Arena
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TITLE (EDIT)
Arena |
DESCRIPTION
A man finds a way out of his midlife crisis.
[1,490 words] |
TITLE KEYWORD
Action |
AUTHOR
Robert Levin |
ABOUT
THE AUTHOR
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[June 2026] |
AUTHOR'S E-MAIL ADDRESS
rlevin@earthlink.net |
AUTHOR'S OTHER TITLES (19)
3 Poems (Poetry) - [129 words] [Humor]
A Passel Of Plumeria (Short Stories) Can an act of violence be an act of love? [6,004 words]
Donald Trump And The Fear Of Death (Essays) Propelled by a pronounced extinction anxiety, white America’s dread has led directly to a heightening of racism, and with it, the presidency of Donald Trump [581 words] [Psychology]
Everything's All Right In The Middle East (Essays) A mutual solution to the problem of being mortal. [805 words] [Psychology]
Free Jazz: The Jazz Revolution Of The '60s (Essays) "Man, In another ten years we won't even need traffic lights we're gonna be so spiritually tuned to one another." [2,709 words] [History]
No Stars For The Eclipse (Essays) I thought more interesting work was being done at the Electric Circus back in the '60s. [529 words] [Comedy]
On Mental Health (Short Stories) If I ever see a shrink again it'll have to be under a court order. [2,608 words] [Drama]
On Turning Sixty (Essays) The rewards of turning sixty [556 words] [Humor]
Peggie (Short Stories) My chance to cross gross obesity from the list of body types I hadn't yet scored. [1,538 words] [Comedy]
Proving God By Consensus (Essays) My Problem with the Religious Right [962 words] [Psychology]
Recycle This (Essays) "I don't even sort and rinse the stuff I keep?" [885 words] [Humor]
Schindler's List: A Fecal Matter (Essays) - [1,306 words] [Psychology]
Stupidity: Its Uses & Abuses (Essays) Stupidity is rivaled in its genius only be schizophrenia. [1,358 words] [Humor]
The Author (Short Stories) An author discovers that his book is missing from the library. [1,466 words] [Comedy]
The Monstrous Season (Short Stories) When you call your Dog Maureen you're asking for trouble. [8,454 words] [Literary Fiction]
The Shooter (Short Stories) WARNING; Content may offend and upset some readers. It's an attempt to explain, not celebrate, the kind of act the protagonist commits. [3,174 words] [Action]
When Pacino's Hot, I'm Hot (Short Stories) A comedy about a pathetic loser with a talent for looking famous. [5,929 words] [Humor]
Why Peace Will Forever Elude Us (Essays) Although the guises may differ, people who study history are no less doomed to repeat it than those who don’t. [769 words] [Psychology]
You Don't Know What You're Doing (Or Why You're Still Fat) (Essays) People with perpetual obesity issues are playing a game with themselves. [786 words] [Psychology]
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Arena
Robert Levin
There were three of them, three guys whose wiring you probably could have smelled as far away as Brooklyn. But, my purpose unknown to me, I found myself heading straight toward them.
If I didn’t know what I was doing in that moment, I was, however, fully mindful of something else; my impending decomposition.
While at this point none of my vital parts had actually shut down, I was convinced, and had been for weeks, that one or more of them was about to; that I was already in the end stages of a horrific wasting disease. In all manner of physical distress — perpetually light-headed, my breath short, my vision dim and my gait unsteady — I’d never felt so weak and frail. Or small. Not that, at 5’6″, 140 lbs, I wasn’t small. But I was getting even smaller. In fact, I was shriveling — I could, in real time I swear, see myself withering and contracting in my mirror. No, it would not be long before I was reduced to something ghastly, to a tiny doll-like thing you might find in the back of a drawer deep in the darkened bowels of a Port au Prince curio shop cellar.
I’d been living with the expectation of my imminent demise since my fifty-second birthday — which, coinciding with my son’s acceptance into college, was when it first hit me that I’d turned fifty. And the anxiety I was experiencing had begun to color my perception of the world at large. I mean here I was, returning home from an errand through the Village on a Saturday afternoon. It was one of those fine days you get just a precious few times in midsummer New York when the humidity’s low and the temperature’s reasonable. The narrow sidewalks were teeming with people celebrating the weekend and the weather, and all I could think was that sooner or later every last one of them was going to get very sick and then disappear.
Okay. I know. I didn’t need to be Otto Rank to appreciate that I was in the throes of a monster midlife depression. But my awareness of this made no difference. If I was exaggerating my situation, if my expiration was perhaps not so close at hand as I believed, it was still true that my youth was gone, and my hyperconsciousness of my body’s impermanence didn’t go away.
So literally staggering under the weight of the menace my body was posing to me, I was turning into West 4th Street (hoping I wouldn’t pass out in the crush of a very dense crowd — and holding a freshly lit cigarette, which would prove to be significant) when I saw them a little way up the block. In their mid-to-late twenties, and emphatically not from the neighborhood, they were swilling beer from bottles and loudly passing judgment on the females who happened near them, even those accompanied by men. One of them, his T-shirt advertising a Jersey City tavern, was leaning against a parked car. He had a face that was almost identical to Jack Black’s and he’d apparently nourished his resemblance to a celebrity by shaping his body to match Black’s rotundity as well. The other two, similarly proportioned, were sprawled just opposite him on the bottom steps of a stoop. Their legs were stretched onto the sidewalk and left with no more than a foot or so to pass, most people were taking to the street to get around them.
As I came up to them and, as I’ve said, without comprehending what was compelling me to enter their space, my conscious intention was to slide my way by. But when, and facing the Jack Black ringer, I turned slightly sideways to accomplish this objective, he reached out, grabbed me by the stomach, and pulled me toward him. “Are you a fag?” he said, his eyes not quite looking into mine.
Now his breath — and an overlay of alcohol did little to mute it — smelled like nothing so much as a chicken coop. His skin, moreover, glistening with sweat despite the moderate temperature, was riddled with acne scars (the remnants of a likely bleak adolescence). And yes, his grip hurt a lot. But what I couldn’t help concentrating on was a huge white globule of snot that was hanging precariously from one of his nostrils.
“I think you’re a fag,” he continued, squeezing my stomach harder and grinning at his friends. “And you know what? I don’t like fags.”
With that my focus shifted to his brain. I think of stupidity as more often than not willful, as a way of shutting out the complexities and ambiguities of life. But this guy’s stupidity wasn’t a choice he was making. No, it was clearly congenital. He was the grim product of his family history, of generations of inbreeding with other people from New Jersey.
And registering then the full sweep of his stupidity, his evident violence-prone derangement, his heft and his inebriation (not to mention the booger and the prospect of it landing on me), I felt a very real panic. And what I started to say was: “Hey, you’ve got the wrong guy. I’m straight, man. I’m married. I even have a kid. Not everybody in the Village is queer, you know? Believe me, I share your disgust. Of course, it’s a perversion. The AMA and the American Psychological Association really caved in on this one, didn’t they?”
But, no, Jesus, I didn’t say that. My pathetic reflex was quickly interrupted by an intuitive recognition of a large reward to be gained here — a recognition that was joined by a feeling of elation and a sense of abandon. (Had I connected to my purpose?) And what I said instead was, “Let go of me, asshole.”
When, grinning more, he didn’t let go, and after taking quick stock of the resources that were available to me — the cigarette I held and the single file approach of two very tall guys with gym bags who by all appearances were oblivious to what was going on and about to push past us — I said to him: “Do your parents know you boys are in the big city by yourselves?”
And then, the cigarette between my fingers and my fingers clenched into a fist, I hit him in the face.
It was hardly what you’d call a devastating punch, but the lit end of the cigarette more than compensated for the limitations of my swing. Crying out, he freed my stomach immediately and before he could retaliate — or his buddies, who rose in unison, could react with more than a “What the fuck!” — I darted, with an agility it amazed me to learn I still possessed, between the gym guys. Ignorant of my circumstance, or indifferent to it, they were, in any case, visibly irritated by my abrupt intrusion. So, hanging with them for only a few yards, I reluctantly abandoned the shield they provided to less than graciously barge ahead of a group of tourists who were just then emerging from a restaurant and starting up the block. From there on, muttering “excuse me” and “sorry” multiple times, I seized upon every space that presented itself and, twisting and lunging, stumbling once, but not falling, I finally arrived at the relatively open expanse of Sheridan Square, where I turned right on Seventh Avenue.
As I headed north, alternately running and marching double-time, I was certain that the feral Jersey boys were right behind me and I didn’t want to look back. But when I studied the faces of people coming toward me from the opposite direction, I saw no alarm in them, no sign, in their expressions, that danger lurked at my rear. And when, three blocks later at Charles Street, I dared to stop and turn around, my adversaries were nowhere to be seen.
At that juncture, with the adrenaline evacuating my blood and my heartbeat returning to its normal cadence, I realized that all of my symptoms had vanished and I began to feel good in every imaginable way. In fact, for the next few days (for about as long as the welt on my stomach and a blister on my knuckle lasted) I was buoyant. I felt like what I’d needed to feel like. I felt like a survivor.
And the thing was that when I came down, when my high evaporated and I settled back, as it were, into my body, my symptoms remained gone and I was something like comfortable with my body. I understood, of course, that in the risk and challenge department the feat I’d apparently devised for myself hadn’t been all that heroic. Still, I’d succeeded in winning a measurable victory and I’d learned, in the process, that my body was not without a lingering capability or two.
With this knowledge to fortify me I had my balance back. And indeed, my mirror reflected, such as it was, my full height again.
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COPYRIGHT NOTICE
© 2008 Robert Levin |
STORYMANIA PUBLICATION DATE
May 2026 |
NUMBER OF TIMES TITLE VIEWED
2322
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