Getting Picky About Aging

I used to perch on my brother’s back when I was small enough to perch on another human being without their need for a chiropractor. I had a bottle of rubbing alcohol and box of Kleenex always within reach.  They were my surgical tools.  I took the process seriously.

My brother would ask me to “get them.”  This meant he needed the zits on his back squeezed.  He is eight years older than me.   So I was probably seven at the time.  He was…oh shit, I hate math.  Let’s see.  If seven and seven is fourteen, then seven and one more must be …FIFTEEN!   He was fifteen.

I suppose this is how we bonded.     I think I kind of liked when he screamed in pain as I applied the alcohol liberally to a freshly squeezed zit. He writhed around furiously, but I never fell off.  I suppose this was as much fun as a strange kid like me could have, unless you counted sitting on the dog house in the back yard for hours.

I also enjoyed clipping my Dad’s fingernails.   He’d swing his arm over the front seat of the car so I could work on his nails. He liked it when I pushed the cuticles back and clipped them ACROSS, not curved. I couldn’t work on his left hand until we”d set up camp for the night, after a couple rounds of Jarts, which were pointy–assed metal spears with huge plastic “feathers” on them like arrows on steroids. You tossed the suckers in the air and tried to stick them in plastic circles that lay flat on the ground … a medieval twist on horseshoes. The fact that I have two eyes and all my toes is a miracle. That’s all I’m going to say on the subject.

We’d barrel down the turnpike, pre- Nader seatbelts, pre fifty-five- miles- an -hour speed limits, hauling a Banner trailer, while I, a morose seven-year-old, snipped away with a Swiss Army clipper on my Dad’s nails.

This is the SAME Dad who argued bitterly with my daughter when he’d take her out to practice driving on the highways around my parents’ house.

“Keep BOTH hands on the wheel at ten and two!”   He’d yell when she casually handled the steering wheel with both hands at the bottom.

“Ten and TWO!”  

“Stop YELLING Pop-Pop!  I know what I’m doing!  JEEZUS.  Chill OUT!”

“If you don’t want to hold the wheel at TEN and TWO, then pull over!”

She pulled over and the two of them wouldn’t speak for the rest of the evening.    Fucking Leos.

So it was “Mister TEN and TWO”, who hauled our asses down the highway, with a trailer, with one arm over the front seat so his psycho daughter could snip away.

                     This brings me to the purpose of this story.    My deterioration.

I liken my deterioration to the monitoring, and subsequent “getting” of those zits and fingernails of my youth.  Zits and aging, an interesting dichotomy of disgusting and mesmerizing.

I cannot believe what’s transpired with this thing that my twenty-year old self lives in.   It’s appalling, yet extremely interesting, in so many ways.

 For example, when I look at myself in the mirror every morning I could absolutely swear that my neck has moved further forward from where it used to be.   The skin below my jaw, what is commonly known as “the neck area,” has become more and more like the shirred fabric on a bad prom dress. From the side, the skin from my chin goes straight down to the clavicle area, very similar to the pouch on a pelican. (Do pelicans have clavicles?)   I use a magic cream than seems to tighten the jaw-line a little until about noon.  I try not to allow anyone to see me from the side. This is not an easy thing to accomplish.  It’s exhausting.

 There was this guy? Who took my picture from the side?  And posted it on Facebook?     They’ve never found his body.     Ugly doesn’t mean stupid, ladies and gentlemen.

My legs are the approximate color of wallpaper paste.  Purple spider veins encircle my ankles. They look like a bad tattoo rendering of bare trees in the winter.  I’d SWEAR there is a new branch every day.  Some of the “branches” end in purple splotches, as if the ink got clogged, then suddenly spit out a glob.  My spider veins strive to become varicose.  I know, because they whisper at night and tell me.  They scare the cat.  But I still find them terrifyingly interesting.  Like watching a boil develop, or an ingrown toenail move deeper.

There is an actual bulge midway up the back of my left leg, like the gnarl of a tree. What the fuck?

My arms are another source of introspection and alarm. In high school I was voted the person with the most beautiful arms and back. Or at least I imagined I was.  The facts don’t matter.

I found a really cool cotton shift dress in San Francisco.  It was in a store that sold clothes from Tibet. It has ruffles around the scoop-neck.    I tried it on, seeing the gamin I used to be in my imagination, because the mirror was too high for me to get a full-body shot.  I believed it would be really sweet with tights and black, patent leather Mary Janes or Swedish clogs.  When I came out of the dressing room, my daughter, ever the diplomat, said, “Mommy, why don’t you try the two-toned grey dress without the ruffle around the neck?”  

 But I liked the ruffle so I bought it.  When I put it on at home and examined myself with the discerning eye of a zit-picker, I realized I looked like a big tranny in the thing. My meaty arms burst forth from arm-holes that are encircled by ridiculous ruffles. What was I thinking?

I’m not going to mention my breasts, except to say that they grow longer each day.  I plan to wrap them around what’s left of my neck to keep me warm this winter.

 

My stomach is far more interesting than all the other parts combined.

I tried on clothes in the Last Chance Thrift Store last week, I got a really good look at the entity that is planning to separate from my body and take over the world after feeding for a couple more months on its host … me.  Such pastiness and ripples I haven’t seen since Ghostbusters.  I don’t need to tell you which character I’m referring to.  There I stood, in that musty place, staring into a chipped mirror. I picked up the entity that bulged forth, then dropped it. I did that several times to test the gravity of the situation. I could actually drape it over my forearm like a small blanket…or a cat.  Where did it come from? I wondered if I could sell it.  Could it be varnished and used as an end table?  

I snapped out of it.  There wasn’t much air in that little fitting room, and the mold of old things was making me hallucinate.    I stuffed the thing back into my jeans.  It was too much to process in one afternoon. 

This happens on a daily basis.  I look at the things on my body and wonder…where the FUCK did THIS come from?     And zits?  I still get those too!  As if aging isn’t enough of a bizarre experiment in cells and molecular rearrangement.   I find zits smack in the middle of my back where my meaty arms can’t reach them, and once, on the back of my upper thigh!   Who gets a zit there???  

I don’t have time right now to mesmerize you with the paper-thin quality of my skin and the fact that it occasionally decides to bleed in the oddest places, merely because I’ve leaned against something.

But I find that my body has become like a science experiment over which I have no control. There’s a mean, cosmic nerd in a lab down the hallway of my life, just past the ladies room, who mixes sinister concoctions in Petrie dishes and applies them to my body as I sleep.

I wish someone could perch on my body and get rid of these things with a box of Kleenex and a bottle of rubbing alcohol.