In Sears one Saturday afternoon, I took a second glance until certain of it and then my sternum collapsed and I blew out a mournful sigh. I was gawking at the rock star Meatloaf in jeans and a denim shirt, his hair still long but graying. Alone at a mall in the allegedly modest burb I called home, the original Bat Out of Hell sat and looked nervous on a green John Deere riding mower. A young salesman was assuring him he could drive and control it with ease. I doubted the salesman knew who this customer was.
Soft forms of misery aroused heartburn that bubbled into my throat as I remembered the cruises and make-out sessions I’d enjoyed while the hit song “Paradise By The Dashboard Light” played on a cassette in my car. I remembered midnight showings I’d attended while drunk and in costume with my friends, shouting “Not meatloaf again” whenever he appeared on screen as Eddie in Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Now this titan of operatic teen angst and a monument within the landscape of my personal iconography was sitting on his rather sizeable rump and testing a machine that would cut the grass around his estate home. Didn’t he have dozens of minions to run such prosaic errands for him? I’m sure he did, but this was what I liked about him. In spite of his fame, he was still a regular guy.
It wasn’t the mighty who had fallen. It was I, just another faceless middle-aged white dude out shopping with his kids. Having melted on the spot, feeling battered and flabby, I went after my three boys, each of them with their little gadgets and little fingers pushing little buttons. I moved them out of hardware toward shoe racks where it was easier for me to forget memories of nights on dirt roads when a new album-rock ballad on the radio kept my fervidly carnal predilections charged and actualized.
How had I grown so old? Was it as simple as time passing? Apparently so.
What to tell my boys? I decided to keep quiet. They linked meatloaf to ketchup, not high school sex, and their Mom cooked it for them usually once a week.
They didn’t link cars or Daddy to rapturous acts of connubial bliss, conception, and excessively strident pop music. Nor did they view time as a thief who sneaks into your deranged idealism and shows you how much a faded picture in a wobbly frame a whole chapter in your life has become.
I had to figure this one out on my own, and boy did it feel lonely. I tried not to stare over my shoulder, but I did so just the same. He was still there. I felt relieved that I was too far away to see him well. I thought about my wife who was in another part of the mall getting her hair done. I would be merciful and not tell her. She no longer looked like the girl I’d mounted in that Dodge late one night on a deserted farm road, Meatloaf crooning at full volume, “Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad.”
She disliked feeling her age even more than I did.
A message in this had been aimed at me. I had to embrace it, to consider my marriage, career, my boys and how far I’d come – not how far back I went.
Did my sons realize I adored them? It remained hard to say. It was a constant process, wasn’t it? It would never end, not until I was one with the very nocturnal creatures that Meatloaf’s tunes had once stirred out of my imagination.
I stood there dazed. I watched as Meatloaf nodded, getting his questions answered, which were no doubt about cost and maintenance and how long such a machine could be expected to last.
One of my sons leaned against my legs and whined that he was bored. The other groaned saying he had to pee. The third started nagging me to buy him expensive sneakers.
I brought them together and led them out of that Sears, saying it was time to head back to see Mom in her new hairdo. I was a lucky man. I had everything I’d ever wanted.
John Michael Flynn was the 2017 Writer in Residence at Carl Sandburg’s home, Connemara, in North Carolina. He’s published three collections of short stories, his most recent Off To The Next Wherever from Fomite Books (www.fomitepress.com). He teaches at TED University in Ankara, Turkey. Visit him at www.basilrosa.com.