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The Gaping Space

Michael Robinson Morris (© RandomInc. 2019)

    That’s how it always goes, isn’t it? You see a girl in a crowd and your eyes lock. You want to talk to her. The moment is Now, and you must. But somehow you ended up on the side of the gender spectrum where you’re supposed to talk to her first. The guy always has to talk to her first — no, not just open your mouth and start flapping your lips, you have to cross the divide, that Indiana Jones chasm with the rope bridge and the Amazon spear-chucking natives at your heels — you have to cross that rickety rope bridge by yourself. All your friends are dead, or simply headless now. There she is on the other side of a yawning gap in space. Just by the sheer unblinking look in her eyes, she expects you to walk across that space, whether or not that is a threadbare and rat-chewn rope bridge to hold you up, she doesn’t care. She just wants you to bring your face close enough to see your eyes and breathe you in, to decide whether she will spit you out or consume you. I’m the male variety of human species and it’s my job.
    How I ended up at a rock venue in Soho New York on a Saturday night to witness a rap artist named Eek-a-Mouse, I don’t know. I suppose I would have jumped that ship in 3.5 to go see Gary Numan or Flock of Seagulls if they happened to be sharing this side of the earth that night. But no one holds their breath for those kinds of odds. Instead you make do with Eek-a-Mouse at some downtown club of mostly white hipsters who think it’s cool to dance to the rhythms of a dread-locking black rapper.
    Then as I attempted to mill through the undulating, surging and restless crowd, suddenly they parted for me, they parted for her. At two ends of a gap in space, we slowed to look at each other. Yes, I should have blocked her path, a visual barrier planted forth with which to say without words: “I want to talk to you.”
    But I didn’t. Thirty years later I am still ashamed. But what could I have done? I was nothing. I was no one. She was Sinead O’Connor. In a puffy flight jacket, she was small and diminutive, though packed with force and daunting energy, her cleanly-shaven scalp too reminiscent of the skinheads gathered in droves only a few blocks down. But her eyes, like little girl saucers, blaring like blacklight high beams into my face. This moment in time dangled in the air for perhaps only seconds, though the cobwebs of my memory have been perched in the corner for several decades.
    I could have — I should have talked to her! Just like I should have talked to the girl at the other end of that dorm party, the girl with the new wave haircut — you know, where one side of her head appears more perky or jaunty than the other more sensual and seductive side, the curling or teased hair at serious risk of covering one eye in the classic “come hither if you dare” look of the timeless ages, the same purpose toward which young Elizabethan girls would flutter an embroidered fan in front of her face just inches below her fluttering eyelashes. I should have talked to New Wave Girl when I had the chance — these moments pass in a fleeting second, as quickly as it takes for Indiana Jones to grab a rope on a passing military cargo truck — if you so much as blink, you are left foolish and adrift.
    But there was no coy hair or embroidered fans on Sinead O’Connor. Her two gaping black eyes burned into me like Manga.
    “I love your eyes,” a girl once said to me in high school, standing closely with her friend for support. “They’re so blue. It’s almost like you could swim in them.”
    And I was so nervous around such blaring attention, such potential for a lifetime of adoring love standing in front of me with a girlfriend for support, so used to being stricken with the grief and torment of so many lonely nights listening to Gary Numan by myself at home, pining over some hopeless crush or another, that my glib response — summoned in a pinch — was nothing more than a phrase so fraught with potential:
    “That could be arranged,” I said.
    Man, that sounded so cool. But it would have been Actually Cool if this line had been the entree to making arrangements to meet at such-and-such a pool party that weekend, etc. But instead it was a flashing of clever, sardonic wit that held no promise behind it — task being to say the cool line, then get out of there and disappear in some alcove or closet somewhere as soon as possible.
    I’ve always had a huge issue with disappointing people. It’s because I’ve always been cute in a boyish way — knock it off, keep listening! — in a way that always caught me off guard, in a way I was never prepared for. For a guy to say “I’ve always been good looking or handsome” is to instantly suggest that he’s a cocksure bastard who we all learned to hate in 80s movies, played by James Spader or something. But I have never been confident. It’s what you’re supposed to do with being good looking. You take it for granted and you use it for your advantage in the world of joy-seeking. But I was always off-guard. If a girl approached me with a suggestive invitation, I shrank, or froze. Felt undeserving, if you will. Because of my broken family, probably. It’s funny (not funny) how the clashing of two parents culminating in divorce can kill a young boy’s self-esteem, “cute” or with “swimmingly blue eyes” or not.
    So with black Irish Manga eyes staring at me in the middle of an Eek-a-Mouse kind of crowd, I was powerless. I let the moment pass. As did she. After all, she was famous. She had a hit album out, the Lion and the Cobra, record copies spread all over the Western Hemisphere. Who was I? I was nothing! I was just a boy who lived in his cute and lonely little world of Space Age Love Songs (Seagulls) and automaton Pleasure Principles (Numan) and would someday grow up to have a little family of his own by the age of 50, not really wanting or able to take the world by storm anymore. Who was Sinead? Diminutive little neck and shoulders standing on top of the world in her puffy flight jacket. I was nothing. I was no one, and now only flirting with the inevitable fate of succumbing to a kind of mental illness, passed down from a mensa-IQ and extremely prideful mother.
    Funny (not funny) thing is that Sinead O’Connor is now fighting a weight problem on top of her battle with mental illness. Her! After all these years. I could have saved her!
    I let her pass in that night club. I let her pass by, and so she did, because a woman doesn’t strain herself to wonder about this or that potential mate. The men are supposed to do all the introductions. I was no better than a girl, a girl who would have loved her like a lesbian lover.
    I let the moment of my youth pass — all of our youths are but a moment passing, aren’t they? — and you know what?!
    That moment circled and passed me a second time! Again! we came to the same parting of the crowd, though this time in a mirror image, turned around like God said, “Let’s try it this way, you numbskulls!”
    And there we were again, facing each other, but from opposite ends of our opposite sides. Same moment — ridiculous — as if the video editor had been instructed to play the scene back but “flop” the image to try it from a different angle. How many of us are given a second chance?
    And I again (we) let the moment pass!
    I just went from Unsung Hero of a Quiet Lives of Desperation story to a chump and general self-absorbed asshole. Like “give me a second chance” and I ducked for cover.
    I had a second or third chance with New Wave Girl and finally walked up to her at some Fiji frat party. I said something equivalent to “Hi” and she said “Hi” and then I starting flapping my lips, and she, like the cruel girl I suspected her to be, she said “Let’s not talk. It’s too loud in here,” and that was that. It was over.
    I couldn’t let that happen with Sinead O’Connor! Never! Better to hide in a closet or alcove and suckle on loss and regret for 30 years only to store these cobwebs in a journal.
    To protect myself from the continuing shame and pain of my parents’ divorce, I become the King of Missed Opportunities. That’s what I do.
    I passed the bald Irish singer who captivated my interest from her album cover only to do it again with Bjork. The Icelandic nymph passed me by on the corner of 2nd Avenue at St. Mark’s a year or two later, looked me in the eye, wearing a fluffy pink fur vest and weird make-up (bed-strewn dyed-black hair), and there again she came and went out of my life forever.

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