Tonight, everything alone, I got involved in a solemn ritual that was probably very late. After about 50 years of service, some of them fruitful, most useless, I decided to save my libido, once and for all.
No, no, I hear you say, don't give up so soon. There is always another bus that comes around the corner, more than one fish in the sea, etc.
But I know when I am licking (only figuratively, of course), so I have placed my libido, symbolized by a single blue pill, in a small but elegant mahogany box, sealed with a rubber band. Then, staggering in a stool, I slim the box on the upper shelf in the corridor closet, just behind the Christmas wrapping and the three ballot boxes containing the ashes of my dead dogs.
There now rests, along with any persistent hope that may have had for a last ferret.
What, can ask, caused this decision? A good question, but to which there is no simple answer. It was nothing, but rather like a slow mounting waterfall.
Was it the acting site mixer at the Mexican restaurant in Ventura Boulevard, where the only woman even close to my own age went to me, hanging the margarita in her hand, with the opening line, not as a question, no, but a statement, “then … are you retired”?
Was it the afternoon that, with a much younger woman, I was breathless in a corner of the street and, while fighting to recover my breath, I had to pretend interest in the exhibition of an vacuum store? (“Well, will you see that? Some of them no longer need a boat!”)
Was it the night when, despite my atrial fibrillation, I went bankrupt and I swallowed a half dose of generic viagra dose?
Thirty minutes later, when I should have entered, my face was blushed, my breasts were congested and the only thing that increased was my blood pressure.
“Are you OK?” Alice asked.
Even in the light of the candles of his room, I suppose that the brightness of my cheeks (only two, not four) was evident.
“Of course,” I murmured, “Why … you … questions?”
“Sit. I'm receiving you a glass of water.”
The water was followed by a trip to the kitchen, where, wrapped in the quota, I fell into a chair while she hurriedly prepared a bowl of vegetable soup.
“I think you need to eat something,” he said, slapping the bowl on a carpet, and was right.
I don't know why, but suddenly I felt voracious and they gave me a dozen jumps and two cookies with chocolate sparks just to pursue the taste of my humiliation.
But it is not simply a matter of age; All my life, my libido and I have had a frantic relationship.
When I was 5 years old, I could never decide who I loved the most: Blond Laurie or Brunet Libby. Everything depended on what Laurie used for the kindergarten that day or if Libby wore a horsetail, which killed me every time.
Even then, I worried that mine was a volatile nature.
Once I started leaving, my mother said that a child who loved her mother would look for someone like her.
Now, I loved my mother, really, but short and Ronda was not my guy.
For years, they were Waspy girls, with long legs, with a tennis racket on a shoulder and a touch attitude. Finally I married a blonde beauty and deer eyes, a former member of the Court of Homecoming Queen in UCLA, who was out of my league but I liked my jokes.
The jokes have been my pilar.
For some time, the joke has been in me. Divorced for 14 years, I have been in the hustle, both on the street and, at the request of my younger brother, online. “You live alone, you work alone, so you plan to go out with your cleaning lady, you have to place yourself again,” he said.
So I joined a couple of sites, I met a team of the good, the bad and the not medicated (and I even found a decent relationship), but I kept my searches in nature.
During the pandemic, in my walk in the afternoon along the Bluffs of Santa Monica, I actually met another ex Yorker, who formed a small welcome capsule with me that saw us both during that dark age. On the eve of the New Year, Amanda and I celebrated with anyone else, but we saw the live feed of Times Square, while we ate burritos in bed in bed.
I mean, it is not that I do not see the wedding ads in the newspaper that announce the unions of late life. They are destined to be moving, I know: “Look at these two, who met at the home of the elderly when their wheelchairs collided leaving the bingo game!” – But they simply sad. Worse are the ads in places like AARP magazine where older people hug under the headlines they proclaim: “The best sex we have had!”
Can that be true? Did you never be 18 years old? If you really have a better sex in your 70 years than in the 70s, you have my condolences.
Clearly, I am superficial; One more reason to withdraw my libido. Yes, I am pleased to inform that I have some very happy memories of sex, since a time when my own momentary reflection in a mirror did not make me bend and cover, when I could join someone in bed without assuring myself, in case I had to get up for any reason, that I had a camouflage bathtub with an easy reach. No, these days there are too many things, from umbrellas to “poor blood in iron” (only people in my alleged dating pool will even remember those ubiquitous ads of Geritol), which pierce my libido before I can inflate.
And although I have been a night owl during most of my life, I am often in bed at 9:30 pm, and the most sensual moment of the day is to lift the new quilt, with the remote control of the TV and a copy of the New Yorker on the night table, for a couple of hours of relaxed entertainment, although lonely.
It is a mature perspective, or that I tell myself, and I am not completely discontent about it. But I can't say it's exactly satisfied either.
The loss of erotic impulse, which caused much of my life to be exciting and unexpected, can make me feel a little drifting. It feels as if my diet had gone from abundant to soft, my mystery perspectives to Mundano.
It turns out that, when I put on that stool to keep my libido box in the closet, I was keeping not only my past, but to some extent my future, that was the most difficult part, and now I am not sure what to replace it.
Please, God, not to be Pickleball.
The author is a writer of historical fiction (although this essay is, unfortunately, true), who lives in Santa Monica. His most recent novel is “HG Wells' concern.”
Los Angeles Affairs Chronices The search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the Los Angeles area, and we want to listen to their real history. We pay $ 400 for a published essay. Email [email protected]. You can find presentation guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
