Common Sense	Common Sense Archive

Andy Warhol was shot in New York City one day before Senator Robert Kennedy, then running for the 1968 Democratic nomination, was assassinated in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, having just won the California primary. Andy went into surgery and lived. As Warhol was a television addict, his friends made sure he had a TV in his recovery room. Warhol recalled that when he came out of his stupor, all he could remember hearing was the phrase "Kennedy assassination," "Kennedy assassination." His evaluation? He thought he had died, gone to heaven, and all it was was re-runs. And who knows? It may well be. (Warhol, famously, had a celebrity photographer take a picture of him, some months later, pulling up his jersey and showing the world his scar-- recalling Lyndon Johnson's baring of his abdomen. Was the Warhol photo taken by Richard Avedon? Or Francesco Scavullo? I can't remember.)

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The same old same old. It's a daunting highway of life. It makes you appreciate, to some extent, what some of the modernists were up to-- to make it new. And in some genres, most notably architecture, they did. But the "new," as so designated, can be deceiving. Christian Dior was credited with creating The New Look in Parisian fashions. When asked about this appellation, Dior said there was nothing new about it at all. He was just trying to recreate what he remembered of his mother's generation's fashions from the Belle Époque, lots and lots of fabric and a sensuous look. It was Dior's response to the years and years of economic depression and world war, an attempt, through fashion, to wipe out two wars and the inter-war misery.

I have noticed a change in behavior in some of my older friends (I am 57, these friends are in their mid-60s). It is this: they repeat themselves, even in the space of a short conversation, and I find myself saying the same thing over and over again when speaking to them. Of course, there are younger people who repeat themselves; they are often folks with little to say and they say it again and again. My friends have had a larger life-script and I can only attribute this change in behavior to medical conditions and age. My mother, aged 85, has only recently started repeating herself, though I must note that on my recent visit with her, she was very sharp about events in 1927, even if I cannot independently validate their veracity. If I live long enough, will this happen to me? I suspect I already have repeated myself over the years-- quoting again and again my favorite authors (Gore Vidal, Oscar Wilde, Dorothy Parker, etc.) The best wears the best. And as years go on, it's hard to come up with anything new, except for the young, for whom the old is new, pruned and gussied up.

Does the brain get full up? Why is it harder to learn new things as you age? Less agile? Resistance? I've always thought so much of what we chose to do is libido (and libido-related) driven.

I recall a conversation I had with novelist Lewis Gannett one day several years back, and Lewis and I were recounting our various adventures when young and after we had run through a list of things which seemed, in retrospect, very foolish if not dangerous, Lewis told me: "It's remarkable that we're both still alive." I hadn't thought about my life in this light, but Lewis was right.

And then something very strange happened not too long ago. Out of the blue, I received a phone call, at work, from an old boyfriend of mine from my high school years. Frank was a gorgeous Jewish guy; we were on the swim team together and would share a bed when off at swim meets. He entertained my affections, but only to a certain degree. Our intimacy never got past canoodling, though I tried my best. Anyway, I had not seen nor spoken to Frank since 1967 or 1968. But he called and I answered. He introduced himself and I said, "How are you?" and there was a pause and Frank said: "I'm surprised you're still alive." I thought this an odd salutation from an old friend. Frank is now a doctor in California and I have gone over this phone call again and again, simply because it seemed so odd. It took me a while to figure it out, but I decided Frank must have been stoned. Do they have stoner docs in CA? They must have. They have everything else. At any rate, I was grateful Frank was thinking about me; I think about him every day, since young love, or at least the repeated memory of it, never ages, even though if we met it would be the balding stoner doc and the wizened gay bookseller.

And these days I'm a little more hardcore than canoodling, though to repeat myself, I understand the attitude of the great English writer J.R. Ackerley, that after age 50, he'd take up with just about anyone and do just about anything for sexual companionship. I sympathize with this position, though it is not my own. But it reminds me of the old joke, which I don't think I repeated before: you don't pay the hustler for the sex; you pay him to go away. Would that most of the world worked on such a simple basis. But here we stay. Now did I tell you about the time I met

Author Profile:  Mitzel
	Mitzel was a founding member of the Fag Rag collective, and has been a Guide columnist since 1986. He manages Calamus Books near Boston's South Station.
	Email:	mitzel@calamusbooks.com
	Website:	calamusbooks.com