Michael Ryan

Reading in the paper a summary of a five-year psychological study that shows those perceived as most beautiful are treated differently, I think they could have just asked me, remembering a kind of pudgy kid and late puberty, the bloody noses and wisecracks because I wore glasses, though we all know by now how awful it is for the busty starlet no one takes seriously, the loveliest women I’ve lunched with lamenting the opacity of the body, they can never trust a man’s interest even when he seems not just out for sex (eyes focus on me above rim of wineglass), and who would want to live like this? And what does beauty do to a man?— Don Juan, Casanova, Lord Byron— those fiery eyes and steel jawlines can front a furnace of self-loathing, all those breathless women rushing to him while hubby’s at the office or ball game, primed to be consumed by his beauty while he stands next to it, watching. So maybe the looks we’re dealt are best. It’s only common sense that happiness depends on some bearable deprivation or defect, and who knows what conflicts great beauty could have caused, what cruelties one might have suffered from those now friends, what unmanageable possibilities smiling at every small turn? So if I get up to draw a tumbler of ordinary tap water and think what if this were nectar dripping from delicious burning fingers,

At four o’clock it’s dark. Today, looking out through dusk at three gray women in stretch slacks chatting in front of the post office, their steps left and right and back like some quick folk dance of kindness, I remembered the winter we spent crying in each other’s laps. What could you be thinking at this moment? How lovely and strange the gangly spines of trees against a thickening sky as you drive from the library humming off-key? Or are you smiling at an idea met in a book the way you smiled with your whole body the first night we talked? I was so sure my love of you was perfect, and the light today reminded me of the winter you drove home each day in the dark at four o’clock and would come into my study to kiss me despite mistake after mistake after mistake.

I had a tapeworm, and imagined it flat—paper-flat—like a strip of caps, pallid red, a quarter-inch wide with bulbous BB bullfrog eyes peeking out of my asshole as I lolled in a crowded fetid basement swimming pool (the kind that used to be in inner-city Ys: windowless; steamy; concrete-block moldings chalky-cracked), and you whom I’ve neither seen nor heard of for thirty years were saying I’d give everyone in the pool my tapeworm, which you knew had eaten my insides and now had threaded through both my intestines and was trying to get out. Where were we? Everyone was old, old— gray, infirm; flaccid and thin or fat and bald, all ill flesh drooping— the women in rubber-flowered bathing caps and black one-piece suits as if we were all on an outing from a nursing home. I couldn’t see myself to see how old I was, but you were thirty, at the peak of your beauty, as when you knelt naked on the motel room bed brushing out your thick dark waist-length hair after cheating on the lover you were cheating on your husband with, who was at that moment waiting for you in another motel room from which you had slipped to meet me secretly: a secret inside a secret, buried, encased, as if if we dug deep enough into it we’d find what we were trying to get or stop.

When did I learn the word “I”? What a mistake. For some, it may be a placeholder, for me it’s a contagion. For some, it’s a thin line, a bare wisp, just enough to be somewhere among the gorgeous troublesome you’s. For me, it’s a thorn, a spike, its slimness a deceit, camouflaged like a stick insect: touch it and it becomes what it is: ravenous slit, vertical cut, little boy standing upright in his white communion suit and black secret.

The lousy job my father lands I’m tickled pink to celebrate. My mother’s rosary-pinching hands stack pigs in blankets on a plate. Teeny uncircumcised Buddha penises (cocktail hot dogs in strips of dough): I gobble these puffed-up weenie geniuses as if they’d tell me what I need to know to get the fuck out of here. They don’t only stink of fear. They’re doom and shame and dumb pig fate. I tell my mom I think they’re great. Dad chews his slowly with a pint of gin, and says he eats a whole shit deal because of us. My mom’s in tears again. I don’t know who to hate or how to feel.

They’re all dressed up in carmine floor-length velvet gowns, their upswirled hair festooned with matching ribbons: their fresh hopes and our fond hopes for them infuse this sort-of-music as if happiness could actually be each-plays-her-part-and-all-will-take-care-of-itself. Their hearts unscarred under quartz lights beam through the darkness in which we sit to show us why we endured at home the squeaking and squawking and botched notes that now in concert are almost beautiful, almost rendering this heartrending music composed for an archduke who loved it so much he spent his fortune for the musicians who could bring it brilliantly to life.

In the ditch, half-ton sections of cast-iron molds hand-greased at the seams with pale petroleum waste and screw-clamped into five-hundred-gallon cylinders drummed with rubber-headed sledges inside and out to settle tight the wet concrete that, dried and caulked, became Monarch Septic Tanks; and, across the ditch, my high school football coach, Don Compo, spunky pug of a man, bronze and bald, all biceps and pecs, raging at some “attitude” of mine he snipped from our argument about Vietnam— I mean raging, scarlet, veins bulging from his neck, he looked like a hard-on stalking back and forth— but I had started college, this was a summer job, I no longer had to take his self-righteous, hectoring shit, so I was chuckling merrily, saying he was ludicrous, and he was calling me “College Man Ryan” and, with his steel-toed workboot, kicking dirt that clattered against the molds and puffed up between us. It’s probably not like this anymore, but every coach in my hometown was a lunatic. Each had different quirks we mimicked, beloved bromides whose parodies we intoned, but they all conducted practice like boot camp, the same tirades and abuse, no matter the sport, the next game the next battle in a neverending war. Ex-paratroopers and -frogmen, at least three finally convicted child molesters, genuine sadists fixated on the Commie menace and our American softness that was personally bringing the country to the brink of collapse— in this company, Don Compo didn’t even seem crazy. He had never touched any of us; his violence was verbal, which we were used to, having gotten it from our fathers and given it back to our brothers and one another since we had been old enough to button our own pants. Any minute—no guessing what might trigger it— he could be butting your face mask and barking up your nostrils, but generally he favored an unruffled, moralistic carping, in which I, happy to spot phoniness, saw pride and bitterness masquerading as teaching. In the locker room, I’d sit where I could roll my eyeballs as he droned, but, across the ditch, he wasn’t lecturing, but fuming, flaring as I had never seen in four years of football, and it scared and thrilled me to defy him and mock him when he couldn’t make me handwash jockstraps after practice or do pushups on my fingertips in a mud puddle. But it was myself I was taunting. I could see my retorts snowballing toward his threat to leap the ditch and beat me to a puddle of piss (“you craphead, you wiseass”), and my unspading a shovel from a dirt pile and grasping its balance deliberately down the handle and inviting him to try it. Had he come I would have hit him, There’s no question about that. For a moment, it ripped through our bewilderment, which then closed over again like the ocean if an immense cast-iron mold were dropped in. I was fired when the boss broke the tableau. “The rest of you,” he said, “have work to do,” and, grabbing a hammer and chisel, Don Compo mounted the mold between us in the ditch and with one short punch split it down the seam.

A man who’s trying to be a good man but isn’t, because he can’t not take whatever’s said to him as judgement. It causes him, as he puts it, to react. His face and neck redden and bloat, a thick blue vein bulges up his forehead and bisects his bald pate, scaring his children but provoking hilarity at work where one guy likes to get his goat by pasting pro-choice bumper stickers on his computer screen while he’s in the john, then gathers a group into the next cubicle to watch when he comes back. He has talked to his minister and to his wife about learning how not to react, to make a joke, and he has tried to make jokes, but his voice gets tense, they come out flat, so even his joke becomes a joke at his expense, another thing to laugh at him about. He has thought to turn to them and ask, Why don’t you like me? What have I done to you? But he has been told already all his life: self-righteous goody two-shoes, a stick up your ass. They are right. He has never never never gotten along. He says nothing this time, just peels off the bumper sticker, crumples it gently, places it gently by his mousepad to dispose of later properly, comparing his suffering to Christ’s in Gethsemane spat upon and mocked (his minister’s advice), and tries a smile that twists into a grimace, which starts the hot blood rising into his face. This is what they came for, to see Dickhead, the bulging vein, the skull stoplight red, and indeed it is remarkable how gorged it gets as if his torso had become a helium pump, so, except for him whose eyes are shut tight, they burst into laughter together exactly at the moment cruelty turns into astonishment.

habit smacks its dull skull like a stuck bull in a brick stall and my version of what I know is like eye surgery with a backhoe on grace so much beyond my pitiful gray sponge of a brain I'd not believe it exists except for such doses of felicity as this.