When did I stop being the man I am, and become the man I was?
What part did I play in this tragi-farce called old age except the part every man plays, unwittingly, in his own demise? And why, why in the name of weeping Jesus did I not see it until now?
It took the headstone, I suppose. The marker with my name on it.
Intimations of immortality my ass!
When I ordered the tombstone, I thought I was doing the right thing, making life easier for my kids. It was part of my pre-need estate strategy. I wanted to make certain no one mucked up my plans or took liberties with my after-death directives. But mostly I was trying to be responsible. Control the narrative, as we say these days. Leave my stamp on things.
I’d paid for the stone months ago. Back when the doctor told me I had less than a year to live. But the day I took the cab out to the monument shop to approve the finished engraving—no! The place was shuttered! Locked up stem to stern. Which left me standing there, like an idiot, staring through the chain link fence with my mouth hanging open and the cabbie shouting over the seat back through the door, asking me should he stick around?
There was a delinquency notice from the Department of Revenue just above the giant brass padlock that held the chains in place. A closure notice that hinted at financial improprieties. Delinquencies of one nature or another. There were handwritten notes stuck in the fence too, some on business cards, some on Post-It stickies, some on the backs of grocery lists and old receipts. Most of them from concerned customers inquiring after their property.
The headstone—my headstone—was on the other side of the wire barrier next to a stucco tool shed with a small, arched window that looked like it came from a child’s playhouse. It appeared quite natural sitting under the shade tree where the delivery service had left it. I could read my name chiseled in the polished black granite: THEODORE J. RENNY, Born 1954 – Died....
I shook the fence in mild protest. It rattled but there was nothing more to coax from it, and my empty hands fell clapping at my sides.
“Hey, pal,” the cabbie shouted, leaning across the seat back. “You want me to stick around or not?”
I waved him away, but he didn’t go.
“Yo,” he said, pointing to the meter with a polite shrug.
I pulled out my wallet and paid him. Then I started back toward the fence.
“Yo,” he said again, nodding at the cab’s back door, which I’d left open. “Mind?”
I walked over and shut it.
The engine rumbled and the tires spat gravel as the lumbering yellow vehicle sped away. I took the cabbie’s hasty departure as commentary on the gratuity I’d given him, which he apparently considered inadequate. But I had my own grievances, and as soon as he and his ugly yellow sedan were out of sight I set about trying to redress them.
The granite marker locked behind the gate was my only concern, and I was forced to accept that its impoundment was going to present me with a number of problems. The biggest of course was that I’d be dead in six months and, without a stone on my grave, or the credentials to pass into eternity, as lost as a lost soul could be.
The cemetery where I was to be buried, Mt. Evergreen, was across the street from the monument company. The plot I was to be buried in was on top of a hill, near a grove of honey locust trees that opened out onto a scenic view of the mountains. Like the headstone, the plot had already been paid for. Also part of my pre-burial planning.
The cemetery’s iron gates were open that morning, so I decided to drop by and see if someone in the front office might be able to shed light on the monument shop’s closure. I found the sexton standing outside the office with his hedge trimmers and decided he’d do. He wore dark glasses and a ball cap and had a sound-muffling headset yoked around his neck. He told me the owner of the monument company, Mr. Noah, had disappeared a week ago. He said he’d closed the doors, disconnected the phone, and vanished, his 100-year-old family-run business kaput overnight.
When I got home later that afternoon, I phoned the Better Business Bureau and inquired after the matter, hoping the sexton was mistaken. But the lady on the other end of the line painted an even bleaker picture. She said there was no guarantee of any resolution of the problem between Mr. Noah and the Department of Revenue, and that the impounded goods would remain under lock and key until the company either satisfied its debt or declared bankruptcy.
“You can file a complaint with us,” the woman told me before we hung up. “Or call the state district of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court and ask about your options. But that’s as much as I can tell you, given the circumstances.”
I expelled a heavy breath. Thanked her and put down the phone.
Six months ago my physician, Alexander Fleege, M.D. with the LaVita Group, informed me that my condition was terminal. He gave me a year to live, at the outside, but said he’d be surprised if the end didn’t come sooner. He didn’t mean to sound callous, he said, but my health history was sketchy, at best, and this wasn’t his first rodeo. He’d been at the oncology game a long time and well, there were days when you blew sunshine and there were days when it was just better to tell the truth.
Knowing what I knew—where I stood health-wise, and where I stood legally with my impounded headstone—I can’t say I was overly enthusiastic about the idea of waiting for the bankruptcy court to come to my rescue. Yet at the same time, I didn’t have much choice. The clock was running out, and the best I could do was cross my fingers and hope a quick verdict would remedy the injustice.
While I waited to hear from the courts, I made weekly visits to the monument shop. I’d turn up every Sunday and check to see that the stone was still there and that the gate was still padlocked, then I’d walk across the street to the cemetery and say hello to the sexton, whose name I learned was Peter (or maybe it was Perr), then walk up the hill and stand on my plot for a while and look out at the world and meditate. Peter (Perr) was always interested in my updates regarding the stone, and he often took time to brew a pot of coffee and chat with me about its involuntary confinement. We spent a good many hours together and got to be friends. I liked the kid, and tombstone notwithstanding, I was comforted knowing such a kind soul would be tidying up my own resting place someday.
Then something happened. Something quite odd.
As the weeks dragged on, my health began to show signs of improvement. I was still going to die, Dr. Fleege assured me, only not as soon as he’d originally predicted. He was embarrassed, I think, at having to revise his timetable and admit the possibility of being wrong. But he was, as he so often reminded me, a professional oncologist, and it was his job to keep me apprised of the situation, good or bad.
A new round of tests were ordered for my next appointment, and when they came in Dr. Fleege grudgingly admitted they looked even more encouraging than the previous set. It had only been two weeks since my last visit, but it appeared my life expectancy had doubled. I was going to live a year now, maybe longer.
“Don’t go getting cocky,” he warned me, removing his rubber gloves with a disdainful snap and tossing them into the biohazard container. “You’re still going to die, Ted. It’s not a matter of if, okay? It’s a matter of when.”
The medical people could call it what they wanted—luck, accident, divine intervention—I didn’t care. But I was on the road to wellness and there was nothing anyone could do about it. I didn’t mention the impounded headstone because I didn’t think Dr. Fleege would believe me. Yet I was certain it had everything to do with my miraculous recovery. When the monument shop closed, putting my future (and yes, my immortal soul) in limbo, my illness was arrested, too. The whole matter seemed improbable, a far-fetched speculation. Yet the way I saw it, as long as the stone marker was unable to find its way to my grave, the same might conceivably hold true for my body.
I was elated, of course, about the turn of events. I had an extra eighteen months or more in front of me. Maybe longer. But the mysterious one-eighty turnabout in my health seemed to exasperate everyone else I knew. Dr. Fleege, for instance, acted like a gambler chasing his losses. And my kids were even worse, treating my new lease on life as if it were somehow embarrassing, brought on by the commission of some masturbatory act.
“Are you sure you’re not dying?” my daughter Karen demanded in a scolding voice when she saw me. “What did Dr. Fleege tell you? Exactly.” She pressed her fists to her hips. “Did he give you a medical reason for the remission? Something useful? The hospice company is going to charge us, you know, if you decide you’re cured and you back out of the program. You can’t just come and go, willy-nilly, with people like that. Remember the forms we signed? The talks we had with that man, Mr. Cushing? They’re an outcome-based operation, Dad. They expect results.”
My son, Kevin, chimed in, looking to put his older sister in her place. Kevin had recently come to Jesus, and his interest in my resurgence was—how shall I say—more than just academic. He’d prayed over me numerous times since my diagnosis, and my recovery confirmed his belief in the healing power of faith. “Never mind Miss Smarty Pants, Dad,” he said. “What’s important here isn’t the hospice arrangement. It’s that you’re on the mend...with a chance to make peace with the Lord.” He smiled, a chilling Christian warmth flushing his face. “Praise God almighty and His son, our Lord Jesus Christ for this miracle of faith,” he said, closing his eyes and laying a sweaty hand on my head. “Thank you Jesus, in the name of the Father, for hearing the supplications of your humble servant, Kevin, whose most earnest prayer is, and ever shall be, to shepherd his father, Theodore, toward repentance and eternal salvation.”
“Jesus can stand in line,” Karen said hotly, turning to her brother. “Last time I checked, it’s me who’s doing all the work around here.” She glared at him, fuming. “Do you have any idea what these medical services run, you idiot? The man’s insurance is shit! He’s two full years from Medicare for Christ’s sake! I’m dealing with a $5000 deductible and a mountain of paperwork!”
Kevin frowned over a pair of thin pursed lips. The words stung, and an anguished look settled in his face. He didn’t like the idea that it was Karen who looked after the bills and groceries for me, taking all the credit for keeping my house in order, and he closed his eyes and folded his hands and whispered in a half-audible voice, “May the Lord in all his mercy damn you to hell, Karen.”
Their bickering went on and on like this. The same way it used to when they were kids. And as I watched them flail and shout and threaten one another over my quote-unquote well-being, I felt myself fading further into invisibility.
People had been looking through me for years, but I hadn’t recognized the extent of my transparency until I watched my children duke it out in the middle of my kitchen that day, shouting one another down in venomous voices, each pretending to know what was best for me.
“Stop it,” I said, pounding my fist on the table.
They looked at me. Surprised.
“Stop,” I said. “Stop what you’re doing and leave.”
They turned to one other, shocked. Flashes of recrimination lighting their eyes.
“Leave,” I said. “Now.”
I turned my gaze to the window. I couldn’t look at them anymore. I’d been given a life-saving reprieve, and neither of them was smart enough or selfless enough to see it. Their mother would have been horrified. Her own offspring! Thank god we decided to quit at two! A month ago I was a condemned man, but now, by some miracle of mysterious origin, my death sentence had been lifted, my execution stayed. I was woke, as the man in the penguin suit said on TV the other night during the Academy Awards. I was present. I’d been given a glimpse of a world I’d forgotten about long ago, and my eyes had been opened to possibilities I’d never dreamed.
I scrounged up a pen and paper. Began writing down all the things I intended to do with my newfound freedom. All the things my early onset invisibility had precluded me from doing in the past. I’d learned a lot listening to people I didn’t know, or like, tell me how my life should, or would, play out. And now I intended to make the most of that knowledge—by ignoring it. I had a future again, and what that future did not include was illness, suffering, or death by anonymity.
“How do you feel?” Dr. Fleege asked at my next appointment.
“Relevant,” I said.
He looked at me, suspiciously.
“Any changes in your medications since your last visit? Any lifestyle changes I should know about?”
I shrugged. “I took up smoking.”
He stopped what he was doing and stared at me, incredulous. “What?”
“I took up smoking.”
He hung his head. “Jesus, Ted.” He looked at me from under a pair of heavy gray brows and implored me to tell him I was lying. “You’re busting my balls, right? Please. Tell me you’re busting my balls.”
I took off my shirt and laid it on the examination table. Flexed my arms and sucked in a deep, satisfying breath. “Camel straights,” I told him, slapping my pecs. “A pack a day.”
He threw up his hands demanding to know why, in God’s name, I would make such a self-destructive choice when it was a proven fact cigarettes kill.
“Because I felt like it,” I said.
“You felt like it.”
“Yeah.”
For once in his life my esteemed oncologist didn’t know what to say. He apparently forgot I was living on borrowed time—time brokered by no one other than himself, the professional MD whose first rodeo was not me—and it must have also escaped his ivy-league memory that it was his diagnosis of less than a year ago that set me on the path to the cemetery. If anyone deserved to act gob-smacked, it was me. The fact that I’d found a way to dodge death was a one in a million shot, and if it annoyed him, too bad. From here on in I was going to do anything and everything I wanted, even if no one else agreed with it. Especially if no one else agreed with it.
“Smoking’s a filthy habit, Ted. Filthy and dangerous.”
“Yeah, maybe,” I agreed. “But it looks sexy, and I look sexy doing it.”
He shook his head and put forth a heavy sigh and stuck the ends of his stethoscope in his ears. He pressed the cold chrome cone to my chest and told me to breathe. Deep. Deeper. My lungs were clear, he said, grudgingly, when he’d finished the exam—despite the reckless behavior I’d chosen to embrace. He removed the earbuds and allowed the instrument to fall against his pressed white shirt. But while I finished dressing he advised me in the strongest language he could summon, to quit. Now. While I was ahead.
But I had no intention of quitting. Or slowing down in any way. As long as my headstone was locked up in the monument shop, I was going to do whatever I wanted. And what I wanted was to cut loose. Live like I’d never lived before.
By the end of the week, I was sporting a tattoo on my left arm.
By the end of the month I’d sung karaoke in the airport bar, eaten my first dish of Rocky Mountain oysters, and attended a purification ceremony in a sweat lodge with a small band of Ojibwe natives who lived in a commune on the western edge of town.
It wasn’t a bucket list. Bucket lists were for losers on their way out. It was a statement of resolution. A declaration of purpose. I wanted everyone to know that from here on in my only intention in this world was to live out loud, full volume, and never again go gently into that good night. I intended to come at life with the same reckless abandon Death had once come at me. Big, hairy, brawling. I didn’t know how long my luck would last or how long my tombstone would remain under lock and key. But I did know that, in the end, it didn’t matter. That what mattered was the here and now.
So I lived.
I lived like there was no tomorrow. I howled at the moon and danced like nobody was watching and embraced every moment as if it were going to be my last because, yes, even in my shiny new refurbished condition, I knew someday it would be.
By month’s end, my self-actualization process was fully underway. I worked at it, twenty-four seven, and was in the early stages of finding my way back from being the man I was to the man I am, when the oncology office phoned and insisted I come in for an unscheduled meeting. The call came as no surprise. It had been a while since Dr. Fleege and I had seen one another.
He walked into the examination room holding his laptop in his palm, acknowledging me without making eye contact.
“Ted.”
“Doc.”
He was scouring the screen, its light reflecting in the lenses of his expensive, tortoise-shell glasses, and in his free hand he clutched a ballpoint pen, which he clicked suspiciously while pacing the room.
I knew what was coming. I could see it. Hell, I could almost smell it, it was so palpable. The sour look on his face telegraphed the content of the entire conversation.
“How do you feel, Ted?”
I shrugged, affably. “How should I feel?”
He looked at me and blinked, his response timed for maximum gravitas. “You’ve got a terminal illness,” he said. “People with terminal illnesses generally feel pretty shitty.”
I smiled, turning up my palms. “And yet, here I am. Alive and happy.”
His eyes narrowed under the wrinkle of his long gray brow, and he tugged at his bottom lip with his thumb and forefinger. “Listen, Ted,” he said, taking up the sentence with slow deliberation. “I’ve got some difficult news.”
I listened, but only out of politeness. I’d visited the monument shop the morning prior and my headstone was still locked away beside the shed, under the shade tree. So what he knew, or believed he knew, or wanted to believe he knew but never would, was going to have absolutely no effect on me.
He cleared his throat and glanced over the rim of his glasses. His attention had already found its way back to the laptop. He scratched, seriously, at the lobe of his ear, and frowning, leveled me with an expression of deep medical concern. He told me we were looking at a setback. He said the latest round of tests showed a remission in the remission—or something like that—and it now appeared as if his original diagnosis was correct after all.
I congratulated him on his prognostication skills.
He chuckled. “You mean prognosis.”
Whatever. I went along. It was easier than arguing.
He thanked me and asked if I was still smoking. I said I was, and that I had no intention of quitting, and with that the conversation ground to an inhospitable halt. He looked at me, sternly. Professionally. Had it been any other day in any other lifetime he might have lashed me with a list of stinging admonishments. But it was as if he knew it made no difference anymore, and instead of a lecture, I was treated to silence.
We stared at one another.
He closed the laptop.
“I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, Ted.”
I shrugged. It was his job. I understood.
He patted my arm and offered a sympathetic smile. It was clear he felt better knowing my expected number of days was back in accordance with his original estimation, and I was happy for him that he was happy about being right. Now the sheepskin on his office wall could start meaning something again.
We shook hands.
He embraced me.
I patted his back and told him to take care of himself, that it was all going to work out.
Early the next morning I hired a cab to take me over to the shuttered monument shop, and there under the shade tree, I saw my headstone, still locked safely behind the chain link fence. Peter (Perr), who was at work across the road in the cemetery, saw me and waved. He was snipping away at a privet hedge with a pair of giant scissors, and I waved back, shouting across the road that we should get together for coffee next week. He gave me a thumbs-up and went back to his pruning.
It’s difficult to remember the exact sequence in which the events of the following week transpired, or by what grace of God their gifts fell into my lap. But by Friday afternoon I was in proud possession of a new ride, a new look, and a new woman.
The Harley Sportster with the RocketTeer sidecar came my way from a guy named Benny who was on his way to jail for criminal trespass...and menacing. He was pinched for change and needed a lawyer before his next court appearance. We closed the deal in less than ten minutes, then spent the better part of the morning sitting on his stoop, drinking beer.
I liked Benny, and I wished him well with his case, and before I left for home he told me to wait on the porch, he had something for me. He disappeared into his apartment, and when he came back he was holding a paper sack. In this sack was a tie-dyed do-rag and an old set of leathers. “Here,” he said. “I want you to have these. I won’t be needing them.”
I was overwhelmed by Benny’s generosity, and I thanked him many times. He grinned and put a beefy arm around my shoulder and lowered his head. “One last thing, Ted.”
I looked at him.
“The operator’s license?” He spoke in a low, conspiratorial voice. “I’d forget about it if I was you.” The practice run I’d made around the parking lot had done little to inspire his confidence, and he suggested that the motor vehicle department might be “iffy” about issuing me a license, even if I did pass the written exam. “But hell,” he said. “Who needs a license, right?” He laughed through a set of stained, broken teeth. “What are they gonna do if they catch you? At your age? Throw you in jail?”
Benny’s do-rag and leathers fit me almost perfectly. But my naked biceps appeared thin and weak poking through the armholes of his leather vest. So I went back to the tattoo shop and signed up for a full sleeve ink job. A Disney-meets-the-Book-of-Revelations theme; Maleficent getting it on with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
My new aesthetic came together just the way I’d hoped, and when I looked at myself in the mirror I couldn’t have been more pleased. The new complement of ink and leather completed my spiritual resurrection. I was no longer invisible, no longer a man to be looked past or dismissed. I’d gotten back what I’d lost or given away over the years, and my newly-acquired confidence gave me the juice to put a personal ad in the classifieds.
I hooked up with Loretta Tinkleman the day the advertisement first ran. She called, we talked, and by that evening we were having dinner together. It was old school all the way. No dating-site metrics, no Myers-Briggs personality tests, no games. We met, we liked each other, and we threw in the way adults used to do, back in the old days.
Loretta was a widow who lived alone in an apartment down on the south side. She’d lost her husband, Danny, in a car accident, and spent the last ten years of her life trying to outrun the old folks home where her daughter, Megan, insisted she belonged. She had some baggage, yeah. But who doesn’t? And what did it matter? She was the living-breathing antidote to every messed up thing that had happened in my life, and I was willing to look past her shortcomings the same way she looked past mine.
My kids didn’t care for Loretta. They dropped by the house one evening when she was at a meeting (she’d had a teensy-weensy cocaine problem in the 80s and still worked her program), and started in like a couple of cheap detectives, telling me everything that was wrong with her. My daughter, Karen, pegged her for grifter. My son, Kevin, accused her of being a floozy and said he wanted me tested for STDs. They confessed to having Googled her name and admitted that while they hadn’t uncovered anything nefarious (yet), they did find her lack of social media presence both irregular and suspicious.
Neither child inquired after the bike and sidecar, which I kept parked in the garage under a canvas tarp. They knew about it—I’d told them the day I bought it—but they were only prepared to wage battle on a single front.
“Why all the wild changes, Dad?” Karen demanded brazenly, fists back on her hips. “What’s going on with you, anyway?”
“Can’t you just content yourself to be alive, Dad?” Kevin said, piling on with his Pentecostal claptrap. “Isn’t that enough?” He shook his head. “Karen’s right for a change. You’re going too fast. You’re out of control.”
They told me I needed to ramp it down. Take it easy before I got myself in trouble. Neither one of them had ever worried about fast when I was on a dead run for my life with the reaper breathing down my neck. So I found their concerns something on the hysterical side—and told them as much. They didn’t like what I was saying. They didn’t care for the extra-strength, unfaded me. But what they didn’t know was that they were going to see a lot more of it in the future. If they thought I was crazy now, wait until they found out I’d let my life insurance lapse. And that I took out a reverse mortgage on the house to pay Benny for the bike and sidecar.
When Loretta got home later that night, the first thing she did was give me a big sloppy kiss. Then she sat down at the table and helped me with the credit card applications I’d been filling out. On average I’d get three or four offers a week from banks all over the country, each one asking me if it wouldn’t enhance my lifestyle if I carried their credit card (respected by businesses everywhere) in my hip pocket. These applications had been showing up in my mailbox for years. But it wasn’t until my tombstone was confiscated and my death sentence repealed and I’d thrown in with Loretta that I saw the wisdom in saying yes.
We had decided to go on a road trip to San Francisco come fall. A long, expensive cross-country road trip that was going to take every penny of my savings—and more, if I could swing it. So as soon as the applications came in, out they went again. One after another until I had a deck of plastic big enough to deal a two-handed game of Blackjack.
“Well, that’s the last of them,” I announced, gathering up the postage paid envelopes and walking them out the front door where I stuffed them in the mailbox. “Let’s celebrate.”
Loretta was all for getting toasted as long as it didn’t involve putting anything up her nose. We opened a bottle of Two-buck Chuck and passed it between us, toasting the vacation that lay tantalizingly ahead. We were excited about the trip. Ecstatic, if anyone cared to know. The long journey by motorcycle and sidecar was going to be an adventure of mythic proportion, a once-in-a-lifetime vacation for both of us, and to consecrate its historic launch, we got high and made love by candlelight.
I rolled onto my back, gassed, when she let go of me. My chest rose and fell like a bellows, and I couldn’t stop smiling.
“What the hell is that?” she snorted. She was spread-eagle on her belly. Eyes aglow, lips curled in a pout of angelic bliss.
“What?”
“That look on your face?”
“I’m dying,” I said. “Of happiness.”
She whinnied and grabbed my cock. “You sweet-talking sonofabitch. Get over here and get kissed.”
Loretta was older than me by five years and had a gimpy leg that tightened up at inconvenient moments, but she was a firecracker in the sack and could have tangoed her way around a mattress in a pirate’s peg-leg if she had mind to. In bed, she called me “Hotrod” or “Turbo.” I called her “Waffles.” She got a good laugh out of that one the first time I said it and clubbed me over the head with her pillow. “Watch it with the rumplebuttskin stuff, buster,” she warned, laughing tears as big as raindrops, “or I’ll cut your pecker off with a butter knife and feed it to my goldfish.”
In my old life when I was transparent, women used to look through me instead of at me. They’d ask me how things were instead of how things are. But not anymore. Not since I’d walked back my death sentence and taken up living again. I was engaged now, present and in the moment, and the threat of having my noodle bobbed by a wildcat in heels was the most fearfully exhilarating thing I’d ever imagined.
We aim to stay in a lot of swanky hotels on our trip out to the coast. Tour the wine country, maybe, and enjoy a meal or two at the French Laundry. The plan is to run up a tab with so many zeros it’ll take an accountant a thousand years to dig to the bottom of it. Max out every last piece of the plastic these bank dopes are willing to part with, and when the bills come due, toss up our hands and laugh.
Like Benny the biker said, what are they gonna do? Throw you in jail?
It was an odyssey, this business with the headstone. But an instructive one. Now that I’m back to being the man I am, the Theodore J. Renny of old, I no longer worry about being buried in an unmarked grave. Or finding myself stranded, cap in hand, on the banks of the River Styx without credentials. It’s the credit cards that finally eased my mind. They were the last puzzle-piece in my quest for immortality; the shiny reminder that no one is ever invisible when he owes someone money.
The numbers were going to be prodigious.
Staggering to the eye!
Unforgettable, just like me.