Was it Oscar Wilde who said that it is too bad that youth is wasted on the young?
Getting old can be fun but being old ain't for wimps or sissies. When you're old you sure can't buy green bananas or fuck with small trees.
All that fitness stuff that I read fails to mention that at 30,40,50,69,70, even 80 you have stamina that is a warm memory at 89. To think that I rode,on my Merckx, 3,500 to 4,000 miles a year going into my late 80's is almost disgusting.
Now, peddling on my bike to nowhere, doing intervals and being a borderline wimp, I quit after 30 minutes and often think of how much of my youth I wasted with cockamamie excuses of why I didn't get off of my lowercase Bronx, Jewish ass and do something besides thinking of work, sex and getting a piece of ass. That, in spite if the absolute fact that I couldn't get laid in a whorehouse if I had a $100 bill stuck to my forehead.
Except when I was on my way home from Okinawa/Korea on a hospital ship. We we stopped in Yokohama and were allowed off the ship for a few hours. Being mostly mobile (When you're young, schlepping a shot up leg to a whorehouse made no never mind. The whorehouse was an attainable goal), I was let off the ship for a few hours, along with other mobile GI's, and off we tramped excitedly to a whorehouse.
To hell with booze and a steak. An orgasm was the deal.
Arrived safely at the house of ill repute, paid my money, stripped own to my bare ass and climbed in bed with a naked Japanese, flat chested hooker. In those days,if you contracted a 'social disease' like gonorrhea, known then as a 'dose', you couldn't get out of the fucking Army for at least 60 days or until you were declared cured, whichever came last.
I decided that the moment of relief wasn't worth 60 extra days in the Army. I had about a minute and a half of 'non-intrusive sex', got dressed leaving physically relieved but mentally frustrated and dysfunctional. Back on the ship, everyone talked about getting laid, except me. I was too ashamed to confess to a 'hand job'.
Thank God, that I always believed my Pop who used to say, in Yiddish, "In America, the money is up to your knees.You just have to know how to bend down and pick it up"..Yeah, a non sequitur.
My Pop entered my stream of consciousness.
This photo was taken in 1946, aboard the USS St.Mihiel which was serving as a hospital ship. It hauled my ass from Korea to Los Angeles by way of Yokohama and Honolulu. The trip took over a month. Wrote my folks almost every day with mailings from the stops. Hard to believe that I was ever 22 years old.
