Ballys. Backtrack: Saturday. Final Exam. The Man in the Moon.

…I come back to the gym strong, stronger, even, than I was before, as if sickness has solidified something in me, and it all goes to prove the myth of what we think are our limitations.

Hardly anybody puts the plates away; or if they do, they put them in the wrong places. I obsessively rearrange plates and dumbbells, break down machines, so much so that occasionally I’m taken for an employee.

There are two types of dumbbells, the ones made of rubber coated plates and the ones made of metal.

The rubber weights bounce off of each other, in a strange springy way. They’re huge, and they don’t make you look bigger or stronger; rather, they make all your arm muscles and your hands look dwarfed.

And the steel weights, there’s the satisfying clink when they touch in the middle.

The rhythm of a good set.
So few of them are good.

…That’s you in the mirror.

You’ll never lift enough to please your father.
You’ll never make enough to please your mother.
You’ll never open yourself up enough to please a mate.

And I know, you think I’m bitching about my own life, but my sporadic use of the second person confuses even me.

…The only legitimate hope you have is to be a good father.
Maybe that’s a false hope.
But you believe in it.
You’ve got to believe in something.

…Saturday, a Christmas party, candles in red paper all up the driveway, everybody inside red cheeked and nosed, the night itself red, but not blood or hell red, but that good kind, that Christmas kind.

You hear the rumor of the threat of a set up but that never seems to transpire, or if it does, it does so subtly that you miss it.

You’ve never had a setup in your life that worked.
Nobody’s ever understood your taste well enough for that.

…How shallow are you? You bring Heineken to parties even though you don’t really like the way it tastes and absolutely hate the way it smells. Still, it is the beer that looks best in the hand, the one that seems to suggest a little bit more about you than a Bud Lite.

I stand there, a stranger to all but three, with my Heinekens, getting more social as the bottles get emptier and fewer.

I find myself saying, twice: What do you do?

A nice party, with two fires, one inside and one out, the hostess’s sisters out of control in a way that could have been scripted, so that I thought for a moment I was being Candid Camera’d, Punk’d, something…

But no.

And the hostess and her boyfriend have a lovely story about how they met in the woods when he was in a kilt.

As the liquor flows, and this collection of strangers, of real estate agents and school teachers grows drunk, the story takes on lascivious twists, the kind that make people giggle with a hand over the mouth, wink so heavily that you turn away before the lid can lift above the bulge.

…TD, he comes up from the South, a break from his all night writing sessions. He spends most of the party talking with a guarded woman with the palest color of blue eyes I have known or could imagine, a face unremarkable beyond them.

And I wonder: if your eyes were a different color, would your life be different?

The more drunk of the sisters starts telling TD that he is cocky. He sort of likes this. It makes him smile in a cocky way.

“Am I cocky?” he demands of me.
And I tell him what he wants to hear though he pretends not to, and I tell him what is true, “Hell yes, you’re arrogant.”

And the sister, she loves it, but she’s angry about something, angry at TD but not me.

And the girl with pale blue eyes, she’s putting on her seatbelt, she’s pulling her head into her turtleneck, and you remember her from a party six months ago, when you gave her and the boy she was devouring a ride home, the way you knew he was in over his head, that he would always be.

He was nice. But he is not here. He hasn’t been here for ages, has been asked to give up on figuring out how to make her his.

He is history.

…Three older men begin to play guitar and sing.
There’s warmth here.
This is a good party in that way.

No wonder you have to flee.

…A quick visit to the Dixie. It’s been awhile. It should have been longer.
You go home.


…And now it is Monday, and I must make up the final I am to give tomorrow.

If a professor were honest, what would he or she ask on the final exam, these attention addicts, these little Stalin’s, these stand up comics?

There are two types. The first wants nothing. They want to get paid. They want to do as little work as possible.

The second type, they want disciples, not students.

Oh, I suppose there is a middle ground, those few who believe they’re doing some kind of good and maybe even do it.

But what would that exam look like?
What color are my eyes?
What was the smartest thing I’ve said?
Did any of your classmates ever bad mouth me? When, and what was said?
And so on.

Your teacher is most likely an egomaniac.

…And then it is the grocery store.
I find myself talking to myself. Like an old man or an idiot.

I pick up a can of soup, read the ingredients, find it vegan. Good, I proclaim it.

I walk another aisle. See some mushrooms in cans, Maybe I’ll add mushrooms, I say to them.

I compare the prices on the organic and non-organic celery. But the organic, I tell the misted vegetables, is not that much more. I’ll buy it.

And so on.

And then thinking back on it (god, I’m always thinking back, always analyzing what has just happened to me for blog worthiness; this is bad; this is dangerous; perhaps it is time to retire, as I’ve heard one other blogger threaten): what is the matter with you, talking to yourself, talking in public like that? Where is your shame?

Thinking: was that not you, four hours ago, at the gym, thinking when the man on the bench beside you begin to groan and grunt, Shut up!

Thinking that he should have learned young like I did to exercise and come in silence.

…My son is expecting a call from the Man in the Moon, and so I deliver.

Suddenly nervous, unsure of my voice, I disguise it with a cockney accent, wondering: can a child even understand things spoken with a cockney accent?

And my son, who won’t speak to Santa on the phone or in person, he tells the Man in the Moon: Don’t be lonely.

He tells the Man in the Moon: I gave you a balloon.

And I remember that, the parking lot, nearly three weeks ago, the string I couldn’t quite nab, the red balloon getting smaller and smaller, pretty in the pale blue and not yet burst against the atmosphere, me saying: The Man in the Moon will take care of it.

My son saying: Who is with him there?
Me saying: Nobody, just him.
My son saying: He’s lonely there.

My son telling me that a divot in the asphalt was from something the Man in the Moon dropped, out his window, out of anger, out of loneliness, my son these days often confusing sadness with anger, loneliness with other emotions, the hard things we try not to learn when we have to say goodbye.

So now they talk on the telephone, that isolated man living in the moon with his coo-coo clocks and clutter, that lonely man with his telescope and cockney accent, he talks with my son, that little boy of four.

And the Man in the Moon, he promises to drop the balloon back down, but with a gift inside, some present from the moon.

And at my son’s request, the Man in the Moon promises never to be lonely.
He promises that when he is lonely, he’ll look down through his window and find my son and think on him and he’ll feel warm.

And my son, who is shy, telling the Man in the Moon, I have to go now.

And then it’s back to the world, him, me, the Man in the Moon.