Fifty-Boy 4 Just The Way The Monkey Hangs

Fifty-Boy

4

Just The Way The Monkey Hangs

I examined the naked body in the full-length mirror. Were these the legs of an old man? Who could tell? I couldn't. I could've used an outside opinion. They didn't look old to me. The feet? The toes? The knees still worked... pretty good. No potbelly, well, maybe a little. The weights in the parlor got a one hour workout three days a week when she was at the gym. I wondered how saggy things would've been if I didn't work out at all.

I'd jotted a reminder: Buy bigger dumbbells.

She peek over my shoulder on the way out the door and said,                    
"I love the big ones at the gym."

N I B D A

"The big what?" I said.                                                                             

She looked at my reflecton, smirked and said. "Bye."

"Molly."

"Bye, honey."

"I'm deflating over here. What? Well go ahead then... I don't need you either. If you can do without it, so can I. What do you think, you're the only one who can take it or leave it?"

I don't think she was convinced. Who was I fooling. I heard her laugh out loud. My addiction in size five shoes. The storm-door shuddered and she cruised down the driveway blasting the radio:                                                                                                         

The lights are on, but you're not home.Your will is not your own. Your heart sweats. Your teeth grind, another kiss, and you'll be mine.

You like to think that you're immune to the stuff, closer to the truth to say you can't get enough. Oh yeah... Might as well face it you're addicted to love...

Be cool, I told myself. Be cool. Nothing you can't handle. That's just the way the monkey hangs.

No need to panic. Talk to the mirror. C'mon. Get focused. Don't even think the word Viagra. Can't get your sexual image all wrapped up in one little girl. She's not the only game on the planet.
Things still function. Look at it, hanging there nice and fat, like a meaty knockwurst. If I were a woman, I think I'd be attracted. But then again,
being married twenty-seven years and having been faithful, there's not a woman interested enough to verify the independent opinion of the lone party in the mirror - that he might still be attractive to members of the opposite sex. I mean, after all, the one woman who remains nonplussed when she sees me naked is the one woman who sees me naked, the foundress and president of the NIBDA - coined that acronym one night in my journal - alone in my bedroom - No Interest Before During or After. Yeah, at first I got a reaction, she hated the NIBDA thing, then she went and had it made into a tee-shirt, and wore it to the gym. She had the world by the bolas, not to mention me.

My Addiction In Size Five Shoes

I decided there and then, on my fiftieth birthday, naked in her new designer bathroom in Camden County, New Jersey, from which I had been exiled for trimming my beard, barefoot on her coffee-colored tile, with the classic off-white pedestal sink, and the matching square-tanked toilet, in front of the celery accent wall, to take what people in spy tradecraft call an updating of assets; to go step by step through my current situation in light of the new intelligence that had come my way. Then maybe I could decide, now that I knew her secret, what the change was in my life I knew I needed to take.

If nothing else, I was pretty sure I was leaving. I mean, what would it say if I  stayed, knowing what I knew? I mean, if it would've been me? If she'd discovered I was plotting a rendezvous with a chat-room lover? Shit, I'd be gone. She'd have my bags packed, the locks changed, all my hats cut into tiny pieces and my balls in a zip-lock baggy, along with the meaty knockwurst.
                                          
Maybe I didn't have the nerve to really run, but I could test the waters, say I was going to Florida for two weeks, for work. Add a little glamour, whisper it was for the CIA. Yeah, she'd believe that. And what would I find? She probably wouldn't even miss me, probably help me pack and let me put the ticket on her American Express. Two weeks without the asshole, her single pet name for me, or the fucking asshole, when she was feeling particularly affectionate. But I wasn't complaining, an endearment's an endearment. I had to take what I could get. The only thing I knew for sure was I ddin't know nothing, and I'd give just about anything for a chance to start over knowing that. It was like I found out too late, but just in time. It'd be a trip to paradise if I could get away without me, go somewhere else, be somebody new.

         

During the sixties, my best friend, Jacob Finley, got hit by a truck on 95 hitching to Miami. Some people said the trucker hit him on purpose, trying to scare him cause he had long hair, but Jake wouldn't move. He was the coolest guy I knew. We were the same age, same height, from the same neighborhood; people thought we looked like brothers. I could borrow his identity; he wasn't using it, complete the odyssey; for Jake, maybe recoup a little something of what I used to be. Then the reality-check in the mirror said, "You're gonna' fake your death and run away at your age, what about Molly?" Jake looked back and said, "Yeah, man, you'd be breaking her heart."
 And that's where I was, shivering on the edge of fifty.  

Fifty was a blindfolded step off a plank, a sorrowful passage to a petrified no-man's land that just sucked you through the looking-glass and there you were. There was nothing about it I liked, no mile-marker, no discernible border, not rite to acknowldege it, and no destination on the horizon I was in any particular sweat to get to. Just one lost boy on a strange dark street.        

www.amazon.com/Fifty-Boy-Desmond-Jones/dp/0741420171