A Thin Brittle Layer of Rationality  

"Girls! Girls!" Miss Karen, my daughter's gymnastics instructor, calls anxiously to her students. The girls, all between eight and eleven years old, are running around, doing flips and splits and cartwheels and seemingly out of Karen's control. Parent observation night always makes the instructors anxious. Their skills are on the line and the school's reputation on their shoulders. A skinny blond girl in a baggy red nylon workout suit with navy stripes down the legs of the zipper pants, Karen's face is downright gaunt. Maybe it's the lighting. We're in the great barn-like gym, overhead lights twinkling like stars a good forty feet overhead, casting what amounts to moonlight around the room; not good conditions for taking photographs, I've learned before, the kids come out in gloom, just beyond the reach of the flash. I'm one of the first parents to arrive; my wife is in Phoenix where her widowed mother has just had a stroke a week before her 83rd birthday. I'm on my own.

My sister Jennifer told me she wanted to come see Alissa, and I keep looking anxiously around for her; it's going to be showtime soon. Jennifer is such a flake, though; it's a toss-up whether she'll actually make it. She always way over-schedules herself. Jennifer's having trouble with her love life, or the lack of a love life. She envies me my three children and solid twenty-year marriage. Pushing 40, she's in competition with the legendary biological clock as well as with her older brother. Sibling rivalry's always been a theme of our relations, and she's done her best to try to steal Alissa's affections from me, so I half expect her to come. She's five years younger than I am, and when I used to bring friends home from college, she'd flirt with them, just to get at me, I believed, though of course she denied it.

"Afraid I'm stealing your boyfriends?" she'd tease, putting an entirely different spin on the situation, and I didn't have a comeback ready for that.

Jen doesn't lack for boyfriends, if you can call the men she hangs out with boyfriends. There's a guy named Les Berlin who's pushing sixty, smokes pot like a teenager; not what you'd call father material, but who knows? Look at Saul Bellow. Look at Strom Thurmond. She also sees a bit of a guy named Frank Stres. Frank's likewise an elderly hippie, and to confuse things, he also sometimes called himself Les, but that's only when he goes to rainbow gatherings, outdoor back-to-nature hippie events that run for weeks at a time - free love, free sex, free dumb - where he tells people that his name is Les Stres. A guy her age named Nick floats in and out of Jen's life. Fortunately she doesn't count on Nick for much because the stories she tells about him sound like real heartbreak material. One day he dramatically dumps her for some personality flaw or moral failing, and the next he's be pleading with her to take him back. She always takes him back. Not to say she lets him into her heart, but she takes him back to her bed. Karen continues to bark at her students and look at the clock, counting heads. Not all of them are present yet, I guess -- late like Jen - and she's getting nervous.

I've scarfed up one of the director's chairs. There are never enough seats at these things, which is one of the reasons I came early, so I could get one. It's been another long day at the investment firm and I don't feel like standing.

As always, after the director's chairs and the uncomfortable metal folding chairs have all been taken, more parents continue to arrive. Most of the parents are women with cameras, but there's also an older couple, obviously grandparents, the woman a dumpy doughy gray-haired person that's everybody's destiny, and her husband, a dapper fellow in loafers, corduroys and an orange sweater who looks like John Updike, a very preppy older fellow. They call each other Mom-Mom and Pop-Pop, the names their grandchild uses. Pop-Pop has given up his director's chair to one of the camera-toting moms and has even relinquished his folding metal chair to another mom. Fucking Pop-Pop! He makes me feel churlish and ill-mannered. That gallantry of another generation. But I am not about to give my seat up to one of these gymnastics moms with their telephoto lenses. They are every bit as healthy and fit as I am.

Mom-Mom seems to be one of those old broads who believe that being rude is sassy, cute, iconoclastic. When Pop-Pop wonders aloud if Tessa would be able to do her handstand, Mom-Mom says caustically, in her voice that could scrape walls, "Well, you set the bar so damn high it'll be a wonder if she accomplishes anything." Pop-Pop, a gentle, soft-spoken man, immediately protests, but in a way that seems to suggest Mom-Mom is saying something accurate. Pop-Pop has the shifting eyes of a spy, red lines veining the wide white eyeballs; Pop-Pop is the enabler. I wonder idly if Mom-Mom is an alcoholic. I can already imagine the stage "asides" she'll make about me before the night's over.

I sit lost in my thoughts, waiting for the demonstration to begin. The stock market has been sinking after three years of one high after another, all those investors eager to sink money into this or that dot-com, greedy idiots out to make a fortune putting their capital into any cockeyed Internet scheme that comes along. Tampons dot com, Dogfood dot com. What are they thinking? But now reality has set in and nobody's investing and it makes my job more difficult. All of our panicking clients hold us responsible; we're supposed to have special knowledge about the economy, the underlying structure of world events, as if playing a chess game fifteen moves in advance. Sure, I admit I try to forecast the future. Thinking in terms of demographic curves makes me feel like a super-detective from a television drama, uncovering complex global conspiracies in the space of a half-hour timeslot. Sitting in my director's chair, I wonder if this is a symptom of my age or my generation, calculating risks and trends on the basis of sociological and economic data. I glance at Pop-Pop and consider it could simply be an occupational hazard.

Looking at dapper Pop-Pop, all at once I become self-conscious about my appearance, and I think about my hair, the lack of it. My current barber is a guy named Kevin, likewise bald. He might also be gay. He urges me to cut my hair shorter. I like to be able to run a comb through the fringe at the side of my skull, but Kevin, who wears his pretty much shaved close to the sides, tells me that in the long run not only is it easier to maintain but it really does look better. Kevin also wears a trim goatee and looks a little like Andre Agassi. Well, partly to appease him I've consented to going down steadily at 1/8-inch every haircut, from a "number 4" clipper down to a "number 1" - a Jesse Ventura cut. By next summer I'll look the part. We'll see. What is the vanity in keeping the fringe at a combing length? Certainly not "sex appeal" - from the cool, dismissive glances Mom-Mom throws my way I knew I don't inspire lustful thoughts any more; on the other hand, do I really want my self-image to be Yul Brynner? But bald has certainly made a comeback in the last decade, it's true. The nineties were good for bald, the bald look, the bald appeal. No longer taken as a sign of a lack of virility. A minimalist statement.

But getting the right barber is a matter of luck and experimentation, and I feel thankful for having met Kevin, grateful for his prescience and concern. When I moved to Baltimore after seven years of going to the same Greek guy in Harvard Square, I found myself having to make decisions. What were the criteria? Convenience? Price? Eventually I chose a place near where I worked based on the name, the Potawatomi Hotel. I grew up in Potawatomi Rapids, Michigan, and I was charmed by the name. Plus, the haircut was cheap and Joe did a nice job.

Eventually Joe's health problems forced him to retire and I was out on my own again, and, flailing about, the next barber I chose was likewise in a hotel. But John spent more time clipping the air around my head than actually cutting hair. He was so slow and deliberate he took forever. I dreaded going to him; although he did a decent enough job, I had to sit in the waiting room flipping through magazines for almost an hour before my turn came, and then, once I was in the chair, another half an hour minimum. Finally, I started going to one of those unisex franchise places, the Hair Store or the Cutting Shed or Hair-Eteria. A young woman named Bobby Jo became my barber; I always asked for Bobby Jo when I came, a sultan selecting one of his harem to entertain and comfort him. Bobby Jo's small talk was a chore to listen to, but she called me "honey" and gave a good haircut. My first experience with a female barber. But Bobby Jo quit and moved to Pennsylvania, and that's when Kevin inherited me. He also works at Hair-Eteria. My first bald barber. A guy who understands the peculiar grooming needs of the bald male.

I wonder again if Kevin is gay. He works out at the Downtown Health Spa, and everybody knows that's where all the gays work out. Then again, I belong to the DHS, too. Still, he has that je ne sais quoi about him, that certain carefreeness I associate with gays. But that doesn't prove anything, does it, his mannerisms? What about his profession, though? Hair stylist? Or does he go by the more masculine "barber"? He talks about the haircuts some of the trainers at the DHS wear and how he'd like to gets his hands on them, especially that hunk Dave.

My thoughts are interrupted then by a man a few years younger than I coming up to Pop-Pop and Mom-Mom and giving them a hug. The father of Alissa's classmate, Tessa, I guess. Pop-Pop offers him his seat, but the man says no. He's heavyset, balding, with a big mustache, breathing hard as if he's just been running.

"Here's a seat next to me, David," Mom-Mom says, and I could swear she gives me the evil eye, but sure enough, another folding metal chair materializes from nowhere. David takes his seat.

All the girls have been accounted for at last, the latest late arrival bouncing into the gym in her leotard and gymnastics shoes, and the demonstration begins. Still no Jen, though. I assume she won't be coming this evening; maybe she has a date with Les - one of them.

You should see all those moms snapping pictures with their Canons and Nikons and Pentaxes and Olympuses, videocams pressed to their eyes. Don't they realize they're going to be disappointed?

After the tumbling and trampoline and the parallel bar demonstrations by the juniors come the individual routines by the more advanced children. This is where Alissa comes in. These kids are still learning, of course, and none of them are ever going to be Olympic material, but I think it's the background music to their routines that really shuts my mind down - Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Jennifer Lopez; this year's Madonnas. It strikes me how the careers of pop stars roughly correspond to the life cycle of household pets, no more than probably a dozen or twenty years, the arc from puppyhood to death, before they've gone beyond that bright new appeal of the pop star, sent out to pasture. Nobody takes Madonna seriously as a sex kitten any more, do they?

But then "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" comes blasting out of the CD speakers, and I sit up and take notice. Wow. Pop-Pop's granddaughter, Tessa, is performing. The somersaults and handstands never looked so good. What next? Jerry Lee Lewis, maybe? During the middle of this gymnastics demo, one of the men sitting on a folding metal chair suddenly starts flipping around on the ground. It's Pop-Pop's son, David. For a second I think he's part of the act, or maybe just a wannabe, showing his enthusiasm, when it becomes apparent something's wrong; he's having an epileptic seizure. One of the instructors rushes over and takes control.

"Depress his tongue!" Mom-Mom starts shouting. "Don't let him swallow his tongue!"

The music stops. Three of the instructors kneel around David as he lies still on the floor. Another has run to call 911. Gymnastics moms are hugging their daughters, as if to protect them from something harmful. Mom-Mom is sobbing. Irrationally, I fee as if I'm responsible for all of this for not giving up my director's chair. I mumble my sympathy to Pop-Pop, offer my assistance anyway I might be of service. That's when Jen comes strolling into the gym, arm-in-arm with Kevin.

"Am I late? Did I miss Alissa's performance?"

Seeing them together like that, I am unexpectedly gripped by jealousy, a tight band across my chest and throat and face. I almost choke. How ultimately unpredictable everything is, chaos lurking right under the surface of the most logically ordered circumstances, subverting all the assumptions you've made, a thin brittle layer of rationality covering the vast turbulent depths of id and confusion. Still, this doesn't mean Kevin might not be gay after all, does it?

Charles Rammelkamp is an adjunct English professor at Essex Community College. His work has appeared in many print and online journals, including, Chiron Review, Comstock Review, The Evansville Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Happy, Lynx Eye, Pangolin Papers, Pearl, Princeton Arts Review, and others. Two chapbooks, i don't think god's that cruel, and Go to Hell, are available from March Street Press. The first is a sequence of poems about a traffic accident in a small fictional Michigan town (Mycenae) and the other is a sequence of poems about a semester in the life of an adjunct English professor at a community college, teaching English 101.

Contact Charles Rammelkamp

June 28, 2001
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