I’d thought my father acted childishly, but I’m the child. At fifty-nine I’m still slamming doors like a baby, I’m still looking at food askance like it should please me in my current mood—even if I made it. Though don’t ask me to name my current mood—I don’t want to get bogged down in those types of questions. Silly-ass questions. What can I say? Is my current mood just being a big baby? Just babying myself from one hour to the next on vines with smelly-scented wipes (my own brand)? Perhaps it’s more important to ask the questions than to give the answers. Yes, because I don’t have the answers, though I have to get to the gym to do some neck pull-ups with a harness. About a hundred, maybe ninety-nine. I also have to see if this woman is there. She looks like my ex-wife but is different. There is more of her. More muscle, more skin, more tit. In fact, she’s rather giant-like for a woman. Of course I’ve never talked to her. How can I? I wear sunglasses, like most of the men there. How can I not? Her schedule was easy to decipher. She’s there every weekday from three to seven. Sure, she might take a vacation once in a while, but there it is. So what if I had to find a different job in order to be close to her (she really looks like my ex-wife)? (I mean, she dwarfs my ex-wife, though she has the same face—if plastered on my ex-wife’s, it might overleap the ramparts of the normal since it’s pretty big. I mean they have the same face relative to distance or relative to the distance between my vision and their faces. Have they met?)
I never told my ex-wife of my fascination with the Incredible Hulk TV series. It just never came up. Or, well, I fought to keep it from coming up. She asked me one time if I ever watched it. We were in a Denny’s on one of our New Mexico trips. It seemed to come out of nowhere, but the TV showed that the main actor, Bill Bixby, had died. No, I didn’t. Maybe a couple of times—I really can’t remember. I stayed strangely silent after that, though I often gave silent treatments when hiding something. Always. If I only had answered that question more fully—I could have still lied but added more gusto to the denial—like talk about the late 1970s, or what other shows were on then. It would have been so great for our relationship.
No matter—what am I doing at the gym? Obviously I can’t keep working out for four hours. I’m a 140-pound weakling. I lost a lot of muscle mass in a bike accident—I wasn’t on the bike. My ex-wife hit me with a bike, I’m still not sure why. My legs were mangled—that’s where most of my muscle mass was, since I was a biker. Now I don’t bike and I don’t have a wife. I have loads of fear, though—I can’t walk by bike lanes and I even avoid the exercise bikes in the gym. If you’ve ever truly been pulverized by a bike, you’ll understand. My body is now just plain weird, even though I eat a lot of fish and leafy greens. What am I doing with the muscles that won’t gain? I look to see what the giantess pumps. Twenty-five-pound bicep curls. Leg press of seven hundred. I can barely do fifteen and three hundred. It’s not fair. She looks like my ex-wife and sometimes I wonder if she’s become my ex-wife—as in my ex-wife incredibly bulked up and nine inches taller. I know this can’t be. I still get a Christmas card from my ex-wife with her new family—a child at forty-eight (good for her). We didn’t have children because we were fighting too much and mainly the same arguments, like who did most of the dishes during the week. At least we were mature enough to know people like that shouldn’t bring forth life. They should be in many-appointments-per-week therapy and maybe start to jog every day. I don’t really like jogging, I get too sweaty. That’s why I had to pick a gym with a lot of AC—and, eventually, the big woman.
It’s such a pleasure to see her almost every day at least for a little while. Obsession is pleasurable. It’s a wonder we don’t all have them. Or maybe we do? This obsession carries me awhile, floats me to different parts of the sea I imagine, though I’m only in middle America. I see her, but what do I really see on my sea? Flesh—Mother—Fantasy… but these are just words, they don’t do justice to the obsession, which is many-sided and many-blurred and many-rooms-filled with heaps of mental imagery and piss-poor sound design. Yes, the Hulk but so much more. I wanted to bend around my mother’s anger, to grow into a python and “Michelangelo Sistine Chapel rendition of the serpent” curl around her belly and squeeze that anger from her so it can pop out of her mouth like the slimy green leaves from a can of spinach manhandled by Popeye. But this was not to be, so what were the next steps—sexual, asexual—going to the store to buy porn mags, the women with the large fronts or backs, or tall women, or even the bodybuilders who could have three out of four? What a marvel—from comic books to the most important “books” in the world. Give it to me—and so we would—we? Well, there had to be another person involved—and they were on my team, playing on my field—my field! Oh, yes—but who was this other person/being? I’m not exactly sure, but it was a “he.” Kind of the same age as me and looking like me (or a casually dressed sophomore at that time) but not me. He came from the far hills, by which I mean his imagination or rather my imagination. But he was inside me—imploring or daring me with his own derring-do. He was Swedish—or so I made him. He came from a family of Swedes, which was good, because how else could it be any other way? I asked for his guidance and there it was—automatic. And soon he had me doing other things, like betting on football games and getting in trouble with the principal, a man I made believe that the Swede existed. “We don’t want you to get in trouble, we want him. Help us get him—we’ll make it worth your time.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him he really didn’t exist—already at that age I fought against what people wanted from me. And of course, for me, he did exist. He had a right to, certainly. What else could he be there for? My mother never saw him, obviously, but this wouldn’t have helped our relationship—nothing would. Poor Mother! What could I say to her? How could I make her understand what went on? I suppose I could have showed her the pictures of the beyond-busty women of the later twentieth century with that big big hair—did everyone use styling gel? It wouldn’t make sense—or would it? She had caught me one night. Very awkward—almost too awkward. I had taken one of the dinner-table chairs into the bathroom, because when I sat on it, with its small hump in the middle, I thought that extra pressure on my ball sack made my penis bigger. Maybe it did. I needed every millimeter I could get. Then what? She came home unexpectedly and I was still in the bathroom on the chair. We lived in a small apartment at this point, just me and her, and when one came out of the bathroom there was no vantage point in the apartment that wouldn’t see the person exiting (except the bedrooms, and she wasn’t in hers). I waited for five minutes and then had no choice—I had to come out. She saw me slowly bringing the expensive chair out sideways so it wouldn’t scrape the cheap paneling of the door frame. A cursory glance, a curious look.
Why was that in there?
I was killing a centipede on the ceiling.
Oh. Did you throw it away?
Yes, into the garbage.
So…nice. What color?
Color? I don’t know, centipede color.
These questions were jokes. She knew what I was doing. The magazines were under the sink—I claimed them right before I went to bed, when she was in her room. These types of close calls led to other not so close ones, for, of course, she was angry and that anger only galvanized this execrable behavior, as I kept running cross-current (a sea, even then), trying to find that golden inlet I’d always heard about, though it was accessible only when I moved out of the house. But I was still too scared of women. One much older than me, and five inches taller, had to take me under her wing for some reparenting and reparative tidings. She separated the wheat from the chaff, but without me knowing she worked on my spiky, crenelated insides—I was her “project.” Emotionally, not sexually. She metaphorically wheeled me around in a red Radio Flyer for all to see and me to see my being seen. What could come from this? I was twenty-three, the age when you are supposed to be having so many great discoveries—and I was—going to art museums, seeing live jazz…I asked her one cloudless morning: What are you doing with me? Why are you educating me so if you don’t think we’ll have a long-term relationship or even marry? She rubbed her third-eye and said, People like me don't have long-term relationships. And marry? Is this 1953? We went on for a few more months and then she cut me loose: When you find the right woman you’ll know, because you’ll be able to look down on her. I took that to mean very different things over the years—I even took it to certain famous code breakers, who, while ensconced by a messy desk, laughed at me over their tuna sandwiches. I’ve considered asking Alison, the big woman, about this Heraclitian-like fragment but it’s too close to home, to height difference. I’m watching her work those twenty-five-pound dumbbells, jerking them up from the floor while she’s in a straddled position, a long bulbous vein running up her forearm like two industrial-strength extensions cords duct-taped together.
Can I sue ABC and Universal Televison for making the Hulk’s transformation overly sexual? I ask a lawyer on Main Street, but he requests that I leave, he has to get a lice treatment.
I hear other people at the gym talk about Alison and I watch myself with them, trying to decode their degree of obsession with a female body almost unlike any other. If their ex’s or ex-wives are inside her? How many could she have in there? Is she a robot? No, that couldn’t be possible—not in middle America. And I’ve heard her voice—low—an excellent thing in big women. She could shield me, she could shield and be my mother, my first love, and my ex-wife all at the same time. Well, who is kidding who? She is all those things—why else would I enjoin this? Enjoin, enjoy—she always pleases me in my current mood—you can’t say that about a lot of people. That’s how and why I continue to grapple. Oh, what a treasure. What a tunnel. What unlovable stone. Am I talking about a person?
No!
My new job will not honor me—it tells me I’m doing things wrong. No matter. The reality is different. Our reality. There isn’t a gaze involved in this relationship. Of course one has to receive the gaze for the gaze to have gaze. This is what I tell myself, behind the sunglasses. I look the word up in the dictionary and still I’m not convinced. A dilemma is building. If I could only change my life—I would be…changed, then my life would change— Or would it? That would be funny if it didn’t change after I changed, but it wouldn’t be funny to me. It would be for this other person watching me. And I’m serious. I don’t know who it is but he’s male—and at the gym. He’s watching me—he’s trying to gaze at me—maybe because he knows I’m watching her and trying to gaze at her. Why would he watch me? What can I give him, except to be a giant pain in his ass? In my complaining for commiseration I’d say something wrong—obviously it wouldn’t be sexual. Look at me, look at what I’ve become. I’m just this old white guy who likes oat-milk ice cream. No matter how hard I try to love myself, I just keep looking at that mountain of a woman I’d like to climb, kissing the enormous bulges in her trapezius. A rarefied fetish. Alison, who could be an actor in an Amazon woman series—and the biggest. If I love myself, think of all I could do. I could speak words to Alison, actual vowels and consonants swirled into hewn-sounding words. Women like words—that’s what my ex-wife said, until she wasn’t around to say it anymore. But I bought her cards and flowers, why didn’t they go so far? Would Alison respond to flowers? To flowers with no words? Or words on a card with the flowers? I’m trying to mix up these two people. Mixing and matching, her in her. Love lights that may not repeat themselves. If I could proceed then the gaze might shine through. But I’d have to use my voice, my precious precious that I don’t utilize too much: computer job—not many meetings, order food over my phone, order everything through the internet. You see where this is going. It’s getting less interesting as it’s getting more sad. There’s only one way to go. The flower shop two blocks away. Salvatore’s. Okay.
I return to the gym with yellow roses. Alison is doing upright rows for those trapeziuses. I walk over with the roses pointed at the floor. Her eyes glitch upon my figure and turn back straight ahead quickly. I have to speak. I can’t speak. I have to. I turn up the roses and point them toward her, being careful not to touch her body with them. I must think she must know what I mean by them. Not I love you, but I want to love you…at least I think I do. Where is my mother now?
