Anyone who has macheted his or her way through life’s gnarly forest and made it to the juice bar at Eighty-Two Beach will reflect on a few questions, the glaring one being, How the hell did I make it this far?
Through precipitous childhood falls out of trees and off roofs and being smacked between the eyes by a batted baseball, past rolling a t-top Toronado over a couple of times, despite heart attack and prostate cancer and dangerous girlfriends, not to mention piloting a couple of automobiles on LSD, here I am, safe and sound in the Land of the Octogenarians.
I have had a shotgun held in my face by a crazy person in the midst of DTs, my foot caught in debris while underwater in a river and walked halfway across the Merrimack on a railroad girder 8 inches wide and 200 feet high. I have been in county jails with ugly customers. Fool that I am, I ran around with Rick Wheeler’s lusty wife. Scariest of all, I lived with Janis Joplin for a month in Austin, Texas in 1962 without taking anti-anxiety drugs. Do you believe in magic?
Whenever I have felt that the Grim Reaper was in the anteroom, waiting to be let in, I philosophized through the fog, Is it that big a deal if I die? And almost immediately I thought, But if I did I wouldn’t know what happened with….an assortment of things, and I perk up. So maybe it’s curiosity that’s keeping me around. The desire to see what happens next. I also think this is the last stop on the Short Line so I might as well nurse the drink in the dining car as long as possible.
I would like to believe Jesus would save me, or cryogenics, reincarnation, the long-overdue discovery of the Fountain of Youth or adherence to David Sinclair’s tips on longevity. It would be nice to think of a future in the clouds with angels playing bluegrass music or perhaps dancing the bossa nova, but the logistics seem so impossible. Not only that, but we learned as children there is the alternate possibility you could wind up in a house on a dark street in a hot neighborhood where all the Jehovah’s Witnesses knew your address and presented their information in rap format. No thanks to taking that risk.
I have been fortunate to do most of the things I have wanted to do and see what I wanted to see. Nobody could be lucky enough to have had better girlfriends and wives and simple amigas. The company of a good woman is better than a candle in the mine, a sip of water at a desert oasis, a breath of fresh air in a conflagration. Without women, where would I have come by the following remarks so etched in my memory banks?
“Pull the car over right here and get in the back seat; I have a vulva emergency that needs attention.”---Betsy Harper
“So what if it’s the State Capitol grounds. They have poor security at night.”---Janis Joplin
“Hi Bill, I’ll be your hostess tonight. The woman you came in with is in the back bedroom with my husband,”---Suzy Shaw
“Come in here, you lusty beast---you have gifts that amuse me.”---Lynn Levy
I actually turned around in the doorway after that last one to see who Lynn was talking to. After realizing it was me, I considered having business cards made.
The Day Of The Dead
It took me until age 15 to realize I had been born on the Day of the Dead, and just as well. Little kids have enough to worry about what with going to Confession, avoiding large dogs and hiding out from aggressive fifth-graders like Doris Miskell, who thought “Dodo” was a pretty good nickname. I did know, of course, that I had been born on All Souls Day, the cheery Roman Catholic occasion for commemoration of all the faithful departed believed to be in Purgatory, having died with the stain of lesser sins on their souls. In case you don’t know this, Purgatory is like the bus station in Ponca City. There’s not much going on there and you don’t know when the greyhound to Dallas will arrive but you’re pretty sure it will show up sooner or later.
When you’re a kid, you have trouble sorting out the mortal sins (very bad) from the venial ones (they only make God wince). Mortal sins seem to involve serious stuff like murder, stealing money from the collection basket and anything involving nakedness with girls. Venial sins are everything else. You can commit a ton of venial sins and still go to Heaven, but one little mortal sin and you’re toast, literally and figuratively. You have the ultimate Get-Out-Of-Jail card, however, with the sacrament of Confession. You can even look under a nun’s habit if you run right off to Confession, advise the priest and get absolution. Of course, it’s best to avoid being in that nun’s class anytime soon.
I used to worry about going to Hell a lot, especially any time I was near a roaring fire. I mean, who wouldn’t? It hurts like the devil and there’s no end to it. I thought it might be better to be Jewish, like my friend Barry Gold. “We don’t have Hell,” he told me. “We have Gehinom.” Barry described a place that sounded like the Atlanta airport the day before Thanksgiving during a snowstorm. “You wait and wait and wait and after a real long time your plane shows up. By then, you don’t even care where it’s going, you just get on.” I told my mother about this and asked her if there was any chance we could become Jewish. Ask your Father,” she said. “The Red Sox lost again and he needs a good laugh.”
The Motor Cooled Down, The Heat Went Down….
Between the ages of 60-65, I made it via the Cable route to the top of Half Dome, negotiated the 14 miles of the Zion Narrows in 12 hours and hiked all over Alaska. Tough stuff, but no problem. Then, at 75, I rode a mule down the Bright Angel Trail to the bottom of the Grand Canyon in 104 degree temperatures, then rode back up the South Kaibab Trail the next day. After the latter, it was apparent that good health and fitness can carry you only so far, the Cosmic Arranger is weakening your body to make the arrival of the Grim Reaper more tolerable. You begin making concessions when you hear your wife discussing with park rangers the possibility of hauling you out of there in a helicopter. Not that I would have gone anyway, but they laughed impolitely, “To get out of here in a helicopter, you have to have a bone sticking through your skin.” I’ll take the mule, thank you.
By the time you get to 82, you have discovered new and interesting medical issues you didn’t know about at 60. Every few days brings a new curiosity. Siobhan says I’m becoming a hypochondriac, I say “No, I’m becoming 82.” I know there are thousands of little things in my body that are aging by the minute and some of them must be reaching the edge of the cliff. Fortunately, that cliff has a safety net called the hospital, where skilled medicos can patch you up until you reach Humpty-Dumpty territory. What then?
I have legions of friends who are full of replacement parts….knees, hips, shoulders, uvulas….who are doing just fine, thank you. But what if I get a diabolical tongue disease requiring amputation? Or yaws, which causes terrible disfigurement? What if I get Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo and go spinning, spinning, spinning into the future? What if I get a non-healing ulcer from worrying about all these things? Siobhan says I should stop reading stuff on Pub Med but I think a person should be prepared, right? I have an appointment soon with a new primary care physician who may be getting more than he bargained for. “Yes, Dr. McWobble, now let’s turn to page 22, Section 6 of the chapter on Graves’ Disease….”
On the encouraging side, at 82 I have never broken a bone in my body, despite precipitous falls, sparring for a week with a professional boxer and wearing cheap football equipment (your helmet is not supposed to bobble around on your head, right?). I walk a 15-minute mile every morning, lift weights three days a week, drink very little alcohol and have never smoked. My near-vegan diet is sterling. My ejection fraction is 40, my cholesterol is low, I live in a positive environment and my spouse will not let me sweep the roof anymore. I have good-humored friends like Danny Levine, Will Thacker and Bob Simmons, who keep the conversation interesting and oldtimers like George Swinford to give me a hard time. Some old men like to play chess in the park, George and I would rather argue about football. He’s always wrong, of course.
I think it’s good for us old knockabouts to have something to look forward to so I guess this is a good time for the semi-official announcement of a monster party, likely at Heartwood, simply called 85. You’ll have to wait until 2025 for the festivities to start but we intend to make it the equal of The Last Tango, though with no age restrictions. Dave Melosh, Jeff Goldstein and I learned a lot from the Tango experience and this one should be a snap. So all of you old Subterranean Circus staffers and customers who emailed pitiful excuses last time have another chance to shake hands before I exit, stage right. Make plans to show up and show off, the lights are flickering, my friends.
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| Lead photo and the one directly above by Sam Rivera; enhancements on lead photo by Michael Goettee. |
That’s all, folks…
