Oakwood Comic Book Program - Oakwood Healthcare System

Jim Anderson
Untitled
Cool
Michael Madigan
Saturday morning. Jerry starts out at the barber’s. He waits for a seat in Eugene’s chair.
Cool with it, Jerry decides, worth it to wait for a man who needn’t be told what to do to his
comb-bending, aerodynamic, lacquer-black hair.
Draped to his knees in the chair, Jerry leans on the points of ten fingertips lifting,
appraising behind him. The call and response of the barbers and customers, crowing and
barking, and ceiling fans, baseball game, teenagers minding their manners, unanswered
rings from guys’ wives on the coin telephone, and Eugene like a priest with his hands on
the Sacrament – brush Jerry’s ears like a jazzman.
Cool, he would say of the scene if one asked.
Jerry turns to the mirror to size up the man he has made of his everyday stuff. He
encounters the eyes of the man she ignored at the bar, the man she turned vacantly from
at her door as he waited, the eyes that looked back in his view to the rear as he drove
away later, flat-footed, blinded, accusing, denying, set in a fist of a face.
But they’re not the eyes he identifies. Nothing but cool is the man Jerry sees.
At eight Jerry’s up at the Palisades Bowl in a silk shirt. He passes the lounge where his
night will end up, and the silk stirs his skin, like a breath he felt once when she bent down
to look at his watch, stirs with a fugitive shade like her first cautious glance, passing
intangibly through to the bone like her words somehow heard but unsaid.
But he doesn’t remember the night or the lips or the look or the voice. The coolest, he
thinks, of the shirt on his back, and no other reflection intrudes.
Jerry changes his cool lizard slip-ons for Dexters in indigo blue, also cool. The clatter of
pins and the rush of the pinsetters flows like a beat in a groove. The fellas show up and
the frames are all open and Jerry steps up to the line.
It feels cool, Jerry thinks as he lifts sixteen pounds with a natural action and unpondered
ease, coiling to start his approach.
Jerry enters his motion, a motion as cool as the curve and the shift of a dance step
performed without touching the floor. Like their dance when the curve and the shift of her
hand in his fingers turned everything silent and weightless.
This time the ball – like his heart when her memory forms on it stealthy as dew, before he
can rise and burn hot enough over the chill to dispel it – gains all of the mass of the earth.
I am cool, Jerry shivers. So cool.
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