Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Memoirist BS
Thirteen senior year memories
I’ve written more about my last year at Berkeley than any other year of my life, thanks to Karen, but I’m sure I can dig up a few fresh stories for you, as well as a few links to old stories some of you may have missed. Onward!
Ruby Slippers and twelve other junior year memories
I was telling Michelle the other day that the only time I ever noticed shoes on a woman was in my junior year of college. Her name was Carmela Maria . . . gaaaaah. How do you forget the last name of a woman you might have married — in a parallel universe where her dad the longshoreman wouldn’t have killed you first? Anyway, they were Carmela’s ruby slippers, and I’m saving that story for a bit later.
1. The house on Milvia. Fellow Napa State Mental Hospital volunteer and all-around pal Debbie — she of the corn silk smooth hair and affinity for boyfriends with huge hands — knew I was miserable in the dorms. Her lesbian roommates were graduating that year, and Debbie was looking to find a smaller place. She invited me over to her apartment to watch Gone with the Wind and, more to the point, to check the place out. By the way, watching GwtW with three hyperintelligent women, two gay and one most emphatically not gay, had to be a high point of my sophomore year.
I loved the place. Quiet neighborhood close to school, grocery stores, fresh produce stand, cheese shop, bakery, fish market, bookstore . . . heaven, the best place I’ve ever lived in. It was one of those sleepy, concrete pylon-obstructed areas where you just know everyone’s growing hemp in their garages, watched over by a beautiful Husky named Nikka Sue, a dog who had come to Debbie’s rescue one evening when some creepy dude was following her home.
It took me a while to recognize the apartment. Remember how my hippy cousin dowsed a map to find me a place to stay, freshman year? The apartment complex without vacancies? This was the very same place.
More stories below the cut.
Hebrew School
I never described the fallout from my Hanukkah Lobster story. Humiliated in front of my first grade class, unmasked as an ignoramus, I vowed to learn more about my religion. I demanded that my parents get me some religious instruction.
In our community’s synagogues, Hebrew school provided preparatory instruction for Bar and Bas Mitzvahs. I was too young for that. For a few years, I went to Sunday School, and I have pleasant memories making challah by braiding instant biscuit dough ropes, saving quarters to plant trees in Israel (much needed for our New and Improved Israel, AKA Israel the Expanded Edition, AKA Israel post the 1967 Arab-Israeli war), and doing crazy shit with macaroni, Elmer’s glue, and gold spray paint; and somewhere along the way, I forgot my desire to learn more about Judaism. Religious instruction, such as it was, consisted of stories about David and Goliath, Samson the Crazy Motherfucker, Esther and Haman. This was fun. Pleasant. A great excuse to get out of the house on the weekend.
Then Hebrew school happened.
Thirteen college memories: sophomore year
Mind-boggling, isn’t it, that I haven’t written a Thirteen for my year in the dorms? Well, not really that mind-boggling. Sophomore year was one of my worst years ever, so I don’t go there without some trepidation.By the way, I’ve added a new category for my Thirteen fans: Thirteen Candles. All Thirteen, All the Time. Revel in it.
Below the cut: thirteen dormie memories. (Here’s a photo of the cast of characters; and if you’re jumping into this out of sequence, here’s the freshman year thirteen.)
Performance anxiety
Ack! The clock is ticking. I’m running out of time for Renee’s Global Orgasm Day contest. But sex isn’t funny; it runs the gamut from exhilarating to pathetic, but funny? It takes someone of Roald Dahl’s talent to make orgasms funny (see “Bitch,” in his collection Switch Bitch).
Upon rereading, I see it doesn’t have to be a funny orgasm story. Just has to be an orgasm story. ‘Kay, I can do that. I’ll give you a pathetic orgasm story.
In the dorms, my roommate used to screw one of our fellow dormies. (These were co-ed dorms, you see. We even had co-ed bathrooms.) I didn’t mind it so much, even though I had a thing for her, too. But once, my asshole roomie screwed her in OUR room with ME in there, too. Guess he figured I would sleep through it.
I lay there listening to them. They tried to make as little noise as possible, so all I could hear was the thumping and the squeaky-spring-squeaking and it was — well, when I could get past being pissed off at my roomie, I had to admit it was arousing, too. I, too, tried to make as little noise as possible; I didn’t want to distract them.
I wanted to see (hear, really) how this would end.
It didn’t take long. Sorry, Joe, but I’m not going to lie for you. I’ll bet you would like me to claim I lay there for over an hour, wondering if it would ever end, but in truth, I barely had time to figure out what I would say to you the next day*.
Five minutes? Okay, six. I’ll give you six.
When it was over, I heard the first non-thumping, non-squeaking sound from them: her disappointed whimper.
If you ever read this, gorgeous, will you please tell me why you only screwed the losers? Were you one of these women who had a bad-boy fetish or something? I hope you’ve wised up since then.
One way or another, I would have left you satisfied. I consider it a point of honor.
D.
*Oh, it was quite the zinger, just what you would expect from an accomplished Man of Words.
“You know, I heard you two last night.”
“Um. You did?”
“Yeah. I did.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
In any case, it never happened again.
Thirteen college memories: freshman year
What, only thirteen? Yes, you can regard this as an extremely limited selection. I’ll be attempting to come up with tales you haven’t heard before. No small feat.
1. Shin splints. During orientation, on our walking tour of the Berkeley campus, the guy walking next to me noticed me limping.
“Don’t baby it,” he said.
“Huh? It’s shin splints.”
“Yeah, I figured that out. But don’t be a wimp. Walk through it.” And that’s how it went for the next hour or two — me limping, him ragging on me to stop being such a pussy.
His name was Russ, and he became my roommate, and remained so for all but one year.
Blankie
My stomach woke me up last night — never a good thing — but I had been dreaming about my brother, a squicky eeew kind of dream which brought back some early childhood memories. I almost woke Karen up to tell her, Do you know what he used to do? Stuff which taken out of context sounds awful, but when I think about all the other general squickiness of life back then, it fades into the background. Ambient color.
I remembered my baby blanket. Like Schultz’s Linus, I had a baby blue blankie. Damn thing was falling apart and my father eventually threw it out. Thing is, I haven’t thought about that blanket in years, so where did that memory come from? And what else sits around in my hippocampus, dormant, waiting to spring out with a little prodding?
I have no interest in recovered memory — you know, the fake stuff a suggestible brain manufactures, a fantasy with the street cred of reality. In dreams, my subconscious (which hates me — have I mentioned that? But what other conclusion can I come to when I never ever get the girl?) has tried to convince me of various incestuous dalliances which I know never took place. I wish I could confront this subconscious, grip him by the shoulders, and ask him, What the hell is the matter with you? On the other hand, I’ve learned that the safest thing, the best thing for my mental health, is to give such dreams all the care they deserve: none.
Maybe that’s why my subconscious has it in for me. I keep flipping him the bird.
It was nice, though, remembering that blanket, rather like finding a photo stuffed behind another photo in an old album. Sometimes I see myself as a set of memories. I suppose there’s more, but that’s the part of me I understand. When I look within, those memories are the only thing separating me from a featureless wall. I wish there were more memories (even if most of them are unpleasant, my blanket notwithstanding), enough that I might forget about the blankness altogether.
D.
Thirteen disquieting statements
For me, Thursday Thirteens provide a means of examining my life through an ever changing lens. A micro-autobiography, perhaps, where the challenge is to be honest, entertaining, and (hopefully) insightful. Like any memoirist, I suppose, I am the topic that fascinates me most. The “entertainment” angle hinges on how well I can convey that fascination to my readers — and, let’s face it, it depends on precisely how honest and how insightful I can be.
That’s the theory, anyway.
Maybe I’m more introspective these days because we’re approaching the end of what has been, for us, a difficult year. The stress has done weird things to me . . . weird in ways I can’t even begin to discuss here. Or even hint at. Suffice to say (despite #13 below) I’m feeling a lot like a pupa, and I haven’t a clue what’s going to hatch out at the end of this metamorphosis.
Below the fold: thirteen disquieting statements. Things folks have said to me which stuck like peanut butter to the palate. They don’t hurt anymore. Mostly.
Brittle
Typical doctor, I’ve never handled my own illness well. Even as a kid, I would become emotionally fragile with a common cold. Fever, in particular, tended to lay me bare. I remember bursting into tears over an episode of All in the Family.
I’ve never had that male barrier to crying — not much of one, anyway. I guess my father never shook me by the shoulders (the way Don Corleone rough-housed Johnny Fontane in The Godfather — Be a man! What’s the matter with you?) No, he tended to push my older brother my way, saying, “Go see what’s wrong with him.” Like that ever helped.
It took me a while to learn you simply didn’t cry in front of people. Least of all people you cared about. You could tear up and discretely wipe your eyes — yeah, that’s cool, no one looks askance at that. But the big emotional outpouring? Nah. Folks tend to think you’re tetched.
The urge to tear accompanies any of my strong emotions. In the past, I may have told the story of the time I developed an autoradiograph and got the result I needed to complete my PhD thesis. I called Karen and she couldn’t understand why I was crying. For me, that autoradiograph meant seven years of my life brought to a successful conclusion. I was RELIEVED. What couldn’t she understand about that?
When her father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, that choked me up, too, and I think it confused her. Why should I be that upset over her father’s illness?
Certain memories I keep at a distance because, well, they’re just too embarrassing. Back in high school, I was a bit too emotionally naked for my girlfriend at times. That’s an understatement, you understand. I suspect she thought I was a raving lunatic.
But that’s adolescence, right? We get to write off lots of bullshit, blaming it all on childhood or adolescence. But I know I’m the same me, older and wiser perhaps, better able to keep things under wraps. One thing I’ve learned is that the emotions of the moment are not to be trusted — and are certainly not to be acted upon.
I’ll be a lot better once this crud passes. Once I can stop taking enough cold meds to anesthetize a draft horse. I won’t have to fend off these wandering thoughts and emotions that rise unbidden from the limbic system, fingernails on the cortical chalkboard.
Maybe my muse will wake up, too.
D.
Six strange and wonderful things
It’s Lyvvie‘s meme. Blame her.
ONE
Karen: You got the money?
Me: Yeah. You hang on to it.
Karen: No, you can hang on to it.
Me: No, I’ll just spend it on cheap whores.
Karen: I’d like to know where you intend to find expensive whores around here.
**more below the cut**