The Man on the Moon
Sympathy is easy, Armstrong. But you needed empathy, and that, the public decided, was too much to give.
Neil Armstrong was born on August 5, 1930, and died on August 25, 2012. This essay was originally published in Gulf Coast, Summer/Fall 2017. I made this playlist in 2014 when I started writing this essay.
Discovery
The Moon will not be caught or lassoed, and this is the first lie children are told. When someone promises to pull the Moon down for you, do not believe them. It cannot be done.
Among wars, America pushes against her seams. Teenage boys sit in movie palace chairs so stiff their hips ache when they leave and watch John Wayne rise like Zeus from the screen. Horseback adventures, treasure to be taken, women to be had, golden suns setting across the West, guns slinging back inside holsters with smoke still moving from black powder barrels.
When Neil Armstrong was a boy, he saw a honey bee drown in its quarry and realized how deep the sticky pit of desire could be. He constructed wings from oak branches on a tree-lined Ohio street, he greased his new baseball mitt, baked it in the oven, laced up his sneakers.
He was too young to know that he would be magnificent, but he would be handsome yet. There are so few frontiers left for boy Neil, there is so little left that is unknown. But he knows differently – there is something heavy hanging over us, and some say that it tastes like cheese.
Later, an Eagle Scout at 16, Neil looks toward the sky. The fresh ink of an earned pilot’s license dries surrounded by the billowing grass of an Ohio airfield, father smiling proudly on. The driver’s license comes later.
I catch him in this moment, observe him, entranced in the transformation of boys absorbing dreams that sink into bone marrow for navigational purposes later in life, when bike tires become truck tires, when cotton shirts become United States Navy uniforms.
✷
How do I tell him that I love him as he drifts so far from us toward the gravitational pull of the Moon? I hear him promising to bring the Moon home with him, tug it from the stars, set it at my feet. To me, he smells like demolition, a street lined with hoisted pianos. One mechanical malfunction. A picnic on an ant hill. Wet fire kindling. I want him, all of him, so much of this desire is cyclical. I could tell him now that he will gain the Moon, but what will he dream of then?
I am dreaming of him on a plane ride north, and when we touch down, the passengers fidget. The aircraft slows, taxis its way to the terminal where we all must wait for the doors to be secured before opening once again. Bags thunking from overhead compartments, fingertips picking the tops of seats, feet tapping in unsteady rhythms. This thick impatience fills me, and I stand with them. I wrap my scarf around my neck because there is snow on the ground, and I have forgotten what the icy winter feels like on my cheeks, untouched by frost in the months I have spent in the Southwest.
I move with this impatience because I will be trampled, left behind if I do not. But I turn – see Neil there, sitting where I was. Table tray down, scribbling out math equations on gridded paper in pencil, taking advantage of each lasting second. I am in love with him because I could once imagine myself like him, note-taking, speeding toward something looming and briny.
But the girlhood fascination left me two weeks ago when the bee hives spilled over the highway and I watched the swarms fly out into the air, uncaged. The beekeepers ran, trying to collect the bees, hustle them into the overturned truck. But they were too late. There was too much ambition in the air; the honey bees were flying too quickly to be stopped.
Neil tugs at my wrist when it’s time to move down the aisle of the plane toward winter. I still love him anyways.
✷
The stories of Edwards Air Force base swim around us as we step into the hallway and see the photographs. The first clamoring of space reaches Neil and the public, seems an impossibility. He applies to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the high speed flight station, because he knows something that I do not.
He stands next to me in the hallway, points to a photo of the Joshua trees. He holds the longest X-15 flight in time and distance from the ground track. Returning from a practice flight, he swings too far, too fast, misses the landing. Over the radio, Neil tells the flight controller he wants to see the trees. He travels farther and farther until he is 40 miles south. He turns back, lands on the far side of the base, does not strike a single Joshua tree in the field.
Neil phones the Armstrong home in 1962, tells his father of his selection one week before he is announced to be a part of NASA’s New Nine. The nine men who will take us to the Moon. He goes home each night to his wife, speaks unceremoniously of the particulars and excitedly of the shuttle. On the Moon, he knows, nothing is washed away. The rock does not fold back on itself.
He tells his wife: Everything that touches the surface will stay.
✷
I still wait because I am still in love. My body is a hymn that Armstrong wasn’t baptized to sing, a springboard for his words made heavy on mathematical terms. He speaks of John Wayne to himself at night when the kitchen light roars bright, pencil swinging between fingers like a black powder prop in dexterous hands, illuminating equations that can be no more than three-fifths of an inch wrong. He thinks that when it rains the sky is opening for him, for his catapulting out to the Sea of Tranquility.
He places his hands flat on the buttoned boards in the control room time and time again, waiting for his countdown. He feels the engines whirring into something that sounds like the harmonica openings of the Wayne Westerns – those old films he watched at the movie palace when he thought the highest he could ever go was the clouds, that there was nothing beyond there, and the thrill of the pilot’s license meant more than driving a car on highways set like strips of duct tape across the landscape.
Everything I learned of survival, I learned from him. I adjust my body into the cool spots around the bed, I rub out the imprints of my clothing on my skin each night. I miss him, but I do not know why. I eat olives from the jar for breakfast and let the salt burn my lips, my fingertips. I feel his gaze lingering too long at night when he begs me to turn off the light. I keep it on just a little longer than he asks. I cannot bear to do what he tells me, when he tells me. His irritation feels like lustful pins sticking into the nape of my neck, this desire is thick, slow, tastes like honey.
I ask Neil important questions like: in space do you think our bones would stay buried on the Moon? Will you leave something just to prove you were there? If you yell in space, does it reverberate forever? Will you abandon us all, Neil, when you return home?
My timeline on loving him is all wrong, weaving in and out of the myths he left behind. There is no order to this phantom feeling. I do not know exactly when I found him, except that maybe he was always there, waiting for me at the end of a farm road detour.
He speaks to everyone and no one; he will do this for the rest of his life. There is an excitement blooming, conversations behind closed doors deciding who will exit first, who will be the first man on the Moon. They tell him, yes, it will be you, Mr. Armstrong, and do not tell him why. His reluctance to be anything more than Neil Armstrong is palpable. Yet, he nods his head, agrees with his superiors.
He doesn’t even have a Masters, his thesis remained unfinished after he was elected to the New Nine. He feels costumed, like John Wayne. He talks to himself on the car rides home from the station and later, during his walks while in quarantine before the trip. He is conflicted - he believes in a higher power, but he does not know who.
How can I tell him that I hear him? That I know what he will leave behind there in that Texas summertime will stay to meet me. He is in a snow globe on my bedside and I watch his future unfold. Would I tell him to turn back or charge forward? He will keep his humility, but lose his faith.
Americana
What Neil left on the Moon:
Gas stations with metal art installations, dinosaurs on the roof. Pencil-drawn arrows in the margins of library books. Movie Palace seats. Holding Janet’s hand. John Wayne, the smell of gunpowder. Newspaper route, blue bicycle. Winter air in coal towns. Naval Aviator uniform, crisp, starched. Televisions in wood casings. Black coffee. Blonde girls, red striped swimsuits. Coney Island hot dogs. Football spinning on a college desk. How to field strip an M1 rifle. Stalks of corn strangling the clouds. Hawaii license plate on Ohio streets. Spaghetti dinners on TV trays. Dancing in the gym. Mud-soaked jeans, steel-toed boots. A Chevy without air bags, anti-lock brakes. Hank Williams in the doghouse. Whiskey and rye. Pink carnation, pickup truck. Servicemen with only one night of leave.
A field of Joshua trees, unstruck. Emergency evacuation plans. Cuban Missile Crisis. White paper gridded, blue lines. Calculations three-fifths of an inch wrong. Phantom scent of burnt flesh. Humming computers vibrating the desks. Antiseptic in doctor’s office, dentist’s chair. Bomb drill. Midnight diner dinner. Ballpoint pen click in the control room. Thick, hellish Texas summertime. Florida swamp, alligator on the roadside. One camera. Oak branches for airplane wings.
✷
What I found:
John Wayne’s leather vest at the Smithsonian. Pink skirt-suit, blood spattered, pillbox hat. Static electricity, blue sparks on blanket. Bathroom mirror, fogged. Single snow globe with spaceship inside. The levee was dry. Sequined cowboy boots, $973. Turquoise and yellow food trucks. Amity Island. Pink eraser shavings, stuck to denim. Jeep Wrangler, desert road. Song of the South. Willie Nelson’s two braids, red bandana. Bloody Mary Morning. Crochet guitar strap. The marching band refused to yield. Gilded astronaut-shaped awards. Video killed the radio star. Buy the world a Coke. Glass table, credit card scrape, dollar bill roll. Ripped black tights. Red lipstick smeared over freckled lips. Dewy Grey Goose bottles. Dirk Diggler. Midnight Cowboy. Handlebar mustache.
If it keeps on raining, the levee’s going to break. Rocky Mountain Way. Crushed beer can, splitting thumb. Banana-flavored condoms. Campfires at the reservoir. White cotton dress, wooden platform sandals. Sprained ankle, purple, blue. Saltwater crushing sandcastles. The Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. Fruit flavored cigarette smoke. Budweiser swimsuit. They caught the last train for the coast. Black liquid eyeliner, white pillowcases. Peach orchards. Busted lip. The White Horse. Marshmallow melting on fingertips, smeared across collarbones. Grow old with me. Broken glass bottles tossed over balconies.
American woman –
stay away from me.
Squandering
He lived quietly, seamlessly in the shards of history. He needle-pricked a single spacesuit pocket, carried a Moon rock home with him, locked it in a desk drawer. He held it, licked it when he wanted to feel closer to dying.
Armstrong, have you forsaken me yet? School children know your name, cite the date of the landing from memory for credit on tests, and yet they do not know you. I can’t remember you sans spacesuit, sans brilliant clip of the grey, pocked Moon. The Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, honorary doctorates from uncountable universities graced the walls of your study. What is it that you learned?
I know your eyes turned to ember in 1986 as the Challenger burst, too full of ambition and more fresh hope than the atmosphere could handle. And again in 2003, when the Columbia never made it home. We dug thick graves in your name, Armstrong, but we did not attend your funeral. Do you forgive me? Could you? Buried at sea, in the Atlantic, I taste you every time my toes touch the surf.
A confession for you now, Neil. Of all the things I did in the summer you died, amidst all of the cowboys I slept next to or with or against, of all the cheap beer I spilled down white cotton dresses from stumbling down dark farm roads toward something looming and briny, of all these things, Neil, there is still the steaming August day in the house built the year you were born on the coast of the sea. I emptied the attic of the old top-floor apartment I rented because I promised the landlady I would because she was forgetting things, like where her own house was and the color of John Wayne’s eyes and those eyes mattered to her at some point in her girlhood, Neil. Just like his dusty cowboy hat did to you.
I threw away everything like she asked: the old moth-eaten blankets, the empty yellowed wine bottles, the chocolate chip cookie recipes, the wooden crate file cabinets of papers, receipts, and old news that she thought would mean something one day. And that’s where I found you, Neil, two days after you died. The headline so simple. Man on the Moon, the Centre County Times of State College, Pennsylvania, July 1969. Your name in smaller print toward the top of the page and I knew from then on you probably would not leave me.
When you disappeared into your cave of anonymity, when you stopped giving autographs because they were being sold, when you sued your barber for selling locks of your hair, Armstrong, the world could not understand what it was you were hiding from. But in your deep sleep after I turned out the light, I heard your voice rising above the darkness, over and over.
I do not want to be responsible for the others.
Perhaps it was because you, too, had forgotten the color of John Wayne’s eyes or the kind of black powder prop he used when he was aiming to revenge his father. Every movie set, every vest with fringe, every nickel it cost you. You were an idol, too, Neil. Did you forget how much you once meant? Or did you never notice at all?
Sympathy is easy, Armstrong. The world knows how to peer downward. But you needed empathy, and that, the public decided, was too much to give. Eye-level with tragedy – but you could manage it. You saw the brutal Earth turn tender as you spun in Apollo 11. You could not reconcile the quiet blue with the red of spilled blood, the yellow of famine, the green of disease. You saw the edge of the knife blur, and as you spun back toward your home, you saw it sharpen again. I was waiting for favorable conditions to admit: maybe I was wrong in believing your faith would leave you, but what you learned as you spun around the distant blue marble, is that favorable conditions do not come. It is only us and the unbearable nothingness beyond.
✷
Perhaps your quietest desire of all, Neil, was not where you went – but where you lay. The moon may not be caught or lassoed; it moves with the sea.
Thank you for reading. If this stayed with you, a single 🫧 Lava Drop helps keep the light on.