My Youngest Oldest

My Oldest Youngest 

At 16, my youngest child Howard is about to die of old age. Something old in his genes or odd in his mother’s diet, the doctors say, but they don’t say what. His burial is already arranged.   

The memories: when I held Howie close after his birth, I heard the slosh of old heart valves, his not mine. I saw liver spots, all of them his. His tiny fingers and toes already bent by osteoarthritis. A sad shock, especially coming on top of his mother’s death. Addie died in childbirth with him. Howie’s grave will adjoin hers. 

Howie began vaping at age 3 and had developed a taste for Guinness and craft brews at 4. At 5 I sent Howie to kindergarten wearing a jockstrap to contain his burgeoning manhood during recess, and clean shaven after I razored off his chest-length rabbinical beard. He began using condoms at 6 and tried to join the military at 8. They told him at the recruiting station to come back in a year or two.  He returned home and read A Farewell to Arms.

Howard has always wanted to drive, I mean since around age 2, and I took him to the DMV for his road test as soon as he turned 16, though biologically he was around 80 or 90. The tester saw this little old man behind the wheel of our family Subaru, seated on a cushion and barely able to reach the pedals due to skeletal shrinkage from calcium loss and crooked arthritic bones, but with the car radio cranking Tool. Naturally the tester assumed an advanced age, and unfortunately Howie fell into the trap when he claimed the traffic lights were glowing like fireworks. I’d told Howie not to mention his cataracts, but you know how young people are, even when they’re 90.  

Addie and I had two other kids before our last born Howie, both girls. Neither of his sisters is afflicted with his precise malady of early onset old age. Ruby, born two years before him and now18, is chronologically my oldest. By age 5 Ruby sported 38DD breasts that she insisted on exposing to feed her dollies, creating a sensation at her playmates’ tea parties. Other than that she was a physiologically normal girl, except for the naturally lacquered ruby-red fingernails that she’s had since turning 6. 

Ruby’s sister Rita, born a year after her and now 17, is my middle child. Rita is also normal except for being born with a huge bush of genital hair, really the size of a rottweiler, along with a full color birthmark across one hip that clearly shows the face of the young Jane Fonda. In addition, Rita was born with two full sets of teeth: besides the one in her mouth, a second set surrounds her navel, giving the umbilicus the appearance of a monstrous eel’s face. The doctors are still trying to determine what combination of drugs Addie, once a hippie living on a cooperative farm near Parma, Ohio, might have taken to produce these somewhat freakish traits in her offspring.   

One doctor suggested that Howie might be an evolutionary throwback to a prehistoric era when the lifespan of a man was around thirty years. I said, Whoa, wasn’t that short life expectancy because men were being eaten by saber-toothed tigers and stomped on by woolly mammoths and had no healthcare to speak of, and not some inherent defect in their DNA? The doctor stared at me coldly and didn’t answer.    

Sometimes I wonder how it would feel to have a vigorous son. This is only natural, since a man enjoys raising a hardy replica of himself.  A son who will grow up to play sports, be a dad like his dad. After Addie’s death I tried dating a woman my age, and her son, age 17 I think, beat the living crap out of me with his fists. He didn’t care for my advances toward his sacred mom. Of course Addie, who died bearing Howie, won’t need any protection from suitors. So that’s a crazy comparison, and the hell with it. The hell with life. But it would be cool to have a son like that, manly and protective, even aggressive. Howie can barely peel a banana and I’m not sure he still knows who I am. His sisters Ruby and Rita are both overweight pacifists. 

Howie doesn’t need a coffin from the mortuary, he’s making his own in woodshop at school. It will be his final project of any kind. I don’t know how he continues to sand and varnish his work, I have to lift him in and out of the car now and push him in a wheelchair to class, he looks like a shriveled penis. “I’m tired,” he moans, but he can’t wait to get to the sander and drill and varnish and have that box ready for his demise that the doctors say will occur any day now, any minute actually. Though he can hardly lift a screwdriver without fainting, it’ll be polished and sturdy, I know. With my hands on his, we’ll attach the brass handles in time.     

END