This too sullied flesh...
What's left when the temptation for which you've long prayed meets the flesh that is now flabby, enfeebled, and implacably, cantankerously flaccid?
My skin, this too sullied flesh, has loosened into all corrugation, furrow, pucker, crinkle, and crimp. When I bend any part of my body, this betraying, crusted sheath in which I’m wrapped turns all to creases and wrinkles and a rucking of rotting, flaking, spotted, leathery husk.
How did I get here?
In my unpublished Bildungsroman of a novel, LIBERTYTOWN, there is a passage about a visit with my aunt, Sissie, at the nursing facility where she spent her last years; during the visit, she mistakes me for my long dead father. This:
When Sissie lost me that day, I wanted to run, call for an aide, but instead, I waited out the disappearance. She returned, and I did what I often do when the distance between who she is and who I remember becomes too great; I tried to bring her back to me with the Pacquin Hand Cream she has always loved. I can no longer find it in grocery or drug stores, and so I order it on line in packages of four from Vermont Country Store. It’s like whipped cream of lanolin and slightly soured honeysuckle, another talismanic scent for both of us, and I hope it will camouflage the odor of antiseptic unguents and unmistakable wafting of creeping, encroaching death in the air at Record Street. As I soothe it into her clawed hands and twisted feet, the skin of which have thinned and dried into etiolated fragility, threatening to evanesce into dusty shards as have the sepiaed, deteriorated pages of the prayer missals and poetry notebooks she’d kept as a young woman and passed on to me (along with Broadway and disapproval of my mother and the bed made by my great grandfather whose name I cannot recall and the hardware for which I have lost in one of these damned boxes in these damned ruined rooms that used to be safe, that used to be our home) I am frightened by the transparent quality of her skin.
No wonder her memory and self have flown; her flesh can barely contain her.
I imagine her life force evaporating through this thin layer of dermis, all exposed nerve and sensation, the protective outer layer long since worn away. The surfaces of her hands are so browned, so brittle, like the once lilac scented tissue paper with which she’d line the drawers of the oak wood dresser companion piece to the bed I cannot now assemble, protective layers between the wood she’d drown in Scott’s Liquid Gold once each year, those now faded, crumbling tissue linings which I have never been able to bear removing, rotting away bit by bit, attaching to my boxers and t-shirts, so that I am always seeming to carry around some part of who she was and what she did and the safe world she tried to make for me. Her skin is so cold and her pulse so dim, as if her heart has all it can do now to keep itself beating and is unable to afford the effort to send warmth and vigor to the extremities of hand, foot, or brain, and so, like her memories, her limbs are wasting away from neglect.
I rub and I remind, but there will never be new skin here, and there will be no new adventures for the two of us, and the trembling of her hands as I try to soothe the lotion into them reflects the vibrating terror strangling my heart as I realize that she is flaking away from the outside in now, becoming a part of the horrid fog of active dying permeating the air there at Record Street, where not all the jars of Pacquin left in the world could cover the stink of so many imminent goodbyes.
The passage was partly inspired by the way Sissie’s skin had thinned, and was all lined. like crumpled parchment, papery, fragile, translucent. Now, when I look down and see my arms covered in the same scarred, battle-worn, war-torn crepe of flesh, I despair.
How did I get here?
I recently turned 62. It is the age at which one is first eligible for Social Security benefits and I intend to start collecting them now, even though the longer you wait, the higher the monthly amount. I think I’d better get what I can while I can; and given that I have no other income, the political climate, and my rapidly deteriorating health … well, picture gotten.
Because my skin. This flesh is weak. Alas. As fate and my rotten luck at all things to do with sexually-charged relationships would have it, at 62 I am being presented with all sorts of carnal temptations, wanton sybaritism, ravenous hedonism, and invitations to venery the volume of which I have only ever dared dream before; and while my spirit is more than willing to say yes to this profligacy of libertinism, to at last live out long-desired fantasies, my body is saying to many (most? ALL?) of these licentious propositions:
“You want me to do what?”
I’ll spare you the details and myself the embarrassment. I’ve no complaints. I’ve had more than my share of delicious hookups and sexual adventures, and I’m unashamed of the thirsty enthusiasm with which I pursued intimate liaisons, languorous lovemakings, and zipless fucks. And now, the combination of having had a bout of covid in December which morphed into serial episodes of bronchitis resulting in what seems to be long covid, and turning 62 with its natural ebbing of physical energies and functions, I’ve been involuntarily semi-retired (more like 9/10ths retired) from tricking and trolloping.
And I’m good. And surprised. Turns out that some of my drive to hook-up was habit, and not just habit, but habit bordering on addiction. There are unwritten novels’ worth of reasons why I spent so many hours in pursuit of sex, and very few of those pages would be to do with the actual physical pleasures, and far more to do with my need to have my lack of self-esteem assuaged by men I considered out of my league saying yes to me. It was from the pursuit I gained my gratification; once I had the beautiful, or young, or hung, or ripped, or attached, or down low, or “straight”, or just visiting, or not interested in anyone over 30, or whatever reluctant or unlikely man in my presence, willing and ready, the actual physical act was mostly beside the point, and often as not, far less satisfying than just getting myself off, or, truthfully, reading in bed.
I had a lot of years where I wasn’t tricking, and so, I felt like I wanted to get as many men as possible before I was so far past gay hook-up viability that it wasn’t worth trying to Grindr. I had a good run. I had a lot of good times. I had (and have) an unexpected and unanticipated number of what could be called “relationships” — not the kind that result in rings or marriage or commitment, but friends with benefits who enjoy each other without expectations or strings.
And among those, almost without exception, we do not know each other’s last names. Or, in some cases, even first names. And that was right, that fit in my life.
But now my life is changing shape. Like infants become toddlers who then move to childhood which segues into adolescence and teen years which become multiple stages of young adulthood and then adulthood and then middle age and then late middle age and then senior years and the long dance of senescence until death; well, just like that, I find I’m somewhere coming to the end.
And long covid’s imposition of celibacy has made me review where I am, where I’ve been, and what it means to be me, now, here where I am, going. And all the pretty young men I’m being offered, and the sildenafil and tadalafil I can swallow to make 62 look like the 49 I claim to be on Grindr, aren’t filling the empty spot in my life now like they once did; like the Pacquin I rubbed into Sissie’s skin, they are a salve, not a cure, and they can’t cover up or delay the stink of imminent goodbyes.