FINE WINE

I've been thinking a lot lately about getting older. Probably because it seems to be happening to me at an alarming rate over the past few years. At the moment I am standing, immobile, fixed squarely in the headlights of my 53rd birthday, which is barreling at top speed down the highway towards me with no intention of applying the brakes. And it's weird, because as far as I'm concerned, I am always the same age. I am always one day older than I was yesterday.
I remember way back in the 1983, when Joan Collins turned 50. She played mega-bitch Alexis Morell-Carrington-Colby-Dexter-Carrington on "Dynasty", and was viewed as nothing less than a goddess at the time by gay men aged 18-25, which was precisely my demographic. She did a spread in Playboy, and the buzz the whole time was "Joan Collins: still Fabulous at Fifty!" That may be all well and fine, although almost anyone could manage to be fabulous with Bob Mackie and professional lighting. But what they are really implying, though, is that by age fifty, just about everyone else should hang it up because your days of fabulosity are over. And I think to myself, I am 53. 
That's not to say that I don't have moments when I still feel fabulous. I still get compliments on my pretty shirts, and once in a while, people on the street will smile at Mark and me as we walk along together, or tell us that we look good together. Then I wonder for a moment whether they're saying that because they're thinking, "Look at those two old guys- it's so cute! They still hold hands!"; or smiling at us the way you smile when Grandma and Grandpa slow dance at a wedding. 
The thing is, I don't feel old. To be honest, I don't feel any older than I did when I was, say, 25, at least not on the inside. Of course, back then I used to drink and do drugs and carouse all night, and nowadays I'm all tucked in safe and sound by 10:30, but I still wake up with bad breath and a coffee jones, and I still spend much of the day wishing I could lie down. So it seems that nothing much has changed.
I am fortunate that I don't feel old physically. My teeth were a mess, but I had those taken care of back in my forties. Years of waiting tables, tending bar, running around in size 10 women's heels from Payless, and general abuse have left my poor feet hideous and looking like they belong to two different people. But they still work and I've never really been one for open toes anyway. My eyesight sucks and I'm stuck behind coke-bottle glasses, but that's been the case since kindergarten. I have spots on the back of my hands which make me look like the "before" picture in a Porcelana ad, but other than those few minor complaints, I'm still pretty much intact, physically. 
But the main thing is that I don't feel "old" mentally, either. I haven't resigned myself to a long, boring future of falling asleep in front of the TV. I still think, I think, the way I thought when I was 25. I don't see myself as "old me", I'm just me.
We've all had those moments: someone is getting out of a car, for example, or standing up from a sofa. Perhaps unconsciously, they moan and groan with the effort. "Gettin' old..." they'll say. Someone responds, "Well, consider the alternative!" Well, I've been considering the alternative, but the alternative I've been considering is one where I get to keep my 32 year-old body, with its not-too-shabby biceps and fairly smooth face, for as long as I want, and still maintain that 20 years' worth of sweet lifetime. 
Unfortunately, no such alternative exists.
The other day, I was probably grabbing my crotch or raising my eyebrows suggestively, or some other such charade which a husband will do which is intended to mean, "Any chance of...?" Mark just looked at me and rolled his eyes at the same time, if such a thing is possible, and said in the sweetest way, "I'm glad you still think you're a stud." Just a little joke, a little repartée between spouses, but ouch, baby. It might have been better without the word "still".
Then there's always the mirror. Much of the morning routine, for me, is actually spent without my glasses on. My face is really just a Paulie-shaped blob in the mirror. 99% of the rest of the time, when I can actually see myself, is spent under the dysmorphic delusion that most of us have, that the face we are seeing today is the same face we saw yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that, and so on, so that we never really notice the ravages of time as they happen. But then there is that other 1%, those moments when you regard your own reflection and you suddenly realize that all those birthdays, all those cigarettes, all those sunburns, have really taken their toll. I'll usually try to laugh it off and say something like, "Jesus, when did that happen?" And it may be shallow, but sometimes it makes me a little bit sad to admit and accept that the days when I can walk down Commercial Street with my shirt off and actually get cruised are long over. I have to get used to the idea that at this point in life, when people do say nice things about your looks, they usually have to qualify it. They don't just say, "He's got a nice ass." They say, "He's got a nice ass for a guy his age."
Of course, there are the two gifts that came with every one of those birthdays: experience and wisdom. This is what we're given when we surrender the perks of youth. 
I'm just waiting for that hot summer day, when I am walking down Commercial Street. A hot beefy farmboy-type stops dead in his tracks in front of me, lowers his Ray Bans, giving me the once-over, and says, "Man, look at the wisdom on him!"
Then I'll feel a lot better about the whole thing.