The Best American Essays 2015 (20 page)

So here I am, again, in this as-yet-uncharted territory, working through the break-in period. It isn't that I'm any further from
l'âge décrépit.
With my silver hair (better than none!), I still look the part. I continue to rack up the requisite litany of pre–
alter kaker
woes: the lower back, the plantar fasciitis, the floaters in the right eye. An arthritic right shoulder has joined the left in the crosshairs of the surgeon's hungry arthroscope. Plenty of my parts are out of warranty, or close. My whole corpus delicti could go at any minute. It is just that as an old man, I am new, as fresh to the scene as when I turned into a teen on the 7 train, riding into the Village to see Muddy Waters for the first time at the Café Au Go-Go on Bleecker Street.

That was the real epiphany, what I told myself when I looked into the mirror this very morning—that, ear hair and all, I remain resolutely myself. I am the same me from my baby pictures, the same me who got laid for the first time in the bushes behind the high school field in Queens, the same me who drove a taxi through Harlem during the Frank Lucas days, the same me my children recognize as their father, the same me I was yesterday, except only more so by virtue of surviving yet another spin of the earth upon its axis. I was at the beginning again, stepping off into one more blank space of the Whitmanesque cosmos, a Magellan of me.

I mention the above because even if there is nothing new about getting old, it is always good to beat the traffic. As we speak, more people are growing longer in the tooth than at any time in the history of the species. I'm talking about my generation, the one that claimed to want to die before it got old, one more bit of moldy bravado only Keith Moon was bonkers enough to make good on. Every day ten thousand fellow Americans I might have shared a joint with in a freshman dorm join me here on the downside of the stairway to heaven and/or hell. I am in just the first wave of the so-called baby boomers to line up at the cashier's window. The tide will be coming in until 2029, 70 million souls all told, enough to bankrupt a hundred Obamacares. And take it from me, if other generations might have been willing to quietly fade to black, it is going to take a way bigger hook to get the Boom Krewe off the stage.

That's because we're special. We always have been, in our endlessly self-reverential way. There was no such thing as youth until we came with the invincible troika of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Likewise, when we got around to the procreating, there had never been such babies as the ones we whelped. These were the most loved, most written about, best-equipped babies in history. So it makes sense that even if Adam, the first man, was supposed to have lived to nine hundred, no one has ever really been old, not the way we will be old.

Expect a whole industry of sunset-themed books, blogs, and consoling lectures, even if a certain proportion of this Last Days rhetoric will be couched in terms of the so-called Apocalypse and other cable TV favorites. Some riffs on the topic are bound to be more annoying than others. Not so long ago I saw a video of former
New York
Times
columnist Anna Quindlen on Huff/Post50 (the flagship outlet for the Net's elder-chic sector) explaining the instant she knew it was better to be old than young. “When I finally nailed a headstand,” she said. She probably had the “physical acumen” to do it when she was younger, but it was “the confidence” of old age that made this late-inning feat possible, said Quindlen.

It is a given: if my big-ass generation is doing anything, it must be the thing to do. Like Diana Nyad swimming 103 miles from Cuba, hardly a day goes by without a story detailing the spectacular exploits of the advanced in age. After all, anyone can be cool and powerful in their twenties. To be cool and powerful in your sixties and beyond—that's the real rabbit in the hat. The way things are going, it won't be long before boomer bloggers proclaim death to be hipper than life.

Sixty-five might be the new forty-five, but what I want to ask the boys at Herbalife is how much omega-3 you have to guzzle before two hundred becomes the new one hundred. One oft-cited study in the chronicle of boomer aging is the so-called U-shaped happiness curve, the theory that human contentment peaks primarily in the early, preadolescent years and again in old age. The stuff in the middle, the muck of everyday life—that's flyover country, easily edited from the highlight reel. For a society with a dense streak of Spielbergian desperation to link the mystical innocence of childhood and the wonderment of the wrinkled and wise, this proprietary attitude toward the possession of happiness fits like a Frye boot.

The vicissitudes of getting old often dominate the conversation among my co-ageist buddies around the virtual communal kitchen table, which is pretty ridiculous, since the majority of us are still wearing (far more expensive) facsimiles of the sneakers and jeans we did when we were seventeen. My father was no fashion plate, but when he went to work, he put on a coat and tie. He looked his age. Then again, he was raised before the invention of television and never made more than $25,000 in any calendar year. Nowadays you can direct a dozen blockbusters and sell a million computers and never once take off that boyish puce-colored baseball cap. Such are the perks when you're brought up in the time that affords the greatest economic and social latitude in American history, are possessed of society's sanctioned skin color, and went to the best schools, even if you only used to get juiced in them.

Here are some of the things nice modern people talk about when they talk about getting old: (a) the nature of regret and whether it is too late or worth it to set things right; (b) fears of irrelevance; (c) what's worse, dying too soon or living too long—and, of course, the money and the pain. Pain more than money. These bummers fight it out with any number of more copacetic, if possibly rationalized, koans (dialogue quoted verbatim) like (a) “to be older frees you from the suffocating anxieties and conventions of youth,” (b) “to be older is to be better at integrating the interior and exterior worlds,” and (c) “to be older is to be empowered to simply not give a fuck at any given moment.” Bo Diddley's classic exhortation about having “a tombstone hand and a graveyard mind/I'm just twenty-two and I don't mind dying” still sounded good. But no one I talk to, whatever their personal history or current circumstances, says they would have signed up for Achilles' choice of living fast, dying young, and leaving a beautiful corpse.

A recurring trope in these discussions is the eternal love-hate relationship every modern generation maintains with its successor, i.e., “da youth.” The prevailing view was that if once upon a time old people seemed the same, now it was the young who presented themselves as an indistinct mass. Who were these invaders, this interchangeable gaggle of screen-addicted, brand-worshipping solipsists who filled every bar and hoarded all the good body parts? Sure, they got laid a lot, but how was it possible for a seemingly intelligent twenty-four-year-old to rack up hundreds of thousands in college debt yet know nearly nothing of the world prior to the year 2000?

“They don't know anything” pretty much summed up the position. The Internet, the supposed information superhighway, was actually a giant forgetting machine. If you were of a certain age, you had to watch what you said around the young. Bringing up bulwarks of the personal universe, names like Lenny Bruce or even Miles Davis, was to risk a soul-deadening reply of “Who?” It was the same for every other person, place, or thing, from Michelangelo Antonioni to Pol Pot. Huge swaths of twentieth-century cultural literacy—my century!—were being removed from public consciousness. The shock lay in the speed and the casual know-nothingness of the deletion. It felt deliberate, one more Illuminati plot.

It was out of this well-chewed bleat that I came upon one more useful insight into the post-sixty-five life. This arrived via email from Carl Gettleman, once of Fresh Meadows, Queens, now of Santa Monica, California. One of the worst things about getting older is that people you know and love begin to die at a more rapid rate. A few years ago, Budd Schulberg, then in his early nineties, offered to give me his address book. “It is of no use to me,” said the author of
On the Waterfront
and
What Makes Sammy Run?
“Everyone in it is dead.” But it also works the other way, since the longer you live, the longer you get to keep treasured friends, and I've known Carl Gettleman for more than fifty years now.

We went to Francis Lewis High School together; Carl was one of those happy little junior beatniks who accompanied the fifteen-year-old me to drink our first cups of coffee at Café Figaro on Macdougal Street. Then we lost touch for decades, only to find each other through the hitherto unimagined magick of Facebook, a generational irony we received in pothead stride. Gettleman figured to be a whiz on this geezer topic not only because he was the only member of our 1966 graduating class to major in philosophy at Columbia, reading Kierkegaard as the NYPD stormed Hamilton Hall, but also because he is the son of the late Estelle Getty, a onetime Fresh Meadows Community Theatre performer who from 1985 to 1992 played Bea Arthur's mother on
Golden Girls
, therefore defining a certain kind of oldness for untold millions of TV viewers.

“Memory is editing and reediting the narrative of our lives, both consciously and unconsciously,” Gettleman wrote of the vast capacity of human beings to lie to themselves. This was the “liberating urgency of old age and knowing we're on the way out.” Truth, such as it was, was now available because “we finally realize that the world no longer belongs to us.”

It seemed a very small and self-evident thing, the notion that “the world no longer belongs to us,” that it was only by being on the outside looking in that a clearer picture could be seen. I mean, is it really any business of mine what a twenty-five-year-old knows and doesn't know? Probably this cache-emptying is an evolutionary imperative, because with all the supposedly hallowed crap floating around in my brain, it is like an episode of
Hoarders.
Besides, where I'm going, it is better to travel light. Triage is the order of the day, with excess baggage thrown overboard. This is the chore: what to keep and what to leave. Like everything, it is a negotiation.

It is a matter of family evolution, the tangle of helices that link me to both forebears and offspring. In the house where I grew up in the 1950s and early '60s, boundaries were well defined. My sister and I were the kids, the parents were the parents. They provided, we didn't screw up, and occasionally there would be a car trip to some place historical like Gettysburg, Pennsylvania—four days in the Plymouth sitting on your hands and looking for cheap gas. As far as the famous Generation Gap went, it wasn't so much a divide as two gravitationally aligned alternative universes. They were from the Depression, the War, and old Williamsburg. I was from Elvis, the Beatles, and the Bomb. The night they bought their first portable record player, they sat in the living room relaxing to Maurice Chevalier. I was in my room, head pressed to the transistor radio, listening to Murray the K's reportage on how Jackie Wilson got shot by his girlfriend in the hallway of his building on Fifty-Seventh Street. It was true we didn't talk much, but there wasn't all that much to talk about.

This didn't mean there weren't valuable lessons to be learned from my father. Battle of the Bulge veteran, lifelong New Yorker, homeowner, he worked hard and deployed a mordant sense of humor. He was resolutely a man of his times, a quality I have come to treasure as what might be called Wisdom, the supposed cardinal virtue of the old.

Once I derided Wisdom as nothing but the gummy verbiage Polonius tried to lay on the head of Laertes. Now I despair over what thoughts of value I might be able to impart to my own children. After all, our house is very different from the one in which I grew up. We never shut up, and the separation between us has never been especially well delineated. Even though each of the kids would eventually get his or her own room, we could often be found piled on top of each other like a litter of cats. We continue to listen to a lot of the same music, even the new stuff, and talk more with each other in a single night than I did with my parents in a month. Once we took a trip around the world, staying in crappy hippie hotels all the way; I wrote a book about it, alternating chapters with my eldest daughter, who described the entire country of India as a living hell. Most people thought her sections, written at age seventeen, were better than mine. There was a kind of haphazard democracy to us, a vague division of labor and authority that we generally took for granted.

I never thought much about this structure, loose as it was, until quite recently, around the time my then-twenty-six-year-old youngest daughter, after four years of college in Indiana, a job in Philly, and a stint in Bed-Stuy, moved back into our house. For me, such a move would have been akin to placing a gun to my head, but that was then and now is now. When I was twenty-six, living on St. Marks Place, the rent was $168 a month. The same apartment now probably goes for $168 a square foot. With the job market slow for experts in the hermeneutics of Michel Foucault, slack must be cut. It seemed a boon, getting extra time with
die Kinder.
Still, with my twenty-three-year-old son already in residence, that made the better part of a hat trick.

The arrangement was less than smooth. Things like waking up in the morning to find those familiar dirty dishes in the sink were particularly vexing. It was no problem for me to slip into the dismaying role of the ticked-off, hectoring dad. According to any system of “stages,” wasn't all that supposed to be over long ago?

Eventually we worked much of it out because we realized that we were both in motion, me to oldness, she to wherever she was going. We engaged in several encounters concerning our transitioning Weltanschauungs. Instead of grumping about how everything is derivative, my daughter said, I should examine modernity as a series of Venn diagrams, ever-shifting spheres, floating balloons of self-defining identities, separate yet fungible. What was necessary was to look for those areas of coincidence, where the circles overlap. It was in those zones that we could make common cause. It was probably a rap she learned sitting around in some crusty punk squat, but in a world where those ubiquitous screens are actually NSA panopticons, it sounded good. So we sat down and watched six straight episodes of
The X-Files.