Introduction
This is the thirty-third installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I of the series is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, Volume XII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume XIV is here, Volume XV is here, Volume XVI is here, Volume XVII is here, Volume XVIII is here, Volume XIX is here, Volume XX is here, Volume XXI is here, Volume XXII is here, Volume XXIII is here, Volume XXIV is here, Volume XXV is here, Volume XXVI is here, Volume XXVII is here, Volume XXVIII is here, Volume XXIX is here, Volume XXX is here, Volume XXXI is here, and Volume XXXII is here.
What are Bits & Bobs? They’re longer than tweets, shorter than essays, and slightly more formal than graffiti. Back when people wrote letters, and then treated email as a way to send letters, and there were no blogs, I got my literary ya-yas out by stretching the epistolary form into something almost bloglike. This old correspondence is what I now mine for literary snippets that, on a slow news day, can be assembled into these posts.
The different volumes of Bits & Bobs are not organized numerically, alphabetically, or taxonomically; nor are they assembled in order of priority, importance, urgency, or applicability. You can peruse them randomly, sequentially, or as directed by your Ouija board.
The following dispatches were written when I was a Berkeley student.
October 12, 1990
Today’s vocab word is “frame,” in the phrase “frame yourself.” I don’t have the etymology, and it’s possible my roommate B— coined it himself, but I’m quite certain it will see widespread use from here on out since it’s such a useful term—and you read it here first! Anyhow, framing yourself is when you say something really stupid and there’s nowhere to hide. Like when B— and I were in the San Francisco Centre, this huge nine-story shopping center, and checked out this really fancy shoe boutique, not because we wanted or could afford the shoes there but because of the really fly saleswoman. We walk in, expecting to sort of drift away naturally at any moment, but then the saleswoman says to B—, “How’s it going?” He looks at her, totally shocked, as if he’d assumed we were beneath her notice, and doesn’t know what to say. Finally he stammers out, “What?” She repeats her innocent greeting, and he trips over some words and then, to cover, picks up a display shoe and starts asking questions about it. He’s just making it worse, but she is pretty fly so I take a seat and pass the time comparing all these Italian dress shoes to my totally thrashed Nike Air Solo Flights. B— is asking now about whether these shoes would be resolable, and the saleswoman is getting really confused—”Why would you want to? Don’t the soles look durable?”—while B— begins to blush. That’s how you frame yourself. (I could give you numerous examples of this from my own life, but what would I want to do that for?)
November 3, 1991 [from a letter to my mom]
Tonight my homework was reading America Is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan, and it triggered a random flashback of memory from just over four years ago. You [my mom], Geoff, Max and I were at the Wells Fargo Bank on the corner of Santa Rosa and Foothill in San Luis Obispo, late in the summer of 1987. All of my belongings—which we had miraculously crammed into your VW Jetta for the trip out—were already at Geoff’s old apartment on McCollum where we’d be staying briefly before moving into our own place. Now we were parting ways: you and Max would drive the thousand miles back to Boulder, and Geoff and I would bike to our apartment where I would start my adulthood.
The moment held oddly little emotional intensity for me. It seemed completely unrealistic—not because I was beginning a completely new life, but because this lifelong separation originated in a bank parking lot, of all places. Geoff showed all the signs of experiencing a big moment, and you began crying. As I sit here recalling it tonight, I am waiting to see if I’ll finally respond to that sendoff, from so long ago. Back then, I was like the kid in the Bulosan book, too wary of the new struggle I was beginning to bother looking back at my old life. In that parking lot I had slipped into some kind of emotional coma. Riding off, and seeing you drive away towards Colorado, I might as well have been biking to a friend’s house, sure to be back home in time for dinner. But what home? Home was not home anymore.
The impact of the moment never did catch up to me; the delayed reaction I expected never came. I simply wandered off into my future, looking around half-interestedly as though browsing at a garage sale, never thinking to look back over my shoulder. But for one long moment tonight, during which I closed my eyes and almost dropped my book, the accumulation of long-neglected responses almost overwhelmed me. Perhaps if I were a faster typist, or more swift in contemplation, you would be reading a more impassioned letter. As it is, the moment has already passed and I’m ready to get back to my book.
January 8, 1992
Did I ever tell you about The Iciest Chick in the World? This betty is cold fresh, man, we’re talkin’ straight-up stupid-fly. I first saw her last spring on the first day of English 139, and decided to bust out on the extreme extrovert tip. (That worked reasonably well with H—, at least until I took it a bit overboard, right?) So like I said, this chick is totally rad and offhandedly mentions how she was just in Kenya hanging out. Then, another totally dope freak sits down next to her. If I had seen her first, I would have called her the Iciest Chick in the World. But as it is, the friend is relegated to a close, yet also breathtaking, second. Then this dude sits down with them and starts talking, as if continuing a conversation from earlier, so he’s obviously their friend. As near as I can figure he’s not a boyfriend since he doesn’t show one of these fly betties more attention than the other. So now the trick is to kind of chat with all of them, even though my attention is drawn completely to the Iciest Chick. (To give you the idea of her look, she has short, dark hair, kind of like the Zachary’s waitress my roommate and I affectionately refer to as “The Lacrosse Player,” and the stylin’ clothes—and body—of a J.Crew model like we used to gape at in the catalogs that would arrive in the mail, unbidden but totally not junk mail.) Well, I never made it on time to English 139 again, despite my most earnest efforts, and thus never got to sit next to the Flyest Chick in the World again (until the day of the final exam, when she sat right next to me just to mess with me). But all semester long, from across the lecture hall, I’d surreptitiously check out the Iciest Chick during class, whimpering inwardly in hormonal agony, like a dog in heat trapped in a kennel. Since that final, I hadn’t seen her since last fall when I was riding my bike through campus down this hill. As she walked up the other way, I did a double-take, was totally distracted, and almost crashed my bike. Seriously.
Well, I recently saw her again. At the end of the fall term the professor of another English class threw a party at his house, and I attended with my friend H—. And who should show up but The Iciest Chick in the World! So I finally have another opportunity to strike up a conversation, and I feel like the situation is more in my favor now. I have a girlfriend, so I’m free from that stigma that lady-less guys seem to have: you know, that invisible sign around the available guy’s neck that says, “DEFECTIVE,” and the built-in kill switch that gets flipped whenever he screws up and lets on that he’s interested in a chick. You know, how he says “Hey” to her and she thinks, “Oh my god, I can’t even believe this desperate putz is trying to hit on me.” So not only do I have the poise of a guy who is spoken for and not on the make, I’m also there with H—, who is frankly gorgeous. Even though H— and I are just friends, nobody would necessarily know that. So a girl might take a slight interest in me, or at least might not be repelled by me, for the simple reason that I seem unavailable. Not that I intend to capitalize on any of this; it’s just nice not feeling like a pariah.
With all this in mind, I have the confidence to I approach the Iciest Chick, who’s standing with her guy friend—the same dude I’d encountered the first time I met her (and whom I only remember because the fact of his friendship with this girl was a source of bottomless envy). I offhandedly remark, “Say, weren’t you two in English 139 last spring?” The dude laughs in my face and says, “Yeah, but how come you remember? There were like 150 people in that class!”
My poise is shaken seismically. What can I say? That I remember him only because he was with her, and I remember her because she’s the Iciest Chick in the World? I’m rescued by J—, a classmate from English 180A, who shows up out of nowhere and gracelessly butts in to the conversation. Even though we’d spent the past semester arguing in class, I suddenly treat him like an old friend. That’s me, Mr. Social. Turns out J— knows the Iciest Chicks’ guy friend, so I’m saved. The three of us chat, just as though the whole point of me saying hi wasn’t the chick.
Next thing I know the food has been served and I’m sitting on the floor at this coffee table, across from the guy friend, pretending to carry on a conversation. My real attention is of course on the Iciest Chick, who is sitting right next to me, fully enjoying my appreciation of her. Just by her presence she’s essentially teasing me, albeit aimlessly, like a cat sharpening its claws on a scratching post. Every time she brushes up against me I think I’m going to pass out. I am hoping this isn’t noticed by H—, who is at a nearby chair, because she’d probably give me endless shit about it later.
H—, meanwhile, seems totally unaware that J— is transfixed by her, pining for her like he did all semester. He gets up and offers to get the Iciest Chick’s guy friend a beer. The friend says, “Thanks,” and I, not having received the same offer, venture a joke and say, “Yeah, thanks” to his back as he walks away. It comes off perfectly—the Iciest Chick even laughs—except for one thing: as I deliver the line, a small particle of food flies from my mouth. Whether or not the Iciest Chick saw the flying particle, the mere prospect that she did is enough to trample my mojo for the remainder of the evening. I’m just as paralyzed as I was ten years ago when I was chatting up the flyest girl in my junior high school class and my retainer fell out of my mouth. I end up pretending to practically ignore the Iciest Chick while shooting the breeze with the two guys. This always happens. Of course, this is actually the most appropriate thing to do anyway since I do have a girlfriend, after all. My interest in the Iciest Chick is like that of a hunter who shoots big game merely for sport, leaving the carcass to rot in the wilderness. Except that (to correct the metaphor) I realize I’m not a big game hunter at all, just some dumb tourist driven into the savanna by a local guide to look at a lion.
January 14, 1992
Remember summers as a kid? Imagine: it’s a hot day, and without thinking you drop by the neighbor kid’s place and ring the doorbell. Without so much as a greeting he strolls out, maybe you slap each other around a bit, one guy slouches into a lawn chair in the garage where it’s cool and the other rides around in circles on his little brother’s bike. Finally somebody says, “So whaddya wanna do.” There’s no answer and nobody cares, so you just hang out and maybe five minutes later (though nobody’s keeping track), the other guy says, “I know, let’s make some Kool-Aid and go up on the roof.” You get some towels and if you feel like it you actually climb to the roof. Otherwise you set up in the street and lie around in the sun. Most of your attention, what little of it there is, centers around making sure there’s a constant supply of Kool-Aid and ice and maybe that the towel’s damp at all times ‘cause it’s so hot. One moment slips into the next and no plans are made more than a minute or two in advance. Those days are never coming back.
February 25, 1992
We had a spate of vandalism on our street [in a sketchy part of south Berkeley]. Car windows broken out, and tires slashed, including the ones on my girlfriend’s scooter. Eventually the lady next door caught the vandal red-handed. He’s a student at the elementary school across the street, just ten years old.
In other news, my roommate and I went mountain biking and were heading up Ashby toward the trails when we encountered these two grade-school-aged kids riding as fast as they could, one on a tiny BMX bike and the other on a cheap, beat-to-hell Miyata ten-speed. We rode with them for a while, kind of making sure they didn’t get run over, because Ashby is a busy thoroughfare. The kid with the ten speed, who was wearing a dark wool cap that gave him the aura of street cred, which clashed comically with his youth, was really stoked on our bikes and asked if we raced, etc. I noticed his bike’s fork was bent, and told him to come by the Square Wheel and I’d write him up an estimate and fix his bike. He actually did bring the bike in, and I went a little easy on the labor charge. Get this: the bike had a sticker on it advertising the shop it came from: The High Wheeler, in Boulder, Colorado. My first full-time bike shop job!
So you might be wondering if there’s a point to these stories, and there is: turns out both are about the same kid. Days after picking up his bike from the shop, the kid happened to see me in front of my apartment, ran over to chat, and learned that I lived there. I mentioned the vandalism (without letting on I knew who’d done it), and described what a hassle it was replacing the scooter tires, etc. He looked so ashamed I felt bad for him.
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