Moon Walk
by Nathan Graziano
When Lisa and I split, she took it all—the house, our one respectable car, and Gary, the parrot I taught to say fuck you. And she cheated on me. Go figure. But this was back before I got sober, and at the time I did what any jilted drunk would do: I rented a cheap one-bedroom place in a bad part of town and spiraled into a stormy bender. Days melded into other drunken days, weeks into interminable weeks, all boiling in a cracked caldron of my own self-loathing.
I was three weeks deep into my bender and pretty tight the night Jackson called. It was the first time I'd heard from him in five years, and he called to tell me his plane would be arriving in Logan Airport at 10:15 p.m. Jackson—a beefy guy whose real name was Brian Unger—gave birth to the nickname one night when he did an improbably perfect moon walk across filthy kitchen tiles while looped at a frat party. Mind you, this was a good decade after the dance step reached its peak of popularity. When Jackson called me from O'Hare in Chicago, he said that he and his wife Stacey were on the skids, and that's all he said. So I wrote the flight number in red ink on the back of my hand then drove, heavy-lidded and sweaty, to the airport in my dented-to-shit Honda Accord with a Styrofoam cooler of cold Coors Light cans in the backseat.As I waited for Jackson at the terminal gate, I passed the time eying a pretty young thing in a yellow sundress, chewing her nails down to the cuticles. After blowing into my hand and smelling my breath—yes, it reeked of beer—I began to inch closer. Her smooth golden legs spilled from the hem of her dress like two cold drinks capable of washing down the acrid taste on the back of my tongue that Lisa left, a taste I couldn't seem to swallow. Dressed in a blue Bermuda shirt, torn khaki shorts and sandals, I was dressed for Jackson, not a pretty young thing in a yellow sundress. She was out of my league. But I thought, Fuck it. Where's the harm?
"Are you waiting for someone?" I asked the girl. I hadn't spoken socially to a woman since Lisa and I split, and only now, years after this went down, does it occur to me how ridiculous the question was.
She gave me a coarse once-over then rolled her eyes. "My boyfriend," she said.
"Have you been together long?"
"I haven't met him yet. We hooked up on the internet."
"Just be careful," I said. "Make sure he's not a serial killer."
She said, "Thanks for your concern."
A sweet Southern voice announced the arrival of the flight from O'Hare, and I stepped back from the girl in the yellow sundress and waited for my friend Jackson. One of the first guys out of the gate was the boyfriend, not Jackson, and I watched the girl's face stiffen up with the fixed smile of a jack o' lantern, one of the smooth golden legs trembling like a stalk of barley in a stern breeze.
Jackson was one of the last people out of the tunnel. We shook hands and patted each other on the back. "Mark, my friend, I'm wearing another man's underwear," said Jackson.
"Jackson, what the fuck?"
"They're these red French-cut marble-bag man-panties, but I didn't have anything clean, so I put them on. Stacey must be humping a male dancer. Normal guys, like us, we don't wear man-panties."
"How do they feel?" I watched as the girl in the yellow sundress planted a dry kiss on the lips of the serial killer.
"Tight, man. Really tight."
Nathan Graziano lives in Manchester, New Hampshire with his wife and two children. A high school English teacher, Graziano is also the author of Frostbite, a collection of short stories, two full-length collections of poetry, Not So Profound and Teaching Metaphors, and seven chapbooks of poetry and fiction. Teaching Metaphors was recently named Best Local Poetry Collection of 2007 by the southern New Hampshire weekly The Hippo Press. For more information, visit http://www.nathangraziano.com.