People talk about a male loneliness epidemic, but I never meet any of these lonely men

Part three of an autofictional series

Part 1 and Part 2

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The loudest leaf blower I’ve ever heard. An industrial strength air machine designed for rearranging cars in junkyards. A sound that annihilates the possibility of thinking, of living; an unremitting roar, a sonic beam sucking me into a vortex of hatred.

I’m smoking a cigarette on my back porch, trying to enjoy the evening, its lingering light, the aged oak barrel sun on the tree trunks and wood planks, on the grassy lawn brushed by the wind. But I live in a nice neighborhood of successful citizens, largely free of petty violent crime, gang related activity and ethnic conflict, on well-kept stately streets where men torment each other through lawncare and home improvement projects. Two houses down, a man plods about with a plastic and metal hunk of garbage on his back, waving a plastic tube emitting a sound giving me flashbacks to a war I never fought in; B-52 bombers overhead, treads crushing the bones of fallen soldiers.

I can see him, dressed like a slob, in a t-shirt and basketball shorts, on his concrete drive, blowing dirt and pebbles into the shrubs that line his house. Pale and out of shape, as usual; 40-year-olds should be sinuous, gnarled; their skin should reflect the natural elements, sun and storms and cold winds and clay. Instead it’s unmetamorphosed larva, the blubber of a grub, something unhatched and over-incubated that prospered nonetheless.

Half an hour of this. I imagine beating him to death, bludgeoning him with his own equipment, shoving the leaf blower up his ass and blowing his organs out of his mouth, going inside to laugh in the faces of his children, covered in their father’s blood. If he keeps it up for five more minutes I’m going over there and putting his head through the back window of his car, punching him in the stomach until he vomits, running over his legs with a dump truck.

But I’m the one with the problem. The violent and anti-social one. My near neighbor is a sweet and beautiful blob of a human being, unaware of the damage he does, his sphere of irritating influence. He owns a large home, has a wife and two or three kids, I can’t tell exactly, but at least two, as well as a dog, and maybe some other pets, an exotic rodent. He’s fine and I’m not. I need therapy and medication and Jesus and the Buddha, I need enlightenment and salvation and breathing techniques; it’s always everyone else who has to be tolerated and indulged with saintly benevolence; why do I have to pray for patience when God could fry this bastard with a lightning bolt right now.

You have control of your own reactions, they say. A convenient belief for obnoxious boneheads and wimps. People who can’t imagine their effect on others and those without influence. Just work on suppressing impotent rage, pretending the subwoofers and leaf blowers and barking pitbulls aren’t acts of war, expressions of contempt.

The urban environment generates an average level of noise that would cave in the skull of a cave man. Our ambience would sound like Ragnarök to a band of Viking warriors.

But I’m the one who needs to adjust. I’m the unhinged boiler room strangler clock tower sniper leap from a dark hallway with a butcher knife slasher freezer full of body parts lumbering clown mask killer, and he’s the decent man, the fine father, the loving devoted husband and productive member of society with guest bedrooms and a secure retirement plan and investments in the stock market. Obliviously he torments me with power tools that cost more than my rented room.

Better off acting like a thoughtless jackass and then throwing a fit when someone tries to correct you. The real disturber of the peace is the one who tries to maintain it. How dare anyone stop anyone else from doing as they please. If there were no laws there’d be no crime, if someone wants to pistol whip you and pull you from your car at a stoplight and then hop in and crash into a dollar general then who are you to stop them, who are you to expect safety and civility.

I’m the one who needs to go to therapy and work on my anger; my contempt that will shatter my teeth like cheap china. Go into the annals of my past and replay or flat out invent scenes of abuse, trauma, my father’s swift kicks in the ass with his steel toed work boots, his eruptions of rage over trivial setbacks, spilled drinks, red faced wrestling with straps on a pontoon boat, his farts that sounded like zippers on duffel bags and smelled like pan seared roadkill, his apoplectic outbursts over my algebra homework. Or my mother and her snobbery, her bitter scorn for the public pool and my trailer park friends, her cloudy expectations. No, it wasn’t their fault, they did the best they could, they were also incredibly loving and attentive, they gave me everything I could want, more than I could want and that was the problem if anything.

My childhood, my sheltered upbringing with baseball games and piano lessons and lunches with apple slices, drinking from sippee cups into my second decade, supplicated like a Roman emperor until I stepped down into the real world where no one cares if you live or die, if you succeed or fail, the real world where you have to pummel people into noticing you, where you compete with greasy swindlers and implacable morons, descend into a neo-noir city of smoke and dank alleys and double-crosses, where sultry dames entrap you with their succubae schemes.

I can barely remember all the good times melted down like chocolate. My first cat, an orange tabby with an astonishingly pleasant temperament. He let me sit on him, pet and smack him with that blend of affection and cruelty characteristic of toddlers that never goes away entirely, that we tend to act out with a bit more subtlety in our later years. Thanksgiving up north with extended family, in my great grandparents' house on a street lifted right out of a comic book strip of middle American normality, the smell of the turkey and noodles and mashed potatoes, card games among the men and horseplay among the younger cousins.

Playing catch with my dad in a backyard bordered by elms and oaks. All those summer nights chasing lightning bugs with glass jars. Coming in after sledding on a snow day, the flush of a warm house, hot chocolate with marshmallows. Halloween in a Chicago bears costume, Christmas in a ghostbusters suit. Action figure epics directed by me and my brothers. Our golden retriever, the only dog I’ve ever loved.

If I tried to remember the days in detail I’d have to put off everything else, never work again or go anywhere or see anyone. Shut myself up in the bathroom, lie back in the bathtub and sink into the years. Thinking on it now, I don’t go places or see much of people anymore. Unless I’m at work or need to go to the grocery or feel like going to a restaurant or cafe. But I haven’t gone to work in a month now, and I’m still waiting to start my next job. Most days pass without my speaking to a single person unless I give them money for a service.

What unsettles me is knowing I don’t mind, I could live like this indefinitely. What unsettles me is knowing I don’t mind, I could live like this indefinitely. I’m going to browse the criterion collection, and I’ll probably spend as much time trying to decide what to watch as I would watching a full-length film. Then I’ll go to bed.