I don’t pick up anything that moves . . . : Specks on the Floor

If the Writers Guild strike doesn’t end soon, there is going to be serious trouble in our household. I am not speaking here of financial problems. I have what you might call a decent non-union job, and my standard of living, which has never been very high, is not dependent upon the vagaries of collective bargaining. But my marriage might be.

I am a member of the WGA because, during times of labor stability, I write television movies on the weekends, which keeps me busy and out of trouble. I was going to say busy and happy but I am never actually happy when I am writing.

I take frequent breaks to drink water or use the bathroom, but there is only so much water you can drink and only so many times people with a normal physiology can use the bathroom before being suspected of scatological compulsions.

So I try sitting at the word processor for longer periods of time, but after a while my head begins to hurt and my eyes water and I finally stand in the middle of the room and swear loudly. It is the writer’s equivalent of a primal scream.

My wife has become accustomed to the obscene roar that emanates occasionally from my corner of the house. What she has not become accustomed to is having me strike-idled on weekends, because that’s when I wander from room to room Picking Things Up Off the Floor.

It is kind of a hobby that began when we first moved into Topanga Canyon. My daughter, who had her own horse, walked into the house one day with manure on her shoes. She left a trail of it from the front door to her bedroom without the faintest notion she was doing so. She was 13 at the time and therefore not of this world.

“What’s this?” I demanded of her, indicating the dried fecal trail.

“What’s what?” she said, looking directly at it.

“That stuff on the floor!”

“I don’t see anything,” she said.

“You don’t see all that horse . . . “

I stopped myself just in time.

“You’ve really got a problem,” she said, and went back to her room.

Since that incident I have developed an obsession about picking things up off the floor. I don’t mean horse manure (we gave up the daughter and the horse about the same time) but microscopic debris that only an expert can perceive. Lint, for instance, or specks of food so tiny that an ant would have trouble spotting them.

I don’t use a vacuum for the job but pick the minutiae up with my bare fingers, sometimes wetting the finger-tips first with saliva so the specks will stick long enough to be thrown away.

Last weekend I was doing my job when I became aware of my wife standing behind me, watching.

“One of these days,” she said, “you’re going to be bending over to pick up a speck and it’s going to be a baby black widow and zap!”

“I don’t pick up anything that moves,” I said. “I have trained myself to observe the speck a scant second before removing it from the floor to be sure it is inanimate.”

“You’re going to drive me crazy,” she said.

“A clean house is God’s domain.”

“The house is clean, God never said that and stop licking your fingers!”

I explained to her one day in a calmer moment that my urge to pick little things off the floor was probably an ethnic trait rooted in generations of my ancestors working in the lettuce fields.

“I’m sure they didn’t pick up specks.”

“It isn’t what they picked up that has been passed along,” I said, “but the instinct to bend over from the waist and just . . . well . . . pick.”

“Sometimes,” she said, “I am amazed at your ability to function in the real world.”

Then she walked away.

I think what really got to her was the weekend we had three little friends over to visit. They were Travis, who is 4, Nicole, who is almost 2 and Shana Lee who is 14 months. I was picking specks off the floor as usual when they decided to help.

The four of us went through the living room spotting specks. They were really quite good at it because they are closer to the floor and accustomed to seeing little things.

“My God,” my wife said, “now you’ve got them doing it.”

“Think of them as apprentice speck-pickers,” I said.

There was a moment of strained silence, and then she said, “I know the Writers Guild is on strike and I don’t want you to violate their rules, but if you don’t get into that room of yours and start writing, I’m leaving for Oregon!”

I could see by the look in her eyes she was serious.

“Write what?” I said.

“I don’t care! Hymns, psalms, haiku poetry, pornographic odes, anything!”

So I went back into my office and spent the time working on a novel I began several drinks of water and visits to the bathroom ago, but nothing was scanning.

My head began to hurt, my eyes began to water and pretty soon I rose to my feet and swore as loudly as I could.

It made me feel better but I still wish the strike would end. I’m running out of specks.