The Second Man on The Moon

In a theater in LA, I got a chance to put on a play of mine, “Short Plays For A Man On the Moon,” a one act, really a “staged visual-meditation,” which at the time was how, if asked, I described it. Thinking of it now, what I recall is a series of slow moving tableaus held together by theater lights, music, off stage voices, projected slides, and film clips of the Apollo 11 Mission to the moon that I purchased directly from NASA. The film arrived through the regular mail. I don't know what I expected from NASA, but I didn't think the film would come that way, a bright blue plastic box propped against the outside of my front door.

The LA theater was a rough space, with limited seating and even less technical support, and best suited to works of the avant-garde, which was the audience I had hoped to attract. I was told the theater had been carved from the front end of a warehouse which once had been used for the storage of meat. It was called The Locker. It was perfect. This was my first shot at the West Coast, and it was important.

My play centered around the astronaut Buzz Aldrin. Buzz was the second man on the moon, and that fact alone attracted me to him. While reading the book he had written, with the help of a writer, about the troubled events of his life leading up to and including the moon mission, and beyond, the first theatrical image that came to mind, and which eventually was used in the play, was this: The scene is the moon. Buzz waits in the Lunar Lander and listens to Neil Armstrong, making his way down the ladder, tell the world about his “one small step.” Then Buzz makes his way down the ladder and at its end hops onto the powdery surface of the moon, landing squarely on top of Neil Armstrong's foot print, obliterating it in the process and replacing Neil's footprint with his own. Of course Neil's footprint was the soon-to-be famous archived footprint, then just a negative in his camera, because a moment before, possibly remembering he had been told to document everything, Neil, in the hop-hop way astronauts walk, had returned to the Lander and, with Buzz looking down from the top of the stairs, snapped his first photograph. You start where you start, was my motto at that time, and I built my play around that superimposed footprint.

All history and evolution, if I read it correctly, is about destruction, about making room. In the history of religion, victors often built their temples on the still warm and consecrated ground of the vanquished, whose temples they had just burned down. I didn't want to destroy anything, and therefore I was having a hard time with the avant-garde.

The premise of my play was that Buzz, who was having a difficult time on earth, found trees on the moon—a grove of Beech just out of camera range, a voice-over informs the audience—and decides to stay on the moon and build a home for his family. The play takes place either on the moon or in mental hospital—the stage setting was purposefully ambiguous—but either way it's all happening inside Buzz's head. An animated series of slides of Buzz's head, projected onto a near-transparent film of gauze that separated the twenty five members of the audience from the players on stage, told us this. The audience learned the details of Buzz's life through more slides, smaller ones, projected directly onto Buzz as he mimed, in slow motion, the chopping of wood. In my play, that was all Buzz did. Homocentrically or, as a friend later told me, narcissistically, all the action slowly revolved around Buzz.

It was to be a one-shot thing—fly in, hire the actors, organize the tech, find the hospital props, build sets, do a bit of rehearsing, perform, and go to a party. The rehearsals went well, but during the performance, the one performance in LA, the main actor, the guy playing Buzz—a guy who although now in Hollywood and specializing in situation comedy had come with great references from people I knew in New York who said he was familiar with the avant-garde—stopped chopping and in slow motion set down his ax. Then, also in slow motion—we had spent most of the rehearsal working on how to move like that—he collapsed and lay belly down in the middle of the floor area of the old truck warehouse used for the stage, where, once settled, he began making spastic motions as though, it seemed to me, he were attempting to improvise, through mime, the last living moments of a land-locked fish.

Buzz's family, who in the play had just arrived on the moon, were in the slow motion process of opening their arms to embrace their long lost loved one whom they had come so far to see. It was right then that the actor playing Buzz collapsed. Being well trained, the other actors mimed joy as they hugged the spot Buzz had just vacated.

The actors went about their business pretending—because that is the business of theater—not to notice the silver foiled, undulating figure at their feet. They continued the play as though their husband or father—there were three children in the cast—whom they loved and had come so far to see, were walking and talking and telling them of his plans for their future on the moon. The actors embraced with enthusiasm the void that was Buzz, stepping over and around the fallen silver foiled actor as they did. One of the three child actors, the youngest, a six year old boy who was the child of a West Coast conceptual artist, took to delivering his gestures from atop the hump of Buzz's back, as though finding it irresistible not to mount the newly discovered higher ground.

When I managed to peek out from behind the back of a large woman seated in the next to last row where I was hiding and catch a glimpse of the stage, the actors reminded me of a small troupe of vagabond improvisational musicians I had recently seen in an art movie house in LA who, with bombs going off around them, refused to have their concentration broken by war. But I noticed Buzz had fallen down and was thrashing about the floor, and I guessed the audience noticed, too, and later I was told that they did.

From the responses I got from those who stayed after the play to talk, those being the woman who ran the theater and her lover who took tickets and ushered his friends to their seats—all the audience knew each other because in LA the avant-garde was a small, tight knit group—I learned that my play had been taken by most in attendance as a midwestern version (I was living in Kansas City at the time) of a mimed romantic comedy. They thought this, I was told, primarily because the actor playing Buzz was at that time working a lot, and they saw his face often doing mostly walk throughs on the big screen. At least that was what they told me. But who knew what the audience really thought. And who knows what anyone really thinks. Recently I've taken to affecting optimism, it's an experiment, saying, “I think people are smarter then they sound. They just don't know how to speak.” I'm trying to believe that, and I'm sure other people are saying the same thing about me. About the woman who ran the theater and her lover? They were trying to be kind. Of course there was no party.

After the performance I went back to my motel. I had said I would, so I called home to a new friend, Otto, someone whom I had only recently met but who was working hard at being my friend. “I think we will be good friends.” He had said that in a flat voice, while sipping wine in a bar where we had gone to watch women pass. Otto was a poet. It took a few years, until our friendship was comfortably established, for him to tell me that when we first met he was in trouble. He explained that while having casual conversations he had found that he could only respond to the world poetically. He said he couldn't help himself. When that happened, he told me, he felt suddenly naked, got so embarrassed that abruptly he had to leave the room. He explained that he was basically a gregarious and warm person who liked social contact with others and was therefore trying to re-learn conversation based solely on facts. He meant to reconstruct a new social personality this way and was working on that new personality when we met. I was, he later confessed, his first “new” friend.

We hadn't developed much closeness at the time I called from LA, so our conversation was forced. He said, “OK, Tell me. How did it go?” He was getting right to it, which was his new style. I said, “So-so.” There was a lull, so I told him I had rented a bright yellow Camaro with air conditioning and power windows, adding, because when I paused there was still that lull, that I had driven fast on the LA freeways and felt lighthearted whenever I slowed and saw myself reflected in other people's car windows. I told him I felt right at home on the West Coast. More lull. He could tell that I was in trouble. There was a longer pause. Finally, Otto asked, “Did you make any contacts, at least?” I told it was too early to tell. Then I said that I was going to San Francisco visit another friend. Told him I'd be gone for a week. There was another pause. I told him he didn't know her. He said, without a pause, “Well, have a good flight,” then hung up. At that time, although I didn't know it, the only thing that I might have contacted in LA was VD—this was in the Ô70's when it was possible to think lightheartedly about sexually transmitted diseases. In the motel, after the call, I stood naked in front of the mirror and looked. It might have been VD, but at that time it was too early to tell.

In North Beach, at the Cafe Trieste, where my friend and I went for coffee the morning after I arrived in San Francisco, she told me that my philosophy was verbatim Nietzsche. I had, until that moment, not realized I had a philosophy. I recall we were speaking about ducks at the time. There had been a pond of ducks we could see from her bedroom window and intermittently we would sit up in bed and watch the ducks glide.

Since I was 37, and not far enough along in my career, I liked the idea of being like Nietzsche, of having my name used in the same sentence with that of a famous man. Of course, at the time I didn't think too much about my chances of coming down with VD, and at the table in the Cafe Trieste, as I sipped coffee, I found myself thinking about the slow progress of my career and not the beautiful woman seated next to me. To kill that thought, I remembered an automobile accident and studied the scar on the back of my hand because I only wanted to think of the woman. This was an old trick of mine that I used to prolong sexual intercourse, a trick I don't need anymore, which I used to clear my head. I would think of something disastrous, or else something familiar, like a child, my child. At times, I recall, I was too successful with image making and completely lost my concentration.

In Los Angeles no one smoked, but in the Cafe Trieste small, bright coals burned intensely from the ends of every mouth, and I was convinced that somewhere in that room a fire was being kept alive. My friend pointed out a well known local poet seated across the room, his table wedged into the far corner of the cafe. He had situated himself so that from where I sat he was framed by a black and white poster-sized photo of Jack Kerouac, whose black eyes looked out at us through the blue smoke. My friend said everyone knew the poet as Todd, but that he was really Polish and had a much longer name. He was dressed in black and stooped over his coffee, his face closed to all in the Cafe Trieste and well beyond, his thoughts deep inside, as though he were digging in that depth for the stuff of poems. Poems were hard to write, I knew that, and looking at that stooped, black figure, I saw that they also exacted a heavy toll. That was how lost that poet was to the terrestrial world of the Cafe Trieste. My friend in SF was beautiful, though. In the Cafe Trieste, poets, even Todd, managed to look up and fill paper with words when my friend crossed and uncrossed her legs.

When I got home to Kansas City, I had coffee with Otto at a neighborhood bar. I told him about the woman in San Francisco, say, “This time I think I have fallen in love.” Otto said nothing. I knew he was thinking of a conversation we had before I left when I told him that I didn't think I had the capacity for love. Otto, leaned close to tell me that when he still spoke and thought peotically that after he fell in love with a woman he called Barbara, not her real name he wanted me to know, a pocket formed inside his body. He said he was days away from propossing when Barbara explained to Otto that she was a lesbian.

“Michael,” Otto said, leaning back now, “I wanted to marry to fill that pocket, then, his new self again, added that he thought that I was totally filled by myself.

In the bar, I thought of the beautiful woman from San Francisco. I thought of her legs, her back, the way she moved her head to loosen her hair, the subtle asymmetry of her face, and as I did, I waited for a hollowness to grow inside me. I longed to be filled with emptiness. I asked Otto, who was fidgeting nervously with his lapel, what he thought about me living with someone. We talked that way then, very vague, slightly abstract, but were to become better friends. He told me that the world was very complicated, and he wished me luck. Then, without a good-bye, he got up and left.

The next day when I went to see a urologist, I marched up to the receptionist's window armed with the answer to her question about why I had come to see the doctor. I would say, “I have a urogenital complaint.” She didn't ask, and without looking up, with a wave, suggested I take a seat and wait because the doctor was running late. She was doing her nails.

It was quiet in the waiting room. Everyone had his or her head in a magazine, as though seeking anonymity. My head was in a Sports Illustrated. Periodically heads popped up, as though the readers were sea mammals coming up for a gulp of air. When they did, I saw--one by one--that, with the exception of a boy of around eight dressed completely, short sleeved shirt, shorts, and socks in dark blue, these faces, waiting for the doctor, were not the faces of happy people. I glanced at the boy, took his expression to be a smile, and flashed one back, then dove back into my Sports Illustrated, where I was reading a story about fish, which probably was responsible for some of the allusions in this telling of the story.

There was nothing externally out of place in the boy's appearance except that he was so clean, which in itself seemed a little odd for a child that age. He was being held like groceries on the lap of a heavily built women whose face I never would see. Whenever I glanced up from the Sports Illustrated, there was the boy, smiling. But it wasn't really a smile. It was more of the knowing half-smile, the kind that fifth century B.C. Greek sculptors applied to faces of statuary in an attempt to have us believe that the stone people they were carving were alive.

The more you look, the more there is the opportunity to learn—I was told that in the only natural science class I have any recollection of—and the more I looked, the more I began to suspect that something was not right with that boy. His eyes were set too close together and his skin seemed inches thick. The longer I looked, the more convinced I became that the child had, in some fundamental way, been irreparably damaged. In the waiting room I convinced myself that hidden beneath the boy's oppressively clean exterior were layers of unspeakable filth. Though there was nothing out of place about that boy, the more I studied him, the more he reminded me of a teaching doll that might have been used in a medical school to train doctors about something--what, I didn't know. I came to that thought, about unspeakable layers of filth, because I knew what was hidden beneath my white tennis shorts. I smiled brightly at the child. He smiled past me into space. To clear my head, I thought about a film on mosquitoes I had seen in the army, then glanced down. In the magazine, near-naked black men leapt for a ball.

After looking me over, the doctor smiled knowingly. His smile was just different enough from the boy's to calm me down. I had taken to calling the doctor George, Dr. George, though everyone else in the office called him Dr. Pritican.

In the office, as I tucked in my shirt, I asked the doctor what he thought. Dr. Pritican paused, seemed to be searching inside himself for the words which would allow him to carry on, and while he was hunting up his vocabulary, I thought about Dr. George. Watching, I had the odd feeling that I had just met him on the subway, and in my mind, instantly, there I was, on the subway with the doctor, the motion of the train swaying us together,as though our bodies were foreshadowing and announcing that soon we would be friends. On the train we exchanged telephone numbers before we spoke of professional inclinations. Then it was my stop and I moved to the door. Dr. Pritican said, as I exited the train, “I am a doctor.” In my imagination, he talked that way, making flat statements of fact of the sort to which my new friend aspired. “I am a doctor,” he said. I waited until the train doors were about to close, and shrieked from the platform, “I'm a syphilitic,” then giddily waved his telephone number in my germ covered fingertips. Dr. Pritican dropped mine. The train doors then closed, like blunt cleavers. Ironically, I thought, this action joined us together. We would overcome our differences. We would become friends.

As I tugged at my belt, Dr. Pritican wrote a prescription. “Well,” I asked again, “What do you think?” He said that most likely my condition had been caused by stress. Nonetheless, I was given a massive dose of penicillin, right in the hip. “Just in case,” said Dr. George.

When I left the doctor's office and reentered the waiting room, the boy had not moved and was still smiling. The object of his gaze, I calculated, was a point marking the exact center of the waiting room. It contained air. The world seemed to revolve around that spot. I got the idea that if I entered that spot, which I had begun to think of as charmed, the child would see me, would smile on me, and I'd be cured. In the larger sense. Cured.

But I didn't take those kinds of thoughts seriously then—it was the 70's—and I left the waiting room. It was right there, just on the other side of the door, that I remembered Nietzsche died of syphilis, and I felt a hollowness grow inside me, as though tissue were softening and falling apart.