Scene 15

Open Letter To A Friend

You wouldn’t believe what I heard today.

After a day of considering the greatness of Neil Young and the end of the line of Buckley .

I spoke, quite naked, with an old man who kept insisting “No, aging isn’t for sissies.” He went on and on. Not only did I not have the heart to cut him off, (“I really should be going,” ) but I didn’t really want to. He had, it seemed, some things he needed to say.

Benign tremors, he explained, were what prevented him from solving the code on the keypad into the 18+ section of the men’s locker room. It was after he mentioned his shaking that I began to notice it. Toweling off, he needed many tries to dry the small of his back.

I indulged every vague piece of information with a question that would give him the opening to tell me what he needed to. After about twenty minutes on the effects of aging, he stunned me.

“What I’m getting at in all this is... I’ve got a yearning for a young woman. I will never be able to have one again. And that’s hard to deal with.”

There he was before me. Leonard Cohen. But older. Perhaps heavier. Aching the way we all do. He was having difficulty looping his briefs around his right foot. He struggled because of the tremors and I had great compassion because of that. For a moment I almost asked if I could help him, but thought better of it.

Nothing good can come out of asking an old man if he wants help with his underwear.