Mid-Life Crisis
An Amazing Author Ezine Column by Jack Riepe
The Body Art Museum
By Jack Riepe
©Copyright Jack Riepe 1999
I recently survived another birthday—my 45th—and have become so mired in mid-life that I give the impression of a mastodon wallowing in primordial muck up to the withers. The simplest issue can become a crisis at this juncture in my life. Getting stuck in traffic behind a garbage truck (on a July day); explaining how much change I should get to a teenage business wizard cashier (for the third time); or even attempting to look cool in western-cut jeans (that would easily fit the Marlboro man's horse) all have me swallowing Xanax or reaching for a flame-thrower.
Technically, mid-life begins when you've matured enough in the mind to fully enjoy what's left of your body. The grim reality is that mid-life usually occurs at the point where your finances are down, your cholesterol is up, and your third wife covers her ears from 40 feet away whenever you start the car. It's the time in a man's life when the most important organ he can think of is his prostate, and younger women are any born after 1954. Mid-life occurs when a man is compelled to pay attention to numbers, and skill in handling a 401K becomes more gratifying than a .357 magnum.
While men have various ways of dealing with mid-life, most of these strategies are reactions to the panic associated with the loss of hair, the accumulation of girth, or abandonment by women who should have known better in the first place. Several of my boyhood chums have physiques that have weathered four decades and then some with a rock-hard resolve, only to be crowned by nearly hairless scalps that date them with the Sphinx. Others sit astride vast wealth, which fails to spackle the flaws in their mid-life personalities and won't get them laid on a rainy night in Times Square.
Men'll try anything to hang on to a fleeting youth, especially if the youth is a tanned, athletic, dynamic blonde, with a dynamite smile trudging along under her skis (canoe, or backpack). For many mid-life men, this means resorting to cheap props, or in some cases, rather expensive toys. One year, two close friends and I found ourselves struggling to regain (or is it Rogain) the excitement of our late teens by buying sports cars. (None of us had the money for sports cars when we were kids. We had motorcycles! But who the hell wants to pick bugs out of your teeth when you're in your forties!)
My friend Bill bought a vintage MGB, in traditional English racing green. Scott snapped up an old Mustang fastback. I went for a RX-7, cool, fast, and deadly. Determined to find a little action one hot summer night, we cruised the Jersey shore like a pack of aging sharks. Bill attracted the most attention, as his classic sports car burned three quarts of oil in just under an hour. Scott scored with the first chick, a spry thing of 60 who wanted to know if her walker would fit in the car's little back seat. But I was the one who snared the real beauty of the night.
She was a genuine Mainline doll in jeans and a tank top, flanked by two other knockouts. I could see her cocking (the very word sent shivers down my spine) her head to see through the RX-7's smoked glass. Her friends laughed and egged her on. She was teetering on the edge of conversation. I didn't hesitate, I cranked the music—unleashing Springstein's Born To Run—and revved the engine, sending the tach soaring.
That did it.
She sauntered over and said, “Hi. My name is Leslie. My two friends, Gay and Lee, really like your car. They sent me over here to see how the hell you fit into it.”
We dumped the sportscars by silent consensus and moved on to other alleged girl magnets. We acquired speedboats, condos, purple racing skis and matching outfits. We had tummy tucks and face lifts. I even had a levitationist make my ass appear weightless. Bill tried every hair growth product known to medical science, and had to have his back shaved 16 times. (His head remained as smooth as a cue ball, however.) Scott got a Mohawk, and dyed it purple. Nothing thrust us back into the mainstream of youth. We even tried body piercing. Between the three of us, our ear lobes, nostrils, and eyebrows sported 67 pounds of stainless steel. And then the winning ticket came to me!
Tattoos!
What we needed were tattoos! It briefly occurred to us that having some bulging muscles upon which to put these tattoos might have been a good prerequisite. But bulging muscles would have taken years to develop. We wanted results now. A visit to Fast Eddie's Body and Head Shop (New Orleans) conclusively proved to us that a little body art was the last realm of youthful manliness. Manliness goes just so far, however. Tattoos are applied with needles. Needles hurt. The artwork that appealed to us (a dragon eating Detroit, a skull with a dagger through it, and a heart with a broken beer bottle sticking out of it) seemed to require hours of stoicism while getting stabbed with pins dripping color. This level of concentration can only be achieved through several days of heavy drinking.
We scheduled our session for Thursday, and started drinking on the preceding weekend. I was the first one in the artist's chair. The chair was pretty comfortable and the droning of the electric needle had a hypnotic effect—which when combined with five days of boozing—had me sleeping like a baby. The artist began coloring in the outline of the drawing, pausing only to swear or to wipe a fallen cigarette ash from my chest. My two friends were amazed at how my new tattoo looked more like a bloody rash indelibly etched on my body than the crisp sketch which appeared in Eddie's window.
“I don't know about this,” said Scott. “Before you put the dragon on me, let's see how it looks on him first.” Fast Eddie obliged, and the dragon was added to my chest alongside the broken heart. Bill sought a similar demonstration, and the skull was applied to my stomach. The boys decided to try out other designs and before long, my body began to look like a billboard from hell. I awakened 16 hours later to find enormous insect eyes drawn on opposite sides of my ass, while my schwantz was colored to look like an elephant's trunk (complete with a peanut drawn on the end).
Worse, my two friends had managed to pick up a couple of southern cuties while waiting for me to regain consciousness. There were no takers for me, however. Nor have there been since. It would appear that an appreciation for art and lost youth have nothing in common.
Just yesterday, I found myself writing an ad for the classified section of a singles tabloid. It read, “Wanted: An artistically-inclined hot-looking woman born after 1954, who occasionally wants to try and wrestle a peanut from an elephant's trunk.”
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