Chapter 4

My original intent when I started heading over to New Orleans was to spend a few nights at the Harrah's Casino there. Somewhere along the way, I became disenchanted with the idea of doing anymore gambling for awhile. It didn't make much sense to me any more. I'd won over five thousand dollars during my week long Las Vegas visit, but it hadn't cheered me up a bit. I was feeling pretty glum after leaving my brother's house, so I drove straight through to Panama City, Florida. The next day, I drove south across the state, ending up on the beach, just north of Miami.

Hollywood, Florida was an experience. I met a lot of other old people, most of them, like me, didn't really know what they were doing there. I got myself one of those extended stay motor inn rooms and settled in to try to do some thinking about where my life, or what was still left of it, was heading.

I was usually an early riser. At home, I'd get up and go sit in front of my computer, writing, playing poker, reading stories, or taking care of my correspondence. It was force of habit mostly. There was something about the air in Florida, plus the fact that I was feeling very restless and uncertain about things.

All of my adult life I'd been busy, going to school, working, raising a family. Then one day, I just decided I was tired of always being busy, so I just pulled the plug on work. I retired, thinking I'd have more time to do those things I liked, but never seemed to have enough time to actually do. I played tennis and golf, went out to more movies and restaurants, and started going on quite a few more gambling junkets. My finances were solid, so I wasn't worried about not having enough for my wife and I to live on.

After a year of being retired, I kind of found myself settling into another rut. Different from the work rut, but requiring just as much of my time and energy. Being retired is hard work too. I stopped being so active, giving up tennis altogether. For awhile, I was spending a lot of time with various doctors, trying to find out why I didn't have more energy, or feel better most of the time. This too became yet another rut, until I decided to cut back on all those doctor visits too.

This change in my lifestyle started affecting other aspects of my life. I enjoyed small parts of my life, but, overall, I wasn't happy with the way I was beginning to feel about myself, my life, or my future prospects. I was depressed. They had me on Prozac for awhile, but my wife said it made me act like a zombie, that I'd sit in front of the television, feeling nothing. I had some good reasons for being depressed, financial, family, personal health, good solid reasons for not being happy.

Lose a million dollars or two, have your mother and oldest sister drop dead, see one of your daughter's throwing her future away by marrying a bum, find yourself becoming increasingly impotent. Add in finding out you have a brain tumor, a failing kidney, forty years after the other one suddenly failed. If that isn't enough, mix in some other things, like multiple lung nodules on both lungs, lymph glands swelling up to be the size of large eggs. All these things begin to add up after awhile.

The situation at Rincon was just one more problem wanting to be added to all the other disruptions taking place in my life. It seemed to me like things were spiralling out of control. One thing I knew for sure, and this was that I needed to try to do something to bring things back to a manageable level. The situation with my wife was the last straw for me. Something needed to change, and I knew there was no one else I could count on now, other than myself.

What do you do when you're three thousand miles away from your home and family, when you find yourself beginning to believe your life has run its course, as far as having anything really pleasant remaining? I don't know what normal people would do, but I started walking.

I had this condition in both legs, I believe its called intermittent claudication, but I'm not sure about that. When I tried to walk any distance at all, especially if I was carrying something, my calves would ache and hurt just like someone with strong hands was down there squeezing them with all their might. I'd had it before, back in '89, but I'd had two of my illeal arteries given a balloon angioplasty, and then had taken fifty intravenous infusions of chelation therapy right after that. I also did some walking, until the pain in my calves went away.

I started leaving my room at around six each morning and walking on the beach until my calves hurt so bad I couldn't stand it. When that happened, I'd sit down in the sand and wait until the pain disappeared. I'd get up again when they felt better, and walk back to my motel room. I'd repeat the same thing before lunch, and then again before dinner, every day. I started eating better too. After the first week of doing this, I noticed I was walking a lot further before I needed to sit down and rest. By the end of two weeks, most of the claudication pain was gone. When I did get some pain, I was able to continue walking through the pain. All my clothes started getting loose on me too.

I had chest pains often while I walked. I kept walking then too, determined that I would allow whatever would happen to go ahead and occur. Surprisingly, nothing much came of that. I started feeling better, more energetic, and more positive and optimistic. I checked my emails about twice a week. When members of my family wrote to me, I replied. I didn't tell anyone what I was doing, just that I was still on the road, and still waiting for hell to freeze over. February gave way to March, and March to April.

I'd brought two or three months worth of my medications with me when I had left the house. I was out of some of my medicine, and running very low on all the rest. I didn't try to get refills or to see another doctor to get new prescriptions. Instead, I kept on walking.

I woke up on the morning of April 12th. I remember it was the fifteenth anniversary of my mother's death. It was also the first morning I remembered waking up with a morning hard on in at least eight or nine years. I got up and looked at it in the mirror. I was very tempted to find out if it would last long enough for me to rub one out, but it seemed too important for me to treat it like something I just wanted to be rid of. Instead of doing that, I put on some running shorts, with no underwear on underneath, and went out for my daily before breakfast walk.

The thing I remembered most about that first hard on, was all the stares I got as I did my first power walk of the day on the beach. It seemed to me that quite a few of my fellow oldsters took notice of that satisfying lump I was carrying around in my shorts. I liked the way it moved all around as I walked on the beach. For the first time in too long, I felt like a man again, rather than an old man. I didn't feel quite so used up any more. It was a good feeling too.

That afternoon, after I had returned from my second long walk on the beach, and had then stopped off for lunch, I went into a camera shop by the cafe I usually frequented, and bought myself a digital camera. When I had taken my shower, but before I had towelled myself off, I took my own picture in the bathroom mirror above the sink. You couldn't see my face in the picture, but my hard dick was featured quite prominently. When I had uploaded the picture onto my laptop, I wrote my wife an email, enclosing the picture as an attachment. On the email I wrote, all in Bold capitals: BEHOLD, THE SECOND COMING! REJOICE, ALL YE NONBELIEVERS.

I sent this email and attachment to my wife. She hadn't been sending me any emails in awhile. I kept getting reports of her though, courtesy of our children. Our forty third anniversary was coming up in a couple of months. I was determined to be back in my own house when that day came.

I kept up my walking regimen for the whole next week, checking my emails at least two or three times every day, but heard nothing from her.

I took another picture of yet another hard on, but this time I held the camera away from me, and made sure the picture also included my face too. Again, with the attachment, I sent her a brief message:

IF YOU CAN'T BE WITH THE ONE YOU LOVE, LOVE THE ONE YOU'RE WITH.

I checked my email, about two hours later. There was an email from my wife: "If I'd known you were going to be giving me your permission, I wouldn't have jumped the gun like I did. Would you like me to take a picture of his dick and send it to you so you can compare it to yours?"

I continued my walking, but whenever I thought of my wife's last email, I tried a little jogging too. I kept getting those chest pains still, but nothing else happened. By mid May, I was feeling like I had when I was about fifty years old. I weighed the same thing I'd weighed when I came out of the service, back in the early 1960's.

I checked out of my motel and started heading back west again. When I got back to California again, I found a divorce lawyer and signed the papers to start the procedure for filing for a divorce. I owned a four plex up in the high desert that had a vacancy in one of the furnished apartments. I moved in there and started playing golf early every morning. For the first time in years, I chose to carry my own bag, and to walk the course. The days were getting hotter, but I wasn't having trouble playing eighteen holes before eleven o'clock.

As soon as my wife was served with her divorce papers, she started sending me plenty of email messages. At least five or six every day. They weren't conciliatory, not by a long ways, but at least she was trying to communicate with me again. I'd joined one of those fitness centers and hired my own personal trainer. I went to a dermatologist's office and started having all those things growing on me either burned off or frozen off. I had some kind of treatment on my back that made most of those brown spots begin disappearing too. When that part of the treatment was finished, I had electrolysis treatments to take off all the hair that had been growing on my back. I also went in and had dental implants put in so that I could have myself a full set of good looking teeth again. In July, I had some liposuction work done around my waist and hips.

I'd gone to all the trouble of getting myself back in shape again. I figured it wouldn't hurt anything to polish my appearance up as much as I could too. After everything else was done, I went to a beauty salon and had my almost completely white hair dyed back to the dark brown color it had been when I was younger.

After everything was finished, I looked in the mirror and saw a seventy three year old man who was doing his utmost to try to look younger than he was. I wasn't happy with the result. I felt like a fifty year old, and I was almost willing to believe I could possibly pass for someone in his early sixties. It was the little things, like the wild eyebrows growing in every direction that gave me away.

My wife had decided to try to fight the divorce. In California, according to my attorney, there was little hope of one party succeeding in contesting a divorce where the other party wanted one. One thing I already knew though, this divorce was going to cost me in many ways, not just the money either.

I'd heard from all four children after I filed for divorce. All of them told me they were siding with their mother. There were several phone calls that became so heated that words were spoken that could never be forgotten or forgiven. My family was being ripped from me. I knew it was too simplistic to blame all of this on what might have happened in Rincon.

If my wife and I had still had a strong relationship when that happened, we would have found some way to get through it and still have stayed together. When the sex we had shared for so many years died, both of us had started drifting apart. I couldn't take any of those erectile dysfunction pills, because I'd been taking nitroglycerine tablets for ten years before Viagra had ever come out.

Our marriage had been in trouble for a long time. Both of us had taken too much for granted, thinking we had too much time invested in each other to ever let our marriage disintegrate. We were both wrong.