The Waning of the Wayne

Look at him! He has an old man’s walk—shoulders crunched like chicken wings, the back in a paperclip bend, the shuffling steps, a look of bewildered caution on his face. He didn’t used to be like that, you know. Of course, it’s maybe an act. Maybe he’s masquerading as an old man for some reason. The baggy pants, the white hair, his arms all flaccid flesh, and the cane to top it off. Maybe he thinks he’s funny. Maybe it’s his contribution to performance art. Maybe it’s a way of filling a space in the universe that he knows will soon bear a rusty half-legible vacancy sign like an out-of-date motel on a secondary road bypassed by the new interstate.

You know, it’s not really him. Not on the inside. He’s just sent out to do some of the things that need to be done—a little shopping, some minor exercise to remind the muscles that once they worked in uncomplaining unison, to meet friends and banter as though everything was normal and right and tolerable. And he also serves as a reliable cash cow for the pharmaceutical and medical industries. In the old days—and that’s a phrase that keeps returning with an unstoppable hum—in the old days if he had to go to a doctor it was a one-time event. He got his shot or his illegibly filledout prescription or maybe even endured the scalpel, and then it was over. Thanks, Doc, I’m outta here. Now every visit and every prescription have a series of follow-ups that will clearly extend into what art-critics call the vanishing point. Well, let the old man, the simulacrum, endure it. We’ll stay here and sit it out, thank you. There’s no way that we’re going to be co-opted by the aarp.

This is hardly a new strategy, of course; he’s been at it for as long as I can remember. The puppet is pushed out from the wings as a handy target for the slings and arrows while he hunches up in a hardshell carapace like a snail or coconut meat inside its protective shell. Consciousness is vulnerable. It’s under constant assault—tsunamis, avalanches, seismic belching from down under, up above, and every which way. A person damn well better learn to build the strongest barriers he can, or otherwise he’ll implode into drift and diffusion. So he huddles fetally inside like a crazed survival nut in his bunker and projects surrogate selves into the world.

For example, years and years ago in Korea in a relatively peaceful, although explodingly populated, Seoul as thousands of Koreans abandoned their homes in the Communist North to seep south after the Japanese capitulation in 1945. This was two years before the North Koreans poured over the 38th parallel like wolves descending on the fold. You could find the huge plaza in front of the railroad terminal blanketed every night with hundreds of the sleeping bodies of the voluntarily uprooted and desperate. Toddlers naked in the summer, their toenails black with grime from the unpaved urban streets. Old men in their strange black horsehair hats. The American regiment was severely understrength—all the four- and five-year veterans— some of them having arced down from Sitka and Attu all through the Pacific and finally garnering enough points to be discharged—and we were pulling guard duty around the clock—two hours on, four hours off—for unending, unrelieved weeks. Bitter cold, sleety so your eyebrows frosted up, your toes and earlobes tingled and then numbed and disappeared, while you trudged the post—a chicken-wire enclosure about the size of a tennis court, illuminated by three bare incandescent bulbs, in which were stacked crates and crates of Coca-Cola. They had plucked me out of college to guard “The Pause That Refreshes” in a country I had never heard of until the Liberty ship docked at Inchon.

And, around 3 a.m. one day about an hour before my...