An Eighty-Year Old Ponders
Eighty going on 81, besieged by chronic pain and chronic fatigue. I have been housebound eight months, after a painful fall on the front steps. Physical therapists stopped coming when I had a severe stenosis flare-up with excruciating pain in my lower back that left me bedridden. I plumped for an e-stim device that miraculously eased that pain.
Then my hands started. Neuropathy on top of chronic carpal tunnel, the hand doctors were unable to promise surgery would eliminate the pain. Then “Trigger finger” — an ugly new thing — and fingertip pain too severe for keyboarding. A different e — stim device failed to relieve it. So I elect to post chapters from previously published work, and search files for old articles and short stories. And read a lot on Medium since my hands won’t hold a book.
Lately I have been troubled by so-called “erotica” by women that focus on cuckoldry and “hot wife” themes. The language is demeaning and suggests a female desire to be dominated and degraded by “bulls”, usually heavily hung contemptuous black men who call them “cum-hungry cock sleeves” — and worse. Where did the ”me too” crowd go? Meanwhile elsewhere women express contempt and anger against men for any number of reasons.
Just today I read a woman’s piece about lovers “daring” to ask their sexual body count. None. of. your. business. was the reply. Then she got off into the condom conundrum. She mentioned several STDs she feared. (evidently none of the “erotica” writers do.) I didn’t see AIDs mentioned; maybe I missed it. One of her respondents said 1950 called, and wants its life back.
Wrong time-frame. The flower-child sixties through the early nineties, the post Roe v. Wade, birth-control pill era, was when women believed themselves free to walk on the wild side. Le bon temps rolleured. I have a vivid memory of where I was when I read the Sunday newspaper front-page story saying San Francisco doctors were no longer calling it the “gay plague.” because they were finding infected women. Vivid as JFK’s Dallas murder and the fall of the Twin Towers 9/11. More chilling because I knew the good times were over.
In her condom diatribe, something she said caught my eye:that men always lied and said condoms wouldn’t fit. I flashed back to a stormy night in a Florida beach town 60 years ago, buying condoms in a pharmacy. The pharmacist looked out at severed palm branches blowing by on the gale and said’ ”nice night for it.” I said you’re right, better give me 12.
What I did not say was my reason: conventional drug-store condoms kept splitting when applied. My then-lady friend was married and had left her IUD home. She almost growled in frustration on the third attempt: “ you’re too damn big! Will it even fit in ME?” Fourth was the charm. Subsequent ones were easier after I filled that one. Each discharge seemed to reduce my erections to what one woman later called “a popular size.” We didn’t run out that long stormy night or gray raining morning.
This is more than I’ve typed in weeks. My hands are screaming. All by way of introducing more of my previous writing. This is from my Venus Mons Iliad:
Dedication: To All the Girls I Loved Before
I love the song To All the Girls I Loved Before as rendered in duet by Julio Iglesias and Willie Nelson. Iglesias’ suave, exotically accented tones evoke night trains to Paris and the haunting echo of high heels on cobblestones. Nelson’s hard-living whiskey and smoke-roughened voice recalls roadhouse sex, long American road trips and tangled sheets in cheap motels. The song is a true anthem for a ramblin’ man, his longings, and his gratitude for restless women.
Long before I heard them sing it, I heard another song authored and sung by Dory Previn. She was called from the audience to sing it in a Southern California jazz joint called the Lighthouse. Hers was the ballad of a lonely woman asking a new man if he cared to stay till sunrise — it’s completely your decision…it’s just that going home’s such a long lonely ride.
I did not stay till sunrise with the woman who took me to the Lighthouse, on what amounted to an unacknowledged first date. She didn’t invite me to stay that night. Sometimes luck mends such mistakes. We were lucky.
But all beginnings have their endings already written somewhere in time. New love spirals into loss and melancholy — and bittersweet gratitude — as in the song Julio and Willie perform flawlessly. Life moves relentlessly on. A jaded woman told me once men and women should always live separately with occasional conjugal visits. It was her solution to the fundamental rift between two sentient species compelled by biology into symbiosis.
Love nonetheless endures, whether with a proper or improper stranger. This book is my heart’s gift for ramblin’ men and restless women everywhere.
Prologue
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
―Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Call me Ishmael. Ish will do for short. I was not christened Ishmael. But the name has not been used for an epic character for a couple hundred years, so why not? The best-known Ish is the narrator of Moby-Dick, a fictional character of “mystic and speculative consciousness,” as some would have it. So I believe Ishmael and I share some traits. The Genesis Ish was banished to wander in the desert. Melville’s Ish was self-exiled at sea aboard a doomed whaling ship. Did Melville intend sand-to-seawater irony? The kind of question critics ponder.
“I alone am left to tell the tale” is one of the most resonant sentences in fiction.
I don’t do well in deserts. Mal de mer is a lifelong affliction. But call me the third Ish anyway. Ish has been a nickname of mine for over half a century — from the German Ich, pronounced with a sibilant C. A literary friend compared my roman a clef about my perambulating career to Ishmael wandering after the mythic whale. He suggested an untold Iliad of mythic proportions threaded my own rambling life. I saw his point. And I saw the coincidence of name and nickname, which appealed to my own mystic and speculative consciousness.
I looked Iliad up: defined lately as (1) a series of miseries or disastrous events; (2) a series of exploits regarded as suitable for an epic; or (3) a long narrative in the Homeric tradition. Close enough.
Venus Mons is my mythic symbol for the alien species with which men coexist in uneasy symbiosis on this planet. From an early age I was preoccupied as an exobiologist by this alien species. A once highly popular book cemented the notion of alien cohabitation with the facile suggestion that men are from Mars, women from Venus.
No alien invented in science-fiction or by Hollywood was to me more terrifying — more beguiling — more difficult to know — than Venusians. I alone am left to tell my tale.
