Chapter 3

When a man breaks up with a ladyfriend or grows older, which seems to happen all the time—and to other folks besides me, and even, I understand, to women—it’s probably best to fill the idle hours with a complete physical checkup. One of those things you do when you’ve got nothing to do. I definitely needed tangible in my life.

My pal Doctor Weinberg, Fred, asked me to blow hard. I blew into some kind of puffer-fish ballooning device. I did this proudly because I don’t smoke. I imagined carefree scuba diving off some lovely tropical reef.

Fred frowned. “Do it again.”

I concentrated and this time imagined thrashing against flinty coral, bleeding, gasping, and drowning. Fred performed snapping, putting-away motions. “Okay.” He looked gloomy and depressed.

“Okay? Just okay?”

“Better’n I do.”

I had to be content with doing better than my gray, overweight doctor who was born the same year as I was. It wasn’t a whole lot of praise; he wasn’t offering gratuitous comfort. I wasn’t going to tell him about my hearing (the tintinnabulation of the bells, bells, bells) because I didn’t want any useless sympathy or useful suggestions about audiologists.

He took blood. They would run the complete set on me; insurance pays for most of it. “I don’t have AIDS,” I told him. He grunted. He and the lab would be the judge of that.

Now he sighed and tried to pretend it was just ordinary breathing he was undergoing. “Bend over, please.”

Hey, pal. But I knew this part all too well. My pants were down at my ankles. (What if there was an earthquake and I had to run?) The snapping sound was not that patriotic one of Old Glory in the breeze; Fred was slipping on his mayonnaise-colored disposable rubber gloves.

“Oh no,” I said.

“Oh yes,” he said.

“It makes me seasick,” I said.

I clutched the edge of the table while my innards objected to the whole interlude. His finger was reaching through my butt toward my prostate. I was wondering what he did when folks were constipated. Oh, I didn’t like this; a world that allows such procedures on a totally healthy person is all askew. I lurched in sympathy with myself.

He mumbled explanations. “Smooth is okay. Rough is not so okay. The PSA test is conclusive, plus margin of error.”

“I don’t, uh, uh, uh, understand.”

He withdrew. I felt better. Some sort of lubricant was tickling my butt. Next hour, the same finger up a different patient.

“Feels just fine,” he said. “Slightly enlarged is normal. How many times you pee at night?”

“I drink lots of water.”

“How many times?”

“I drink coffee, too.”

“How many times?”

This guy, my pal, my doc, was uncivilized. He demanded the truth. “Well, one time. But then maybe a couple hours later, another time, And if I sleep seven–eight hours, just before my last dawn nap, oh—”

“Yes?”

“Not usually.”

“Sometimes?”

“One more time.”

He was writing. I was repeating myself about drinking one hell of a lot of water and coffee, or soda, beer, other liquids, or diuretic substances, maybe spices in my Mexican food, terrific digestion, eat out almost every night, always thirsty … tried the lite beers but don’t really prefer them …

“Any diabetes in your family?” he asked.

“None! Never! Not!”

So I seemed to be getting away without telling him about my hearing loss, probably from an old war wound, too much rock and roll during my ten-year-long summer of love, and my occasional narcolepsy, falling asleep almost without warning when I was depressed, sometimes taking two naps a day—that isn’t narcolepsy, it’s escapism—and my lack of joy in my love arrangements; and then my wife, my former wife. Some things are none of a person’s doctor-and-friend’s goddamn business.

He was looking me straight in the eyes. “Have any problems with anhedonia?”

The question exasperated me. “Some people say ‘prostrate.’ I get it right. I leave out the r. But what the fuck is anhedonia?”

“Inability,” he began gloomily, sighing, “or difficulty … in feeling pleasure.”

“I come okay.”

“I mean pleasure in general. The deliciousness of the morning chill, the smile of a baby next door, the smell of the dew on the flower…”

“So why didn’t you say? Yeah, sometimes I wonder if it’s all worthwhile. Actually, there are other things I like better, Fred. The smile of a baby next door? Where I live it’s more like raccoon doo-doo on the flowers.”

We sat looking at each other in silence, two men of a certain age, divorced, our children escaping into their own lives, the years inexorable. I doubted the entire world-historical import of the smell of morning dew. It was a good thing Fred stuck with medicine because his career as a lyric poet would have been a nonstarter. But I felt certain he too knew what it was like to have history buzzing in his ears, keeping him awake, giving him a bat’s nighttime alertness, along with sudden hibernations during the day. Our distant cousins, the bears and bats; my immediate neighbors, the raccoons, fleas, and feral kids from the Projects.

“Old days, when I started out, we used to try thyroid or speed with vitamins, that turned out to be not so good an idea, or advice, the talking cure…”

“Yeah.”

“Now I say: Enjoy your naps. That’s not narcolepsy.”

“And enjoy my anhedonia?”

He walked me to the door and made one of those growling Japanesey sighs. “How about a movie and the Early Bird dinner?” he asked. “You name the night, I got nothing on, either.”

We’d have to sit halfway down the aisle at the movies. He was farsighted, liked the rear, but I needed all the help I could get to pick up the sound track. A lot of healthy young folks prefer to sit forward, folks who can sort it all out in their heads, process the music when a Korean cutie is saying “Cling?” but means to ask “Drink?”

Getting old was a full-time occupation. I wasn’t sure I still had the time for it.