The Intermittent Man

by Norman Ball

It’s been two weeks, but the sound of our Mycenaean-era urn crashing to the floor still rings in my ears. God what a clatter! Creeping downstairs to confront the midnight intruder, cherry-wood cane at the ready, I struck repeatedly with a ferocity that surprised even me. Then, as you attempted to revive your mother, I collapsed in a heap against the closet door, thoroughly exhausted. In the ensuing blur of ambulance lights and CPR ministrations upon Mamma P’s prone form, two thoughts occurred to me: (1) permanent manhood is unsustainable; and (2) mothers-in-law with house keys offend some deeply rooted patriarchal sensibility. Zeus would have avenged the trespass with lightning dispatch. But I, joint tenant in a community property state, offered my storehouse’s finest grains to the harvest moon-goddess of your choosing.

If apocrypha is nine-tenths repetition, I’m mostly numb to your rendition of that fateful evening. Perhaps I like the sound of my own pleading voice. But I continue to press my defense: there was NO hidden agenda—overt or subliminal—in my assault. I simply executed a woozy, ill-conceived defense of our home. That, and your mother possesses a naturally furtive quality which acquires sinister proportions in the wee hours. Why can’t she knock?

I won’t deny the DNA agenda. Genes are selfish little buggers. For the good of the species, attacks on the birth-womb—however inadvertent—warrant swift reprisals. I accept this, but merely note the limits of strident matrilinearity: After all, Mumsy was padding about our house unannounced. Though it’s me, your erstwhile protector, who stands accused of some heinous crime. But there I go spinning plates of reason in the gale force winds of female rectitude. Where did I tuck that fateful fortune cookie missive? Women rule the Earth and I am but an itinerant sharecropper with an onerous mortgage and a surfeit of revolving credit. Like Prometheus on a panty raid, I disturbed the slim détente existing between mother and daughter. No fool casts eggs at the sorority house without a trip to the Weird Sisters’ woodshed.

Retribution came swiftly. In the hospital waiting room, you started in with evident malice, recounting the infamous “multiplex incident” that occurred just prior to our marriage. We were exiting the theater, after “Braveheart.” There, beyond the exit, stood a massive, hulking man who I pegged immediately for an Anglo-Saxon, the quintessential bad teeth being a signature giveaway. He was commiserating with some compatriots over their ancestors’ humiliating defeat at the hands of “the men in skirts.” Thanks to Mel Gibson, centuries-old bad blood was coursing anew.

Wearing my tartan scarf that evening (MacNab, ceremonial), I was in a fine mood basking in the glow of my tribe’s cinematic victory. Of course the oaf read my merriment as a north-of-the-border sneer. He approached and inquired if I was Scottish. I’m telling you, the bourbon on his breath would have slain a dozen of King Edward’s courtly retinue! Barely hesitating at his question, I blurted, “no comprende senor” in my best Andalusian brogue. As your eyes searched my face earnestly for some glint of valor, all I could offer was the sweat of extreme discretion pouring, indiscreetly, down my face.

So how is it that I pick my fights? By lottery, mood, happenstance, the stature of my opponent? As you know, I am a nonrecovering metaphysician, a malady I trace to the D that I received in high school physics. Spurned by Heisenberg, I threw myself into pre-Raphaelite poetry with a passion. Allow me to offer a cottony defense laced with high-brow breast-beating.

Though striving heroically to blunt the harshness of your verdict, I accept your general thesis that heroic intermittence is my nagging constant. For all we know, manhood is an episodic state of being subject to biologic ebbs and flows. Please, wipe the derision from your face. I’ve acceded to your PMS. Besides, even cartoon desert islands get an obligatory shade tree. So would you deny me my one palm in the sun? As for the “vampiric” nature of my character, well, that is an especially hurtful charge. I hear your mother in that accusation. She never forgave me for turning you from the Ann Taylor collection. Trust me, autumnal beige is a sin with your coloration.

Yes, I have controlling tendencies, an unfortunate trait. I refresh myself in Homer: the highest expression of manhood, the hero, cannot control his environment. Accepting his subordinate position in the universe, he strives nonetheless against his own finite nature. Heroism means not only courage in battle but succumbing to the inevitable with grace when required. Speaking of the inevitable, we are all dying, but how many of us are dying well? Acquiescence is not necessarily defeat. Sometimes we must gather ourselves to fight another day. I champion Homer not for some mindless, ever-charging bravery, but for his cunning and discretion. Between epic struggles, he often spaced himself for years at a time, relaxing in one Mediterranean hideaway after another.

Nor will I belabor Freudian dogma and its claims about healing psychic wounds. I consider wounds as medals. Who are you to patch us up toward some idealistic wholeness, Herr Doktor, fellow-bleeder? Didn’t Yahweh endow Jacob with a divine limp? Do not presume to heal my birthright as growth springs from my imperfections. I have earned my madness, my waking nightmares. I endeavor to transform them into redemptive art. Failing that, there are many promising new antidepressants on the horizon.

Don’t I make a magnificent tortured soul? Despite your damning assessment, I attempt to be a man and sometimes, for brief intervals, I succeed. The truth is, most days I am barely a man, which is perhaps the best that can be hoped. You have seen me at my worst, gripping the rim of my existence like a shipwrecked fool. In fact, I have given up sailing with my drinking. There’s no sense harboring a false sense of prowess until my port keels better to my starboard.

At times, I think I’ve lost a step. But the youth are not much better. Today’s gyms teem with young men bench-pressing toward their ideal of manliness. Many mirror gaze as though trying to coax heroism from swelling biceps. After all, man is power, yes? Or can a weak man sheath himself in musculature to avert confrontation? And forget steroids. Like Sisyphus, we cannot shirk the weight on our shoulders when the real burden is ourselves. Absent rites of passage, we are left to make our own way. Sometimes a dumbbell must do.

The path to a Greater Good is paved with hurt feelings. A man must have the strength to be misconstrued. Should fame find him, he regards it like an odd rash. Men who achieve great public accolade are immediately suspect. Much of the credit belongs to their publicists anyway. There is, I think, a certain self-deprecation central to manhood itself. I prefer to withhold judgment on celebrities and their fabricated manly visions until the tabloids reveal how their children turned out. Fatherhood is a great leveler. We inherit the sins and virtues of our fathers, often flourishing—or perishing—beneath the wreckage of their private agonies. No publicist can spin a bad parent, no sound stage can overdub his neglect or abuse. (Perhaps you thought I’d venture into this estrogenic fray without Dad by my side? Hah! My mother didn’t raise no fool!)

Bad actors notwithstanding, it is difficult reconciling the current fever of American idolatry with the tombstones of Arlington. I am drawn to the cultural reticence expressed in those endless carpets of sublime uniformity. The magnitude and anonymity of the silence is disquieting, particularly in an age that exalts noise and notoriety. I should add that there are many brave women buried there, too. Please excuse the chauvinistic limitations of my current thesis. But this is a fully girded gender crusade.

I believe I’ve told you about my great-uncle? He died in Greece during World War I. By all accounts, he was the portrait of quietude and virtue in an era when such attributes were still held in high regard. His younger brothers, my grandfather among them, grew up loutish runabouts. One was a notable Glasgow street-boxer who subsidized his not-inconsiderable bar tabs challenging fellow patrons to knock him down, bare knuckled, for money. Okay, so the pugilistic gene did not carry through. But I often fancy my teetotaling Great Uncle William—the oldest of the brothers—curtailing such behavior among his younger siblings. Then, he died in a trench. Extrapolated across an entire culture, the cost of these lost men is incalculable.

But I’ve labored too much on youth. We suffer equally from a surplus of old people and a shortage of elders. Eminem spews misogynistic bile and meets with token rebuke. His mother sued him, God love her, but where’s his father? And in his father’s absence, where are the city-fathers to sanction him? Aeneas braved the underworld for a final glimpse of his father. Odysseus could not fully consummate his return until he was assured Laertes recognized him. Haunted by his forebears, immortalized by poets, the hero is driven to prove that the baton indeed passed to a generation of equal or surpassing merit. But dead men can’t pass batons. And we are surrounded by men more dead than presently alive. As for the latter, I struggle for examples. Surely you can name some unsung men of your own? Together we might assemble a small battalion. When the swelling subsides, we’ll solicit your mother for candidates.

Like the lame Jacob, a man is eternally striving and is a stranger to premeditated poise. So we must accept a chronic dearth of real men, forever out-manned by men-in-tights. The “celebrated” man reclines on a gilded hammock of presumption, girded by his agents and handlers. He is static, a framed mirage. As Jack Nicholson’s Joker remarks to Batman, “where did you get those wonderful toys?” In fact, no man has arrived. Manhood is about creeping inches. Some days our demons seduce us and we are diminished. But then there are the days we eke out a semblance of redemption; man as stubborn, committed ember.

The Greeks endowed each man with one fateful vulnerability. Thus Jacob’s birthright was Achilles’ flaw. Most of us are not epic fodder, preferring convenience to adversity. We opt instead to detest ourselves in cunning ways. Self-loathing often masquerades as self-veneration. Pick your pablum from any New Age bookshelf: “We are all limpid pools of awareness, gods-in-our-own-right.” The proliferation of little gods has spawned an ungodly racket. We are awash in gurus clamoring for seminar attendees. But the many symposia overwhelm our vacation time, especially when the beach is nice too.

I am a catalog of quaint anachronisms, bracketed by failures. At least it takes my mind off the medical bills. Veering wildly from my injured pride, I’ve retreated to high concept, a sure victory of discretion over valor. I want the best for you. We’ll spare no expense on rehabilitative therapy for your mother. As God is my exasperated witness, I pledge my intermittence to you in full. Just forgive me my dollops of absence. By now you should know I conserve my vitality for thieves in the night.