A Novel Approach

Part 1

The Withered of Oz

Chapter 1

Beauty and stupidity are in the eye of the beholder.

From the age of fifty I found my life speeding up like a Bullet Train on corroded tracks. I flashed through the stations of Grey Hair Bend, Failing Eyesight Falls, Hard of Hearing Hollow, Denture Downs, Celibate City, Replacement Retreat, Varicose Veins Vale, and almost came off the rails at Grumpy Grange before reaching Senility Square, on the outskirts of Depression Valley.

Not a trip for the faint hearted.

Whoever says ‘Age is all in the mind’ hasn’t checked the mirror lately, or else they need an urgent appointment with their Obstetrician – or do I mean Optician? (I get so confused lately. I made an appointment at the Neurologist and finished up at the Urologist. Couldn’t work out why he was checking out my arse!)

I don’t want people to think I’m bitter about growing old; not bitter, maybe just a little ‘sour’. I know there are a lot of elderly people out there who jog around their compound, do line dancing, skip around the lawn bowls green, looking happy and positive. Mind you, I think it’s a sure sign of creeping senility.

On my seventieth birthday, I stupidly glanced in the bathroom mirror, and gasped. Who was this strange old man who was sharing my bathroom? Had my darling wife taken in a boarder and omitted to tell me? And suddenly, in shock, I realised the awful truth – it was me!

I quickly looked away and reached for my black satin sleep mask. This was my yearly ritual; once a year I allow myself to look in the mirror as I shave. The rest of the year I shave wearing a sleep mask so I can’t see the ravages of time. This can be tricky if you’re using a cut-throat razor, as you can imagine.

However, I steeled myself and sneaked another quick glance in the mirror, and sure enough, the vision that peered back at me did look uncannily like my passport photo, only maybe not quite as old. On closer inspection it looked more like a caricature of the image of myself I carried around in my mind. I had become the caricature! So you can understand how shattered I was.

At last I was forced to confront the wrinkled face with sagging jowls and deeply etched lines, the less-than-perfect skin, with dark sun spots and blemishes, the thinning grey hair that wasn’t quite camouflaging the pale scalp beneath, the discoloured teeth with alarming gaps, that reminded me of uncared-for tombstones, the grey stubbled chin and the haunted eyes – they were mine! All mine! I had become a postscript of my desolate life!

Taking a quick stock of the accompanying body, that somehow seemed to be sagging out of my pyjama pants and heading for the floor, I sucked in my breath, flexed the muscles of my pecs and biceps, turned slightly to one side for a more flattering angle, squinted my eyes and dimmed the lights and, I had to admit, I was looking pretty good.

So you’ve turned seventy, I said to the unrecognisable image in the mirror, and look at yourself. At least you’ve outlived your body.

Now what are you going to do with the rest of your life? I said to the sneering reflection. It’s too late to become a fireman, or a pilot, or a train driver when you grow up. You’ve already grown up; well, maybe not ‘up’, more ‘down and out’. But there must be something left to do to justify your continued existence. You cannot remain a cling-on to the anus of life.

Suddenly the revelation hit me like a spiritual epiphany: without having to wander in the desert for forty days and nights. You used to write scripts for television and stage productions! I beamed at the morose image staring back at me. I know, I’ll become an author!

So I did.

I sat at my computer and a tsunami of creativity flooded over me. My fingers flew over the keys and I was astounded at the brilliant prose that washed over the monitor. It’s true, I had written two hundred pages before I’d even thought of a storyline but I put that down to ‘practice’ and pushed on.

To give you a picture of the author as you plough your way through the following chapters of random thoughts, I would like to describe myself as tall, slim, olive skinned, with good muscle definition, glossy dark, wavy hair with a hint of silver ‘wisdom strands’, sparkling blue eyes with a naughty glint, a distinctive, classical profile and an engaging smile that hints of sexual playfulness.

I would very much like to describe myself as such but that would be a trifle exaggerated. In fact, in 1937, my mother gave birth to an eight-pound nose – with a sinus condition – and the rest of me grew on later. This was not a propitious start.

I do have olive skin and my muscles are well defined – by wrinkles and sagging skin. My wife declares I have always had the body of David, but I have since discovered she was not referring to Michelangelo’s masterpiece, but to David Willhelmstein from number 27, who is eighty-two and suffering from some mysterious wasting disease. My hair is completely faded silver and my blue eyes no longer sparkle, except when I bend over and stand up too quickly, but they are, patriotically, red, white and blue, and the sexual playfulness outplayed itself long ago. What happened to the previous exuberant, fun-filled youth, I have no idea.

It was like I had dozed off to sleep somewhere in 1970 and suddenly surfaced in 2008. I suddenly realised that, in fact, I was still living in the 70s; with the same expectations, behaviour, reasoning, ethics, moral standards and, I’m fairly certain, some of the same wardrobe. Mind you, I suspect in the seventies I was still living in the fifties. I just don’t seem to be able to catch up. Forget the X and Y generations; I have now entered the Zzzzzzz Generation.

I was sitting at home watching ABC television with my wife, who is disabled down the left side from a stroke twelve years ago. This suspiciously occurred after a neck operation and not being given any blood-thinning drug to counteract clotting.

She hates euphemisms and especially the word ‘disabled’. ‘I’m not disabled, I’m fuckin’ crippled,’ she claims indignantly. But she enunciates it beautifully. She used to be a speech teacher in bygone years, with a wonderful mercurial voice and a marvellous laugh, which someone once described as ‘laughing in arpeggio’. Unfortunately, her voice and speech have tended to flatten out a lot since the stroke but she still says ‘Fuck’ beautifully, and, I’ve noticed, a little more frequently.

I have to talk to her seriously about this loathing of euphemisms. ‘Now look,’ I say, ‘you can’t have signs up everywhere saying Fuckin’ Cripple Parking or Fuckin’ Cripple Toilets. Someone’s sure to take offence.’

She also hates the euphemism ‘indigenous’, claiming, according to the Oxford Dictionary, it means ‘born or produced naturally in a region; belonging naturally’. In which case she claims to be indigenous, certainly being produced naturally in Queensland in 1937. I have to forcibly stop her from ticking the ‘indigenous’ box on Government forms.

Anyway, I digress. A BBC programme came on entitled Grumpy Old Men, which consisted of a half a dozen men of a similar ‘mature’ age to myself, I thought, having a whinge about all sorts of subjects in today’s world that really piss them off. It turned out these Grumpy Old Men were in fact only in their mid fifties! Mere children in their prime. Unfortunately, they don’t have an Australian version of the show out yet but no doubt that will follow in due course, as to be unoriginal seems to be an unending pattern of television production in this country.

To the amazement of She Who Can’t Be Ignored, and even myself, I found myself shouting, very loudly and passionately, ‘YES! YES! YES!!!’ somewhat in the style of Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally, without the exchange of any body fluids. What is happening? I wondered. Could there possibly be other men out there who think the same way as I do? I thought I was totally alone in my disillusionment of thwarted dreams and ambitions and today’s society in general. But, apparently not.

Why is this? I asked myself. Why do we old buggers feel compelled to whinge at seemingly everything? Probably because we’ve had years of inactivity and irrelevance to think about the injustices of life, the unfulfilled dreams and ambitions, and we’ve therefore come to the inescapable conclusion that we’re wiser and always right and anybody younger is obviously wrong. In fact we have reached the stage where cynicism has become reality.

Now it’s true that this was an English program and in Australia the Poms have a probably undeserved reputation for whinging, and like the Americans, they do seem to live on a different planet, but there is one thing we do have in common and that is whinging against perceived injustices. Well, I mean, just think about it.

It’s the 18th of February in the year 2000 at 6.30pm. I’ve just finished mowing the lawn and Marie’s preparing dinner. We sit down on the terrace overlooking the park and lake, our favourite spot to enjoy a pre-dinner glass of wine, with the sun setting over the distant hills and the water reflecting like a mirror. It’s so peaceful. Marie is telling me about a friend of ours who has just been visiting her daughter in NSW and in mid sentence, without a beat of a pause, her voice suddenly changes and sounds like a record has suddenly been switched from 78 RPM to 45, every word slowing down and elongated, low and flat.

I look at her to see if she is joking and say, ‘Sorry, what did you just say?’

Continuing in that same flat, awful tone she says, ‘I–said– Shirley–just–got–back–from–visiting–Amanda–’

‘Why are you talking like that?’ I ask.

‘Like–what?’ she drones.

I suddenly notice she has slumped slightly to her left and her face has dropped slightly on that side. Christ! A stroke! She’s having a stroke! I race to the phone and dial 000. In seconds our life has changed and will never be the same again.

Well, for a start, take our average general health. We seem to spend so much bloody time being encouraged to look after our health and beauty, what with doctors’ appointments, blood tests, eye tests, X-rays, dentists, physiotherapists, and not to mention, proctologists and urologists, who like to stick their fingers in everything, so to speak, and dozens of other denizens of the medical profession. I swear there are some weeks when it’s difficult to find a spare day to fit in the next medical or dental appointment. And their favourite word is always ‘degeneration’.

Everything is degenerating. Now in our youth we took a certain pride in being called a ‘degenerate’ but in old age the word has elongated somewhat and the implications have definitely expanded to become, frankly, insufferable. We’re literally degenerating at such a pace that it won’t be long before our bodies completely collapse and crumble away into dust and extinction. If I wake up in the morning and nothing hurts, I think I died during the night.

And yet our minds and senses are positively flooded constantly with advice from ‘experts’ at every page turn and channel switch, on how to live longer and of course happier, more beautiful, and healthier lives. Now let’s face it, very few of us, if any, look or feel beautiful after the age of, at tops forty, and it’s all downhill from there on in until sixty, and then the acceleration increases at such a pace it’s like flying into a black hole in space. And after seventy you don’t want to know about it and you can really only make future plans, if you’re lucky, up until this afternoon. I’m all for ‘pushing or looking outside the envelope’, but pushing hurts my back, and no matter how hard I push, it still remains stationary, and looking is all very well, if I can find my fucking reading glasses.

The stores and pharmacies are stuffed with rejuvenating creams and lotions to erase lines and wrinkles, blemishes and age – oops – maturity spots. I need a lotion, cream or pill to take away the crow’s feet, wrinkles and blemishes in my brain.

Diets and health advice are thrust upon us by gurus who have never even been to India. We’re steered in every direction from no carbs to high carbs, no fat to fat-eating spreads made of fats, or high protein to low protein, you must lower your cholesterol, take vitamins, don’t take vitamins, eat this, don’t eat that, a glass of wine is good for you, any alcohol is bad for you, don’t smoke, don’t take that pill we prescribed ten years ago because we’ve now discovered it’s carcinogenic. Run and exercise until you drop but don’t overdo it and remember, ‘It’s really important to enjoy yourself in old age,’ the psychiatrists extol; ‘It’s good for your heart.’ What good is that if your degenerating body is hit by a runaway bus because you can’t hear or see it coming?

So throw down a Viagra every day and screw yourself to death; at least it will stop you from peeing on your Velcro’d runners. When ya gotta go, at least go happy. And what about that Age-Defying Makeup for women? The only age-defying makeup that works is putty or a decent coat of formaldehyde.

It also amazes me how dentistry has changed since I was a kid. If you had a toothache in those days they ripped the bloody tooth out! I often wonder, when I see pictures of skeletons or mummies, hundreds or thousands of years old that they’ve dug up, how a lot of them all seem to have a full set of choppers. Was that because they didn’t have dentists then? They certainly didn’t have Colgate.

I have been through, ‘Brush your teeth in a circular motion, brush your teeth up and down, brush your teeth horizontally, use a hard brush, use a medium brush, use a soft brush. Brush gently, brush vigorously’, which I did for years, causing me to wear a trench in the enamel.

And now, as the sun sets on the one-time glistening whities and they loosen in their sockets, I sit in the dentist’s waiting room singing the Abba hit ‘Denture Queen’ while I bid farewell to the days of chomping a juicy steak or a veal cutlet and look forward to a diet of vitamised mush.

The ambulance arrives and I’m in such a state of shock I don’t know what to do to help her. I’ve never seen anyone with a stroke before. My mind can’t accept the enormity of what is happening. The attendants are serious and efficient, lifting her onto a stretcher and giving her oxygen. I light myself a cigarette to ease my nerves and one of the attendants snaps, ‘Put that out! We’ll take her to John Flynn Emergency. You want to ride with her?’

I automatically think I will need my car to get back home again. The thought of a taxi never occurs to me. How strange. ‘No, I’ll follow in the car.’

Much later she tells me she was cold in the ambulance and she’d thought that I was sending her to hospital alone to get rid of her. She had no idea what had happened to her. I cried then.

And of course at this stage, wouldn’t you know, Willie, my local member for fun, is no longer a ‘standing’ member. After dominating my life since I was fourteen or so, he has apparently decided to retire from the house and indeed the party. No more the night-long sessions, the sometimes-raucous behaviour, the jocular intercourse. (Or even serious, if it comes to that.) No interjections without injections. Well, at least I outlived the wrinkly old bastard.

But those of us Withereds in a similar condition are still constantly inundated with sex; in movies, books, mind-numbing celebrity and fashion magazines, stage shows, and a never-ending plethora of awful television commercials assuring us that if we buy this or wear that we will become one of the ‘beautiful’ people and be more sexually alluring. Now I’m sorry but can you honestly show me a sexually alluring, beautiful-looking person at seventy?

So if I can no longer get it up does it mean I can’t really wear those clothes, drive that car, use that aftershave or cologne, eat that chocolate, because it will make me too sexy, too attractive? Would that be a kind of false advertising on my part? Could I be sued for making myself so sexually alluring that I’m irresistible, and then bomb out at the point of entry, so to speak? In these days of American-inspired lawsuits, probably.

We sit outside the hospital emergency reception and wait, each lost in our own fears; myself, for my beautiful wife of fifty years, whom I love, and our only child, Ben, for the mother who loves him so dearly. Eventually they call us in and we creep into the emergency ward and find her apparently sleeping. A lady doctor comes up to us and, in reply to our whispered questions, tells us that they’re going to admit her into the hospital and no, they can’t say the extent of the damage until further tests are made but to try to keep our hopes up because some stroke victims recover fairly quickly. She doesn’t.

And speaking of lawsuits, why is it that there always has to be someone to blame, to sue, for the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune? What happened to personal responsibility? If you trip over a crack in the road or fall into a trench someone has left open, don’t sue, open your fucking eyes.

I really think though that there should be a different set of laws, rules and regulations for the over-sixties. I mean we were brought up in a different era with different attitudes, different standards. It’s like the western civilisations trying to understand the Orientals, or Middle Eastern civilisations, or men understanding women. We don’t THINK the same! Stupidity in laws, rules and regulations has existed in every era. It’s just as you get older you have more time to examine them and seethe about the intrusive insults and manipulation they really are sometimes. Warn us of the dangers and then, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else, let us make up our own bloody minds but don’t make it a regulation or a law. We’re regulated to the point where you have to carry a set of instructions on how to live without being fined or arrested.

Now I must admit some regulations are necessary because there are a lot of stupid people out there doing remarkably stupid things. So when somebody does something stupid it immediately hits the media, Facebook and YouTube and before you can say, ‘Young twittering people of today should be put into compounds and fed on nothing but Ritalin’, it becomes the latest fad and other idiots immediately jump on the bandwagon for their minute of fame. I suppose you have to protect society as much as possible but what about personal responsibility?

Take the planking craze for instance. Now I can see why you should have a law to stop bored, mental deficients from lying flat on their backs on a balcony railing twenty storeys high. I mean there’s a real danger they may fall and land on top of a couple of unsuspecting Withereds, out walking their poodle. I don’t mean you should stop the planker from killing himself, that’s the risk he takes, but think of the damage the poor poodle could sustain.

Gun control was another brilliant idea. Now the only people with guns are legal shooters and criminals. Up until the horrendous Port Arthur atrocity it was legal to carry an AK47 around in broad daylight but if you were caught in a gay act you could be prosecuted. Children are not allowed to purchase tobacco products, alcohol or condoms but there’s no law stopping them from using them. The legal age for sex is sixteen but if they’re in the care of an adult the age is eighteen (?). It is also illegal to wear black clothing and a blackened face in the street. No wonder our Aboriginal brothers in dinner suits face persecution. I can understand banning Muslim women from wearing black burqas because there may be a disguised biker underneath but if you’re an innocent, underage, gay Maori walking down the street to play in the junior All Blacks team you’re in deep shit.

The same could be said for smoking but don’t start me on that.

On the way home I do a lot of thinking. I think about how much she means to me; the history we have shared. The way she has cared for me during the fifty years of our marriage, forgoing her career for the sake of mine, supporting me and our small son when I was out of work, spoiling us, loving us unconditionally. I make a solemn commitment to look after her and care for her for as long as I am able, ‘till death us do part’, as we vowed, to give her the happiest life I can.

Chapter 2

Tobacco the new Cocaine

Oh, alright then. I have been a dedicated smoker for sixty years and yes, I am still alive, and yes, I am addicted but my doctor informs me I’m in excellent shape for my age. It’s just that I happen to enjoy smoking. I took to it like a mongoose to a cobra. In the fifties it was almost obligatory to smoke. And in the forties the Salvation Army and other charities packed cartons of cigarettes and tobacco for the soldiers in the front lines before they packed the socks and tins of Anzac biscuits. But then again, that was before paranoia set in, backed by an unending line of scientific experts.

Now I am naturally someone who hates being regulated and told what to do in my private life so all of the restrictions being forced upon me, regardless of plain packaging with the obscene images and much publicised health warnings, is like a red rag to a bull. Of course I am against young people being exposed to the dangers of smoking and maybe they should be forbidden by law to purchase tobacco before the age of thirty but for old, long-term addicts already stressed by age and coping with today’s Government restrictions and technological society, the strain of giving it up can be horrendous; in some cases suicidal. Don’t Governments realize that young people are renowned for being attracted to the vicarious pleasures that are denied them? The more monstrous the better; look at the violent video games they play. ‘The damage has been done,’ we wail, ‘let us die in peaceful agony.’

I’ve attempted to quit dozens of times but then again, I am a weak person. The first time I tried I was acting in some forgettable television series and for the first time in my career I forgot the words of the script and kept blowing the take. This went on for an endless number of takes and the embarrassment and stress were unimaginable. The harder I tried the worse it got. Each time I dried I yelled, ‘Fuck!’ in frustration, each time louder than before and we had to start the scene again. The director finally called a break and I went outside the studio, accosted some poor technician who was taking the opportunity for a quick fag while they waited for me to get myself back under control and threatened to kill him if he didn’t give me a smoke. Being an understanding addict he obsequiously submitted to my intimidation and after a determined few drags, I returned to the studio and finished the scene without any further interruptions. Later I ran into the producer who smiled at me and said, ‘Had a bit of trouble with that speech, eh?’ I apologised and humbly gave him my excuse.

‘I was watching the filming on the monitor in the office,’ he grinned. ‘Do you realise you yelled fuck twenty-four times on that take? And it was a love scene?’

‘Some of the actresses like it when you talk dirty,’ I replied, meekly.

I don’t think he really accepted my explanations but I continued smoking and never blew a scene again for which I and everybody else were most grateful.

Another time I tried to give up the filthy habit, my niece, who was a heavy smoker, said she’d succeeded with the help of a drug the doctor had prescribed. Off I went to the doctor who dutifully filled out the prescription and I left with the determination of a lion tracking a gazelle. I tried the drug twice but each time after a couple of days, the side-effects of suicidal depression, and strange noises in my head, forced me back to the nicotine. You’d think there may be a particular gene that affects some people prone to cancer or addiction more than others. Why is it some people succumb to the lethal effects of tobacco while others don’t?

Why isn’t the medical profession trying to find out if this could be the case and treat an addict accordingly? Maybe the huge taxes they charge and the enormous amount of money spent on obscene advertising could be put to a better use in research. Save the ghastly images and expert opinions for the early education of trainee people. It would certainly cut down on the stress of trying to give up, not only to the smokers but their family and friends and society in general.

The non-smoking fraternity who had been unjustly forced to put up with nasty, smelly smokers for years are ecstatic. At last they have a cause, a justification for their distaste. And once they got their