Some reflections upon the perils of growing old as an impecunious bachelor in this particular part of the world.
I sit at the counter of a loud and smoky bar, watching all the pretty people flitting by. It’s just another night in another watering hole. Once again I am surrounded by young people. But they are not really young, they are just younger than me. And that isn’t saying much anymore. These days, there are even old people who are younger than me. Indeed, it is not infrequently that somebody whom I assumed was much older than me turns out to be much younger than me.
A song from twenty years ago plays on the jukebox. It provides strength, or the reminder of it. A memory crystallized in a few bars of music. But somebody else’s song can’t save me now. I am the oldest guy in the joint. There’s no getting around that fact. It shouldn’t matter. There are people who age gracefully (or otherwise) without letting it bother them. But I cannot pretend to be completely impervious to such gnawings. Perhaps that is because I measure age by achievment and I have not achieved anything in this life. Moreover, most of these whippersnappers are wealthier and more successful than me… and that isn’t saying much either.
Then I wonder if this is what it feels like to lose it. Maybe these are my twilight times, my waning days, the ones dreaded throughout all the lost years that led to now. The decline has been too gradual to trace. In darkness, corners have been groped around, and without realizing it, I have aged.
I am not going to be this age forever, though I seem to have been for a long time.
When people meet me they are often impressed by my curiosity. I ask a lot of questions. But mostly I am attempting to gauge how old they are and how much money they have, so that I can resent or pity them accordingly. When I read or hear about anybody who has accomplished anything the first thing I do is calculate their age and then compare myself to them. The results are seldom encouraging. There used to be other late bloomers to take solace in. But I am now older than the most dilatory of those late-bloomers were when they ‘produced’ anything.
As one grows older one keeps extending one’s expiration date. Once thirty was the deferred wake-up call to turn one’s life around, then thirty-five, then one was looking at forty. But surely there is an age that unequivocally represents the end of youth, of choice, and of promise. That age would have to be one’s mid-forties. That is about as far as one can stretch it. The artist Jules Pascin once maintained that if a man had not produced his best work by the age of forty-five, then he was unlikely to do so afterwards. Pascin proved his point by killing himself on the night of his forty-fifth birthday, slashing his wrists and smearing a bloody love message to his young girlfriend on the walls of his studio.
Others adjust in different ways. The countdown to obsolescence begins. You are the only thing that is slowing down. Time itself is moving faster. Five years ago seems like last month and everything seems like five years ago. Death is closer now than birth and one spends a lot more time looking backward than forward. Panic sets in but apathy wins the day. So little has happened. What markers can one use in order to navigate one’s way back through such a wasteland? At the same time, the view beyond early middle-age seems inconceivable.
As one grows older one must learn to suffer the pity of others. There exists the added indignity that one must brook not only pity but also resentment. One’s juniors resent one for growing old, as if there is something shameful or indecent about it. One’s age becomes an accusation, as if one has been found guilty of committing a heinous crime or carrying a fatal disease.
One’s face, from which life is visibly draining, sends out a warning signal: defeat, decay and death are more than mere abstractions. One becomes a living reminder to others of what they will one day endure, and they resent you for pointing it out to them.
The solitude of one’s position makes it harder to take. The long tracts of seclusion that were so vital to one’s development as a younger man are not as important now. One’s friends drift off and lose it in one way or another (death, career, family &c). The need for company becomes greater but kindred souls are harder to find. On the rare occasions when one encounters a contemporary who is in on the same shaky footing as oneself one initially finds it refreshing. Then one instinctively recoils. It is an automatic reaction to the scent of mature poverty. There is something more corrosive than consoling about the company of one’s fellow scufflers.
As a single person on society’s fringes one can easily acquire a distorted and hazy view of age that it is foolish to succumb to if one wishes to avoid looking ridiculous. Without the traditional signifiers of progress to guide one through these difficult years one risks drifting indefinitely in a state of stale suspended adolescence, a lifestyle choice that has become viable in the morbid youth-obsessed climate of the last fifty years (and a criterion by which it is tempting to judge oneself even when one doesn’t subscribe to it). It might even be deemed an achievment of sorts to have maintained the questionable standards of integrity fostered during one’s misguided youth into middle age. At the same time there seems to be something unsavory, even sinful, about growing old without changing one’s ways. It is perhaps a means of deluding oneself, of living in the realm of undignified make-believe that one is so anxious to avoid.
To age gracefully without making the usual adjustments requires careful handling.
Beware the vain (in both definitions of the word) lure of eternal youth. It is natural and right to carry on as if one is recklessly immortal when one is young but to continue behaving that way into one’s declining years is unseemly. The outward signifiers of age-denial must also be avoided. One would be advised to dress and act in an elderly manner while still young, therefore pre-acclimatizing oneself to the desolations of middle-age. William Burroughs and Robert Crumb were exemplars of this breed.
But they, of course, were successful. And therein lies the crux of the matter: The only way to redeem age is through success. It is acceptable to grow old as long as one has the money, power or achievment to counterbalance its more humiliating aspects. Success commands respect and an endless supply of nubile flesh, regardless of how decrepit one has the audacity to become.
But success, after all, is a young person’s game, and perhaps one has grown too old for it.
This bar is filled with young puppies who are learning how to drink, learning how to smoke… learning how to hold their cigarettes properly. They are passing through this world, enjoying their brief flirtation with bohemia. Then they will move on.
Another old chestnut plays on the jukebox. How different this music from long ago would sound to me if I were now successful or had changed at all. What precious nostalgia it might then hold. How sweet and distant those early years would seem, which do not seem so early, only the beginning of a long unbroken period that has lasted until now. My lifestyle hasn’t changed. A rite of passage turned into a way of life. A refuge became a trap. I have aged, that is all. I haven’t ‘moved on.’
How, back then, back in the good old back-in-the-day days, did I appear to my embittered elders? Doubtless as callow as these young people now appear to me. Did I know then that I was in it for the long haul? It never occurred to me to make other plans. Marriage, family and career never entered my mind…or if they did they were only apparitions to be mocked and avoided.
At an impressionable age, as soon as I began devouring, with rapacious appetite, the appropriate cultural nourishment, the precepts of ‘maudit’ and ‘manque’ were ingrained in me. All my heroes were damaged or doomed. I took consolation in the failure of others and attached a certain honor to it. But the failures I took consolation in were, of course, famous… otherwise the stories of their failure would not have been disseminated. They were not true failures but the failures of the successful, and the failures of the successful are always exaggerated by their hagiographers, generally intent upon casting their subjects in a light more tragic than that in which they lived.
I always regarded lack of ambition as a virtue.
The people I always had the most respect for, whom I regarded as having the most intelligence and integrity, were those that appeared to subscribe to the false sense of modesty and anti-ambition that I am now finding results in so much regret and resentment.
Unconsciously, perhaps even consciously, I committed myself to a marginal lifestyle. It never occurred to me that I might actually have to do something to get somewhere… and getting somewhere seldom crossed my mind.
Over the course of the last quarter of a century the basic elements of my life haven’t shifted too dramatically. I have no considered plan, no settled course of life. I’ve been doing the same thing for a long time. Most people get tired of it. I get tired of it too. But I do not become tired enough of it to change. Maybe I should try something new. But I don’t think I can, not until I have exhausted this way of life, what’s left of it. What way of life? There’s nothing to it: it just goes on and on, and as long as even the slightest morsel of such pleasure that was once tasted to its fullest (not that it was ever truly tasted to its fullest) is still available, I will maintain fidelity to a perversely assumed creed that I long ago ceased to believe in.
I have changed but my lifestyle hasn’t changed.
Others, to their credit, serve their time in this world and move on. I remain stuck in it, obstinately faithful to it, as if there were any honor to it. Not many stick it out for this long… consciously… ignoring more sensible options. And these other options may no longer be realistically accessible to one who has shunned them for so long.
I have become one of those people I used to dread becoming: ‘That old guy.’
Such elders as I must now appear to these striplings I remember from my nonage, such men as I hoped to avoid becoming: poor old bachelors. A few such crusters I remember from those days. They exuded mustiness, dustiness, rustiness. They seemed irrelevant, unworthy of the younger women they often sported, and to whom they seemed to cling jealously and protectively. I only hope that I don’t turn into one of those old men grateful merely to be in the company of a young woman. This is one of the fading bachelor’s most urgent responsibilities… and in it I have already failed.
They were walking warning signs, these ossified swingers. But perhaps this mean-spirited attitude was mine alone and perhaps it still taints me now. I have always dreaded growing old, to the point that I never realistically considered it, perhaps recognizing the inevitable fate that awaited me as a result of having not laid in the necessary provisions, precautions and preservations for later in life. There were beautiful times, I noticed, even as they were passing me by. Times that might have been built upon… times that tapered away.
A time of hope, borne back to me in song, ravages the air. A terrible nostalgia washes through me, for what might have been. Regrets, as they harden into something definite, are becoming difficult to face. Denial and distraction have turned into a preferable alternative to being continually paralyzed with fear. Denial and distraction as a means of survival.
Optimism suddenly seems viable: that dubious optimism derided as the fuel for other people’s lives. It took a long time to arrive within sight of this affected state and it is impossible to be carried along by it into anything resembling permanence. Instead only fleeting desperate glimpses of it are experienced.
These kids I am surrounded by, I have already seen through… been through… the years they are advancing towards. They will not exercise the same negligence that I did. This creates a gulf of sadness.
I can’t look at youth without lamenting my own wasted youth.
I can’t look at success without considering my own failure.
Yet, still, I can look at a union of two souls and be profoundly grateful that I am still a single man.
But this position too might be harder to maintain as one falls further into impecunious decay and one begins reaching out for… anything.
A woman walks by, deliberately turning her head in order to avoid making eye contact with me. I’ve seen her around. We’ve been introduced. She is no prize. She’s not even particularly young. She resembles an anorexic garden gnome. But due to some quirk of personal taste I’m attracted to her. She has sensed this attraction and recoils from it.
Perhaps she would like me better if I were famous.
A few minutes later she’s happily engaged in conversation with a man who clearly isn’t as fine a conversationalist or as attractive as me. He’s not even much younger than me. But she’s responding to him.
For almost thirty years I have been standing around with a drink in my hand, looking at women.
What a waste.
And if life beyond a certain age as a single man is unthinkable, then why remain single as a matter of principle? Because it still seems to be a preferable alternative… to something that is no longer an alternative.
In one’s forties, or even one’s thirties, the dating game becomes a terminal state of closing time at the bar with everybody desperately pairing off with whoever’s left before ‘last call’ is announced. In the absence of a meaningful union, one yields gratefully to fleeting, barely satisfying bestial contact with minimally appealing partners. The older one gets, the further one has to lower one’s standards. This descent into ‘bitter promiscuity’ is a natural process.
They, the fairer sex, sense that there is something not quite right with one, that something is missing. Any initial spark of curiosity and attraction quickly fizzles out. The scent of age and failure is soon picked up on.
The possession of wealth, power or success, preferably all three (they are all basically the same thing) can make up for other defects. Youth is the most precious commodity of all and it makes up for all other insufficiencies. But it ran out long ago and you are sadly lacking in those other potentially compensatory sufficiencies. You are declining physically, morally and financially. You are exuding a morbid effluvia from which all but the most kindred souls recoil.
Yet there does sometimes exist an initial brief window of opportunity, narrowing into a painful slit, before one is ‘found out’, and it must be taken advantage of before, with no uncertain finality, the window slams down.
Hesitation is fatal and the build-up – so exquisite to savor in earlier times, when one had more time in front of one, and so much less time behind to drag one down – cannot be indulged in. Soon there will be no more windows to crawl through or even hurl a rock through.
These considerations, considered elsewhere, would have more substance. These waves, crashing on an eastern shore, would have more resonance. Here they caress the sands submissively. It would be easy to walk into this ocean and not realize one was being consumed until writhing in the undertow. Living here detracts from the seriousness of life. One can remain young for longer here because more value is placed upon youth. It is made to seem possible. It is very easy to lead a frivolous existence here, to sleep through life, to dream your way into death. The sleep itself acts as both preservative and anesthetic. The subtlety of the seasons makes time pass more quickly, less dramatically.
Hailing from an older culture, fraught with ancestral disquietude, where the emotional severity cuts into one’s bones, one craves the numbing quality that can be found here in southern California. It has a seductively deadening quality. Seldom jolted out of numbness, sinking uncomfortably into penury, in this numbed-out comfort zone. However, any consolation derived from such surroundings comes doused in unreality, and a certain amount of soul-deadening is involved.
But that’s what you came here for in the first place: the numbness.
And when your numbered days are numbed, your numb days are still numbered.
When one is older one is supposed to have dignity. It is difficult to have dignity without money, particularly difficult here. There is no worse place on earth to grow old than Southern California. Without money or success one is dead meat in this town. No amount of charm, good looks or stimulating conversation can compensate for the lack of those properties. This is something that is mutely accepted. It is simply the way things are around here.
A certain respect for the superficial is a form of currency. Without which one finds oneself confined to the nether regions of bohemia, a particularly unappealing strata in this city. One simply seldom sees poor old white people in these environs… or poor people… or old people. The cities up the coast are much kinder places to be an aging bohemian in. Here, a natural process is made to seem unnatural, shameful. One is not supposed to grow old here - in this place that is always quickly filling up with young people – and to do so bereft of the aforementioned qualities is unthinkable. It could almost be considered a crime. The air is like sandpaper, unforgiving. There can be no dignity in poverty here. It suffers too much by contrast.
Of course, you could leave town. But no… not now… you couldn’t. You have been here too long and you are too old. Just forget it: the logistics of relocating to a new city are too daunting, and you have the feeling that a worse fate awaits you elsewhere.
Besides, you are in your element here, much as you are sick of your element. And, ultimately, you are grateful, deeply grateful: you still need the numbness. All these years here have rendered you unfit for anywhere more bracing.
Ah, to be old and unsuccessful.
Despite advanced age and reduced means life goes on and events keep unfolding and folding over. There is still time… but am I going to do anything with it? I don’t want to die, but I don’t know what else to do. I have made a mess of this life. I would like to start again. But since that’s impossible, I might as well make the most of this one. But it seems too late. But it has always seemed too late. But I don’t possess the energies I once possessed. But I never did possess much energy.
How foreign seems the notion of celebrating my birthday, of viewing it as an occasion to reflect upon my accomplishments and measure my satisfactions, rather than an excuse to reflect more deeply than usual upon my failure. I do that every day. A birthday is then an accumulation, a culmination of such days.
Had I done something with my life I suppose I might feel differently about it… about a lot of things.
I have always been able to imagine my life up to a certain point: the point I’m at now – at this late stage, with no indication of a future – and no further. The mid-forties were as far as I could stretch my imagination. Anything past that point was inconceivable.
Can I think of a single single man who has aged gracefully beyond his mid-forties in this city? Without the usual provisos, the answer is a definite no. They seem to beat a beaten down retreat from public life. It is hard to escape the encroachment of mustiness. It is difficult not to become musty and beaten down. It takes character. And where does character alone get one? Nowhere.
There has to be a way out… a way out of nowhere. Maybe if one did something. A desperate last minute attempt to save oneself? But late-blooming ambition has something unsavory about it: late-blooming ambition and its attendant sorrows of failure and bitterness.
To whom do these words ring true: few, very few. And of those few even fewer would care to admit it.
There are not many who can speak with authority from this (disad)vantage point, and it is pointless to have reached this point: this summit of finely seasoned staleness. The callow negativism of youth (im)matured to a dubious vintage, with a voluptuous bouquet of regret and a lingering aftertaste of self-disgust.
As one grows older in this state one alienates more people. Friends give up on your ever realizing your potential, distance themselves and drop off.
They all moved on years ago. Only you are still here, long past the age of promise, still (mis)leading the same existence.
If they could only see you now: they would turn away.
And it is discouraging to observe the unraveling of one’s few fellow travelers. There is an apparently unavoidable corrosive bitterness and barely suppressed anger distressingly evident in single males beyond a certain age: a form of dried-up fuel, simmering on a low flame, evaporating into freefloating resentment.
Some there are who resent the fact, that as it turned out, life didn’t owe them anything. Some there are who brood ruinously over missed opportunities, realizing there will be no more. Some there are beyond desperation, almost complacent in their desperation.
It seems that one must strive consciously to avoid these fates. But perhaps, unknowingly, one has already slipped into them.
The horror of youth: that one will never be young again.
There are no young people who are older than me anymore. I am never going to be the youngest person in the room again, except perhaps at an old folks home.
The older one becomes the more young people there are taking over the world that belonged to you… when you were young.
I seldom think of people who are only slightly older than me as being my contemporaries. I think of some of my juniors as being my seniors because I am stuck at a certain point in my lack of development, from which they have advanced.
One might think this would be a kinder time in which to grow old. In some respects, the generation gap has narrowed. Teenagers listen to the same music that sixty year-olds listen to. Figures in their fifties and sixties are considered ‘cool’ because their younger selves are revered by young people who live in a more impoverished culture.
Young people seem to have taken over the world. It is easy to be young in this day and age, and probably not very rewarding. The world nowadays is ready for them. They are easily processed into the culture now. Mass produced individualism awaits them with its generic youth zones and manufactured bohemian lifestyles.
One can rebel against counterfeit rebellion but that is just another form of counterfeit rebellion. Complacency is all the rage. But is useless and unbecoming to rail against complacency when one is old.
What is it about growing old that is so disturbing? Death, decay, sickness, poverty and loneliness. The first is guaranteed for all. No one, to the best of my knowledge, has ever escaped it. The latter three guarantee a miserable old age. Decay is also a given, but it can be compensated for by the lack of the latter three afflictions.
There’s no use attempting to conceal the evidence of decay. You can’t pretend to be young anymore. But you can’t age in a dignified manner in the position you’ve put yourself in.
It seems that a drying up occurs, both physically and mentally. Many dry up long before they reach that age, many are born desiccated, but the descent into the desert of old age is unavoidable. Of course one dries up. That is what happens as one grows older. One loses one’s moisture, one slows down. There is no shame in that. Why whine about it? Because not everything that is natural is desirable, but mostly, in the case of the mature bachelor ( for the ladies, doubtless, the situation is just as grim, if not grimmer, but I do not attempt to concern myself here with the plight of the spinster), because refusal to age gracefully, in the accepted manner, places him in a lonely and precarious position, especially when financial insecurity threatens his cherished island existence.
Now it’s all about preservation… about dying old and leaving a well-preserved corpse.
In my twenties I told myself that I wasn’t even going to attempt to do anything until I turned thirty, that those years were meant exclusively for accumulating knowledge and experience, and to some extent I succeeded in this. I fell into the habit of just living and it was a hard habit to break, to the extent that when I turned forty I found that I still hadn’t done anything, so to speak, with my life. Hitting my mid-forties, I found myself in much the same position.
But as I have been saying for a long time: there is still time.
Is the glass a quarter full or three quarters empty?
All right, I am only in the late September of my years.
I’m going to extend it again: the expiration date that is.
And what, with ways unchanged, can possibly lie beyond one’s mid-forties?
To somebody raised on the culture of youth turning fifty is almost unthinkable: it cannot be fathomed, it boggles the mind. One never imagined thinking in such terms. But in such terms, eventually, one must think.
It is the last horizon. When one turns thirty one is looking at forty. When one turns forty one is still looking at fifty. But when one turns fifty, one is just looking at death.
There are people who refuse to believe that an unrepentant bachelor (and an unrepentant bohemian) can age any further than his mid- forties. As if life, as he has lived it, becomes suspended at that point.
Up until the age of fifty, everyone is in the same league. We are all roughly contemporaries. At fifty a great divide is crossed: one is now on the other side, in another world. A world without return or returns. A door has closed, on the other side of which one is instantly distanced from everybody that is younger, even those who are only slightly younger. It is another zone, one in which proof of failure has finally been furnished, with an age stamped upon it.
To turn that last corner, reaching that age you thought you’d never reach: What can possibly lie beyond that door? Only that other door, that other world… if world it is at all.
48 is the last age with even the slightest residual glow of youth about it. At 49 one is conspicuously knocking on the door of fifty. The widest psychological age gap lies between 45 and fifty. It is much wider than the difference between 40 and 45, or any other age gap.
For a 45 year-old man to be involved with a 30 year-old woman is acceptable. But there is something unseemly about a 50 year-old man carrying on with a thirty-five year-old woman.
At forty one can still be a late bloomer. At fifty it is all over. After forty there is still life. After fifty one is living in the shadow of death. Nobody makes it after the age of fifty. If you’re fifty and you’re not a success, then you’re a failure.
No other age carries such weight. It is, at least, a sort of halfway funeral. This is the age that you unknowingly crawled towards. It is staring you in the face: You are now officially invisible.
By shunning the traditional route of coupledom and career one forces oneself to dwell morbidly upon age. Such transitions/concessions as marriage and gainful employment make the passage of time endurable. To dismiss them is to take a difficult path, and considering the sacrifices involved, usually not worth it. Lifestyle becomes life-stale. The options one has renounced become progressively more attractive and less attainable as one proceeds. One finds oneself outnumbered by sheer force of complacency: a complacency that doesn’t seem as contemptible as it did when one first set out on this path.
How then does one cope with the awkward business of growing old without – in the accepted sense – ‘growing up’? There are several alternatives to consider: one could live on the street, commit suicide, get a job… or get married. Marriage, of course, is a convenient escape route. It is easier to grow old as part of a cozy domestic unit. Such arrangements, apparently, force one to grow up and provide one with a degree of security. It is comforting to know that someone will be around when the time comes to push one’s wheelchair and empty one’s bedpan.
Bachelordom, which once seemed a means of prolonging youth, turns on one. The mature bachelor resigns himself to a life of diminishing returns and becomes a potentially absurd figure. But why should it even matter? In a society that places so much emphasis upon coupledom it might even be considered heroic to remain single as a matter of choice. It is a lonely choice and one that few people consciously make. But for some it beats the alternatives. There is a certain satisfaction to be had from taking such a position and exposure to the lives of one’s married friends is usually enough to convince one that the right decision has been made.
Life rolls on: rock hard, gently rolling. You distance yourself from what you once would have viewed as possibilities. You drift in the dullest glow of what once was. You don’t allow yourself to get carried away with the thoughts you used to get carried away with. You resign yourself to indifference, your own and that of others. And in this way life can become quite painless. It doesn’t feel as if there’s much to look forward to anymore. But so what? Perhaps there never was.
Tags: Bachelordom, john tottenham, Jules Pascin, r. crumb, the fall, william burroughs
