Hello My Old Heart

Pressing into my personal space, the young lad, wearing a black leather jacket with studs, sporting a spiky hairdo with gel dried plastic hard, a scornful look riding on his pasty white face, reached over me to grab the yellow plastic cable running through the whole city bus to yank hard on it, triggering a bright bing to wake up the bus. I noticed the badge stitched to the jacket: the letters "ER" with white flowing lines circling and winding around it. I smiled at him.

"Elephant Revival! I love their album Break in the Clouds."

The lad hissed at me, "Get over it, old fart!" His lips moved with decisive derision and contempt, the words having been preloaded in his mind like a shell in a tank gun. While he couldn't stop the momentum of his words, his eyes told a different story: surprise, astonishment, and confusion, my recognition of his culture slowly thinking in. The mouth and the eyes were like two lovers on opposing trains passing and shooting in different directions away from each other. He walked away to his buddy, checking over his shoulder to figure out or confirm in his mind what had just happened.

The bus ride was familiar: The blue Santa Monica Boulevard street sign had been replaced seven years ago and already bleached under the bright California sun. Bayside deli had been an institution for two generations, who each discovered the non-descript place with the long line on their own as if nobody had ever known about it. Real Food Daily had been my go-to place during my year of veganism. Even the waiters and waitresses knew me by name because I had gone there daily. Only they had been replaced every quarter with a new batch of staff that was completely inexperienced, working like mad, running, yelling, balancing dishes on their head, yet excruciatingly slow to actually bring the plate out of the kitchen. By the end of the third months, they'd barely move, leisurely gaze into each other's eyes, and discuss the latest yoga intrigue in the local teacher community, yet the plate was instantly on the table. A city is a shell of streets, buildings, concrete, phone cables, and street trees that breathes slowly to the tune of decades while people run in and out, re-decorating and painting the facades in their short stints measured in years or less, ultimately forgetting and ignorant of what came before and after, completely self-absorbed in their universe of the moment, and the city keeps breathing slow and long and deep inhales and exhales, staying equanimous.

I could close my eyes and still see the city. My body leaned back from memory on Santa Monica Boulevard and 11th Street because the light was always red. Mentally, I could float over in any direction. Do you want to see what Griffith Park looks like with the abandoned zoo cages that look like from a horror movie? I can show you down the detail of the wood plank at the head of the left most parking spot to keep cars from rolling down the hill into the sprawling cosmopolitan. Want to get a quick sushi snack in Little Tokyo? The one with the dirty, yellow awning is my favorite. Like a ghost, I drift through the city at will, never really touching it anymore as I can stay in the city replica inside of my head. I touch the gray, smooth handle that's oh so familiar to my touch on the way down the back exit stairs, an easy swing in my steps, a remnant from the swagger of my teenage days and still a pride to me today, like a secret sign to the observant onlooker that I had the moves, a magician on the dancefloor.

Finality, as I let go of the pole one last time.

I walked into Grace of Ann, a gray low slung, non-descript building through a double glass door for the first time. The sticker, "Best of Yelp," sets a macabre shudder into my bones. The thought of who could leave a review, or more precisely the physically, decomposing state of such a person, seemed gratuitously gory. The note on a slip of paper torn of an envelope said "Room 103 -- Susan."

Susan was decently friendly, blond hair, well treated with product to control the freeze and neatly fixed in place with hairspray, a little chubby, yet struggling with exercise to do something about it as the sneakers stuffed under a chair suggested, and the golden smile of a sales person, white bleached tease contrasted by red lipstick so intense that she could have been a real estate broker. The smile lingered, her face unmoving, my gaze hitting her back with a question mark, the wall clock ticking and subsuming the burden of conversation until a magical moment had passed. She snapped out of it and machine gunned me with questions for her intake form, furiously typing without taking her intense gaze of the screen.

After what seemed like fifteen minutes, she got up to get a measuring tape out of the side drawer.

"Uh, oh, what's that about?"

"I need to take measurements for your casket."

"Just burn me and throw me into the sea."

"Okay, come over here and hold these two handles!"

"Why?" I blurted out. I felt like an old, grumpy, and ever angry man. I wanted to be smooth, friendly, and upbeat.

"We have to measure your fat and water composition, so that I can order the right sized urn."

What startles me is not the claustrophobic and asthma inducing act I'm about to consent to. What startles me is my utter emotional flat line, like nothing registers anymore. The needle on my emotional plotter has gone home and closed shop. So much did I have to bear in this lifetime: The boss that talked about new thrilling new opportunities only to shove me into a soul crushing task or out the door into the howling cold, the doctor that cut yet another piece off my flesh, the nurse that robbed me yet of another dignity, the lost argument that required me to swallow my pride despite me being right, yet lacking the social capital to win, the many hours watching others get the charming girl or the uplifting hug that I so desperately yearned for. I beat the living pain out of me with the hammer of acceptance until only a gray, barren wasteland was left behind. What a tragedy!

My eyes roamed her desk for something personal, as my old buddy Dale had taught me. A tampon wrapper lurked in her miniature sized trash can next to a single serving carton of Domino's and Kale juice plastic cup. An edition of Vanity Fair from two years ago tried to hide a bottle of shaving cream. The rest was messy, work related, and should probably have been discarded a long time ago. A fortune cookie was taped to the wall: "You are beautiful, successful, and smart." Time was running out on me to find a conversation starter, so that she would see the human side of me. I desperately didn't want to be perceived as cattle that passed through her office. Time was running out on me.

She placed her hand on my hand resting on the desk holding my ID, "Will, could you do me a favor? You'll receive a survey in your e-mail. It would help me a great deal if you filled it out."

"Of course! Do they do anything to help you with your career?"

"Yes, they are very lovely here. This morning, we had a workshop on how smile can significantly increase customer satisfaction. The teacher was a very lovely man and personally worked with me on my smile."

I looked pointedly down at her hand still resting on mine. She continued, "Yes, that was last quarter's workshop. We learned how physical touch can increase the goodwill of people. On average customer evaluation ratings go up by 0.5 points when there is physical touch during the intake session. If my performance metric goes up this quarter, my boss will give me a movie ticket as a bonus. There is a new James Bond movie coming out."

Acquiescence. The world works in a certain way.

"Of course. You were very lovely today. I hear Sarah McDaniel, the girl from the first non-nude Playboy cover, is taking the lead role of Jane Bond. Crazy isn't it!"

"Yeah."

"Her heterochromia iridium is pretty fascinating."

"Her what?"

"Her eyes have different colors. She considers it a symbol of imperfection and how acceptance of imperfection creates beauty. It's like the constant struggle of life to keep up and overcome our perceived deficiencies."

She pulled her hand off mine with those crumbled and jagged edges on the red nail polish. She looked with worry at the half empty Starbucks coffee cup with the red lipstick mark. Her facial expression turned inward, like a train having popped off the track forced to face with what to do now. The moment passed. She pulled the costume of care counsellor back on, lifted the fallen over teleprompter up, and machine gunned the end of her script.

"Please, walk down the hallway and check in with the nurse."

The nurse station was a counter at the end of the hallway with a little green fabric sofa of boxy, modern shape, all painted in soft, natural light filtering through the curtains giving the area an angelic, peaceful ambiance, a sense of you have arrived and can rest here in ease. The decoration of the station had something sleepy to it. There was a cracked open box of chamomile tea packets inviting the passerby to take one and cherish time passing while relishing the heat soaking through the cup into the fingers holding it. There was a neat organization to the forms, pamphlets, and trays behind the counter that spoke of ample idle afternoons where any task is a welcome distraction. "Please, press button to page nurse," was on a sign above the button with the white cable running across the counter, snaking up the wall, and disappearing into the edge of a lightly lifted ceiling tile. I sat down.

Black, long hair, naturally red lips, an energetic and loving face that put the world on pause to create a bubble of time for whoever was with her, the nurse meandered in at a leisure pace. Her body was well composed. Her posture was straight her. Her eye contact was clear. Her trust and competence was established instantly. Only the white headband with the stark red cross seemed over the top, like out of a cosplay scene, not the hardworking world of a nurse shuffling bedpans and hauling lumberjack sized patients twice her size. Actually, the outfit, a white, form fitting dress, had overtones of a sexy Halloween costume, yet done tastefully, teetering at the edge of fashionable and suggestive. A sympathetic pain for the demeaning work uniform stitched my gut. An image of a stewardess forced into a suggestive skirt with open décolleté for $17 per hour, so that beer drunk, obese, and humanity-bankrupt sales people could ogle here, while she did the backbreaking work of feeding three hundred cranky passengers trashing the plane in the progress and shortchanged the few minutes of her break to instead soothe the bratty toddler throwing food and toys through the cabin while yelling how much he hates his mom.

"Come with me," she said. Her name was Sadie.

She walked me into a small room with a hospital bed, railing to keep the sick from falling out, remote control tethered by a cable, triangle handle to lift up, the whole shebang. A flat screen TV was on the wall. Plastic, but really well done, flowers in a vase on the bed side table. A red sharps container was screwed in near the door. The room was meticulously clean, so clean in fact that it had to be new. The wall paint was perhaps half year old. I took it all in carefully. So, this was it.

Sadie held an elegant black iPad to me with the terms, policies, and a big signature box.

"Four hours are included with your package. Every additional hour will be billed to your custodian. I need you to sign here that you understand the charges. If you are okay with us using any last words for our promotional material, please initial here."

I tapped my finger on the iPad and finger painted my signature like a kid's painting.

"We also offer a new service for the comfort of patients. I can cuddle with you on the bed. Double-blind scientific studies have proven a significant reduction in anxiety about the transition. The exact mechanism is unclear. Yet scientists speculate that somatosensory cells in the dermis are directly connected through dendrites to oxytocin producing cells in the hypothalamus. The rate would be $120 per hour. Because of past billing issues with caretakers, you'd have to pay with card now."

I thought it over. There was no downside to the proposition. I handed my card over and paid with my good name one last time.

I lay down on the bed. The mattress was comfortably supportive. Sadie reached under my shirt to remove the patch and drop it into the medical waste container. Pulling a step out from under the bed, she stepped up and laid her body along mine, carefully draping her right arm across her torso. Her mind went into a hibernation state of waiting.

The position caused her dress sleeve to ride high and expose the crook of her elbow. Little white lines and dots gathered there. She noticed my glance and said nonchalantly, "I've had an abusive boyfriend." I knew better H was the name of the game. Emotional emptiness and bleak outlook was directly solved by going to the root, the opioid receptors that needed to be stuffed by some chemical to shut them up, to shut up the gnawing voice of futility and pointlessness, to soothe that voice into a gentle slumber, just to have peace, not to really live, simply to have peace and ease, while resting with a zoinked out face staring into nothing.

I put my right arm around her, getting a jolt of sensation about her body, her physical reality, a young girl in her thirties, a tender body, feminine fluidity, lively warmth, adorable smallness, things that made my heart twitch and jerk. In panic, I tried to squash my old heart back into a monotone beat. Her head was resting on my chest, listening and feeling to every heartbeat, every nuance and derivation. The pulsating heart sucked so much oxygen that my lung muscles started pulling against my will to inhale deeper: "We need more oxygen, you old fool!" The lungs and I were locked in a game of tug of war. I wanted to remain the calm, respectable elderly man for the young girl. My lungs simply wanted to nourish my body with oxygen. With a big heave, my lungs filled full, lifting her head up to the ceiling, or so it felt to me. She knows! She knows! A moan escaped my lips as the tension and weight of my life lifted off of me.

That feeling of virility, of physical presence, and emotion bursting through my heart, I had forgotten about that. The bricks of the wall around my heart toppled down to the ground one by one. I could feel the plants around the forest tower coming to live and growing. The thorns were falling of the roses. New rose buds bundled up with energy. The assembly line of going through the motions stopped to soak in the intoxicating emotion of this moment, the slight discomfort of embarrassment, the sensual touch of her body, and the warm breath with its periodicity caressing over my chest, leaving little, microscopic drops of condensation behind in my shirt to turn into a general moist, warm feeling on my chest.

My mind produced memory of my youth when I had felt and lived in a world of emotions and connectedness every day, cheerful moment of riding the bike with learner wheels on a sunny summer afternoon; all consuming, secretive attention to the girl in the last row; a first kiss, soft touch on the lips, replaying for days afterward; a plastic bracelet as a gift from a mysterious girl with daisies in her hair at a desert rave party -- who was she? -- the bracelet becoming a symbol of love, peace, and unity, a touchstone that I carried for months into the world, every time taking me back to her when the daily grind got too grim.

I held as hard as I could onto every moment of Sadie's body on mine and all that it stirred in me until the last moment came. Let it go. Just let it go. With an exhale, it was over. I saw a bright yellow light. The words of my yoga teacher floated into my ears: "Don't go for the light. Follow the snowy path." I looked around.