The Charleston

I've always said, "Ground Control to Major Tom..." in varying degrees of reactionary beseechment ever since I was a kid whenever I was in any sort of trouble, or sick, or scared, or nervous, or in a situation where I wasn't enough by myself. Whenever things haven't been the way they ought to be. Either that or I'd bury myself in a closet and listen to Beatles music until whatever ailment or malady allayed itself or passed. It was at times an imploration. Other times, more of a subtle complaint. Sometimes it was a favor I asked of seemingly no one. 

"Ground control to Make Tom..." 

It is a quirk, maybe you'd rather call it. We all have them. Things we do or say when no one else is looking. Things we think which no one else knows. Things we keep vaulted or hidden in our heads and hearts either because we are afraid of the prospect of ridicule or because it is just more special that way. It is our buried secret. No one else's. One of the last few things we have for ourselves outside of our opinions on a very small and ever-constricting collection of things. In 44 years of life, I realized I've never told anyone this. Never a single soul. No wife or girlfriend. None of my kids. It is the greatest secret I have ever kept, I suppose. An achievement. For while I am very good at keeping other people's secrets, I've never been good at keeping my own.

I was always scared when my parents fought or I had the stomach virus as a kid. I was always afraid of throwing up. So into the toilet I'd say, "Ground control to Major Tom..." I didn't need to say anything else. He knew what I wanted and either he did or didn't help me. I was afraid when I played baseball and batted with everyone watching me. I'd look up into the azure sky and into tufts of wispy clouds and say it as I tapped my aluminum bat onto home plate. "Ground control to Major Tom..." As though I were asking for help. Pushing some red button. As though Major Tom was some sort of satellite that could turn himself my direction and help me hit a fastball I could hardly see. Or tackle someone twice my size playing pee-wee football. Or make my stomach not erupt like Mt. Vesuvius. Or make my parents love each other again. It didn't always work. But sometimes it did. Sometimes Major Tom came through for me. The big test. The doctor's exam. The biology essay.

I never sought to define him. Never gave his physical being any real consideration. Never drew pictures of what I thought he might look like. As to whether he was a man floating in a tin can, or a robot smoking a Pall Mall cigarette, or a cloud, or something even greater still. He didn't ever exist that way for me, though assuredly, he existed and exists to this day. Perhaps not in this dimension. Perhaps in another where his are the fingers to my strings. It seemed obvious to me, even as a kid, that often what we seek to define falls apart. And the more we seek to scrutinize and question it with rational thought and concrete predetermined concepts, the less it shines or the faster it erodes until there is nothing left but a lusterless disillusionment and dust not fit to plant any more thought. 

  

I've had broken hearts before because such is life or because I love too much or because sometimes I didn't do things the right way with the right people. You realize a lot after the fact. When there is only cigarette butts where the orchestra was and confetti and a empty punchbowl and shoe marks from where they danced the Charleston all over your soul. Sometimes my heart would heal because Major Tom was called upon to heal it. It seemed like he could fix about anything at times, while on other occasions, it seemed as though he were a million miles of indifference away. This evening I had a touch of heat exhaustion and was in bed feeling like I was dying. I hadn't spoke to him in a while. "Ground control to Major Tom..." I puled softly. In a few minutes, I was feeling better. He must have heard me. I have no doubt. 

I've been through a lot in the past two years. I put myself through a lot being with the wrong people and sometimes doing the wrong things. Things contrary to my happiness and my natural place in this wonderful universe. Things contrary to my purpose. Trying to fix what was broken in broken people and breaking what was fixed in others. Absence isn't an apology. Nor is presence. Nor is the vacant and sometimes hostile occupation of someone else's time and space just to be somewhere with someone so not to be alone. To become a miscreant, without intent. An invasive parasite. There are no secrets. I don't hide anything. I'll tell almost anyone all about my life so much so that it doesn't even seem to be mine anymore. 

Sometimes he doesn't answer. Sometimes he does. The time I crushed a double into deep left field at Miller Park off one of the best major league pitchers around. The time I solo tackled the best running back in all of pee-wee football and my name was called on the PA clearly without the usual scratchy reverb. The times I fell in love and was very happy and held my newborn babies in my arms and my kids anytime ever until they fast grew out of the want of being held. The times I got the job. Or when she said yes. Oh, he was there. Somewhere. Floating around. 

I realized tonight walking home from where it is that I go in this strange galaxy when I can't sleep or sit still that I am very much alone. People come and go, but no one stays. No one sticks. It isn't hard to be with the wrong person and lie your way through it, to suitably match ages, bank accounts and relative social classes and feel like you fit because of a few convenient congruities. But it is difficult to be with the right one who doesn't at times seem to exist. Who seems to have never been born at all. Maybe she was aborted or miscarried, I fear. At times, she seems like she might be right in front of me, then she is a million miles away. Bars are substitute lovers. Drinks are artificial affection. Lies. Fictitious romances. Ladies of the night in cold glass mugs and shot glasses that never say no. There is a dog who always barks at me on my walk home. Cars drive by indifferently. Shooting stars above and broken cracked sidewalks of abysmal reality below. 

At home, there is no one waiting. No one to ask how my day was, or to laugh at my jokes, or to tell me hers or to help me plant flowers or build a fence for a dog yet to be, or make the house look just so. To decorate for holidays. There is no one to help me make the yellow brick road to our doorstep. There is no 1920's enthusiast who loves big band music, speakeasies and flappers with long strands of pearls, and 34 Ford's with whitewall tires who belongs in a different time like me with heavenly dreams of building a backyard gypsy wagon and to sit by a fire while listening to Glenn Dorsey or Bea Wain or Al Bowlly or Frank Sinatra. There is an empty fire pit, a vacant backyard, a partial fence, and a bed with only a book in it. So I say it through the darkness and indifference, one more time, "Ground control to Major Tom..."

Maybe such is my comeuppance for being so reckless in my youth. I don't know why I wrote this. Maybe just to finally say it. To confess it so it doesn't go with me as though it were a great mystery of the world like the truth of Jesus, or who shot JFK. Or maybe because it is a heavy weight to be let off my chest. Or maybe in hopes that it may register with someone who might care to know something about me and so I may be preserved in a way inside them like a prehistoric insect in amber when it is my time to go on and to be wherever it is that Major Tom is, or where he let's me go, supposing that is how it is. I suppose the heat exhaustion went to my head like the bubbles of a cheap champagne and Major Tom is floating amongst the black spots on the back of my eyelids where the ghosts of people are always doing the Charleston, wildly, imploring me to join. They dance like Bengal fire. I suppose I like to think it might interest you, if ever you find and read this. Whoever you are. You who are unique to my world as I dream I may one day be to yours.

"Ground control to Major Tom..."