Sputterpub's Blog

“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.

Beau developed his personality. He was naturally inclined to talk back and wisecrack, and he grew into telling and playing jokes. Especially in his association with Steve, it worked with the girls. Beau had his high school’s largest collections of knock-knock, grape and elephant jokes. In the years to come he would readily absorb other genera, like lightbulb jokes, and lawyer jokes, and dumb blonde jokes.

As for physical comedy, he started with items from the Anthony’s catalogues: whoopie cushions, cigarette loads, plastic puke. He matured into acts like soaking a sleeping friend’s hand in warm water to make him wet his bed, short-sheeting Steve’s bed, stealing underwear from girls at a slumber party and freezing it. For a time when they were in college Beau got into cooperative ventures. He organized big projects like taking three horses up into the dean’s office, or disassembling/reassembling a VW bug so it formed the centerpiece of an upstairs co-op dining room. But before and after that, for most of his jokester life, Beau has worked alone.

Steve and Beau caddied all the way through high school, and in that period their attitudes did change about golf. Steve accepted the fact that he wasn’t going to win any big awards at the game. Beau realized that he had developed a kind of unwilling commitment; he still couldn’t say he liked golf, but he was accustomed to playing it, and that custom had become something of a ritual for him. The young men went together to college and continued to play a couple of times a week.

Perhaps Steve liked the way it felt to, as he said, “face the facts about golf and drop the fantasy,” but he became increasingly more practical and pragmatic as he passed into adulthood. He majored in economics in college and then went straight into his father’s very successful brokerage business. He married Elena Boudy, the girl from his neighborhood his parents most wanted as a daughter-in-law. That’s not to say he didn’t love Elena in his own way, but it was very convenient and useful to marry her. Especially after their son came, the union provided the impetus for her father to merge his business into Andreini & Company, and anyway, Elena’s mother and Steve’s mother were best friends.

Beau went the other way. It was ironic for him to be so impractical, given the fact that he had no family money behind him, but he couldn’t resist majoring in classics. He was never good-looking, always too thin for his height, with features unoffensive but too bland to attract, but he went with a number of young ladies in college. He may have driven a few of them away with pranks like the Vaseline lump on the toilet seat for that squishy surprise when she uses the john in the middle of the night, but mostly his sense of humor drew them to him. In fact, his last and best girlfriend, his future wife Annika, laughed when she sat in the glop. Came after him without even cleaning her thigh, pounding him with her pillow and wrestling with him until of course they fucked. She made him agree to stop pranking her when they got married. Actually, the day after they got married. On their wedding night, after consummation but before sleep, Beau stretched some Saran Wrap tightly over the toilet bowl, set the seat down, and unscrewed the lightbulb. He figured Annika would use the toilet during the night and if she tried the light he wanted her to think the bulb was blown. He snickered as he imagined her urine stream bouncing off the drum-tight plastic.

As it happened the joke worked. That time, Annika wouldn’t have found it funny. She was a very good sport but just a little sentimental about it being their wedding night. She would have been genuinely angry at Beau except for the fact that a huge sewer rat had managed to swim up their plumbing and into the toilet bowl. But for the Saran Wrap, the rat might have had a piece of Annika.

Some people say golf is the hardest sport to master. Some say it isn’t a sport at all. It’s like cilantro that way; folks seem to have strong opinions about it. Almost from their infancies, Steve Andreini loved the game and Beau Anderson didn’t.

Golf is what brought those boys together. Golf and the alphabet. They were the same age and attended the same school so they were always being lined up or seated together. But they got to know each other when they started caddying at the country club in 1961. Steve had already been playing for six years; his prosperous father got him the caddying job so he could be even more immersed in the game. Beau on the other hand worked for money. He’d been established for several years as the local boy most able to retrieve lost golf balls; each week he sold at least a bucket back to the pro shop. The head pro noticed and promoted Beau to the regular income of summer and weekend caddying.

Working on the course didn’t change the boys’ attitudes. Steve continued to love the game, but his improvement came with practice and maturity rather than from carrying clubs and associating with the members. He agreed with Beau that most of the golfers were jerks regardless of the size of their tips.

Beau kept recovering and reselling golf balls. He liked money and disliked golf. He and Steve became acquainted while waiting at the pro shop for work or while attending a group around the course. By the time the boys returned to school they were good friends.

They arrived for their first day of junior high together. Steve’s parents drove him from their luxurious, unincorporated, golfcourse-abutting neighborhood to Beau’s small tract house in the middle of a ten-year-old subdivision a block away from the school. Steve’s mother tried to get a kiss from her seventh grader but Beau walked out of his front door at that moment and saved his friend from the sentimental demonstration. The boys greeted each other with a “hey” and an upward toss of the head. That movement would make their hair fly in a few more years when boys began to have hair, but on that September day in 1961 Steve’s dark Brylcreemed waves stayed where they were supposed to stay, and Beau’s blonde crewcut didn’t have anywhere to go. The boys stood together beside a large bird-of-paradise plant and waved to the Andreinis as they drove away. Then Beau and Steve walked the block to school.

They entered their junior high campus two twelve-year-olds, and they matriculated three terms later as new people in a new world. Beau was still taller and thinner than Steve. Steve was still handsomer than Beau, and they were still good friends, but they had body hair and baser voices, and the world had been shrunk by assassinations and transistors and expanded by new music. Steve was interested in girls, attractive, and dating. Beau was interested in girls, gawky, and not.

They still caddied. Steve’s golf game had about hit its peak but he didn’t know that yet; he continued to fantasize about a future as a famous pro. It irked him that Beau who hated the game had developed a wondrous putt; Steve had the better grip, the superior eyesight, and nearly a decade of experience, but Beau was almost always able to sink the ball if it was within fifteen feet of the cup. “It’s a brain thing,” Beau used to say (in another three or four years it would be called a “head thing”). “It’s not about my eyes and arms as much as it’s about visualizing where the ball will go. I don’t know, Steve, but I can almost do it better with my eyes shut than open…” Beau tried to describe the sideways concentration that occurred for him, but Steve couldn’t grasp it. He got irritated. He worked on his grip, his stance, and his measurements, but he didn’t putt as well as Beau.

Steve had the advantages over his friend in almost all other aspects of their lives. He was better looking, better shaped, generally more popular. He got better grades but that was largely because he didn’t argue with the texts and tests; Beau spent a lot of time talking back. Steve had more attention and money from his parents. Beau did about as well at baseball as Steve did at football, but Steve’s sport was far more glamorous. Steve had girlfriends.

At first, Beau’s experiences with girls all derived from Steve. There was always at least one with a crush on him, and she’d come around with a girlfriend or two to watch Steve play or talk to him. Beau got to know the girlfriends. That socializing led to nighttime meetings on the golf course. It was a popular spot for the area kids; they found privacy around the lagoon-like water traps and freedom on the greens. They understood the perils of the automated sprinklers that would rise from the ground in concert and circle-soak to the zzhup zzhup zzhup of their movement. Sometimes the kids would find the course already invaded by a herd of ruminants – horses from the livery stable or a group of mule deer or once even a dozen cows from a pasture three miles away.

I overheard a bunch of Mom’s conversations with Ward when we lived at the Santa Maria. She wouldn’t let me swim at night and I couldn’t get too far from them in our rooms. I think I even heard their breakup talk.

I’m not sure it was actual breakup talk, because Ward kept coming around for awhile. He helped us move back into the house and I know he took the three of us out to dinner a few times. But he never acted the same after the night I heard her call him an acolyte, and she didn’t seem to care very much.

Ward was an okay guy. Not brilliant but smart enough, and everyone seemed to like him. He always had a pleasant low-key way about him. He told a joke well. But he wasn’t charismatic. He couldn’t care less about leading.

I heard Mom’s derisive voice before her words. I knew that tone well; it brought a layer of dread into any conversation. She said something about Ward needing to speak his own mind. Apparently he’d been acting like he agreed with some management nonsense from his boss at work, when he really had big objections. She said he should speak up – his job was secure – what did he have to lose? He answered with a no, thanks – if there was one thing he’d learned it was not to show disagreement with superiors. Mom scoffed – “learned!” – and made a comment about how Ward was always looking to a guru. She said men tend to have active role models while women mostly don’t, and that’s hard, but it means that a woman who does make it will be more confident about her ability to decide. Confronted with a new problem, her first approach won’t be to look for the colleagues who have already solved it. I don’t think she meant to be critical so much as observant. But she can be scary. And judging from Ward’s attitude afterward, her words must have cut, twisting in him like acid. He didn’t act as light after that.

Anyway, Mom already had a house, and we were all dreaming about it before we got to move back in. We’d come to realize that we didn’t own it so much as borrow it; we’d live in it for our years, but we were just one family in its history, and it likely had a future as long as its past.

We all visited it nightly while we slept, but Mom’s dream had an extra room. She told me she’d been having the same dream for years before the accident: our house but with a windowless hidden room deep in the interior, a spot she rediscovered just before waking, always regretting that she hadn’t yet furnished or used it, foreknowing that she’d forget it again until the next time she dreamed.

She said it would really bug her, to live in a house with an unused room. She was glad our place didn’t have a formal dining room or other waste of space. And that part of her dream bugged her too; she was always distressed in the dream when she found the room and she was distressed awakening to have had that vision again.

But here’s the corny truth: ever since we moved back into the house and she started writing these little stories… ever since then, she hasn’t had that dream.

Red Cross Disaster Services moved us into a residential hotel. “Efficiency Suites” read the small sign to the right of the office door. Ours was on the third floor: a big living area with a kitchenette in the corner, followed by two bedrooms with a bathroom between them. There were windows along the right wall of the living room, the right and back wall of Mom’s room, the back of the bathroom, and the back of the room I shared with Brian. The right side windows overlooked a patio and black-bottomed pool in a kind of courtyard. Mom never let me swim in the pool at night.

I wasn’t too happy about sharing with Brian. I’ll admit I had even hoped for a big bed. But I was stuck in a twin in a small room with my baby brother, and I should have been grateful at that. If Mom had gone with her original plan to rent out the house, we probably would have been camping in a city park.

As it was I liked some things about the Santa Maria. It was downtown, so when I was allowed out it was no distance to interesting places. The grab bars in the bathroom were so useful they soon looked attractive to me. I’ll admit I even got to like the kitchenette. Because it was just a corner it was easy to get to. Its openness forced us to keep it clean, but that turned out to not be a bad situation. And after I got the plaster cast off, the pool was very handy for the exercises I was supposed to do.

Our space was so tight it was kind of like living on a boat. Or maybe like sleeping on an island after shipwreck, because we kept making trips back to the house to scavenge more clothes or books or whatever we thought we needed.

Which was part of what Mom was after. She likes it when life wakes you up. That’s one of the reasons she got rid of the car. She says living without a car is like keeping a vegan diet or being a little disabled; it makes you conscious about everyday things.

No thanks, I told her after a month in the hotel. I said I was awake enough, with the broken ankle. Even when the plaster came off it was hard to get around and easy to see how much I used to take mobility for granted. But I could live without the car. It was the house I was having nightly dreams about.

So was Brian. So was Mom. We were all dreaming about the house. Mom said maybe houses are more important even than true love. She said little girls dream about the palace as much as the prince, and little boys fight battles over nothing but territory: more house stuff. I even heard her telling her boyfriend Ward that real estate is the only justification for marriage. Ward wanted to get married but Mom didn’t, and I heard her argue that marriage is an advantage if the couple is struggling to survive but a limitation if they already have the creature comforts. She said “creature comforts” really means “house,” because most of us have the food and clothing items. After all, the first thing a couple aims at is a house.