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Yo-Yo | Oct 08 2001

In the bus station a man displayed stuffed dolls on a blanket. Ugly stuffed dolls. Were they pigs? Whatever they were, they were ugly. Seeing this, Paul remembered something he’d seen while stuck in traffic with Liz near the Holland Tunnel. A man walked between the lanes of cars carrying a small cardboard box and playing with what was presumably a glow-in-the-dark yo-yo. I say presumably because there was too much light (this being morning) to confirm that the yo-yo glowed. As the man ambled past, Paul muttered, as much to himself as to Liz, “What pain,” this being a secret reference (secret in the sense that he never bothered to explain it to Liz) to a poem he’d heard perhaps twenty years before, a poem about a man who together with his girlfriend watches a boy miss a ball in a Little League baseball game – “The ball rolled between the boy’s legs. What pain” – a poem by a man who according to Paul’s friends was mentally ill and had spend half his life in mental institutions. Then the yo-yo vendor appeared a second time, having looped around, evidently. Neither time did Paul look at him for more than a second, in part because of how sad it made him feel to watch this person yank his yo-yo up and down and in part because he didn’t want to give the poor man the false hope of making a sale.