Don't Call Me Hon!

My ship has sailed and I am standing on the pier waving as it pulls out of port. On second thought, it is more like I am inside the terminal looking through the grimy window at the backs of the people standing on the pier waving at the departing ship. On third thought, I am actually in the men’s room at the back of the terminal standing in front of a urinal trying to pee while all that waving and sailing is going on outside! It seems that I am no longer at the party and nobody is missing me.

I have never really been a player. In my professional life I took the first teaching job I was offered after graduation and I did it for thirty-three years. My social life wasn't much better. Because I went to parochial school for sixteen years, I was so riddled with Catholic guilt about sex I was a semi-virgin when I got married at twenty-two. By semi-virgin I mean that there were two glorious pre-marital occasions, both with a friend’s older sister, once when she was drunk and thought I was somebody else and once when she needed money for a pack of cigarettes. Both times I was so nervous I was hardly there, and both times it was over so fast I had to replay the scenes many times when I was home alone.

During those brief marriage years I must admit that I did a bit better, overcoming my guilt enough to have the occasional dalliance at work. It was the main factor contributing to the divorce. The affairs were mostly with disgruntled Home Ec teachers and unhappily married women who found me slightly less unpleasant than their husbands. After the divorce there were some other escapades with happy hour alcoholics, Parents Without Partners divorcees, desperate housewives and several graduated former students who returned because they remembered me from my long ago “glory days.” But like the postman who never rings twice, they generally never came back for seconds.

As I grew older and whiter and wider there were others, fewer of course, women of a different caliber, who had diminished expectations and lower standards. All had wear and tear, been banged up a bit in the race toward the bright light at the end of the tunnel, all had walked up to the edge, stared into the abyss and stepped back. I gravitated to the halt and the lame, the weak and the infirm, the addled and the marginally insane, woman with bigger scars than mine. They were women met not in singles bars, but in doctors' offices, CVS drug stores and Wal-Mart.

On these occasions the conversation went something like this:

SHE: “Looking through all these old pictures of you, you, um, seem to have put on more than just a few pounds over the years.”

ME: “Oh, yeah? Well, maybe so. But you only have one leg.”

My state of affairs worsened when I slipped and fell from that viable “25 to 50” demographic to become a full-fledged, card-carrying A-A-R-Per, and then hobbled into retirement, Medicare and golden-year senior status. Suddenly, or maybe it wasn't that sudden, as my systems started breaking down – seeing, hearing, hydraulic – I became invisible! Like the old soldier, I faded away into the wallpaper. Try as I might to re-invent myself, to change my image by darkening my hair and beard with Just For Men that made me look fifteen minutes younger, up-grading my disco wardrobe and daubing on more cologne, I was a wraith, a phantom, the ghost of many Christmases Past. No one saw me. No one heard me. No one cared. Whenever attractive young women came into a place where I was sitting trying to look “not so desperate and not quite dead yet,” the first thing they noticed was the furniture. “Isn't that a great maroon leather couch in the corner? The one with the patchouli-smelling old guy in the tie-dyed shirt sitting on the end of it.”

But I had seen the handwriting on the wall many years before, the first time my son offered to take me out to dinner at the Pasta House on Third Avenue in Brooklyn where he worked. The staff greeted him at the door, "Ian! Ian!" The young college girls serving our table constantly flirted with him while they over-filled his water glass. “This is my father,” he said as I looked over the top of my menu and smiled from the background at their polite, indifferent nods. My worst fear was that someone would bring me a booster chair!

It was just a matter of time until waitresses everywhere leaned in to inform me in a much too loud voice, “You are too late for the Early Bird Special, dear, but you can order from the salt-free Senior Menu,” inevitably steering me to the back page next to the Kiddy selections.

And when the simple task of filling out things like shipping labels, census forms, and Department of Motor Vehicles applications required assistance, annoyance was often balanced by compassion for my feebleness. I got, “You forgot to sign it here, dear, and you left something out here… and here… and here.”

The evening after my 50th high school reunion downtown Brooklyn, I stopped at Burger King to pee, a routine that has become a ritual, and get a drink to keep me awake and propel me to the next stop along the way to home and bed. A small coffee was a buck, a pretty good deal these days of $4.00 a gallon gasoline. But when I ordered the register rang up up 48¢.

“I thought it was a dollar,” I said to the pretty girl behind the counter, a high school junior, flashing my best smile. “Is this a promotional offer?”

“It’s the regular ‘Senior Coffee’ price,” she said not even looking at me.
“But I didn’t ask for that and you didn’t card me!”

She had just assumed that I was an empty antique, a seedy bump on a park bench, a harmless senior on Social Security, a pity candidate given one of the sops society bestows on those close to death.

That was when I decided to show this little pretty girl not to take me for granted. I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and announce: “DON’T DISMISS ME! I AM NOT AS HARMLESS AS YOU THINK! I AM HARMFUL! And to prove it, I am going to SPANK your shapely, even in that Burger King uniform, teenage bottom and then BOFF you! No, I will BOFF you first then SPANK you!" But I said nothing. I thanked her instead and took my bargain coffee to the car to be savored on the journey back to my not too distant rest.

Last week, along with my other scheduled doctors’ appointments, I visited my dermatologist, a man who seems to spend less and less time at further and further distance examining my sagging body during his regular yearly assessment of the multitude of things growing on it. His very attractive 30-something nurse smiled and ushered me into a small examining room, and for a few moments I thought that the old magic was back.

“Now take off all your clothes, hon,” she told me in a melodious voice and handed me a little packet still warm from her body heat.

“You know,” I flirted back, “it’s been a long time since a beautiful young woman told me to take off all my clothes.”

“Oh, you!” She put her hand up to her face as if to cover a blush. “Everything except your underwear, hon,” she said with a bigger smile. “And be sure to put on the robe with the opening to the front, hon. I’ll be back to check in a minute.” And then she patted my cheek. I could feel her smoldering warmth and smell her perfume.

When she was outside I pulled quickly off my pants and rolled them into a ball, my shirt, my socks, my sneakers, everything except my underwear. I pulled on the paper robe with the opening where she said.

I heard her soft knock. “Are you decent, hon?” she asked, popping her face around the door for a look.

My heart was pounding in my chest. I could feel the blood coursing through parts of me long dormant. “Decent enough,” I said, “although you should have seen me in my prime, or even just ten years ago,” I added. “I was more than decent then!” I used my best efforts to suck in my gut and hold closed my too-small paper robe.

“Oh, aren’t you just so cute,” she said. “You must have been something when you were young, hon.” She patted my old gray head like puppy or more like an old dog that can’t or won’t learn new tricks. “You can take a seat over there, hon. The doctor will be right in to see you. Okay?” She wagged her finger at me. “And one other thing, hon. You just might want to put your, um, little man back inside your underwear.”

That was when I knew my ship had definitely sailed.

© 2012 Joseph E. Scalia