Sputterpub's Blog

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.

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.