Sputterpub's Blog

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.

We drove home with unopened champagne and leftover snacks. I took a bag of chocolate raisins but otherwise managed to leave the junk in the car. Corky and I resettled rather happily in our house.

Until the next day. I woke up and couldn’t walk. Nothing like that had ever happened to me. My left foot, back above my heel, just wouldn’t flex the way walking requires. I’d already arranged to take that day off from work; I kept hobbling around my house denying that I had a problem. It just didn’t make sense. I tried aspirin, I tried ibuprofen: no relief. I rubbed. I raised. I iced. There was a little easing of the immobility that afternoon, but still my left foot didn’t work right.

The day after that I had some mobility. But I was stiff, especially when I first started to move after sitting. And a lump had developed just above the creases between the back of my heel and my ankle.

After a week of lumpy stiffness I went to the orthopedic doctor. He told me I had Achilles’ tendinitis. I asked him how it happened and he shrugged. All I can figure is I strained it somehow climbing around with Sam. The doctor said pain pills wouldn’t work because the last place our circulatory system sends stuff is down to the feet. He told me the best I could do was ice the area frequently to promote circulation there and speed healing, to rest the injury, and to learn how to stretch the tendon. He told me not to wear heels any more but I’d given them up years ago. And he gave me the discouraging news that tendinitis takes a long time to heal.

He was right. Heel-healing is a process. It must have been six weeks before the stiffness went away and over a year before the lump diminished.

But I derived some benefits from the experience. It didn’t hurt to learn a new stretch. I no longer take ankle strength for granted. I met and fell for Rick.

He was in the waiting room when I went for my follow-up visit with the doctor. He wore a cast on his right leg and had to move his crutches to permit me to sit in the one empty chair. We got to talking.

He’s tall and gorgeous and ten years younger than I am. I never would have considered myself eligible for a guy like him. To which he said: “Hah!”

He broke his ankle in a bad landing after his third skydive. But it healed stronger than before the break, and he still jumps. We’ve been a couple for over a year and a half now and he has introduced me to more active habits. I won’t jump out of a plane but we take bicycle trips. We hike a lot. We river raft. I seem to be reverse aging.

Not so Beth. My poor ex-friend sister-in-law has only grown fatter and more murky. She didn’t make that trip to Hawaii. She seldom leaves her house except to go to work. My brother, who is the most loyal spouse I’ve ever known, is starting to grow discontent. But lately I’m a little hopeful about her. Two weeks ago she twisted her ankle. With her weight, it turned out to be a bad sprain. She’ll be on crutches for six weeks. She’s starting to understand what a drag it is to have a mobility problem. She’s doing the prescribed exercises. And it appears that she is eating less.

Beth and Sam are joining Rick and me for dinner this Saturday. They’ve agreed to try my current favorite restaurant, where all the food is fresh and clean and it’s easy to dine well and still feel well. And Sunday, this Sunday, Rick and I plan to go ice skating.

Hah!

So Beth must have refused half a dozen of Sam’s travel ideas before the Mendocino plan. Suddenly she agreed. Sam arranged for two rooms at a dog-friendly inn and a vehicle big enough for the six of us, and we set off at a comfortable hour on a Friday morning in May.

The ride went pretty well. Corky puked once when the road started winding, but I was prepared for that and caught the mess in paper towels. All three dogs are females, and Corky had to contest for status with Raquel, Sam’s and Beth’s oldest, but we managed then and throughout the trip to place easy-going Baby as a buffer between our feisty bitches; the canine pack settled rather gracefully.

The primate pack dynamic wasn’t quite as smooth. I tend to be direct and talkative. Beth is the most passive/aggressive person I’ve ever known. We never argued but we also never eased into the comfortable companionship that we used to enjoy and that Sam so wanted to see.

That’s not to say we didn’t have a good time. At least I did, and I believe Sam when he says he did too. There’s no assessing Beth. Not only will she lie to us, but she is forever flipping in her heart between resenting her loved ones and nurturing her enemies; the woman is more ambivalent than a parent.

We walked on the headlands with the dogs. We lunched on café porches, with the dogs. We hung around our cabin-like rooms, drinking the champagne we bought on the way there and watching the dogs romp. Sometimes we left the dogs in the car and went into a restaurant, but mostly we cooked junk food in our kitchenettes, munched junk food on our couches, chowed down on junk food while lolling on our porches. Sam and Beth share a binge eating disorder, and I’ve visited there enough myself that I could get back into it for the weekend. We’d driven to the Fort Bragg Safeway even before we checked in, and we had stocked up on every kind of treat that appealed to any of us. Normally Beth hides her binges; to dine with her one would never guess how she manages to pack in and maintain the 200 or so pounds she carries on her short frame. But we have enough history that she’s not ashamed to let me see her at it, and that weekend she went for it. Sam was with her most of the way, and I kept up with them at times: nuts, chips, candy, ice cream, cake and pie, frozen fried shrimp, pizza rolls and pizza and taquitos and fries and onion rings and then a start-over, always careful to alternate the salty with the sweet with the fat so we only had to stop when we slept.

Sam and I did a bit of clambering around the rocks and near tide pools but Beth didn’t join us for that. The fact is she’s not very limber. It’s been a long time since Beth could pick something up off the floor without holding onto a door frame and counterbalancing by sending a leg up behind her. She really wasn’t fit enough to make it down the rocky path to the water, let alone back up. So Sam and I had some brief excursions with the dogs while Beth read People and fashion magazines in their room. Sam talked then about their plans to go on a diet together – he had a business trip to Hawaii coming up in a few months, and he knew Beth would find a way to duck it unless she could get into a bathing suit – and I think I was very restrained, not letting him see on my face how hopeless I thought it would be, unless they started to get some sort of regular exercise. I’ve told him before that it’s not the calories activity burns; it’s the mind-set toward health that’s the charm. But I kept my mouth shut. I’ve finally learned not to beat that poor dead horse.

My weak spot, apparently, is an Achilles tendon.

Not that my mother was a demi-goddess, except perhaps in her mind and my father’s (at least at first). Not that I was ever dipped. I’m Jewish. Jewish babies are not dipped.

I was supposed to be sweet and precious but I grew big feet and thick ankles, big face and stubborn brain. “Simplicity is class,” my father said when he gave me a single cultured pearl on a thin gold chain, but delicate jewelry was lost on my frame. I thought delicacy and subtlety, and even class, were wasted on me.

I grew thick ankles, and I consoled myself with the idea that they would never turn on me.

Hah!

It’s true I don’t sprain them. You never see me on crutches after some city stumble. But I who ice skated at age seven on the sidewalks of my Long Island neighborhood was quite surprised, in a disappointed way, when the family rented skates in Blue Jay, California, when I was 14, and I discovered that I couldn’t keep the blades beneath me. My ankles just weren’t strong enough. I didn’t try to ice skate after that.

Four decades passed. After three of them, I forsook my sedentary ways and discovered the joy of physical activity. I learned that body work is mind work; I am in fact connected through the isthmus of my neck. It came to pass that I thought I was fit.

Hah!

Two years ago my brother and sister-in-law and I, with our three dogs, rented an SUV and made a long-weekend trip to Mendocino.

We’d traveled together before, and well, but then events occurred that strained the relationship between Beth and me. I had introduced her to my brother – we’d been work colleagues and friends when she made a serious suicide attempt, and ended up living for a month with me and my then-husband because her mother was too busy (narcissistic, childish, creepy) to take care of her. That’s when Beth met Sam; that’s how Beth became my sister-in-law.

We continued working together after they married – she had such a toxic relationship with her mother that Beth decided not to have kids of her own and so she never interrupted her career with a pregnancy. Soon we moved together from the consulting office where we met to the new firm which I established, and a year after that I gave her some stock. I thought that would make her act like an owner, hoist her out of the supportive secretarial role she’d filled for so long, because I hadn’t yet realized that ownership has nothing to do with a certificate. And when she quit the job, a year before the Mendocino trip, five years after the stock award, in the throes of another bout of clinical depression that she chose to blame on me (I didn’t show her enough appreciation), she harassed me for buyout money, funds I didn’t have because I’d instead always paid her more than her job was worth, and our relationship ruptured every way it could.

Poor Sam. My baby brother has always been driven to try to make people happy. He frets about facial expressions; he apologizes for heavy traffic and bad weather. He couldn’t stand Beth’s complaints about me and he hated to hear my bitter comments. He kept trying to make it right.

He suggested several vacations before this one took. I was always agreeable as long as I didn’t have to leave my dog. Corky was beyond normal large-breed life expectancy, allergic to dozens of irritants and plagued with some other imperfections too, but she was my sole mammalian companion, the dog with whom I’d lived longest, and I was determined to continue to take care of her. I’d decided when she was one year old and began to present her medical problems that I’d do whatever was necessary. I like to think that when I take on a dependent it’s for the full ride.

No, till then Beth had been the balker. She wouldn’t agree to go anywhere warm, lest she have to reveal her body (Beth is obese and ashamed of it. She tries to hide her girth in tunics and shapeless dresses, apparently oblivious to the fact that her five-foot height and humongous tits tell the story no matter how she is appareled). Or circumstances in her new job made it impossible to leave. Or she let plans proceed to a week before departure and then got too ill to go.