I HAVE A theory about time: The longer you live, the faster it passes. When I was fifteen and wanted my driver’s license more than anything in the world, it took me exactly seventeen years to reach age sixteen. After I finally became sixteen, I wanted to be twenty-one so I could go into a bar and order a beer without fearing the Gestapo would show up at my table and take me off somewhere and beat me with rubber hoses. They could have rerun the Thousand Years War during the period it took me to go from sixteen to twenty-one.
Then things began to speed up. It took about six months for me to become twenty-five; twenty-six through twenty-nine went in about a week; and the next afternoon, I turned thirty.
Turning thirty does have some benefits. For one, it means you can smoke cigars. I have never smoked cigars, but I don’t think it’s appropriate for anyone to smoke them until after they’ve turned thirty; there’s nothing more obnoxious than some juvenile puffing on a big cigar and pontificating about world affairs — which inhaling cigar smoke apparently makes people do. After thirty, however, a person is finally old enough to light up a Cuesta Rey, lean back in his chair, and say the president is an idiot. Even if he is completely misinformed, people will listen to what he has to say and nod in agreement.
Another good thing about turning thirty is that you’re finally old enough to realize the truth about life: It isn’t fair. All young people think that Moses brought down an extra tablet from the mountain, and written on it by the hand of God was, “Life is Fair.”
When my cousin got more banana pudding than I did after supper because she had eaten all her turnip greens and I had just picked at mine, I would complain to my mother, “That isn’t fair.”
When I was twenty-five and had cornered a beautiful young woman at a singles bar and was regaling her with my interesting tidbits of knowledge, but she wound up leaving with some guy who had large muscles and a Porsche, I turned to the bartender and said, “That isn’t fair.”
By the time I turned thirty, however, I had learned that what actually was written on that other tablet was, “If life had been meant to be fair, there never would have been such a thing as a proctoscopic examination.”
There are some negative aspects to being thirty, of course. For example, young girls start calling you “Mister” and asking you if there was such a thing as television when you were growing up. Your parents and friends stop forgiving you for doing stupid things because you were too young and didn’t know any better.
When you’re thirty, you finally realize there is no chance you’re still going to be discovered by a major league scout while playing recreation league, slow-pitch softball and wind up in the big leagues and on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
When you’re thirty, in case it hasn’t happened already, you know the time is coming when you will be unable to perform sexually one evening, because your older friends have already started talking about it. The simple knowledge that it could happen to you will eat away at your mind, and soon that evening will come and it will go something like this:
“What’s the matter?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it me?”
“Of course, it’s not you.”
“It must be me.”
“I don’t know what’s the matter.”
“Has it happened before?”
“Of course, it hasn’t happened before.”
By this time, a cold sweat has covered your body and what you really want to do is hide under the bed in the dark until she leaves, and then have a nervous breakdown in private.
“Why don’t we wait until morning,” you say.
“I have to be up early for work.”
“You don’t hate me, do you?”
“Of course, I don’t hate you.”
“It’s just that I’ve got a lot on my mind.”
“I understand. I really do.”
She doesn’t really understand, of course, and she really hates you and thinks you’re a wimp, and what if she goes around telling everybody? This is the stuff suicides are made of.
I had flirted a bit with adulthood before I hit my thirties. I got married for the first time when I was only nineteen. An insurance man followed me around for a month and made me feel guilty until I finally took out a policy that would make certain my bride would be kept financially secure should I die.
Should I die? The thought that I might actually die one day had never occurred to me until I took out that insurance policy. Realizing mortality is a giant step toward adulthood.
I got my first divorce when I was twenty-three. Something like that will wear off a little of your tread, too. I got married again when I was twenty-six and got divorced again when I was twenty-nine. Then something quite adult happened to me: I stopped for a few moments and had a long talk with myself to determine what it was about me that had led to two marriages and two divorces before I turned thirty.
Self-analysis is a very adult maneuver, although in my case, self-analysis did me little good. I couldn’t come to any conclusions because I always was arguing with myself.
“Maybe it’s because my parents divorced when I was six, and I really haven’t had a role model to teach me how to fashion a happy marriage,” said my ego.
“Quit making excuses. The truth is, you’re a selfish, insensitive person, and nobody can live with you more than three years,” said my alter ego.
“But I really tried to make a go of it.”
“Tried nothing. You never tried until it was too late and you were afraid of being alone.”
“I wasn’t afraid of being alone.”
“Yes, you were. You realized all of a sudden that if you were alone, there wouldn’t be anybody around to keep your underwear clean.”
“I can take care of my own underwear, thank you.”
“How? You’ve never washed a pair of dirty underwear in your life. Your mother washed it for you and your wives washed it for you. When you weren’t married and your underwear got dirty, you simply went out and bought new.”
“So look what I did for the underwear industry. I’m basically a good person.”
That sort of thing went on for months without resolution, so I did something that all modern adults eventually do. I went to see a psychiatrist.
I didn’t tell anybody about this plan, however, because I was reared to believe than anybody who went to see a psychiatrist was admitting that he or she was some sort of screwball, soon to be admitted to a home where they would be kept very still and quiet. Milledgeville, a pleasant little village in central Georgia, was where the state sent its loonies when I was a kid. Anybody who went to Milledgeville for observation or admittance automatically was deemed completely out of focus.
The old men at the store:
“Heard about Tyrone Gault?”
“What happened to him?”
“They done took him to Milledgeville.”
“When did he go crazy?”
“Said it come on him real sudden. He come in the house from the barn one day and told his wife one of his cows had just told him to go to town and buy a new tractor, and he thought it was the Almighty that was talking to him. He was back in a hour on a new John Deere.”
“I heard about a fellow could make animals talk.”
“You ain’t never heard of no such thing. You ain’t crazy like Tyrone Gault, are you?”
“Naw, it’s a true story. There was this Injun and he was sittin’ out by his tepee and this fellow walked up and said, ‘Can your horse talk?’
“The Injun said of course his horse couldn’t talk, so the fellow turned to the horse and said, ‘Horse, is this Injun good to you? Does he ever put you up wet? Does he feed you plenty of oats?’
“Well, the horse spoke right up and said, ‘Yeah, I can’t complain one bit. He’s pretty good to me.’
“The Injun couldn’t believe his ears. Then, the fellow asked the Injun, ‘Can your dog talk?’ The Injun said of course his dog couldn’t talk.
“So the fellow turns to the dog and says, ‘Dog, does your master treat you all right? Does he give you plenty to eat and does he scratch your ears?’
“The dog said, ‘He treats me just fine. Ain’t a thing in the world wrong with the life I got.’
“The ol’ Injun was amazed. The fellow asked him then, said, ‘Can your sheep talk?’, and the Injun said, ‘Yes, sheep talk, but lie like hell.’“
“Get away from here with your foolishness.”
“It’s a shame ’bout Tyrone Gault, though.”
“I feel sorry for his wife and children. Don’t reckon he’ll ever get out of Milledgeville. They say once you’re down there, you don’t ever get back right.”
“I heard tell the same thing. I wonder what his wife would take for that new tractor?”
Even from a background of complete misunderstanding about mental health, I figured I had no choice but to seek psychiatric help. I decided, however, to pay cash for my treatments and not give my real name, in case the psychiatrist wanted to have me committed.
I was living in Chicago at the time, which added to the possibility that I might be crazy. I looked in the yellow pages, found a psychiatrist’s office near my apartment, phoned him, and made an appointment.
I should have expected something was wrong the moment I stepped into the psychiatrist’s office, which wasn’t an office at all but the man’s apartment. There were two cats sitting on the couch. A cat never has done anything all that terrible to me personally, but I don’t like cats because they’re sneaky and snooty, especially if you’re a man. Women and cats seem to be able to get along together, to understand each other. Most men don’t understand either one.
I sat down on the man’s couch between the cats and immediately got cat hairs all over my slacks and the back of my shirt.
“Irene, you and Sparkle leave the room, please,” the psychiatrist said to his cats. Not only did the man keep cats in his apartment, where they could get cat hair all over everything, but he had named them “Irene” and “Sparkle.”
The psychiatrist looked a bit feline-like himself; he was thin and had beady eyes. We began by talking about my childhood. I told him about my parents’ divorce and the fact that I was having problems staying married.
“Did your mother give you a lot of attention as a child?” he asked.
Yes, I answered.
“How about affection?”
I said yes to that, too. Once my mother came to school to pick me up in the third grade and she kissed me, and my friends saw her do it and made fun of me the next day at school. I didn’t tell the psychiatrist that, however. He looked as if he had been a big sissy when he was a kid, so I didn’t want to offend him by telling him how much I tried to avoid being connected to that description in any manner.
“Did your mother read you stories when you were a child?” he asked.
Sure, I said. “The Little Engine That Could,” “Billy Goat Gruff,” and “Little Black Sambo,” because it wasn’t considered racist and you could even name a restaurant chain after it in those days.
“Did she put her arm around you when she read you those stories?” he continued.
I honestly didn’t remember.
“Don’t you think that would have been a warm, pleasant memory if she had?” asked the psychiatrist.
He was getting fairly personal. I asked him his point.
“Perhaps,” he began, “you have been looking for someone to share an intimate relationship with, and because your mother never put her arm around you when she read you stories, you never felt an intimate relationship with her. So now you aren’t able to construct one with anyone else.”
How could I overcome this obstacle, I asked the doctor?
“Perhaps we could start now,” he said. “How would you like for me to read you a story?”
Whoa, Jack, I thought to myself.
The psychiatrist reached into his bookshelf and pulled out a book. “May I come sit on the couch with you and read you a story?” he inquired.
Okay, so I was a little nervous about the way my first psychiatric session was coming along, but I figured I might as well get my money’s worth. The doctor sat down on the couch with me and got cat hair all over his slacks and the back of his shirt, too.
Then he began reading me a story. It was a story about a couple of rabbits — I remember that. It might even have been quite a good story, but I was having a difficult time concentrating. Sitting on a couch covered with cat hairs, listening to another grown man read me a story about rabbits was a unique and somewhat unsettling experience.
About halfway through the book, the psychiatrist asked, “Do you want me to put my arm around you while I read you the story?”
He had dialed the wrong number this time.
“I think that’s about all the therapy I can take today,” I said as politely as possible as I stood up from the couch.
“But we still have fifteen minutes left,” he said.
“If it’s all the same to you,” I replied, “I think I’ll be leaving.”
“But you haven’t heard the rest of the story,” he insisted.
“Heard all I want to hear.”
“When will we see each other again?” he asked.
I was halfway to the door by then. I threw a couple of twenties and a ten on a table and tried to figure out what was happening. The man wanted to put his arm around me and read me a story. I wondered if somebody had tried to do that sort of thing to Tyrone Gault in Milledgeville. He might have talked to cows, but I was willing to bet that Tyrone was sane enough to avoid this sort of thing.
“Probably never,” I answered belatedly.
As I opened the door to leave, Irene and Sparkle appeared in the hallway. I made barking sounds and growled at them, and they ran away. If I didn’t get anything else for my fifty bucks, at least I got that.
I never went back to another psychiatrist. What would the next guy want to do? Put a pair of diapers on me and make me suck on a pacifier?
* * *
I suppose I was thirty-one, nearly thirty-two, when I left my apprenticeship and became a full-fledged adult. That’s how old I was the day Elvis died. After Elvis — whose music had launched my generation into another direction from our parents’ — got fat and died, I realized that adulthood was squarely on me, whether I liked it or not. I was growing old and the world was driving me toward the grave. I was convinced it would be a short trip.
Although my childhood was filled with nothing more than the usual maladies — chicken pox, mumps, measles, etc. — I became a hypochondriac at a very young age. For example, since I was eleven years old and found a wart on the side of my wrist, I’ve been certain that I have cancer. It was a big, ugly wart, and when I heard that a change in a wart or a mole was one of the danger signals of cancer, I never took my eyes off it.
When I was fourteen, the wart suddenly went away, but then I worried about a mole on my back. I made the mistake of mentioning my fears to my mother. She suggested that when my uncle, a doctor, came to visit, we should have him burn it off.
Burn off my mole? You mean, set fire to it? This is modern medicine? I had seen witch doctors perform the same procedure on television. Cancer or no cancer, I wasn’t about to go through anything like that. When my uncle came to visit, I hid in the pump house. Later, somebody told me that the way to get rid of warts and moles was to rub them with a dishrag and then bury the rag.
I followed those directions to the letter. The mole still hasn’t disappeared, but you have to give these things time.
Most hypochondriacs enjoy going to the doctor. It gives credibility to their belief that they’re seriously ill. But I’m a weird sort of hypochondriac. Although at various points in my life I have had (or thought I had) tuberculosis, leukemia, malaria, and several strokes, I always have avoided going to a doctor. I simply have chosen to sit in a dark room somewhere brooding over the possibility that I might be seriously ill.
Doctors and doctors’ offices spook me. I hate sitting in a waiting room — not only frightened out of my wits that I’ll soon find out I have only weeks to live, but also nervous about catching whatever the other people in the waiting room have.
That’s another of the health problems I’ve had. Whenever anybody else has a disease, I automatically presume that, with my luck, I soon will have it, too.
A guy at work came down with kidney stones.
“He was fine one minute,” somebody said, “and then he was in terrible pain.”
I began to feel gnawing pains in my back and stomach and stayed out of work three days drinking beer (for medicinal purposes only) to flush out my kidney stone. I’m not certain if I got rid of the stone, but for three days, I felt absolutely no pain, save a severe headache that disappeared somewhere in the middle of my second beer of the day.
I knew another man who was having trouble with his prostrate gland. He said it hurt when he went to relieve himself, and that the biggest problem was he couldn’t always finish, which resulted in a terribly embarrassing circumstance each time he wore khaki pants. “All men begin to have problems with their prostate after they get older,” said my acquaintance.
All men? Older? When I was thirty-two, I had managed to avoid doctors for years. But maybe the odds finally had caught up with me. Maybe I had it, too. I decided it was time to get a professional opinion, so I looked up another doctor in the yellow pages and made myself an appointment.
I was quite proud. I had made my own doctor’s appointment without anybody forcing me to do it, and I would walk in there and face whatever medicine the doctor dished out. I thought of cancelling the appointment no more than two or three hundred times, the last of which was when the nurse stuck her head into the waiting room and said, “We’re ready for you now.”
I could bolt away from here, I thought to myself. It’s not against the law to run out of a doctor’s office and refuse to take an examination. This was something I had to pay for.
The nurse sensed my hesitancy. “Be a big boy and come on in,” she said.
Women do that sort of thing to you. They question your manhood in tight situations. If I had walked out of the doctor’s office, it would have been a sign of weakness, so in I went.
Did you ever notice that the doctor is never ready to examine you when the nurse says he’s ready to examine you? After you get out of the waiting room, there’s another wait in a tiny cubicle they call the “holding room.”
It’s always very quiet in there, and everything is made out of cold metal, and the chair you have to sit and wait in is very uncomfortable, and I always have the feeling that I’m being watched.
“Watch him through the two-way mirror, nurse,” I imagine the doctor saying, “and see if he does anything weird.”
That idea, of course, makes you even more nervous, and if you have to scratch your privates, say, you’re afraid the nurse might be watching you. So you just sit there in that quiet room, in that uncomfortable chair, nervous and frightened with itchy privates.
The doctor finally came in. He checked everything, including my prostate gland.
“Bend over,” said the doctor.
I bent over.
Oh, God.
“Do you feel pain or pressure?” the doctor asked me.
“Both!” I screamed.
“Is it more pain or more pressure?” the doctor asked again.
“Pain! It’s pain!” I shrieked.
“Are you certain?” asked the doctor.
I was certain by now. It most certainly was pain, the worst I had ever felt.
“You can straighten up now,” said the doctor.
“That’s easy for you to say, doctor,” I replied. “You haven’t just had an intimate experience with the Jolly Green Giant’s first finger.”
After finally conquering my fear and going to the doctor, I decided I ought to try to do something about my problem with dentists, too. I gathered all the courage I could muster and went to have my teeth checked and cleaned.
“When was the last time you went to a dentist?” he asked me.
“I was fifteen. Why do you ask?”
“No reason,” replied the dentist. “It’s just that I’m going to have to use an acetylene torch to get down to where I can clean these things.”
The dentist asked if I wanted gas.
“I woke up with it,” I answered. “I always get gas when I’m nervous.”
“I mean nitrous,” the dentist explained. “It’ll help relax you.”
I didn’t know what nitrous was, but if it would ease my terror, I would take it.
“How much do you want?” was the dentist’s next question.
I said two shoulder tanks should do nicely.
When I came out of my trance, the dentist said he was through cleaning and checking my teeth and that I needed seven fillings, two caps, four extractions, and a root canal.
“Soon as my prostate clears up,” I said, “I’ll be back.”
* * *
I remember that as a child I would read things that said, “By the year 1980....”, and the “1980” would look so strange to me.
“How old will we be when it’s 1980?” my friend Danny Thompson, not exactly a mathematical whiz, would ask when we were boys together.
“Thirty-four,” I would answer him.
“Think we’ll ever really be that old?” he would ask.
“Not before 1980,” I would say.
I had a feeling even back then — and the feeling grew with each passing year — that the 1980s might be somewhat traumatic for me. The sixties were turbulent, the seventies disillusioning, and what on earth would the eighties bring?
I got married again in 1980 ... for the third time.
In 1981, I went to Europe for the first time. The trip cost me a lot of money, and I saw a lot of cathedrals and concierges with their hands held out.
I also turned thirty-five in 1981. I awakened in a motel room in Birmingham, Alabama, on my thirty-fifth birthday. I was alone. I called practically everybody I knew and mentioned I was alone in Birmingham — that’s why they hadn’t been able to reach me to wish me a happy thirty-fifth birthday.
“Please don’t go overboard on my gift,” I cautioned them all. They didn’t.
Turning thirty-five also had its ill effects on me. It depressed me a bit to know that I was only five years away from forty, but I was uplifted by the thought that I was now the age my father had been when I was born, and I could easily recall his vitality during my days on his knee. I figured I still had a ways to go before it was time to put on a baseball cap and go to the park and feed pigeons and wet my pants (an indiscretion society allows to old men with worn out prostates).
In 1982, when I was thirty-six, I made another of my infrequent trips to the doctor, and this time he did find something wrong with me. My hypochondria had been vindicated; I’d been telling people for years that I wasn’t well. I soon had heart surgery to repair a damaged valve.
I was convinced I was going to die, but I didn’t. So what if I don’t like Boy George, hair dryers, and airplanes? I’m impressed with medical science, and if there was any sort of computer involved in helping me live through my operation and making me fit again, then I vote that’s one we spare when we get around to destroying the others.
I got another divorce in 1983, and that sort of brings my confused life up to date. I’m single again. I live alone in a large house with my dog. My mother is still concerned that I can’t stay married and haven’t produced any grandchildren.
Aging in any type of world has its negative effects — the hair grays, the eyes and legs go bad, the back hurts, the hangovers linger, and the mind starts to drift. But aging in this modern world is even worse, I think, because the older people get, the more they tend to worry, and we have everything from the killer bees heading north from Mexico to getting wiped out by nuclear war to worry about.
Next to worry, guilt is the most obnoxious part of aging.
I have a friend named Billy. He is forty-two and feels guilty and gets depressed a lot, like I do. Sometimes, we visit each other and feel guilty and depressed together. This usually is after we’ve gone out the night before and done something to feel guilty and be depressed about that was a lot of fun while we were doing it.
Billy and I are both divorced; we feel guilty and get depressed about that sometimes. We feel guilty because quite often being single is a wonderful state in which to live, but it was instilled in us in a simpler time that we weren’t supposed to wind up in our middle ages still acting like we were nineteen. We get depressed because we tried to do what our parents taught us to do but failed, and damned if we know what to do about it now.
We feel guilty because we really don’t have all that much ambition anymore. We both have concluded that the best way to live is not to have a lot of things you worry about losing, but our parents wanted us to have it better than they did, and if we just hauled off and went and lived on a boat somewhere, we would be letting them down. We get depressed because we don’t know how to deal with those feelings, either.
Depression, says Billy, often takes the form of a tall man with a hat pulled down over his eyes and wearing a raincoat. Billy calls him “Mr. D.”
He starts on you in your thirties, according to Billy. “He’s the voice you hear in the morning after you’ve been out having a great time the night before. You never hear that voice when you’re younger. Your conscience is basically still clear then.
“But after you get a little older, he starts on you. You remember that Christmas song you used to sing when you were a kid — ‘He’s making a list and checking it twice, gonna find out who’s naughty and nice’? Well, it isn’t Santa Claus making the list anymore. It’s Mr. D.”
I’ve had my own bouts with “Mr. D.” He gets me when I awaken in hotel rooms far away from home in the morning. He’s always peering around the corner at me when I’m doing something my mother and the old men at the store wouldn’t approve of. He’s there when I get involved in the Sunday Morning Academy Award Theater movie and don’t make church. He’s there after I drink too much, and he’s there when I eat animal fat, reminding me that it causes cancer.
He’s there whenever there is a dilemma in my life, whenever I don’t know whether to go or stay, whether to join or not to get involved, whether to use my heart or my head.
Dilemmas. Has any other generation ever had to face as many as mine has? Sometimes, in recent years, I have felt that modern life is like a giant ice cream parlor with innumerable flavors. Do I stick with vanilla or go for something more exotic? And if I eat tutti-frutti, will it make me gay?
My mother could have read me rabbit stories and hugged me until I turned blue in the face, but I don’t think it would have helped.