Manboy

Manboy

His eyes are shot. Well, buggered really. Too much strain, too many months without the money to get new contact lenses and he refuses point blank to get glasses. So when the lenses aren’t in, he peers into his laptop as though he were a boy again, burning ants under a magnifying glass.

But he is not a boy – he’s almost 40 and poverty gnaws around the edges of him, along the frayed hems of his trousers, nibbling at the stains on his t-shirt.

For all of that, soap is his friend. He is clean. Beautiful hands with nails that sparkle, moons rising on every smooth fingertip.
It is funny what people find important.  He likes to preen – hair and hands are a primary source of pride.

I can’t remember how long it is since he worked in a paid job. He’s never idle though. Every minute of the day is filled with things that matter.

Did you know sleep is extremely important for your health, “people who sleep more, live longer".

He has just completed a three-day investigation into World War II – apparently no one taught him about it at school and there is so much to know, a million moments of human misery to absorb, processes and form an opinion about.

The DVDs pile up – the holocaust unfolds first in black and white and then in rare colour footage – he lingers over all of it. And I wait for his pronouncements about that, but like any good researcher the knowledge draws out more questions.

Today’s big question is why were Jews so despised?  What did they do to deserve such hatred?
The research will now head off on a new tangent – the history of anti-Semitism – it could take days or weeks – I’m not really sure.

On good days, days where he feels in charge and in control – he sallies forth into the world. He rides the buses and completes self-made errands, he fantasizes that school girls find him sexy and that given a large bank balance and the perfect suit all the ladies would want to sit next to him.

I wonder why he would be riding the bus in Armani and a Rolex. But I keep mum about that. I am quiet about a lot of things that would burst his bubble. It seems the right thing to do.

Besides he is incredibly clever and brilliantly adapted. However the sands shift on a discussion, there will always be a way, a granular path in the argument, where his truth and reality can prevail.

In gentler times he would have been a philosopher. In times where ego, a quick wit and a penchant to ponder was valued – who knows he may have found some kind of following, a modern day Proust.

But in this life where the measure of a man is all in the material, he remains on the outer. Thoughtful’s just another word for someone who won’t do...he is a welfare hard nut...uncracked.

And part of me cheers at the thought.

But for that little circular nub of misery I see in him – I would admire his defiance.

But I think I know what he longs for and it is a little disappointing.

If I were the Fairy Godmother and with one wave of the wand could present him with a home, two kids and a pretty little, indulgent wife, I suspect he would be happy.

I can see his lean waist running to a more settled suburban flab. He’d spend weeknights watching the box, weekends in the shed fixing stuff and be the master of all he surveyed. He’d get those glasses and be able to recognise the neighbours and give them a wave – still from a healthy distance.

The cold, wet, green flecks at the back of his eyes would melt into a benign domestic brown and he would smile more and only read the gory details of the latest world horror in passing, in the Sunday papers.

Maybe I am wrong. That may all fall apart too – get sucked into the black hole that is his discontent.

I have discovered that love does not conquer all. That some people walk around with a vortex in their hearts that sucks in all goodness and affection and makes it disappear.

I wonder sometimes if these holes in the heart are a birth defect or if they are put there by some violent or abominable assault.
In his case the question is still open.

The dark stories about bad mother love are incomplete.  I wonder about her - the women who asphyxiated his affection with an abundance of her own.

The way he tells it she drowned him in love – some of it a little too touchy feely to be healthy.  There is no detail in the story – his memory for family is as bad as his eyesight.  In war blindness can be a blessing I suppose.

When he was 15 she went a bit mad – became a little violent, abusive - and he left. He lived with his father, but not for long.

And then it was alone. Well never really alone. There were opportunities – girls to screw and cook for him, women too. Maybe he flitted from one style of mother to another – mother and anti-mother, size six, size 14...demanding, berating, soothing, smothering.

But there was never home, never completion.

In his book on life which I like to call – Philosophical musings from a manboy with a 135 IQ – there is no love.
Love is a tool – a destroyer – a waster of time – life’s great deception.

No-one is ever truly kind either.  People do kindness for only selfish reasons...to feel better inside about who they are, to win praise, to have others think well of them, to build their internal hero.

From this premise he can justify a whole world of selfishness.

He calls it honesty. He, unlike others, is honest about his selfish motivations.

And the diatribe continues and I grow sad under the weight of it.

I watch him, which he hates, with love.

It is hard to describe what I find lovable about him.

Maybe it is his broken heart. Maybe like all the other women who have mothered him – I look into the vortex and want to weep at the cold hollowness it reveals ...I want to save the boy, suckle the baby.

I see it in his eyes, that frightening abyss and want to wipe it away.

But I am not the first person on this path. There is line of flattened grass to his door.

And I know I cannot win.  For a minute I contemplate his philosophy on altruism and wonder about my own motivations. I play with the idea that my ego is so great that it fancies that the very nearness of me, the gentleness of my touch, the constancy of my love, will banish all sorrows.

The black hole will fall in upon itself and disappear under the light of me.

It is a troubled musing. His cleverness undermines a person.

So I bring his shirts in from the line and fold them.

He says he will be moving on soon and the thought of it is making me tear up.

I will miss his dominating strangeness. I will miss his stealthy presence, his belligerent intellect, his unapologetic idleness, his incisive criticisms, his blazing lack of human sweetness.

I will miss his unresponsive presence.

I leave a $20 on the counter because he’ll need bus fare and a coffee.

It’s one of the good days today.