What Would Kinky Do?: How to Unscrew a Screwed-Up World (6 page)

ZERO TO SIXTY

 

oon I'll be sixty years old. Impossible, you say? How the hell do you think I feel? I don't know whether to have a birthday party or a suicide watch. I have received a few misguided cards and several inquiries from paleontologists, but basically, all being sixty really means is that you're old enough to sleep alone. In my case, having breezed through my entire adult life in a state of total arrested development, it's especially hard to realize that Annette Funicello is gone. I don't mean to make light of Annette Funicello. She died a tragic, lingering death, I believe, or maybe she's still with us, merely eclipsed by yet another former Mouseketeer, Britney Spears. The older and wiser I get, indeed, the less it is that I seem to know. Soon I may become such a font of wisdom and experience that I will know absolutely nothing at all. There are some, no doubt, who believe this stage of evolution has already occurred.

But this is where seniority comes to the rescue. For the older you get, the less you care what others may think of you. You may find yourself peeing in Morse Code, but you're still happy to share your wisdom and advice with the world. When hotel magnate Conrad Hilton was a very old man, someone asked him what was the most important thing he'd learned in life. "Always keep the shower curtain inside the tub," he answered. These may not sound like words to live by but, you'll have to admit, it does make for good practical advice. What's more important, of course, is all the water under the bridge that Hilton, for his own reasons, deliberately left out of the tub.

Possibly, even more importantly, I was cooking chicken gizzards for the dogs yesterday while watching
Wuthering Heights.
I forgot about the chicken gizzards until I saw smoke billowing out of the kitchen like the fog on the moors. This is what it amounts to, I told myself. To ask in the same breath, "Where are all our Heathcliffs? Where are all our Stellas?" And then, "Now what did I do with that damn coffee cup?" We usually find the coffee cup. But for everything else we've lost it's probably best simply to look back at life with a wistful smile and see it all as reflections in a carnival mirror.

According to my friend Dylan Ferrero, guys our age are in the seventh-inning stretch. This sports analogy may be lost in the lights by Iranian mullahs, adult stamp collectors, and other non-baseball fans. Or perhaps everybody knows what the seventh-inning stretch implies, but most of the world is too young or too busy to take the time to think about what it means to baseball or to life. A lot of wonderful things can happen after the seventh-inning stretch, of course, but, statistically speaking, it's pretty damn late in the game. None of us are getting younger or smarter. About all we can hope for is wise or lucky. But at least we're old enough to realize and young enough to know that when the Lord closes the door he opens a little window. Old age is definitely not for sissies, but those of us who are chronologically challenged may take comfort in the words of my favorite Irish toast: "May the best of the past be the worst of the future."

Sometimes I wonder why, God willing, I will likely make it to sixty when almost all the people I've loved are either dead or at the very least wishing they were. My fate, apparently, in the words of Winston Churchill, is to "keep buggering on." It's too late for me now to drive a car into a tree in high school. Yet I remain a late-blooming serious, a veteran soul for whom anything is possible, a man who at times feels like he is eighty, at times forty, and at times, a rather precocious twelve. What I do not feel is sixty. Sixty is ridiculous. Sixty is unthinkable. What God would send you to a Pat Green concert and send you home feeling like the Ancient Mariner? Hell, I've lived hard and loved hard and I was supposed to die young. If that had happened, of course, I never would have gotten the chance to order the Blue Plate for Senior Citizens at Luby's. And I probably wouldn't have noticed that John Wayne movies seem to be getting better and better.

All that notwithstanding, when you get to be a geezer you can gleefully gird yourself in garish geriatric garb. I've lately taken to wearing an oversized straw hat like the one van Gogh wore when he painted "Night Cafe." In van Gogh's case, unfortunately, he wore lighted candles on his hat, which was one reason they put him in the mental hospital. Other heroes of mine who wore large straw hats are Father Damien, Billy the Kid, and Don Quixote, none of whom saw sixty except for Quixote, who lives forever in the casino of fiction. And then, of course, there's always Juan Valdez.

My life, it seems, is a work of fiction, as well. As a reader, it's getting more and more difficult to find books that are older than I am. I'm currently reading, for instance, J. Frank Dobie's
A Texan in England,
which was written one year before I was born. When you read books created before you were, the ancient pages are green fuses, leaves of grass, through which, as if by some arcane form of spiritual osmosis, you seemingly receive the wisdom of the past. Writing at the ripe young age of sixty, however, is quite another matter. Larry McMurtry once remarked that nobody writes great fiction after the age of sixty. If this is true, I don't have long to find out. There was a time when my goals were to be fat, famous, financially fixed, and a
fagola
by fifty, but these lofty ambitions were never entirely achieved. Looking back, I realize that the goals themselves were not important. The only thing that was important was my being an alliterative asshole.

My father, in his later years, would wake up in the morning and say, "It almost feels good to be alive." The older I get, the more I understand how he felt. I have emulated Tom in surrounding myself with people still older than I, but needless to say, this task gets harder all the time. In the narrow, brittle world of material wealth I've tried to follow in my father's footsteps as well. When our accountant, Danny Powell, once asked my father what his financial goals were, Tom responded: "My financial goals are for my last check to bounce." This witty and wise outlook is very much in keeping with the gypsy's definition of a millionaire. The gypsies believe he is not a man with million dollars, but a man who's
spent
a million dollars. The gypsies have been reading my mail. At sixty, I find that I am rich in the coin of the spirit. That may not buy you a cup of coffee these days, but it might just buy you a large, satisfying slice of peace of mind.

Finally, my incipient old age renders me the unalienable right to impart words of wisdom to all young little boogers whether they want to hear them or not. Some of the best I ever heard came from our old family friend Doc Phelps, one of my father's buddies in World War II, and for many years a biology professor at the University of Texas in Austin. Sometime in the midst of the eighties, on a trip to California, Tom and I stopped in to visit Doc one last time in a state hospital in New Mexico. Save us, Doc had almost no family or friends left, having been guilty of the mortal sin of outliving those who had once populated his life. We found him in a sterile room, void of even a shard of the personal possessions that would normally accrue to one who had lived such a rich and colorful life. Now he was dying in a little criblike hospital bed that very well may have resembled the crib in which he was born. It might've been easy to pity Doc, had he not given us something to take with us. "I'm a very lucky man," he said, "because I've loved many people in my life and I still do."

TENNIS ANYONE?

 

aven't played tennis since high school. Haven't touched a racquet since Christ got aced, but I was pretty hot way back when. Got to the state finals in my senior year. My coach, Woodrow Sledge, always emphasized basic skills and ground strokes, a dominant serve, strong forehand and backhand, and a confident, yet conservative approach to the net. Therefore, he was never completely happy with what I will call the peculiar morality of my game. As long as I was winning, however, he'd just pat me on the back and shake his head.

They say sports does not build character, it just reveals it. Maybe this is true, but I think I learned important life lessons from the way I was able to win at tennis. To put the best face on it you could say I played like a high-stakes poker player or a riverboat gambler. There was nothing
wrong
with my game. It was just that I'd allowed my basic tennis fundamentals to be corrupted and seduced by weaving a web of artifice and delusion. Playing me was, for most good church-going Americans, like playing tennis with a sentient wall of carnival mirrors. And that has been my style ever since. Maybe even before I ever picked up a racquet.

You see, I was a chess prodigy when I was very young. At the tender age of seven I played the world grand master, Samuel Reschevsky, in Houston, Texas. He was there to play a simultaneous match with fifty people, all of whom, except for me, were adults. He beat all of us, of course, but afterward he told my dad he was sorry to have had to beat his son. He just had to be very careful with seven-year-olds. If he ever lost to one of them it'd be headlines.

The way you play a game, especially as a child, does more than reveal your character. I believe, after some grudging reflection, it provides a psychological peephole into the kind of person you will someday be. The way you play the game becomes an ingrained, living thing, a succubus that eventually determines how you play the game of life.

As far as chess was concerned, however, you could say I peaked at the age of seven. But by then, I now realize, I'd internalized the nature of the game. Very possibly, I'd unconsciously brought a sidecar of chess to my game of tennis. After all, tennis is not a team sport; the way you play tends to reveal who you really are. As long as you're winning, of course, nobody ever notices.

The game I played, the one that mildly irritated Coach Sledge, was an extremely duplicitous, downright deceitful at times, fabric of cat-and-mouse conceit. Yes, I'd begun with a strong, left-handed serve. But after that, things tended to degenerate. My stock-in-trade became a willful charade of evil fakes, feints, and last-moment, viciously undercut backhands. In other words, I was playing physical chess. There is no morality in chess or tennis, of course; morality, I suppose, is considered to be confined only to the game of life. Again, when you're winning, nobody notices.

Opposing players, many of whom were superior to me in basic tennis skills, were often left shaking their heads in what looked to me like a slightly more demonstrative impersonation of Coach Sledge. I would smile and graciously accept whatever accolades were thrown my way by any lookers-on. Sometimes there were stands full of people and sometimes there was only the sound of one hand clapping. It didn't matter. I knew. Deceiving the opponent was just as good as, indeed, it almost seemed preferable to, beating him with sound ground strokes and solid play. When you beat a highly skilled player in such a fashion, you almost have to struggle to contain your glee. I got pretty good at that, too.

When I graduated high school I left the sport of tennis far behind me, much as I'd done with chess back in my childhood. I could still play either of them, of course, but life was moving too fast for chess, and tennis seemed to require too high a degree of tedium in finding appropriate courts, lining up appropriate opponents, and constantly changing into appropriate clothing. It just didn't seem appropriate. Besides, I had college to deal with. My tennis racquet remained in the closet; the only webs of deceit associated with it were now woven exclusively by highly industrious spiders.

But, to be sure, I was quite busy myself. College was a whole new ballgame, as they say. Many of the kids who were the stars of my high school senior class went directly to pumping gasoline. New facts emerged in college, and I discovered to my personal delight that I flourished in this new environment. A deft talent for obfuscation works wonders with any seemingly sophisticated social set. "What you do in this world," the great Sherlock Holmes once said, "is a matter of no consequence. The question is what you can make people think you have done." Like Sherlock, I somehow instinctively knew never to reveal my methods.

No matter what anybody tells you, relationships between men and women on this particular planet are anything but straightforward and forthright. A successful relationship is usually governed by forces ingrained from childhood that one or both parties often remain totally unaware of. One may be a born gold digger looking forever for a free ride. One may be a caregiver, always looking for a bird with a broken wing. It's not so important who the two people are: timing and
what
they are is usually what counts. That's how the game is played and won. Sometimes, however, the bird with the broken wing heals up and beats you to death with it.

I met my future ex-wife, Leila Marie, in anthropology class, on one of the rare occasions I attended. I cut a lot of classes and (I hope you won't be disappointed) I also cribbed an exam now and then in the manner of Ted Kennedy at Harvard. After all, I was enrolled in a highly advanced liberal arts program at the time that was mainly distinguished by the fact that every student had some form or other of facial tic. Every student, that was, except Leila Marie.

Leila Marie was a perky brunette with flashing green eyes who helped me write my monograph for anthropology:
The Flathead Indians of Montana.
Even with Leila Marie's talented and efficient help, it soon became apparent that liberal arts was never intended to be my long suit. I didn't want to become some stuffy professor helping students learn about the Flathead Indians of Montana. If they were burning with intellectual desire to find out about the Flathead Indians, they could damn well go to Montana and study campfire shards. I needed a field that was more applicable to today's world. A field in which I could help others, but also help myself. Meanwhile, the only field of study I seemed to be identifying with was Leila Marie.

Not only did Leila Marie appear to have an infinite amount of income, but she was also very easy on the eyes and lips. On top of that, no pun intended, she seemed to be willing to do anything it took to see that I succeeded. As things transpired, it was going to take quite a bit. I had decided that I wanted to go to medical school. It was not going to be easy and it was not going to be cheap. That was where Leila Marie came in.

I was always pretty strong when it came to the old gray-matter department but I must confess I was not prepared for organic chemistry. Leila Marie had to practically walk me through that one. But somehow we managed. I came to rely upon her judgment, her hard work ethic, and, yes, her financial resources. But I worked hard, too. Leila just worked a little harder. She even took a waitress job on the side when medical school tuition loomed near. That meant a lot to me. Besides, I've always been a sucker for attractive waitresses.

I didn't get into the best medical school, but I did get into medical school and that's what counts. In medical school, the guy who comes in last in his class is still called Doctor. We had to move to the island of Grenada and Leila Marie was beginning to look a bit shopworn from working two jobs, but we looked to the future and somehow kept moving forward. I believed in myself and Leila Marie believed in me and sometimes that's all that keeps you going. Fortunately, I could stand the sight of blood. Otherwise, I would've had to go to law school.

Leila Marie and I got married about the time I realized I wasn't going to be a brain surgeon. As long as I finished medical school and got my internship I didn't really care what kind of doctor I'd become. Just as long as I didn't have to make house calls. You had to be sort of ruthless about the whole thing or otherwise you wouldn't get through. What was the point of saving the world if you couldn't save yourself? So I became a proctologist. It's nothing to be ashamed of, I figured. Besides, you have to work with so many assholes every day you might as well get paid for it.

After medical school we moved to a new town where I took my internship at the local hospital. If you've never gone through an internship you probably have no idea how much of your personal life it consumes. Every night in the emergency room I'd witness the flotsam and jetsam of humanity walk, crawl, wheel themselves, or be carried past my increasingly jaded irises. People with limbs missing. People with gunshot wounds. People stuck together fucking. It was a real mess but I think I can truly say that it made a doctor out of me. All those hours at the hospital, of course, had a rather debilitating effect on my marriage. But it was at about that time that I took a turn for the nurse.

She was a gorgeous, young, blue-eyed blonde from the Great Northwest and she had a real way with people and one of them was me. When you work with somebody in life-and-death situations, you really get to know them. Her name was Lana Lee and I credit her with bringing the fun and excitement back into my life. Somehow, I had grown past Leila Marie, who'd continued working her dreary jobs and complaining about the long hours the internship was causing me to keep. It was kind of sad, but increasingly Leila Marie seemed to be living in the past and I seemed to be living for the future. And Lana Lee seemed inexorably to be a part of that future.

If there's one thing I know about destiny it is that you can't count on it forever. I knew things couldn't go on like this, and sure enough they didn't. Tragically, in the first year of my private practice, Leila Marie died rather suddenly of a fairly

arcane illness that is faintly related in the literature to toxic shock syndrome. The malady was impossible to treat, diagnose, or detect, and it caused me no little grief to realize the irony that I was a doctor and there was nothing I could do for her. The subsequent autopsy revealed no clue as to the cause of her death.

Lana Lee was there to support me, however, and one thing led to another. When the Lord closes the door He opens a little window, they say. In my case, at least, it certainly seems that way. There was, indeed, a nasty little hint of suspicion surrounding me after Leila Marie's death, but it comes with the territory. Doctors have become as used to this sort of mean-minded gossip as we are to scribbling prescriptions or working with HMOs. I didn't let it get me down.

Today, I'm happily married to Lana Lee and I have a thriving practice. If you're patient and you see a lot of patients, the medical profession can provide a very lucrative lifestyle. Not only that, but it's a good way to help serve your fellow man. And speaking of serving, guess what? I've taken up tennis again.