Sputterpub's Blog

   When I was 15 I went faster on land than ever before or since, and I did it more than once. I look back on those days and I marvel at how many of us survived to adulthood.

The time was 1965, the place was Bonita, the gas was cheap, the cars were American, and the drivers were boys.

There was a stretch of narrow, almost straight but slightly hilly road out there, beyond the cemetery and near the country club if I see it right in memory, on which some guys got their cars up to 110, 115. Really. Pedal to the metal and big things starting to vibrate. Trees flashing by in the semi-darkness.

We didn’t wear seatbelts. None of the cars had airbags. None of the parents had a clue.

Most of us lived through it. I moved away and heard later that Mark didn’t. He crashed and burned, but that was partly owing to exposure. He did it much more often than other guys. He lived out there, and his dad was into vehicles. Mark was nice and cute but not very smart.

That was the suburbs. We didn’t have enough to do and we had cars to do it in. We were bound to bump into things.

The sweet thing about raising kids in the city is there’s plenty to do. Not just movies or even youth centers; I remember hearing that my kids were getting night-time fun by running scavenger hunts for exotic ingredients in the 24-hour Safeway. I’m not saying they didn’t take risks, but I don’t think any of them rushed to get drivers’ licenses at 16. They didn’t much need them till they left home.

My kids roamed the streets and rode public transportation. As far as I can tell from talking to other parents, they were substantially safer than suburban teens.

     When I was 15 I was exposed to Synanon.

I wouldn’t have gone without my quasi-beau Raymond. I didn’t drive and I’d never heard of the organization. But Ray was a grade ahead of me, nearly two years older than I, and a seeker.

He scooped up my heart shortly after I started high school. He asked me out on a date and he made me laugh. He was overweight, not an athlete, but he had friends. He was president of the Key Club and he may have had the best personality I ever loved.

We didn’t go out long and we never progressed to sex. I don’t remember as much as a kiss, although it’s possible we got around to that a few years later, after I moved, during a visit.

But we talked and we laughed and he took me to Synanon.

He wasn’t an addict and neither was I. We both had addictive tendencies, certainly, and some other day I’ll describe the activities on which I later got hooked, but at 15 I don’t recall any damaging habits.

What I remember about Synanon was a couple of dreary rooms, clouds of tobacco smoke and bottomless urns of mediocre coffee, encounters with ashen people. My memory is populated with bent men, prematurely aged women, bad hair bleach, scruffy whiskers, hand tremors that flicked cigarette ash sideways.

More than anything I recall hearing “stoo-pid.” Addiction was stoopid, using was stoopid, reneging was stoopid.

The catechism seemed so shallow. It went wide, it was comprehensive, it clearly became a mantra and a consolation after awhile, but that occurred inside people who were isolated and desolated. I watched it pull some sufferers into harness. As long as they stayed in that harness it was like a magic feather; they could exist without their junk and slowly proceed and make connections they hadn’t experienced before, which in turn kept them in harness hoping for more.

My acquaintance with Synanon didn’t last long. It ended when my family moved, half a year later. But that move was to the bay area and into the late 60s. I was headed for the summer of love and Berkeley. I’d soon be surrounded by encounter groups, screamers, drummers, moonies, EST.
ETC.

     When I was 13, I began visiting the library on my own and I discovered classical mythology.

It was the summer after 7^th grade, and the way I remember it I’d been allowed to ride alone for awhile. I’d been to the public library in Chula Vista with my mother and brothers. Something about that summer took me there once or more a week, alone and on my basketed bike, to acquire a stack of books.

I’m sure I checked out novels – that may have been the season when I plowed through Gone with the Wind just to accomplish the reading of a book with more than a thousand pages (I didn’t love it but I still recall parts of it) – but what took my heart were the tales of the Olympic pantheon.

I read various versions of most of the stories. I condescended to anyone who used the Latin names instead of the real ones. I even branched out from tales to some plays and that’s when I discovered how quickly a drama can be read, and how perfectly it plays in the mind (unless it’s a comedy – a comedy needs a stage).

I’m sure it was a formative and fortunate meeting. It led to my studying classical Greek in college and it helped build a wordsmith. I can still be seduced by those stories.

In love as well with libraries, I noticed others. I considered the Christian Science Reading Room and by the next summer I was flirting with the American Opinion Library, even after Dad told me they were John Birchers, even after he twisted his mouth at me so I couldn’t tell if he wanted to ban me from the place or go with me.

It was probably Dad who then steered me toward Ayn Rand. Oh but I loved The Fountainhead. Sure I read Atlas Shrugged too, and liked it, but like Tolkien’s hobbit books, the better was earlier. Rand wrote individualism so perfectly, so like a fairy tale or classic myth, that she put its idealism in perspective for me.

     When I was 8 I acquired my other sibling. My brother Andy was born. I’ll never forget how Dad announced that pregnancy.

He got Steve and me seated in the living room in Glen Cove. This would have been the winter of 1958. We were on the floor, facing Dad and Mom who perched in the matching chairs, their backs to the big front window. Dad was on the left side, closer to the front door, and Steve was opposite him. I was near Mom.

“You know how you guys have always wanted a puppy?” Dad began. Of course we got all kinds of excited at those words. At least I did, and Steve immediately joined in. “A puppy! A puppy! We’re gonna get a puppy!”

Dad had to speak fast and loud to break through our enthusiasm and disappointment. I think all Steve and I took away from that talk was the wish for an opposite-gender baby so we wouldn’t have to share a bedroom.

We perked up in a bit though. We participated in so many chats about the coming kid that we named it. We started calling the embryo “It’ll” because we were saying things like “It’ll have green eyes,” or “I bet it’ll like ice cream.”

I’m sorry to report I brought chicken pox into the house. I caught it in school, gave it to Steve, and he shared it with Mom. His case was light but she suffered. They said Andy was born with antibodies – that he’d had the pox right along with her – but if so his immunity eventually wore off; he had a dreadful case of the virus in his early 20s.

While Mom was ill Dad was our primary care provider. He wasn’t much of a cook but he thought he could make a salami omelet. And maybe he could, but I liked neither salami nor eggs so I didn’t enjoy those meals. What I did enjoy was the extra time with Dad. He was playful. Imaginative. I’m sure he created and encouraged the It’ll tales.

Little It’ll was born on July 12. I was spending the night at my next door neighbor’s, a very rare event, and I felt a bit ripped off when I woke up to discover my brother Steve was spending the night there too. But the birth of It’ll was a nice consolation. Mom named him Andrew and vainly thought we’d call him Drew. She brought him home a few days later and he promptly began to be cute.

     When I was 8 my parents gave me a big bicycle, except my birthday is in January and there was always snow on the ground then in New York, so I didn’t acquire my new bike till April.

It was an English 3-speed, and it looked like a Raleigh but it read Gazelle Sports Model. Eventually I was told that Gazelle purchased the Raleigh factory in Nottingham and produced bikes for about three years before reselling, and mine came out of that era. Someone told me it was identical to a Raleigh but with stronger welds.

I learned how to ride well on that bike. I thought of it as my own black horse, and I named it for the animal on the popular television show.

It came with us to California, and I remember thinking a trip to Imperial Beach and back, 16 miles with my dad and Steve, was a heroic jaunt. I pedaled Fury to the library every Saturday, to friends’ houses, everywhere.

The bike moved with us to Marin county but its frame was knocked just enough off-kilter that I couldn’t ride it no-handed for any distance after that. But Fury waited, and at the end of college, after my boyfriend Mike totaled his 10-speed, Nick and I salvaged the Campagnolo parts and converted Fury to a racer. We had to rebuild the rear wheel but I ended up with the only 10-speed in the bay area that had side-pull breaks and the ability to take any cable or streetcar tracks in the City.

I gave up bike riding when Katie got big enough to throw my balance off in her above-the-rear-wheel carrier. I meant to get back to it and when I did, 20 years later and lightly, I had to admit that old Fury’s frame was just too small for mine. I bought a new bike.

But I couldn’t give Fury up. We’d had too many good times, gone too far together.

I housed my old bike at Deakin Street, in the storage area of Capistrano, and in the funky detached garage over Codornices Creek all the years I lived there. Finally, when I built my little place in Eugene, I buried old Fury in the foundation.