Pete Hamill - Piecework

But soon that theory shriveled away, as I read both Marx and history and witnessed the spectacle of “socialist” tanks in Czechoslovakia, the atrocities of Pol Pot, the crushing of Solidarity in Poland. There might again be a time when young Americans will be moved by political idealism or faith in a theory; alas, I won’t be able to join them.

For any truly conscious middle-aged American must recognize that belief is the great killer of the century. Political belief has slaughtered millions. Religious belief has slaughtered the rest. Agree with me or die has been the essential slogan of the believers, at home and abroad, and you could fill every line of every page of every newspaper in the world with the names of their victims and still not have sufficient room. And yet we cannot seem to ever get free of them; charlatans pose as wise men; hustlers offer themselves as redeemers. And in come the brawny young men with the shovels, to turn the earth and bury the dead.

So in middle age, I am permanently secular. Television preachers provide inexhaustible entertainment, on screen and in motel rooms. And I am moved to outbursts of crazy laughter at the irrational gibberish of the New Age pitchmen, whose public appeal so perfectly mirrors that of the Swaggarts and Bakkers. Both represent some peculiarly American mixture of political exhaustion and the fear of death. Here (they say): grip this crucifix or this crystal and place your faith in the unseeable. Don’t worry about the homeless, the starving, the injured, the humiliated; this life is a mere vestibule through which you must pass to greater happiness on the other side of death. Great stuff. But when they start running for the presidency or proclaiming on The Oprah Winfrey Show that they are God, I begin to check the locks on my door.

The basic question in middle age might be this: How can I live the rest of my life with a modicum of grace?

For many men, the heart of the matter sometimes becomes sexual desire. In spite of the Leather Elbow School of American Literature (aging professor with leather elbows sewn on his corduroy jacket falls in love with hot sophomore), I’m convinced that most middle-aged men aren’t interested in involvements with very young women. It is not that sex has lost its power; if anything, the drive is stronger, because you know what you are doing at last, you have the accumulated sensations of a lifetime packed within you.

But very few young women can join middle-aged men in the exacting voyage of a love affair, never mind embark on the ardent passage of a marriage. Sensible men know this. Unless they have recently emerged from monasteries, middle-aged men simply know too much for young women — about sex, about themselves, and about the world. And most such men are not yet old enough to be cast in the role of sage. In the last years before I married again (fifteen years after my first marriage ended), I met some enchanting young women. They possessed a fresh beauty. They were intelligent. They had common sense. But I couldn’t bring myself to explain again who Sandy Koufax was, or Flattop, or to recite the lyrics of “Teach Me Tonight.” I couldn’t describe the rules of stickball or nights at Birdland. None could believe that there was once a world without television and that I had lived in it. Their myths were not mine.

So, like most sensible middle-aged men, those who have learned to adjust their emotional thermostats, I let them pass by. Their young, taut bodies were delightful to gaze upon, but they only reminded me of the serrated flesh of my own aging carcass. They were of an age when they could still expect ecstasy, some gigantic removal from the planet in the union of love and sex; I envied this blind romantic faith but I also knew better. I also did not want to become a comic figure, the dirty old man of song and story, who gets older and older while the women remain the same age. And I suppose, too, that I feared an inability to perform; all aging men do. Was it possible (I asked myself at the midnight hour) that I once made love eight times in a single day, to two different women? And answered: yes, but no more.

But if my own experience can stand for that of others, then sexual desire certainly does not wane as you move into middle age. It does assume its proper part in the larger drama of the completion of a life. And any life is obviously more than sexual bliss or its denial. I have friends who have been searching in vain for two decades for some simple explanation of the meaning of life. I’m convinced that there is no such meaning. I don’t ask for the meaning of the song of a bird or the rising of the sun on a misty morning. There they are, and they are beautiful, and I embrace them when I can. They are part of living, and living does have a value. When we’re gone, the world vanishes forever. We lose baseball and Vermeer, the poetry of Yeats and the moves of Fred Astaire, wives and children, brothers and sisters, the smell of dogs in winter and the sound of bees on a summer afternoon.

Knowing what you will soon lose makes living even more precious, and the middle-aged man becomes infinitely more concerned with time. I find myself more conscious of light, because light is the most primitive measure of time; I spend as many hours as possible in the country, where the movement of the sun is so much more obvious and poignant than it is in the city. I arrange my social life in different ways, avoiding whenever possible the brittle chatter of cocktail parties, the strained social performances at formal dinners. I try to avoid all fads and fashions and to be skeptical of flattery. I seldom read books when they are published and find myself drawn back to the classics, to a few books that I first read years ago and failed to understand and that now seem to be about my own time on earth. More frequently now, I read history, biographies, memoirs, and journals because they have the effect of lengthening my life backward into the past, and because the complicated stories of other lives layer and multiply my own.

And because living seems more extraordinary than ever, I sleep less. In this, among so many other things, I resemble my father. In the last thirty years of his life (he died at eighty), he rose before dawn, rattling teacups, furious in some inarticulate way if his sons slept late. He never said so, but I’m certain now that the fury was about the waste of living. We have these dwindling hours and days to savor and use; it is almost sinful to occupy them with death’s sweet brother, sleep. Ancl so I am awake. Look (I say to my wife, her hand warm in the chilly dawn): the snow is melting in the fields outside the house. The trees are noisy with birds. The lake is making churning sounds, as the ice breaks and the bass stir at the bottom. In a few more weeks, they’ll be playing the first games of another season, and we can watch a fresh new rookie try to hit the curveball. The world will soon be green again. We’ll read Trollope beside the pond. And around these parts, fruit always ripens in the autumn.

ESQUIRE,

June 1988

That evening, when I returned to the hotel room in Miami, the message light was blinking on the telephone like an extra pulse. I sat down wearily on the edge of the bed and dialed the operator. My wife had called. And two sources for the story I was reporting. And my doctor… my doctor? Calling me from New York? The weariness vanished. In fifteen years, he’d never once called me anywhere unless I’d called him first. A week earlier I had submitted to my annual physical. All was normal. But here he was, calling me in a hotel in Miami. I glanced at my watch: a few minutes before 7:00. Probably gone home, but I called his office anyway. He was still there. And he went straight to the point.