Man and Moon

The Abandoned Machine

When Tony's family announced to the rest of the neighborhood that they were leaving, no one congratulated them. No one shook their hands and assaulted them with wishes of wellness and prosperity. Honestly, I don't remember anyone saying anything else to them ever again.

It was different with the children though. We had no concept of unity or enmity beyond our unending game - this thing our parents called life. Games stayed games with us, and Tony was still Tony. He just wasn't going to be around anymore. I remember my only concern was who was going to be Nightcrawler in our group of mutants once he was gone.

Tony's body was a miracle of nature. The closest I can come to describing what he looked like in motion is the gait and rhythm of a spider monkey swinging in a consistent loop about a zoo's jungle gym. Tony just looked like he needed to hanging from something - often times you found him doing just that. He could peel a banana with his toes, walk a mile on his hands, hang from a branch with the tops of his feet - the kid was just simian all round.

He fit the Nightcrawler part perfectly.

Our mutual friend Brian, the oldest of the kids in our neighborhood, had a collection of rare comic books. Many a lazy summer afternoon had been spent in his attic digging through trunks full of the old medium of adventure in still frames. Our favorite of his collection were comics involving a group known as the X-men. Reading these comics evolved into mimicking these comics. Soon we all had our favorite characters and together we would wreak havok throughout the neighborhood as Wolverine, Cyclops, Jean Grey, Professor X, and Nightcrawler.

Unlike the forbidden topic of the moon and likewise any other heavenly body, my father encouraged this sort of creativity not exclusively with myself, but with all of us. His favorite thing to do was don an old red Haz-mat suit from his days with the Department of Reclamation and pretend to be any number of villains, all bent on "anhiliating the X-kids once and for all!!", as he liked to scream from behind his shielded helmet.

I can honestly say these were the only moments I really felt a kinship to my father. We connected in the realm of creativity. In some ways, I think it was his last connection to his childhood.

That spring, when the moving vans first rolled up to Tony's house, the first Redi-Crap products started showing up in our pantry. My father became distant and more prone to sudden acts of punishment for seemingly harmless actions. That Meadow Green taste might as well have been my apple a day - keeping the real dad away. I became an apprentice to his ideals - a student of his philosophy.

"Man grew from the Earth, and the Earth is our home," he would say. "The Earth is our responsibility, and all things that occur on its surface are our responsibility."

My father enjoyed running down the list of neighbors like team briefs in a sports column. Even back then when Tony's house was the only vacant one, my father knew that soon all the houses would be vacant.

"Your friend Brian's dad was telling me he thinks the Saudis are wrong to hand onto their land and resources," he say with a scoff as punctuation. "Imagine that. An educated man falling in with all these lunatics screaming 'Free Gaia' and throwing peace signs like petals at some fucked up marriage between the idiots and the animals."

My father would spend hours writing in angrily slanted cursive, filling dozens of journals and spiral notebooks.

"Did you see Deanna's mother has started wearing those damn earbuds plugged into her ear twenty-four hours a day?" This said as he snarled through a crease in the venetian blinds, eyeing Deanna's house across the street. "She seemed like such a nice lady at first. What kind of music does she listen to?"

"Radio something," I'd respond. "With the robot talking song."

"You watch your mouth, young man!"

His tone was as sharp as the metal blinds clacking against each other as he spun to glare at me.

"And don't let me ever hear that you've been listening to that hippie music." This was always followed with a long session of "music education" where my father would make me listen to what he called "the only real music left".

I didn't know and didn't care who this Monk guy was, or this Duke character, Mehldau, Modeski, Martin, Parker - they all sounded like names from Brian's comics but their music was a foreign language to me. I couldn't feel a groove to it, no repetition or beat, just a constant flood of sound that my father inflicted upon me like a rough baptism.

So when Tony's parents had their last garage sale before the move - a garage sale I might add that no one in our neighborhood attended - I knew deep down that it was a bad idea to have even considered taking CD player.

"My dad used that in college," Tony explained. "He's got a whole bunch of CDs to go with it too. You can have them."

One particular CD caught my eye. On it was drawn a strange armadillo/tank in a dreamlike deserted plain. Tarkus was the name on the cover, by some group of musicians calling themselves Emerson, Lake and Palmer. It reminded of the name of some of my father's favorite artists, but my father outwardly condemned the use of these small silver discs to procure music. My father's turntable and his aging black records were in his opinion the only true medium in which to experience true music.

I should have left the CD there along with the player, but something about it called to me.

Of the two abandoned machines that I remember from that first summer of the vacant house down the street, the CD player remains my fondest memory.

The old gutted dryer, however, will go down in infamy as the first real catalyst to the series of events that lead me to be one member of the human race to set foot on the moon.