TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 34

[Tobie Shapiro]

October 20, 2000000000006


Dear Old Friends,

	Today is the fifteenth anniversary of the 
Oakland/Berkeley Hills fire which destroyed my 
house and everything in it that I didn't pack in 
the car and cart away.  It feels odd being this 
far away from the event.  It was such a turning 
point in my life.  I don't even feel an ache now. 
It was stuff.  And so much has happened since 
that it just seems like another life story.

	Now hear this.

 
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An X

	When I was first away from home, going to 
the University of Washington in Seattle, I 
rejected staying in the dormitories, thinking of 
them as a twenty four hour social affair, and not 
wanting to have a room mate.  So my mother and I 
travelled up to Seattle to find me room and 
board.  We found a woman who rented out several 
rooms in her house to college students.  She 
lived near sorority, fraternity row, adjacent to 
the campus.  Her roomers were all female.  She 
had a basement with four rooms off of a central 
hallway and each room went to a different young 
woman.  Upstairs, she had more rooms that she 
rented out.  I was never aware of the upstairs 
crew, just of the ladies who rented rooms near 
mine.  We all shared a single hot plate, and 
there were a few pots to cook things in, plus a 
few utensils.  It was less than minimum.  But it 
would do nicely for a room first time away from 
home.

	For board, we found a co-ed boarding 
house on the corner, not far away from the 
rooming house.  We signed up for this place 
thinking good things, but when the quarter 
started and I went to the boarding house for my 
first dinner, I found out that I was the only 
co-ed.  I felt like a goldfish in  a bowl without 
a castle to hide in.  I ate one meal there, and 
then disappeared to eat my meals exclusively at 
the hot plate in the rooming house.  I would call 
my mother and ask how she made those Italian 
string beans.  I was almost helpless in a 
kitchen.  I went shopping for parsnips and came 
back with daikon radish.  It just didn't taste 
right when it was done.  This is when I began to 
learn how to cook.  Not very well.  But passable. 
There was no oven and no toaster, no mixing 
bowls, no collection of cooking tools.  So the 
first five weeks, I lost a lot of weight eating 
string beans and not much else.

	Then I discovered that Hillel was across 
the alleyway from us, our houses back to back. 
And I also discovered that Hillel held Tuesday 
night socials at which they served tuna fish 
sandwiches and doughnuts.  I'd go over to Hillel 
on Wednesday morning and eat the leftover 
sandwiches and doughnuts.  So the second  five 
weeks I gained a lot of weight.  Doughnuts and 
tuna fish sandwiches: a great diet, but not as 
bad as some diets kept by kids away from home for 
the first time.  I was lonely up in Seattle.  It 
was not like Berkeley, where nothing was frowned 
upon.  In Seattle, one had to wear the right 
clothes, say the right things, know the local 
routine, and fit in to the mold.  I did none of 
that, so I was labelled as an outcast, which was 
not unfamiliar to me.  Largely because I wore 
sandals, I was, "The Beatnik from Berkeley".  I 
made a few friends, but connected with the young 
men who roomed across the alleyway, right next 
door to Hillel.  I would go there and flirt with 
them.  Well, them except for Ramsey Hill who was 
a social predator, who knew how to select his 
victims and tear them to shreds, make them cry 
and wish they'd never come to Seattle to go to 
school at the big U. Of W.  Ramsey had it in for 
me and many a sharp comment sent me weeping back 
to my stuffy little room in the rooming house.

	I was innocent, very gullible, and had no 
street smarts.  I was used to a crazy family in 
which bizarre behaviour was argued to be normal, 
where what I saw as destructive abusive behaviour 
was defended as being acceptable.  Where was the 
fault to be assigned, then?  To the eye of the 
beholder.  So I doubted my own perceptions of 
what was crazy and what was sane.  This has 
followed me throughout my life.  I always doubt 
what it is I perceive.  It is the underlying 
question that informs most of the short stories 
that I have written.

	I was walking back to the rooming house, 
my arms free of books.  I can't recall what my 
errand was.  But I was about a block away from 
home base when I noticed a car driving alongside 
me, slowly following me.  It made me nervous.

	Then, the driver, a balding man wearing a 
T-shirt and jeans, opened the window closest me 
and shouted out, "Hey!  Hey!  Do you know where 
Sigma Chi fraternity is?"

	I turned to face him.  I answered, "No. 
I'm not a sorority girl or a fraternity boy.  I 
don't know where it is.  But try a block over on 
seventeenth.  That's where all the frat houses 
are.  You might find it there."

	 He thanked me, but he kept tailing me. 
"Hey!" he shouted, cheerfully, "I just swam the 
lake."

	"Good for you," I said in return.  I quickened my pace.

	"Hey, can you do me a favour?"

	I stiffened.  "What?"

	"I'm rushing for the fraternity, and I 
have to get someone to mark an X on my hip.  Will 
you do it?"

	"Pick on someone else," I said, nervously, and kept walking.

	He leaned way over to shout out the 
window.  "Oh, c'mon.  It'll just take a minute."

	Like an automaton, I responded, having no 
excuses that I could tell, and not wanting to be 
rude, no not ever to be rude, "Oh.  All right."

	I walked hesitantly over to the car, came 
up to the window and received the pen he handed 
me.  I wondered if I should mark his jeans with 
an X.  And I was informed exactly what he wanted 
me to do when he seized the waist of his jeans 
and pulled them down past his thighs.  His penis 
shot out, erect, from his groin.  I averted my 
gaze.  Maybe he didn't know he was exposed. 
Shaking inside, I reached over and marked an X on 
his skin near the outside of his hip.  This 
frightened me.  But I kept making excuses for 
him.  Maybe men weren't embarrassed by things 
like this.  Maybe this wasn't aberrant behaviour 
after all.

	"Hey!" he called out.  "Will you mark my other hip?"

	My head reeled.  I was frightened, as I 
should have been at the outset of this whole 
episode.

	"Go pick on somebody else," I said, and 
sped ahead, turned the corner and ducked in 
between two buildings down the street from my 
rooming house.  I went over what had happened, 
and what scared me most was my inability to sense 
the danger in his behaviour, how I made excuses 
for him, and insisted that I be polite over all 
other considerations, including my own safety.  I 
rushed back to my room, curled up on my bed and 
cried.  I couldn't trust anyone.  But it was 
worse.  I couldn't trust myself.  I had no 
judgment, no automatic warning device that would 
save me from predators.  I kept on wanting to be 
nice, well beyond the point of danger.  I 
shivered.  I dared not call my mother.  She'd 
just worry, and what I'd done was shameful.  I 
kept it to myself.


 
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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net