What, he wondered, was so great about the Golden Years? Getting old was so wonderful? So much fun? Getting old was depressing, is what it was. The Golden Years meant it was time for arthritis. Time for loss of memory, sight, and hearing. Time to catch new diseases. It was the age when a minor head cold could turn to pneumonia and kill you. And if that didn’t, your trip to the hospital would for sure. (Or as they say in California’s San Fernando Valley, fer sher.) Growing old meant watching the nice members of your family and best friends die, while the rotten ones kept right on living. Growing old meant giving up all your wonderful bad habits: smoking, drinking, eating crap. Growing old meant nothing worked anymore (hips, knees, pecker) and nothing was allowed. No more masturbating (prostate). No more double scotches on the rocks (liver). No more cigarettes (cancer). No more glasses of cold milk with two Mallomars (cholesterol). No more grilled Nathan’s hot dogs on fresh buns with mustard and a bag of fries (carcinogens). No more calves’ liver, chicken gizzards, and calves’ brains (a quick though tasty death). No more Cohiba cigars while taking a hot bath (heart attack). No more picking fights with strangers (you get beat up).

And what’s so golden about waking up every morning knowing life is finite and wondering if today’s the day you don’t dodge the bullet. If today you’ll take it in the heart and die. And then there’s how you die. Will you keel over from a stroke while crossing Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street? Or will it be a long and painful death? And speaking of keeling over, is there an afterlife? Is there a heaven where everybody walks on little puffy clouds? Of course there isn’t. What a crock. So if it’s a crock, what is there?

The Golden Years, ha!

The shit years is what they are, if you ask me.

Boy, do they ever grow short. Funny how the older you get the faster time flies. You live to be a hundred, but it feels like you’ve been around for a little over a minute and a half. Who cares? Death gets you in the end no matter what.

Right?

Right.

Even Frank Sinatra wasn’t powerful enough to beat death. And he had it all. Except a way not to die. I mean if Frank Sinatra couldn’t beat it, who could? And he was a Catholic! He had the whole damn Vatican behind him! And he still died!

Listen, if you don’t have someone to love at eighty-one, where are you going to find her? In an old-age home? In a geriatric hospital ward? In a mortuary? So go out and find yourself a young girl. Okay? And what would I do with her? How can you be anything but dejected and depressed when you wake up in the morning and there’s no loving wife snuggled up against you? That is, if you wake up. What’s that joke? Every morning when I wake up I stretch, and if I don’t touch wood I’m still alive. It would be funnier if it wasn’t so true. And another thing that’s true is that the older a man gets, the more like himself he becomes.