Sputterpub's Blog

If Ollie was interested before that lunch, she was smitten after. They parted at 1 p.m. with a pair of reciprocal smiles and flirtatious looks, but neither suggested anything then. Blake was gratified and not completely surprised when Olivia stopped on her way home. After a few comments, he collected his stuff and accompanied her.

She was a little embarrassed on the train with him. She could see their reflections in the curved plexiglass windows as they stood side by side with one hand each on the overhead railing. He looked so obviously…”street” was the only kind word for it. She saw commuters watch them converse; she had to shrug off her self-consciousness. She was glad to detrain and reach the privacy of the evening neighborhoods.

As soon as they got to her place she showed him the bathroom. “You have to get clean,” she said. She gave him a thick towel, pointed out the soap and shampoo. She brought him a robe that would fit him well enough. She took the clothes he was wearing and everything in his pack, and told him she’d wash them as soon as he was done using the water. She heated up soup and bread.

She was in sweats by the time he joined her. The soup was bubbling and the bread was warm. She turned off the stove and oven and was about to open a bottle of white wine when Blake walked to her, pink-tan and slightly damp, and took her firmly in his arms. His long hair was towel-dried and plastered a bit against his right cheek. His face lowered to hers and he gently took her lips into his mouth. He said “Ollie.”

She stiffened and melted at the same time.

Food cooled. Wine went unopened.

It wasn’t like her, to have sex so soon. “Not like Olivia, maybe,” said Blake with a post-coital smile, “but you’re Ollie. And I’m Blake. Hey: don’t get me wrong. I’ve never done anything like this before either.” He turned on the burner to reheat their soup. He pulled the robe around himself and tightened the terrycloth sash. They settled into their meal like a couple, but the evening seemed surreal to both of them.

In the middle of that night she went to the bathroom. The rats or mice or squirrels, whatever they were, were scrabbling in the attic again. They were so loud that she turned on the light. And screamed. Olivia wasn’t a girly-girl. She was not squeamish. But anyone would freak at the sight of that rat face, poking through a just-chewed hole in her bathroom ceiling.

Blake came running. Neither of them know exactly how he managed to garrote the beast, but he took care of it and disposed of the body.

They returned to her bed and reached for one another. The first time had been explosive for him and flattering/overwhelming for her. This time it was more mutual and less definitive. Followed by cuddles till they began to stick together: then Ollie edged away from him and into dream.

They didn’t speak about it, but Blake didn’t leave. Like a Jamaican man he moved in on the woman and the woman’s place, and without discussing anything they knew the arrangement was at her sufferance. It wasn’t until Ollie woke up six weeks later, with Blake’s morning-firm penis in her hand, that she recognized a relationship. Realized it would no longer be simple to discard him, if she wanted to discard him. Wondered if she really wanted him.

It never would have happened if she hadn’t kicked over his change cup. It probably wouldn’t have progressed without a chest-high flight of pigeons. It very well may not last. Ollie squeezed his organ gently and slipped out of bed. She watched small butterflies mate tumbling in the air outside her apartment window, while she poured orange juice into a jelly glass and wondered how she felt.

Olivia found herself thinking about Blake on and off all day. She felt too shy to see him that evening. She walked the long way around to her train station and then fantasized about him that night. Not so much sexually, although she had seen a bulge in his pants and, normally, Olivia didn’t notice that. She wondered most of that evening what Blake would be like cleaned up. She’d always been intrigued with the whole makeover concept, but she never thought about applying it to a guy. It was the woman in those old movies, who removed her glasses and shook out her hair and was transformed from spinster to sexpot. It was females in the magazines who sat for the before-and-after shots. But Olivia imagined scrubbing Blake clean, donning him in fresh flannel and denim, combing his streaky hair.

She woke the next morning trying “Ollie” on for name. She liked it. She’d been a little put off when he first said it, but it was growing on her. She’d never had a nickname before. She attempted “Livy” for a brief time in high school, but it didn’t take. Her friends kept calling her by her full name – “Oh-Livia” when they paged or lulled her, just like her mom – and she kept feeling frowsty for it. “Ollie” seemed capricious to her. Whimsical. Comfortable/goofy. She rolled the syllables around her mouth while she brushed her teeth. She said it out loud while she watched two squirrels chasing around the trunk of the oak tree outside. She shouted it, and the closest squirrel sat up and bulged his berry eyes at her, spine like a question mark, tail like a bottlebrush.

Blake was looking for her when she hit the sidewalk that morning. “Hello Ollie” he said with a smile. And “hi Blake” she returned. “Take me home tonight?” He asked it without assumption or insult. She was startled but she stopped. “What?”

He hesitated. He looked in her face, considered something, mumbled, blushed, and smiled. Before she thought her words through she told him she’d be back at lunch.

“I can bring food,” she said. “What do you eat?”

“Anything.”

“Not vegetarian…?”

“You know the saying: beggars can’t be choosers.”

“Okay then, Blake. I’ll see you around noon.”

She continued up the crowded sidewalk to her office building. She was surrounded by pedestrians wearing electronics, but she was as unaware of her environment as any of them. She moved inattentively amid a sea of headphoned folk, into intersections crowded with cars driven by people on radios or cellphones, but Olivia saw only the inside of her forehead, where visions of cuddles and conversations danced in place of the morning sun.

For lunch she bought portobello mushroom sandwiches, with mozzarella and pesto on focaccia. She didn’t intend to seem fancy, but it was the only tasty item at the Italian coffee bar outside her office. She added bottled water and a big cookie. She walked with the food and her nervous excitement to Blake’s corner.

He put away his cup and they sat on the wall overlooking the hackysackers. An adolescent Dalmatian interfered with the game and had to be leashed to a small tree. Ollie learned that Blake was in fact a bike messenger. He’d been clipped by a bus two months earlier, and he broke his knee. Bike messenger jobs didn’t come with benefits. Blake had no health insurance. His meager savings had gone to the doctors, he’d lost his rented room, and he couldn’t work until he healed. He was an aspiring metal sculptor without a studio, three years younger than her thirty-one.

It was the unusual story: adopt a derelict, clean him up, and wake one morning with his dick in her hand. If she were a prostitute they’d describe her heart as gold. But one thing leads to another, connecting people like trains of thought across the space of gray social matter, and so a length of life is strung.

She saw him on the corner for weeks before she gave him anything. At first she assumed he was one of the bike messengers; he looked young enough and he seemed to talk to them lounging around between jobs playing chess or hackeysack and sneaking hits of cheap pot. But slowly she came to realize he was different. As Olivia walked each morning to her office from the train, each evening to the train from her office, it seeped into her awareness that this one stood a little apart, and listed to the left. He leaned against the concrete wall more than the others, or he sat on the ground. She noticed that the cup he held was not full of coffee or cola; on the ground before him she saw that it was empty except for some coins.

Usually she didn’t give any money on the street. There were too many hands and cups to choose from, and Olivia was pretty sure what she gave would not go for food. Usually she just walked past the sidewalk folks, bike messengers and panhandlers alike, observing body modifications and wardrobe choices but keeping her hands in the pockets of her jacket, where the only thing her fingers touched was her transit pass.

But one day, three and a half weeks after he first became a streak-haired presence in her subconscious, Olivia exited the station with a five in her pocket. She felt almost ill with sudden hunger as her train pulled into the city, and she moved her smallest currency from the wallet in her backpack to the linty right pocket of her corduroy coat. She bought a blueberry streusel muffin as soon as she surfaced to the pillared daylight of the financial district, and she came away from that transaction with a small bag of sweet fatty bread and $2.25. She was so involved in pulling a little globe of streusel topping off her muffin that she didn’t see the paper cup on the sidewalk. She kicked it over, and she spilled his few coins.

He wasn’t crazy; he didn’t yell at her. He simply leaned forward and began to gather the scant change, so she bent and helped him. Pushed one of her dollars into his cup and met his eyes. Noted they looked dark amber, like the steaks in his long straight hair. He smiled and thanked her. She continued to the office, impeded on the sidewalk behind a pair on cellphones. They appeared to walking together but not relating to one another, not attending to their surroundings, rapt in their telephone conversations and slowing her down. She considered how much more real the guy with the cup was than the pedestrians ahead of her. She looked back at him and saw with surprise that he was still paying attention, watching her progress up the street.

From then on she noticed him. Everyday their eyes met and sometimes she dropped change in his cup. Eventually their mouths moved in silent “hellos.” Soon after that they vocalized. Still they might never have conversed if it weren’t for the pigeons.

Dumb birds. They make no sound and rarely fly. They are not lovely. They bob their heads like chickens when they walk, their armlessness apparent. Baby pigeons are not much smaller than their parents: just browner, stupider, more often dead.

It happened one Tuesday morning that she was flocked by pigeons when she passed his corner. A bad bum flushed them over the hackysackers immediately before Olivia stepped off the escalator onto the sidewalk, and a bunch of the birds flew chest-high past her in a poultry-panic, startling her so that she misstepped off the curb and stumbled into her acquaintance-derelict. She noticed his bad smell before his good looks. She felt his strength as his hand gripped her arm above her elbow, holding her up against her fall’s momentum. “Whoa,” he gasped out with a smile, as he leaned into what she was to learn was his injured leg. “You okay?”

The pigeons had cleared out, although Olivia noticed a man a building away who picked at his jacket shoulder as if he was besplattered. “Yeah,” she answered. “Thanks.”

“No problem. I was here anyway.” He smiled and Olivia noted again his amber eyes.

“My name’s Olivia,” she blurted.

“Ollie.”

“No one’s ever called me that…”

“It suits you. I’m Blake.”

They exchanged a few sentences and then she walked on.

Now it was Jacob’s time to shine. Off he went to visit a cousin and acquire a wife and start patriarchin’. He promptly encountered a young woman named Rachel who happened to be the cousin’s daughter. Love at first sight. He asked Rachel’s dad (named Laban I think) if he could have her. Well I reckon so, said Laban. But only after you work for me for seven years.

The wedding was lovely, exactly seven years later. But the marriage kiss wasn’t. When Jacob lifted his bride’s veil it wasn’t Rachel’s visage upon which he gazed. It was the face of her older sister Leah. But the marriage was done.

What the hammer? Jacob complained to his father-in-law. Laban said, I couldn’t marry Rachel off while her older sister sat at home, a virgin. If you still want Rachel, that’ll be another seven years.

So Jacob didn’t get to marry his love until he’d put in fourteen years of hard labor. But he wasn’t celibate. He didn’t hate Leah. He didn’t hate her handmaiden either. And he was of course affectionate when he finally got around Rachel. So affectionate that he “knew” her handmaiden too. The book tells us he had six sons by his first wife and two by his second. He also had two sons each by the handmaidens, and one daughter by Leah. Jacob fathered twelve boys and a girl.

(At least. There were other daughters who aren’t named in the Bible. There have been persistent rumors about a thirteenth son, and we have the Rastafarians to prove it.)

Now things get complicated. Multiply the protagonist by twelve and the story expands. It’s not very surprising that Jacob favored the two boys he got from Rachel. The younger of those sons was named Benjamin, and he was such a baby in the family that he was protected by all. But the older boy, Joseph, was close enough to his brothers’ ages that he competed with them. He was such a father’s pet that they resented him. And it appears it all went to his head. He got cocky. Arrogant even. He was cruising for a fall.

His brothers helped. They threw him in a pit. They told their parents that Joseph had come to a sad accidental end but they really sold him into slavery. Joe went to Egypt.

And thrived. He did well at every job he got. But he ran into trouble with his boss’s wife. She tried to seduce him, he refused her, and she then complained to her husband that Joseph had raped her. Joseph lost his job and his liberty. I hate that theme of female dishonesty and I always wanted to believe it was misogynist propaganda. Unfortunately, I’ve now lived long enough to witness actual examples of it. Nasty.

But Joseph came out on top. While in jail he had an opportunity to interpret a few Pharaonic dreams. He predicted the famine that in fact came to pass, in time and credibly enough that grain was stockpiled, so Egypt survived and even had surplus to feed hungry immigrants from what’s now Israel, including Joseph’s own brothers, which led to reconciliation and other events.

Of course there’s more to these stories. I haven’t yet mentioned that Jacob was sent away for masquerading as the first-born, which is how he could dream of a ladder to heaven and angel-wrestling, and how he came to be visiting the cousin that gave him all the mothers of his sons. I haven’t mentioned much. But I hope I’ve provided enough to acquaint you a bit with some root stories from your culture. I hope I’ve whetted your whistle for more.

I remember a bit of Sunday school. I recall a few stories, from the rabbis and others. I suppose it gelled in college, when I majored in traditional English lit. All drama and fiction in our language started with Bible stories. I became acquainted with the tales.

I’ve been surprised recently, to learn in conversations with educated loved ones, that they don’t know these stories. They are familiar with the Greco-Roman myths, maybe even with some of the Norse legends, but I get blank stares when I mention the rape of Dinah or even her 12 brothers.

I wonder if I can recite the beginning adventures from memory.

It all starts with Abraham. Not the Bible (that opens with Adam and cruises through genealogies and Noah), but the Jews. I recall a children’s story about Abraham as a kid. He grew up in the Mesopotamian big city Ur, and his father was an idol-maker. One day a woman entered the family shop seeking a new big stone idol. Because her old big stone idol had been stolen the night before. While Abraham’s father took the order and began the carving, the boy wondered: how could a god allow himself to be stolen? Shouldn’t a god be powerful enough to protect against simple theft?

Abraham got to thinking. He concluded that a stone statue, built by his own dad, couldn’t be a god. He went on the roof to continue wondering and was struck in the face by all the sunshine. Hello! he thought. The sun is all-powerful; it must be God. And he stayed on the roof, worshiping and probably tanning a bit, until the sun set. Set?! Whoa: up came the moon. The moon appeared to conquer the sun. The moon must be God. But then a cloud covered the moon. And just when the boy was about to name the cloud God, a wind scattered it.

Abraham had seen enough. He sensed the trend. He had a revelation. The only way to answer his question, finally, was to conceive of an all-powerful, invisible God. Just one. There was no need for more than one, and more than one brought problems that resembled silly humanity. No. Just one. Really powerful.

He was the first monotheist. The initial Jew. The male convert from whom most guys who become Jews take a name (the female convert name most popular is Ruth). If he started his ruminations as a child and made his first deal with God when he was beyond full-grown (see below), then he must have mulled over the question all his life. No surprise.

The book says he made a deal with God, promising to circumcise all male children. And (in time) God made an agreement with him, resulting in the birth of a son from Abraham’s long-sterile wife. By then Abraham already had a son, Ishmael, born of his Egyptian concubine Hagar. Wife Sarah birthed Isaac. Isaac became the second Jewish patriarch and Ishmael became the first of Islam. Yes. Brothers.

God wasn’t quite done with Abraham. He tested the man’s devotion by commanding him to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac. God stopped him at the last moment, but the vignette is one of the more disturbing scenes in Genesis.

Isaac was allowed to grow up. He became the father of twin boys, Esau and Jacob. Esau was the slightly older, so he stood to inherit his dad’s position. In Bible terms, Esau held the birthright. That was too bad, because as the boys grew it became apparent to all but Isaac that Jacob was the proper heir. Esau just wanted to hunt and engage in good-old-boy activities. In fact, one day he returned to the family kitchen, footsore and hungry after a day of hunting, and he said to his homebody brother that he’d trade anything for a good meal. Really? asked Jacob. Oh yeah. Will you trade your birthright for a bowl of my stew? You betcha.

And so it was, at least between the twins. Dad still had to be contended with, and Isaac wasn’t about to give the patriarch’s blessing to the younger son. But Isaac was on his death bed and not seeing well. The family put gauntlets of animal hide over Jacob’s arms and, when Isaac felt all the rough hair, he thought he was touching Esau. He gave Jacob the Esau-blessing. Mission accomplished.