Tag Archives: relationships

237. Old Man and His Walker

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Slow-going, this afternoon, for the old man and his walker
through the mall,
his wife beside him coaxing
as his left foot does half a stutter-
step against the floor, half a br-
oken animal claw.

The quiet fights in the bedroom, hissing
under their breath long after
the sleeping children
have grown up
and moved on, the fierce
love-making, diets, drill
bits, March flowers, hearing—all of that gone.

They’ll do anything now to make it into the sticky booth
where in the middle of his meal, with red sauce
on his chin, after he launches into what
is obviously a long and tired rant,
she reaches across with a napkin
in her trembling hand in the pretense
of wiping his chin and—not necessarily
unkindly and perhaps only to get
his attention—slaps him, as if to say, “Shut up, just
please be quiet. Shut up now, or you’ll choke to death.”

230. More Like Dogs

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I would like to see this old man on the bench next to me here
at home
filling the dish with round crunchies
and calling his dog
in that coarse whispery voice
over from the couch
to have a little bite. I would like to see
their private life—the sharing
of meat scraps and late night
moonlit craps—even as I’m disgusted
at their public display
of affection: how the man says,
“Come here, come here,”
and then without hesitation,
and with his bare fingers, wipes clear
those white strings of snotty stuff
from under his dog’s eyes, something
I probably couldn’t even do for my lover.

But then as I say this, you are gone again
and I am alone again
and lonely
and is it any surprise
when I take the tin
out of the cupboard
along with that little yellow lighter
I found? Is it any surprise
that I want to be dumb tonight
and not hear the voices
crawling inside the walls of this house?

Aren’t we all a little
like dogs? More like dogs
than, say, cats
or cantaloupes?
Isn’t it always
just a bit more friendly
when alone together
at home
as I curl up on the floor
where I pretend to sleep
but watch you dancing?

I won’t believe when they say that love
is only something
that gets played too hard
like a chewed-up Frisbee
lying in the grass
in the park. Love is me
dreaming of you
reading your books
by Carl the Dreamer, laughing
at some in-flight
entertainment, or asking
for a second bag of pretzels or nuts,
while I—suddenly—am an animal mess,
surprising myself that I still can find
the number for the taco shop on Hawthorne
and my jacket again
and my wallet
and the keys
and the door
through all these strings in my eyes.

206. I Googled: “What in the Hell Am I Always Searching For?”

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I clicked on the first search result, but the page could not be found. I refreshed the page and cleared my cookies, just in case, and learned, in the process, that I had somehow signed up for a Harry & David 12-Month Presidential Fruit-of-the-Month Club. I couldn’t figure out how to stop my membership, but rather than getting frustrated with myself for clearly being so technologically inept, I waited for my first order with great palatable expectation.

One day towards the end of the month when I still hadn’t received my fruit, I again googled: “What in the hell am I always searching for?” to check on my order. But I couldn’t find the original lost link. I clicked on the link for another search result, but the link was broken. As a result of my contact with these lost or broken links, apparently, or by my constant consumption of what was only, or so I’d been told, genetically modified SPAM, I caught a virus that took me down for days.

After I recovered, my girlfriend confronted me at breakfast one morning. I had a piece of bacon in my fingers and was lifting it to my mouth when she told me that she was concerned that I no longer loved her or found her attractive.

“Of course I find you attractive,” I told her. I took a bite of the bacon.

“But why, then, for three nights in a row,” she said, “has your device failed to make sync?”

“I’ve just been a little stressed.”

“What does that even mean?”

“It means that I’ve been stressed is all. Work has been stressful. It’s nothing more than that.”

What I couldn’t tell her, of course, was how I feared that I was becoming myself as realized by my machines. I feared that I was turning into a subhuman, or a supra-human, a technological beast. When I opened my mouth during the afternoon conference room meetings, for example, I tweeted—squawked, actually—yelped, brayed. I feared, furthermore, that my operating system was three or four updates behind. I felt slow. My pages loaded slowly. I couldn’t remember people’s names. I couldn’t remember my colleagues’ names, people I had worked with for years.

“This is exactly what I’m talking about,” she said. “You’re not even here. We’re in the middle of a conversation, and you drop the connection.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll try to be here. I’ll really try to connect.” And then I closed her down, temporarily, with one of my fantastically smug, all-purpose emoticons, so as to open another virtual page right there, in real time, and google across her forehead, “How do I slip out of this situation?”

192. Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Penis

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Two women took the table directly behind my own in the coffee shop this afternoon. I couldn’t see them, but I heard one of these women say, basically, and I’m summarizing, that she returned home last Saturday morning for her water bottle when her husband had been expecting her to have already been at the gym, and walked in on him in the living room, in front of the fire, giving himself fellatio.

“No!” the other woman said.

“Yes!”

“And what did you do?”

“What could I do? I first didn’t understand, of course, what I was seeing. He didn’t even bother to disengage.”

“Oh, Janet!”

“Well, he didn’t. And I honestly had no clue that he was that flexible.”

The other woman giggled.

“It would explain a lot, though,” Janet said.

“Like what?” the other woman said.

“Like, for starters, why he has sores in his mouth all the time.”

“Oh, gross, Janet. Please.”

“And why, for seconds, he always seems to have a kink in his neck.”

“Please,” the other woman said again.

“And here I’d been thinking that he was having an affair with his masseuse. Now I’m thinking that an actual affair, to walk in on him fucking another woman, or even sucking off another guy, might have been better.”

“Really?”

“Well, not really? But it was really weird. Really really fucking weird. I’d never seen anything like it, nor could I ever actually imagine it. It’s like a bad picture that I don’t want to have in my head.”

The other woman cackled and then, presumably, by the hard sucking sounds, was hitting the bottom of her cold coffee beverage with her straw.

“And you know what he tells me the next morning,” Janet said, “right before leaving for church of all things?”

Her friend waited. I waited. Janet was a fine storyteller. She had a good sense of timing.

“Only one in 400 men are flexible enough to do that.”

“No!” Janet’s friend said, and again cackled.

“But you know what he tells me next, the most disturbing part of all?”

“Oh, God!” the other woman said. “Don’t tell me.”

“Yep, you got it. He swallows.”

The other woman let out a wild shriek of a laugh that caused me, literally, to jump.

“That was exactly my response,” Janet said. “I laughed, which was part scream and part what the fuck are you telling me right now over eggs and toast before church sort of unbelievability. I’d rather him say that he was gay. I mean who does that? It’s just weird. Why can’t he yank it with his hand? What kind of guy gives himself oral pleasure in the living room on Saturday morning in front of the fire?”

I had come to this coffee shop to read, ironically, the now pop classic, if not somewhat outdated, Men are From Mars, Women from Venus. It was part of the research for my doctoral dissertation in psychology. I was studying to become a marriage counselor. Unbeknownst to myself, while listening to the two women talk, I had been drawing an erect phallus and balls over the word “Venus” on the book jacket. Men Are from Mars, and Women, apparently, at least according to my subconscious, from Penis.

When I refocused, either I had lost the thread, or Janet for some inexplicable reason was deliberately throwing a non sequitur into the mix. She said, “I feel like I’m Joan Baez sometimes, you know?”

“No, what do you mean?” the other woman said.

“I feel like I’m some folk singer from some other era when folk music was something cool that people did.”

“Like Joni Mitchell.”

“Yes, like her. I feel like I’m Joni Mitchell sometimes.”

“I know what you mean,” the other woman said.

I waited for them to go on, but when it was clear that they were not going to, I turned to them and said to Janet, “And who is he, your husband?”

“Excuse me?” Janet said.

“Sorry, I was listening to your conversation. And now I’m wondering: who is he? You compared yourself to Joan Baez, so is your husband like Bob Dylan or like Neil Young or what?”

“Nobody,” Janet said. “He’s just himself.”

“But that doesn’t make sense. I don’t understand you.”

“What don’t you understand? And why were you even listening?”

“Why compare yourself to somebody and then not finish through with the comparison? It’s like a metaphor or something, you know what I mean?”

“No, I frankly do not know what you mean, and I’d wish you’d leave us alone. You’re a creep.”

“But if it’s a story you’re telling me here,” I said, “you’ve got to bring it to climax.”

183. A Non-Physical Entity Trapped in a Human Body

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My wife told me one night while she was washing the dishes, and I was drying, that this was difficult to say, but she wasn’t really a human.

“Uh-huh,” I said as I took the plate from her and dried it.

She said it again. She said that she wanted me to listen. She handed me a knife.

“Okay,” I said. “What do you want me to hear?”

“I want you to hear”—she handed me a wine glass—”that I’m a non-physical entity trapped in a human body. I have to come to terms with this.” She handed me a spatula and another plate. “We both do.”

“Okay,” I said. “But what are you telling me?”

“That I need, because I am a free spirit, to be a free spirit.”

“Again I will say,” I said, “What are you telling me?”

“That I’ve been having an affair with my energy healer.”

“You mean Gary?” I’d met Gary once when I dropped her off for one of her sessions. “You’ve been having an affair with that protohuman Gary?”

“Don’t call him that. He’s not a protohuman.”

“He’s a gorilla, then, is what you’re telling me. You’re sleeping with an incense-lighting, chakra-pushing gorilla!”

“See, this is why I didn’t want to tell you—couldn’t, actually—because I knew you’d respond like this.”

“Like what?”

“Like a total asshole.”

“But how would you like me to respond? What, in your opinion, would be the most appropriate response at this moment now, when you tell me basically that you are a ghost and because you’re a ghost, you need to have multiple partners, even if that includes the ugliest person I have ever seen, and most likely ever will, in my entire life, that gorilla named Gary?”

“Are you done?” she said. ”Because he’s outside now.”

“No, I’m not done,” I said, and then: “What?”

“He’s outside now.”

“Outside? I went to the living room and looked through the blinds to see Gary waiting across the street in the dark, hunched over the steering wheel of his car.

Meanwhile, my wife had gone to our room for her bags.

“You’ve already packed,” I said, when she returned to the living room.

“Yep,” she said.

“So that’s it?” I said.

“I guess so, yes,” she said and shrugged. “At least for now.”

“And if the spirit wants to revisit this house?”

“Always a possibility, I suppose,” she said, and tried to smile but could not. And with that, she was gone. From where I stood out of sight near the still opened door, I could hear giggling, and car doors opening and closing, as Gary no doubt was helping her with her things, and then only nothing after he pulled away, taking my wife with him to wherever he lived, in whichever the house or apartment complex in whichever the cold and cruel universe this sometimes was.

178. Kites on the Coast

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Some time not long after the war had started, after the demonstrators had demonstrated and then gone home (their cardboard protest signs in the recycling bins), and after the manufacturing boom in Taiwanese-made American flags and Chinese-made American flag t-shirts and Mexican-made American car flags and car flagpoles and Malaysian-made Made in America pendants, you found yourself on the coast lacquered with 30 SPF and patting your hair down, over that bald spot, and pulling your shorts up to your belly button, over that embarrassing albino bulge.

Kite-flying looked like fun, rather relaxing even. You turned to the person next to you—a lover, perhaps, or a spouse that you remembered once loving—and said: “I think it’s the sound I like best.”

You meant that one kite there, wanting to dive, to dive, to dive for the sand—rippling, wind-torn, angry almost.