Sputterpub's Blog

I saw him last night. He was dressed up, in his way. Wearing his crow and even an eye patch. It always amuses me when he wears the patch. Gives him a rakish look. Implies that he can see something. And maybe he can.

We’ve been talking, recently, about skydiving. I’ve been trying to describe the free feeling in free fall, and Ty has been telling me the birds’ version of it. But when I explained the body high, from having your weight hang unsupported by your skeleton, that seemed to get him. I guess the birds don’t feel that.

Last night when I met him, he wanted more discussion about diving. But I was pretty obsessed then about Chris. Sure, objectively I hear everything my mother says about fish in the sea and how I’m only nineteen and have my whole life ahead of me, but I know (and I guess Ty does too) how much the relationship means to me. I want it to work, and I was thinking I might have blown it.

I walked with Ty and he heard me reproach myself for not learning. That launched him into a talk about creatures only learning what they have to learn. He said that cliff-dwelling birds don’t even learn to recognize their offspring; as long as they can find their nest they can safely assume it contains their chicks. On the other hand penguins raise their chicks in flocks. So they have to learn to recognize their babies or they’ll waste their energy feeding creatures who aren’t theirs.

I didn’t have much patience last night. I told Ty it would be weird not to know your own kid, but that didn’t help me solve my Chris problems. Then I watched him talk to the crow. Ty didn’t actually speak to the bird but there did appear to be something going on, bird-to-blind man.

The crow voiced sounds for a minute or so into Ty’s ear. And then Ty told me with a smile that Chris and I would be all right. In fact, he said he couldn’t give me specifics, but he saw Chris in my life for the rest of my life, and he understood that I would be satisfied with the nature of the relationship.

Sweet. His words really did make me feel better. A kernel of warm happy energy opened in the core of me, flowered out, and the next thing I knew I was blurting an invitation to dive. The words were out before I understood them. I almost laughed. But he quickly accepted, and I thought: why not? I do all the work in a tandem jump …

We’re going to the drop zone in a few hours. Ty is meeting me at the park. We may have to clean him up a little first. I can almost see us on our way, my car ringed by escort birds. But I called Chris this morning. We talked while I watched Barking Man pass by the front of my place. We’re getting together tonight. I think things are going to be okay.

Ty tells me all birds talk and no birds talk. He says they have separate valves on their bronchiae, so they can warble two simultaneous but different wavering tones, and those two tones fool our brains into hearing words. It’s called “sine wave speech.” Kind of like the way we can hear muted conversations in the rush of white water. But more isolated and refined.

All birds can do it. Mynahs and parrots are naturals, but mynahs are cousins to common starlings: any bird can do it if he tries. And I guess, around Ty, birds try.

He says he can understand them. I assume his blindness makes him pay more attention to what comes in his ears. But I don’t know: sometimes I think maybe he reads their minds. No. He says he hears them.

They tell him the future. Advise him about love and war and winds and storms and even coming earthquakes. And sometimes, he says, they foretell the effect of a spiritual adventure; that’s why they’re known to flock around certain holy folks – there they gather information, and process it to predict.

Ty has amazing stories. His own life has been three. He says he started life male, switched to female in his late teens, and flipped back to manhood seven years after that. I’m not at all clear on what he means by that. I don’t think surgery was involved but Ty just won’t provide details. If I ask he changes the subject, usually to something about birds.

That’s how I learned that all bird embryos start out male. Ty didn’t answer my surgery question but informed me that all other animals start babies as females, and something has to happen to the little bud to make it male. It’s the opposite with birds. The default is boy.

Or another time, when I poked into the sex change stuff, Ty explained how a bird can dive at a speed faster than your basic falling object. He got me that time. I forgot my question because I’m into physics and skydiving. I may major in physics. It all depends on how the quantum class goes next semester. No matter what, I’ll keep jumping. Lately my life seems to be time spent between jumps. It makes my mother nervous, even though she knows I’m safer jumping that driving to the drop zone.

Anyway, to hear Ty tell it, he’s been three versions of himself. He’s the only person who’s ever had sex as both a man and a woman. He says it’s way better for women.

I was surprised to hear that. It runs counter to common understanding. Also seems to make less evolutionary sense. But I’m not sure Ty believes in evolution. He talks about gods a lot.

He even has three stories about his blindness.

The thing you learn when you integrate with the disabled is that it’s not cool to ask them about their actual handicap. Neither the extent nor the origin. So when a disabled person volunteers such information, you tend to pay attention.

The first time he told me, he said he was handicapped by the gods because he knew too much. He could foretell, so they wouldn’t let him see. He said he was stricken by disease and when he recovered he was blind. Untreated measles? I got the impression then that he was a kid when he lost his sight.

Another time he told a long story about witnessing a goddess bathing. I think he was drunk, and I only heard the tale once, but it was a rather vivid and elaborate account. I don’t doubt Ty saw someone naked. Maybe there were painful consequences. He must have been at least a teen.

The best version, the one I’ve heard most often, is the story about sexual gratification. Because of his background, Ty is in the unique position to state whether the pleasure potential is greater for women or for men. According to him, when he tendered his conclusion for women, the women were not pleased. They had been maintaining that men had more fun. Their displeasure resulted in his loss of sight. He calls the disputants gods. I wonder if, really, they were doctors.

(to be concluded tomorrow)

Crazy people walk here. Not dangerous-crazy, though some are clearly off their meds. More like bizarre-crazy. I looked up “bizarre.” My dictionary says it comes from the Basque “bizar,” for “beard.”

I live in Berkeley. I was born and raised here, and now I attend Cal. We call “here” the open ward.

We have Barking Man. He’s got some sort of palsy and he seems to walk for therapy. He also barks. He knows where the dogs live. He tries to provoke them by calling their names and barking when he passes. He usually succeeds. The surprise is when I see him drive by in his Mercedes coupe. I wonder if he bought it with settlement funds from some accident that crippled him.

There’s Praying Woman. She wanders the streets with a vacant look on her face. She kneels and genuflects on the sidewalk of most street corners.

Friendly Guy always wears a red crash helmet. I’ve never seen him fall or even wobble, but he’s padded as if he’s had some concussions. He likes to say hi to everyone.

Purple Woman is so color-coordinated that even the tennis balls that pad the rear legs of her walker are lavender.

But the true bizarre, the Bearded One, is Ty. He walks with a bird on his shoulder, and he refers to himself as a Scalawag. He doesn’t have a pegleg, but he’s blind.

“Arg” is what Ty often says. I’ve heard him refer to cops as Scurvy Rats. But privately he’s told me that rats don’t get scurvy. Only people and guinea pigs and monkeys lack the ability to synthesize C for themselves.

I started to know Ty a year ago. I was walking a lot then, at night. It made my mother uncomfortable, but I was too restless at home. I kept passing Ty. It doesn’t matter to him whether it’s day or night when he wants to walk.

One of the things about growing up in Berkeley is how accustomed you get to disabled people. The Cal campus was the first accessible one in the country, and the Bay Area is a good place to live. Most of the disabled students who come here stay. So from an early age, we’re used to seeing chair-riders and blind folks and silent groups with vivacious hands.

I was entering my “evolved” phase. That’s when I started to make a point of politeness. I tried to be gentle in voice and body language. When I caught myself with my arms crossed in front of my chest I’d turn it into a self-hug. I tried to notice. Nodded or said hi to everyone I passed. Acknowledged them and tried to be acknowledged. So I said hello to Ty.

It took a few times before he talked to me. At first he may have been too surprised to speak. I don’t think blind people in general or Ty in particular are often greeted by passers. But after a little he was hi-ing back at me, or evenin’-ing, and soon we progressed to conversing in short sentences.

It got to where I saw him often. He knew my step the way a dog knows a car engine. Within a month we sometimes walked together.

Like I said, Ty wears a bird on his shoulder. You’d expect it to be a parrot in keeping with the pirate theme, but the birds are not his pets. He insists he doesn’t own them. They’re locals.

Most days he wears a pigeon. On occasion it’s a seagull. And rarely during the days but quite often at night, a crow rides next to his left ear. I know there’s more than one pigeon. I never get close enough to the others to be sure.

(continued on Wednesday)

“The thing is,” Denise would start her speeches to Dinah, forefinger aimed like a pistol shaking with her vehemence. “The thing is …” She stabbed the air with those words. She’d be bouncing naked on her twin bed, on her side of the room, hair flapping, breasts swaying, belly shaking, angrily declaiming over some offense of Moe’s, threatening often to kill herself, to throw that unclad body from the window at her side, even though they were only three floors up and the sliding glass could be opened maybe four inches.

It seemed like the only time she spent in the dorm room was after a fight with Moe. She’d storm in, heated flushed indignant at least, and pull off clothes she’d worn too long. She had fine-pored olive skin and her big breasts hung in U’s. Her aureoles were brown. She was slim but her belly draped a bit over her crotch, wiggled oddly when she then climbed to bounce on her small toes on her small bed, O-eyed and O-mouthed with that finger out: “The thing is …”

Dinah knew Moe hit Denise sometimes, and she concluded that Denise asked for it. It was like a dance they ran and each knew the steps; the reward was some kind of fabulous makeup sex, busy mouths locked on each other’s loins for hours, hours, that Scott and Dinah couldn’t even imagine well enough to mock.

Dinah saw it once from the other side. Instead of being in the dorm room studying when Denise tromped in, she was at the fight when Denise stomped out. They were all at Moe’s and Kaseem’s place. Scott and Kaseem were playing a long game of chess and Dinah was reading when sounds of strong argument began in the bedroom. Epithets and drawer slamming.

Soon they were in view. Denise was leaving, Moe was following yelling, she was turning screaming, and he was reaching for her at the door, taking her by the shoulders and shaking her a little to emphasize his words. It was scary, so sudden, but then they saw Denise was moving under those hand-covered shoulders, resonating like a tuning fork, amplifying the sway till her back was smacking the door. Like pushing the Ouija piece. They witnessed her helping the passion look good before she tore out of there for the privacy of her bouncing bed.

They saw all that, the choreography, but they somehow never realized that the sags and shadows of Denise’s body signified more than harmless ventures into sex. Why that girl had birthed at least one baby, and Dinah never knew it till recently, gazing at her own used belly, thinking back.

West Virginia. Denise didn’t go back much. She and Moe didn’t make it of course; neither did Scott and Dinah. They lost touch after that year, but Dinah heard tidings of Denise last month.

She married a fireman. They moved to Nevada. Denise settled down in the Sparks area and raised four kids.

Dinah got the news from Philip’s wife Rita, after connecting with them on the Internet. Philip seems successful: a tenured math professor well-married to a self-employed businesswoman. Through them she learned about Kaseem’s disability and Moe’s death in a rock climbing mishap. They told her no one knew where Scott was. They forwarded some e-mails from Denise.

Her letters were creepy. It sounded like she had gone completely over to the other side. A regular church participant. Almost fundamentalist. Profoundly anti-choice. So consistent about denying her past deviance that she almost believed the rewrite herself. It was easy to resist re-acquainting with her.

The view of Denise is much more satisfying from here, decades backward, noticing clues about histories that nobody thought of then. Dinah can still see Moe edged forward on his chair, fired by argument, punctuating his opinions with sharp drags on the unfiltered cigarette between his orange fingertips. She’ll never erase the vision of wide-eyed Denise in vehement, naked, chaotic bounce. They were all young then, weary and excitable, coiled in abusive ballet. It amazes Dinah, really, to note how little they noticed.

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.