The Hardyman | Page 2

relentless demands
of his undeniable penis.
Try as he might, stare as he would, Jack had found that he could not
bring his furtive exercises to what other boys in his class had described
with graphic enthusiasm to be the appropriately explosive conclusion.
When almost there, his mind would set off on a different path than the
road down which his body was pointing. The women on the pages
would take on strange, disruptive metamorphoses. The leggy brunette
grew a hand from behind her head that waved distractingly at him. The
big bosomed blonde sprouted a third breast with a disarmingly winking
eye for a nipple. Jack's desires were an enigma to him.
It wasn't until the school year had ended and the blistering summer had
set in that Jack was driven from his sweaty seclusion. To the red velour
seats dappled with chewed-up bubblegum and slick black floors coated
in melted butter of the local movie theater he went. There, he looked
into the dark movie-house sky hanging over him and saw on its
towering screen a woman who was altogether unlike his silent mother,
the incomprehensible girls of the eighth-grade, or the silent ladies of his
X-rated magazines.
Atop her head a yellow beacon flashed and gyrated as if heralding her
advent into Jack's life. Her two enormous metal arms reached our to
him as if in eager expectation of his lover's embrace. Her robot legs

pitched her forward in a gait not dissimilar to the manner by which
Frankenstein's monster had staggered towards its maker. In the recesses
of his mind, Jack knew that this was a movie, that this was a made-up
character, that this actress was simply playing a role. Regardless, Jack
was paralyzed by her presence. She administered punishing left-hand
and right-hand blows to her alien attacker, shooting her flame-throwers
shamelessly into the air, revving her engines so her robot claws
gnashed and snarled at the universe around her. When she fell into a
full-body sprawl atop her quarry, grinding her hips down into it, it took
everything Jack had not to fall into pieces. I have seen the mother lode,
he realized.
On the movie screen, the male android, white internal fluids leaking,
croaked at the woman, "Not bad--for a human." With that, young Jack
promptly came in his pants.
3
Sixteen years of Jack's life passed by him. He went to high school. He
went to college. He received a bachelor's degree. He became an
engineer. He bought a medium-sized house. He purchased a mid-level
car. He went to work in a tall steel tower. He came home to a small
stucco house. That was his life.
As an administrative engineer employed by the train system of the city
in which he lived, Jack had spent the last four years overseeing the
endless reams of printed materials related to the city's myriad train
routes. Every day, he worked diligently at his desk, reminding himself
what a privilege it was to be one of the many cogs in this well-oiled
machine. Below him, and because of him, the city's engines onward
churned.
His friends were few and far between. His extracurricular interests were
cursory. His relationship to the opposite sex was superficial. Women
were like a fleet of automobiles, the model of which he could never
quite make out. In his brief romantic relationships, the woman would
invariably look to him for some kind of emotional connection that he
could never parrot to her satisfaction. At those times, a vision of the

mechanical woman would erect herself in his mind's eye, and Jack
would go drifting off with her, leaving the real woman's distantly
frowning face behind him.
As Jack's life wore on, the number of unprocessed files atop his desk
grew taller and the grip of his hand around his remote control grew
tighter. It seemed to him that a man could engage in occasional acts of
intercourse, speak politely to his mother on the phone every weekend,
and jump out of an airplane along with several male co-workers one
Labor Day weekend, but all the women would expect him to ejaculate
at the drop of a hat, his mother would invariably sigh disappointedly
just before hanging up, and if he did ever go skydiving with his
coworkers again, he had the distinct impression that he would be the
one coming back down to Earth with his parachute wrapped around
him like a funereal shroud.
The aging bachelor who lived across the street from him had recently
spent all of his free-time arranging ten marble statues of naked
Greco-Roman male gods in a semi-circle on his front lawn, erected a
fence around the perimeter of the compound, and, upon it, in curling
metal letters, proclaimed the place YOUNGWOOD. Coming home to
that sight every