The Living Dead

Many people today consider them a plague of society. They tax our time and monitor our morals. They don't hear what we say but they watch our mouths as we speak. They are not "big brother" or any form of government and we are each and every one of us eventually destined to join their ranks barring some sort of tragedy. They are old people; those humans that are 65+. They eat from the senior menus. They drive Cadillacs. They have flesh colored ear pieces and at the tender age of twenty-seven, I am becoming one of them. Everyday my friends and family are witnessing my premature transformation into one of the.......not UNdead, some zombie, but the ALMOST dead, the elderly. And I don't mean that in the traditional, philosophical essence of "we are all growing older, watch him grow, isn't he maturing nicely?". I'm speaking in the sense of My-Knees-Hurt-My-Back-Hurts-Those-Rascally-Children-Are-In-My-Yard-Again-I'm -Calling-The-Police kind of old man. I'm talking about being twenty-seven going on seventy-seven. I'm talking about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

I don't know what happened or how it happened. Initially I thought it had crept up on me like some disease, crawling up and strangling my youth like a deadly, liver spotted vine. Monday I'm out with my friends, playing tag in my front yard. Wednesday I'm in junior high. Friday I'm in high school and by Sunday I'm in college and now what? Will I be dead by thirty? Can I stop The Change?......perhaps if I took a slew of pills...perhaps if I filled my medicine cabinets with pills and pills and pills and took them with me, took them after meals and at certain times of the day. I could get a weekly pill planner container and......no......this isn't helping.....my instincts are all wrong. It wasn't that simple. What if.......what if there was no Change? What if I really am just an old man trapped in a child's body? Have the signs always been there and I'm just starting to recognize them for what they were......

I'm in third grade and the bell rings. My classmates, my peers, my friends, put their schoolbooks away. They shove them carelessly into their desks and they run out the door. They break into the sunlight and head for the monkey bars. I stare out the window and watch them hang upside down and do penny drops. I watch them jump off the swing sets and play kickball. The teacher asks me if I'm going to join them. I pull open my desk (it's a mess but I know where everything is) and pull out a small novel. It's advanced for my reading level, but then again, so is my Inner Age. I ask the teacher if it would be okay if I just curled up in the classroom with a good book and read for a bit. I am eight years old. I am eighty years old. I am geriatric. The teacher puts a cough drop in her mouth and I jealously eyeball it, imagining the menthol burst behind my teeth, the cold heat caking my tongue. I make a note to save up my allowance to purchase some. My friends will be eating suckers and Big League Bubble Gum and I will be satiating my throat, coating it in a bitter but soothing lozenge.

I am in Junior High, making my way from the school to the street with the rest of my class. We are in gym and the teacher is a little (a lot) heavy. I don't understand why a fat man is teaching gym class. What could he possibly tell us? Would you ask a blind man to teach driver's ed? Would you ask a deaf man to teach Spanish? Would you ask a mute fellow to teach speech? The children jog along in front of me, excited to run the mile. They say they are going to beat their time from last year. They say they are going to do it in under ten minutes. I can barely hear them because I'm so far back, strolling along behind them at a snail's pace, trying to conserve my energy.

The teacher, his huge body covered in thick mats of tangled hair, fires off a gun and everyone takes off running. They are sprinting, legs pumping, sneakers slapping against the concrete. They are gasping for breath, screaming and shouting. I watch them disappear into the distance, around the corner, out of sight. I am power walking, pumping my arms at my sides while trying to regulate my breathing. "Slow and steady" I keep repeating to myself, "slow and steady wins the race. The turtle and the hare, my friend". I have to be gentle with myself, my body, step by step. Don't want to hurt the knees.

When I shuffle across the finish line, hands held high, a slight stitch in my side, I find that I am the last victor. "Last Victor" I believe, would generally denote a third place winner, not necessarily the Best Loser but I am okay with this. I'm just pleased with myself that I actually finished. I can now take "Running a Mile with No Preparation and For No Reason" off my Bucket List.

The fat girl, the kid with the limp and knee brace and the boy with the learning disability have all completed the mile at least two minutes in front of me. I look over at a boy named Brad who ran his hardest the whole way. He's breathing very heavy and his face is red and he's caked in sweat. Someone asks him if he needs to sit down. He drops to his knees and throws up in the grass. I do a lap (under cranking my power walk by a notch or two) around the group just as a bit of a cool down exercise.

Even though I finished a solid eight minutes behind Brad I am exhausted. The stitch in my side has exploded into a full blown tear while my upper back, neck and gums ache. My mouth tastes like blood and I'm caked in perspiration. More than anything I just want to take a nap. Back in the locker rooms I change without showering and lay down on a bench to catch a few ZZZs. In my life I will have two different locker room experiences. The first is this one. Some of the older boys take showers and meander around in towels. When they change they are quick and work hard at covering their tiny pink genitals. There is a bit of shyness, a bit of shamefulness, a bit of nervousness in our bodies. We want to be comfortable but are not. We cannot be. The second experience is at the YMCA where the old men are. These are my people. They shower in groups, in the nude, their gray pubic hair clinging to their lower abdomen, their thighs, falling to the wet tile floor. They put their feet up on benches and swing their giant yellow squash before you with pride, daring you to look, to peek. They dry themselves off and then peruse the place in the buff, searching for a drinking fountain, searching for a tennis partner, looking for a lost sneaker. They chat with each other, dressed in less than fig leaves, some deranged form of The Garden of Eden. I am terrified that this is what I will become in just a few short years if my transformation continues. Will I be thirty and shoving my penis into a young child's face? Asking him about snow mobiles? Asking him about Algebra? Asking him about his back swing? Aren't there laws about this sort of thing?

I'm in high school and all of my friends are having sex. They're waiting for their parents to leave the house so they can do "it". Someone does "it" in their parents bed, on their parents couches, in bowling alley parking lots. They're doing "it" in the backs of cars. Someone does "it" in a ditch next to a dirt road. A couple does "it" in the boys bathroom at the high school before getting busted and on one occasion a girl I know does it in a portapotty at a concert. They are disappearing into other rooms at parties and switching partners and partaking in three way maneuvers. A few of them are experimenting with same sex relations. They drive to the lake and do the crap out of each other in several tantric positions. "Doing the crap out of each other" is what I imagine is happening. Earth shattering, mind blowing sex. My friend earns himself the nickname Two Pump Chump from his girlfriend and my illusion becomes slightly skewed.

Old men don't have mind blowing sex. Old men don't have sex in the backseats of cars while using tantric positions and old men CERTAINLY don't have sex in dumpsters or portapotties or whatever. I drive my girlfriend down to the lake. I find a dark spot next to the water. I turn the engine off and the radio down, tuning it to some light rock. I crack the window a bit to let the warm summer breeze blow in. I turn in my seat to face my date and I ask her how her day was. I chat. She looks at me and untucks her shirt. She takes off her shoes and lets her hair down. I reach into the breast pocket of my button up and pull out some Werther Originals and offer one to her. She declines and slouches back, telling me that her day was just "okay".

I'm in college and I'm at a party in the dorms. It's taking place just down the hall from my room. People are wearing baggy clothes, backwards hats and listening to rap music. It's too loud and I can't hear what anyone is saying. I don't understand why the man on the stereo is so angry. Someone asks me if I want to play their Xbox and I say yes but just end up mashing all the buttons together, unable to understand or control the man on the screen with the multitude of knobs and levers (different sizes and colors) on the vast controller.
People carry beer bottles, beer cans and red plastic cups filled with orange juice and vodka. They drink ice tea and rum. One kid is drinking Scope because he couldn't steal anymore alcohol money from his parents. He is hopped up on codeine and groggy looking. A guy we call The Dude is sitting in the corner, alone, with a white robe on, staring at a photo of a tennis player in a magazine. He recently ate who knows how many mushrooms. He caresses the photo, looking as though he's going to start crying. Two kids are in the corner smoking pot from a glass pipe and two other kids are smoking something called Salvia Devinurum from a water bong with a butane lighter. They tell me that it's the prime way to smoke it. Something about the butane activating the plant and the water cleansing the smoke. I'm nodding my head and holding a bright green plastic cup my mom bought me filled with milk. I'm sipping it and I have a milk mustache.

Days, weeks, years later I need to go to work and have lost my keys (again). I'm looking for them when I realize that both my glasses and my wallet are on the loose as well. Jade asks me if I'm having a "senior moment". I finally borrow her keys and when I get to work a guy makes a crack about my "child bride". I've always thought this was an inside joke he made in regards to the infantile age we were when we got married but the more I mature / change / transform into this old man I'm thinking it's probably geared more towards an attack on the general idea of me being ninety-two and she being a mere twenty-five.

On Saturday afternoon Jade and I go to a matinee and tickets are twelve dollars and I say, "What!!! When I was a kid tickets were four-fifty!". The girl behind the glass (who doesn't even look old enough to have a job) just shrugs. I'm wearing loafers and cordoroys and a sweater with an ancient design on it that Jade calls my "Bill Cosby Sweater". It's ninety-five degrees outside but I am an inherently chilly person. I take sweaters with me almost everywhere I go.

Kids are texting during the film and I don't text. I mumble something darkly under my breath and Jade shooshes me and gives me a dirty look. Stupid technology. I don't understand it and it makes me angry but mostly just scares me. What about the "old ways"? I throw some popcorn at them and then slouch down in my seat and when they turn around to find out just who the F threw that I turn around as well to help them search the back (backER) rows for the scoundrel. Jade tells me I'm turning into the mean old man at the movies and I say fine and slouch down further and cross my arms and bite off a chunk of my Twizzler.
I take naps in the afternoon. Exhaustion just washes over me and I can't go on. I'll sleep for an hour, maybe two, before getting up for a few to have dinner and read a good book, maybe the Bible, before slipping off to bed. I will awake at five or six thirty with the sun where I will contemplate my life for a short while. I try to imagine how I got here. Why am I not going to the gym and drinking beer and doing push-ups and working on my truck in the garage? The transition has perhaps......perhaps not been a transition at all. Perhaps I wasn't born as a young man who was bitten by the Almost Dead and altered into one of them. Perhaps I really was born as Benjamin Button was, as an old man in a child's body. Perhaps I am aging in reverse and I will meet my youth in the middle. Perhaps my mid-life crisis will put things back on track. I will find interest in carpentry and working out and advanced video games and Ferraris and auto mechanics and perhaps by the time this happens they will have invented a time machine, perhaps in the form of a Dolorian and I have to take it to eighty to activate it's flux capacitor and when I do flames burst forth from my tires and I appear in 1989 and I am in fifth grade and I go outside and I kick the crap out of that stupid red kickball.