When Mike Manderlin was a high school freshman inspecting the Castro Valley High football team’s weight room for the first time, he felt entitled, perhaps because he was a national Junior Olympic Weightlifting champion, to make harsh criticisms of the gym’s dumbbell deficits and ergonomic defects. Senior linebacker Erik Simonson was chafed by the know-it-all freshman, and between reps of barbell military presses he curled his mouth like a professional comedian from the Don Rickles school and barked, “Is someone paying you to be an asshole, Manderlin, or are you just doing volunteer work?”
The entire Castro Valley football team laughed at Simonson’s snide remark. Even Mike appreciated the wit of Simonson’s expertly delivered joke told at Mike’s expense. But deep down he felt the wound of humiliation that would drive him into the recesses of his mind, a place he called his Inner Life. He retreated from the weight room, went inside the locker and sat on a bench while imagining himself making a quick comeback to Erik Simonson. “No, my asshole campaign isn’t volunteer work,” he imagined himself saying. “It’s community service for drunk driving.” He imagined the entire football team laughing and watching Simonson, the aspiring comedian, put back in his place. Of course, none of this happened except in Mike’s Inner Life, a sanctuary from his sense of slow-wittedness, inadequacy and mediocrity, a place where the world did not reject him but loved him and greeted him with the cheer of a good-sized marching band.
Looking at the arc of Mike Manderlin’s life narrative was to see an Inner Life that continued to grow and grow unabated, through childhood, young adulthood, and middle age, and become a sanctuary from the anxieties that would plague and oftentimes overwhelm him.
His Inner Life became most active when, as a middle-aged man with a wife and twin daughters, he sat down to his ebony Yamaha mini grand piano and played recitals for a variety of imaginary audiences, mostly acquaintances from his late teens and early twenties. He played homespun ballades and nocturnes for the cheerleaders that used to visit his house when he was in high school, long before he developed his piano skills to the advanced level they were today. With an upright piano propped against the cases of merlot and cabernet, he played for his co-workers and the customers at the wine store in Berkeley when he was attending college. The store’s sommelier, James, in fact had a Masters in Musicology from Yale and in Mike’s Inner Life performances James was stunned that this nineteen-year-old stock boy could play such mellifluous, heart-breaking tunes. Mike played for the Parisians who had surrounded him when he really did play in a French café in 1984. They applauded him and saw his Faure-like compositions as a sign of hope that Americans weren’t all vulgar philistines. In that same year, Mike played for a platoon of Soviet army soldiers at a hotel restaurant in Moscow. With looks of mockery and derision, the sleep-deprived, disheveled soldiers waved him over to their table after his recital and demanded he join them in a round of warm beer. This was actually a true story, but Mike included it in his Inner Life anyway though with the usual embellishments, including a revised, less sneering countenance of the soldiers. Mike played for his college classmates when attending their fiction workshop professor’s house, and as he dazzled them with a glissando-laden etude he could hear them whispering that perhaps Mike’s fiction writing, while promising in its Kafkaesque leanings, was not his true vocation after all but that he should be writing film scores for Hollywood.
In accordance with his Inner Life’s soothing narrative, all of these imaginary recitals awakened a beauty to his listeners’ existence that they had never known before. For days, weeks, months, even years, their contemplation of his piano recital would tug at their hearts and give them that faraway, melancholy stare that affirmed there is a Higher Reality to be embraced instead of the culture’s crass consumerism. Over their lifetimes, many of Mike’s listeners would have mystical dreams accompanied by his heavenly piano playing. These dreams were so acute many underwent spiritual conversions compelling them to delete their naval-gazing social media accounts and volunteer their services at local soup kitchens, animal rescue agencies, and international habitat societies.
In another Inner Life scenario, people who listened to Mike’s piano recitals enjoyed a source of ethereal sustenance that curtailed their cravings for food. People lined up to spend thousands of dollars to listen to a half-hour recital knowing that this spiritual nourishment would cut down on their calorie consumption and result in a significant weight loss. Of course, Mike gave all the earnings to charities vetted by the world’s most reliable philanthropic philosophers.
Mike didn’t realize it at the time, but his Inner Life made him into an egomaniacal version of Jesus. Whereas the real Jesus, as Mike understood, served others by lowering himself, Mike lavished his audiences with beautiful music through his unbridled self-aggrandizement.
We cannot speak of Mike’s Inner Life without mentioning its constant interruptions and rebuttals. His twin daughters, in the first grade, would jump on his lap while he was playing piano to tell him they needed a My Little Pony bandage for a marginal booboo or to go into tedious detail about some incoherent narrative of a amateur YouTube video they had watched on their iPad. Or his wife would interrupt his piano playing to say, “Oh my God, your butt crack is totally showing right now.”
Sometimes after accommodating his wife and daughters’ interruptions, he could transition back to his Inner Life, but sometimes the interruptions and rebuttals were too involved and he’d have to forgo his Inner Life for the day. Part of his maturation process was realizing that he would have to place his Inner Life on hiatus without losing his temper or becoming sullen. He was consoled by how easy it was for him to disappear into his Inner Life. He could simply from his family chaos by retreating into the bathroom or taking a shower. But nothing pulled him into the Inner Life as richly as his solitary piano playing. It was the crown jewel of his imaginary delights.
Part of Mike’s desire to retreat into his Inner Life was his inability to countenance life’s everyday offenses. As an example, he once made a rare exit from his domestic cave and took his wife to a tofu festival in Los Angeles. The festival didn’t have normal bathrooms. It had port-a-potties. Mike hadn’t used a port-a-potty since he was a little kid, and he must have had a higher tolerance to them back then because what he saw inside the port-a-potty was such an abomination that he went into a deep depression afterwards and had to convalesce in bed for several weeks while listening to motivational podcasts and reading selected passages from the Book of Psalms.
Another source of Mike’s Inner Life was an attempt to “balance the scales” against the hurt and humiliation of being rejected by so many people in the real world. Male friends had “man-dumped him.” Girlfriends had “love-dumped” him. Potential friends had prematurely dumped him before the friendship could even take growth in the soil. What made Mike so repellant was an overbearing demeanor that sucked the life out of people. The default setting for his serious facial expression came from a famous scene in the 1935 movie Les Miserables. There is a man being crushed by a cart, and Frederic March, playing the movie's hero Jean Valjean, gets under the cart, and in a display of superhuman strength, he assumes an expression commonly called the thousand-mile stare, one that is suffused with melancholy compassion for the whole world’s suffering. That was the default setting for Mike’s face. To accentuate it, he sucked in his cheeks to create an illusion of higher cheek bones.
Mike had been too serious for his own good his entire life. For example, as a teenager, he got a job at Taco Bell. He hated wearing the abrasive Dacron shirt that made his back break out with acne. He hated the regulation company hat that kept falling off his big head. He hated cleaning the repulsive bathrooms. But what he hated the most was when he’d see single mothers and their children come inside the eatery and the moms would try to pay for meals with a sack full of coins. With crying children in their arms, these single moms would count scrounged-up pennies and nickels on the counter so they could buy a couple of tacos. It was even worse when these moms would find themselves 12 cents short and hit their foreheads in utter exasperation. Mike told them he’d cover the balance. Then when no one was looking, he’d walk into the freezer box, shut the door, and cry his guts out. One day as he walked out of the freezer box and wiped his eyes, his manager asked him if he was okay. “Never been better,” he said. “I love this job. Taco Bell is the best thing that ever happened to me.” After a few weeks he quit.
Being so serious taxed his energy and others’. His first girlfriend Angelica found his grim disposition intolerable. They once drove to San Francisco “for a night on the town” and he got tired and anxious after an hour and wanted to go home. Angelica said, “As soon as we go anywhere, you always want to go home. It appears you find it impossible to let go and live in the moment. Are you familiar with the word spontaneity?”
He shook his head.
She said, “I suggest you familiarize yourself with that word immediately.”
Then she said, “Speaking of words you don’t understand, you might want to look up uncouth.”
“Uncouth?” he said making a mental note of it so he could look it up in the dictionary later.
Angelica then cried on the Oakland Bay Bridge as they drove back to the East Bay.
A couple more “nights on the town” with her uncouth boyfriend who was incapable of spontaneity and she said, “Mike, you’re a great guy and all, but this isn’t working out.”
“Really? I thought we had a great thing between us.”
“No. Since going out with you, I feel like an essential part of me has died. I’m proposing that we take a breather.”
“A breather? For how long?”
“Indefinitely.”
He didn’t even know the meaning of the word indefinitely, but for his pride’s sake he pretended he did. He said, “Okay, we’ll take a breather . . . indefinitely.”
He was too dumb to realize that his girlfriend had just broken up with him. It was only an hour later when he was in his pajamas and alone in his room that he got out his dictionary and a magnifying glass and looked up his girlfriend’s “vocabulary words.”
The first word he looked up was uncouth. That word meant he was a lame moron.
The second word he looked up was indefinitely. His girlfriend not wanting to see him indefinitely meant she did not want to see him forever.
In his pajamas squinting at tiny dictionary print with a magnifying glass, he was like Sherlock Holmes trying to figure out the mystery of what Angelica had said to him. And the mystery was unfolding before his eyes: He had been dumped.
Whenever Mike thought of the emasculation resulting from his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend dumping him using “vocabulary words” he later had to look up in the dictionary, he’d sit down at his piano and retreat into his Inner Life. There he could enjoy a sweet morsel of love and acceptance.
Of all the audiences he played for during these Inner Life piano recitals, the one that dominated his imagination above all was performing for two sisters and their mother from his church days in the early 1980s when he was in his late teens and in a state of upheaval from a recent religious conversion. While attending a megachurch, he met a pair of beautiful sisters. He didn’t remember their names or if they were fraternal twins or a year apart. In his Inner Life, the leaner one was Jennifer and the more voluptuous one was Lynn. Jennifer was the more witty and sarcastic, which he found more appealing, so in his fantasy he was dating her. He had never met the sisters’ mother, but in his Inner Life he decided she was an attractive piano instructor, and her name was Roberta.
The piano recital for Jennifer, Lynn, and their mother coincided with his competitive bodybuilding days when he was runner up in the 1981 Mr. Teenage San Francisco. He was lean and muscular in a way that made women make passes at his svelte physique and chiseled cheek bones. His 185-pound body was quite a contrast between and the one he had decades later, well fed in the Southern Californian suburbs with a wife and twin daughters. He was now a husky 240 pounds and wearing a 38 pant size.
We can’t say his Inner Life was a complete delusion, for it was true his real piano playing was pleasing to the ears. Neighbors heard him play, especially during the summer months when the screen door allowed his piano songs to resound freely across the neighborhood, and they would compliment him when they saw him. His neighbors’ expressed listening pleasure, however, did not gratify him like his make-believe audiences whom he played for as he imagined himself to be in his teens and early twenties.
Nor can we say that some of this Inner Life did not actualize in some way or other. For example, his cheerleader acquaintances from high school were now his Facebook friends and they would “like” and comment favorably on some of the piano videos he had posted.
It should be noted that Mike despised himself for receiving any gratification at all from the attention he received from his postings on Facebook and YouTube. He knew seeking the approval and attention of others to repair one’s tattered self-esteem was a dead-end. Sometimes he’d get on his knees and say a prayer like this: “Only God can complete my soul. If I’m not completed by God, I fear I will try to fill my soul with luxury watches, money, friendships, social media followers and likes, and essentially live a life of self-destruction and futility.”
He also knew his Inner Life was undeniably creepy, the kind of thing that afflicted crazy loners, alcoholic, unemployed, fat, middle-aged men who lived in their mothers’ basements and barked beer-soaked, paranoid, rage-filled diatribes on AM talk radio, but he could not help himself. In spite of the self-loathing his Inner Life caused him, it was a compulsion he could not control.
To avoid appearing creepy and egotistical in his Inner Life recitals, it was important that Mike created a humble persona. In the case of Jennifer, the girl he met at the megachurch, he was always on a first date with Jennifer and playing a grand piano inside her parents’ living room. The back story was he had sold a film score to Disney and was about to move to Hollywood to compose movie scores full-time. After making this announcement, he would assume a humble pose and say, “I can’t let this success get to my head. It’s important that I stay grounded right now. Scriptures warn us of living for the ego.”
Surprisingly enough, getting hired at Disney was not that farfetched because Mike’s maternal grandfather, a Jewish leftist with strong ties to the Movement, was close friends with a fellow lefty who was a chief writer at Disney in the early 1980s. This writer once invited Mike and his grandfather to eat lunch with him at the Disney studio cafeteria as he hinted that he might be able to get Mike a writing job.
One plot twist Mike wouldn’t tell Jennifer, however, was that this writer was eventually arrested in Paris by Interpol when the Peugeot station wagon he was driving was revealed to be full of illegal weapons. Under circumstances that were unclear to Mike, this leftist writer was of course terminated from Disney but managed to escape extradition to the United States and was spending the rest of his days in Nicaragua. It fascinated Mike that this true tidbit was somehow even more strange than the fictions he produced for his Inner Life.
Another important part of this first date with Jennifer and the dates that followed was that he was always chaste. He never made a move on Jennifer and in spite of his desirable physique evidenced by his winning runner up in the Mr. Teenage San Francisco, he impressed her with his Christian piety. In one of his fantasies it was actually she who had made a move on him, and he gently rebuked her reminding her of their pledges to chastity and how any compromises would affect their relationship in the long-term. Teary eyed, Jennifer would thank him for his inner strength, which evidenced a love for her so profound she bore the conviction that no man on earth could ever match it.
In the real world, not to be confused with Mike’s Inner Life, there was one song in particular he had composed that he believed to be worthy of being the song that would be his ticket for Disney, the one song he would play for Jennifer on their first date. When Jennifer, her sister Lynn, and her mother Roberta cried in tears over the surprising beauty of this song—a stunning piece by the runner up in the most recent Mr. Teenage San Francisco no less—Mike imagined himself saying, “I know this sounds corny, but I actually thanked God for helping me to write that song. I mean, I don’t have a very high self-esteem and I never thought something so beautiful could come out of me. So I got down on my knees and thanked God. My grandfather on my father’s side prayed on his knees every night, so I guess I take after him.”
“Was he a Christian?” Roberta asked.
“Catholic. Roman Catholic.”
She nodded. “And on your mom’s side?”
“We’re Ashkenazi Jews from Poland.”
“How did you get saved?”
“Why God pitied me I’ll never know.”
“It’s a miracle.”
Sometimes Mike was concerned that the ideal self he created was too perfect to be plausible. “I’m just too good to be true,” he worried. “Jennifer will suspect I’m a fraud.” Worried that he had made himself into an unbelievable Superman, Mike would revise the Inner Life first date, putting in shadings of imperfections that would make him more human and realistic. Perhaps, for example, he would make a mistake at the piano and apologize for being so nervous. Or while drinking a diet soda with Jennifer inside a restaurant, he would accidentally jam the straw up his nostril and it would get stuck until a stream of carbonated beverage flowed all over his shirt. These flaws would not only make him more human, but give the date hilarity and verisimilitude.
We should make it clear that not all of Mike’s Inner Life scenarios, as he referred to them, were piano-based. He also imagined himself being an amazing father, a stark contrast from the reluctant father he was. As a real father, he was more interested in the idea of fathering than he was in actually doing it. For example, he would be reading a book about helping “your child reach her full potential” when his twins would interrupt him to play, upon which he would say, “Not now, girls, I’m busy reading a book about parenting.” His Inner Life could not tolerate such parental neglect. Once in the shower he was having an imaginary conversation with his six-year-old daughters, imagining them to be in their teens. He was explaining that his parents never wanted children and left him and his younger brother unattended.
“We were on our own. Not that my mom and dad were bad people. They were just too self-involved to deal with us.”
“What about you, Dad?” one of them asked. “Did you want kids?”
“I could not imagine living life without either of you. Both of you are an inseparable part of my existence.”
Here the Inner Life allowed him to see that while he resented many of childrearing’s challenges—especially the daily task of unzipping his twins’ backpacks and retrieving stacks of tedious memos, field trip permission slips, and homework—he truly did love his daughters and they had indeed become an inseparable part of his self. This realization—that he loved his daughters so deeply and could communicate this fact with such warmth and candor—made him cry uncontrollably in the shower. What a sensitive, caring father he was after all.
Mike’s compulsion to retreat into his Inner Life started in his early childhood. It was a way of coping with his mother’s mental illness, which would cause his mother, wearing a nightgown and slippers, to go on abrupt walks away from the house and to talk endlessly to strangers, prompting some to call the police. Sometimes Mike and his father would have to drive around the neighborhood at night to track her down. During extreme bouts of her perambulatory adventures, his mother would have to be institutionalized and Mike would have to spend most of his time alone. Mike taught himself how to prefer the pleasures of solitude and the satisfactions the Inner Life afforded him. By the time he was nine, he invented Dice Baseball, a game that required two dice and box score sheets. He played “his team,” the Oakland Athletics against their opponents for full 162-game seasons, including playoffs, in a period of about two weeks, then would play the entire season over and over for perpetuity. Mike recorded statistics, a laborious albeit satisfying procedure, and would play this game from eight in the morning till bedtime. During Dice Baseball, Mike announced the games, imitating the vocal inflexions of the Oakland Athletics’ real broadcaster Monte Moore. Mike even conducted post-game interviews, playing both the role of Monte Moore and the baseball player, be it Reggie Jackson, Sal Bando, or Vida Blue. The interviews were captured on a Panasonic tape recorder. For visual aids, Mike had the baseball cards for each player. Once while playing Dice Baseball in the living room where his father was watching television, his father nonchalantly picked up a Bert “Campy” Campaneris baseball card and used inserted the card between his two teeth to remove some steak gristle, prompting Mike to cry in protest. From thereon Mike played Dice Baseball games in the privacy of his bedroom. He learned early on that the Inner Life is best lived in solitude.
During the same time as his Dice Baseball, Mike had created another Inner Life scenario that foreshadowed his lifelong obsession with religion. Here the Inner Life was based on spite. His neighborhood friend, Gordon War, a Mormon, used to tell him about Jesus, how Jesus was raised from the dead and talked to people. Mike imagined this occurrence happening in modern times and Jesus knocking on neighborhood doors and promoting his wares like the Avon lady. But Gordon’s faith is not what angered Mike. It was a Yahtzee game they played one afternoon in Gordon’s garage. Mike got into an argument with Gordon about how he should get another roll of the dice since one fell off the table and landed on the ground, but Gordon would have none of it. He took his turn while shaking his head with a smug expression. Mike had never seen anyone smile with such smugness before. It was a smugness so odious Mike could not let go of it and in fact he had recurring dreams that Gordon was making that same expression of smug refusal and that Mike slapped the arrogant grin off Gordon’s face. But the dream did not satisfy Mike’s spite. He imagined a scenario, a giant block party in which all the neighbor’s were at a banquet table and eating with a king. The table and the feast’s participants were elevated about fifty feet above the neighborhood and they ate the overflowing food while laughing with great joy. Meanwhile, Gordon had to watch the feast from the garage where he was chained to the water heater and forced to listen to what Mike believed to be the most depressing song ever—Frank Sinatra’s “It Was a Very Good Year.” With great satisfaction, Mike lay in bed at night and replayed this scenario while soothing himself into a deep sleep. It was only later, in his late teens when had his religious conversion, that Mike saw the Banquet in the Sky and Gordon’s consignment to the outer darkness as biblical representations of heaven and hell.
Mike’s Inner Life took a sharp turn later in life when his classmate Erik Simonson became a nationally-known comedian. He had a TV sitcom, several televised comedy specials, and a popular podcast. Simonson interviewed other successful comedians and they would talk about smoking fine cigars and drinking expensive whiskey. Simonson’s success afflicted Mike with envy. Why didn’t I think of becoming a comedian instead of a boring college English instructor? I’m funny. I’m edgy. I’m naturally sarcastic. My students are always telling me that I should have tried out for a career in comedy. They say I make funny faces and talk in hilarious cartoon voices. But he knew deep in his heart he’d have to work three times as hard to be one-third as funny as the comedians he admired, including the very talented Erik Simonson. Scratching a living as a third-rate comedian, he’d probably live a semi-homeless existence in the back seat of broken-down cars and roach-infested hotels, but in his Inner Life he was a prominent writer of TV and movie scripts for comedies. Simonson invited him to be on his podcast to sit down and talk about Mike’s amazing career with Disney studios and how the man who got him a writing job was an political extremist now living under an assumed identity in Nicaragua. The podcast’s popularity would lead to invites for comedian poker games where the funniest men in the world would smoke cigars and drink whiskey and tell ribald stories of their past. Mike would be one of them. He shared their dyspeptic vision of the human race, after all. He belonged to their misanthropic Funny Man club.
This new dimension of Mike’s Inner Life proved short-lived. He heard on Erik Simonson’s podcast that he was performing at a comedy club in Hermosa Beach, a close ten minutes from Mike’s house. He made a rare foray into the outside world and attended the performance. He watched as Simonson, sporting a silver pony tail, a bald pate, and his distinctive broad hero’s chin, repeated much of the same material he used in a recent cable TV special. He talked about his girlfriend and him living in Los Angeles and how their chickens and cats were being taken by coyotes. Mike was impressed that Simonson could take material as ghastly as losing one’s pets and turn it into a hilarity. The part where Simonson described himself wearing nothing but boxer shorts while chasing a coyote and a rooster in his back yard had the crowd laughing hysterically, but all the while Mike silently crossed his arms and thought, “I could do better.”
When Simonson was done with his material, Mike went to the backstage and tracked down his classmate. Behind the curtains, the sweating Simonson was talking to what appeared to be two couples who were sycophantically praising the comedian’s performance. Mike interrupted them. “Erik, remember me? Mike Manderlin? The gym? Is someone paying you to be an asshole or are you just doing volunteer work? Remember?”
“Manderlin, you’re a dick. Get the fuck out of here.”
At first, Mike thought this was comedian speak for being nice. Comedians called fellow comedians bad names to show their affection. Then to reinforce Mike’s sense that there was promising camaraderie between them, Simonson said, “Hey, Manderlin, did you brush your teeth before coming here?”
“Yeah, how did you know?”
“Because you’ve got white crusty shit all over your lips, doofus. Anyway, I don’t feel like making a connection with you. I didn’t like you in high school, and I don’t like you now. Get the hell out.”
Was Simonson being sarcastic? Was this just part of the natural blistering amity between two funny guys?
“You heard me, Manderlin, get the fuck out of here before I have to call security.”
The comedian’s admiring fans looked at Mike derisively and laughed. In that instant he knew he had been ordered to leave.
Driving home, he felt his cheeks burn with shame and humiliation. How dumb was he to think he could make a connection with Erik Simonson, that they were two funny souls bonded by their comic talents. The pain became so intense that as Mike slogged south on the Pacific Coast Highway, he felt like his childhood friend Gordon War chained to his garage’s water heater as Sinatra crooned “It Was a Very Good Year.” Simonson and his comedian friends laughed and gorged on succulent dishes at a lavish feast, but Mike wasn’t invited. He was in a dark garage forced to listen to the most miserable song ever written over and over and over again for all eternity.
As he drove through the traffic, he retreated into his Inner Life where he heard a piano melody he had never heard before. It may have been he most beautiful melody he had ever heard. He was comforted by the knowledge that he would be able to turn this melody into a beautiful piano composition. Tomorrow he would perform it for Jennifer, her sister, and their mother. He only hoped the music wasn’t too beautiful because they might not believe he had really written it. They might dismiss him as a fraud, a plagiarizer, and a needy psychopath, which would ruin everything. He would make sure his performance was believable and that it felt authentic. Afterwards, the mother would invite him to stay for dinner. He would say no, he really shouldn’t, but she would insist that he stay. It would be no ordinary dinner, she would assure him. It would be an all-out feast, and his piano performance for the dinner guests would make them all love him as much as she and her daughters did. It was an invitation he could not refuse.
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