The Tipping Point of Oliver Bass Read online

  Copyright © 2016 Larry Spencer. All rights reserved.

  FIRST EDITION.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017901154

  ISBN: 978-1-5323-2996-8

  Colophone

  Designed by Robert Latham Brown.

  Cover photo by Lolo Spencer.

  The typefaces used are Adobe Caslon Pro for the body text and Clarendon for the chapter titles.

  Contents

  Half Gainer/A 10 For Degree Of Difficulty

  The Historic Canals

  Lamb Chops With A Side Of Murder

  My Fear Of Pacific Heights

  Spreading The Wealth

  In Search Of Freedom

  Addenbrooke’s Room #402

  Home Is Where You Hang Your Sanity

  …the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars…

  — Jack Kerouac, On the Road

  Chapter 1

  Half Gainer/A 10 For Degree Of Difficulty

  I believe it was a Wednesday at around 6:30 in the misty foggy morning when my mother took her own life, leaping off the Golden Gate into the cold, choppy waters of the San Francisco Bay. I was five. It was 2002. When my father and I got the news I was just rubbing my eyes awake. He was, however, already downing his third can of Heineken. This was his way of showing emotion. Dealing with tragedy was new to him. He didn’t cry or even swallow hard. He just stood at the big living room picture window and stared without so much as a sigh or a blink. We weren’t exactly people who were tied to deep feelings of remorse. We were more of an intellectual family, who found solace through reason and justification. Hugs came at a premium.

  Thing is, we both knew her life would end with some sort of self-destruction. Growing old wasn’t an option for her. She was unhappy and a serious alcoholic. But a brilliantly smart lush. Her car was found idling next to the orange guardrail; a bridge maintenance crew discovered it. It was nearly out of gas, so it must’ve been there for quite some time. After a good three hours they gave up dragging the bay. Her body was never recovered. Probably eaten by a shark that got high off her wine-soaked flesh.

  November 16, 1997

  Life for me began alone on cold Spanish tile in the kitchen of a Mexican-style house in San Jose, California. My mother, an attractive woman of 30, made it as far as the kitchen before her water broke, sliding onto the floor and giving birth like a frontierswoman in the middle of the prairie. Her screams could be heard for blocks. I’m sure the neighbors thought she was being murdered. Still, no one came to her rescue. They just let her do her business until the noise stopped and I was brought into this world pushing my way through the vaginal canal onto a dish towel that had spaghetti sauce stains from the previous night’s meal. That, mixed with placenta all over the beautiful Spanish tile, made for some extraordinary marinara, which to this day I have an aversion to. My stepmother, Lorraine, who’s a shrink, calls it “neonatal phobia.” I call it an irresponsible father who was out of town on business—or so he claims.

  For the record, I am missing a testicle. I was born with only one ball. I’m sort of special in that way. Or freakish; it depends on how you perceive it. In any event, it’s a good way to identify me in an emergency situation.

  DECEMBER 2004

  So here I am, now seventeen, lying face up on the wet sand of Stinson Beach in Northern California. I’m fully clothed in a long-sleeved button-down shirt, a scarf around my neck, khakis, loafers with no socks and Ray Bans for added mystery. Or protection, depending on how you view the world. Personally, I don’t want people to see my eyes. You can tell a lot by someone’s eyes. I want to keep my persona to myself.

  It’s a peaceful enough picture. I’m cold and damp and pretty much appear dead. How I got here is yet another great mystery. A bearded man walking his dog suddenly approaches. It’s one of those golden retrievers. (The dog, not the man.) It’s not on a leash. I believe there’s a law against that, but I’m in no position to complain or bring it up.

  “Excuse me; you okay?” he asks. You’d think he’d know I wasn’t okay after the fifth inquiry. The man nudges me with his foot. The dog sniffs wondering if this is a good place for him to relieve himself. Then under a nervous breath the man says, “If you’re dead I need to call someone to remove your body or the gulls will nip you fleshless.” There’s a pause. What’s he waiting for? Go get help. “Okay, I’m calling for help”, he says, then hustles across the wet sand with his dog barking in tow. Just as the bearded man is out of sight the tide comes in washing over my body several times. As the tide ebbs and flows I’m washed out into the bay, eventually going under and disappearing from view. But before I sink into the abyss, I open my eyes to get my bearings. Here’s the ultimate question I ask myself: Am I dead or not?

  I bob up and down in the choppy water like a toy boat. In the distance I notice a fishing vessel with a small crew of fishermen. Several lines are over the side. Suddenly there’s a bite and one of the poles almost bends in half as one fisherman struggles trying to reel in what he and others believe to be the “big one.”

  The catch of the day suddenly emerges from the water and it’s not the big one at all, but an attractive younger woman, 30-something with a fishhook in her mouth, shaking her head furiously trying to free herself like a mackerel. It’s a disturbing picture to say the least. It’s freaky. It’s my mother.

  Suddenly my head also begins to thrash back and forth and I bolt awake in bed gasping for air. It was all a bad nightmare. I spoke to myself with uncertainty.

  “What in the fuck was the significance of that?”

  I called out for my stepmother.

  “Lorraine!”

  She didn’t answer. After several attempts, she finally showed up at my bedroom door. In her early 40s, attractive, with a Ralph Lauren style and a possessor of 200 pairs of shoes. She usually speaks with disdain because she hates me.

  “What seems to be the trouble, Ollie?”

  I fired back. “First off, is it possible to drop the Ollie endearment? Cute really offends me.”

  “Consider the Ollie dropped.”

  She turned to leave. I wasn’t done. I stopped her by revealing that I was in crisis mode, explaining my dream on the beach and the image of my mother with the hook in her mouth being fished out of the bay. I asked her to interpret the dream. She told me I just have a vivid imagination that borders on morbid and callous with sexual overtones.

  That wasn’t good enough, but that’s all I got because I called her a hack and a disgrace to her profession. I mean, come on— what kind of an answer is that coming from someone who makes her living analyzing people for one hundred and fifty dollars an hour? I asked her for smart input and I get first-year Psychology 101 words of wisdom. In truth, she could care less about my emotional state of mind. She was an inadequate stepmother. They all were. Lorraine is my father’s third or fourth wife. It’s hard to keep up. It’s a revolving door of needy, maladjusted women in this house.

  With Lorraine also came baggage— a stepsister, Shelby. Twenty-one, with a Joan Jett magnetism about her; a rebel of sorts. She decided today was a good day to interrupt me while I was masturbating in the shower. I didn’t flinch. I’m not a big reactor. Not too many things shock me. She wanted money for her bad habit. Cigarettes. Twenty dollars. She promised to pay me back when Lorraine shelled out her monthly allowance. My response was quick and insightful.

  “Shelby, try using common sense. You think I carry cash in the shower?”

  Her
response was just plain nasty. “Yes. You’re a person who has a distrust for humankind.”

  I pointed out that she was 21 years old and I thought it was time she took some responsibility and earned her own money. Better yet, quit smoking before she fucking died. She thinks I’m a person who needs to always be in control and views most of the population as fucking idiots. Feeling a sense of a lost cause, she quickly changed the subject and revealed the truth behind her unexpected shower visit — she got herself pregnant. The money was for an abortion. Okay, let’s get real: where on the planet can you get a great bargain abortion for twenty dollars? She became flustered, made some off color remark about my testicle hanging on the wrong side, and then left me to my unfinished masturbation. But before servicing myself, I came up with a personal diagnosis about my bizarre dream — me being swept out to sea, then my mother emerging on a baited hook is a manifestation of me trying to survive in a dysfunctional, unbalanced environment. The hook represented being linked to mental anguish. Me going under and never resurfacing symbolized me drowning in a sea of underachievers.

  Jeffery Bass, my father, is a relatively handsome man of forty-three with a tailored personality molded from Yale Law School. I could always tell by his morning Bloody Mary cocktail and his cold, hard stare that I had done something to annoy him. He drank to ignore the truth: That he was an alcoholic, and that I was a vast disappointment. This morning’s displeasure concerned my grades — a 4.8 gpa. I told him that I tried my best to take a dive and come out a kid of average intelligence but my brilliance overshadowed my Kamikaze suicide mission. I was wrong. That wasn’t what bothered him, not getting average grades. Seemed my grades came with a disturbing letter from the dean’s office.

  “You have managed to piss off every teacher and the dean of students with your holier-than-thou attitude,” he said. Here’s the thing — I was so much smarter than those clods and they resented me for it. Their only recourse was writing a vicious letter to my parent. They didn’t have the balls to confront me face to face. They had already tried once and failed miserably.

  “That doesn’t give you the right to call them fascist right-wing hypocrites,” he said. I admitted I might have gone too far this time. So, what was I supposed to do? Write them back a letter of apology? Give them each a hand job?

  “It’s your call, pop,” I said. “You’re the guy footing the bill. I’m at your mercy.”

  Seems it was too late for apologies and hand jobs. I’d been expelled. I was officially out on my butt. This really irked the hell out of my father, which then led to him threatening me with boarding school.

  “Isn’t this a little extreme?” I said. Just because a few mollycoddling teachers waved a fucking red flag in my direction, I had to be sent adrift. Didn’t the fact that I had the highest GPA in the school’s history count for anything?

  “It’s the third school in two years, Oliver. Your personality clashes wherever you go.” And he generously added, “You have trouble fitting in. You have an inane propensity to distance yourself from people.”

  This all may have been true. According to my mother, before she did a half gainer off the Golden Gate, most of my social leper qualities came from witnessing bad-mannered, ill-bred relatives fight over a fucking turkey leg at Thanksgiving dinner. My father accused me of shifting blame.

  “Your mother was an emotionally disturbed woman who was so drugged up on pills she couldn’t complete a full sentence without passing out.”

  I thought to myself, aren’t we all in some way emotionally disturbed? In a sudden need for something to wash down his words, I grabbed his bloody mary and chugged it. I grimaced. It was stronger than usual.

  I wasted no time in distancing myself from even more people and more memories. The very next day I cleaned out my locker at the prep school that had expelled my ass — a book of Shakespeare’s comedies, histories and tragedies plus a stainless salad fork worth plenty. As I reflected on the now empty space, a voice from behind interrupted my thoughts.

  “So, I hear you got the heave-ho.”

  I turned to see Sydney standing there. She was 16, plain and had all the accoutrements that came with being unfashionable and socially inept. Horn-rimmed glasses, Converse shoes, artfully bedraggled, but under that vanilla exterior was a girl who had the potential of being a genuine beauty. Like me, she wasn’t afraid to say what was on her mind.

  “Yeah, bummer, the heave-ho,” I said. “They cut me loose because I lacked a close and harmonious relationship with the hired help.”

  She predicted that I’d achieve greatness and that those traditionalist bastards would regret ever casting me aside like some rank-and-file plebeian. Who knows if she was right. I just nodded and gave her the salad fork as a remembrance of our indefinable friendship. She starred at the fork like it was the key to the city. I explained that my mother ate her very last meal with it before taking her own life. It was the last thing that touched her lips before she hit the water.

  “I can’t take this,” she said. “It’s a sacred memory of your only mother.”

  “I have others. Forks and mothers,” I said.

  After a long reflective pause looking at the fork then back at me, she said, “Why is it we never did it, Oliver? Why is it we never hooked up? Why did we never make crazy love until your thing had no more fight in it?” “Bad timing,” I said. But truthfully, if I had a type, she wasn’t it.

  She wanted to know if I had a plan. I told her that after grad school, I intended to travel through Europe and settle down in a country where I don’t speak their language or follow their customs, where I get a shrug and a smile for saying “fuck off.”

  She said that she admired my ambition, and I explained where marriage, babies and discovering a cure for some pandemic disease were somewhere in that ambition.

  Sydney wanted my phone number for future contact. This felt uneasy to me. I cleverly dodged any kind of response. I said, “Maybe some other time.” I then slammed the locker door shut and reached closure on this chicken shit prep school that turned its back on me because I had valid but critical opinions about how to run this lightweight institution.

  It was 8 p.m.

  This was the dinner hour in my house because my father and Lorraine liked to eat late. They said it felt civilized eating after the sun went down. They, I might say, were full of civilized shit. They thought of it as an upper-crust late night supper event. They called it supper. Regular people and Democrats eat dinner.

  Dinner conversation usually consisted of politics, mental health and Shelby’s fascination with getting the word derrière tattooed on her lower back. This time however, Lorraine and Jeffery took control of the conversation. They made this absurd decision to send me off to live with a perfect stranger for the entire summer, thinking it’d help curb my attitude and give me some human qualities they felt I was lacking. I had no vote on this idiotic resolve. My first instinct was to fight them on it, fling the prime rib supper across the room and point out how immature they were being. Instead, I went verbally nuts shouting at the top of my lungs.

  “Why aren’t you guys trying to be more productive and put your energy into more important issues than my well-being? Like finding a cure for cancer. Or comforting poor Shelby here with her own personal crisis— the bargain-basement abortion.” Their mouths didn’t even drop. The fact that Shelby could be pregnant did not compute. My father took a swig of his martini and Lorraine just kept chewing her bloody rare roast beef.

  I thought it would be smarter for them just to ship me off to reform school or the Army than to hand me over to some stranger who could be a sex offender — or worse, a fucking Republican. Lorraine assured me that Vance Briggs was neither. He was a shining example of success, a journalist who wrote for Rolling Stone until he took a network job as an investigative reporter. I rolled my eyes then stood up from the table. I was leaving the room when —

  “He was a patient of mine,” she said. I sat back down with a big sigh.

&nbs
p; “You can’t be serious. You’re handing me over to a pop culture journalist who probably has maternal, nurturing issues.” Pretty sure I said that whole thing in one breath. I listened as she poured herself a third glass of Chablis and told me how this man, Vance, suffered from a great loss and needed someone like me to get him through some rough spots. Me? Except for being self-absorbed, what talent do I possess?

  “You need someone like Gandhi’s kid, not me,” I said. Lorraine gagged, then suddenly spit out the chunk of beef she couldn’t swallow into her napkin. In the back of my mind I was kind of hoping she’d try to swallow it and choke to death at the dinner table. My dad gave me one of those looks that dads give when they’re fed up with life. Shelby thought it was a good time for her to chime in. “For the record, I’m not pregnant.” Still no comment from either Jeffery or Lorraine. Lorraine made it known that this wasn’t about Shelby. It was about Vance Briggs’ son who overdosed and was still feeling pain. “And where do I fit in?” I asked.

  “You have a lot of the same qualities,” she said.

  “I see no connection between a druggie and me.” My dad lit a cigarette. He was one of the few left on the planet who thought smoking was chic. He took a drag.

  “His kid died of an overdose,” he said as he exhaled the smoke. “His mother walked off a ledge at a local institution.” I finally understood the common bond this man and I shared. So what? His depression was not my concern. His despair was his problem. Besides, I’m not a therapist. “Aren’t ethics involved here?” I said.

  “You both have your own demons to deal with,” she answered. “Like your fear of the unknown that causes those bizarre dreams.”

  I stood up, pushing myself away from the table. “I have no fear of the unknown.”

  “It’s subconscious,” she fired back.

  “What I have is a fear of people like you, who convince other people like me, that they have fears.” As I turned and headed out of the dining room, which was now filled with second-hand smoke and resentment, I threw out, “You’re dangerous, Lorraine.”