Not Dead Yet

by Herbert Gold

  But then, probably he had the consolation of getting laid.

  Well, if he's still alive, he may remember the Peabody Bookshop beauty's name, just as I remember that icy winter in Baltimore when we both were, and in memory still are, but one day will not be. I look forward to not recognizing him if we happen to be among the final stragglers at a last convention in Saratoga Springs.

  “You look terrific!” I say to my fellow Ritchie boy.

  “Haven't changed a bit, have I?” he answers. And peers at my face through his bifocals to see if, like Pinocchio's, my nose has grown longer.

  The life-affirming joys of hatred and revenge invigorate a person like a surge of steroids, but with age, the purity of passion can be disturbed by double vision. (The hated one is contemptible, and yet… He deserves nothing but spite, but hold on now.) Therefore I obeyed the peculiar impulse to invite a former, seriously former friend to meet me at the Chameleon Cafe in my neighborhood.

  It was an inspiration that didn't rise to the level of a considered idea because it couldn't change my mind about the former friend's status. But it seemed like time to indulge whims—a gambling weekend in Las Vegas, an overdose of sweet barbecue, a beveraging hour with a cheating, lying, conniving, remorseless sleazebag. For whom I no longer had fond feelings.

  Extant was a grievance about a financial scam. I used to host a dinner for other victims on the anniversary of the futile legal decision in our favor. Each year I would invite as a Special Surprise Attraction someone who had been similarly afflicted by the same affable and charming operator; we would laugh, applaud, and toast the guest star as he recounted his adventure, sometimes breaking glasses in our enthusiasm.

  A doctor, cheated by the same pal, used to stand at the pool where they both swam, shouting: “You're polluting the water! Get out of the pool!”

  This disturbed the meditative Zen stillness, which even a thief enjoys while doing his laps. He switched health clubs. Despite my own complaints, I thought our doctor colleague was going too far. In California, routines of physical fitness are sacred, like the marriage bed in other cultures.

  At the afternoon date with my former friend, I bought the lattes and organic bran muffins. After all, I was the host. It was only right. He looked haggard and shrunken, going through a serious divorce. He had married the lady at the time of our lawsuit and put most of his assets in her name, protecting them from his victims. (Perhaps she was also his type.) During the settlement conference, when his lawyer explained the situation, I considered expressing my opinion in the matter with the famous booger-flick—a finger to one's nose, which then skillfully projects its moist accumulation at the adversary. More eloquently than words, this could enhance understanding of diminished regard for my former friend.

  Now he brightened with pleasure at the assumption that I had “put our little business disagreement behind us.” He made a tearing-paper, casting-out gesture.

  I said that I was sorry about all the trouble in his life. His back, his knees, osteoporosis, divorce, child custody, asset division, all that must be difficult for him. On my next trip to Haiti—compassion flooding my soul—I might visit the voodoo priest who had put a curse upon his existence. I might ask him to remove it. I might also extract the pins I had inserted in the back, knees, and genitals of the dedicated ouanga, the black magic doll, I had hung in my closet.

  I might do so if it was not too expensive to cancel a Haitian fatwa. Options need to be weighed; commitments shouldn't be made lightly. But after all, I had pleasant memories of tennis and abalone diving. I was hoping this erosion of my temper did not signal any ominous softening of my heart. Compassion is desirable, forgiveness is a virtue respected in many creeds, but betrayal of friendship for mere dollars still seemed drastically discourteous. I told him I prayed events would look up for him in the distant future. That was a slip of the tongue; I meant to say near future.

  “How's it going?”

  “Not so… not so okay.”

  “Things will improve,” I warmly replied, not going into detail about whether things would improve for him or for the efficiency of my voodoo priest.

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “It's nothing.” But in fact, it was something. I decided at that moment to remove the pins from the ouanga in that dark corner behind the all-cotton Banana Republic shirts. (These pins also bring migraines, bad breath, poverty, and parking tickets.) Maybe in a month or two, if I happened to be packing tropical clothes for my next trip to Haiti, I'd take a look at the thickly-stuck ouanga.

  And yet, and yet, hearing him reminisce about our old companionship, I too felt sentiment welling in me. We used to drive to Big Sur together, we pulled on wet suits and pried abalone off rocks when it was approximately legal, we pursued the bachelor life together, we discussed taking or not taking mind-expanding cactus brews. It was the sixties, after all.

  I also planned to tell him, as we picked at the raisins fallen from our bran muffins, that I no longer bore him any resentment. He had taught me something about human nature—that it was not to be trusted. Red in tooth and claw; nasty, brutish, and now short; only about five feet seven, in fact, due to calcium loss. But I couldn't speak these things aloud. Anyway, he was not a regular reader of Hobbes or Machiavelli. He was a human creature with a cheerful relish in his hustle through the city. My intelligent second wife used to suggest I try looking at him by the fluorescence of the Safeway meat counter, a glow that she claimed would strip away the jolly surface to reveal inner character.

  Only when his excess of grateful, damp-eyed feeling overflowed as we said good-bye did it occur to me to say: Wait now. Sit down again. You're a schmuck. I want to remind you of that.

  I let the impulse pass. Bile brings acid reflux, a lasting aftertaste. So thank you, old pal. You enriched my life.

  Next time, he said, the snack would be on him. Knowing I was watching, he jumped into his antique Mercedes 280 SL convertible—top rakishly folded down despite the fog—just as he used to, barely wincing because of his arthritis. He waved a happy salute.

  As de Gaulle wrote, Old age is a shipwreck. But not necessarily. It can be a holiday in truly liberated reality after the vain, anything-is-possible fantasies of youth. Blonds may have more fun, but grays have more responsibilities. As an eighteen-year-old soldier, I was convinced nothing could kill me. Now I'm not so sure. I wasn't afraid of jumping out of airplanes; now I get vertigo at the edge of a roof. Evidence of the slippery slope surrounds me. I need my rest and look forward to a nap after lunch—a power nap, of course.

  There are hours of gray dreariness as I think of the friends summoned away, one by one: Paul, George, Bernard (two Bernards), Bob, Anatole, Gavin, Rex, Saul (two Sauls, also), Ed, Marvin (long ago in the war), Issa, Ted, and surely tonight I will wake suddenly to remember others. Aubelin, Dwight, Max, Alan (two Alans), Albert—I don't have to wait for the middle of the night for these specters to rise up. Those who introduced me to new ideas, those who confessed their ambitions, failures, and longings and to whom I confessed mine, some who were merely good company because we laughed a lot together, but surely that's not a merely. I'll not list the women because the list doesn't need a complete inventory of griefs and lonelinesses. Ben, Jacques, Roland… No, I'll stop. I've learned to go to the movies and to hike alone; it's harder to learn to laugh alone.

  Scrapbooks, photo albums, letters in boxes, journals, become instruments for nostalgia and pain. Perhaps they help to deal with reality, just as does the dentist's drill, but unlike the dentist's drill, they excavate but do not clear away. The sharpness of immediate grief, that stab of acknowledgment, is part of life we have to live; prolonged useless yearning, like jealousy, is a condition that does no work.

  In fact, of course, I don't want to lose the memories and reminders of those who are gone. I had better accept the excess life given me with gratitude. The alternatives, such as a career of mourning, wastes the times past with those cherished ones.

  A friend complains of u
nusual memory loss, as opposed to the usual kinds. I'll not use his name, although I remember it. Many of my contemporaries speak more of what they have given up than of the futures they plan. Joint problems are noted as things to live with, not to repair. I miss playing tennis or racquetball with partners who used to be better and tougher than I was. Drastic stress on the spine is out of the question, covering four walls or rushing the net. Most of my cohorts no longer travel with sleeping bags.

  I too complain. I'm not ill (knock on wood), but suffer loneliness as the ranks thin. Why should anyone sympathize with me? Looking on the bright side, if it's eventually a contest, say, between cancer and me, even if I don't win, at least I can come in second.

  Awakening to death, a kind of prememory of “the distinguished thing” to come, helps to appreciate the life we have now. The passage of seasons gives both sadness and pleasure; fall's muted colors are as touching as springtime's bright and gleaming ones.

  Some people, of course, believe in an afterlife, like a movie remake or sequel. Memory passed along is the best afterlife to dream of. There's enough loveliness in the sky—nightglow and daybright, clouds, sun, stars, planets—without angels and ghosts cluttering things up. Our duty (in my opinion; excuse me) is to create the closest approximation we can to heaven here below, while we are here, although the human race so far has not proven to be very good at it. Room for improvement gives us something to live for.

  When a friend asked Saul Bellow, recuperating from an illness but sick and old, if he was getting better, he answered: “I've been getting better my whole life. Now just look where it's got me.”

  I Was So Much Younger Then

  (An Old Story)

  Proust, at the end of his monster effort to recover lost time, and by doing so, to redeem it, tells of venturing out of his cork-lined present to a party where he hopes to meet again the friends of his past. Instead, he enters a nightmarish scene of garish crones, doddering relics, desiccated and lumpy masks of themselves. Dwelling as he did in time past, this exemplified Freud's definition of the uncanny: something which cannot be, cannot, and yet is. Marcel is horrified.

  Then he notices a young woman. He speaks to her. He sees in her eyes her reflexive disdain: Who is this geezer? And realizes what he has become.

  In a North Beach coffeehouse, I take a table near a skinny California beauty with the just slight loosening at the belly, which healthy skinny California yoga practitioners offer as part of their blessing upon the universe. She is reading a book in French with a pocket dictionary by her side. Ah, but life is beautiful! (And also, la vie est belle.) I can always chat up a woman who reads French.

  My plan, eventually, if all begins well, if her fluency is sufficient, is to point out with sophisticated savoir-vivre that I am definitely of another generation, in case she wondered. And if I were twenty years younger, a relationship between us would still be inappropriate. But since I am even beyond the twenty-year cutoff date, our relationship would be ludicrous. Therefore (raising a Sorbonne-trained Gallic finger on behalf of close attention) all she needs about the situation is a sense of humor and we're in business.

  What decent café reader of French could resist this appeal?

  But before I advance to the envisioned triumphal conclusion, I notice in her eyes a certain look: This guy seems harmless… maybe a professor or something… Whatever.

  At least old Chinese ladies don't get up to offer me their seats on crowded buses; not yet.

  Now I'm explaining to the Francophile in the café that I'm a skopto-klepto-bibliophiliac, pronouncing it slowly to see if the light of interest can be kindled. “It's a word I made up. It means a person who likes to steal looks at other people's books.”

  She doesn't say, “In that case, Franco -skopto-kleptobiblio…”

  She says, “So you used to teach French before you retired?”

  Like some older guys, I wake in the morning young, virile, and filled with hope. After good nights. Sometimes. Forgetting the middle-of-the-night call to bathroom duty, where the body's business is accompanied by past losses and fear that sleep will now desert us.

  On the less good nights, I glance in passing at the unfamiliar grizzled head in the mirror. I lie awake till dawn, listening for the first chirpings of the robins and sparrows of my childhood. I don't hear them because the birds have disappeared, or because the little ear cilia that conduct sound toward the brain are now sparse and shriveled, thanks to gunfire, rock ’n’ roll, and time.

  Or I manage to return to sleep and dream of the lost wife who in memory still takes my arm like a happy lover. I wake and dismiss the three A.M. insomnia as vain and self-indulgent. I do some stretches, leg lifts, and pushups on a mat. I follow the routines of cold water on my face, a brisk stroll, coffee amid the anonymous good-fellowship of a public place. For once more I am young, virile, and filled with hope.

  Who was that man in the mirror? What is the grizzled beard doing on a face like that of my father? These are old questions, this is an old story. Those who plan to live long had better deal with a plan for answering the questions, but of course they won't. As a by-product of youth, we knew ourselves to be immortal. Once I jumped out of an airplane and asked the captain on the ground why, obeying our training, I had to kick the soldier on the stick ahead of me to get him out. “He's twenty-eight,” said the captain. I was nineteen.

  Instead of sleeping forever, or even till ten in the morning, I still rise and shine, which was the command of training sergeants in that war whose veterans are diminishing in number by the thousands each day: “Rise and shine, assholes!”

  In 1956 I spent a summer in retreat from the desolate early marriage at an artist's refuge near Saratoga, New York. I ate well, whined to my companions, fellow strivers, listened over and over to a Louis Armstrong recording that I recall as “Loveless Love,” but was actually a version of “Careless Love.” Louis Armstrong's thick happy articulation was a great comfort. Loud complaint appealed to me. I hit my Olivetti Lettera 32 portable typewriter with my pains.

  Pouring words over trouble sometimes calms, sometimes adds gunpowder to the fire. Rehearsing rage, inventing, elaborating, remembering idiocies, remembering regret, blaming another, blaming myself, pleading, denouncing, sorting out, muddling, telling a story was fulfilling and exhausting. Telling this story was a moral aerobic exercise. “Loveless Love” rumbled and growled in my head. Moral aerobic exercise doesn't necessarily bring the sleep of the just or any other variety of peace. I had nightmares despite telling myself that self-pity was about as useless as jealousy. Love oh love oh loveless love.

  It was hard work to master a dilemma that was the opposite of the pain a young Mick Jagger snarled and sang about ten years later. Sometimes you can't even get what you don't want.

  Late in my term at this retreat, it dawned on me that we were guests, not inmates. I decided to walk into town like a normal decent person, carrying money in my pocket in case options for spending it presented themselves (beer, cheese-burger, postcards). There would be strangers in Saratoga Springs, tourists and summer visitors. I would amble among them like a living creature in a place of non-complainers. It was a pleasant hike to a main street with ramshackle but grand hotels, built with spacious terraces, from the days when folks came to take the waters at the spa.

  And the sight terrified me—a nightmare vision of an entire population brought down by a curse. Everybody here was ancient. I had not left the grounds of Yaddo for nearly two months while the world had sunk into decrepitude. Wheelchairs, crutches, rolling walkers, gaped mouths, a drifting crowd of the drooling and the crippled filled the street. They were strewn on the verandas like the debris of some magic catastrophe. Quick, I needed a mirror. I was sure also to be one of these palsied, shrunken, pitiful creatures taking lurching or shuffling steps if they walked at all, making little mouse snorts with the effort.

  Then I saw the banner stretched above the street: WELCOME VETERANS OF THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR. It may have been their
last convention.

  Thanks to abated panic, I then noticed attendants, children, grandchildren, watching over the veterans. There were a few sturdy younger wives, too. The heroes of the “Re-member the Maine” war were not throwing water-filled balloons and condoms like the veterans of my war. They were back-bent, slumped, mostly three- or four-legged if ambulatory. There were kindly and patient expressions on the faces of those pushing wheelchairs. I already knew the word “Parkinson's” and in due course would learn the word “Alzheimer's.” Even today, there could be a bureau in Washington, where nothing ever quite dies, with a clerk in charge of disbursing final survivor pensions to the no-longer-young widow of a bugle boy from the Spanish-American War.

  I was released from fear, I felt warm and alert in downtown Saratoga. I found a tavern for a beer and a hamburger. I noticed a pretty young woman, probably a student at Skid-more College with a forged ID (Where are you now, pretty young woman? Please write.) I hiked back to Yaddo, ready to make a final copy of my story inspired by early romance, too-early marriage, and grief for the child victims of their parents.

  * * *

  The grammar of my future needs parsing. Who I will have been when I cease to be is the sum of what I was. It's a congeries of verb tenses, future, present, past, not to mention conditional.

  Still leading this conditional existence, I visit my son Ari in New York, and we ride bikes up the trail along the West Side Highway. I'm entertained by his concern as he keeps glancing back to make sure I'm not wobbling into traffic. I feel a surge of happiness in the river breezes, on a bike, May in Manhattan; the big-city joys of the strollers in their jeans, the joggers, the other bicyclists sailing along. Ari grins, he winks. He is young, strong, filled with hope and ambition. At this moment, I too will live forever.