Sputterpub's Blog

   When I was 16 I spent the first most uncomfortable night of my life. I went casual camping with Ellen and two other friends and got caught in the rain.

My parents’ house in Larkspur was on the very lowest part of Mt. Tamalpais. The back yard sloped down to the house and a storm creek bisected it. If you walked up the back yard, crossed the road above, and did a little left-right jog, you’d be on the fire trail to Lagunitas. If you resisted that and kept climbing the ridge, you also climbed Mt. Tam. Your hike would top out near Pan Toll and then it was just a saunter to the beginning of Steep Ravine. You could take that pretty fast in the shady damp and you would emerge at the swampy area near the sea. It was another short walk to the right before you hit the public beach. We were so young that we did it fairly comfortably with bad gear: cotton sleeping bags roped to rucksacks, hanging from our shoulders.

Stinson is public and didn’t allow camping, and north of there, Bolinas is private and also prohibited. But between them was a string of properties with houses that weren’t right on the beach, where it was legal to sleep.

So that’s what we did. We hiked up my yard to the ridge to the ravine to the beach to the strip where we could lay out our sleeping bags.

We made a meal. We talked. We settled into our bags. In the middle of the night the rain began and by the time we woke up and understood what was happening, we and our bags were wet. Our only recourse was to retreat with our stuff to the bathroom/change rooms on the public part of the beach. I have a solid memory of sitting on a wooden bench in that cinderblock structure for the rest of the night. I sat there because of the hand dryer on the wall above my head, nozzle twisted to aim at my cold self. I kept waking from my battered sleep each time the dryer stopped, to reach above me and punch the power on again.

I was cold, gritty with sand and sticky with salt, on a hard bench against a hard wall, exhausted. It was an agonizingly long night. I sometimes like to remember it, when I wake and have trouble returning to sleep. Immediately I am cozy.

 When I was 21 I got to experience perverse sexual jealousy. Nick’s band (not a serious band, but able then to pick up occasional gigs at high school dances and small venues) had a series of performances at the S.I.R. Club.

This was 1971. The S.I.R. Club was on 6^th Street in San Francisco, between Market and Mission, a block away from the Greyhound Terminal. The Greyhound Terminal was probably then the seediest commercial site in downtown SF.

S.I.R. stood for Society for Individual Rights and it was – get ready – homosexual. This was before the birth of LGBT and similar initials; “homosexual” meant men who liked men.

The club was a lot smaller than the Greyhound station, and a little bit cleaner. The dance floor and bar area were fine, normal. But the little rooms created by the movable barriers, lined with mattresses and screening grainy films that featured pimply butts: that part was distasteful.

So I stayed away from the periphery. I stuck near the dance floor. I remember grabbing a random balloon and holding it so I could feel the bass guitar by the way it made the orb vibrate. I couldn’t dance except when the band was off and records were played, and even then it meant prevailing on Nick to take a break from his break to accommodate me.

Which he did. We enjoyed a fast number and when it was followed by a slow one we slipped into each other’s arms and began swaying to that. At some point during the slow dance I glanced around the floor. I saw looks of appreciation on the faces of the spectators. But those looks were not what I was used to. I’d become accustomed to seeing jealous faces on the other women when I danced with the keyboardist from the band. But there it was the men at the edge of the dance floor who were aiming the envy at me.

  When I was 21 I went to Israel. I didn’t really mean to go, and I never meant to stay so long, but that’s how it is sometimes, especially right after college.

I was traveling on a strict budget with two pals: my close friend Ellen (a brilliant non-secularly religious individual), and our mutual friend Liz (a lovely soul with a hard-partying heart).

We knew we were headed for Europe, and I was aimed for Greece if anywhere, but Episcopalian Ellen had done a Cal year-abroad in Jerusalem. She wanted to re-visit, and a number of the guys she met that year were then in rabbinical school, reform variety, which required a first year in the holy city. In other words, Jerusalem would be familiar and contain friends, so we figured we’d start there. But it was odd, me being the only Jew and the one least interested.

We arrived in late September. We spent a bit of time in Jerusalem, at the reform rabbinical dormitory of course, and then signed up for a kibbutz. We were sent to a small poor one near Hadera (which is halfway between Tel Aviv and Haifa). It cost us almost nothing to live there; we were paid a little less than a quarter a week, and usually we spent more than that, on bus fare to Hadera where we bought ice cream or cookies. With the occasional jaunt back to Jerusalem, my money lasted into January 1972. Then I had to head home. Cheaply.

Ellen opted to come part way with me. We took an Israeli luxury liner (oxymoron, at least then), but we had to buy the cheapest tickets, so our interior cabin was just above the stabilizers and cars.

We disembarked in Marseilles, traversed France in a tortuous train (one of the two most uncomfortable nights of my life), crossed the channel at Dunkerque, and made it to London and relative luxury at the Green Park Hotel, where Ellen’s dad happened to be. From there I took a charter flight home. I was surprised by the tears that filled my eyes when I glimpsed our East Coast from that plane.

When I got back it was early February. I had been away from home, out of the country, for over four months. And I didn’t have a camera with me. Neither did Ellen or Liz. Really: we lived an amazing adventure and we don’t have a visual record of it. Which may be why some of my memories are so vivid.

   When I was 17 my father gave me his footlocker. I’ve treasured it ever since.

I took it with me to college, where it occasionally contained contraband but usually just my stuff.

I stored it with my folks that year between university and marriage, but I reacquired it as soon as I had my own place again. It’s been close ever since.

It now acts as side table in my Berkeley cottage.

My mother once disparaged it, commenting that it wasn’t a “real” footlocker. I think what she meant was that it was made instead of bought. Dad got a metal box somewhere, fitted it with hinges and a lock, made a drop-in shelf for it and applied supports for that inside, painted it Army green, and stenciled his name, rank and serial number on its outside (all sides, maybe required but typical of my dad anyway).

It has remnants of shipping stickers still on it. They are from the Territory of Hawaii.

A few years ago I hung his dog tags on one of the handles.

That footlocker may be my most prized possession. I love its size and shape and I view it as one of the witnesses of my life.

I’m not sure what all it contains. Occasionally I open it but I never look at everything. I know there are old letters, old journals, college papers, pictures, ancient stuffed toys. You know: treasures and junk.

The year I didn’t have it, from mid-1971 to mid-1972, I mostly spent in Israel. That’s not true – the trip was about 4 months out of 12 – but it was the time when I first left the country and the only time I left it long enough to sense what it would be like to live outside the US. I may want to write about those experiences. I know there are some diaries in the footlocker. I’m getting ready now to open it.

    When I was 60 (November 2010), I got to see a little of Egypt. It was part of a Holy Land cruise, and I’ll admit that the Cairo stop was the big draw for me on the itinerary and, perhaps partly because of that, the big disappointment of the trip.

I knew ahead of time that we’d spend half the day on a bus. Port Said is a 3½ hour drive from Cairo/Giza. That wasn’t the problem, really. When we boarded the coach that morning, our guide advised us to use the toilet in the vehicle. In her perfect English, Yasmin told us we wouldn’t have many chances at other facilities. The bus toilet was by the rear stairs. It stayed dark unless you got the door closed right, and it had a shifting thin scrap of carpet and the smell of urine. Maybe I got the stink stuck in my nose but most of that day, inside or outside the bus, smelled like the same piss to me.

Yasmin was lovely. A young, willowy Muslim woman, she embodied everything I ever imagined about innocent female beauty in Arabia. She wore her head scarf so well I almost wanted one myself. Her facial features were perfect. Her hands were balletically graceful. Those of course were the only parts of her that showed.

She was also an encyclopedia of Egyptian facts and a proud representative of her tourism bureau. She seemed to have all dates and statistics in her brain and was able to answer our every question as well as the Internet could.

But here’s the circumstance I want to note. While our bus traveled those hours from the Med to Cairo and back, while Yasmin regaled us with glorious facts about 94% of the kids finishing college, about equal pay for women, about the impossibility of rape, I was looking out the window at sights that contradicted her sentences. I was seeing poverty and garbage, window-less, roofless occupied buildings, vermin-encrusted children who tried to sell us bad postcards for “one dollah.” I saw crudeness and no evidence of health or intelligence.

Meanwhile, Yasmin answered “What’s your opinion about Sharia?” with “I’m a good Muslim. Of course I’m for Sharia. As a matter of fact. I think if four individuals testify against a thief, the proper action is to remove one of the thief’s hands; that’ll stop him stealing.” And when a fellow traveler asked her about Egypt’s government, our young guide waxed almost worshipful about Mubarak: how much he’s loved, how wonderful a job he has been doing, how after 30 years no one wants anyone else as President …

I have never experienced such a profound disconnect between what I heard and what I witnessed.