Age Is Not Your Friend

Hang around the coffeehouses of midtown Sacramento long enough and you risk becoming a character, an aging guy who wears Birkenstock sandals, a ratty denim shirt, and  has what remains of his hair pulled back in a ponytail.  If you're female, facial hardware and purple streaked hair is just around the corner of your life.

Such people keep the Peace And Freedom Party on the ballot and lead the fight to legalize pot for medicinal purposes. And here they are, sipping Guatemalan Ganja Roast at little round tables while perusing the personals ads in the alternative weekly. Thing is, I fit right in as far as the age cohort goes. Only I don’t have enough hair for a ponytail, I wear cheap sneakers instead of Jesus shoes, and I think the Peace And Freedom Party is comprised of useless ninnies whose brains were permanently fried during the Summer Of Love. 

 Not all the patrons are that depressing. As Saul Bellow wrote in Henderson The Rain King, “Every 20 years the earth replenishes itself with young women.”  A lot of them spend time in coffeehouses. But these young women are not the ingénues Bellow imagined when he wrote those words in 1959. With their purple hair and hardware piercings, they are hardly the type to be draped in the creations of Oleg Cassini, as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was before she broke America’s heart by marrying That Greek. 

 No indeed, these latter day waifs appear dressed and accessorized in poverty chic by a couturier with a rapper name like Hott D. Dawgg. Not one Vogue model among them, but nor are they like the bubble-brained Gidgets of the Jackie O era. They appear to be determined students as they tap away on laptop computers or have their pierced noses buried in serious books. Who knows? One of them may cure cancer or herpes some day. Besides, I am no Halston model myself. I was clad in an old flight jacket and a grubby beret I affect to cover my shiny bald head. A pair of khaki pants completed my warrior ensemble. Some warrior. I spent four years in the military during the Vietnam war making damn sure I never got within 500 miles of the shooting. That’s how you become an old warrior. 

 Anyway, I was waiting to meet an on-line pal I'll call Bill, an aspiring writer I met in an on-line chat room where all the chatters are nominally writers, or claim to be, even though they may only write overdue checks. Some of them even read books. 

In fairness, I have met some actual published authors in that chat, a few of them quite well known, although most of those were run off by the viciously envious or by desperate appeals to read unreadable works in progress. Besides, the successful ones are too busy actually writing to spend much time in a computerized rehab for the chronically lonely.      

Bill wrote that he was composing a memoir.  I’m doing the same thing myself. As Bill is about my age, I thought we could have fun by sharing our views on what we had done during our three score and change on this mortal coil. So we agreed to meet at a coffeehouse on neutral turf, halfway between his place and mine, in a kind of cerebral blind date between two old heteros who could at least compare Medicare coverage if their literary nattering fizzled to silence. 

 Turns out Bill was another coffeehouse character, like me, and yes, I do tend to judge by appearances. Anyone who doesn’t is someone who reads with his fingers and carries a white cane. Bill’s appearance betokened a womanless existence in subsidized housing: hospital scrubs, thrift shop pants, a Greek fisherman’s cap and fingernails that apparently had not been clipped since June. He was also pushing a wheelchair. “I have emphysema,” he said, adding that he had broken both kneecaps in a fall years ago. “I push the wheelchair for exercise, and so I can sit down when I run out of breath.” 

 In short, except for the wheelchair and fingernails I was seeing myself. As we talked about our efforts to write memoirs, it occurred to me that we were actually writing our epitaphs. That was not a good thing. I do not need help being depressed, although, depression, like self-pity, is always sincere. 

 I made my excuses to leave after an hour’s stroll down a littered and weed choked memory lane, coming away with a resolve to only visit that coffeehouse to drink coffee and sneak looks at the girls. That way my character can remain in character without a lot of bad news.

 I wrote the above last summer, or maybe spring, or maybe a year ago. I don't know. But I do know that since writing it, the Divine Yawp or whatever diety is running the Holy Bureau Of Retribution has bestowed a case of emphysema upon me. I imagine a 50-year cigarette habit, since ceased, also contributed to my wheeze-along existence. I am not yet pushing a wheelchair as a rolling rest stop, but I am backpacking a portable oxygen bottle when venturing out. At home I'm tubed to a squat little machine I call R2D2.  Like its Star Wars namesake,  it makes noises and blinks lights, but with the added benefit of helping me breathe normally instead of gasping like a landed carp.

I tellya this aging stuff is whole lot of not fun. 

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