Interview with Sam Pickering

After spending 48 minutes poking and prodding me, Ken stood and said, "Sam, we just have to maintain you." As a person ages, his world becomes more fleshly. In comparison to medical concerns which now storm through weeks like nor'easters, youthful lusts merely gusted, disrupting dress and ruffling only an hour or two. A fortnight after the physical, I bought a new seat for my bicycle, an Avenir, eight and a half inches wide, only 50 percent as broad as my bottom but the most expansive seat available in Willimantic. The pressure of years and pounds had bent my old seat swaybacked. Springs collapsed, and metallic needles jabbed through the Naugahyde cover ripping trousers into a fine mesh. "Now I can sit back and relax when I ride," I told Vicki, "and my blood pressure will go down."

Blood pressure was on my mind. For 75 minutes two afternoons a week, I lecture 300 students. Performance matters as much as words. I stride boards in front of the class, waving and gesticulating, shouting so students in the back of the room can hear. To awaken those in whose stomachs lunch and book clump soporific, I hammer the lectern, and like a Pentecostal preacher aroused by the Spirit, I bark and howl. At the end of class, I am weary. Although my stock of ideas is exhausted, fury still throbs, raising blood pressure. The day before buying the bicycle seat, I raced from class to give blood. "Good Lord!" the nurse exclaimed after measuring my blood pressure, "I can't take your blood. You have to see a doctor right now." My blood pressure was 186 over 102. To maintain a machine, one must know its innards. Instead of hurrying off to Ken, I went home. To purge class from my veins, I slumped into a chair in the study and ate a chocolate cupcake. An hour later my blood pressure was 143 over 79.

Years ago I labored to be smooth and round, a person who could roll through change with equanimity. Time has transformed me into rip-rap. Instead of intriguing, change now threatens to sweep my way of life out of existence, and so in hopes of enduring, I've become angular. Gallons of snake-oil gush into my house through the mail. Much purports to be medicinal. In February an advertising booklet entitled Popular Health Magazine arrived at the back door addressed to my Uncle Coleman. Published by Bentley-Myers International in Vancouver, a cacographical but not scientific cousin of Bristol-Myers, Popular Health hawked the virtues of Achieve ES. Blazoned across the cover of the magazine was the headline "GREAT SEX OVER SIXTY." Achieve, the magazine declared, could "help raise Men's Testosterone 98% in 40 Minutes!" Brewed by Leonard Rapoport, Achieve could be purchased without a prescription and cost $101.95 for a 120-day regimen. "With proper testosterone levels," Stanley Harris, Men's Health Correspondent, testified, "firm erections, strong orgasms and a youthful sex drive can return regardless of age!" Among illustrations in the magazine were nine shots of smiling couples, all of whom, the magazine implied, tumbled days away in the hay.

One afternoon after class in hopes of lowering my blood pressure, all cupcakes having been devoured, I wrote "Messrs. International Bentley and Myers." "I answer," I began, "on behalf of my uncle Coleman Pickering, to whom you sent Popular Health, promising to reveal 'the secret to great sex after sixty.' Coleman Pickering died seven years ago at 85. If Achieve ES can resurrect his intimate life, then the Big Fellow who raised Lazarus from the dead is a quack in comparison to Leonard Rapoport. In the mouths of your miracle workers, the old hymn 'Up From the Grave He Arose' assumes new medicinal significance." "I hope you have meditated long and hard," I continued, "about the social implications of Achieve. All those vanished generations dozing peacefully in wooden suits and munching dandelion roots...