Sputterpub's Blog

Berkeley. September 1967. Dinah selected the dormitory site unseen, solely for its proximity to Telegraph Ave. She and her best friend Mary had been parentally prohibited from sharing a room, owing to a recent (chaste) misadventure involving a bonfire and older boys at Stinson Beach. Dinah had no other roommate preference. She picked the dormitory obelisk closest to all the action, and she took her chances with random assignment. She got Denise.

The room was empty when Dinah’s parents left her to settle in. Denise made her appearance soon after.

“Are you my new roomie?” Her voice piped like a child’s, lilting on “room.”

Dinah turned away from organizing her underwear drawer, to first sight. She felt no love and little interest. She intended to get along with Denise of course, but Denise was no Mary. She sounded and looked a lot like what Dinah despised.

Denise was cute. Short, small, with sleek brown hair longer than Dinah’s, round chocolatey eyes, a pert nose, big breasts, tiny feet. Her lips weren’t full but the upper one curled poutily. Her fingers were short and her palms were plump.

“Where you from?” Denise asked after Dinah smile-nodded at her. That voice! High thin sweet. Dinah wondered if Denise had short vocal chords.

“Oh, I just crossed the bay,” Dinah said, pointing roughly northwest over her right shoulder, approximately toward Marin County. “You?”

“West Virginia.” Dinah was surprised. She’d heard of West Virginia but she didn’t know where it was. West of Virginia, obviously, and she thought Virginia was somewhere near Washington. She didn’t know U.S. geography.

Coal mines. Mountains. What they call mountains in the East anyway. Mountains with their tops shaved off, for coal. That’s what Dinah thought about West Virginia. She never wondered about Denise coming all the way to Cal.

For that matter, Dinah didn’t wonder about all the other out-of-state students she met. Half of the kids she encountered during orientation were from LA, but the rest weren’t residents. They were from Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Montana. A clot of them from Washington, D.C. Delaware.

Delaware! The state that makes Maryland look huge. The place with Chancery Court and reverence for corporations. Traveling all the way to UC …

There was a posse of them from Wilmington, but after some sifting three emerged distinct: two Philips and a Moe. The first Philip was brilliant at math and adept at French; he had lank dark hair and acne-scarred cheeks and decided the night they met that he was in love with Dinah. The second Philip went by his last name, Kaseem, which was as strange as coming from Delaware. He was wide-eyed and fat-cheeked and no one ever saw him work at anything except chess. He never graduated. He went straight from Cal to Social Security for a mental disability, and this may be unscientific but no one who knew him then can forget all the acid he dropped, or resist wondering if whatever he has was self-induced.

Then there was Moe-who-would-be-called-Maurice. He was medium tall with medium brown hair, and he affected a slouch. He looked insolent and a little dangerous, but he was just Morris Zumbach from Wilmington. As bright and political as they all were, no one noticed that the group contained amiable Jews and Arabs.

Moe and Philip and Kaseem sauntered into the orientation dance the night Denise and Dinah moved in, and they zigzagged through the crowd – “Hi. Where you from? What’s your major?” – till they got to the young women. Then Philip fell in love with Dinah, Moe and Denise sparked like a match and gasoline, and Kaseem shuffled. Moe affected Frenchness and asked everyone to call him Maurice, but he was already Moe.

Dinah’s social life took a little turn. She didn’t spend as much time with Mary as she had imagined she would. The boys were a year older and lived in apartments a few blocks away. They had kitchens and no curfews, which felt almost as liberating as leaving home had been; Denise and Dinah couldn’t resist stepping into real-life unsupervised apartments. They grew closer than they otherwise would have: spent more time together out of their room than in it, talked about the boys when they weren’t with them. Dinah didn’t return Philip’s regard but they managed to be friends. Within a month she hooked up with his pal Scott from Ohio. Scott and Dinah were relatively hot. Enough so to trade their virginities on a striped mattress on Spaulding Street that December. But they couldn’t hold a candle to the passion that was Denise and Moe. Dinah was struck when Moe asserted that oral sex was the best sex. Denise agreed.

In the first times, after earth was decanted from the universal fluid but long before crops, when chaos abounded and organization came slowly, Prometheus was. Man-maker after all else, he’d gifted the goods away by the time he came to form people.

To plants he gave the green, and with it the ability to make food and air. To birds he presented flight. The fish he endowed with the power to breathe in water. Insects were given invincibility; the exoskeletons that protected them also limited their size, or they would have controlled the planet immediately.

To bears went patience. Elephants perfected long memory. Cats were equipped with night vision and balance. Dogs, then called hunds, were provided with nonstop noses and fashioned as empathic opportunists.

Indeed, whatever wasn’t created, named and characterized, that which remained after Prometheus finished, is what we call cancer: chaotic immortal life without gift.

The last creatures made by Prometheus, the stuff of detritus or the apex of creative genius, depending upon point of view, were people. It’s a matter of esoteric debate whether humans were fashioned from stellar material, or from bits of earth mixed with ocean which still contained motes of heaven, but it’s generally understood that people were made in the god’s image and that all the divine gifts had already been dispensed by then.

So Prometheus looked upon his complex creations and he pondered. Forethinker foresaw.

And first he gave people language.

But that wasn’t enough. It was mastered too well by women, and its effects proceeded too slowly from its causes. The creatures needed more than verbal skills. Prometheus determined to give people the trick to controlling fire.

To deliver it, he would have to steal some formfire. The problem with that plan, the challenge before him, was that the basis for all earthly fire was a bit of the sun that simmered in Jupiter’s den, and security was tight around it.

Prometheus recruited help. In exchange for an assurance of warmth, Cat accompanied him and showed him the way, silently stealthily, to the den in the dark. In exchange for the promise of cooked food, Hund came with them. For while they could sneak in, Cat-led under cover of darkness, they had to wait for daylight to leave with their prize. The flame was too visible at night. As dawn blushed into the eastern sky, Prometheus took a live ember from the perpetual fire, wrapped it in a fennel stalk, and dashed with Cat and Hund back toward people. And when, as Prometheus expected, the alarm was given and the ways obscured by storms and clouds of divine wrath, then Hund’s nose found the path for them; it didn’t matter to Hund that they were surrounded by cold dense white mists of rage, for Hund’s nose always saw a warm vivid world.

That’s how it was, in the beginning. That’s how people got language and fire. That’s why people have cats and dogs. For the warmth of the hearth, cats agreed long ago to be the one wild thing that lives intimately with people. For the savoriness of cooked food, dogs decided to be … well, exactly what we want them to be.

I went, but I learned later I didn’t go alone. Charlotte tailed me, which of course she would not have been able to do if I had Pippi with me, but I didn’t, because Pippi would have complicated my vandalism.

Charlotte learned where I live, and now I’ll probably feel a little bit stalked, especially when my curbside recycling is disrupted more than my neighbors’, or when my newspaper isn’t where it should be, or when my garden sustains a little damage and there wasn’t any weather to account for it.

I’d get me a bright light and start lurking in my own windows except it won’t happen often enough. I hope I have better things to do.

Anyway, that’s not the worst of what I brought on. For Charlotte ran her own search, about me. She’s still friendly with her ex’s sister, and Norah knows Pat, who used to be with Christy, who actually roomed with Libby for a year in college. (These links appear at near light speed.)

Now Libby has met Charlotte, and liked her. Now Libby wants me to call her Eli, and she wants me to like Charlotte, and I’m not sure I can do either. The additional clues about Charlotte – that she only reads or sees what The New Yorker advises her to read or see, that even with her front yard she considers herself a gardener – haven’t uncurled my toes.

What goes around comes around, they say here and elsewhere. The next time I see crazy signs, I’ll know I’m supposed to honor the absent perpetrator for expressing opinions in a way most of us wouldn’t. I’ll remember that I should smile and just continue on my way.

But I’ll fail. The truth is, I can’t bear Charlotte’s kind of hostility. I can get used to her as Libby-Eli’s mate I guess (she’s no worse than some of my cousins), but I’m not going to ignore barbaric yard signs or assertive front fences.

I want a Red Balloon ending. I always loved that book – about a boy who loses his friend the balloon to a gang of rock-armed bullies, and who then receives condolence and adventure from all the balloons in Paris.

I’ve considered the bathroom idea again – could I gather dogs to Charlotte’s parkway if I anoint it with a lot of pee? But again: too much work; no fun; not positive. I need the gathering to be people. I need social coercion. I have to come up with more signs and beguile others into the game.

Limericks present signage problems. But epigrams may work:

Here lies a lawn that struggles to be free
Of your dog’s shit and your discourtesy

This lawn is grown for landscape. Don’t assume
It’s purpose is to be your dog’s bathroom

We love your purebreds and your mutts
But not the product of their butts

NO
POOP

It took me two blocks out of my way, but I couldn’t resist going by the next morning. I stayed on the opposite side of the street and peeked. My signs were gone.

I wasn’t totally surprised about that; in fact, I’d considered making duplicates along with the first set. If all the signs had been removed I might have stopped then, maybe even assumed that I’d gotten some point across. But only mine were gone. The original sorry three still stood.

Not for long, I vowed as I headed for the bus. And then I remembered Burma Shave. Perfect! I needed to come up with a rhyme and break it into four signs and plant them in order, in place of hers.

The best I came up with at first was NO POOP/NO PEE/DON’T LET YOUR DOG/RUN FREE, and I just couldn’t love it. But I worked on the idea, and around mid-afternoon I had it:

THEIR SHIT IS GROSS
AND
STINKS A LOT

 THEIR PEE
WILL KILL
THE GRASS

 IF YOU ALLOW
YOUR DOG
TO SQUAT

 I’LL AIM
TO KICK
YOUR ASS

I knew it was good. I could barely wait to get home and make the signs. And this time I made doubles. This time I pulled hers, leaving mine well-spaced in the four-by-twelve foot plot. I even built my signs to be bi-directional, mating 1 and 4 and 2 and 3 so readers got it no matter which way they were going. I did myself proud.

Charlotte had restored her own idea of order by the time I walked by the next morning, and I resisted another visit that (Wednesday) night. I figured she might be watching for me, so I waited till Thursday to respond. And I guess that wasn’t wait enough.

It was a moonless night and I arrived around 11, so I was covered by darkness. I had removed her signs and was pushing my first into the ground when a light as bright as halogen was suddenly on me. It was like one of those motion-detector bulbs people hang on the eave of their garage, except Charlotte was standing in her front window holding it, aiming it my way.

I had a childlike impulse to abandon all and just run, but I didn’t have the childlike speed. Charlotte was through her door before I took a step, yelling “What the fuck are you doing?” with a shrill tone. (I know she isn’t brave. It was probably only after she pegged me as another woman that she decided to confront me, and even then I heard nerves in her tone.)

I actually stammered. I said “I, uh, well, er,” or something slick like that, and she yelled in stronger voice, “You need to leave. Now! Get out of my yard!”

“Look,” I tried. “I was just responding to your signs . . .” and she barked “Leave!!”

I went. Maybe I should have continued to try to discuss, but it was late and I was ashamed. Oh, I still thought her signs were neurotic and mine were great, but the objective picture didn’t flatter me. The person in the house, with the bright light and indignation, played way better than the one doing the midnight mischief.

At first I considered the obvious: that parkway could be the final resting place for Pippi’s used poop bags. Except I’d have to be careful not to get caught, which meant night-time walks, which I didn’t want and old Pippi didn’t need. For that matter, the yard was at least a block farther from home than our regular ambles, so it just wasn’t convenient. Not enough payback for the effort.

I started thinking satirically. Take a ridiculous position (No Dogs!) and defend the hell out of it. And I started chuckling. Imagining the anonymous help I could give this advocate …

But first I thought I’d better do a background check. I called Libby.

If you want the skinny on an unfamous person, talk to a woman. A good, networking woman. Better: a Jewish woman. Best: a Jewish homosexual woman. My friend Libby.

I’m not gay (yet), but most of my girlfriends are. We have free loving supportive open friendships but they don’t invite me to their parties. They don’t pressure me but most are biding their time, me-wise, waiting for me to discover my full gayness, as they all did in time, after mucking about to their varying levels with people of the other sex.

I want to tell them it really isn’t a matter of choice, but the subject almost never actually comes up, so my words would sound like protesting too much, and I am silent. However, I can use the resources. So when I wanted something on the resident of 3978 Fresno, I called Libby and started her snooping.

She was even more amazing than usual. Only three degrees of separation, she said. It was easy once she knew that Charlotte was both gay and a paralegal.

Briefly, Charlotte was despicable. Middle-aged and bright enough to know better, she filled her life with affectation in place of passion. She was rude to waiters and bellmen, which was always a bad indicator. She insisted on traveling with a large carry-on bag even though she’d never had her luggage lost. For that matter, she was compulsively cautious – fearful of all bumps in the night and also dog shit – and she was amazingly (megalomanically?) self-centered. Everything had to be about her. Even Paula leaving her – Charlotte’s primary response was argument, because it didn’t make any sense to her that Paula would stop loving her enough to leave her.

So her dog deal wasn’t a cultural thing. And while maybe Charlotte could have used some Prozac or Paxil, it didn’t sound like any psychotropics were around. I felt safe enough to prank.

I made the signs Monday evening and first planted them that night. One said, “They make us laugh but NO DOGS!” and another said “One million years of co-evolution but NO DOGS!” and my favorite, the one I really spent some time on, read:

YES
They’re the best
home security
But
NO
DOGS!

I felt a little weird, walking over there late at night, but it only took a few minutes to push my little sign poles into the parkway. At first I thought I’d pull hers out, but I concluded that more was better and left that little plot of weeds with six messages sprouting from it.

You never know what’s going to put someone over the edge. The straw that broke the camel’s back probably looked like any other straw.

For Charlotte, it was walking out of her house a month ago and stepping in soft dog shit on the way to her car. For me, it was Charlotte’s response to stepping in soft dog shit on the way to her car.

To be thorough, we’d both been going through a rough patch. I now know that Charlotte had recently lost her life partner to another woman, and I’d lost a raft of clients, which happens cyclically if you serve small businesses but which invariably brings me down.

All I knew (at first) was the surreal scene in her parkway, unfolding on my left as I walked home from the grocery store one Sunday. It was an eyespanking cheekslapping afternoon. Copenhagen blue sky pocked with puffy clouds. I was striding along with my two shopping bags, when suddenly: “NO DOGS!” screamed a cardboard sign on foot-high sticks, planted in the weedy grass between the sidewalk and the street. And “NO DOGS!!” blared another, shorter, four feet further. I turned in my tracks so swiftly the shopping bags knocked into my thighs. I read the biggest sign, aimed the way I’d been walking. It was about 18 inches off the ground and after “NO DOGS!!!” it said “CLEAN UP AFTER YOUR ANIMAL!”

This seemed to be an hysterically strong response to an invisible threat. My first wonder was whether the resident went off his or her meds. This is Berkeley after all. Then I tried imagining what could drive anyone to plant such signs.

The yard was unexceptional. Offensively low-maintenance: juniper and camellias near the one-story gray stucco edifice, ratty lawn elsewhere, all shaded by a big parkway elm. Only ginger rock and ivy would have been worse. I wondered what the resident was trying to protect.

I began walking again and I started to get angry. I’m like most dog owners: responsible. I don’t let Pippi out without me. I use a leash unless there’s clearly no one around. I carry a bag for scooping her poop. I’ll admit that, very occasionally, when my supply of plastic bags and patience is low and my social resentment is high, when no one appears to be looking, I walk away from Pippi’s shit. I feel a little young and reckless doing it, like when I dare to litter the floor of the bus. But mostly I’m socially ept.

So I was surprised about my anger at those signs. But I flashed on a high school memory. Some movie in Driver Ed called “Courtesy is Contagious.” It showed a woman driver pleasantly waving another driver into traffic ahead of her, and that other driver then behaving well to the next person he encountered, and so on, extending to people holding doors open for those behind them and all the way to smiling at passing strangers. I remember thinking it was hokey but completely true, and 40 years of life experience haven’t contradicted it.

But at the same time that I “got it” about courtesy, I also understood the contagion of rudeness: a person offended is a person ill-disposed toward others, tending not to inhibit his own offensive behavior.

I took a lot of offense at those signs. I felt my heart swell with determination to somehow say fuckyou right back at the sign-planter. And nothing arose in me to inhibit that determination.