Sputterpub's Blog

My old friend Glen. I can see him skinny at 13, playing Casino with me nightly across one of his twin beds, dealing to the playlist that rocked out of his new transistor radio. He was consumed then with curiosity about cars and God and sex. I remember him in college, still scrawny and growing a beard that looked like armpit hair, wrestling with metaphysics, long chess games, and ideas about nonpossessive sexual love. I have Glen’s summer letters from then, missives out of Southern California where he was stuck with his alcoholic mother or his ever-silent dad, unfurling communal plans and trying to make changes so he’d like himself.

I can also see him a few years ago, telling me I’m the only person he knows whose childhood was happy enough that I can afford to recall its unhappiness. I remember thinking those words were wise, or at least charming, at first. Now they sound like something an autistic might say if he were trying to identify with a willful person.

For Glen doesn’t get it. He says no to himself; I say no to others. He grows more bitter every year.

He knows about his letters in my footlocker. Three times in the last five years I’ve offered them to him. “It’s fun,” I told him after I read my teenage diaries. “Really: it’s not as embarrassing as I thought it would be; I actually got into it and found myself rooting for the writer! I only wish I’d used full names and recorded weather and prices…”

But he declined. Didn’t even indicate he might read them sometime. He shoved the subject aside like astrology or prayer.

I could never do that: know there’s information available, easily available, and not look. That would be like refusing to unfold the map; fine if you’re playing a game but not if you want to get somewhere.

Glen used to travel for work. He used to say the only way to do it was to keep moving, as much as possible in the direction of your goal. But that was awhile ago. I doubt now he remembers his own words.

I remembered yesterday. I entered the downtown Berkeley BART station just in time to overhear most of a conversation between a potential passenger and the station agent.

They were both well-dressed, attractive, middle-aged, African American. The station agent was a woman with coppery curls and wide-open big eyes. The passenger was portly and male, wearing a brown suit, short hair, polished shoes. He carried a brown briefcase and greeted the agent with courtesy:

“Good morning, ma’am. How are you today?”

She answered pleasantly, softly, smiling, in about three syllables. I was passing them then on my way from the fare gate to the stairs.

“Can you tell me when the next train comes for San Francisco?”

“Let’s see…” and I could imagine her running a manicured fingernail across a schedule as I descended. I slowed to hear her answer because I was later than usual and could use the information myself. “Ten-forty” she said, as I read 10:30 on my watch and 10:31 on the platform monitor.

“Then I’m going to be late,” I heard the man say. I had two thoughts: “I don’t want to wait 10 minutes either” and “Well, sir, if you’re going to be late it isn’t the train’s fault.”

“I want to get to One Sansome,” the man continued.

“That will be the Montgomery Station,” said the agent.

“But there’s no train till 10:40?”

…mumble…

“Then I’m going to be late.”

That’s when the platform monitor began to flash: FREMONT. 6 CAR TRAIN. BOARD CENTER. Standing with half a dozen others I heard the whine of the wheels on the track and felt the pushed air in my face. I looked around for the brown-suited man. I wasn’t surprised not to see him. He’d made the mistake of asking a system employee instead of a rider. He had probably headed streetward, either to give up because he was going to be late or to spend a lot of money and risk time anyway, on a taxi.

A 9-car San Francisco train pulled in opposite ours at MacArthur. I crossed the platform and took a seat and rode it to the city on time.

If you don’t know where you’re going…

…any road will get you there.

Great line, huh? I heard it at a conference. I know who said it then but she attributed it to someone else, so I can’t take or even give credit where it’s due. But I’ll keep saying it.

Not that anyone will listen. Nobody listens. That used to frustrate me. Lately I find it liberating. I can say anything; it’s not like I’ll have to take responsibility.

That’s the silver lining anyway. Of course I’d rather they listen. Not so I’d be right but just so I’d get through.

I want to figure it out. Existence. I’ve made some strides. But no way can I do it alone. I need to brainstorm with others.

“You may have the best idea in the world,” my dad used to say, “but it will be useless unless you can communicate it to others.” That was his argument for a liberal arts education. Sure he was right. But he didn’t go far enough. He never considered what “communicate it to others” really means. It’s not enough to be correct or eloquent or even charismatic. You still have to get through…

Problem is, getting through isn’t possible any more. If it ever was. Whole damn culture’s gone autistic now.

I’m talking about American middle-class middle-aged culture. The post-war baby boomers and adjacent cohorts. The notorious demographic bubble.

See, here’s the simple version of the story:

Once upon a time (not very long ago), there was a war to end all wars. It was called the second World War because the first hadn’t, and although it didn’t involve all of the world it was big enough to swallow a whole generation of America’s young adults.

They went they fought they won, and they returned to covet the American Dream, which turned out to be a single-family ranch house on a cul-de-sac with a perpetual chicken in a pot on the stove and a triennial station wagon for the attached garage.

They moved to their American Dream homes in the new suburbs, leaving in the cities their older and wider relatives, who would have acted like guides for them into the mysteries of parenthood, so they were clueless, the poor war vets and their brides, about how to be.

Incompetence loves company. Their neighbors were just as lost. Coffee and cocktails and card parties became their entertainments; the children were safe and hardly needed tending. The children would be all right.

Meanwhile the grandparents tsked. Dr. Spock instructed. Vodka spiked mothers’ morning coffees. Affairs occurred. Divorces became just horribly common enough to merit a daytime reality show.

The children of course were not all right.

Until around age seven a kid’s world is magical. That’s why it’s unfair to expose them to religion before then; they’ll take it too much to heart. Until seven or so, a child’s world won’t be stable unless the child sees the parents as gods.

When confronted with inescapable proof of parental incompetence, a kid has only two possible reactions: willfulness or autism. Nothing else will address the problem. The child either has to take charge or opt out.

Few take charge. Depending upon surrounding circumstances, the willful number 1% to 5% of the population. Except for age, they don’t share qualities that permit the sociologists to predict them – they’re as rare and random as albinos – but almost all willful children assume responsibility for themselves between age five and seven.

The autistics are too numerous to assess. They comprise almost all of the culture and have to be broken into subgroups to be studied. There are agoraphobes to varying degrees, who try to stay home and avoid social contact; ragers who indulge their social frustrations in manners even kindergarten teachers would never condone; groups accused of bigotry and prejudice who in fact suffer from simple unresolved xenophobia – they were deprived of guidance by their nuclear families about how to enjoy strangers. There are a huge number of apparently functional individuals who do well enough socially but lack a basic interactive skill, like the ability to say goodbye, or any understanding about privacy in the context of personal space. But by far the largest set of autistics, the crowd who provoke the standard of measurement for the group, are the depressives.

Willful people are seldom depressed. They can suffer from boredom, but the benefits of self-control are so powerful and consistent that they rarely sink in spirit. When they do go down they tend to rebound within days, no matter what. When a willful person is impassioned, expression is outward and often forceful.

Depressives work in the opposite direction. Although often tragically apathetic, they can experience passion. And when they do they implode.

For them the storm aims inward. They swirl into a vortex of their own sadness. Still waiting for the grownups.

I watched. I’ve been paying attention. Used to be I was pulled out of my school classes, deposited into a room with the stutterers, the rockers, the arsonists. But as we got older our numbers thinned. I watched them mostly turn inward, to darkness and sadness, away from our hopping red impatience.

I sent the letter. I still had almost an hour before Julia would get home. I could use it to sand the deck or walk Fletcher. Either way I’d be thinking.

I parked the mouse in the middle of its pad and stood. My desk looked neat – clutter is like chatter to my eyes, and it makes me edgy – but I straightened the framed photograph of Lily and Vera from last summer. Their eyes looked so clear, their cheeks child-smooth.

The odd thing about reuniting with a lost love is the physical aging. You get all the mirror shock of seeing yourself: this person you remember as a kid is in front of you, definitely familiar, but lined and saggy, maybe even with a tremor, but then sometimes like when you squint a certain way or during sex she looks again (except for hair color) exactly like you remember and you get a little surge of mixed youth and sadness. It’s compelling. Disturbing. Rousing. A drag. Ultimately a drag…

Julia hums. It doesn’t seem deliberate or even conscious but most of the time, if Julia isn’t talking or sleeping, she seems to emit a low hum.

At first I thought it was an indication of happiness, like a cat’s purr, but soon it came to be more annoying than gratifying, and lately it’s grown obnoxious. I now hear it as a symptom that her brain isn’t quite right.

But the bottom line is she’s just not committed enough to our marriage. If she were, she’d understand that sometimes a person just has to let out some of the pressures that have been building. It’s not pretty or fair, but if the person is determined not to use his size to destroy things or to hit people, then he has to rage to release. Sometimes it just has to happen. And a loving mate will accept that.

The young Julia would have. Oh I can see her now, petite and sweet and always looking up to me. A compliant Catholic girl. Now she’s pliant, thanks to all the time in the gym, but I can’t describe my wife as compliant. She insists on her own e-mail, her own car, even her own bank account. She read about how she should have all those things, in some book. She’s always reading a psychobabble book. I tell Julia she thinks too much but really? I think she thinks too little.

For Julia it has to be written down. She even uses book language to argue for marriage counseling. As if someone who isn’t here, 24/7, would have a shot at understanding the complexities of our dysfunction! As if…

She says a marriage counselor will make us see the tacit arrangements of our relationship. Some crap about every relationship having its unwritten rules, its invisible book, and how the counselor is supposed to help us get the book up on the table where we can read it and see if we still like what’s in it.

But see: that’s too many words already. Like the problem of the Bible. The sweet clear truth is that the few real rules are so sweet and clear that they need never be written down. God isn’t that wordy. It’s the priests who are so dimwitted they need all the hoopla.

True love doesn’t need analysis either. I remember the vision about Julia 45 years ago. I recall my excitement about the possibility of securing that vision, just two years past. But the fact is, Julia mostly repulses me now. At first I was bothered when she left my bed, but all of her attempts at words about us have swamped the beauty I used to see. The hum that was musical has grown irksome. The shaved pubes that were girlish are now a geriatric joke. I’d rather be alone.

Something like that is what I’ll write to Lily. Something like that is what I’ll tell my wife.

I had to reproduce to have a soul mate. I’ve been ill-married four times now, but at least we made two people while we (all) were taking one another apart. Lily and Vera have been loosed upon the universe.

I love them both, unequally and infinitely, but Lily is my correspondent. She’s the female I would have been. I’m the prototype for the guy she’d be.

Vera has a strong side, but we’re fundamentally different. Lily acts like she carries a high testosterone level. I used to know life was all chromosomes but now I’ve learned. Now I have respect for the endocrine system. Hormones are powerful.

So Lily ranges and I sit tight. I’m like the fixed point of Donne’s compass; the farther she travels the more I lean toward her. I traveled enough when I was young: never less than United Premier level in my prime. Then it was my wife who formed the stationary compass point; now I stay home, rather retired, with the cerebral, verbal, needy, incompatible love of my life.

I told Julia this morning that I’m finished. I more or less challenged her to move out, abandon me again, head back to San Francisco and all her cerebral, verbal, needy friends. I meant it at the moment but I didn’t think she’d do it. She’s still into trying to make changes so we work. She wants me to change too, but I’m waiting to see some effective modification in her before I figure out how to alter me. As I’ve told her a dozen times, I spent months on my own issues after Barbara left, and I’m now fairly satisfied with myself.

After all, what am I asking of her? To put the spices away so we can find them again. To stack the pots so the non-stick finish isn’t scratched. Am I really supposed to see my care of tools and equipment as some quirk in me that requires repair or accommodation?

“If you don’t have the time to do it right at first, where will you find the time to fix it?” That’s true about life too. I’m older than Julia and I’ve considered the question more, and I do know the recipe for happily-ever-after from here.

I already live in one of the perfect parts of the world, and I own a tidy house with a garden. There’s time and the places for golf when the weather is good – excellent for exercise and meditation – and it’s easy to go for the thrill and warmth of skiing in the winter.

All I needed was a companion in my Eden. My Julia from when life began. Finding her again after 45 years, talking her into leaving that stale career, that boring marriage, her static weeks, those were like miracle beads accumulating on a cord of silk. All Julia had to do was come here and move into my paradise already prepared.

But I didn’t write any of that to Lily. If she were here I’m sure I’d be talking to her about Julia (except, I hope, for the physical comments), but by e-mail I didn’t want to discuss the fray. I stuck to the Bible, especially because she seems to be headed for Jerusalem. “The thing that ultimately struck me most about the Old Testament,” I wrote in response to her news that she and Jay planned to interview rabbinical students, “was that there’s never a commandment or even a suggestion that we write it down.”

Of course I couldn’t stop there: “See, the good thing about writing is it locks the words in without change. The bad thing about writing is it locks the words in without change.”