Chapter 1

When you're an old man, there's still a young man inside you, looking out at the world through your eyes, the way they were, many long years ago.

People laugh and talk of "dirty old men," but it's not really the old man who's "dirty." It's the surviving young man inside him. The one who remembers what it was like to look at a stunning young woman, ripe with youthful beauty and sexuality, and feel a craving for her with every fiber of his being.

Take it from me: I'm 76 years old, and long past my last reliable erection. I wake up, alone in bed in the depths of the night, and, sometimes, my penis is hard -- the way it used to be, or at least, an approximation of the way it used to be.

And I am not too proud to get up and take it into the bathroom, and rub it with lotion or soap, and immerse my hand in hot water, and attempt to reenact, in my mind, the long-ago times when it was a woman's body, and not my hand, that encased my eager organ.

But, likely as not, the middle-of-the-night erection will fade before I can climax; the rubbing is pleasurable, but only in a vague and distant way. If I come, it's a disappointing dribble -- sometimes emerging from an already-softened penis.

Sometimes, the rubbing is so lacking in sensation that I cease even trying to reach an orgasm.

It's a pitiful, and, happily, a private little experience of repeated disappointment. In the daytime, I am still a reasonably vigorous old man, with only a bit of a paunch, and shoulders that still are held back proudly. An old man, but a man.

Or the memory of one, anyway.

But what people don't always realize -- unless, of course, they are themselves old, worn-out men -- is that, inside, the flame still burns brightly. Most of us old fellows treat young women with polite deference. We're well-aware that, for them, we have nothing -- nothing -- to offer. The best we can possibly do is to be courteous, considerate, and kindly, so that these beautiful creatures won't regard us with total contempt.

If we're fortunate, they'll perhaps feel a little sorry for us, but will try not to show it.

The girl in the restaurant was very young. I don't know how young. Eighteen perhaps? Twenty? It's difficult to tell, anymore. There are girls of 13 or 14 these days who look, to me, the way that nineteen-year-olds used to look, in my time. I don't set out to lust after some child barely into her teens; but, looking at some of them, one simply cannot gauge, with any accuracy, their true age.

But, so what, if I silently lust after some girl-child? I'm not about to do her any harm; I couldn't, even if I wanted to.

But this young woman, this waitress. She's gainfully employed, and handsomely endowed, so she has to be an adult, however young an adult she may be. No liquor is served in the little cafe where she works, so it's not necessary that she be old enough legally to serve drinks to customers.

But I estimate that she's probably at least twenty. There's no baby fat. Her waist is impossibly slender, her breasts quite large, and her bottom, oh, God! It is a thing of exquisite beauty! So firm, so prominent. It doesn't matter how long it has been since I was young enough to do a woman any good: This creature is so lovely, so ripe and perfect, that she brings back a flood of memories of all the finest females I've ever had the pleasure to behold.

Seventy-six years old. There is no twinge, at the tip of my flaccid penis, as there would have been, on seeing this woman, years ago. No sudden rush of blood, bringing on an involuntary erection under my breakfast table, there, in the little cafe.

But the sensations -- in my mind -- are the same now as they were, back then. The longing to touch her, to speak to her; not as a customer, but as a young man prepared to demonstrate his excitement at meeting her. The fervent wish to know her. All of those longings are as fresh, and as clear, and as strong as they have ever been.

It is as if I, too, were twenty years old, or thereabouts. It is a melancholy thing to be feeling. Still, to me, it seems better to feel the longing than to feel nothing at all.

There was a large plate glass mirror, I notice, on the wall that I am facing. As she approaches my table, ready to take my order, I notice that I can see her, coming toward me, and, at the same time, see her reflection in the mirror -- her gorgeous, twitchy, provocative bottom, tightly encased in the little short-shorts that she wears under her apron. Her unbelievably lush body, seen front and back, all at the same time.

Almost too much.

She arrives at my table and, smiling at me radiantly, she asks me if I want a menu. I don't. I am a regular Sunday morning breakfast customer. I want my usual -- scrambled eggs, bacon, home fries, unbuttered wheat toast. Hold the coffee, please. As usual, I have brought my own coffee from home. I am enough of a regular that I am mildly surprised that she hasn't already guessed what I would order.

While I recite these ordinary facts, I notice a change in the timbre of my voice that shocks me a little. I hadn't been attempting to be anything that I am not. I know myself. I am just an old man. Nothing more.

I look, again, at the reflection of her bountiful backside in the mirror image from across the room. I feel, again, the pang of longing that, inevitably, seeing her tight little body produces inside me.

Then I notice my own image, in the mirror, too. It has to be me. That is she -- the waitress -- standing at my table, next to the image of the seated man in the mirror.

It has to be me, only, it isn't. It is a young man -- a somewhat familiar-looking young man, broad of shoulder, thick thatch of blond hair, a square, manly jaw.

It is me, but it is an old me -- from a half-century ago, or more. And it isn't even the old me, exactly. It is a familiar-looking young man -- perhaps an idealized version of the young man I had once been. He is dressed in modern clothes, however -- clothes not far distant from those I had worn, in the real world, that morning, but not precisely the same clothes, either.

The clothes fit the young man well. His thirty-inch waist is tightly encased in stylish jeans that fit -- not in the worn, 40-inch waist "relaxed fit" Wal-Mart jeans I had worn that day, the ones with the worn knees and the small hole, just above the left knee.

I am looking, in the mirror, at an idealized version of me, as a young man.

But is it my own ideal I am looking at? Or hers?

The young woman took my order and retreated behind the cash register to convey it to the cook. Alone, now, I examine myself in the mirrored wall opposite and expect to see an old man again. But I see, still, the same handsome young fellow I'd seen before.

It wasn't me, as a young man. Not precisely. It wasn't even, precisely, the young man I might have chosen to be. It was just a similar, but different, younger version of me -- a present-day version, but a half-century after the original had faded into oblivion.

I wondered if the other people in the cafe were seeing the same person that I was seeing. Did the waitress -- my exquisite, unbelievably sexy waitress -- also see me this way? Did the other people who worked there? The other customers?

My waitress, and two others, all young women, were huddled behind the cash register, across the room from me. All were looking in my direction. All three were showing a lively interest, whispering, giggling, smiling slyly behind their hands. Unmistakably, they all three were looking at me with frank interest -- appraisal.

"My" waitress, evidently, has said something to the others, and they were checking me out.

Or perhaps they were merely joined in private ridicule of the preening old man, there, pretending to be something that he was not.

I look at the mirror again. He -- the young, handsome man with the broad shoulders and the confident countenance -- looks back at me, straight in the eye. There is no mistaking it; I can see him clearly; more clearly than I have seen anything in decades. My glasses -- the glasses I'd been wearing when I came into this cafe -- aren't even on my face! I don't know what has become of them.

My breakfast arrives. It is delicious. I consume every morsel, drink the coffee I'd brought along with me from home. Finished, I leave a handsome tip, and go to pay for my breakfast at the register. The young woman who made change (a different young woman) looks up at me with unmistakable interest in her eyes.

It was not the kind of look she'd have given to a 76-year-old man.

I notice that my wrists and hands, accepting the coins and bills, are not those of an old man.

This is astounding! What has happened to me?

When I leave the restaurant, I find that, whoever I now was, I still had the keys to my minivan, and that it still unlocks at the touch of the remote. The aging minivan seems, suddenly, in inappropriate vehicle for a 20-something stud with broad shoulders and a Joe Palooka-style thatch of thick blond hair. But the minivan starts up, and I drive off in it, all the same.

Out of sight of the cafe, I suddenly feel smaller in the driver's seat. My hands, on the steering wheel, are the wrinkled hands of an old man again. My forearms are covered in dry skin and liver spots, just as they had been, when I awoke that morning. My glasses -- bifocals -- are back perched on my nose where they belong.

The dream is over. I am just -- me, again.

It had been an emotionally draining experience. An illusion, apparently. I was back to my old self again -- my really old self -- three-quarters-of-a-century-and-counting.

The sadness I had felt, earlier, silently looking at the young woman -- all the young women -- in the cafe and remembering, with a mixture of pleasure and pain, the times when the way I regarded them was so very different from now -- that sadness was nothing, compared to the bitter pain I now felt, at this transformation -- this moment of exaltation I had felt in the cafe, and now this terrible, terrible return to reality. It would have been far better, I thought, never to have experienced such a moment at all!

But it had been so real! How could one explain it? A hallucination, perhaps? The onset of Alzheimer's?

Everything about it, though, had seemed real. The way she looked at me; the way all the young waitresses had looked at me -- with speculative interest, as if I'd perhaps been the New Guy in Town.

All, no doubt, my imagination, running away with me. Like a waking wet dream.

Well, if it was a waking wet dream, I might as well just enjoy it. I wasn't experiencing any other kinds of wet dreams, these days.

Usually, I only went to the little cafe in the strip mall on Sundays. The place had the best home fries in town, and all the food was prepared with care. The prices were good, too. Their coffee, unfortunately, was inferior, but they never objected when I came in carrying my own 20-ounce thermal cup, filled to the brim with my coffee-from-home. They would even offer to refill my cup for me, when it was time for me to leave.

I usually declined the offer; the cafe's coffee just wasn't up to snuff.

Usually, I only went there on Sunday.

So why was I going back again, on Monday morning?

Well, there was no real harm in it. I was an old widower, I had a handsome pension from my old life as a high-ranking federal bureaucrat. I lived well. My late wife's life insurance had been adequate to pay off the mortgage on our house. I had lived there, now, alone, for the past four years. But I had been content. My biggest expense, by far, was gardening. My wife had been a wonderful gardener, spending long hours outdoors, working on her many flower gardens, spread throughout our very large yard.

Now, having no interest of my own in gardening, but unwilling to let all her work go for naught, I paid for professional services to keep up her gardens as best they could. I had even advertised for help from amateur gardeners who might enjoy access to our rich array of plant life. I paid two women, both in their late middle age, to come out and work on the rose garden and on the large flower garden next to the house. The pay was nominal -- these two women had been what I had hoped to find -- lovers of gardening without a challenging yard to call their own. But the necessary supplies they requested to perform their work were sometimes dauntingly expensive.