Sputterpub's Blog

Starting late in 2012, American society ceased to move. Communities turned inward, made do with less, stopped interacting. But some of the college-age kids, those who had been associating most freely with each other, refused to quit.

Clara and Hank met half a year before that. As odd as their names was the site of their introduction: Ft. Lauderdale at spring break. It’s true that they were college students, but they weren’t party-type college students. She was a diligent architecture major at MIT, and he studied physics at UC Berkeley. It was a pure fluke that each of them made it to Florida that week, but once there it wasn’t that strange that they found one another.

Clara came from Los Angeles but she attended MIT because her parents were from the east coast and were secret snobs about college. She lived in the French house, and her housemates cajoled her into going with them to the spring break capital of the western world. But Clara was a diligent serious studious young lady, and she did not enjoy the heady hedonism of the Florida scene. She tended to sift back against the walls in any tavern or party.

Hank was born and raised in Walnut Creek, a suburb of San Francisco. He traveled less than twenty miles from home to move into his northside co-op at Cal. Compared to Clara he was a lackadaisical student, but he had a gifted brain and an outgoing disposition; he did well at school.

His full name was Henry, for no familiar reason. His parents were Creative Anachronists, ever into the Renaissance Faire, and they named their children Henry and Morgaine. The whole Arthurian atmosphere so permeated his childhood that Hank eagerly embraced science in school. He had an aptitude for it anyway, and he grew up a total rationalist. He was too sensible to waste spring break on frivolity when he could be contemplating quantum physics, but his best friend Jason was competing in a bicycle race there and then, and Hank didn’t have the heart to refuse Jason’s plea to make the trip with him.

Clara and Hank bumped into each other at the back of a party. He leaned against his left shoulder and looked toward the bar, half attentive to the flirtations going on there. She rested her right hip against the same wall and glanced the other way, toward the dancers. Without either intending it they bumped butts just as a song ended, and they heard each other’s awkward excuses. Eyes looked into eyes and they made a connection. Before an hour had passed they agreed to disdain the party, left it, and started making plans for a broader escape. The next morning they assembled sleeping bags and backpacks, borrowed one of her housemate’s cars, and drove off to experience the Everglades and each other.

(continued next Monday)

Before the Jihad, travel was easy. Before the Jihad, “jihad” meant holy war, but terrorists and the media changed that. Muslims had to come up with another word for holy war, afterwards. After-word.

In the old days, travel was easy. That was before newguilds were established or traffic was understood, back when people carried separate cellphones and personal computers.

They had all sorts of little devices hanging from their belts, but they didn’t have air travel restrictions. They could book their whole trip online, use electronic tickets, carry everything with them, and arrive just a few hours ahead of takeoff to make their planes.

It was easy then, often cheap, always popular. People from developed nations traveled all the time. The planet was wrapped like a golfball in airline routes; con-trails wreathed it like rings. Culture coursed. Commerce flourished. Viruses were transmitted. Terrorists acted.

Amazed afterwards at how obvious it was, it took the genius of Abner Abeneski to observe that neither terrorism nor disease could spread without travel. And it took the forcefulness of Capt. Powell to actually shut travel down.

The Jihad started in 2012. Within a year easy travel was a nostalgic memory. At first everyone declared the spirited intention to move and trade like before. Anything less would “let the terrorists win.” But the business-as-usual plan was like trying to stay friends after a romantic breakup. The participants have the sincerest intentions, but a process is initiated, a process which must proceed in its own inexorable time, eroding intentions and reshaping attitudes, until what results, the gradual complete estrangement, is perfectly natural and retrospectively obvious. In the same way, although everyone vowed to keep on keeping on, folks tended to stay in their communities because it was too much hassle to move around. Their communities began to resemble villages. There was a measurable improvement in security.

The problem was, novelty went down as security went up. It sank along with travel. There weren’t many visitors, and there wasn’t much news. Those conditions, along with a general fear of terrorist acts, led to a provincial distrust of strangers and of anyone who looked or acted differently. Nonconformity was not well tolerated.

Everything might have devolved with blissful ignorance if it weren’t for the transition group. If only there had been some adjacent wilderness area that people could inhabit for a generation, civilization might have made the shift and secured the advantages of a cozy feudal society. But the late adolescents were present. Most of them were caught up in the indignation and carried by the tide of fervent nationalism, but some paid attention. Theirs is the age most likely to attend, grown out of the pretense of childhood and not yet sheltering under the nostalgia of maturity. Some of the twentyish actually shake their heads, look up and around, point and say: “But see here: This makes no sense!”

They never make it to the vigil. Rob is hauled into the waiting area outside the dean’s office, and after 19 minutes he is summoned inside and suspended for three days. Colleges are informed; he always afterwards believes he was rejected by Stanford because of the suspension.

Vivian waits the 19 minutes with Rob. Mrs. Engles (Dean of Girls) orders her to return to classes but Vivian harangues the woman about the true purpose of school. She maintains then and afterwards that most kids can educate themselves, through books and discourse, but that school is for socialization and civilization and the application of ethics. She speaks with eloquence and vehemence. Her cheeks flush and her eyes shine. Mrs. Engles rears back a little awed and retreats to her office. Rob is rapt with admiration.

Of the 312 seniors at the school, 214 try to protest the execution. 84 of those, Linda among them, simply cut school and drive to the vigil. 63 more make it off the campus before the cordon goes up. The remaining 67 are trapped in school, although Rob is sent home.

David goes back to class but Vivian doesn’t. She circulates from room to room of senior students, trying to enlist her classmates in a real movement to do the work to outlaw capital punishment entirely.

She stops in one doorway after another and makes a plea that loses some passion with each iteration. She appeals to her fellows and at the last class, the one at the northwest corner upstairs, she even begs a little. But no one offers to join her.

She’s wrought up and reactive. She orates hard but she can’t help noticing that the crowd energy has dissipated. The faces look empty. The eyes don’t meet hers.

She considers all the spirit she felt when she tried to get to the vigil. Reveling in the excitement, the rush of actually doing something, the extreme focus. Her friends were then invigorated; now she reads their embarrassment for her and their tepid reluctance to work.

Whatever inclination Vivian has to activism was mortified today. She concluded that people would rather be riled and excited than sweaty and laboring. Now she becomes more loyal to Rob and less smitten by David. She remembers David’s wry face in Rob’s car and she disdains his noncommittal style. She doesn’t know that David will become a psychologist or that Rob’s actions were driven by an impulse to rage rather than heroism.

Vivian will grow up to be a sardonic adult, assuming the worst about her species, laughing at human foibles. She will be uncomfortable in large groups and will seek gratification in sporadic kinky sex and the controlled consumption of controlled substances. She’ll be nearly sixty before she tries politics again and allows that people want to be better. Actually love to be taught. It’s just that people have a taste for high production values, Vivian will finally understand. Seldom moved unless entertained. Never entertained unless moved. Those are her best realizations, and they’ll take her almost forty years.

It is the first execution in almost 20 years. The state intends to kill James Abner Maddox, and the students are against that. Their high school looks like the prison; the seniors enjoy not a lawn but a quad. They can see the penitentiary from the back parking lot. But they’d have protested the procedure anyway. They’re against capital punishment.

No one argues that Maddox is a good guy. Over a two-year period he raped and murdered six women in the area. Before that he offed his parents in Michigan. He is a white sociopath with very little likelihood of rehabilitation. But capital punishment is too final. Not a deterrent. Uncivilized. The students are 17 and 18 and their futures are so wide they want to keep the rims unsullied.

A vigil began outside the prison last night. Votive candles. A lot of students considered it but most didn’t attend. By morning, excitement had built up a bit. More students showed up. But many made it to school before the urge to demonstrate became irresistible.

The time is February 1967. The place is northern California.

Vivian and Rob and David are seniors. They are all bright, white, and headed for prosperity. Each appears totally together to the others; each within feels awkward and unsure. Vivian is short, too plump in her own opinion, and very intelligent; she likes both boys but has a sneakily strong crush on David. Rob hides a major attraction to Vivian while David feels fond and of course curious about her. The boys are alike lanky, but Rob’s a tall redhead and David is medium height and medium brown.

They have a number of classes together. In math, English, and Latin they sit in a block with their other friend, Linda, and sometimes they’re so sarcastic that they get in trouble. (Linda has a crush on no one at this time. She is more interested in creating new tastes, like raw mushroom slices on corn chips, or baby carrots with salsa. Linda will be asexual until her early twenties, when she will admit she is gay and try to make Vivian her lover, and seriously rock their friendship for almost a year).

They have a lot of classes together but not till third period. Vivian and Rob and David make a plan to go to the vigil at the prison. They conspire before school starts, her dark blonde hair next to red and brown. They agree to meet in the front parking lot, at Rob’s car.

Rob has PE second period and David has photography. It’s a simple matter for them to cut their classes and rendezvous at Rob’s Corvair. More often than not they cut second period anyway. They tend to hang out then in the senior quad, where Vivian can see them and toss them notes in two-hole rubber stoppers. She spends second period as lab assistant to her old chemistry teacher, whom she respects, so she drops by Mr. Gibson’s room to let him know she’s going to the vigil. During their brief talk the school administration forms a cordon around the doors to the rectangular building, and when Vivian tries to get to Rob’s car she is confronted by a phalanx of dark-suited adults.

She attempts to get through anyway. She asserts herself between the dean of boys and a counselor, but Mr. Roscoe pushes her back. She tries again, and again the dean shoves. A third time. Rob and David see it all. Rob is so incensed that he comes tearing out of his maroon car and around its rear to do unto the dean. A little friendly assault.

“There’s no doubt about it. Just look around you. Gay couples obviously make the best parents. They’re the ones adopting the older kids and the mixed race babies, and look how well they do.”

“Come on – it can’t be that simple,” she argued. “Are you saying kids are better off without parents of opposite sex?”

“Of course not,” he replied. “In fact, I think there are some dangers inherent in same-sex environments. I’m just observing that the kids sure seem to turn out well.” He sat back and drank from his cup. He looked around for a refill.

“Then what dangers?” she asked, and the tone of her voice was less aggressive, more curious. Their server approached and poured.

“Dangers in perspective. It happens whenever a homogeneous group restricts its interactions to its own members. Girls get more tidy, boys get more heady, old folks more petulant, disabled people more indignant …” He sipped, nodded, sipped again. “But that concentration doesn’t get in the way of good gay parenting.”

“You’re right. It’s probably because the couple already understands each other, you know? In basic ways.”

“Exactly,” he murmured. His strong features softened. “Gad but this year’s pressing is good.”

She drank from her own cup and agreed. It was probably why they were getting along so well. Most days they would have been battling already.

“No, what I meant to discuss,” he continued, “before I was distracted by your dazzling participation,” and she tensed as she heard the habitual sarcasm in his tone, “is how to encourage heterosexual unions. They may not be the best parents but they’re the best at producing offspring, which we want, so we have to find ways to encourage them to connect in the first place and then to stay connected while they raise their young.”

“Then glorify the union.”

“I’m thinking the same thing. It’s the only way to go. We can engineer tax subsidies and other municipal considerations, but the real draw has to be blessings and divine approval. We’ll call it marriage. Only heterosexual couples will be allowed. Let’s do it.”

Zeus’s proposals almost always carried, but that one passed fast and unanimously. He and Hera finished their cups of ambrosia and in a rare demonstration of amity, she took his offered arm when they left.

“I’m sorry, but I just don’t like your laugh.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve tried to get over this, but it irritates me. It sounds phony.”

“Phony? How can you say that?! If I were putting it on, don’t you think I’d make it more attractive? Geez: whenever I really get going I make no sound. I run the risk of snorting when I finally take a breath.”

“I know, I know. It may be unfair but I can’t get over my opinion. It’s like the way you say ‘um’ right before uttering something that you think is witty – I hear that like it’s a flag signaling affectation.”

I’m sure those weren’t our exact words, but they’re close enough. The complainant was the love-of-my-life, the poet with whom I longed to starve, the man I thought I’d marry. He loved me, he loved making love to me, but he didn’t love my laugh. I thought at the time that his words were cruel; I see now that the situation was impossible.

I once knew a woman engaged to a man who didn’t like her smell. I’m not talking about any scent behind her ears, and I can assure you she bathed often enough. I remember feeling a little superior to her, knowing that I wouldn’t have stayed with the guy, or to be more honest, I never would have been with him in the first place. But now I see how much worse it would be to stay with someone who hates my laugh.

Chris and I met when I came to Cal. He was one of a small group of guys, sophomores, mostly from the East Coast. Chris was born and raised in Palo Alto, but his family lived then near Washington, DC, so maybe it made sense for him to hang around with a bunch from Delaware. I don’t know. I never asked. Come to think about it, I don’t have an inkling of how he spent his first year at Cal. I was so into myself then that it was like Chris came into existence, 18 and whole, when I met him.

Did he hate my laugh then? Maybe. Because the truth is, we didn’t like each other. We fell into immediate disagreement about something, and we continued disagreeing as our groups, a circle of California freshwomen and another of Eastern sophomoric boys, wriggled our way to intersection.

Chris and I became a couple a month or so later, after an encounter in Sproul Plaza produced a disagreement which we decided for some reason to walk off. We headed south together on Telegraph Avenue, and before we got to Ashby we weren’t disagreeing so much.

I recall finding him attractive. He had beautiful curling red-gold hair, without being obnoxiously freckled. His forearms were well-shaped and firm. He wasn’t my male ideal, but he was taller than I and weighed more and had bigger hands and feet than I do, and he was intellectually and poetically stimulating.

But then again I wonder. He didn’t resemble the dark-haired wide-chested man of my dreams. And the sex, when we got to that (it took a little while, because we were each inexperienced, and he was more hesitant than I wished) was sweet and loving but not exciting.

I sensed then and know now that we were both good people, so even though we were never a match made in heaven, we were friends, we agreed more than we disagreed, and our disagreements were academic and honorable. We were two young people about to take our flights, poised on the edge of the nest angling forward for the drop that would swoop us aloft, and our hands fit well together for that exercise.

We were together for most of our college years, which seemed like a lifetime unto itself. But Christopher and I didn’t marry. We didn’t spend our lives together or even live in the same area.

I have attributed our failure at times to his psychotic break. Once or twice I accused his ineffectual dad of killing it for me, when he asked me to take care of Chris for him. But now what I mostly remember is the time Chris told me that he couldn’t abide my laugh.

We broke up. We almost got back together but then I decided to marry Adam. And then Glen. It turned out I wasn’t very good at marriage, but it also turned out that neither of my husbands made a particularly impressive run of their lives. I’m less disappointed and happier alone. Chris never managed to find someone. He lived solo and celibate after we split up, eventually becoming a teacher and then a professor. Chris lived a life I respect. That was one of the surprises, for me.

Now here we are at the end, never able to get our timing to agree enough to be together again. Both still sweet and loving, and each respecting what the other has done. Who’d have thought it? And who’d have thought that now, of all times now, now when the cancer has just about killed him, Chris would be telling me jokes, trying to cheer me, assuring me how much he loves my laugh.