I'm 55 and this afternoon I was listening to Jefferson's Airplane's SOMEBODY TO LOVE with three 18 year-olds on Pattaya's Soi 6. The trio of Thai girls wanted me to visit an upstairs short-time room. "You sexy man. How old you. 40?"
Even through beer goggles my mirror doesn't lie more than 49.
My wife thinks I'm ancient, however Pattaya is a refuge for men not wanting to face their age.
To misquote TS Eliot. "As I get old I shall wear my trousers rolled where the women don't speak about Michelangelo."
No one in Pattaya mentions Michaelangelo unless he's a Ninja Turtle fan. No one wants to show their age, but I've been old for a long time, but the old age truck never blows its horn when it backs up over you as I learned in 1986.
I was working at the Milk Bar in New York. Our clientele favored cokeheads, artists, and models. Everyone went home with someone. Not me. I was living under my next-door neighbor's curse of celibacy and Mrs. Adorno wasn't in a mood to forgive my eviction of a Madrid flamenco dancer. Months passed without my touching a woman. I was reverting to being a virgin, then one night I told a 19 year-old mulatto singer the story. She took pity and accepted my offer to take her home. I wish I could remember her name, but that loss of memory isn't the first sign of old-timers' disease.
Upon entering my apartment on East 10th Street she said, "I've been here before."
With my subleasee. A Swedish male nurse. He liked black chicks.
"When I came here the first time, I wondered who lived here."
"Really?" My flat was a classic homage to the 1920s.
"Yeah, I was sort of cool, but looking at the records I figured the guy who lived here had to be a hippie."
"Hippie?" I had long hair once and hitchhiked to San Francisco in 1970 three years too late for the Summer of Love.
But better late than never and what was wrong with liking Quicksilver Messenger Service?
Who do you love?
The mulatto girl was right. I was an old hippie.
But this afternoon on Soi 6 the fountain of youth was flowing with the unabashed compliments of working girls. "You very sexy."
No one in America has called me sexy since high society interior designer Tony Ingrao bought a 20-carat Burmese blue sapphire from me. At our celebratory dinner he cooed, "You're very sexy."
Tony only wanted sex. Not much different from the Soi 6 girls. They were after money for sex.
Still I liked hearing what they had to say. Only other place I might hear those words would be on Palm Beach from an 80 year-old crone with a billion dollars in trust. "Come here, young man, let's see how sexy you are."
Just a gigolo.
So if all else fails then I'm on the Gold Coast of Florida a couple of months a year working the ageless Botox turtles of at the Breakers. I'll do most anything for a lobster roll and my wife would understand. After all you're only as old as the woman you love.
By the way the name of the waitress from the Milk bar was Shane. My memory is back, if only temporarily. Do you think I am sexy? Girls on Soi 6 think so.
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