his GPA up more than a full point during his jail term. He also had lots of time to consider his errors. When he was released and he returned to dealing, he started doing business carefully, conscientiously, professionally even. He only dealt with customers he knew well. He didn’t work with referrals. And he planned his exit from the industry; Peter applied statistics to his own venture and made a bright-line determination about when to get out.

It took him less than a year. He earned enough to buy his car and his stereo, and he graduated with a decent transcript. Peter’s father is so pleased he’s helping with rent on the hill place, assisting with placement in a job with a future.

He took a weird phone call this morning, before driving me home. It wasn’t a woman (and I’m not jealous anyway) and it wasn’t his dad. If I hadn’t heard otherwise I would have suspected it was a customer. But he told me he’s retired from his life of crime.

I wonder.

Ronnie and I faced the divergence after our sophomore year. We live separately. After Ian flipped out and left the Pelham program, Ronnie was single for awhile. Now she seems to have settled into something with Prof. Pelham’s colleague. Horace is old enough to be Ronnie’s father. Sometimes I wonder if he’s her way of continuing the Program now that she’s upper division and has had to make room for the new crop of freshmen. Sometimes I think it’s all about her unsatisfactory history with her father. Anyway, I understand they’re enjoying Don Quixote together (the Smollett translation). I’m weirded out. I’m reading Salinger and Wilde.

I’m still with Chaz. We maintain separate places (my studio apartment, his room in a shared house) but we spend most nights together. I still read, he still programs, and we seem to be less compatible, but we continue to smoke weed so we rarely fight. We have to find a new dealer.

Pip got busted, big time. Coincidentally the arrest happened right after I finally met him and immediately before I realized who he is.

He’d become somewhat famous for his neat baggies and elegant horticultural comments. His were buds of beauty, seedless and with flecks of red or gold hairy fibers. He was working part-time as a projectionist in the avenue movie house and I hear he spent the moments when he wasn’t setting reels packaging his product and taking customer messages. As Chaz says, he just let it get out of control. He wasn’t vetting the friends of friends of his regulars and it was just a matter of time before he did business with a narc.

It was a scandal. As word spread the connection was made: the son of Professor Pelham was in jail. It was all Pelham in the local news, and then Peter Pelham, and pretty soon I understood that Chaz’s dealer was my lost lust.

I don’t know when or why Peter became Pip. It was hard to get any facts at first, what with all the rumors about Pelham child psychology (how could a boy from such a background go so wrong?) and tax bills (there was a persistent story that the state was going after Pip/Peter for some old $100/ounce tax on the books, instead of for possession and sale).

But we got together with a collection of old buddies last night, and I think we have it as straight as we’re going to. Pip/Peter is going to jail, but it’s county jail and it’s kind of a part-time lockup. We hear he will attend classes during the week and sleep at his parents’ house. If I understand the arrangement, he’ll be spending weekends in jail for the rest of this year. And Chaz has found a lesser but adequate source.

By the end of our first year, Ronnie and I are ready to move on from the dorm. We are still best friends but our paths have diverged. She is so into the Pelham program (Dryden’s Aeneid) that she wants to spend even more time with her fellows. They seem almost like a cult to me; you have to belong to the group to get their references, and you have to understand their references to be considered one of them. When Ronnie isn’t meeting with them it seems like she’s reading things for her next meeting with them.

I on the other hand am wasting my time and loving it. I chip away at required courses, academically, but my first years away from my parents’ home are all about being on my own, away from my parents. I try every drug I encounter (carefully, almost scientifically: reading up on its constituents and effects, blocking out the right time (night or daylight) and arranging for an escort if it is hallucinogenic) and most of the guys. I dabble in student activism but turn away from all the consensus-building (I never did well at working with others).

Maybe Ronnie and I shouldn’t have remained roommates after our first year, but there’s an inertia to strong friendships, a set of habits that sometimes links folks during periods of what would otherwise be estrangement. We get on each other’s nerves in our small apartment, and we seldom have a genuine connection. But we will survive our differences. In fact, I am so nocturnal and she is up with the birds, studying all day, living clean and forever brushing her teeth – except for the lack of storage space it’s almost like living alone.

Soon we’re managing to share the place four ways, most of the time. Both Ronnie and I settle into relationships. She has of course selected a fellow Pelhaman; Ian is slight, curly-haired, armpit-bearded, myopic, and apparently brilliant. He pronounces his name with a long “I.” My lover is Chaz. He writes code and wins at most games. He is big and surprisingly steady. He makes me laugh.

Ian and Ronnie tend to study when they’re in the apartment. Study or cook. They’re trying to read all three volumes of The Divine Comedy (Sayers’s version). They’re down for the night by 9 p.m., so Ronnie and I agreed to give them the bedroom. Chaz and I sleep in the living room, usually from about 3 a.m. to 10, and they try not to disturb us when they come through at dawn, to go to their seminar.

I’m starting to get into school. I did nothing but required courses last year, but now I’m spending time with Classics people, learning Greek of all things, and I’m with Chaz, and I’m not partying as hard. We still smoke weed. In fact, there’s a new dealer in town and we’re getting better stuff lately. I haven’t met the guy – even with all the advances it’s still the man’s job to score the hooch – but Chaz seems to like to buy from Pip.

The buds are beautiful. Pip obviously spends time grooming his product; everything is nicely packaged and details are provided, like provenance for art. Chaz tells me Pip is a tall, Afro-topped white guy, apparently enrolled but not very. Pip doesn’t use what he sells. He characterizes himself as a proud peddler, motivated by two ambitions: he wants a state-of-the-art sound system and a Porsche.

I always put aside what I’m doing when I smoke with Chaz. I get the most out of the experience if I’m not simultaneously reading, translating, or working a puzzle. Lately I’m into Vonnegut. I had to give up Heinlein after Stranger. Peter was right about that; early Heinlein was genuine and fun but later on he yelled too much.

We each run smack into a Pelham on our first day of college. That family forms something of a unified theme for Ronnie and me.

In Ronnie’s case the meeting is intentional. She’s taken by what she reads of the Pelham Seminar Program in the course catalog so she goes to the introductory meeting and listens to the man himself. Professor Ernest Pelham believes that the humanities should be delivered by the great books and discussed in Socratic seminars; the four dozen students who will be admitted to the program will each devote two years to it, and fulfill all lower division liberal arts requirements.

My best friend likes that unified approach. Me: I’m more into ala carte course selection. If I’d wanted that kind of guiding I would have chosen a small school.

So Ronnie goes to hear Prof. Pelham, and I attend a little class in the Oriental Languages department that has nothing to do with oriental languages. It’s the only 1-unit course available in Letters & Science, and it is famed for requiring just one thing from each student: a book report, on any book.

I think my schedule needs that unit. I carry a paperback copy of Stranger in a Strange Land into the small lecture room. I don’t know then that it’s the last book by Heinlein I’ll enjoy. But that’s just one of a myriad of things, a plethora even, that I don’t know.

Fifty minutes later, exiting the classroom where nothing happened (really: a mixed group took the desks and waited 25 minutes for the instructor, who then introduced himself and had each of us stand, state our name, show or tell the book we intended to read, and sit), I am approached by a lanky guy who turns out to be Peter Pelham.

“How do you like that book?”

“I haven’t started it yet. But I’ve always liked Heinlein.”

“So far.”

By the time we’ve exchanged those sentences, he is pacing beside me, and we are approaching the entrance to the lecture building. Without commenting we take the same path and walk together.

We don’t talk about books. Peter asks me questions about me, and describes himself as a life adventurer, born and raised around the campus but destined for farther things. He is supposed to be enrolled and two years ahead of me but he is taking time off. He says he popped into the OL class hoping to get an idea for a book to read, but he is delighted to meet me instead.

I am charmed. I like his height, the length of his limbs, the way his blue eyes seem to want to laugh. I like the way his brown hair curls and the shape of his fingernails. I’ll never know what he sees in me; if I did, I might make it last.

We walk all afternoon. I skip dorm dinner but we grab cafeteria Chinese food at an Asian “hofbrau.” I almost miss dorm lock-out. I am kissing Peter in the stairway near the side entrance and I think it is only my virginity that sends me into the dormitory as the doors are about to be locked for the night. The kissing is amazing, the temptation is strong, the fear only prevails by a little.

Our relationship lasts four days before it is interrupted by what he describes as a necessary trip to LA. We walk, we talk, we kiss deeply. I admit his hands everywhere by the third day. He wants to put his mouth where his hands have been and I am sorely, heatedly tempted; who knows what the course of my sexual development would be, if he puts off this trip?

As it is, I have four memorable days, and I miss him more than I want to after he leaves. He sends one postcard, sweet and sexy and suggestive. But it postpones his return, for reasons he doesn’t specify in the small postcard space, and then I don’t hear from him again.

I talk about him to Ronnie. She’s my best friend and my roommate. Her full name is Veronica and she’s as far from the Archie Comics character as she can be, except for her dark hair and Episcopalian religion. She’s the only Veronica I’ve ever known.

Ronnie is enraptured with the Pelham program, reading Pope’s translation of the Iliad, and I don’t even know Peter’s last name. It isn’t till I receive the postcard that I learn it and I don’t make the connection then. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

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.