Jerry Stahl - Old Guy Dad: Weird Shit Happens When You Dont Die Young

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Copyright 2015 by Jerry Stahl

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Set in Minion

ePub ISBN: 978-1940207896

Publishers Cataloging-in-Publication data

Stahl, Jerry.
Old guy dad : weird shit happens when you dont die young / by Jerry Stahl.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0988745629

1. Stahl, Jerry. 2. FathersBiography. 3. Middle-aged fathersBiography. 4. Children of older parents. 5. Parent and child. I. Title.

HQ756 .S735 2015
306.874/2/0844dc23

For Elizabeth, Stella, & Nico

Also by Jerry Stahl

Permanent Midnight

PervA Love Story

Plainclothes Naked

I, Fatty

Love Without: Stories

Pain Killers

Bad Sex On Speed

Happy Mutant Baby Pills

To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase terrible beauty. Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: its a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone elses body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away.

Christopher Hitchens

Contents

Introduction

W hen I imagine the future, I see my daughter clawing her way across a blistered landscape, gasping for water, grubbing for cancer scraps while struggling to endure five more minutes in some world stripped of sustenance by the greed and idiocy of the generation that raped it to the bone before hers ever had a chance Im dead by then, but even from beyond the grave I feel guilty for having brought her into the living hell of the Monsanto-ravaged, Boko-Haramed, Naomi Klein dystopia thats in the mail.

This, in our current era, is the peculiar thrill of spawning a child when youre no longer young: along with the joy of looming mortality, theres the festive knowledge that you and the planet are both already seventy-five percent dead before the tyke even rolls in.

But maybe Im being optimistic. I cant speak for other post-fifty fathers, but I feel like these are my pre-tumor years, my avant-stroke time, to be enjoyed until the moment my heart stops beating and starts attacking. Throw a toddler in the mix and youve got an unnatural, if thrill-packed and delightful, setup for decline.

(I should add, I was more or less dying when the baby was conceived; at the tail end of a twenty-year run of needle-induced hepatitis C, brought to an unlikely end by a trial drug program at Cedars Sinai. One minute Im a fifty-plusser with a terminal disease and a newly pregnant girlfriend, the next Im gulping some non-FDA approved drug cocktail so toxic it was verboten to touch a pregnant woman. One wrong move and the baby would be born with horns and flippers. Throw in night sweats and youve got yourself a party.)

You could argue that spawning a second child in your fifties represents its own kind of moronic life-affirmation, or you could argue that doing so in the face of impending death and global implosion is an act of such colossal narcissism and folly I should probably be gelded live on the Discovery Channel.

Most disturbing of all, the whole thing leaves me with some kind ofwhats the word?happiness. Sure, Im embarrassed to still be alive, and just not wanting to throw myself from tall buildings on a daily basis still feels a bit disconcerting. But heyneurosis was the gift my parents bequeathed me, along with facial moles, unibrow, and a propensity to chafe. And if I have any goal as a damaged Elder-Dad, its to not pass that depresso-bent along to my offspring.

Sacrifice is (justifiably) a somewhat quaint, if not outright Old Testament-sounding word. But, unless youre a disappearing dad, youve got commitments now. And, unless youre a dick-dad, youre going to put little Seymour or Sallys needs above your own. For me, even after kicking the needle-drugs, life pre-Dadhood was pretty much a non-stop binge cycle of Work, Fuck, Sleep. Self-destruction disguised as creativity. No more, Pops.

The columns you are about to read (or discard, or pass up for an inspirational angel bookmy favorite, courtesy of Nick Tosches, being a blessed tome called Gods Mittens ) are here presented as originally typed: each a bloggy snapshot of a particular stop along the newly minted OGD highway. And each as ragged around the edges as the joy-stressed wreck who penned them.

Heres a chestnut: if youre tired of thinking about yourself, have a child. On a good day, guilt and fear trump self-obsession; on a bad one, you can enjoy them all while singing the hits from Frozen.

So, go ahead. Pretend its still your world, Old Guy. No human being under three is ever going to believe it. Which is, unless Im prematurely demented, exactly how it should be.

#1: The Hum

W aiting for a baby to be born is like sitting in Nagasaki, listening to the hum of planes overhead, and wondering when the little joy bomb is going to be dropped and destroy your life. In a good way. And ours is supposed to drop any minute.

Of course, Ive heard the hum before. Been flattened by the thrill and terror of new life delivered from beyond. Only now its different. For a lot of reasons. Not the least of which is that the first time I staggered into fatherhood I was thirty-five, and strung out, and feeling all the guilt and weirdness over that. And now Im fifty-eight, and, wellfifty-eight, feeling all the guilt and weirdness over knowing that, no matter how great things are, inevitably Im going toJesus, I cant even say it without crampsIm going to be seventy when shes twelve. (The realization, at my age, that seventy is closer than forty, when, in fact, I feel thirty, is a whole other discussion. I mean, who wants to be the creepy old guy on the playground? How do you give horsey rides in a walker?) I dont know why Im so obsessed. But I cant help it. I harbor this irrational fear that E, the thirty-year-old mom, will have just finished having to change our childs Pampers when shell begin having to change mine. Two in diapers! Jesus.

I told you, it was irrational. So far Im footloose and diaper free. But still, some men dream, and some men dread, and Im a dreader.

Discussing our happy accident, I told E, the thirty-year-old Future Mom, that the night our soon-to-get-here semi-Jew tot was conceived, I imagined I could hear a faint buzzing coming from her vagina. More like a tiny motorized drone: the drone of my sperm chugging along in a Hoveround at the head of a pack, colliding full-on into my sweethearts eggnot because it was the strongest, or the most worthy, but because it was near-sighted and didnt see the thing. My little Mister Magoo, sputtering accidentally into the miracle of creation.

So now, friends and fans, Im sitting in Austinlong story, which Ill get towaiting with the woman of my dreams, while she laments that fact that shes ballooned from a sylph-like 111 to a Hindenburg-esque 150-something. I tell her shes still beautiful, of course, but still Shes been an athlete all her life, and now its an Olympic event bending to pick up a sock. I used to think that love was damage loving damagewhen our pain jibes with the person were with. Now, I believe, among other things, that its about you accept my neurosis and Ill accept yours. Either way, sometimes life can be just too fascinating.