What Would Kinky Do?: How to Unscrew a Screwed-Up World Read Online Free PDF Page B

you home feeling like the Ancient Mariner? Hell, I've lived hard and loved hard and I was supposed to die young. If that had happened, of course, I never would have gotten the chance to order the Blue Plate for Senior Citizens at Luby's. And I probably wouldn't have noticed that John Wayne movies seem to be getting better and better.
    All that notwithstanding, when you get to be a geezer you can gleefully gird yourself in garish geriatric garb. I've lately taken to wearing an oversized straw hat like the one van Gogh wore when he painted "Night Cafe." In van Gogh's case, unfortunately, he wore lighted candles on his hat, which was one reason they put him in the mental hospital. Other heroes of mine who wore large straw hats are Father Damien, Billy the Kid, and Don Quixote, none of whom saw sixty except for Quixote, who lives forever in the casino of fiction. And then, of course, there's always Juan Valdez.
    My life, it seems, is a work of fiction, as well. As a reader, it's getting more and more difficult to find books that are older than I am. I'm currently reading, for instance, J. Frank Dobie's A Texan in England, which was written one year before I was born. When you read books created before you were, the ancient pages are green fuses, leaves of grass, through which, as if by some arcane form of spiritual osmosis, you seemingly receive the wisdom of the past. Writing at the ripe young age of sixty, however, is quite another matter. Larry McMurtry once remarked that nobody writes great fiction after the age of sixty. If this is true, I don't have long to find out. There was a time when my goals were to be fat, famous, financially fixed, and a fagola by fifty, but these lofty ambitions were never entirely achieved. Looking back, I realize that the goals themselves were not important. The only thing that was important was my being an alliterative asshole.
    My father, in his later years, would wake up in the morning and say, "It almost feels good to be alive." The older I get, the more I understand how he felt. I have emulated Tom in surrounding myself with people still older than I, but needless to say, this task gets harder all the time. In the narrow, brittle world of material wealth I've tried to follow in my father's footsteps as well. When our accountant, Danny Powell, once asked my father what his financial goals were, Tom responded: "My financial goals are for my last check to bounce." This witty and wise outlook is very much in keeping with the gypsy's definition of a millionaire. The gypsies believe he is not a man with million dollars, but a man who's spent a million dollars. The gypsies have been reading my mail. At sixty, I find that I am rich in the coin of the spirit. That may not buy you a cup of coffee these days, but it might just buy you a large, satisfying slice of peace of mind.
    Finally, my incipient old age renders me the unalienable right to impart words of wisdom to all young little boogers whether they want to hear them or not. Some of the best I ever heard came from our old family friend Doc Phelps, one of my father's buddies in World War II, and for many years a biology professor at the University of Texas in Austin. Sometime in the midst of the eighties, on a trip to California, Tom and I stopped in to visit Doc one last time in a state hospital in New Mexico. Save us, Doc had almost no family or friends left, having been guilty of the mortal sin of outliving those who had once populated his life. We found him in a sterile room, void of even a shard of the personal possessions that would normally accrue to one who had lived such a rich and colorful life. Now he was dying in a little criblike hospital bed that very well may have resembled the crib in which he was born. It might've been easy to pity Doc, had he not given us something to take with us. "I'm a very lucky man," he said, "because I've loved many people in my life and I still do."

TENNIS ANYONE?

     
aven't played tennis since high