I HAVE ARRIVED AT LAST...

IN THAT CURIOUS STRETCH of life where I am no longer young nor middle-aged.  This stage of life is, of course, called old age.  In the course of my time here, I have not accomplished all that I wished to accomplish.  I have seen a small portion of the world, loved women, fathered children, watched grandchildren be born and grow, worked at several trades, committed cruelties and engaged in folly, had fine meals and good times, drowsed through summer afternoons, walked the beach at dawn and heard cathedral chimes at midnight.  That is to say, I have lived a life.  


  My hope is that I am far from finished with this splendid accident, but there is one enormous fact attached to this condition: I know now that the path is leading inexorably through the evening to the barn; that not far away, up ahead, perhaps over that next lilac-covered hill, lies death. 

  For some, the imminence of death creates remorse about wasted time and opportunity; for others, fear; for a few, relief; for many, a sense of urgency.  I am going to die, we whisper to ourselves.  Sooner rather than later.  This dramatic sense of the inevitable does not resemble the fatalism of the combat soldier, who knows that if he lives, he will still be in the command of his youth.  Nor does the vision of death have the dark romantic glamour it had when you were young.  The warning signs of decline and decay are as unavoidable as the sunset.  The most obvious are the physical.  It was only a few years ago when I discovered that I had grown a small paunch, which I noticed suddenly in the window of a store, and it made me look like another person, some chunky old man going about his mundane business.  At the same time, more white patches mysteriously sprouted from my scalp.  The paunch would not go away, and I was unable to summon the force of my dormant adolescence to work it off.  As for my scalp, these changes were a sudden reminder of the inevitable.  The hard, invincible body I thought I possessed when young was now forever gone.    

  To acknowledge the inevitability of death, however, is not to fear it.  I was more afraid of death at 25 than I am now.  My night thoughts when I was young were haunted by visions of the sudden end of my life.  Images of violence roamed freely through my dreams.  Before sleep, I would act out imaginary struggles with the gun-wielding intruder who was somewhere out in those shadowed streets.  I slept too often with the light on.  Today, I accept the inevitable more serenely.  I know that I will never write the great American novel.  Nor will I enter a game in late September to triple up the alley in center field and win a pennant for the Yankees.  I've now come to understand that dying is as natural part of my living as the falling of an autumn leaf.  I have committed my share of stupidities.  I was a somewhat dreadful husband.  I tried to be a good father but made many mistakes.  There were other sins, mortal and venial.  


 
  In old age, you learn to forgive yourself.  Faced with the enormous crimes of the world, you acquire a sense of proportion about your own relative misdemeanors.  Each of us goes from problems of others to the problems of self and back again, over and over, for the duration of our lives.  And most often we measure the triumphs and disasters, errors and illusions, against the experience of others.  I am aware that it is already too late to agonize over my personal failings.  As Popeye once said, "I yam what I yam an' that's all I yam."  The damage of the past is over and done with; nothing can be done to avoid it or to repair it; I hope to cause no more, and I am sometimes comforted in remembering that to many people I was also kind.  For good or ill, I remain human.  That is to say, imperfect.

  There is one thing, however, that I regret about the loss of my youth.  It is difficult to explain to the young the heady excitement that attended the election of John F. Kennedy or the aching hole his death blew through this country.  I was young when Americans thought that change could be affected through politicians.  When Fidel Castro triumphed over Fulgencio Batista on New Year's Day in 1959, I cheered with all my friends; now poor Fidel is just another aging Stalinist.  Once I embraced the hope for a democratic socialism, wanted to believe in the generous theory of  a creed.  But as I grew older, that theory shriveled away when I read both Marx and history and witnessed the spectacle of "socialist" tanks in Czechosolovakia, the atrocities of Pol Pot, the crushing of Solidarity in Poland.  There might again be a time when young Americans will be moved by political idealism or faith in a theory; alas, I won't be able to join them... 

  ...Thus, the basic question I have for myself is this: How can I live the rest of my life with a modicum of grace?

  In spite of all of the above, living seems more extraordinary than ever.  I sleep less.  In this, among so many other things, I resemble  the finest man I ever knew - my Dad.  In the last thirty years of his life (he died at 72), he rose before dawn, and although he never said so, I'm certain now that the early rising was bout the waste of living.  I think that Dad thought that it was almost sinful to occupy life with death's sweet brother, sleep.  And so I am awake.  I take time to listen to the trees noisy with birds, watch animals play in the backyard.  I know that after Summer and Fall have come and gone, Spring will soon arrive, and  the streams of my Colorado childhood will be making churning sounds, as the ice breaks and the trout stir at the bottom.  Spring will bring the first games of another baseball season, and we can watch a fresh new rookie try to hit the curve ball.  The world will soon be green again.  And life will, once more, begin anew.

  My hope is that I will be around to witness the elegant beauty of all of it for just a few more times...

a Tijuana birthday:


BACK IN 1954, TIJUANA WAS A TOWN OF 19 THOUSAND CITIZENS...

MANY OF WHOM WERE EMPLOYED IN PROVIDING PLEASURE for visiting Americans.  In 1920, Prohibition had become the law of the land, so thousands of Americans began crossing the border to do what they could not do at home: shoot crap, bet on horses, get drunk, and get laid.  Movie stars came down from Hollywood with people to whom they were not married.  Gangsters traveled from as far away and New York and Chicago.  Women with money had abortions at a place called the Paris Clinic.  Sailors arrived from San Diego to lose their virginity, get their first doses of clap, and too often to spend nights in the Tijuana jail.  Sin did not depart with the end of Prohibition.  The town boomed once again during World War Two, and thousands of more Americans would forever remember the bizarre sex shows and rampant prostitution of that era and the availability of something called marijuana and of how the whorehouses of the Zona Norte seemed always to be busy day-and-night.  Sin was the city's major industry.  Sunday, the 26th day of September in 1954, happened to be my 18th birthday that year, and four of us had traveled from Nebraska to Tijuana between registration day and the initial beginning of our college semester  to celebrate.  


  On our first innocent night in town, Tijuana would become the the city in which I almost paid for the-one-and-only prostitute I would ever meet.  Her name was Margarita, and she was a dancer at one of the nightclubs where Jack Dempsey and Babe Ruth had once been among the clients, a place complete with gambling drinking, a big band, and fancy restaurant. "You have very nice blue-eyes," Margarita said, as she sat down at the table where me and my three college pals were sitting.  She then gave me a smile and said that she had heard from one of my college friends that it was my birthday,  asked me if I would like "a freebie," then pulled her blouse down a bit and gave me a small peek at her ample brown breasts.  The band boomed behind me and I continued to stare at the wondrous sight until she pulled the top of her blouse back up.  To me, she  looked like an absolutely beautiful nymphet, a genuine love goddess.  A vision which promptly evaporated the moment she promised me that she no longer had the clap.  Much to the amusement of others, the four of us immediately got-up, paid our tab, and rushed out of the place, as the laughter continued to grow throughout the place until our final exit was made.

  It was dusk on the following day, and the 4 of us were in a small restaurant on the Avendia Revolucion, dining with an older Mexican woman we'd met that afternoon.  From our table, while the mariachis played aching old songs of love and betrayal, the Mexican woman said, "It is so beautiful.  The music of Mexico."  The woman's face trembled as she went on to talk about her husband and son.  They had died within one year of each other.  The husband of a heart attack after many years in the Mexican foreign service, the son in a senseless automobile accident along the border between Texas and Mexico.  "When those things happened," she continued, "I couldn't live anymore.  I didn't want to.  I sat at home in the dark."  She sipped her drink.  "It was my daughter and 8 year-old grandson that insisted we go together to Puerto Vallarta, and that I take long walks on the beach.  They said I had to heal myself.  I had to see the sky and the sand and the sea and get well.  Nature heals.  Beauty heals.  Don't you boys ever forget that.  I hurt still at times.."  She went on to say that the gray years had been erased by the sun and the sound of children laughing in the still hours of the siesta; she now worked in a small shop on Coaulia Avenida and was catching up on a decade of lost laughter.  Not all the stories we heard in Tijuana contained such elements of melodrama and redemption. 


  But there were other tales of healing - a man from Brazil who had lost a daughter to drugs; another from Iowa who had lost a career to whiskey; a third from Britain had postponed an old dream of becoming a painter.  All had come to Tijuana to live a little longer or, perhaps, for the first time.  Among the ordinary Mexicans, life seemed sweeter.   We watched great crowds of children play along the beach.  Each day of our stay was crowded with a mixture of tourists and Mexican families.  The Mexicans were friendly, even kind, but they were more concerned with their children than with visitors.  Outside of the Zona Norte it was a good town for walking.  We saw flowers growing everywhere: on the streets, on balconies, in small private gardens.  The stalls of markets displayed watermelon, guava, cantaloupe, avocado.  Street vendors sold shaved ice and coconut milk.

  There were also irritations.  In our small hotel the cost of newspapers, aspirin, and other necessities were extortionate.  At night a small band played at poolside, playing watered-down American music, instead of the vibrant music of Mexico.  We listened to banal versions of My Way and The Lion Roars Tonight.  The combination was so deadly that we almost lost our appetite.  "That is what the Americans want," a waiter said to us one night.  "It's terrible, no?  But they want this.  They want to feel at home."  When walking, taxi drivers came upon us like piranhas.  Many of them were displaced Americans or Canadians, trying to look respectable; others were young and old Mexicans.  It was an infuriating hustle.  Staff members ushered us to restaurants.  We suspected that was probably a racket with the restaurant owners kicking back money to the steerers.

  Late one afternoon, we walked into a small shop selling Mexican folk art, and spent the remainder of the day with the owner, a woman by the name of Jillian Marcos, who had been in Tijuana for more than 20 years.  She featured the best of the local painters, and for many, her shop served as a hangout and communications center for the artists, a place for hearing gossip, making contacts, and buying small gifts for friends.  She produced cold drinks, smoked a cigarette, and talked about Tijuana.  "First of all, it's really a street town," she said.  "Everybody is out in the streets.  You see your friends there.  You meet new people there.  The town is not social; it's certainly not normal with all the tourists coming over the border.  But you can wear what you want to wear here, go as you want to go.  It's certainly not like Acapulco.  My friends come from Los Angeles and New York to enjoy the tawdry side-of-life.  God knows, they have a good time.  But the thing that they enjoy the best is the air in the morning.  Here, the weather is always great.  I go to New York and it's cold outside.  I go to Phoenix, and it's blistering.  Here the windows are always open.  You can't really capture Mexico in photographs or paintings, because they leave out two essentials, sound and smell.  In the states the windows are always closed and the air is imported and smells like cement.  And another thing, there are too many people around for there to be any danger.  I have always felt safe." 


 
  We never felt menaced in Tijuana.  There were no obvious hoodlums, no street gangs, no dope peddlers.  We never saw the kind of homeless people who now collect on the streets of America like piles of human wreckage.  Even with the infamous Zona Norte, the town beyond was built upon the hard foundation of the Mexican family.  In the evenings there were young men flirting with young women as they do in the evening in a thousand Mexican towns.  You could hear the growl of the sea.  You could dine in many restaurants.

  On our last evening in Tijuana, we went to a wonderful authentic Mexican market called El Popo, filled with stacks of fresh cheeses, sweets, wooden spoons, piles of dried chilies, pinatas, and Mexican curios.  We walked out to the street just as the sun was setting, watched kids pedaling tricycles down the hill and country people in sandals and straw hats gazing at the wonders of the metropolis, watched a carpenter laboring with an artist's intensity in a small crowded shop.  As the afternoon turned to evening, we looked up at a disco above a large restaurant, and in the window, we could see that it was filled with with dark-skinned girls in tight bright dresses, the daily colored denizens of the Mexican night.

  I carried all of them home with me from Tijuana, along with the sound of a rooster at dawn and the healing benevolence of the sun and the salt of the sea and the magnificent memory of the Mexican people.

  It had been a wonderful adventure and a glorious 18th birthday... 

ON THE 24TH DAY OF JUNE 2014...
THE LAST OF THE "MISFITS" DIED.


  It had all begun back in 1960 when John Huston arrived in Reno, Nevada with a crew 0f 130 to direct the movie version of Arthur Miller's The Misfits in the 108 degree heat of the western desert.  The principals of the movie were housed at the Mapes Hotel next to the Truckee River on Virginia Street, a distinctive art deco high-rise with the Lamplighter Bar on the main floor and The Sky Room at the top.  The stars of the movie were Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe, along with Montgomery Clift and Eli Wallach and Thelma Ritter; and the story centered centered around a recently divorced woman (Monroe) who spent time with three men: Gable, Clift, and Wallach, three cowboys who chased Mustangs in order to make a little side-money roping the horses, who would eventually be shot and turned into dog food for a dog meat factory.   It was said to be a symbolic tale about the death of the old-West written by Monroe's current husband, playwright Arthur Miller.  The marriage was beginning to break apart, due to Monroe's declining mental-health and accentuating use of barbiturate drugs.  It would be nice to say that they lived happily ever after.  Almost nobody does, particularly celebrities who are addicted to drugs.  

  Within weeks reporters and photographers were making their way to Reno.  A large parade was held when the stars arrived.  "They are giving us a million dollars of free publicity," said the owner of the Mapes.  The Reno tourist board was equally excited.  Gable and Monroe were the attraction that elevated the town.  John Huston was back in Reno, hauling his aging bones back to the States after a long sojourn to Ireland, and spent many morning hours strolling along Virginia Street and most afternoon hours in the Lamplighter Bar after taking the morning stroll.  Within the swirling currents of celebrity and alcohol, staff members greeted him fondly.  And Huston had grand fun.  He enjoyed the attention.  "Huston was the greatest drinker I ever saw at my bar.  He could drink anything and ever seemed to get drunk," said the day barman.  The shooting of the movie, of course, had yet to begin.  Far and away the worst irritation in Reno during the wait, was the intense heat.  On most days the leaves of the trees outside of the hotel drooped beneath the hot sun, while the music in the bar was the usual soft-rock pap: watered-down Beatles, creaky Barry Manilow, but at least it was cool and an excellent place for Huston to doze-off now and again between drinks.


 
  Both Monroe and Gable were the  gigantic stars in the old Hollywood galaxy, and their presence captivated the town.  Montgomery Clift, who played a mother-fixated rodeo performer, had been in a car crash in 1956, which left his face partially immobile and his once-perfect-profile altered, was now addicted to alcohol and prescription drugs, and spent the majority of his time reading alone in his room, lonely and isolated.  Monroe was sinking further into alcohol and drug prescription abuse, and Gable, who had gone on a crash-diet in order to get in shape for the film, was not in the best of moods, and began to chain-smoke cigarettes and drink large quantities of alcohol.  The only two performers who seemed normal were the two character actors, Wallach and Ritter; thus, they garnered little attention from the public or the press.  The two of them were said to have been friendly, even sweet.  And yet, one critic wrote that, "From the very beginning, an atmosphere of doom hung over the picture." 


  The movie would not be released until February of 1961.  It would be the final film appearance for both Gable and Monroe.  Gable suffered a heart attack 2 days after the filming came to an end and died 10 days later, on November 16, 1960, at age 59.  Within a year-and-a-half, Monroe passed away from an apparent drug overdose on the 15th day of August in 1962, at the age of 36.  Gable had been her screen idol and she had, as an abandoned child, often claimed that Gable was her father.  And then, on the 23rd of July in 1966, Montgomery Clift died in bed with his glasses on from an apparent heart-attack at 6:30AM in his home on East 61st Street in New York City.  He was 45 years-old.  The evening before his death, his personal secretary, Lorenzo James, had asked him if he wanted to watch the late-late movie on TV  with him, which happened to be The Misfits.  Clift's terse reply was, "Absolutely not!" Ritter would pass away with a heart-attack on February 5th in 1969 in her New York home at the age of 66; and by the end of the decade, the only star left alive was Eli Wallach.  It seemed that the critic had been right-on-target about the atmosphere of doom. 


  As  for John Huston, he would go on to direct 8 more movies, including The Night of the Iguana and The Man Who Would Be King before being diagnosed with emphysema in 1978, and by the last year of his life he could not breathe for more than 20 minutes without needing oxygen.  He eventually passed away on August 28th in 1987, at the age of 81.  The only one to arrive unscathed in that peculiar zone known as old-age was, of course, Eli Wallach, who died in June of 2014 at the ripe age of 98, leaving behind a wife of 66 years, 3 children, 5 grandchildren, and receiving an honorary Academy Award from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences at the age of 94, after having come to the screen in 1956 in a movie called Baby Doll at the age of 41; a man who the actress, Kate Winslet called, "One of the most charismatic men" she'd ever met.  When he was asked about the theoretical doom which hung over the cast of The Misfits and why he had managed to avoid the curse, Wallach is said to have replied: "The way I figured it, life is a roll of the dice, and maybe God didn't want me to ruin the scenery."