Sputterpub's Blog

  I mean: minimalist or collector? It seems to me that one of the ways we can classify folks is into two categories based on how many possessions they aim to acquire.

I’m not into having stuff. Never have been. When I was a kid I harbored a romantic longing to be poor: the idea of owning just one doll or other toy, and treasuring that object without distraction, was powerfully attractive. You know how kids are into ordering items – what’s your favorite color? song? game? food? Well, I wanted my answer to be fast and definite. I wanted the field of choice limited.

Even now, I avoid department stores. Big shopping opportunities just make me nervous; I’m sure no matter how I go about it, I won’t see all choices.

Clutter makes me anxious. Chatter puts me on edge. You can call me anal or accuse me of OCD, but I know what doesn’t work for me, and it looks like a collection of items that need shelving and will require dusting.

There are other people, even in my own family, who see life differently. They acquire often and well. Although they practice rituals about which I know nothing, like the passing of no-longer-needed items to friends or the sale of possessions through the Internet or the occasional yard event, they never dispose of their stuff as fast as they acquire more, so their homes are accumulating components as inexorably as a river collects silt.

You can call them packrats and maybe they’ll smile. Say “hoarders” and they’ll argue right back at you: I’m not a hoarder; I’m a collector. And then you can smirk a little because you both know that’s exactly what any hoarder would claim.

They’re collectors. Really. They take pleasure out of having sets of items around. They probably find my walls too blank.

There are other ways to divide folks. Democrat or Republican. North or South. Male or female. Nostalgically: Chevy or Ford; Wards or Sears. Most of the classifications are useless, except maybe to create “sensitivity” toward others. Which should have been created long ago, right? Right?

   I love it when this blog provokes a reader to recall and tell a memory. That happened recently from my mother; she came by on a Saturday and we strolled from my place to lunch on College Avenue, and on the way back she told me a story about Dad.

She said it happened in Chula Vista (we arrived there in fall of 1958). The plot involved election results and I wasn’t told about the event when it occurred, but it makes sense to us to place the escapade in November 1960, when I was 10 and John F. Kennedy was running for president against Richard Nixon.

Dad’s car was a 1958 two-tone Austin Healey. He loved that machine. One night he was stopped by a policeman and given a speeding ticket. It was an unjust bust, he told my mother. And he decided to contest it.

He went to court. He was allowed to explain a feature about his beloved roadster. The weak part in that Healey was its radio. A simple AM unit, it didn’t have good fidelity or strong sound. In fact, you couldn’t hear the radio if you drove the car at any speed; the roar of the engine just drowned out whatever the radio was broadcasting.

Dad’s argument was simple. He’d been listening to election results while driving. He declared that there was no way he could have heard the radio if he’d been traveling at the speed the ticketing cop claimed.

Dad won.

And Mom says he always maintained that his argument was true. He hadn’t been speeding. He was an early victim of red sportscar profiling.

     The first suggestive book I ever held was my father’s copy of Candide. I have the volume here, with its “Ex Libris” bookplate and its penciled $1.50 used-book price. It was published by Hartsdale House in New York, in 1930, and in addition to Voltaire’s ideas, it carries illustrations by Mahlon Blaine. The translator is not acknowledged.

Some of the pictures have unclothed women. You can see breasts, butt cleavage, even the shadow of pudenda. I found the sketches provocative when I was 10 or so.

And then there were those National Geographic magazines in elementary school classes. Some issues featured articles about communities in undeveloped countries. There might be a photograph that included women, and then breasts were likely to be visible. These were not the perky units that would later be shown in Playboy and Hustler, but they were noted nonetheless, by boys and girls alike.

I knew Candide wasn’t trash, and we knew the Geographic pictures weren’t salacious. We snuck a little stimulation from them, but we didn’t feel any tarnish.

I was a little older when I got my hands on porn.

I think I was around 12. I was visiting in New York with Mom, and staying as usual at her sister’s house in White Plains. I bunked with my cousin Susie (3 years older than I), but right through the shared bathroom was her brother Jeff’s bedroom. Jeff was a year my senior and thoroughly obnoxious. He teased, he drooled, and he bored us to tears.

One day I slipped into his room and looked at his bookshelves. I pulled a paperback called The Amboy Dukes, scanned the back cover, and borrowed it. Total filth. The yellowy pages opened to a gang-rape-on-bus scene, and went on to abuse women from there. Took the top of my head off.

My aunt caught me with the book. She dragged me and the book to my mother and began lambasting me for reading such filth, repeatedly demanding to know where I got the thing but ranting non-stop so I couldn’t answer. When I finally got to say that the book was Jeff’s, well, that stopped the noise. It was a precious occasion for me.

After that it was kind of easy. I had friends with older brothers. All we had to do was sneak into their rooms and invade their stash.

Of course the porn didn’t work. We soon saw that every plot line could only be maintained by increasing the number of participants. The climax orgy scene was boring. We found that what worked instead of porn was a good book with appropriate moments of eroticism. Like Another Country, by James Baldwin, presented to me by my stepgrandmother about the same time. I remember she tried to take it back from me when she learned it had some sex in it. No way! I loved that book.