BACK IN THE DAY

When I tell people I’m 72 years old, they don’t believe me. “No one’s that old!” they guffaw, but it’s true. I am the oldest man alive, at 72 years. And I’ve seen and heard and been through everything there is to have seen or heard. Or been through.

When I was growing up, my favorite TV show was, “Murder, She Cave-Drew.” My uncle invented fire, but he was beaten to the patent office by a young Benjamin Franklin.

As a kid, I once got in trouble for playing Freeze Tag in a construction site. My brother and I were chased down the hill by these huge Teamsters with glowing eyes, pitch-black capes and yellow hard hats. That construction site is better known today as Stonehenge.

When I was a teenager, I was known for my delinquency. I once sucker-punched Saint Francis of Assisi for “allegedly” keying my Thunderbird. Sure, everyone thought he was so nice, but I knew the real St. Francis, and he was a grade-A creepo. He thought he was the cock of the walk, the penis of the prance, the shlong of the shimmy. But I knew that was all just a clever ruse to get canonized. And it worked! Which is why I say to Saint Francis, up your nose with a Bible hose!

My first real job was removing the arms from sculptures during the Renaissance, which was surprisingly lucrative, but work dried up once the sculptors just started using lepers as models. But soon after, I was drafted to fight the Factory Uprising in the bloody Industrial Revolution. Though we came to a peaceful conclusion, I still have trouble being civil to warehouses.

And the women! I’ve lived and loved with the greats, including Cleopatra, Queen Elizabeth, Mata Hari, J. Lo, Gertrude Stein, Yvonne De Carlo, Mary Magdalene, Secretariat, Mon Mothma, and Sherlock Holmes’s sister. I’ve been called a cad, a sham, a sharpie, a shmoo, a rover, a rambler, a festiva, a jag-off, a slag-off, a cutie-pie, a kewpie doll, a rubber tarzan, and a liar. And I’ve never been married- twice. And I’m a happy man, though some nights it gets lonely in my mineral waterbed.

That’s how it goes when you’re as 72 years old as I am. You’re left with nothing but your memories. Your misty, frosty, foggy, water-colored paint-by-numbers abstract expressionist memories. And yes, I may not feel as young as I used to, lo those many centuries of 72 years ago, but I’ve lived and I’ve loved and I’ve laved and I’ve louved. And who else can say that? I ask rhetorically. And rhetorically you reply, No one, old man. No one.