A week later, Carol e-mails her friends to tell us that she beat out fifteen younger candidates for her dream job on her dream show—which, as it turns out, shoots in New York. Carol has lived in L.A. for thirty years; none of her friends, including me, are happy to see her go. “I’ll come home for Christmas,” she promises, and recruits a bunch of us to pack up her duplex so she can list it on Airbnb.
My fifty-five-year-old friend Lolly is leaving her husband of twenty years. After a decade of ambivalence and marriage counseling and romantic escapes that were neither romantic nor an escape, Lolly hung it up. “Jim’s my best friend,” she tells me. “We have grandkids together. I can’t stand the idea of erasing all that history. But being married to my best friend isn’t good enough. I want to be madly in love again before I die.”
Eighty-two-year-old Mary, whose first book was an international bestseller and whose second and third books weren’t, was my Berkeley writing buddy. When I moved to L.A., Mary moved under duress, too. “I did the math,” she told me. “I had $80,000 in savings. With my pension and Social Security, I could make that last about three years in Berkeley.
“I figured I had two choices. I could keep renting a $3,200 Berkeley studio for two more years, then kill myself when I ran out of money. Or I could live someplace affordable until I’m ready to die.” Mary moved to the small town in Oregon where her daughter and grandson live. She rents a two-bedroom house there for $550. “I’m keeping your Hendrick’s and your martini glass in the freezer,” she told me, “in case you feel like driving four hours to Butt-Fuck Oregon to drink with me.”
My fifty-five-year-old bestie, Celia, spent two years and much of her savings starting a small restaurant, then chucked it for a nonprofit job. At sixty, Naomi quit her union job as a script supervisor and started working on call so she can write a memoir about her childhood in a kibbutz “while I can still remember what happened.” Fifty-one-year-old novelist Dana, my first Bungalito guest, took out a second mortgage on her Brooklyn apartment and spent a year watching The Sopranos in one-minute intervals, teaching herself to write for TV. Then she wrote a pilot based on her novel, sold it to HBO, and started earning more money per episode than she’d made as a novelist in a year.
These reports calm and console me. Clearly I’m not the only old fart whose life is continuing to take young-fart turns. If I’m going to be reduced to a cultural stereotype, the “sixty is the new forty” demographic isn’t a bad club to join. The changes my friends are making scare them, too. It gives me courage to see them acting on their determination, pushing past their fear.
—
HEARING MY NEWS, local friends rally round. They tell me I’ll be happier being a “real writer,” cook me dinners, buy me drinks, walk me up and down mountains until my anxiety dissolves into cardio overload. I’m blown away by the quality of the friendships I’ve built in two short years.
I’m surprised, too, to realize that, through no particular effort of my own, most of my new friends are in their thirties and forties. Maybe that’s a function of my denial about my actual age, or my propensity for hiking steep mountains, celebrating happy hour religiously, and exchanging the grittiest sexual details.
And then there’s this. I’ve grown close with a bunch of young women who see me as a spare mom. Jade, who’s thirty-seven, calls me FM, for “Future Me.” Charlotte’s mother, whom I met when she visited from Boston, thanked me for “being such a good local mother” to her girl. Darcy and I talk about sex at a level of detail I’ve never shared with anyone, but she looks at me blankly when I mention the word pain in conjunction with sex. Molly introduced me at a book reading as her “writing mom.” When I complained to Helena that I thought of these women as my friends, not my kids, she laughed and told me to be grateful they don’t call me Grandma.
Helena has a point. Why should I care? If my young women friends love me in part because they’re looking for mothering, I love them in part because I’m looking for young women to mother.
—
WITHIN A MONTH of sending out my SOS, I have a contract to edit a friend’s sister’s debut novel. Within two months I’m helping an actor’s widow write her husband’s biography. I’m not earning enough to replace my Bellissima income, but if I shop at Costco more and Yummy.com less, I’ll be able to make it work for a while.
Once I would have rejected any financial plan that came with a life-span of “a while.” I would have driven myself nuts looking for a more long-term, less anxiety-provoking solution. Now I know better. Long-term solution? Security? Stability? God laughs. So do I. These days my plan is this. If it’s good enough for now, it’s good enough for me.
—
I’VE BEEN WORRIED ABOUT MONEY all my adult life. Unlike my worries about my marriage, my most catastrophic money worries have never come true. The Holocaust mentality that was my inheritance kept fear on the payroll as my abusive coach, flogging me from the sidelines, keeping me focused on the next loss even as I was winning.
Now I know that when I stumble, when I fall, I get up and keep going. I know I’ll do that again. The one thing I can’t afford to lose now is time. I can’t, I won’t waste time worrying about money or anything else that doesn’t pose an immediate, intractable threat.
I don’t know how I’ll make it without my job at Bellissima. It seems likely that job will be my last. Sixty might be the new forty, but a sixty-two-year-old without a job is commonly known as a retiree.
Still, whether it’s fair or not (not), I’m a middle-class woman from a white upper-middle-class family, and—to state the often-ignored obvious—that gives me an advantage. I’ve never asked a loved one for a loan, and I hope I never need to. But I have friends and family who have enough—more than enough, some of them—and unlike less blessed sixtysomethings who tightrope-walk without that net, I have people and resources to break my fall.
Helena’s right. I won’t lose my house, and not because she’ll pay the mortgage if I can’t. Thanks to the dumb luck of my birth circumstances—my race; my parents’ educations; an affluent, sophisticated childhood in one of the world’s great cities; the feminist movement, which stuck its foot into some critical doorways just in time to let me in—even without a high school diploma or a financially advantageous marriage or the ability to keep a job for longer than two years, I’ve managed to support myself (and later, my children) since I left home at sixteen.
I own a 750-square-foot house in a neighborhood like so many other neighborhoods in “desirable” cities: “dangerous” until the white folks moved in, now increasing in value with the arrival of each beard-waxing barbershop, hot-yoga studio, and fresh-pressed juice bar. So yes, post-Bellissima, I’ve gone back to being a “starving artist.” But chances are good that I’ll never starve. And I’ve got a lot of help.
Al-Anon meetings help. They remind me that the object of the game is not an uninterrupted stream of good news and blissed-outedness, but the ever-improving ability to achieve and maintain serenity, whatever the news may be.
Forgive me, fellow twelve-steppers: alcohol helps. I’ve always enjoyed the warm, loose, truthy-blurty blur I find at the bottom of a martini glass. But since I arrived in L.A., where carbs are contraband, cocktails are compulsory, and everything stops for happy hour, every day of the week, alcohol has become the face I’m eager to see as I drive home at night, the hand I reach for as I walk in the door, a trusty companion who bats away the loneliness before it sinks its stinger into me.
Paradoxically, being old helps. In Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, David Ulin, former book critic of the Los Angeles Times, quotes Orson Welles: “The terrible thing about L.A. is that you sit down, you’re twenty-five, and when you get up you’re sixty-two.” The opposite is true of me. I got to L.A. and sat down at sixty, and now I’m getting up with the life of a twenty-five-year-old. Most of my fellow geriatric Americans are retiring from lifelong careers, not hustl
ing to start new ones. I veered off the straight-line path, along with several hundred thousand members of my cohort, in the 1960s. Unlike most of them, I never veered back. So how surprising is it, really, that I don’t find myself on a straight-line path to a well-funded retirement?
Also helpful: Helena’s generous friendship and encouragement, even as I continue to doubt our compatibility as lovers.
God helps. Until my first night in Los Angeles, when I ran out of hope and ran into God in the middle of a dark night, I’d spent the past half century railing Bill Maher–style against “the opiate of the masses.” Living in close-knit harmony with the God-fearing elderly African Americans in my Oakland neighborhood, I rued the fact that my neighbors were being suckered by the preacher man, giving God the glory instead of giving the One Percent hell.
Whoops. More and more often, these days, I’m able to practice Al-Anon’s first line of defense, “turning it over”—to God, to fate, to a more benevolent universe than the one my persecuted progenitors inhabited. Doing that—even imagining doing that—actually helps.
Living in Los Angeles helps. What better place to start over than this city of reinvention, where people, and businesses, and the city itself slip into and out of identities with the ease and frequency of a costume change? So said Moby in The New York Times, in a story about droves of New York creatives moving to the Eastside of L.A. “Los Angeles is now where young artists can really experiment, and if their efforts fall short, it’s not that bad because . . . almost everyone else they know is trying new things and failing, too.”
What’s not to love? L.A. is a bright grin of a city whose man-made miseries (paralyzing traffic, depressing strip malls, dangerous pollution, and did I mention soul-eating traffic?) and natural wonders (seventy miles of pristine, mostly public beaches on one side of town, and a 4,300-acre park with fifty mountain miles of hiking trails on the other) are blessed and bathed by the most show-offy weather God and climate change have to offer.
My Plan B life comes complete with blue sky, warm breezes, birdsong, and citrus-scented air. Plants that struggled for survival in the salty Bay Area chill grow here like kudzu. In the garden I planted, pink angel trumpets go limp and lovely in the afternoon sun. Leggy papyrus puffs wave in the warm breeze. Gardenia bushes sprout fragrant white blossoms; lemon, lime, and orange trees fruit throughout the year.
When I feel lonely, or when the Eastside heat hits the high nineties, I pack up and head for Hannah and Michael’s house on the cooler, ocean-adjacent Westside. There I spend days writing on the antique olive-green velvet chaise that Hannah calls my “throne,” spurred on by the keyboard clicks from her office down the hall. When the daylight goes dusky blue, Hannah and I cook simple-fancy dinners together from her Silver Palate Cookbook, peppered with the basil and thyme she grows in her backyard.
In my old life, I was my own bad boss. No later than six each morning, over my wife’s sleepy protests, I slithered out of our warm bed, pulled on my threadbare cashmere socks, tiptoed upstairs, and stationed myself at my attic desk. There I stayed until I’d met the day’s deadlines or until the sun set, whichever came first, refusing myself a meal at the kitchen table, let alone a midday hike with a friend.
Now I live in paradise. And now I’m too old for that shit. In three years, I’ll be eligible for Medicare. In five years, if Social Security still exists, it’ll cover half of my nut.
“I had come to the end of the line,” I read in my current bedside companion, Sidewalking, “the place where the myths of possibility and reinvention butt up against the edges of the continent, and the vanishing point of the horizon becomes the vanishing point of the known world.”
The vanishing point of my known world keeps moving, which is scary and disorienting, and keeps me on my slightly arthritic toes.
—
NOW THAT I’M FREELANCING AGAIN, I say yes to anyone who asks me to do anything interesting—even in the middle of a workday, and especially when the invitation is to something new: a “talk-back” screening of some hot series’ next season on the Paramount lot, a talk by Anne Lamott or Mary Karr at the downtown public library, a lawn picnic and movie at the Hollywood Forever cemetery where Douglas Fairbanks, Jayne Mansfield, Rudolph Valentino, and Cecil B. DeMille were laid to rest.
When I was a teenager, my what-the-hell adventurousness was fueled by an age-appropriate assumption that I’d never grow old or die. Now my what-the-hell-ness is fueled by the opposite motivation, the fact of my impending mortality. Striking out as a sixteen-year-old in 1967, I cared only about what I got to feel and do—how many thrills I could cram into each day; how much war-and-inequality-busting I could get done while I was at it. Now that I’m a sixty-two-year-old, the family-building, career-building, marriage-building years are behind me. I’m not building anything anymore, except bone density if I’m lucky. I’m back to where I started, a pleasure-seeking missile again.
At this stage of life, what else is there? Before I die, dammit, I’m going to have myself some mind-blowing adventures. If not now, when?
—
IF I HAVE TO GET OLD, at least my timing is good. Now’s the best time ever to be old and female and bold. At eighty, Joan Didion’s wearing big black shades in the pages of Vogue, modeling Céline haute couture. Harriet Doerr wrote Stones for Ibarra, her first book, at seventy-three. Judi Dench won her first Oscar at sixty-four; Glenn Close is going strong at sixty-nine. Distance swimmer (and TED speaker, and Dancing with the Stars competitor, and out lesbian) Diana Nyad made it from Cuba to Florida on her fifth attempt at age sixty-four. Iris Apfel is modeling jewelry at ninety-five.
The day I harvested my first crop of gray hairs was the day I went cynical on the cheery feminist declarations about women and aging. “Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age,” Gloria Steinem said. Eve Ensler wrote, “It has taken me so many years to be okay with being different, and with being this alive, this intense.” Christiane Northrup, queen of women’s wisdom, promised, “Ageless living means . . . you have enough experience to know what’s not worth worrying about and what ought to be your priorities.”
Biggest. Surprise. Ever: That cheery feminist crap is true. For the first time since childhood, I’m responsible to no one. I can be Helena’s girlfriend or break up with her without upsetting my kids or my own living situation or my finances. I can make money or rest on whatever laurels I’ve got without depriving anyone of anything. I can binge-watch Girls till midnight or go to sleep at nine. The bad news and the good news is the same. I have nothing and no one to lose.
—
EIGHTEEN MONTHS INTO OUR RELATIONSHIP, Helena and I are perched on leather-topped stools, bellied up to the gleaming mahogany bar at Cliff’s Edge in Silver Lake. Friendly hipsters are munching on sautéed Brussels sprouts and Parker House rolls; friendly hipster bartenders are muddling exotic herbs into splashes of small-batch vodka and bourbon and gin. I’m on my second Upper West Side; Helena is nursing her first and last Lemon Drop of the evening. If, as Dr. Phil says, the past is the best indicator of the future, she won’t finish it; I will.
“I want to talk about your drinking,” Helena says.
I stare at her, dumbstruck. “Where’s this coming from?” I ask.
“You turn distant when you drink,” Helena says. “You’re like a different person. A person I don’t much like.”
My heart sinks. A cocktail-free future flashes before my eyes. It’s not a welcome sight.
—
AS A CHILD OF THE SIXTIES, I came of age seeing alcohol as “the man’s” drug, a soporific meant to mollify the masses, like religion and Ozzie and Harriet reruns. Our parents drank to get blotto, to feel and know less about themselves and the world. We did pot and hash and hallucinogens to feel our feelings more, to expand our consciousness, to see through lies and delusions: the government’s, our parents’, our own.
When I aged out of t
he youth movement, I started warming up to drinking. Getting buzzed no longer felt like an act of activist or artistic submission; it felt like a nice way to wind down at the end of a long day. Wine with dinner proved the gateway drug to a cocktail before dinner, sometimes after. More than once, during the war years with my wife, I brought a bottle of wine to her place in the guest-room bed.
But when I moved to L.A., alcohol and I got serious, fast. All those happy hours with strangers I hoped to convert to friends. All those unhappy hours in my rented apartment, alone. All those nights with nothing to look forward to.
I’m not about to admit this to Helena, but I’ve been a little worried about how much I love to drink. I’d devised a little test that I self-administered whenever my concern about my drinking exceeded the carefree pleasure I took from its effects. I’d tick off the differences between me and the alcoholics I knew, giving myself a get-out-of-sobriety-free card for each one.
I’d never had a blackout or an overdose or even a hangover. Check.
My drinking had never caused me to do anything I wish I hadn’t: blow a secret, fall down, or puke. Check.
I’d never lost anything to my drinking—time, a job, a relationship, my car keys. Check.
I’d never gotten a DUI. Check.
Most significant—and this was my bright line, the notion to which I clung when I found myself counting down to happy hour at odd times of the day—no one had ever expressed concern about my drinking. How could I have a drinking problem when my drinking had never bothered me or anyone else?
Until now.
“You check out when you’re drinking,” Helena adds. “You’re unreachable. It makes me feel alone.”
Everything in me rises up against the sickening realization that I’ve just flunked my own test. My bright line has been crossed. Only one thing can save my relationship with the sexy, sweaty martini glass in front of me. Helena has to take it back.
The New Old Me Page 19
