Abnormal Occurrences

by Thomas Berger

  But then the German Grand Prix was won at the Nürbürgring by France’s Jean-Claude Blondel, a racing driver sixty-eight years old; Hans Kronhausen, a seventy-one-year-old Austrian skier, took the world championship in the giant slalom; and at an international weightlifting competition held in Hungary, Jock McTavish, a Scottish superheavyweight, eighty years of age, walked away with the clean-and-jerk.

  As yet, however, these extraordinary events had been confined to the so-called Western world and had not yet penetrated to the countries formerly of the Soviet Union, let alone reached those nations to which the term “developing” could apply. In consequence there was widespread sentiment in the General Assembly of the UN for a resolution by which any triumph by an aged athlete could be condemned as a device of the US-led conspiracy to revive colonialism. But before the matter came to a vote an eighty-three-year-old Rwandan tennis player won at Wimbledon, in a sport in which his countrymen had hitherto not been conspicuous; a Libyan swimmer, ninety years of age, set a world record in the butterfly, and at Kiev a Ukrainian purporting to be a hundred and nine ran 1500 meters twelve seconds faster than anyone else in history.

  There was no longer any doubt that something unusual was happening throughout the world.

  The old athletes of Asia were the next record-breakers: ancient Indians, superannuated Chinese, and Japanese so old as to be properly on the threshold of senility were defeating healthy young men at every sport played in that part of the globe.

  Clearly the situation had now gone beyond the realm of sports as such, and the World Health Organization undertook a series of studies of athletes over age sixty, but absolutely nothing was discovered that differentiated any from nonathletic though reasonably healthy specimens as old as they. Indeed, some of these champions were none too hale: for example, Burmeister, the seventy-eight-year-old American miler, had cataracts on both eyes; the skier Kronhausen, seventy-one, suffered from a liver complaint; and the old Rwandan tennis player, Georges Karisimbi, had, of all things, a heart flutter. Almost all the old athletes had varicose veins; were, though otherwise trim, bloated around the midsection, could not read a newspaper without eyeglasses, and were awakened in the middle of the night by a need to urinate. Many wore dentures, were hard of hearing, and could easily be upset when in the presence of hyperactive children. In short, they could not have been more normal.

  Thus far the amazing achievements of aged men had been confined to sports, but now, unfortunately, old codgers began to make their mark in another area of human enterprise. Numerous bystanders agreed that the male who, with his bare hands, attacked and savagely beat four husky youths on the sidewalk just outside a pizza parlor in the Brownsville area of Brooklyn, New York, could not have been younger than seventy years of age. If this incident was the first to be reported, it was not long afterward that brutal assaults by the elderly on the young became routine across the nation and next, as those things go, similar news was being made throughout the world: Amsterdam, Athens, Calcutta, Rangoon. According to a story in Le Monde, the average Paris pimp was at least seventy-five. In Britain Scotland Yard uncovered a terrorist group responsible for bombings in Germany and Spain: its personnel consisted exclusively of fanatical Islamists not one of whom was younger than eighty-five.

  American politics was not long to react to the new situation: youth quickly became an impediment to a politician, and the younger candidates for public office—that is, those in their late sixties—were at pains to disguise themselves as men older by a decade or so. When the incumbent President, a person aged sixty-nine, ran for re-election he was derided by his ninety-year-old opponent as being a stripling without sufficient experience of life to hold his own in a crisis. When the votes were counted it was established that the public ardently agreed with the latter, who rode into office on a landslide. His popularity did not survive the first year of his term, however, for he was opposed on most issues by a Congress made up of men older than he, who successfully painted him with the same brush he had used on his predecessor, namely, that he was an ineffectual youngster, whose answer to every domestic problem was greater expenditure and whose foreign policy could not be defined.

  He probably could not have been re-elected had the country not teetered on the verge of entering a nasty little war with, of all places, Switzerland, in the final year of his first term. The crisis had its origin in an all too typical remark the President had made at a news conference when asked by one of the more bumptious old reporters whether he really trusted the Swiss to honor their agreement to disclose the identities of Americans who sought to evade US income taxes by means of secret bank accounts in the Alpine nation.

  In answer the Chief Executive made his raspy chuckle, and with a twinkle in his oysterish eyes said, “’bout as far as I could throw a cuckoo clock.”

  The Swiss were irate and demanded an apology, which at the outset was not forthcoming. “By golly,” said the President, “if those fellas can’t take a little goodnatured joshing, it’s a sorry commentary on the younger generation of what used to be a real swell little country.”

  This comment was taken as a further insult, for nobody in the Swiss government was younger than ninety-two, and Switzerland thereupon severed all diplomatic relations with the United States, announcing that any further provocation might well evoke a formal declaration of war.

  Except for the usual dissidents, the American public greeted what was seen as Swiss effrontery with a defiant snarl. Next day thousands of old men queued up before the armed-forces recruiting stations, while persons in their middle years, too young for the services, performed symbolic acts of hostility, such as sacking the offices of importers of Swiss watches and blowing up great wheels of Emmenthaler cheese before the video cameras. Editorial commentary in the media was prowar by the ratio of almost ten to one, and after the Swiss made a blustering, showcase demonstration of a new gunboat on the waters of Lake Lucerne, the President publicly sneered, “Hell, we got lifeboats that big.”

  The next day a crowd of old men besieged the US embassy and burned the Stars and Stripes in the street outside. Despite the combined efforts of the other European countries to dampen the sparks, war seemed imminent—when suddenly the crisis quietly came to an end. Though the investigative reporters did their share of speculation, the complete story was never quite established, but rumor had it that an ad hoc, and rare, alliance of the nonagenarian executives of Big Oil, the Colombian drug cartel, Al Qaeda, and certain old leftwing billionaires, working behind the scenes, pointed out that nobody could profit from the wrong war at the wrong time. Likely this appeal was accompanied by a threat that considerable funds might otherwise be withdrawn from Swiss banks, on the one hand, and from American soft-money political-campaign contributions, on the other.

  Whatever the explanation, the President made something vaguely like an apology to Switzerland during an apparently impromptu stroll in the Rose Garden, noting his weakness for uttering harmlessly intended wisecracks that might nevertheless be misinterpreted. Later in the same week, the Swiss ambassador, who came bearing gold wristwatches for both members of the First Family, was invited to stay for a little intimate supper at which the fondue was made with Gruyère and washed down with Neuchâtel.

  But now that their wind was up, the aged of America would not be easily placated. They rallied in unprecedented numbers around the Washington Monument, where they were whipped into a frenzy by a series of incendiary speakers and the strident tunes of a brass band, and soon they marched to the White House and attempted to charge it. They were finally driven back after almost breaking through the cordon of massed Washington police, White House guards, Secret Service men, and a battalion of combat Marines. Many white heads were clubbed bloody, and tear gas made many old eyes even more watery, but the rioters returned the favor and scores of the defenders bore wounds and bruises as souvenirs of the day.

  The mob refused to disperse until the President came out to address them in person. There was some jeering when
he began with “Fellow oldsters,” but his subsequent references to the standard complaints, arthritis, constipation, insomnia, shared by old commoners and old kings, old citizens and old Chief Executives, found more sympathetic ears (many of them equipped with hearing aids), and by the time he made the incontrovertible points that the “only true equality is found in time,” and that all the foolish young people would inevitably themselves reach old age one day—unless of course they destroyed themselves first through fecklessness, self-indulgence, and a lack of respect for tradition—when the President put the matter this way, most of the gaffers there assembled believed they had won the argument, and the mob slowly became a collection of individuals, who limped back to their own discrete lives.

  But the March on the White House, more than anything else, established the aged as a political force to be reckoned with, and in the ensuing years their influence was formidable. The kinds of jobs hitherto filled almost exclusively by the young were now oftener assumed by the old. For example, the new minimum age for a policeman in most major American cities was sixty-five. In Los Angeles a candidate for the Police Academy must have reached his seventieth birthday. The average age of New York City firemen was eighty-two years, three and a half months. By federal law an airline pilot could not be younger than seventy-five. The youngest soldiers and sailors called up in the new draft were what once would have been thought ancient men, but occasionally a patriotic chap in his late sixties would lie about his age and dupe a recruiting sergeant into signing him on. If he were subsequently uncovered, he had to be discharged, but not without admiration for his zeal.

  A more subtle effect was felt on the popular language. The euphemisms of an earlier era, “senior citizens,” “mature persons,” “golden years,” and the like, were now regarded as, in the least, bad taste, and militant old men were known to picket TV stations whose newspeople employed such degrading terms. The preferred usages were those which boldly identified, perhaps even gloated about, advanced age. Thus “geezer,” “duffer,” and “coot” became honorific words, and the opprobrious irony of “Dirty Old Man” was replaced by a sense of respectful affection. The Mayor of New York City, a man himself in the prime of life, i.e., ninety-three, instituted the practice of recognizing the DOM of the Month, the ancient exhibitionist who had been most evident in or near municipal schoolyards in the previous thirty days, and awarding the codger with a handsome decoration called the Freedom of the City.

  Hollywood was as always a bit slow to pick up the new trend, but when the moviemakers grasped it, they did so by the fistful. Superannuated male stars were brought back from the pastures to which they had long since been put to graze, and talent scouts fanned out to search Sun Cities across the country for new old performers. Soon such names as Uncle Bud Murphy, Toothless Bannister, old Roy Granger, and, the most successful of all, Pops Alcott were recognized in every household throughout the land. As usual, foreign cinéastes responded in their own fashion to an American influence. Gaspare Vincenza, the renowned Italian director, made a surrealistic film in which old men were continually metamorphosing into Russian wolfhounds and devouring nuns. Several French films took a droll look at the taste of voluptuous teenage girls for palsied oldsters—though in the best of these, Le Vioc (in America the dubbed version was entitled The Old Goat), the story takes a tragic turn when eighty-year-old Gaston dumps young Solange in favor of her best friend, Marie-Louise, a maiden of sixteen, and the rejected girl drowns herself in the Meuse.

  American television reacted to the new state of affairs with docudramas, miniseries, and of course exhaustive coverage of the sports in which aged men were pre-eminent, which were invariably the more violent and not golf or bowling or billiards. No less than seven situation comedies took as their premise the dominance of age over youth. Many of the actors who played leading roles had already attained stardom before the end of World War II. (There was a scandal when The National Enquirer unmasked not-so-old Cootie Barnes, star of Ninety’s Way Too Young!, as being an impostor of but sixty-three, whose withered face was due mostly to make-up.)

  In the typical sitcom the old hero had a weary wife in her early twenties and a family of at least three enervated young children: in every episode he tried to lure the former into the bedroom for what in each show was called by a different name (e.g., “human kindness,” “some laughs,” and, in the all-black series, Grampa Chocolate, “sugar”) took the kids into the back yard for a game of full-contact football without padding or a bit of high-speed skateboarding down the kind of road used by cars in the Pike’s Peak Hill Climb. The comedy came when he was inevitably frustrated in both efforts—until the last five minutes of the half-hour, when finally, by sheer example, he succeeded in transforming the lazy cowards of his family into winners, to the dismay of his envious neighbor, an impotent wretch of thirty-five.

  ...Appropriately enough, it was on TV that the nation saw the first indication that the whole thing was coming to an end.

  One Saturday afternoon, in March of that year, a ninety-eight-year-old boxer won by knockout a televised bout against an opponent of seventy-four. By now this result would have been utterly routine, the older having been, as usual, the favorite by overwhelming odds. But when the referee raised the victor’s arm in triumph, the latter announced in a strident voice that she was 100 percent woman. Afterwards, a group of female reporters emerged from the locker rooms and confirmed the fact as stated.

  Trend-spotters, determined not to be caught napping again, quickly identified a change of era, but only time would tell how long the next one would endure.

  Granted Wishes: Talking Dog

  OWING TO HIS SUPERIOR sensibility, Vernon Bowers had no friends left by the time he had graduated from high school. Other people simply could not endure long association with someone who could see and identify the illusions by which they were habitually duped; the fraudulent causes they supported, the talentless performers they adored, the mendacious leaders they followed. He did not spare himself: he knew it was his weakness that he could not play along in silence with hoaxes on every hand, he who was a slave to truth. He could not forbear from saying to the proud owner of a new car, “I guess you haven’t seen the results of the latest crash tests—?” Or to a female cousin, “I wonder if that low-carb diet is living up to your expectations—?” Or of a contemporary’s latest haircut, “Really?”

  He was even more outspoken with his parents, under whose roof he continued to live for three years after college, rent-free, for, lacking in employment, he had no income to speak of. The jobs he had been offered were too stupid to take seriously. As to women, there actually existed a few who were initially attracted to him by what they assumed was an attention-getting gimmick that at least made him stand out from the usual herd of stiffs they had to choose from, but it seldom took more than one date to prove that Vernon had no alternative act; he was an a-hole to the core of his being. “Why do you wear those shoes?” “That’s your brother?” “I never heard of that school.” And so on. Not to mention that when sooner or later told to go eff himself he seemed to take it as a well-earned reward.

  At home he complained about his mother’s cuisine and his father’s grammar, pointing out that Italians never put grated cheese on sea-food pasta and that “Joe couldn’t help but run into her” is barbarous, the correct usage being either, “could not but...” or “couldn’t help running...” His parents not only put up with this sort of thing but were proud of their only offspring, whom his mother had produced when she was older than most of those in first pregnancies. Also, neither Mom nor Dad had ever spent a day of higher education, whereas Vernon had a full two years at the community college that was near enough to commute to and knew a lot more about the great world than they did, his father being a plasterer and his mother still a part-time manicurist, earning a combined income that was enough to feed him and even dispense pocket money.

  Nevertheless Vernon was not happy to be an eternal dependent. His folks would die one
day, leaving not a whole lot after years of the big spending to which they were addicted: two cars, plasma TV, and his mother was a shoe freak, with a closetful. So eventually he had to do something that paid generously and demanded little, because though he was capable of vast achievements, experience had taught him to expect that envious others would block any effort conspicuous for its ambition. What he wished for was that one big break.

  He got it in an unexpected way. In a dinner-table discussion of why, with all he had to offer his fellow men and women, Vernon spent little time with any of them, his father concluded, “Well, I was watching C-SPAN the other night, and some professor said, ‘According to Harry Truman’—you know who he was, Vernon, I’m sure.”

  His son nodded impatiently. “President who lost the Vietnam War because he refused to use the atomic bomb.”

  “So what the professor says was, ‘If you want a friend in Washington, DC, get yourself a dog.’”

  As it was pro forma for Vernon to disparage everything his parents said, and for them to admire him all the more for it, he did so now, but the Truman doctrine made its mark on him and when enough time had elapsed for the matter to have been forgotten by the senior Bowers, who could however recite the batting orders of baseball teams from three decades earlier, Vernon bought a dachshund with his father’s Discovery card and took it home for his mother to feed and house.

  She of course was flattered to receive the assignment. “And what do you want to call him, Vernie?” she asked, accepting the puppy, about the size of a plump squirrel, in her arms. “How about—”

  Vernon snorted. “Certainly not. I would feel like a fool every time I called it.” He deliberated for a moment while the puppy, which had welcomed the initial embrace, now had become blasé and struggled to go elsewhere.