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.”

“You’re the only person I know who’s actually read the book,” my daughter wrote. “Is this guy right?”

She included a link to an article by some Russian man, about the Bible really being a terrorist manifesto. A few years back I read the whole book – New Testament, too, to answer the question I’d gotten most often. I learned a few things, like that most folks don’t read it all no matter what classes they attend, or they’d be talking about the slapstick in I Samuel.

I read it to call my own bluff. I’d made enough harsh statements about the Bible and organized religion that I thought it was time to learn whereof I speak. “Lord no,” I wrote back intentionally. “When you take the big view the OT is mostly a breeding manual, for the healthy husbandry of people. It’s about food and water use and exercise and neighbor relations (rendering aid or judgments for the close and destruction unto the far) – all of which are most likely to produce and prosper viable offspring.”

I hit SEND and wondered when I’d see her.

She’s taking her time and traveling the planet. She stops when she must to work. Babysitting in Belgium, teaching English in Spain, telemarketing in Australia. She has plenty of time, everyone tells her, even though that’s untrue. In fact, life whips by and she’d better strike while her brain is still amazing. But I think she knows that; I haven’t kept it a secret.

Lies parents tell … to their kids (you can be whatever you want badly enough) and to themselves (what matters is quality time, not quantity). It’s not so much that they believe them; they just never think to question them.

Ach, how weird my fellows be:

I’ve never understood all the compartmentalization. Work/home, friends/family, residence/travel. There’s no natural separation to any of these. But almost everyone I know works at work and doesn’t take it home. Abandons home all weekday and travels some distance to an office that is not used at night. Sits in a trench 5/7 of their days, waiting for 2 weeks of vacation.

They should try to work at home and do personal tasks at work. Eliminate the commute, or at least walk or use public transit and read or write while riding. They won’t have to travel if they walk or ride transit around a city, watching, hearing, interacting with citizens. It’s consistently stimulating and almost always attractive.

But don’t listen to me. No one does. Seems like all my life I’ve been watching naked leaders as they stride by, their wide bare feet slapping the pavement, their asscheeks bobbling, their portliness swaying above their sex. They turn their heads from side to side like beauty queens on parade floats, and their faces take on such expressions of serious importance that all around me my fellows only see them from the neck up. “But he’s nude!” I say, or “Look: she has toilet paper stuck to the bottom of her foot!” and I might as well be a substitute teacher, for all I’m heard. No, I’m worse off than that, because the sub knows he’s being ignored; I’m often in the presence of someone who nods in apparent agreement, even comments “uh huh” or “no duh,” and doesn’t have the self-esteem to confess: “Say again? I’m sorry; I wasn’t paying attention.”

Beau attempted to do something with his classics degree at first. He subbed and then taught as a regular faculty member in a private K-8 school. He tried to start ten- and eleven-year olds on Latin. He beguiled kids with myths. He made next to no money and after Annika become pregnant in 1975 Beau took a job at Andreini & Company. With his personality he actually outsold Steve. They both did well.

Beau was practically a stand-up comic by then. He performed jokes more than told them, constructed shaggy dog tales (don’t cry over milled spilk), and did some wicked impersonations. His practical jokes were seldom executed but ever well-conceived, and almost always played on Steve. Who actually didn’t mind them. Steve was so consistently into philandering that he needed some tactical support from Beau – he was nothing if he wasn’t grateful for that – and anyway, the big jokes always turned out to Steve’s advantage.

There was the time Beau put rocks in both back hubcaps of Steve’s T-bird. Maybe it wasn’t the most original joke but it worked. It scared the pants off Steve, who loved the car and panicked at the sound those rocks made when he started to drive away from work that March day. And it’s true that the rocks actually damaged the insides of the hubcaps, but Steve had extras at home. The thing was that the noise made Steve stop the car just outside the fenced parking lot. Just in time to miss being hit by an escaping slab of concrete that was being hoisted up to the building which was under construction next door. The freak accident never would have happened except that the crew was under pressure to complete the job. They were too tired to be trying that maneuver; the slab slipped and fell forty feet to smash on the asphalt below. If Steve hadn’t stopped, the concrete would have nailed him.

It was several years before Beau pulled another one, but his next idea was original and brilliant. Both of them wore eyeglasses then, but Steve was acting obnoxiously cocky about the fact that he didn’t yet need bifocals. He was also tiresome in the way he appreciated the design of his new Dior frames. He was accustomed to looking good, and he took care as he aged to use what the designers and cosmeticians offered. It was his practice to set his expensive glasses on his desk most of the time; Andreini & Co. employed several sweethearts and Steve always tried to look his best for them. One day when he left his glasses behind Beau borrowed them. Working carefully with some transparent tape and an Exacto blade, he applied thin strips of tape to the lenses in such a way that the wearer would immediately assume both lenses had shattered. He replaced the altered glasses on Steve’s desk and then loitered around to witness the reaction.

Steve had never outgrown an impulsive temper. As soon as he put his glasses on his face he saw the crack-like lines; snatching them off he hurled them to the floor in exasperation. Which action did break them. Beau roared his laughing delight. Steve glared, paused, grunted, paused, giggled, paused, and guffawed. “I deserve it,” he concluded. “I really do it to myself, don’t I?”

The joke had two interesting effects. It made Steve focus on his old temper problem and begin to deal with it. He’d had such a generally successful life that his temper hadn’t often hurt him, but it took a toll on his marriage. Elena went with him for counseling and the process did help their relationship. Of more interest to him, it improved his golf game. He and Beau hit the links before Steve’s replacement glasses arrived, so he couldn’t see well to putt, and under that disadvantage he began to understand the focusing advice that Beau had been giving him all those years. Without his eyeglasses Steve had the best putting of his life. He made jokes about “using the force.” He thanked Beau.

A year ago Beau came up with what may have been his best one. He and Steve never used caddies. Their memories of golfer-mocking were too vivid for them to put themselves in that role. They didn’t use carts either. They wanted the exercise of walking the course and carrying their own clubs.

Beau began adding weight to Steve’s bag. He was subtle about it. They always played at least two days a week, and Beau added a rock only every other time. Within a couple of weeks Steve was commenting. Observing that he must be out of shape. Resolving to work out more. By the end of two months Beau gave the joke a rest but Steve joined a gym. He hired a personal trainer and met with him three times a week. He found the place to be a treasure trove of females and their presence inspired him to exertion.

Steve never caught on to the joke but Beau told him about it four months later. By then Beau had seen the improvement in Steve’s shape and attitude and joined him at the gym. Both of them benefitted, of course. But when Steve had his heart attack last month the doctors got their first close look at his system. They said the training saved his life. No one had any idea until then about the extent of his heart disease.

Steve’s going to be fine. As fine as anyone fifty and growing older. He sailed through the quadruple bypass. But he and Beau both know that if it hadn’t been for that sneak weight-training and consequent gym work, Steve wouldn’t be alive now to record this.