All my life I recall hearing adults say that life goes by so quickly, if you blink you’ll miss it and youth is wasted on the young. I didn’t heed a word of it. I perfected the art of being a C student in grammar school and honed that art in high school, finally earning a bachelor’s degree in Average at a state school that encouraged me to drink to excess. I don’t remember where I had my last beer on campus. I don’t remember the last time I walked out of a classroom and I can’t recall the names of half the women I dated. But I do know one thing with absolute, one hundred percent clarity. I wanted that time back.

I graduated with a degree in English and, with not an idealistic or altruistic bone in my body, had no intention of going into the teaching profession. I could only envision dating a high school senior named Mindy or Brandy and soon after being invited to leave my job by a school administrator as armed school guards escorted me to my car to make sure I didn’t wink at any juniors along the way. I was boorish, immature and had no prospects for legitimate employment.

I took a job at a Yacht club after graduation, selling beer and gassing boats and getting tan and smoking cigarettes. I wore a button down short sleeved white shirt with my name in cursive writing on the left breast and the word dock on the right, meaning that’s where I belonged, on the dock, selling beer and sniffing gasoline. Soon enough, each day became the same. I would drink and flirt and rub suntan lotion on my arms and legs and walk up and down the lakefront with the aroma of gasoline, beer and cigarettes tickling my olfactory senses. I was aimless and twenty two years old and the lake water felt magnificent on my feet in the evening, when I would kick off my shoes, take off my dock shirt, open a cold beer and smoke a cigarette while watching the sunset behind the masts of pristine sailboats that bobbed on their moorings with a rhythm that hypnotized me.

Soon enough necessity and keeping up with the recently graduated Joneses would push me in the direction of finding real employment. My roommate knew somebody in an office that pushed papers and typed on a computer and smiled at the boss and faxed important documents and mailed letters with the word priority on the envelope; someone who drank too much on weekends and looked forward to vacations more than a prisoner looks forward to parole. This person was going to see to it that I was granted an interview for an inside sales position. I remember thanking my roommate and then asking him what an inside sales position was.

Like college, I can’t remember certain things about my first job; chains of events and names and faces and how I felt at particular times, involved in instances where things bothered me or made me laugh or made me feel like crying. But I do remember the first day of my new job and that first day led to the present day as much as a connect the dots picture of a duck in a five year old’s coloring book leads from the tip of the bill to the feathers on his butt.

I woke up in a single bed with ten year old sheets that hadn’t been washed in a month. They smelled like an unshowered me. Musty, rank, sweaty and hopeless. I had a Baywatch calendar above my bed I think, loose change on my dresser top, clothes lining the floor like a shag rug. My bills were matted to the window sill by a twenty pound dollar store bucket of laundry detergent. Pigeons sang outside my window. Broken CD jackets lined the top of my closet. A day planner my parents bought me as a gift to celebrate my new job was still in the clear plastic wrapping. An empty two liter bottle of soda collected cigarette butts for the times when I just couldn’t make it outside to the fire escape to smoke.

I looked at my digital alarm clock and realized it couldn’t be 11:46am. I had neglected to set the clock the night before or I had set it incorrectly. It was actually 5:55am. I had gotten up without an alarm for the first time in my life. I wasn’t gung ho about the job in inside sales, I still didn’t know what it meant really. I just couldn’t sleep because I knew I wouldn’t be staring at luxury yachts and majestic sailboats anymore, drinking premium beer compliments of half soused yacht club members, smoking cigarettes and getting the perfect shade of light brown, courtesy of the summer sun and Coppertone lotion.

I dragged myself out of bed as if weighted down and I turned on a shower that couldn’t muster the effort of a solid stream. It was a lukewarm drizzle, as it was every single morning I lived there, but for some reason I had never cared before this particular morning. On day one of the inside sales job, I felt I deserved a solid stream and water hot enough to generate steam on the bathroom mirrors. But alas, as was the status quo, it was not to be.

I put on the only unwrinkled shirt I owned and this happened to be a dress casual office, so Levi’s would suffice and thankfully so. I had brown shoes that were scuffed by endless parties and smelled like beer and I had black shoes that were scuffed by endless bar tours and smelled like beer. My roommate told me once that my shoes should match my belt and I only owned one belt, black, so the black scuffed shoes it was. It hardly mattered, but as I remember it, I thought it was one of the bigger decisions I had to make in my adult life, right up there with do I spend the last six dollars I have in the bank on subway tokens for work or a six pack of beer. On those long, 26 block walks to work, I would curse malt and barley and hops.

I sat on the train and I watched all the zombies on the way to the maze. It didn’t matter what they looked like, what they were dressed in, how old they were, what their nationality happened to be or what they were listening to on their walkmans in pre IPod times, they were all what I call Have Tos. Like me, they had to go to work. They had to get up in the morning. Some had to decide what tie to wear. Some had to have their shoes shined the night before. The Have Tos praying for Friday. The Have Tos riding an elevated, rumbling steel box with filthy windows, reeking like urine and old newspaper ink. The Have Tos surviving. The zombies on the way to the maze.

The three block walk from the train to the front door of my new place of employment as an inside sales zombie was like a death march. I hated the people before I met them. Would there be a long, loud, ear piercing whistle to declare our lunch hour? Would some guy with sweaty armpit stains on his light blue oxford yell Quitting Time? I had been through the interview process and I couldn’t believe they hired me, although they weren’t paying much more than the Yacht Club. I was getting insurance though, although I couldn’t imagine what the hell I would ever need to go to the doctor for. I was just shy of my twenty third birthday. I was still indestructible. The doctor was for old people in their mid thirties and up.

I stood in front of the doors to my new place of employment and I hesitated. Could I go back to the Yacht Club? I felt my tan fading. I tasted the cold beer. I saw the big, beautiful, captivating eyes of nubile twenty something women walking north and south, east and west adjacent to the Yacht Club. Some winked, some looked longer in my direction than they probably needed to, some asked if the beer was cold and some asked me if I had ever been on one of the luxury yachts. I brushed the hair away from my eyes and I felt like crying. Going into this job, in some weird, indescribable way that I couldn’t negotiate in my mind then, was going to close the book on a chapter of my life that I’d never be able to revisit. College was gone, now the Yacht Club too; which to me was a certain extension of college in a way that seemed normal enough.

7:58am oh so many years ago and I opened the door. And here I am. Telling this story about a thirty six year old relatively successful salesman, with no wife, questionable morals and an uncanny ability to stretch the truth in directions that suit me.

Several weeks ago, I sat down at my computer at work at 7am and checked my e-mails. There were questions about expediting orders and price discrepancies and quotes for materials and delivery shortages. I answered all of the e-mails to the best of my ability and delegated tasks to the inside sales staff. I am now an outside sales person, defined as a salesman that calls on current and prospective customers in order to secure orders, build relationships and increase the bottom line for his employers and thusly, through a commission percentage, himself as well. The inside sales people are entry level workers, like me fourteen years ago. I remember my first day as an inside sales person. Now here I am, making less than six figures, but more than the average American man. I drive a six year old domestic automobile, live in a pretty cool gentrifying section of town and hide my receding hairline pretty well with a thickening shampoo and overpriced hair gel.

The last e-mail I replied to was from my ex wife. I don’t care for her and she doesn’t care for me, but we communicate because we share custody of a daughter. Erin is my world and I have matured as a result of her being born. I have matured even more trying to make it financially as a divorced man in a judicial system that loves the single mom. And finally I have matured because I don’t want Erin to see the angry, misogynistic, obsessive-compulsive freak that her father is behind the mask of adulthood. I want her to be happy and to go to college and to grow up satisfied. I don’t want her wishing for time machines.

My first sales call of the day cancelled on me just as I hit the send button for an e-mail to my ex. My most lucrative client treats me like the proverbial red headed step child and I accept it to pay my bills and feed my daughter and buy things I don’t need on the internet. So on this particular day, before my second cup of coffee and my not yet cancelled second appointment, I chose to surf the internet and Chad Helton’s voice message began once again to reverberate in my ears.

TheOne.com-TheOne.com-TheOne.com echoed against my brain.

TheOne.com is an internet dating site. Chad is a fellow salesman six years my junior and his libido is otherworldly. He is a vampire that must feed. He is the bear the morning after hibernation has ended. He is the slugger with forty nine home runs and ten games to play for fifty. His sexual desire for women is insistent and comical and the person he shares his sordid tales of conquest with is me.

TheOne.com he always says. This is your time machine, he says.

I didn’t know what he meant by that for some time and he wouldn’t elaborate. He’d just giggle and move on to another story of dating mastery. He is the little brother I never had and his exploits caused a jealousy in me I didn’t know existed. I wanted to be him in ways that were disconcerting to me. He made me realize that certain doors were closed to me, that nothing is more evil than time.

On the morning where this story begins, I signed up to be a member of TheOne.com. I told no one, especially not Chad. I had said I wouldn’t do it so many times it became a running joke.

Did you sign up for TheOne.com he’d ask? No, I’d say. Then more of Chad’s exploits for the ensuing hour.

The site consists of pictures of women of all ages, a profile about their histories, their likes and dislikes, what they do for a living, where they went to school and what they are looking for in a mate. For the first time in my life after signing up for this site I felt like women were a commodity. I was never a perfect man and my issues with women could fill a modern psychology textbook, but ultimately at the end of the day I placed a certain value on women even though they made me angry and confused the hell out of me since I was fourteen years old. Now it was like I was shopping for one, like they were disposable. Like Ketchup. I could find one I thought I liked, try her and then move on to the next sale item if I was unimpressed. TheOne.com just dusted off old issues I didn’t want to deal with.

So for months I checked my e-mails on TheOne.com website every other day and read about the women that e-mailed me or replied to an e-mail I had sent. I went on two or three less than memorable dates with women I wasn’t attracted to; one that was preoccupied with money, one that wouldn’t stop talking about how marijuana should be legalized and one who had five kids and a husband (she was separated) who was doing three to five years in prison for armed robbery. I soured on TheOne.com relatively quickly. So much so, that I had the nerve to tell Chad I had signed up and that my choice was a miserable failure.

Wait for the time machine, he said. I still didn’t know what the hell he meant.

One day shortly after an evening in which Chad and I went to a tavern and he proceeded to share three hours worth of stories that were better than most Playboy forum columns, I received an e-mail from a twenty four year old girl in a college town. She was studying history, actually working on her master’s degree and working full time as well. She was the right size, she had a winning, white smile and beautiful long sandy blonde hair. She had big eyes and wrote that she liked baseball and Vonnegut and deep dish pizza. Unlike most of the girls her age I had seen on the website, she didn’t seem concerned about dating men significantly older than her. She was interested in meeting a friend that she might be attracted to, but ultimately she knew she couldn’t currently get serious with anyone. School came first and she was working over forty hours a week as well.

I e-mailed her. She e-mailed me back. A regular correspondence developed between us.

After several weeks of back and forth, I like this and what did you do yesterday type stuff, we decided to meet. I would come to her. It was the chivalrous thing to do.

On the two hour ride to her place, I drove past corn and wheat fields that reminded me of the trips I took from the city to my state college so many years ago. I noticed farm houses set two football fields off the highway and rest stops with greasy spoons, truck stops and dirty magazine warehouses. I felt like I was taking a trip back in time…

The time machine. Liz, my new graduate student friend. She was my time machine. How did Chad know?

When I arrived I saw the campus unfold before my eyes. The arena where they played basketball was big and modern and impressive. The football field had colorful flags and banners waving in the wind, declaring conference championships and winning seasons. Memories retained on cloth for the whole current student body, administration, town folk and visiting alumni to see. I wished I had memories documented in colorful letters and numbers. Then I felt silly; the whole trip felt silly.

I saw students coming and going. The apartments looked like they belonged on my college streets. These looked like my memories developing again in front of me. Was I one of these kids once? Was I now? I looked at myself in the rearview mirror and reluctantly decided I wasn’t. I felt a strange transference, like I was leading a very temporary life that wasn’t exactly mine. It belonged to this university town and my memories were vivid, lost and twisted at the same time. I hadn’t met Liz at this point, yet she had offered me the chance at another dimension. I’d be knocking on her apartment door as nervous and frantic as Michael J. Fox in Back To The Future.

I drove past bars where a couple dozen kids were getting an early start. Backpacks tossed to the side of their barstools, their five dollar bills on the bar, waiting for the next discount ale. I could hear the conversation without hearing it. I could feel the carefree brainwaves as they delivered their bravado and bar talk, oblivious to mortgages and garnished wages and little girls not yet ready for junior high school that asked for video games for Christmas.

This trip to see Liz took place a short time ago. I still remember her phone number and her address. I remember every farm I passed on the way, every wheat field, every truck stop, every town with a backwards, ridiculous, hillbilly name. I see the green awnings of the bars I passed, the school colors bleeding in my daydreams. Every kid I saw walking with a backpack was me, every lecture hall beckoned. At the coffeehouses wannabe beatniks told stories about a divorced dad who was given this time machine by a buddy from the office. How he used it to have sex with a girl that was inappropriately younger than he was. How it didn’t satisfy him, how the bills were still going to be there when he got home. How his ex wife of six years was still going to hate him. How he’d still have the words outside salesperson on his business card. HIS school seemed so far away now, the beatnik would say. THIS wasn’t his school at all. Somewhere his daughter was crying because her daddy was lost.

There was an empty keg on the porch of Liz’s apartment. It was her neighbor’s, Bill I think his name was. I think he was getting his master’s in education. We talked for about five minutes that night and I told him I was almost a teacher. He looked at me like I was an alien and for some odd reason I looked at him wishing he were Chad.

Liz was cute and funny and personable. We drank and I told lies. I didn’t mention my daughter or my bills or my ex wife. I told her I made one hundred thousand dollars a year after I bought us our eighth round of beers. She was drunk and unimpressed. She said she was tired and confused by why I drove all this way to see her. I said I thought she wanted me to and she said she was having a good time. Our eyes sagged in cloudy recognition of one another as we sat not saying anything, playing with each others fingers.

We went back to her place and the drunken fumblings took place. She could have been any one of the twenty one women I slept with while I was a college student. I was so taken with her when I knocked at the door, how she looked in a worn out sweatshirt, cute with no make up and a body unblemished by child birth and attrition. She walked around her apartment barefoot while we got to know one another, her toenails painted red. Then we went to a bar, I shared lies, she killed time and we came back to her place to complete the evening. I was without feeling and she moaned like a drama major. Then she walked out onto the porch and smoked and I text messaged my ex-wife, telling her I’d be late for Erin in the morning.

On the way back home the next morning, it was like a bomb of tightly compressed memories exploded with rage inside of me. The evening played over and over again in my mind, mixed with memories of my college days and sprinkled with my lies and my life of the here and now. I played the radio in the car and all the songs reminded me of things I didn’t want to think about. I thanked God out loud for my daughter’s love, because it’s real.

I pulled over at a rest stop about an hour from home. I grabbed a soda and some gas. I called Chad on my cell phone but he didn’t answer and I didn’t leave a message. Then I called my ex and asked to talk to Erin.

I told her she could be anything she wanted to be. I told her it was possible to be happy.

She asked me what I was talking about and I said I didn’t know exactly. I told her I’d be there soon. She asked me if I was alright and I said yes and she said she loved me. At that moment the trip was over, the time machine was gone. One moment of my daughter’s voice and I was a thirty six year old outside salesperson again. I took a drink of my soda and I started the car. A song on the radio said something about love and sex and affection. The sky began to cloud over and the corn stalks bent north with the wind.