the effects of aging on a 6’4″ caucasian male

1. whenever you pass a mirror, look directly into your eyes. you will be thankful you did as it helps mitigate the horror of seeing your body sagging (cake in the rain syndrome.)

2. your ears and your nose take on a life of their own as they continue to grow.

3. hair growth and loss: what falls from your head lands on your ears and shoulders. expect your leg hair to disappear from your calves and thighs, but grow on the tops of your toes. the whole experience is similar to continental shift. of course, you can expect it to grow faster where you don’t want it, than it will where you do.

4. your jawline begins to meld into your neck. in fact, all of your edges, the sharp angles of youth, begin to fade as if an artist had decided that they were unhappy with their life drawing and had started erasing the outside lines.

5. you become invisible to young people. not children necessarily, but certainly the 15-25 group look right through you as if you did not exist. (example: shop at the gap/old navy.)

6. you’ll begin to need to pee every half-hour and it becomes harder. say good-bye urinal and hello toilet!

7. the belly. it happens. whether beer or butter, if you’re as tall as i am, it will automatically find its way to your belly. not your legs or your arms and definitely not to your chest. as a consequence you will look like the saint-exupéry drawing of a snake who has eaten a bowler hat turned on its end.

8. you’ll need more sleep and find it harder to sleep longer. naps become mandatory should there be an extra hour in your day for you to lay your balding head and hairy ears down on a pillow.

9. why does everyone insist upon speaking at the same time? if you want me to hear you, speak directly to me. (i am not ready for a hearing aid, damn it.)

10. you’ll have crystal clear memories from 30 years ago, but cannot remember what tv show you watched last night.

11. there’s more, of course, but much of it is too graphic for such delicate sensibilities as my readers exhibit.

visitations (lives of the saints)

“o, the sisters of mercy they are not departed or gone.  they were waiting for me when i thought that i could not go on.  and they brought me their comfort, and later they brought me this song.  o, i hope you run into them, you who have been traveling so long.” –leonard cohen

part 1

they always drove into town in the pickup with the camper shell from their home in south dakota or missouri, making the journey seem like a vacation, taking their time, stopping (as we always did when i was young) at roadside attractions, deciding on the spur of the moment to take this two-lane road or that one instead of the interstate, just to say they had done it, “it looked interesting,” she would tell me later, going into the details of this farm or that small town they had ‘discovered’ on their way to somewhere else, her fourth husband a willing participant in her explorations and whims.

they would visit friends, a collection of people she gathered wherever she went, a true talent and one i cannot say i fully understood at the time, the making of friends wherever, whenever.  i try now to remember if that ability was because she was a good listener or if it was her simple, pleasant manner, maybe it was an undefinable trait, or maybe it was just her nature that led people to her.  however she managed it, she had friends scattered around the midwest;  columbine and lilac, peony and rose.  when did she find time to maintain such a flower garden?

when i was growing up i didn’t pay attention to the subtleties of my mother’s maturity, her adult abilities and worldly navigational devices and tools, but perhaps i have been most influenced by them or by the lack of them and have only come to realize what they were when i reached a certain cognizant age (somewhere between 2_ and death, or perhaps in the never world of my subconscious) and when i find myself employing a skill set i had no idea i possessed.  i wish i could spell out for you what those subtleties are (other than the obvious petty lying one engages to keep the social wheels greased), their details, their lattice work on which your friendships flourish.

the first time they came to chicago to visit me, was it 1975 or ’76?, i can’t recall, and there is no mention of it in my journal from the time; i do know it was summer and chicago was a-shimmer with heat and humidity, but somehow perfect while they were there (or maybe it was its awful hot, sticky self, the weather is unimportant to this story, i was just hoping i could set a mood for you in order that you might appreciate more of what i’m about to share with you.)

have i mentioned that my mother would cast her spell over my friends so that they would also become her friends?  o yes, months later after they had been introduced, this one or that one would casually say something to this effect (and to my horror), “i was speaking with evelyn the other day and we were talking about you.  o, don’t worry, it wasn’t anything negative, but you know how she is…”  and i, on the other end of this particular telephone conversation, blushing, my pulse racing.   i would try to figure out how and when they found the quiet moment of their, most likely, one and only meeting, to secretly exchange phone numbers, neither of them so much as breaking a sweat in their collusion.   this habit of acquiring my closest friends as hers was one she began when i left for college and kept until she died, not unlike her pack of marlboros on the telephone table next to her chair in the living room, taking one out and carefully lighting it with a decorative flame and then that exhalation; i can hear it now, they must have too.

part 2

so.  plans are made, destination and arrival time plotted and soon (too quickly) here they are, standing in the lobby of 2___ n. pine grove, pushing the buzzer for r. patrick, apt. 1114, suitcases in hand, a bit of american gothic done up in polyester (“it travels better”) and smelling of the road, my mother a bit wind-tossed and my step-father solicitous as always of her every need, although her independence might have put off a less secure man, he seemed not to pay any attention to it and i think that may have been part of his appeal to her, this final love of her life (after me.)

this is the summer that i was sporting a collection of straw borsalinos accompanied by fringed silk scarves tossed gaily, yes you read that right, tossed gaily (in case you thought your eyes were deceiving you the first time) over one or the other of my bony shoulders.   you might ask the author at this point how open he was about his sexuality with his mother and step-father and he would say, “it’s none of your business.”  that is how it was handled in our family.  (if you’ve been following any of these family history jaunts i’ve been indulging myself in this past days/weeks/months/years, you may have discovered that at one point in my life i had two mommies, that too was never discussed.)

they settled comfortably in my studio apartment, sleeping in the bedroom alcove with me on the little off-white curved boudoir sofa i’d rescued from a second-hand store in uptown (lawrence & clark-ish) where it was wilting from disuse, hiding in a corner.  i’d swathed it in watered georgette, patterned in blue and green hues from a sari shop in the same neighborhood, covering the blemishes it had been wearing for years before i came to own it.   at least i’d start out on it, but it was so small and kidney-shaped that i ended up sleeping on the floor instead (he shrugged).

we took the 151 bus down to the near north and walked over to arnie’s for lunch one day and ate spinach salad and steak tartare (“why would you eat spinach raw,” asked my stepfather, my mother delighting in the alfalfa sprouts crowning hers, possibly making a little mooing noise under her breath to my horror–and secret delight.)

that evening we dined with my dearest friend (bff before there was such a thing), jimmy, in his apartment in the same building.    he had a 100 candles lit, reflecting the shimmering lights of the city below, the warmth of the light magnified by one mirrored wall, his palm trees and exotic plants making it a tropical night in the middle of chicago.  jimmy was an adept.  adept as in magical-thinking, fantasy-producing, another world/universe-living, brilliant human consumed by the darkest undercurrent (the river styx) and for a few years my off- and on-again gay mentor and guide to the world.  under his tutelage my culture quotient shot way up, i shed some of the country ‘gosh’ ness and instead acquired a big city ‘fuck’ ness.  what i chose to take with me has stood me well these many years.

my mother was fascinated by him and he by her and they soon had their heads together on his living room couch while step-father and i fiddled and twirled our wine glasses and idly watched them.  she would parry and he would feint; he would joust and she would side-step as elegantly as a show horse, so subtle was their mutual admiration and interest in each other that, to the untrained eye, you would have thought they had known each other for years.  at some point in the evening they exchanged phone numbers (see paragraph 5 above.)

wisely, jimmy continued to pour wine into their glasses, so that when it came time to lead them back to my apartment after dinner there was no objection to his and my heading out to the bars for a little late night revelry.

part 3

i’ve always been partial to the hindu concept of life:  a spiraling thread of history through which your life dissects, your past may be someone else’s future, their now your long ago.    but it is that spiraling (do you always think of the word ‘spiraling’ as a downward movement?  i think most of us do, but i often like to contemplate it laying on its side or moving up instead of down.   it is the same with its shape, a funnel your first thought with its wide top and narrow bottom, but i see it as particularly regular in shape, as wide at the top as it is at the bottom–or equal from side to side), that will now come into play.  we have moved from that idyllic summer of ’7_ and it is now close to the end of a decade and i have called out to them.

j.w. had a country girl’s charm with a big city woman’s body, all legs, ass and breasts cooing sweet nothings to men twice her age ’til they’d be wiping the drool off their chins with a paper cocktail napkin already wet with their sloppy beer.   she and i worked together at arnie’s, she in the bar, me on the floor, and we had an immediate connection.  as with most of us there, the restaurant job was ‘temporary’ until our real job came along.  she a potter, me a _________ (the blank is intentional, i had no idea what i wanted to be.  all i knew is that i did not want to be working in a restaurant another day.)  she lived in the pilsen east artist community at 18th street and halsted and after my first visit to her loft i was ready to move down there and lead la vie bohème, she mimi, me rodolphe (beats his chest).

instead of this [imagined] love affair (whether it was with her or not) it fast became a downward spiral of drugs, drink and wantonness (not because of her, or maybe it was) and when i finally pulled myself up out of the <insert your favorite word here to describe the depths of despair i was feeling at the time> i made up my mind to make something happen (even if it did not come true, as it didn’t, and as is often the case with the irresolute–you know who you are–there were more hard days ahead), i set out to change my life.

there was a party.   a going-away party where everything in the house was for sale. we (i had a roommate, more on that at another time, it is too hard to write about the living right now.  i’ve started to address this time in some written form or the other over the last several months and have failed each time –failed as far as i am the judge of what works and what doesn’t when speaking of the living–we shall see if i am able to move past that in the future as it is an important part, a key actually, to this story, both before this tale and afterward, and yet it does not matter now as i relate to you these visitations), sold everything including the refrigerator that belonged to the landlord (we replaced it) during this night of manic revelry; hundreds of people came through and by morning, the place was stripped bare (bare-ish, i ended up staying on by myself for several months afterward, not everyone took with them what they bought and never mentioned that they hadn’t gotten what they paid for.  it still makes me giggle with elfin delight that the party was so good that paying for something was like the fee for enjoying yourself, whether you took home your purchase or not.  there was never an ounce of recrimination from any attendee.  another “oh, well,” he sighed.)

part 4

and finally.  it’s not the final ‘final’ just so you know.  i don’t want to get your hopes up that this will be the end of it, you’re just going to have to soldier on here for a bit more as i dredge this pond bottom for all of the memory that’s been laying there gathering algae and scum (and the occasional dead frog).   focus, rp, focus.  i called them and said, “i’ve got a job lined up in phoenix and i’m going to move in few weeks, don’t want to take a lot with me, will you come and get the important stuff?” and she, “why, honey, of course, we will.”  and being the deus ex machina that they were, days later the pick-up with the camper shell (why were they always silver-y blue?) is parked in front of 7__ w. 18th st.

it is summer again in chicago and this time i’m not living on the lake.  instead i’m down in a neighborhood that has seen many better days, the streets are dusty, two doors down from me live a pair of hookers (as sweet as pie, btw) and the neighborhood abuts little mexico city, so named, well, you figure it out.   the artist inhabitants are a motley crew, a little wild-eyed, gypsy fortune-telling, handsome and beautiful, exotic birds really and i loved each of them, but that’s definitely an aside.  it’s not that my mother didn’t know where i was living, i shared as much as i thought necessary and i’d been down to see them several times over the intervening years–the important thing is that they had seen me, they had to know that it was not good, but they looked past it, not wanting to bring up something that they had no control over.  is that the mark of a good parent of an adult child or the telling point of one who was not?  i only ask the question now as i am writing this as it did not cross my mind that they were there with anything but love in their caring hearts.

“does this make me look like an artist or a kook?” she asked me as she sported the lamp shade on her head, standing on the sidewalk just down from my space (it’s the tan one in the light with the two big windows) and so the photo above, the one that i had been searching so desperately for so many weeks and it turned up on the shelf in the closet in the 2nd bedroom in an album, “yeah, didn’t you know that’s where it was?” said m. with the nonchalance of an olympic slalom skier or a secret agent.

the night before the photo, i’d taken them on the halsted bus up to greek town for a night out.  we ate at roditys where i was a regular and the staff poured on the charm and the wine and by the time we left a couple of hours later, she and my step-dad were as lit as i was.  we  stopped at the belly dancing place a few doors down for a night cap and somewhere between there and here (the tinkling of the silver jewelry adorning the dancer and the buzz of the crowd) i realized that my mother could pretty much handle anything that life threw at her.    no matter where she was she fit in.  instead of kilroy was here, it was evelyn was here, and don’t forget it; but do remember to call me, okay?  you’ve got the number.

winter (an allegory on discontent)

the discomfort of aging.  there’s the saggy skin, the furrows & lines, the forgotten names of even the closest of friends, the sudden deaths of acquaintances (“so young, too soon!” you cry,) the lost keys, the misplaced bag, the unbidden reminder of your salad days, the waste of youth.  a body in revolt, its masses congregating in the squares & plazas of your internal organs, disrupting the status quo (an autocracy ruling over microbes, cells, blood, guts,) journalists jailed (hijacking your reason, “oh, it’s nothing, it’ll pass,”) when all of the signs point to regime change.

but steadfast you stand, implacable in the narrow confines of your skin; your brain producing excuses (funding a counter-insurgency,) just so that you may hold onto your riches (the past) just a little bit longer (“i’ve worked so hard to be here, now, it’s my time, mine, mine, mine,” in a lisp of spit & anger as you stand in the gilded opulence of your palace, the body that once housed such promise.) your stalwart aides murmuring advice, cajoling, & suggesting that perhaps some change would be good, “it would be good for you to grant some freedoms, to acquiesce to select demands,” the body politic requires your benevolence & understanding.

relent, it won’t be a failure, instead it will be a triumph of reason over your gut.

four eyes

It doesn’t come easily.  But when it does, it’s all at once in a rush of feeling, memory, cascading words/images/thoughts/dreams/impressions/dots of color/black & white/gray scale/composition/color/form/volume/spatial insight/unedited & unfiltered.  It’s up to me to sort it out and discern the truth or perhaps the paucity of truth–let it settle/digest/flow through my veins/spark a synapse/skip a heartbeat/take a vacation/work hard.

Four eyes:  quadruplet orbs/two real/two parallel to reality–I’m just saying that it’s possible & although adopted my mother’s mother/my mother had four eyes.

Four eyes:  when you’re a child & wearing glasses + there may be other differences/tall/skinny/effeminate = certain harassment from the middle, because they are the middle & always will be.  Do you think they know that?  Some little voice in their head, nagging/nudging/abusive/that keeps them chained to their middle-ness.   It never bothered me.  It was jelly slipping across cream cheese on a warm bagel running down your finger/hand/catching it with your tongue, m-m-m delicious this ridicule & ridiculous.

Four eyes:  the glasses go in time for you to become yourself, but the stigmata of otherness branded around your eyes/raccoon/bandit/yosemite sam-like anger lurks just below the surface/nessie & mythological/legendary eruptions/mercurial/these visions come unhindered & unwanted.  They drive you WRONG WAY DO NOT ENTER, but you go anyway & it’s years before you can extricate yourself from that choice.

Four eyes:  one day it just comes back, you can’t see clearly [reality] + it’s too late/you’re too old/habits challenge you & chain you–you allow it–still that vision/foresight/demands of the future unspool leaving a trail perhaps breadcrumbs/roadside markers & then you’re there–it’s not déjà vu, it’s not the future it’s now.

in the mirror today: my face betrayed me

i avoid the mirror, in the morning particularly, when my skin is creased from the bed linens and my hair, such as it is, is pointing in the opposite direction of my thoughts, its own little maelstrom of indecision, an eddy of gray draining down my back—my friend, S., told me that she no longer steps directly out of the shower, but instead backs out so she doesn’t have to see herself naked—i try to avoid the mirror, but i am gay, and i am curious, and i am still narcissistic enough to care, chagrined at the loss of tautness/firmness/glow/hair growing where it never did before and where before it grew fleeing in such a way as to warrant emergency sirens; truly it’s not the wrinkles (i lie) it’s just that i hate to see it leave — you know — those questions pop up:  did i love deeply enough?  was i always kind to those less fortunate?  could i have shared myself with more people?  would they have wanted me?  but i am stuck with the answers/memories that now are making/leaving their marks on my face/body/hands/knees/elbows/torso/legs/feet/neck.  a warning: it’s a bit of shock, not wholly unexpected, but a shock nonetheless, i hope that i am up to the challenge/i fear most losing my mind

slings and arrows

On Thursday last I began a day of fasting–medically prescribed–that surprisingly didn’t affect me as much as I thought it would.

In fact, it felt good.  The indignities of aging are many and well-documented, but oftentimes the process on the way to the indignity is overlooked.

I felt purer as the day progressed and the process in preparation for Friday’s procedure continued its cleansing duties.

It cleared my mind, all manner of thoughts formed, like clouds in the summer sky as you lay on your back looking for faces, objects, places.

Hamlet’s soliloquy from Act 3 popped into my head: “…Whether ’tis nobler in the mind/To suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,/Or to take arms against a sea of troubles/And by opposing end them…”

Which seemed relevant as my body ages, requiring additional maintenance, suffering ‘slings and arrows’.  Perhaps the outrageous fortune is that I’m here, now.  Will old age be a ‘sea of troubles’?  I stand against it for now.