Week 39, Day 5

So it’s the middle of the night and I hear screaming. It’s the baby, trapped in E’s watermelon belly, and she’s not happy. Ear pressed to this taut flesh-bubble, I can’t tell if the little squib’s yelping “let me out” or “who fucking stuck me in here?”

I wake up gnawing my own fist and stagger to the window, gasping for air in the muggy mosquito farm that is Austin in springtime…. “It’s just a dream,” E mumbles. “Right, right,” I say, rubbing my skin. But my relief is short-lived. Once my brain de-fogs, I instantly flash to our earlier OB/GYN visit, where once again, we bought our popcorn and plunked down in front of the ultrasound monitor.

This time, our camera-shy little girl decided to block the camera like Madonna dodging the paparazzi, covering her face with her elbow. Only according to the doctor, she wasn’t being coy – she was sucking her arm.

“She’s… what?”

“Sucking her arm. Lots of babies do it. It’s sort of like practice-suckling. Though I have to warn you, she might show up with a hickey.”

E raised her head on the table, dizzy from doctor-probing. “Wh-what? A hickey?”

“On her arm, obviously,” the doctor chuckled. “It may take a while to break her of the habit.”

Naturally, I bite my lip. If I don’t I’m going to blurt out my paranoid fantasy. “What the fuck, is she going to show up with a stump?”

I know, I know. I’m not proud. It’s just – how to explain? – there’s a particular species of paranoia particular to looming childbirth. And thanks to the wonders of our friend the internet – half party-sewer, half enlightenment-engine – it’s impossible not to feed it. Add to this the specifically bizarro circumstances of our current situation, waiting for the penny to drop – no, waiting for it to drop the rest of the way – advised by medical professionals to stay close, not do much, lay low… Well, Christ, how not to go online? Or – if you happen to be wired like my high IQ, hard-core life-experience girlfriend – how not to instantly start trolling through Worst Case Scenario Pregnancy Videos?

I’ll skip the opening act. But let me just say, without embellishment, that the Anal Cauliflower has to take the Oscar for all-time Worst Shit That Can Happen Short of Death or Life-Threatening Problems video. What am I talking about? Well, deep in the bowels of cyberspace, there is a mother who felt compelled to go before a camera and share her epic pregnancy-induced sphincter’n’skin-tag trauma. There I said it.

What happened see, is that – for lack of a more tactful description – this Mommy’s anus exploded into a festival of skin-tags. I am not talking about a few. We all have a few. I’m talking hundreds. Maybe thousands. Onscreen, all I can tell you, is that something resembling a cauliflower protruded out of her nether-cheeks, rendering (according to her own testimony) basic bodily functions a daily horror, driving her husband out of the room when she undressed for bed, and last, but hardly least, making the act of childbirth what can only be described as a colossally painful, unspeakably shameful hell-fest.

(On a personal note, it is a beloved family story how my own mother, God bless her, made no secret of how much she resented me for giving her hemorrhoids when she squeegeed my tiny guilt-ridden bottom into the world, half a century ago. Family!)

Which takes us back to the anal cauliflower. Poor E, projecting all her (understandable) dread of the unknown on this unlikely malady, makes me promise I’ll hang in with her, even if she sprouts some heinous, between-the-cheeks skin-tag bouquet of her own.

“Of course!” “I say. “But it’s not going to happen. I promise. If it does, I’ll handle it.”

I almost say, We’ll sell tickets! But, as I’ve discovered, borderline dickish humor doesn’t really work with a pregnant woman. At least not this pregnant woman. (And really, when does it ever pay to be a borderline dick? Unless you’re Mitt Romney?) Instead, what I say is, “why don’t we head out to Walgreens, lay in some liquid nitrogen and scissors, just in case?”

“Talk about a dream date,” she snaps, and I know things are back on keel.

Okay then. Having cleared the anal cauliflower hurdle, made it through the whole baby-sucking-her-arm syndrome and survived my stroll down maternal hemorrhoid memory lane, E and I are finally free to kick back and do what we now do best – stress about when the fuck the little object of our affection is going to get off the dime and hi-tail it down the birth canal.

“I swear, I don’t think she’s ever coming,” E says, shrinking into the couch with her basenji, Alvin, sprawled lewdly on her lap, as he is wont to sprawl, legs up and splayed in some X-rated opposition to the elegant Asta of Thin Man fame. Alvin’s as louche as Asta was cute. But great company when you’re going out of your skull from late term pregnancy, or, in my case, incipient, itchy leprosy. (I know leprosy doesn’t itch – your shit just falls off.) But something in this bug-drippy Austin humidity does not agree with me, and for days now my face looks like something dermatology students would sneak pictures of and pass around at parties.

Still, reaching over and stroking the barkless dog’s spotted belly, I try to rise above, and think of something reassuring to say.

“Listen,” I begin, trying in my ham-fisted way to put a chipper spin on the situation. “Horrible analogy, okay, but it reminds me when I was freshly relapsed, out of rehab, and living with a lady mechanic in Phoenix.”

“A lady mechanic? Really?”

“No longer with us,” I say, only a little defensively. “Or maybe she is. I don’t know. The point is, I used to spend every day waiting for the Fed Ex guy to arrive with the heroin I had mailed in from LA. After a month, I’d self-Pavloved to the point where I could make out the axle squeak of the Federal Express van from five blocks away. I mean, I’d be jonesing, I’d be dying – my dealer only got it together to mail shit once every few days – but suddenly, when I’d pretty much given up hope, when I was, like, totally bottomed out – ske-REEEEEE  – here comes Fedex!”

“So what you’re saying is… ?”

Jesus, what am I saying? “Well,” I faloomph, “I guess… what I’m saying is, you know… Oh, fuck it, I don’t know what I’m saying, let’s just fucking roll with it, okay? You’re nine months pregnant, the baby’s not going to sneak off under cover of darkness, you’re seeing the doctor every few days, and there’s really no way out but the way she came in…”

“So?”

“So let’s see what’s on TV. I think Colbert’s on.”

“Good idea.”

And then – cue kettle drums – she feels something big.

NEXT TIME:.. Does anything rhyme with cervix?… The second word in heaven is heave… D-Day or indigestion… Who has a shoehorn?

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

Related Posts:

• OG DAD #4: Stir Crazy
• OG DAD #3: Insane in the Membrane
• OG DAD #2: The Texas Jew Panel
• OG DAD #1: The Hum
• Internal: Jerry Stahl in San Francisco

WEEk 39, DAY 5

Jesus, this fucking waiting! It’s like, if I were paranoid, I would actually be wondering if this baby-to-be kind of hates us. Or, more accurately, hates me. What going on there in Wombville? Has she heard me fart? Why is she shunning our invitation? Last to leave the party in Mommy-gut…

Being the type who never acknowledges stress or emotion, and instead drives blithely into phone poles while chewing his tongue, I have, during this (massively long) wait for our overdue daughter, developed a festive rash on my face. Think pepper spray victim, or ringworm, but more garish. It’s the kind of look that makes strangers back away slowly at the supermarket, groping for Purell.

What happened, see, during our last visit to the baby doctor, was that she mentioned, casually, that there was a mini-outbreak of leprosy in Austin. Well, actually, more of a minor plague…. Okay, one lonely case. But still. Less than three hours later, I began to break out in fire engine red blotches, lumps and pustules across my forehead. And let’s not even talk about the itch. (I once had a pal in first grade who wiped his ass with poison oak in the woods. I imagine now my face feels like his sphincter felt.) Seriously, I am so itchy, I stand in front of the mirror with a cheese grater, thinking Should I?

Anyway, that night, between painful contractions, false alarms, and bloody panty-liner panic (a result of the membrane stripping, see OGD 3), my girlfriend offers a bit of old racetrack wisdom, suggesting the best thing for an out-of-control rash was – what else? – a nice hot oatmeal bath. All well and good, except that, not being a look-at-the-label type, E grabbed the organic oats off the shelf, then dumped them around me in, as Mitt Romney would say, severely hot water.

So, voila! In three minutes, like some lost episode of the Lucy show, there I am, sitting in a batch of beautifully congealed, ready-to-eat oatmeal.

“Well,” said E, blessed with an unimpeachable deadpan, “should we add raisins or just dump you in the disposal?”

All of which I mention, not to hammer home the fact that life, on occasion, imitates sitcom. But to demonstrate the depths to which two humans, unable to really go anywhere or do anything, having been told that childbirth is imminent, will descend. I mean, where do you want to be when your water breaks? The circus? An Olive Garden? Watching a Vin Diesel movie?

No, we’re playing it safe. Staying at home, in a palatial three-micro-roomed rental in Hyde Park, Austin, scoping MSNBC, trying to write, snacking out on elaborate avocado-walnut-and-mystery toast concoctions, reading or walking our Basenji all day. (Writers, you know, have a little extra free time.) But, speaking of Basenji, I heartily recommend this breed for anyone who wants a dog but does not, you know, want a dog-dog. They don’t bark, they sleep like cats, they tend to have the same face as  the late-inning alcoholic Judy Garland, and best of all, you can wear them around your neck, like their original owners, Gambian antelope hunters, were wont to do in ancient times. How do I know this? Google, of course. You tend to do a lot of Googling when you’re cooped up waiting for your fucking baby to be born. (Wait – did I just write “fucking baby?” Jesus! Strike that from the record! I already love that little scoop of ice cream more than life and living. I just wish Satan would move things along.)

Speaking of Google, did you know that Benjamin Franklin invented Tampons? Stick around!

After an afternoon spent alternately studying her belly-globe – “hey come here, feel how hard this is!” – finishing Joshua Mohr’s insanely great novel Termite Parade, absorbing coverage of Obama’s Gay Marriage announcement, E Googled Crystal Ball, her fave political commentator,  and found a photo of her mouthing a dildo at a Christmas party, thereby cementing her girl-crush. “I love her,” she says, showing me the picture, “she’s brilliant as shit, and she knows how to have a good time.”

I have to agree. “Show me Wolf Blitzer fondling a sex toy, and maybe that bearded minge would be halfway watchable.”

And so it goes. The proverbial elephant in the room is the unborn newborn herself. But we talk around it, puttering like addled rest home residents, already sleep-deprived, not from some wailing crumb-cruncher, but from the weird festering pressure of knowing what’s in the mail. E is terrified – as who wouldn’t be? – of the pain to come, and, simultaneously, terrified the pain won’t ever come. What will come, what keeps coming, are drops of panty-staining blood, mysterious rib anguish, palpitations, shuddering fetal kidney-kicks, and so on. “Oh Jesus… Fuck!” she’ll shriek, “it feels like someone is wrenching my uterus out with a claw-hammer.”

Now it’s evening. E’s belly is a roiling maw of agony, her feet swollen as a marathon dancer as she and I go about the business of re-packing the “hospital bag” the doctor advised us to pack, making sure we know where the car keys are – I can’t swear it’s not early senility on my part, but they keep surfacing in the freezer – and, last but not least, helping haul her newly ample ass off the couch, to look for her baby-papers. These, while too complicated to describe, are nothing compared to the Cord Blood pack. We’ve signed on to save the umbilical cord blood, for stem cell purposes – who knows when you’ll need a batch? – but the red tape involved alone is enough to incline one to brain surgery, preferably lobotomy. (January Jones, apparently, freeze dried her placenta and munches it like corn chips, but we’re still on the fence about placenta snacks.)

In any event, here we are, in a private cocoon of expectation, literally waiting for agony, for ecstasy, for whatever combo platter of lifelong joy, obligation, pressure, weirdness, fun and crushing debt is to come. The greatest moment of my life  - and excuse me if I’m all dewy-eyed, but cynics, as Voltaire once said (or was it Cher?) are just failed romantics – the greatest moment of my life was feeling my now-grown daughter’s tiny form on my chest, when she herself was newly hatched. And the prospect of going through it again, of getting the opportunity,  what can I say, to do it on the natch, is just too much. The first time, thanks for asking, there was some heroin involved. And now, well now, call me a wild man, it’s more about 4 AM guacamole and 2 PM naps. But a man’s got to what a man’s got to do.

But who am I kidding? If that fucking baby doesn’t get here soon, I’m going to need an epidural myself.

NEXT TIME: Is that your leg in my womb or are you glad to see me?….  Down, Fetus, down!… So elephants  gestate for 22 months, but when do they get their waist back? AND MORE

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

Related Posts:

• OG DAD #5: The Anal Cauliflower, and Other Wonders of the Pregnant World
• OG DAD #3: Insane in the Membrane
• OG DAD #2: The Texas Jew Panel
• OG DAD #1: The Hum
• Internal: Jerry Stahl in San Francisco

WEEK 39, DAY 4

So, we’re back in the OB/GYN waiting room. Our baby still hasn’t come. The suspense, as they say, is killing me. The walls are hung with photos of other peoples’ babies – half in sunglasses, a practice, for some reason, that creeps me out even more than Ray Bans on dogs. Though somehow, shades look okay on cats. Life’s a mystery.

Weirdly, an attractive, yet massively lipsticked chinless woman facing us flashes a semi-beaver. Pink pencil skirt crawling up her parted thighs to reveal Hot Mama panties. This isn’t a judgment of some kind. The panties literally say “Hot Mama” across the crotch, in red on white, over the faux-imprint of a red-lipped kiss. Impossible to look at, impossible not to. E, noticing me noticing, dismisses the display with a shrug. “Cry for help.”

We sit another moment. Leafing through an old issue of New Mom – the cover sports a catchy headline, “SAY GOODBYE TO YOUR HORRI-BELLY!” – before she blows blonde hair out of her face, drops the mag and sighs. “I’m always uncomfortable coming here. It’s like I know when I walk in that examining room I’m going to be fisted. But not in a good way.”

Not much I can say to that.

Minutes later, we’re ushered in to the exam room. Minutes after that, E’s back in the stirrups, and the blue uniformed nurse, who could be a twelve-year-old Nina Simone, gels up the heartbeat monitor, which looks like a karaoke mike, and plants it on her mega-watermelon belly. Instantly, a sound like horror movie wraiths dragging rusty chains across the floor fills the room.  When this bit of Wes Craven entertainment is over, young Nina announces the heart-rate – a stellar 143 – and tells us the doctor would be here in a sec.

Like clockwork, a half hour later, the doctor whisks in, chipper as Ruth Gordon in Rosemary’s Baby, and smiles big. “Okay. What we’re going to do today is strip the membrane.” Explaining as she slides her fingers into the latex sado-glove, she bids E to lean back and slides her arm in up the elbow. My girlfriend begins to writhe on the table. I jump out of the chair, to the head of the examination table. E grabs my hand and squeezes as the doctor narrates.

“Okay, what I’m doing is placing my fingers in the opening of the cervix….. Mmmmph…. Trying to – Ooof! – gently separate the amniotic sac from the uterus.”

When I can suppress my gorge long enough to form words, I squeak, “What, um, does this do exactly?”

“Well, after around the 40^th week, membrane stripping stimulates the release of prostaglandin.”

My head spins so fast, seeing my girlfriend endure medieval torment, what I hear is “pasta glands,” which clearly can’t be right.  “I’m sorry,” I manage, “can you, um– ”

“Prostaglandin. It’s the hormone that softens the cervix to prepare it for labor.”

By now E has squeezed my fingers to total numbness.

“There’s going to be some pain, and a bit of bleeding,” the doctor goes on, withdrawing her hand and ripping off the blood-tamped glove with a flourish.  “But, if all goes well, we should see you go into labor within 48 hours. So how do you feel?”

“Like I’ve been raped by a potato peeler.”

Big chuckle from doctor. “I’m on call Tuesday. Call me before then if you have any problems.”

Helping my sore but admirably uncomplaining girlfriend off the table, I wait while she gets dressed, recalling a spectacularly ludicrous argument we had months ago, on a visit to our first obstetrician in Los Angeles. This was at the dawn of pregnancy. We’d tracked down an OB/GYN over the hill, in Burbank, who said he preferred  it if we called him “Dr. Tug.” Tug turned out to be a burly, marathon-running 71 year old who played Motown in his examination room and kept his sleeves rolled-up to the shoulders, showing off his guns. This lent him a strange, unseemly resemblance to an obstetric Mister Clean.

During the first exam, with me in the room, Tug got my girlfriend up in the stirrups, then asked, over a rumbling, bass-heavy Barry White, what she did for a living. E filled him in, explaining that she was an exercise rider, working, most recently, at Santa Anita, powering world-class thoroughbreds full speed around the track every morning before the races. In truth, she’d been banging around the country, working on the back side of racetracks since she left home at fourteen, giving her a history even more dangerous and crazy than my own, which is one of the things that attracted me to her. If I thought junkiedom was hard-core – the world she ran in was a whole other level. E was addicted to speed, but not the narcotic kind. Her fix was the kind that put you in danger of a broken neck, or shattered skull, or brutal violent death on a daily basis. How could you not love a woman that bad-ass? But Doctor Tug had a different take.

“You ride horses,” he chuckled. “That explains those beautiful legs.”

Admittedly, she does have amazing legs. But really, do you want to hear your obstetrician talking about them? If this weren’t bad enough, a minute later, while he was all up inside her, the old beefcake got – I will swear this to my grave – a dreamy smile on his face. As soon as I saw this, I was ready to snap. But a second later, while still probing – “looks good in there!” -  he exchanged a little smile with E herself. Again, I managed to hold my mud. But back in the car, I’m not going to lie, I had to bring it up.

“So,” I said, “you like this guy?”

“He’s all right. The important thing is, everything seems to be okay.”

“Of course,” I agree, regretting what I’m about to say even before I say it, “but what I’m talking about is, you seemed to, I don’t know, enjoy the examination.”

“Come again?”

“I don’t know,” I babble on, feeling myself lurch deeper into idiocy with every syllable. I’m not the jealous type, but this is just too much. I turn the key in my old Caddy’s ignition and continue. “I’m just saying, when he was inside you… it’s kind of fucked up, but he looked like… he looked like he was enjoying himself.  You had this smile on your face, you know, the one you sometimes get when…  anyway, he’d already made that creepy remark about your legs, so I thought maybe– ”

“You thought what?”

By now I know I’ve crossed the line. This has all the makings of an epic car fight. But instead of yelling, E – to her eternal credit – just turns to me as we peel out of the lot, and laughs in my face.

“Are you insane? First of all, that’s a completely bizarre thing to even think. Second of all, the man is gay. Didn’t you see all those pictures of him and his partner? While you were in the bathroom he told me he and Ted were happily married.”

“Really?” I hear myself sputter. “Did his hand feel gay when it was inside you?”

My eyes stay on the road as we nose onto the Hollywood Freeway.

“Holy shit! You’re jealous of a gynecologist?”

“Of course not,” I lie, and have to swerve to miss a fuel truck, barely managing to spare the three of us – future Mom, future baby, and currently babbling dad – a fiery horrific death.

By the time we make it back to my place, we’re both laughing about it. Sort of. But later, talking to a few fathers of my acquaintance, all confessed to some version of what my friend Willie, a guitar player, calls “Gyno Up My Wife Syndrome.” Which usually manifests the first time a man sees another man sliding his hand up the woman he loves. Often – or so it seems –  wearing a dreamy, distracted smile on his face. Or worse, talking about “how wonderful” everything feels in there.

This is not something I’m proud of. But hey, fatherhood is a journey of discovery. And OG Dads – having to deal with receptionists who mistake them for the patient’s father, not to mention non-stop sweat-soaked 3 AM meditations on their own mortality – may just get a little more winded going uphill…

Ah, memories. Back in real time, here in Austin, I help the now racked-with-pain E up into the taint-colored Honda crossover I’ve purchased to handle baby duties. And yes, possibly more traumatic than the fact that I’m going to be a father again in my fifties is the fact that I’m now driving the four-wheeled equivalent of Cotton Dockers, in Texas. But that’s a different discussion for a different time. This, after all, is not about me.

NEXT TIME: The doctor says my sperm could help induce, but I remind her that it’s poison… Is the baby not showing up because she already hates us?… In the end, pregnancy is just fucking medieval… AND MORE

Related Posts:

• OG DAD #2: The Texas Jew Panel
• OG DAD #1: The Hum
• OG DAD #5: The Anal Cauliflower, and Other Wonders of the Pregnant World
• OG DAD #4: Stir Crazy
• THE BLURB #19: The Complete Thing

For reasons I explained last time around, we are having our little she-creature in Austin, which has a reputation as the hipster heart of Texas. But whatever enlightenment has pooled in this wet spot in the center of the Lone Star State, it did not seem to spill over into the Perinatal Clinic, to which our OB/GYN has dispatched us, in order to screen for every infant malady known to man. All well and good, until, filling out a form by the frosted glass window, the beehived lovely in charge of our application raised her eyes and asked, in a tone somewhere between blasé and pre-chunk blowing, “So, like, are Jews Caucasians?”

I just looked at her. “What?”

This time another nurse-slash-receptionist type stuck her head out, doing little to hide her distaste, and barked in a voice loud enough to rouse the New Mommy! magazine readers in the far corner of the waiting room, “Sir, we have to do a Jew Panel.”

“Excuse me?”

For one brief second I thought I saw the ghost of Mengele waft over the counter. He used to measure noses with calipers, to sniff out latent Smites.

“Jew Panel,” she repeated. “We don’t get a lot of your people around here. We need to check for Tay Sachs and Cystic Fibrosis.”

Turning away, I felt a dozen sets of Texan eyes upon me as I rolled back to take my seat beside my blue-eyed blonde-haired Viking-ette girlfriend. She saw the look on my face. “Jesus, baby, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” I lied. “I just hope we make it back to the car without getting rounded up and sent to some Panhandle Auschwitz. Most places, they at least try to pretend they don’t hate you.

“They don’t hate you. It’s Texas,” she said sounding like the guy who tells Jack Nicholson, Come on, Jake, It’s Chinatown,  at the end of the Polanski movie. Right after John Huston shoots Faye Dunaway and scoops up her wailing, product-of-incest daughter.

Happily, all tests proved negative, but even without that soupcon of regional bigotry, there’s a certain weirdness to every aspect of childbearing. Especially now, when Tiny Screamer could be popping out any second. Nine times a day, my girlfriend and Future Mom asks me to reach over and feel the baby kicking. (And, forgive me, I’m not going to say BabyMama; it reminds of pinstriped barely post-pube Hollywood agents who greet each other with “Whassup Dawg?” and “Yo, Homey!” like they’re straight out of Compton, instead of straight off of Wilshire Boulevard, in Beverly Hills. And I say this with love.)

“Look it’s her little foot,” my girlfriend will coo. And, no doubt it is. (I mean, it couldn’t be a shiv, could it?) But to me the whole deal still feels like touching a weasel trapped in a water balloon.

Truth be told, the whole concept of carrying a baby feels like transporting a body in a trunk. As though, at the end of term, instead of the obstetrician in scrubs, Joe Pesci and Deniro will waiting with shovels and hacksaws. I’m not proud of this, but every time I put my fingertips to the roving baby-bulges, I half expect hands to come bursting out, like the ones that Catherine Deneuve hallucinated exploding out of the walls in Repulsion.

Mind you, I couldn’t be happier about looming fatherdom. It’s not the bundle of joy that’s the issue here. It’s all the stuff leading up to it. For one thing, when you’re going to have a baby, other babies know. I’m convinced. You can see it in their eyes. The way they glare you at you out of their Peanut Shell adjustable baby-slings, as if to say, One of us is on the way. Be ready, Sucker! It’s the opposite of cuddly. Cross paths with a toddler in an airport, a deli, wherever, and you can almost hear them, mocking. Better man up, Shlomo, cause a lovable four-limbed poop-grenade is about to blow up your life. Whoever you are, unless you’re at the Mitt Romney car elevator, full-time night-nurse, live-in nanny and diapers-woven-from-hundred-dollar-bills end of the spectrum, you’re going to be reduced – or nominated– to Wiper in Chief.

But even that’s fine. I had no problem manning the Pampers with my first child, still the proverbial apple of my eye. Mind you, now she’s 23, meaning, for some time now, that I’ve been free to obsess about myself and not worry my hoary little head about meeting her every need. Even now there is no certainty – the world being what it is – that something heinous might not happen to her, but chances are this would not involve falling out of a crib and crushing her soft spot, or eating glass off the floor. Without a doubt, at 23, I might have done some glass-eating. But thank my lucky stars, my First Daughter, thus far, has shown no such inclinations. She’s talented, smart, beautiful, and clearly the product of her mother’s genes. (Otherwise she’d be waxing a unibrow.)

No, wait – I have to stop! Contractions coming faster and faster! In fact, we were halfway to the hospital, on the line to the doctor, who announced that it was  probably just a Braxton-Hicks contraction. What are Braxton-Hicks? They’re the Milli Vanilli of imminent childbirth indicators, faux-squeezers that mimic actual contractions, by way – some theorize – of giving the soon to be Mom a taste of the real thing. “Practice contractions,” as the doctor explained it. Of course Braxton-Hicks sounds like a British art-band from the 70s. The Fripp & Eno era. But they’re an actual medical occurrence. Source of many a false alarm. And so, we turn around. And head back to the launching pad.

NEXT TIME: Breast-feeding lessons… Five fun things you can do with a used umbilical cord… Plus, I pledge not to steal the epidural… AND MORE

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

Related Posts:

• OG DAD #3: Insane in the Membrane
• OG DAD #1: The Hum
• OG DAD #5: The Anal Cauliflower, and Other Wonders of the Pregnant World
• OG DAD #4: Stir Crazy
• THE BLURB #19: The Complete Thing

***

Waiting for a baby to be born is like sitting in Nagasaki, listening to the hum of planes overhead, and wondering when the little joy bomb is going to be dropped and destroy your life. In a good way. And ours is supposed to drop any minute.

Of course, I’ve heard the hum before. Been flattened by the thrill and terror of new life delivered from beyond. Only now it’s different. For a lot of reasons. Not the least of which is that the first time I staggered into fatherhood I was 35, and strung out, and feeling all the guilt and weirdness over that. And now I’m 58, and, well…. 58, feeling all the guilt and weirdness over knowing that, no matter how great things are, inevitably I’m going to – Jesus, I can’t even say it without cramps – I’m going to be 70 when she’s 12. (The realization, at my age, that 70 is closer than 40, when in fact, I feel 30, is a whole other discussion. I mean, who wants to be the creepy old in the playground? How do you give horsey rides in a walker?) I don’t know why I’m so obsessed. But I can’t help it. I harbor this irrational fear that E, the 30 year old Mom, will just finish having to change our child’s Pampers when she’ll begin having to change mine. Two in diapers! Jesus.

I told you, it was irrational. So far I’m foot-loose and diaper free. But still, some men dream, and some men dread, and I’m a dreader.

Discussing our happy accident, I told E, the 30 year old future Mom, that the night our soon-to-get-here semi-Jew-tot was conceived, I imagined I could hear a faint buzzing coming from her vagina. More like a tiny motorized drone: the drone of my sperm chugging along in a Hoverround at the head of a pack, colliding full-on into my sweetheart’s egg – not because it was the strongest, or the most worthy, but because it was near-sighted and didn’t see the thing. My little Mister Magoo, sputtering accidentally into the miracle of creation.

So now, friends and fans, I’m sitting in Austin – long story, which I’ll get to  – waiting with the woman of my dreams, while she laments that fact that she’s ballooned from a sylph-like 111 to a Hindenburg-esque 150-something. I tell her she’s still beautiful, of course, but still… She’s been an athlete all her life, and now it’s an Olympic event bending to pick up a sock. I used to think that love was damage loving damage – when our pain jives with the person we’re with. Now, I believe, among other things, that it’s about you accept my neurosis and I’ll accept yours. Either way, sometimes life can be just too fascinating.

The Austin thing, by the way, is a whole other saga. Which I but might as well march out now. This is a blog, not literature, so I don’t have to worry about seamless transitions. Instead, I can just tell you, in a clunky, intrusive way, I’ve had hepatitis C  for decades, since my stint as a professional needle-jockey, back in my days as a dope fiend. (Again, as mentioned, first time around the Daddy track I was shooting Mexican tar in the Cedars Sinai OB/BYN men’s room in Los Angeles, freaking when the nurse banged on the door and told me the baby was coming, and I had to put on scrubs, not having worn short sleeves in forever, what with the unsightly bleeding tracks and all. But I digress.)

Fast forward to the present. After years of trying every brand of alternative medicine known to man – from coffee enemas and gargling sesame oil to Vitamin C drip to injectable ozone therapy, from troughs of wheatgrass to a trip to the Dominican Republic for illegal stem cell treatment to daily consumption of enough vitamin and herbal supplements to choke a sea monster, I occasionally felt okay – except for crushing fatigue, night sweats, a roaring irrational temper (the liver, in Chinese medicine, is the organ of anger) and non-stop brain fog. But I was, on paper, dying just the same. My viral load, as my 80 year, side-burned old ex surfer hepatologist used to say, “looked like something out of Ray Bradbury.’ Way up there in the bazillions.

I imagined my liver, not to get too technical, as a dried up old dog turd lodged in my stomach, a hair or two way from cirrhosis. While I lived on in denial, going to the gym, doing Chi Gong living my veggie life, it continued to decline. Being a Jewish vegan Jack LaLanne didn’t help.

Long story short, I ended up on this trial drug from Some Major Pharmaceutical Company – embracing the enemy Big Pharma, after years of fighting for Team Alterna – and sure enough, after one week on a cocktail of AIDS-drug adjacent protease inhibitors and virus killers, my count went from a quarter gazillion down to 23 – 23! – and the week after that, be still my heart, down to undetectable.

Mind you, there were side effects, about which I’m not complaining: shortness of breath, weird ingrown hairs that make my chest and legs look like I’ve taken shrapnel, a constant, crushing spaciness that made every day an adventure in bad acid… etc, etc… (Full disclosure: Even though the 12 week trial’s over and I’m still, miracle of miracles, hep free, I have to pop into the hospital every month to see if the evil virus hasn’t returned, sending me back down into the shadow of the valley of hep.) But the main side effect, the one that got Future Mom to Austin, is that the stuff was so noxious, so massively mutagenic, that basically just being in the same county as me – well, okay, the same bed  - was dangerous, and enough to cause screaming birth defects to any child with the misfortune of being nearby and in utero. Forget sex or intimacy of any kind. It was as though my sperm was now manufactured by Monsanto, and fatal to unborn generations.

How toxic are we talking about? Just touching my finger after that finger had touched a pill, or – God forbid! – coming in contact with my sweat – all of it, any of it, enough to cause the fruit of my loins to emerge – according to the trial administrators – purple with wheels. Hence, for the months I was on the trial, she went to be with her people in Austin, while I, back in poison bachelorville, remained in Los Angeles.

NEXT TIME: Contractions… False Alarm… The Texas Jew Panel… We used to have a lot of sex, but now I’m afraid I’ll put a dent in the baby’s head like Cary Grant’s chin… Why the ultra-sound of a fetus in the third trimester looks like Grover Norquist, AND MORE…

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

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I never actually thought I’d make it. (Look at me, I’m blushing like Miss America!) But, damn it, I’m not going to lie, I turned 56 last Monday. That’s right, my birthday is on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and I’m now older than your Dad. Go ahead and make carnival at my angst. Mortality aside,  I am busting my buttons at having made the roster of big name dope fiends compiled by the brains at NNDB, a list of giants who lent the whole damn business such heinous allure in the first place. I mean, Johnny Thunders, Iceberg Slim, Jimi Hendrix, Lenny Bruce, Fats Navarro… Corey Feldman. Okay, maybe not Corey Feldman. But you get my drift.

I  may be staring down the barrel of Deep Fifties.  I may never have gotten a Guggenheim, never written a book that ended up in a supermarket. And my liver may get its mail at a dog track in Granada. But — there I said it! —  the struggle wasn’t all in vain. Thanks to a frenzied career track that included “dope fiend” (after “failed novelist” “pornographer” and “TV Writer,” but before “McDonalds Fry Jockey” on the resume ), I have carved out my own hard-earned, embarrassingly thrilling niche in the annals of Celebrity Addict.

Do I sound like I’m bragging?

Forgive me. I do have humility, and I’m not knocking the kids in my third grade class who never got to be astronauts, firemen, or Moe Howard. We can’t all hitch our wagon to a star. But thanks to a long-gone yen for God’s Medicine, your humble author has taken a seat in Narco-Posterity.  Sure, there may have been a marriage that  tanked, a friend or five who still wonder what happened to their VCRs, some inappropriate public napping and a couple of novels that sold worse than Iranian pocket Torahs. I’m not saying I’m Albert Schweitzer.  Not at all. It’s just, at the end of the proverbial day, what, really, do we have but our reputation? That’s why I included the fridge door-ready compilation below.

After I pick up my Golden Syringe at the Hard Rock, Las Vegas ceremony, I’m going to put it in on my mantel beside the… well, actually, it’s going to be up there by itself. Like an Irving Thalberg Lifetime Achievement award for IV Professionals. Not to suggest that I ever did anything particularly impressive with my life. But, call me sentimental, to celebrate the peculiar, squirm-inducing miracle of Not Being Dead. I didn’t have a plan B — but I didn’t have a Plan A, either, so what the hell…

Never let go of your dreams.

This is a beta version of NNDB Search: All NamesLiving peopleDead peopleBand NamesBook TitlesMovie TitlesFull Text for

Risk Factor: HeroinLISTS Name Occupation Birth Death Known for Ryan Adams Singer/Songwriter 5-Nov-1974 Heartbreaker Steven Adler Drummer 22-Jan-1965 Former Guns N’ Roses drummer David Allen Author 28-Dec-1945 Getting Things Done Rick Allen Drummer 1-Nov-1963 Def Leppard’s one-armed drummer G. G. Allin Musician 29-Aug-1956 28-Jun-1993 Hated Gregg Allman Musician 8-Dec-1947 An Allman Brother Trey Anastasio Musician 30-Sep-1964 Lead singer and guitarist for Phish Brett Anderson Singer/Songwriter 29-Sep-1967 Former Suede vocalist Phil Anselmo Musician 30-Jun-1968 Former vocalist for Pantera Antonin Artaud Playwright 4-Sep-1896 4-Mar-1948 Theater of Cruelty Rick Aviles Comic 14-Oct-1952 17-Mar-1995 Ghost Chet Baker Jazz Musician 23-Dec-1929 13-May-1988 Jazz trumpeter, The Chet Baker Quartet Nicky Barnes Criminal 1933 Heroin kingpin, Mr. Untouchable Jean-Michel Basquiat Painter 22-Dec-1960 12-Aug-1988 NYC graffiti artist Matthew “Stymie” Beard Actor 1-Jan-1925 8-Jan-1981 Stymie in Our Gang John Belushi Actor 24-Jan-1949 5-Mar-1982 Animal House Steven Jesse Bernstein Poet 4-Dec-1950 22-Oct-1991 Grunge poet and punk rocker Jack Black Musician 28-Aug-1969 Half of Tenacious D Robert Blake Actor 18-Sep-1933 Baretta, acquitted of murdering wife Mike Bloomfield Guitarist 28-Jul-1943 15-Feb-1981 Guitarist, Paul Butterfield Blues Band Don Bolles Musician 30-Jul-1956 The Germs John Bonham Drummer 31-May-1948 24-Sep-1980 Drummer for Led Zeppelin, 1968-80 Anthony Bourdain Chef 25-Jun-1956 Kitchen Confidential David Bowie Musician 8-Jan-1947 Ziggy Stardust Lillo Brancato Actor 30-Aug-1976 A Bronx Tale, acquitted of murder Russell Brand Actor 4-Jun-1975 Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know Lenny Bruce Comic 13-Oct-1925 3-Aug-1966 Multiply obscene comic William S. Burroughs Author 5-Feb-1914 2-Aug-1997 Naked Lunch Charlotte Caffey Guitarist 21-Oct-1953 Lead guitarist for The Go-Go’s John Cale Cellist 9-Mar-1942 Velvet cellist and influential producer Gia Carangi Model 29-Jan-1960 18-Nov-1986 Troubled supermodel, died from AIDS Judy Carne Actor 27-Apr-1939 Sock-it-to-me girl on Laugh-In Jim Carroll Author 1-Aug-1950 The Basketball Diaries David Cassidy Singer 12-Apr-1950 The Partridge Family Nick Cave Singer 22-Sep-1957 Bad Seed 50 Cent Rapper 6-Jul-1975 Wanksta, P.I.M.P. Jimmy Chamberlin Drummer 10-Jun-1964 Ex-Smashing Pumpkins drummer Lauren Chapin Actor 23-May-1945 Father Knows Best Mark David Chapman Assassin 10-May-1955 Assassin of Beatle John Lennon Ray Charles Musician 23-Sep-1930 10-Jun-2004 Georgia On My Mind Eric Clapton Guitarist 30-Mar-1945 Slowhand Kurt Cobain Musician 20-Feb-1967 5-Apr-1994 Lead singer of Nirvana Natalie Cole Singer 6-Feb-1950 Singer-daughter of Nat King Cole John Coltrane Jazz Musician 23-Sep-1926 17-Jul-1967 Jazz tenor saxophonist Peter Coyote Actor 10-Oct-1942 Dennis Ryland on The 4400 Darby Crash Singer 26-Sep-1958 7-Dec-1980 The Germs David Crosby Musician 14-Aug-1941 Crosby, Stills, and Nash Aleister Crowley Religion 12-Oct-1875 1-Dec-1947 Wickedest man in the world Adrianne Curry Model 6-Aug-1982 America’s Next Top Model Joe Dallesandro Actor 31-Dec-1948 Took a walk on the wild side Evan Dando Musician 4-Mar-1967 Lemonheads frontman Miles Davis Jazz Musician 26-May-1926 28-Sep-1991 Jazz trumpeter, Kind of Blue Jose Luis de Jesus Miranda Religion 22-Apr-1942 International Ministry Growing in Grace, Inc. Kelley Deal Guitarist 10-Jun-1961 Sometime guitarist for The Breeders Janice Dickinson Model 15-Feb-1955 1970s supermodel Dion Musician 18-Jul-1939 Runaround Sue Pete Doherty Musician 12-Mar-1979 Ex-frontman for The Libertines Robert Downey, Jr. Actor 4-Apr-1965 The Gingerbread Man Bobby Driscoll Actor 3-Mar-1937 30-Mar-1968 Child actor, succumbed to drugs Sanjay Dutt Actor 29-Jul-1959 Mission Kashmir Bill Evans Jazz Musician 16-Aug-1929 15-Sep-1980 Jazz pianist Stanley Fafara Actor 20-Sep-1949 20-Sep-2003 Whitey on Leave It to Beaver Marianne Faithfull Singer/Songwriter 29-Dec-1946 Sister Morphine Chris Farley Comic 15-Feb-1964 17-Dec-1997 Saturday Night Live Perry Farrell Musician 29-Mar-1959 Gangly lead singer of Jane’s Addiction Corey Feldman Actor 16-Jul-1971 One of the Coreys Jennifer Finch Bassist 5-Aug-1966 Former L7 bassist Flea Bassist 16-Oct-1962 Bassist for Red Hot Chili Peppers Althea Flynt Relative 6-Nov-1953 27-Jun-1987 Larry Flynt’s dead wife wiL Francis Singer 8-Jan-1982 Lead singer of Aiden Justine Frischmann Guitarist 16-Sep-1969 Guitarist, Elastica John Frusciante Guitarist 5-Mar-1970 Guitarist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers Dave Gahan Musician 9-May-1962 Depeche Mode Jerry Garcia Musician 1-Aug-1942 9-Aug-1995 Grateful Dead Leif Garrett Musician 8-Nov-1961 1970s teen idol Boy George Singer/Songwriter 14-Jun-1961 Karma Chameleon Balthazar Getty Actor 22-Jan-1975 Lord of the Flies J. Paul Getty, Jr. Business 7-Sep-1932 17-Apr-2003 Heir to the Getty Oil fortune Stan Getz Jazz Musician 2-Feb-1927 6-Jun-1991 Jazz tenor saxophonist Dwayne Goettel Musician 1-Feb-1964 23-Aug-1995 Skinny Puppy, fatal heroin OD Whoopi Goldberg Actor 13-Nov-1955 Sister Act Dexter Gordon Jazz Musician 27-Feb-1923 25-Apr-1990 Influential bop saxophonist Peter Greene Actor 8-Oct-1965 Laws of Gravity Tim Hardin Singer/Songwriter 23-Dec-1941 29-Dec-1980 If I Were a Carpenter Debbie Harry Singer 1-Jul-1945 Blondie Domino Harvey Relative 7-Aug-1969 27-Jun-2005 Laurence Harvey’s daughter Mitch Hedberg Comic 24-Feb-1968 30-Mar-2005 Stand-up comedian known for one-liners Richard Hell Musician 2-Oct-1949 Blank Generation Jimi Hendrix Guitarist 27-Nov-1942 18-Sep-1970 Purple Haze Billie Holiday Singer 7-Apr-1915 17-Jul-1959 Lady Sings the Blues Shannon Hoon Musician 26-Sep-1967 21-Oct-1995 Frontman for Blind Melon Etta James Singer 25-Jan-1938 Soul Diva Denis Johnson Novelist 1949 Jesus’ Son Angelina Jolie Actor 4-Jun-1975 Tomb Raider Elvin Jones Drummer 9-Sep-1927 18-May-2004 Different Drummer Steve Jones Guitarist 3-Sep-1955 The Sex Pistols Janis Joplin Singer 19-Jan-1943 4-Oct-1970 Ball and Chain (Piece of My Heart) Al Jourgensen Musician 9-Oct-1958 Lead for industrial band Ministry Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Relative 17-Jan-1954 Son of Robert F. Kennedy Chaka Khan Singer 23-Mar-1953 I Feel For You Anthony Kiedis Musician 1-Nov-1962 Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Jaime King Actor 23-Apr-1979 White Chicks Cris Kirkwood Bassist 22-Oct-1960 Meat Puppets Patrick Kroupa Author 20-Jan-1968 Lord Digital of LOD, Mindvox Artie Lange Comic 11-Oct-1967 MADtv, Howard Stern Christopher Lawford Actor 29-Mar-1955 All My Children Daulton Lee Spy 1952 The Snowman Tommy Lee Drummer 3-Oct-1962 Mötley Crüe drummer John Lennon Musician 9-Oct-1940 8-Dec-1980 Beatle Larry Levan Disc Jockey 20-Jul-1954 8-Nov-1992 Legendary Disco DJ Peggy Lipton Actor 30-Aug-1946 Julie Barnes in The Mod Squad Sonny Liston Boxing 8-May-1932 30-Dec-1970 World Heavyweight Champion 1962-64 Courtney Love Singer 9-Jul-1964 Kurt Cobain’s widow, Hole Frank Lucas Criminal 9-Sep-1930 Harlem heroin kingpin Frankie Lymon Singer/Songwriter 30-Sep-1942 28-Feb-1968 Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers Shane MacGowan Musician 25-Dec-1957 The Pogues Vaughn Meader Comic 20-Mar-1936 29-Oct-2004 Comedian, JFK mimic Russell Means Activist 10-Nov-1939 American Indian Movement Jason Mewes Actor 12-Jun-1974 “Jay” to Kevin Smith’s “Silent Bob” Sharon Mitchell Pornstar 18-Jan-1952 Starship Intercourse Lee Morgan Jazz Musician 10-Jul-1938 19-Feb-1972 The Sidewinder Gerry Mulligan Jazz Musician 6-Apr-1927 20-Jan-1996 Greatest jazz baritonist of all time Dave Mustaine Guitarist 13-Sep-1961 Megadeth Dave Navarro Guitarist 7-Jun-1967 Guitarist for Jane’s Addiction Fats Navarro Jazz Musician 24-Sep-1923 7-Jul-1950 Be-bop jazz trumpeter Chuck Negron Singer 8-Jun-1942 Singer for Three Dog Night Mike Ness Musician 3-Apr-1962 Social Distortion frontman Aaron Neville Musician 24-Jan-1941 Nature Boy Nico Musician 16-Oct-1938 18-Jul-1988 The Velvet Underground and Nico Brad Nowell Musician 22-Feb-1968 25-May-1996 Lead singer of Sublime Anita O’Day Singer/Songwriter 18-Oct-1919 23-Nov-2006 Feminine master of scat Tatum O’Neal Actor 5-Nov-1963 Paper Moon Nivek Ogre Musician 5-Dec-1962 Vocals, Spooky Horn for Skinny Puppy Carré Otis Model 28-Sep-1968 Mickey Rourke’s ex-wife Jimmy Page Guitarist 9-Jan-1944 Led Zeppelin Guitarist Charlie Parker Jazz Musician 29-Aug-1920 12-Mar-1955 Be-bop jazz musician Gram Parsons Musician 5-Nov-1946 19-Sep-1973 Flying Burrito Brothers Robert Pastorelli Actor 21-Jun-1954 8-Mar-2004 Housepainter on Murphy Brown Barbara Payton Actor 16-Nov-1927 8-May-1967 Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye Joe Perry Guitarist 10-Sep-1950 Lead guitarist for Aerosmith Kristen Pfaff Bassist 26-May-1967 16-Jun-1994 Bassist for Hole and Janitor Joe John Phillips Musician 30-Aug-1935 18-Mar-2001 The Mamas and the Papas Mackenzie Phillips Actor 10-Nov-1959 Julie on One Day at a Time River Phoenix Actor 23-Aug-1970 31-Oct-1993 My Own Private Idaho Pink Singer 8-Sep-1979 Can’t Take Me Home Iggy Pop Singer/Songwriter 21-Apr-1947 Iggy and the Stooges Glenn Quinn Actor 28-May-1970 3-Dec-2002 Mark Healy on Roseanne Dee Dee Ramone Bassist 18-Sep-1952 5-Jun-2002 Former bassist, The Ramones Lou Reed Musician 2-Mar-1942 The Velvet Underground Brad Renfro Actor 25-Jul-1982 15-Jan-2008 The Client Little Richard Musician 5-Dec-1932 Tutti Frutti Keith Richards Guitarist 18-Dec-1943 The Rolling Stones Nicole Richie TV Personality 21-Sep-1981 The Simple Life Savannah Pornstar 9-Oct-1970 11-Jul-1994 Saturday Night Beaver Maria Schneider Actor 27-Mar-1952 Last Tango in Paris Edie Sedgwick Socialite 20-Apr-1943 16-Nov-1971 Warhol factory girl Hubert Selby Author 23-Jul-1928 26-Apr-2004 Requiem for a Dream Ray Sharkey Actor 14-Nov-1952 11-Jun-1993 Sonny Steelgrave on Wiseguy Eric Show Baseball 19-May-1956 16-Mar-1994 MLB pitcher Nikki Sixx Bassist 11-Dec-1958 Mötley Crüe bassist Slash Guitarist 23-Jul-1965 Former lead guitarist, Guns n’ Roses Christian Slater Actor 18-Aug-1969 Kuffs, True Romance Iceberg Slim Criminal 4-Aug-1918 28-Apr-1992 Pimp-turned-author Hillel Slovak Guitarist 13-Apr-1962 25-Jun-1988 Guitarist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers Penelope Spheeris Film Director 2-Dec-1945 Wayne’s World Nancy Spungen Victim 27-Feb-1958 12-Oct-1978 Sid Vicious’s girlfriend Jerry Stahl Author 1953 Permanent Midnight Layne Staley Musician 22-Aug-1967 14-Apr-2002 Frontman for Alice In Chains Ringo Starr Drummer 7-Jul-1940 Beatle Sonny Stitt Jazz Musician 2-Feb-1924 22-Jul-1982 Jazz saxophonist Izzy Stradlin Guitarist 8-Apr-1962 Former rhythm guitarist, Guns n’ Roses James Taylor Singer/Songwriter 12-Mar-1948 Seen fire, rain Johnny Thunders Guitarist 15-Jul-1952 23-Apr-1991 New York Dolls guitarist Danny Trejo Actor 16-May-1944 Ex-con turned character actor Karla Faye Tucker Criminal 18-Nov-1959 3-Feb-1998 First woman executed in Texas since 1863 Steven Tyler Singer 26-Mar-1948 Frontman for Aerosmith Keni Valenti Fashion Designer 1958 The King of Vintage Stevie Ray Vaughan Guitarist 3-Oct-1954 27-Aug-1990 Blues guitarist Sid Vicious Bassist 10-May-1957 2-Feb-1979 Sex Pistols bassist Charlie Watts Drummer 2-Jun-1941 Drummer for the Rolling Stones Scott Weiland Musician 27-Oct-1967 Frontman, Stone Temple Pilots Dennis Wilson Musician 4-Dec-1944 28-Dec-1983 Founding member of The Beach Boys Amy Winehouse Singer 14-Sep-1983 Rehab Paula Yates TV Personality 24-Apr-1960 17-Sep-2000 Rock Stars in Their Underpants

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To quote somebody far more incisive than me, “Once your book comes out, the weirdness begins…” Being of a certain age, of course, adds a whole other level of splendor to the experience. The oldest person ever to attend was an elderly homeless fellow in New York who came into a Barnes and Noble to get out of the rain and get down to some serious lice-removal. What follows are a few random observations from the kick- off of my own sub-big league book release.

FAQ

When reading first person novels, some people wonder if the main character, or any of the characters, are thinly veiled portrayals of the author himself. What’s the deal?

Was it Moe Howard who, when confronted with criticism, would respond, “I resemble that remark?” Was it Fitzgerald who quipped, when asked about writing novels, “You kind of empty your head into a tin pan then open up a can of plot and mix that with a fifth of ‘Now what?’

ORIANA FALLACI LIVES

Right out of the gate, Becky Fritter, the Lansing-based interviewer for Palahniuk.com, wondered, “Why are all the women in this book oversexed?” (I’m paraphrasing, the interviewer was more eloquent.) To which, after a brief, defensive blurt about “the deviance of unreliable narrators” who “have their own point of view, which is not the author’s,” I can’t remember if I said “Jesus Christ, you’re right!” out loud or if I just thought it. Orianna Fallaci lives!

One of my favorite writers, Bruce Jay Friedman, once told me in an interview, “When you write a sentence that makes you squirm…keep going.” The same applies to interviews. The great ones are the ones that make you squirm. (Emails, by contrast, should not make you squirm. If there’s even a hint that you’re sending something that’s going to have you eating your arms the next day – hold off! Do not make demands at three in the morning. Even if they’re reasonable. You’ll look insane. Whoever comes up with a pill for Cyber-Turrette’s and sells it Glaxco will be set for life. But I was talking about something else.)

THE HEARTBREAK OF MDS

There is something about this process that recalls earlier bouts of MDS, Memoir Disease Syndrome, which kicks in the year or two immediately after publishing a memoir, when you think that, because you have published a book about yourself, your thoughts are automatically interesting. Something like this could go a long way toward proving that they’re not.

A BRIEF WORD ABOUT SELF-EXPOSURE

I am not one of those people who was born to blog.

While I can – and have – slapped all manner of personal and professional weirdness between the covers of books, I have not been the most prodigious of blog-meisters. Sometimes, in the wee hours, I bolt upright in a tide of sweat and beat my head off the bedstand and wonder out loud, WHY CAN’T I BLOG?WHY DO I FIND IT INCOMPREHENSIBLE THAT COMPLETE STRANGERS WOULD FIND THE MUNDANE DETAILS OF MY EXISTENCE – OR MY EVERY PITHY OBSERVATION – EVEN REMOTELY INTERESTING? Why can I not believe that this won’t come out boring, self-indulgent, or lame-ass? What the fuck is wrong with me?

Well, these are the eternal questions.

TARGET AUDIENCE

There was a young fellow with Down Syndrome in the audience at a recent reading. We chatted, and he seemed like a lovely guy. Which – I’m not going to lie to you – made it a bit of a squirm-fest when I came to a passage from my book where Joseph Mengele, who plays a central role in the story, launches into a sidebar about the special uses to which certain members of the mentally-challenged community can make to his personal causes. “America’s enemy, al-Qaeda,” he says, “sends Down Syndrome victims into the market with remote-controlled bombs on their backs. This is genius! Why kill the unfit when you could use them as weapons! That is true ecology!”

My thinking, as I’m standing there is ‘you wrote it, you own it.” But still… I felt a damp little moment of trepidation. Even if, in a book, what you are doing is repeating the insane and offensive and indefensible rants of a real person, does just repeating them, by default, represent the novelistic equivalent of borderline personality disorder? Maybe not. Joseph Mengele and his ilk (many of whom were American) did say such these things. Many people in America agreed with them. And to not say the unsayably offensive, now, means censoring – out of good taste or fear – actual examples of things people were saying – and believing, then. If that makes any sense.

Just to put the icing on the cake, so to speak, my new friend passed gas loudly and – by the expression of those book fans in his immediate vicinity – pungently in the middle of the reading. Which, you know, happens. (I may have been told, by an eminent historian who left it out of his book, that Teddy Roosevelt was a huge fan of Frenchman Joseph Pugol — AKA le Petomane, the legendary “fartiste” — the highest paid performer on the Euro stage of his era.)

Sadly, Emily Post has no entry on the subject of bookstore flatulence. Which left me with a kind of curdled smile on my face, nodding along when the young fellow showed his approval of my literary efforts with an impromptu pants-recital. The truth is, I’ve had worse reactions.

When things really go south, a reading can start to sound like a call-in radio show, at four in the morning, in a county where there’s just been a toxic train derailment.

I do not know if there is an Author’s Clearinghouse to which writers can turn when confronted with unanticipated queries or extra-intriguing audience behavior. But maybe there should be.

PARTY FAVORS

Last Saturday, at a book party, I was cornered by a lady whose Web site was called either “Smarm” or “Snarf,” or maybe “Smarmalicious,” I could never quite tell. The point is, she was nice enough to whip out her tape recorder and Radio Shack an on-the-spot Q&A. Prob was, whatever book she’d read was clearly not mine, and when she asked the first question – “So how prevalent is bestiality in the Bureau of Land Management?” – I wasn’t sure whether to correct her or roll with it, so I rolled.

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And just like that–pass the honey, Doodlebug!–you’re plunged from the quotidian  guts-first into the Holocaust.  Here  comes the other popular N-word (“Nazi”), then  “Dr. Death,”  then the heavy ammo: “operations without anesthesia,” “removing organs from healthy inmates,” ”injecting gasoline into hearts.” And–here’s a new twist : decapitating inmates who had good teeth, cooking their heads in the crematorium until the flesh stripped off, and giving them to his co-workers for desk decorations! (Because, if you’re saving the Master Race at Buchenwald, what’s Christmas without a cooked Jew-head in your stocking?) The sickness of that, the mundane arm–chewing disgust at knowing it happened–what? 80 years ago–is only amplified by the fact, newly gleaned, that the perpetrator of such medical atrocities has been tracked down. (NOTE: the word  “atrocities,” in our own atrocious age, has about as much impact as the word “edge” in Hollywood pitch meetings. Here’s the deal! We make the  zombie coprophiliac  edgy, but we make him likeable!) That Heim has been found dead, for seven years, in Egypt, does not lessen the impact of discovering that he’d been walking around, a free man, careering from Spa Gynecologist at Baden-Baden to serious Muslim in Cairo.

Having just spent three years as full-on Mengeloid for a book on another at-large-until-death marquee genocider–this one the Angel of Death, Josef Mengele–it was with mixed gratification and horror that I read the story of Doctor Heim. Gratification because it backed up  my gut  that, on some level, this story remains the story, the story with tendrils in Abu Gharib and Iraq and Rush Limbaugh’s liver and Rick Warren’s homophobia and McCain’s racist campaign ads and the lady who made octuplets so she could finagle  a decent fee from People. Horror because–well, for the obvious reasons . . .  and one extra one:  my book comes out in a couple of weeks, and now, no matter what I say on the subject, saying anything sounds like I’m coat-tailing on a Nazi in the News to work some PR bottom-feeding. What would Thomas Mann do? (The eternal question.)

Oddly, however, while considering the issues raised by the discovery of this latest sado-death camp freak practitioner, my thoughts turned to Steven Adler, ex Guns and Roses drummer turned star of Sober House. Steven, lovable as the day is long, was recently captured executing the most perfect lurch I’ve ever seen on cable television.  Helped, apparently, by liberal doses of tin foil and Mexican tar, Steven’s onscreen toxic shuffle left one wondering how future residents could top it. Adler met and raised the bar for narco-lurching set by former lurch-meister Jeff Conaway, who lapsed into a kind of Granpappy Amos Walter Brennan crouch-scamper when his back pain hit and he needed some pain killers. He, too, I found massively sympathetic, and could relate to a little too much. (The only difference, in all honesty, is that I was never even famous enough to relapse in front of a reality TV crew. But that’s the kind of shame I’ll just have to live with.)

What links the charismatically damaged Adler and the Waffen-SS sawbones is their shared love of human experimenting. Like many addicts, myself included, upon occasion, the former Axl Rose band-mate seems to have rendered himself a one-man science project. And watching him stagger and twitch, blinking like a light bulb in an electric storm, I wondered what the professional chemical-administrators, the Third Reich faux-medicos who had to force the helpless to test their toxins, would make up of American celebrities who not only dosed themselves, but did so voluntarily, on camera, for the entertainment of untold thousands of cable subscribers throughout Post-Economy America.

I have a theory–crackpot or not–that American viewers are going to need deeper and deeper strains of TV mutants to satisfy their craving for People Who Are Worse Off Than They Are. Already, when not blasting shows hosted by my dream date, Rachel Maddow, or fave news-chewers Oberman and Matthews, MS/NBC offers near blanket Inmate TV, offering fine television from the bowels of our nation’s hardest hard-core penal institutions. VH-1, of course, graces the nation with the aforementioned Sober House. But eventually, America is going to want more. As the airborne toxic event that is our fiscal collapse sinks the hearts of even the most chipper TV viewers, how long till the private entertainments of state-sanctioned maniacs like Mengele and Hein are revived for the entertainment of citizens so stunned by their own crumbling reality that reality TV is the only succor left to pull them through?

Assuming the electricity’s still on, and somebody can cover the cable bill, don’t be surprised when Death Camp Divas shows up in a splash ad on the side of a city bus, or live human experiments from Plum Island Bio-Research Center take the place of by-then bland-seeming offerings like Tool Academy and For The Love of Money. Dulled by disappointment and dread, what’s left, for Homeland America, but the past, all over again, this time on video, live from Dauchau, Nebraska?

Call me crazy. But how many people went to bed on February 3rd expecting to wake up February 4th and read about boiled skulls on the front page of The New York Times? And how many, human nature being what it is, felt  happily distracted, relieved not to be reading about economic torment, planet-wide panic, and their own disappearing future.

Thank you, Dr. Death.

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But enough about him. There’s now a test that can measure the ammonia in the blood. Which, somehow, makes it sound like if I get a paper cut, I bleed Windex. I guess I’ll find out.

My big fear, though, is that the smoke in the attic is not the result of some liver-brain combo impairment. Forget ammonia fume – it’s straight up EOA. Early Onset Alzheimer’s. And I’m going to be that 59 year old with a drool cup who just grins and masturbates. In public. Maybe I’ll be still be able to understand the snide remarks of passers-by –“Isn’t he a little young to be senile?” But I won’t be able to react.

To the extent that a man is defined by his fears, my own have changed from under-30 to over-50. When I was thirty and strung, I’d worry about running out of drugs.  Now I’m post-50 – unstrung – and worried about running out of – what’s the word?  Sanity? Awareness? Time? Pre-senilitude?

Out of sheer fear of the malady, I decided to research it, a little. By research, I mean, I googled Early Onset Alzheimer’s, read the first three entries out of five jillion, and scared the shit out of myself.

What really broke my will to live was that I was already squirming after the first two questions of the Alzheimer’s Associations 10 Warning Signs of Alzheimer’s.

1. MEMORY LOSS and 2. DIFFICULTY PERFORMING FAMILIAR TASKS. By the time I bumped in Number Three: PROBLEMS WITH LANGUAGE. I began to experience a deep and unrelenting sense of foreboding. What men’s adventure magazines in the Fifties liked to describe as “inchoate fear.” This language difficulty was something, unironically, I had not been able to articulate until I saw it in print. At the online Alzheimer’s’ party place. I mean, their site. Jesus!

Listen: People with Alzheimer’s disease often forget simple words or substitute unusual words, making their speech or writing hard to understand. They may be unable to find the toothbrush, for example, and instead ask for “that thing for my mouth.”

Maybe that’s part of it, talking as if you’re translating from Low Yiddish. Or maybe that’s how the Disease works, slowly taking away one word at a time, as though your brain were a piano with one key removed every week. Until it ended up like the mythic circus piano Theologies Monk learned to play on. (A jazz legend anecdote I probably have wrong – my memory being what it is.) It brings to mind Stravinsky’s epigram, “The more limitations I have, the more creative I can be.” Not that I’ve ever read a word of Stravinsky. But one category of memory that seems to remain intact are Smart Things Other People Have said. I have about five of these, which I’ve been squeezing into pretty every conversation I’ve had in the past five years. One is the Stravinsky thing, the other’s from George Bernard Shaw, “Ideas are not responsible for those who embrace them.” Don’t ask me what masterpiece old vegetarian and daily human breast milk drinker planted this nugget in. The last big one is from Voltaire – whom I actually have read, though don’t ask me to quote from Candide.

Perhaps, once my brain is drained like the battery of a 56 Impala whose lights have been left on for a week, the one category of memory left will be stolen apercus. The stuff lifted from books of quotations next to whatever bed I’ve been unable to sleep in for the past half century and change.

What’s the harm, if I’ve still got a few brain ells, in responding to any query with “’Fear Plus Hate equals power.’ Eugene Burdick.” Or “A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.” Ernest Hemingway. The last one’s a real icebreaker. Try it the next time somebody asks you how you’re doing. It also works, in airplanes, if you want to put the kibosh on chatty seatmates. But still… Nothing can hide the fact, when the fog rolls in and it’s time to go on automatic, that I’m as shallow as a stuffed parrot. Kind of a Chauncey Gardener meets Bartlett’s Quotations thing. Maybe senility is just not giving a shit – when you don’t know you don’t give a shit. Even if you’re a little addled, what’s the downside of spouting the wisdom of the ages to passersby? There are worse things in live to end up than an oracle.

But back to the Alzheimer’s test. Every category concludes with the eternal question: “What’s normal?” Which, in the case of 4. PROBLEMS WITH LANGUAGE,  breaks down to a single sentence. “Sometimes having trouble finding the right word.”

By the time I stagger through 4: Disorientation to time and place. (Check) 5: Poor or decreased judgment. (Check)  and 6: Problems With Abstract Thinking.  (Check.) I’m ready to collapse in a Dread Nap. Is it even necessary to even say it? I have every symptom. More accurately, I can’t remember not having them. But what consolation is that – know you were pre-senile (as opposed to prehensile) at seventeen? It’s a grim psychic crawl from 8. Changes in Mood or Behavior. (What time is it now?) to 9. Changes in Personality.

That’s it. Fuck it. I’ve had enough. I don’t want to know about Ten.

Yes, I am a coward. Thanks for asking. I’d rather remain ignorant, cling to some dim hope that I’ve dodged the clean Alzheimer’s Quiz sweep. Maybe – call me a cockeyed optimist – a tenth of my neuro-transmitters are yet quick and nimble, balancing out the 9/10 that require trained care-givers. Although, this being tax time, its probably worth inquiring as to whether care-givers are tax deductible. On the off chance The Time Has Come.

By fickle coincidence, the police department in my hometown publishes a pamphlet called “Safety for Seniors,” one of which some concerned public servant slipped under my windshield in a supermarket parking lot. My first reaction was to check and see if any other cars had senior crime tips under their wipers. I was the only one. Which made it hard to believe that me getting the pamphlet wasn’t some kind of “message.” (Maybe Number Ten on the test included the word “paranoiac.”) Either that or I was driving an “old man’s car.” A possibility. Though the simmering furor of product placement in blogs prevents me from being more specific. But keep an eye out for Kias in hipster auto blogs this Christmas. That’s all I’m saying.
Once you are actually senile, are you even capable of taking the senility Quiz – let alone being functional and aware enough to pop a stress-goiter worrying about whether you have Alzheimer’s – or whether you can have all the symptoms and not have it? (Somehow I think Charlie Kaufman answered that question in Synecdoche. I couldn’t tell you in which scene. It’s around where Philip Seymour Hoffman starts pretending he’s his ex-wife’s maid.)

I made the mistake of glancing at the pamphlet at a red light, and became immediately fixated. Under the topic Elder Abuse, there is the directive, “Look to see if elderly friends’ homes are unusually unkempt…” If they are, the concerned friend is advised to contact the authorities.

I’m not completely sure why this got me tweaked. Unless it was the thought that, at some future date, being a slob could get you arrested. Not that I’m a slob. It’s just, on certain days, if I’ve been working, with a few too many hours in a row alone, I confess to leaving an absent-minded slime-trail of paper around the house, a dozen opened and discarded books, scribbled notes on the bottom of Kleenex boxes, dishes slipped under a chair, talk radio, television and music all blaring at the same time… A scenario which, to the casual observer, might look “unusually unkempt.” Depending on what their idea of kempt is.

Was it right that, after you’d clawed your way to some high rung on the chronological ladder, being a slob morphed into a sign that you were some kind of crime victim? But when was the cusp? How many years did you have to crumple paper and not read 19 magazines on the floor before the crumple and mag pile had neighbors dialing 9-1-1 – or loved ones signing papers to make you a ward of the state? One of my happiest childhood memories is going to visit my grandmother in the County Care Facility. She sat on a folding chair and clapped all day. Somehow, even if you knew she was an all day clapper, just walking toward her across a room and being applauded felt great.

If I had more ambition, I’d insert some wry observation about how creativity, on some level, is a kind of dementia right here. I could probably come up with something. But I’m just too tired. I can’t keep the thoughts straight in my head. Except for one or two. Which I should probably write down before I forget… I just can’t remember why.

The good news is, I don’t have to worry about succumbing to Early Onset Alzheimer’s somewhere down the road. I already have it. In fact, I can’t remember ever remembering where I put the car keys once I put them down. At any age. Maybe, after the ADD craze fades, the grade school shrinks will come up with another pathology: Adolescent Alzheimer’s. They’ll switch prescriptions from Adderall to Vasopressin. (A nasal spray prescribed, originally, to the elderly in mental decline; and adapted, underground, as a fave smart drug during the smart drug craze of the 90s.)

In the end, what can you do but make friends with obsesso-fear? I mean, if I really do get Alzheimer’s before I pass the old speed limit, say, of 55, the nice thing is I won’t know it. That’s the heinous beauty of it all. If you forget you’re old and fucked, maybe being old and fucked can be fun. You may look like you have Stage III Charles Laughton, but inside, you might feel nine. What the hell….

If you have to be alive, mentally challenged, and dying, what could be more pleasant?

- Jerry Stahl

See Also: Post-Young by Jerry Stahl, an Introduction

Jerry Stahl’s books include Permanent Midnight and I, Fatty. Pain Killers, his new novel, will be published by Wm Morrow in March, 09

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Introduction: Post-Young

So, yeah, the world’s boiling over; entire countries going under; economies collapsing like those crappy rope-and-wood bridges Tarzan had to jam across in every remake to save white colonialists from the jungle abyss. (At the height of the Greystoke/Tarzan revival, in 1984, there was actually a NAMBLA spin-off: NAMCLA – North American Man Chimp Love Association.) But so fucking what? It’s hard times right now. We’re all whirling face-first into that screaming abyss, devoid of hope.

Or were. Until Obama came along. Even if he’s not the most progressive player in the universe, and even as Blago-gate threatens to poison the president-elect’s gumball before he loses the hyphen, this remains our moment of national hope.

And yet. Like many of my demographic, I have a secret: since Obama beat the odds and won the White House, a single thought has crowded out all the requisite visions of change and unity. It’s a thought I’m not very proud of. Maybe not a thought at all. More like an obsession. Some kind of private, festering psycho-emotional shame boil. That busloads of my like-minded Americans are plagued by the same globular inflammation makes it no less mortifying.

But fuck it, I need to share.

From the first minute it was clear that Obama won, I had one recurring thought, on a kind of panic-loop: I’m older than the president. How the fuck did that happen?

There I said it. As a citizen, Obama had me bustin’ my buttons. As a post-fifty with PCD – Persistent Chronological Denial – I had one bad moment where all I could think was,  Do I kill myself now or wait and see who snags that Secretary of Transportation spot?

A great blog, for my money, is one with just enough patina of cultural relevance to make it seem like the blogger is not really some self-obsessed jim-jim eating his arms and calling it dinner. It’s not about them, it’s about the zeitgeist.

Like many of my bent, I’ve been thinking about death since before I had pubic hair. I just never thought I’d be worrying about it going gray before it happened. The curse of the aging hipster is not that they’re aging. It’s that they’re not dead. But what can you do? I was never that hip to begin with. In the immortal words of Steven Fry (b.1957), “I don’t need you to remind me of my age, I have my bladder to do that for me.”

If this were the 1949, I’d be retired already!

In an earlier incarnation, as feature magazine writer, I used to love assignments where you’d dive into some extreme-o wing of mainstream culture, slither in and slither out with the goods. Today’s greatest practitioners, Matt Taibbi, in The Great Derangement, or Chris Hedges in American Fascists, insinuate themselves into the most virulent strains of wing Red, White and Bornagain reality, then duck back to our world and report on what they saw. Sadly, I won’t be infiltrating the post-fifty 50-adjacent ‘lifestyle’ industries that have cropped up around it. I won’t be infiltrating an alien reality, because I am the alien. As the vanity plate on the powder blue KIA that sideswiped me yesterday on the 101 put it so succinctly, 55NHOT! I didn’t get to see the driver up close – she took off – but even in fleeting profile, I could tell she worked out.

In a blog that will, no doubt, wring tears of boredom to the bulk of the blogaholics, I will explore the products and politics, the cultural, financial, fashion and psycho-emotional fun-fest in becoming as old as your grandfather used to be….

Now that Seniors are the new Teens, one column might focus on the piquant after-taste of sexy ‘lifestyle’ advertising intended for guys like me. Clearly, “ask your doctor if you’re healthy enough to have sex!” – is not aimed at frat boys who want a three day boner.

Dip a senior hammer-toe in the pool, and pretty soon you’re sucked in. An entire parallel universe is devoted to the Reluctant Elderly –  from senior swing parties to Testosterone doctors, who’ll give you the body of a young Dolph Lungren, even if they can’t do anything about the fact that your ear lobes now hang down to your shoulders. All I’ll be doing is reporting from the front.

Somewhere a Mad Man is already coming up with copy that will make adult diapers SASSY. “Dammit, Harris, how do we snag the diapo-sexuals?”

When I grew up, back in Pittsburgh (not to brag,) people looked 55 when they were thirty. And when they were 55 – it was over.  But since I live where I live, I can go to the Hollywood Y, on any given week day, and see guys in their sixties with six packs and non-saggy chins. Which is inspiring, and helps take attention away from the 80 year old ex-sitcom regulars with testicles hanging below their knees in the steam-room.

Statistically, the greatest rise in drug use in the US is in 50-to-60s. As if a lot of them are saying “Fuck it, what can happen!” – and opting to turn the rest of their lives into a long weekend, followed by Death instead of Monday.

Here, for better or worse, are a few topics we might cover here at Senior Beat, the world of the Post Young.
AREAS
1. Life Extension/The Perma-Youth Movement….
2. Yoga/Meditation/Spirit – Is Sting Made of Synthetic Material?
3. Sex Before Death
4. Politics, Lobbyists/The A.A.R.P. Mafia
5. The Heartbreak of O.I.R.  (“Oldest in Room” Syndrome)
6. Magazines/Web Sites/Media
7. Role Models: Senior Rebels, Old Punks, and Not Dead Rockers
8. How To Be a Post-Fifty-Year-Old Bad-ass (Hint: Don’t even try. You will never star in Gran Torino.)
9. Fashion: A Style Guide for Pre-Seniors – Do I Look Musty?
10. Guess How Old I Am? Or How to Clear A Room By Talking About Your Age At Parties
11. Daddy Is An Aging Hipster (How kids deal with parents who won’t get old)
12. Is Death Just Another Bad Drug You Don’t Have To Take?

Big fun ahead.
Stay down.

JS

***

See Also: Swinging Modern Sounds By Rick Moody

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• OG DAD #2: The Texas Jew Panel
• OG DAD #1: The Hum