At
my age, I had honestly begun to despair of ever finding love again. Once, when
I sauntered into Carlos ‘n’ Charlie’s on Sunset Blvd., lovely young women would
pout and stick their breasts out as I passed. In the past 25 years, though, no woman I haven’t paid has seemed so
much as to notice me. I blame the fact that my ears and nose are almost twice
their original size now, and that the hair that no longer grows out of my scalp
is growing instead out of my nostrils, in profusion. I blame no less the fact that my neck
resembles poultry’s, and that, however much Old Spice I might douse myself with
every morning, it isn’t nearly enough to make up for the stench emanating from
the diapers into which my incontinence has forced me.
But
the old Dean Martin favorite turns out, to my infinite relief and delight, to
be true; somewhere there was, and is, a someone for me. Her name is Consuelo. I
am unable to pronounce her last name, as it isn’t familiarly Spanish — not
Gomez or Lopez, not Ramirez or Martinez — but a weird Indian one. She is from
Honduras, not entirely legally, I don’t think. She speaks no English, at least
that I can hear, but that isn’t saying much, as my hearing took a powder at
approximately the same time my continence did. I have a hearing aid, but it amplifies
everything, rather than only that which you’re trying to hear, and is
unpleasant to wear. Consuelo and I communicate primarily with our eyes.
She
is a member of the staff here at GoldenYears, without a space, to which my son
and daughters condemned me after each of them had taken a turn trying to
accommodate me in his or her respective home. Todd’s brat children couldn’t
bear the way I smell. Edie’s prima
donna husband LaMarcus got bent out of shape about having to help me out of the
bathtub a few times, and about my peeing in it, and Ella got even more bent out
of shape about my going for a walk on the freeway one afternoon when I was
supposed to be looking after her two kids, who aren’t much more palatable to me
than Todd’s.
So
I occasionally call them by Todd’s kids’ names! You’d think they’d admire me
for being able to remember any name at all, but no. They act approximately as
Mary Ellen [surname withheld] did when I swallowed my pride and applied for a greeter’s
job at Walmart in ’65 or ’75 or whenever it was. I’m pretty sure there was
a 5 in it. She had me put a bunch of index cards in alphabetical order — real
difficult! — and then had me fill out this Minnesota something-or-other “inventory”
to make sure I didn’t believe aliens were trying to communicate with me through
the fillings in my teeth, and only when I’d passed both with flying colors did
she finally offer me the job. I,
trying to be sociable, trying to do that Dale Carnegie thing of pretending to
find the other person interesting, asked when she was expecting, and she wasn’t
expecting at all, but was just big-bellied, and you should have seen the hatred
in her eyes!
I
guess there were legal reasons she couldn’t retract the job offer just because
she felt insulted, and it was a good thing, because with three children and a
wife who every afternoon like clockwork went through a fifth of gin, and was
absolutely nobody’s idea of a
“good mother,” may God rest her poor, troubled soul, I badly needed that
paycheck.
But
weren’t we talking about something else?
Oh,
yes. I remember now. That girl I’m in love with, the little Mexican one. No. I
beg your pardon. Honduran, as from Honduras. Tegucigalpa, to be exact. And
don’t think it didn’t take me a good couple of weeks to memorize that particular
mouthful. The Goosey Gulper is how I remember it. I know that doesn’t make a
damned bit of sense, but neither does 80 percent of the American public
thinking President What’s-His-Name is a Muslim. People didn’t used to be so
stupid when I lived out in the world, where everything isn’t beige like it is
in this goddamn hellhole.
There.
I’ve said it. Hellhole. It’s reasonably clean, I suppose, and I can imagine
that less expensive places probably smell worse, but I can tell you that after
a month or two surrounded by all this beigeness, by all the artificial flowers
and pleasant music and taped birdsong and tasteless, texture-less beige food
those of us who have any hair left are darned near pulling it out by the
handful.
Obama.
President Obama. Our first Irish president. Get it? O’Bama? I've always had a sense of humor. That's one thing no one can take away from m e.
Three
weeks in here and I’ve figured out I’ve got two choices. I can go gentle into
that good night — that is, I can let all the beige and artificial flowers and
pleasant Muzak sedate me into not knowing for sure if I’m alive or dead — or I
can make the choice to live, and nothing says you’re alive so much, at least if
you’re a fellow, as wanting to shoot a gal full of sperm. Just the other
night I saw on the National Geographic channel that nothing makes clearer to a
zoo that a pair of animals is adapting well than their conceiving offspring.
Deciding
that I’d much rather die while screwing at 82 than of boredom at 87 or 88 was
the easy part. The much harder part was figuring out whom to screw. I could
have had any of the female inmates in a heartbeat — after 75, the gals
outnumber the fellows by about eight to one — but the sad fact is that I could
picture it feeling like screwing my grandmother. I may actually be older than a
lot of them, and I might have cataracts, but when I look at them, it’s through
the eyes of the 27-year-old version of myself.
I
began looking at the help in a new way — first, of course, at the few English
speakers, because I thought a lot of things would be easier with them. After
dinner one night, I worked up the nerve to ask one of the little waitresses if
she thought we should go into the darkroom and see what developed. I guess that
in this era of digital photography, it was stupid to imagine she’d have any
idea what I meant, and she didn’t, so I tried asking instead if she’d consider
a roll in the hay. As she put two and two together, a look of horror that ought
to have been on a movie poster set up camp on her face. She said, “Eww!” and
dropped her armful of plates. She looked, as she scrambled for the kitchen, as
though she might upchuck.
I
thought maybe I’d better stick with immigrants, who were a lot more likely to
be impressed by my having a few bucks in my wallet — not that I was very often
able to remember where I kept it hidden. But of course I’m speaking
metaphorically. I do indeed misplace everything, but have no need of a wallet
in GoldenYears, and don’t carry one. What I have is a nice chunk of change in
the bank, well into the five-figure range at last count.
In
any event, I asked a laundress, Rosa, whose English wasn’t sensational, but a
whole lot better than my Spanish, if she’d be my translator. When I told her my
intentions, I think her feathers might have been a little bit ruffled by my
lack of designs on her, but come
on now; she's not exactly Jennifer Lopez. She asked how much I had in mind to pay. I
guess the days of anybody doing anything out of the goodness of her heart are
long gone.
It
occurred to me that even immigrant girls might respond better to a more subtle
approach than I’d used on the little white waitress, so what I had Rosa ask the
first two she approached for me was if they wanted to grab a bite after
work on New Year’s Eve. Rosa didn’t understand “grab a bite” at first, and
seemed to think I had mayhem in mind. To spare myself embarrassment, I asked
her to talk to the girls when I wasn’t around. One of the first two had a
boyfriend back in Guatemala, and the other dated only Catholics as devout as
she, and I haven’t been to confession since the early ‘70s, if I ever went at
all. I may be Episcopalian or some goddamned thing for all I can remember. Back
to the drawing board.
After
three more failures, Rosa came to tell me that her new assistant had agreed to go
out with me last night on the condition that I keep my hands to myself.
This, of course, was Consuelo, who isn’t exactly Jennifer Lopez, but in the
service we had a saying All cats purrs
the same in the dark, which is to say that if you’re horny enough, Phyllis
Diller’s as good as Jennifer Aniston or whoever. We saw Night at the Museum: Secret of the
Tomb, which I wouldn't recommend, but apparently in
Consuelo’s country Ben Stiller is lusted after as openly as Johnny Depp is in
this one. I bought her an $8 box of
popcorn, but she’d finished by the time Stiller has his threesome with Scarlett
Johanssen and Angelina Jolie, and afterward described herself as hungry enough
to eat a [large rodent indigenous to her country, not heretofore heard of by
me, and I’m not going to try to spell it].
The hostess at Applebee’s insisted,
though, that she had no tables, even though the place was maybe half-full at
best. I think it may have had to do with my not having been able to make it to
the little boys’ room at the multiplex in time when we were leaving, and with
these supposedly deodorant diapers my daughters brought me at Thanksgiving not
being very effective at all. I
wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out they were made in China. Or maybe even
goddamn Honduras.
Happy
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