by Peter Rodman
Our tires wear off one microscopic particle at a time along the freeways. Were it not for CalTrans our highways would eventually be covered by drifting, shifting dunes of dead tire rubber. But CalTrans sweeps it up. When the rubber is collected it's delivered to our prisons where it's sifted, bleached, mixed with red rubber cement, compressed, and extruded as a pink cable. This recycled tire cable is delivered in huge coils, each with 16 miles of rubber, to pencil manufacturers who tip the ends of pencils with it. Not only are our freeways kept clear, but the State coffers are enriched by as much as two hundred and fourteen dollars annually from the sale of the rubber. If a person travels far enough and long enough on our highways, he can find anything he may need.
HOUSEHOLD GOODS. Years of heavy use have just about worn out our mattress and box springs. Coming home from work at rush hour one day I saw the perfect replacement on the freeway. Unfortunately, the mattress and box springs were in the fast lane of Highway 50 and I was in the slow lane, doing my usual 55. Many people in the fast lane were obviously interested--they came very close to the set before they finally braked and veered off into another lane. Someone was very interested; by the time I made it back to the place the whole set was gone.
Over the years I've seen sofas, lawn furniture, end tables, and assorted lamps on or by the freeway. I could have easily furnished an entire house with what I've seen. One note of caution: my experience has shown that appliances such as refrigerators and toasters found on or along the road seldom work without expensive repairs.
BUILDING MATERIALS. Not only can a person furnish a house with found materials, he could probably build one, albeit a rather odd-looking house. Siding, 2 x 4's, whole squares of shingles, aluminum roofing, nails, screen doors, windows, and hot water heaters are all available freeway close.
SPECIALTY. Bootmakers can find an ample selection of Vibram in convenient 10 foot strips all along the road. Likewise, auto repairmen know there is always a good selection of previously-owned mufflers and tailpipes along the highways. I once saw a complete set of eight pistons and sleeves for a semi diesel engine beside an on-ramp. Often entire cars are parted-out beside the freeway, staying in one place until they are picked down to skeletons.
CLOTHING. We've all seen the bundles of clothes on and around the roads. The problem here is size and selection. Those of us who have had our colors done and feel it's important not to wear spring colors when we are autumn people can't really utilize much of what the highway has to offer. But there's always something we can wear--if nothing else, one of the large selection of baseball caps available in the road.
FOOD. Admittedly, highway groceries are limited in variety, but seasonal foods are abundant around harvest time. Check out the bumps and curves for tomatoes and sugar beets in late summer. Bring a big basket. I suppose if there's anything you need to remember about freeway shopping, it's, "Be alert and move quick." English majors can move quickly. But watch for bargains, watch for oncoming traffic, and get what you need when you need it. It either won't be there later or if it is there, you won't be able to recognize it.
Government Credit
There's some very good news from Washington, D.C. for me and people like me who use money. The federal government is making it easier for me to go into debt at their convenience. Naturally I've always had the option to mortgage the house or get a bank loan using the children as collateral to pay my government bills. But this is new. Now I can incur huge debts and pay usurious interest rates using my credit cards with two agencies of the federal government.
It used to be the feds would only take checks or money orders in payment; now the Customs Service and Justice Department will accept plastic. Forty other agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service, are also considering making an investment in those sled things with the slider you run over the credit cards. All to make it easier for me to give them money.
There are reasons it took so long. Probably the main reason has to do with taxes. In 1986 I went into debt with my credit cards and got a tax break--I could deduct the interest payments on my plastic from my income taxes. It wasn't much, but it was something. Suppose I could have paid my income tax with a credit card, then paid off my credit card over the next year? Why then I'd be able to deduct the credit card interest from next year's taxes. I'd end up paying less tax next year because I paid taxes with plastic this year.
Even the government must have seen this is highly immoral, so now we have a new tax law. A fine new tax law that does not allow me to deduct credit card interest from my income tax. I can't do it. And I'm astonished to find that the government has now decided that plastic money is just fine.
But because I can pay my government bills with a credit card, will I?
No.
I won't for the same reason that I won't use my credit card to buy a complete three-record set of Boxcar Willie's Greatest Hits from the man in my television set. I won't for the same reason I tear up and swallow the carbons when I make a credit card purchase. I plain don't want some yahoo with my credit card number paying his taxes or buying his set of Boxcar Willie albums on my account. Often all you need these days to buy something over the phone is a credit card number.
It isn't that I don't trust the government . . . well, actually, it is. I don't seriously believe that everyone in the federal government should be in jail--indeed, many may never even be indicted. It's just that the federal track record isn't all that hot.
Remember, we're dealing with a group of people who can't even do something simple like ransom hostages by trading arms to a hostile country without turning it into something low and sordid by laundering the money and using it to undermine the elected government of another country. Face it, if some of these folks don't stop at violating federal and international laws, they would not be too worried about a simple credit card scam.
If you pay your government bills with your credit card, don't be too surprised if you get some odd charges on it. Like a couple of grand for "Parts" from Honest Juan's New & Used Munitions in some town you never heard of in Nicaragua.
If you're still not convinced, try an experiment. Give your long-distance calling card number to a lonely serviceman in Guam. Tell him to use it judiciously, but share it with his friends. But don't be surprised to see the Post Office fork lift drive up with your telephone bill.
Nude, Not Naked
The confusion with the color nude (not naked) goes back many years--to the first grade, I think--and has its roots in the color flesh.
I showed up in first grade with my box of eight crayons and was feeling quite prepared for everything, but as it turned out I lacked even the basic tools for dealing with the world.
This is because we had to draw people--our families. With a mother, a father, three sisters, a brother and me, that was a lot of skin to color in, and I had no flesh in my box. I didn't even have pink, you don't get pink until you buy the 24 crayon boxes and flesh doesn't show up until you buy the 64 crayon assortment with the built-in sharpener.
Since the 64 crayon kids did not share their flesh, and according to the nun the closest color we could get to skintone with our palette was orange, and because the best my seven year old's draftsmanship could manage was a macrocephalic stick-figure, my careful drawing turned into a horror. Even extra hair on everyone in the family and a long beard he didn't own on my father couldn't hide the obvious fact that I belonged to a family of pumpkinheads.
And I wasn't the only one. A lot of the poorer kids were pumpkinkids. Others were pinkkids, which embarrassed the boys. The only people who came from real families were the 64 crayon kids who had flesh families with tan and burnt umber hair.
Even this didn't quite work out right. One of the 64 crayon kids was black, and though he used flesh, he wasn't happy with the result.
This problem came to a head in the late sixties when Barbie turned liberal and acquired a friend with a darker flesh than her own. When baby dolls that cried and wet had their eyes c
hange from blue to brown and their skin turn dark. When, even, socially conscious plastic bandages were sold in a browner shade for Afro-American cuts. None of the black fleshes matched black flesh.
Which isn't surprising. (White) flesh Band-Aids stand out on anyone's skin, even a white kid's. Flesh is at best an approximation, and doesn't look like flesh when it sits on it.
But nude is another thing altogether. Modern science seems to be getting a handle on the color nude.
From the early experimental nude of women's stretchy undergarments (where the color still does important work), nude has moved out in the world, first in pantyhose, and now in every facet of human life. With each refinement of the color, more and diverse products appear in it. Horticulturists are racing to breed the first nude rose. Soon we will have nude sports cars, refrigerators, and power tools.
This is all still in the future, yet even today the color is very convincing. Go to the ballet and listen for the audience's intake of breath, the sudden murmuring, and the rustle of cummerbunds being adjusted when the dancers spring out dressed in nude body stockings. You very seldom hear someone shout, "Take it off!" at such functions these days.
I know I often have to look two, three, or four times at a woman to be sure that what she is wearing is something she's wearing. And with the exciting new tan-line patterns, sometimes I have to circle the block a few times to be sure.
It was inevitable that fashion designers apply the new color to men's clothing, and it has happened. An Italian designer recently unveiled his line of men's wool three- piece business suits in nude. They caused a sensation and are said to be particularly striking when worn with a matching silk dress shirt in the small black curlicue pattern (the so-called "chesthair design").
This style has not reached the States yet, but look for it soon on the prime-time soap operas, and shortly thereafter, at Macy's.
The Can Lid Satori
It was only last Thursday night when I took the garbage can from the back of the house to the curb in my bathrobe that I realized I had arrived.
It was a very cold night and I was in bed with the electric blanket on seven when I remembered the garbage. It had to be out at the curb at dawn. The wife said, "Where're you going?" and I said, "Garbage." "Oh, yeah, Thursday," she said. I found my houseshoes.
I emptied the office, bathroom, and bedroom wastebaskets into the kitchen bag, then stepped out back into the night. The sky was cold, its blanket peeled back, and the stars were small and very, very sharp.
The bathrobe did it; it and the houseshoes. I'd always thought I'd die before I turned old, but I must've got preoccupied, and somewhere along the line I missed out on dying and started aging. Until I got out of bed and knotted it on I hadn't realized that I'd left behind being young and cocky. I used to knot the belt a little off to the right because the knot would always settle in my navel and dig in; as a child I was worried about calluses on the only perfect part of my anatomy, my belly button.
But last Thursday I had a small enlightenment. I could tie the robe closed above my stomach or below it, but if I tied it straight across, the cloth band would creep up or down and my robe fall open. Years of beer have done their work; the shortest distance between two points was by avoiding my stomach.
Putting the house trash in the garbage can helped: when I pulled off the can lid all the rainwater from two days before sloshed out of the rim--a cold surprise down my bathrobe and along my leg. A trickle ran down my calf, around my ankle, and settled inside my houseshoe. Old, chilled rainwater down the leg is a wonderful aid to correcting one's view of the world.
I took the can and lugged it around the side of the house, my right leg chilled from the water and my house shoes (worn at the heels, crushed at the backs) almost slipping off, going, "thuck (squish), thuck, thuck (squish), thuck," on the concrete.
I set the can on the lawn beside the driveway and stood for a moment to rest, shiver, and wonder why I hadn't brought my cigarettes on such a beautiful night. The streetlights were like caught moons up and down the road, but the moon itself was just a curved nothing. I heard the "Skreeeek," and looked up. The barn owl was white and silent against the cold of the sky. If I'd had my glasses I probably could have seen his feathers.
Klaus the cat came out from under the rose bushes expecting food. Being mute, Klaus is a good conversationalist and one of my best friends. "What do you want?" I asked my friend. "You're supposed to be a hunter, go kill something. There are two squirrels across the street," I said. "They just laugh at you." Klaus looked away, repelled by the sight of a no longer young man in a bathrobe taking out the garbage. Last summer Klaus was sitting between the two palm trees across the street, watching two squirrels argue in the fronds when one of them lost his grip. The squirrel fell 50 feet. Klaus watched him fall and seemed ready to spring, but then he flinched, realized the squirrel was falling directly on him and sprang away to the cover of an azalea older than I am.
"If you shave its tail, it's just a rat," I yelled at Klaus, but he was already gone. The squirrel went "THUD" on the concrete, stood up and looked around as if to say, "You know, I really meant to do that," then ran back up the palm tree. Klaus came back rather sheepishly for a cat, but eventually got his cockiness back.
On the night of the dead houseshoes and wet bathrobe that no longer tied at the navel he sat for a moment with considerable composure on the cold dew of the grass, then stood up, turned, and walked away. Amazing arrogance for a cat that doesn't even own a bathrobe.
When I was a boy we often moved. At one place we lived, there was an old man in our neighborhood who used to scare religion into us kids; we'd pray for him to die. He'd sit on his porch and we'd all approach his street carefully. We'd look down the road and if he was on his porch (he had a castor bean bush in his front yard, and sometimes you'd have to creep up the block and look around the bush to see if he was there), we'd circle the block to avoid him.
If he caught sight of a kid, he'd run him up the block (but he never really left his yard or even his porch--he just yelled and you ran; he couldn't run, his belly was too big.)
The odd thing was that on Halloween everyone went to his house and rang the doorbell. He'd have on a green rubber scarface mask and would laugh and shout to all of us in our disguises at the door as he gave out whole handsful of those banana candies that no one else seemed to have.
I always thought that if I managed to survive World War II and the Germans and Korea or whoever we were fighting there on television, I'd like to grow up and have a house where I could sit on the porch and terrify the neighborhood kids and give them banana candies on Halloween. And now, with a clammy flannel bathrobe sticking cold to my thigh that won't tie across my stomach on a frosty night when the owl's looking for something to kill and my own damn cat won't show me any deference, I find my dream within my grasp.
“You kids get off my lawn.”
Fortunate Failures
There have been times in my life when in spite of substantial talent (mine), ample materials, and perfect timing, something I attempted and could easily have accomplished instead went in the toilet. These failures invariably were the best thing that could have happened to me at the time. Without getting too metaphysical, it seems something out there knows better than I do what I need and sees I get it whether I want it or not.
Take the sailboat. I took a sailing class and found I loved it. But the class ended and I had no boat. Even small sailboats run a minimum of six bills, about $500 more than I generally have.
But my father was replacing his garage door with a metal roll-up electronically-controlled dogcrusher, so I built a sailboat in his back yard with the plywood from his old garage door. It took me eight months. The boat was beautiful, and from the way it held water, fallen leaves, and a drowned bird, I'm sure it would have floated if it ever got in the water.
I got a trailer, wired it for lights, and my father put a hitch on the Gremlin. Then something terrible happene
d-- the trailer got a flat tire. I couldn't deal with it. If I fixed the tire, I'd have to register the trailer and the boat, take it somewhere, sail it, then store it somewhere--somewhere else. My father was becoming firm about boat-shaped bird sumps not fitting in with the landscaping. After about six months my father pumped up the flat tire and gave the whole mess away, probably to someone who takes kittens from people with cardboard boxes full in front of K-Mart.
Then I was going to publish a novel. I had a novel (one of mine--unfunny, but quite good), a letterpress, an ample supply of type, cartons of cut paper (eggshell white), cover stock, binding adhesive, and all the time in the world.
Using all my free time, I managed to set the first page and print 50 copies of it in only one week. It looked wonderful. The problem was that was only page one, and I didn't have any place to store it. The other problem was that there were 350 pages. At that rate, assuming I did nothing else (such as go sailing), it would take me six years and five months just to print the damn thing. Then I'd have to bind it.
So I threw away page one and got rid of everything except the eggshell white paper.
Years ago, I read Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, and thought I'd make some (it was magical). After a day bending and picking the blasted flowers from every lawn in the neighborhood, I had enough for a small batch. I cleaned the blossoms, cooked, fermented and bottled the swill and waited six months for the wine to age.
Although I wouldn't personally sit on Ray Bradbury's chest and dig my thumbs into his eyes, I wouldn't stop you if you wanted to. It was vile stuff, just what you would expect lawn weed wine to taste like. Plum and peach wine weren't much better. On the chance that grapes might make a difference, I fermented a batch of tokay juice. It was pretty bad at first, and after three months still made my eyes water. I let it age a bit longer. I'm known for having a very flexible palate when it comes to wine, but the older this stuff got, the more it tasted like dandelion wine. I gave up on wine.
