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Print Friendly Page CHAPTER ONE EARLY BIRD I lost my job in january. The television show I was working on was canceled. I've been raised to believe that losing your job is a bad thing, but I am more relieved than disappointed. I've been working seventy hours a week for the better part of a decade. I've spent more time in my office chair than I have in my bed. My wrists twitch. My back throbs. My butt hurts. When I close my eyes, I see a blinking keyboard cursor. I'm twenty-eight years old, and far too many of my memories involve me sitting in my office after midnight, tasting every quarter-filled coffee cup on my desk until I find the one that is still a little warm. Now I'm off work and I don't care. I may not be a coal miner, but work is work, and I need to stop doing it for a while. I don't know what I want to do next. Everyone says I should make lists of what my priorities are and see where that takes me. It's nice sometimes to be told what to do. I try making lists of "important things," and "life goals," and "meaningful values." I take long walks, praying for epiphany. Epiphany does not come, so I get pizza instead. Being unemployed makes everyone around you nervous. Nobody knows what to say to you. At parties and dinners, making small talk, you're always supposed to be "doing" something, or at least "up to" something. "So what are you 'doing?' What are you 'up to?'" they start to ask, once a few weeks have passed. I tell them I'm "off work" or "taking time off," terms I've come to resent because they remind me that I'm supposed to be "on." Years ago, people would call this "taking a vacation," which had a nice, assertive ring to it, but nobody I know calls it that anymore. The first place I vacationed was Florida, to visit my grandparents. It blew my eight-year-old mind. The snowstorms and school-yard fights of my typical New York February were far away. My family rented a convertible and drove around as an actual family for once, listening to bad radio like Lionel Richie. But down in Florida, I learned, "Lionel Richie sounds good!" I'd get sunburned, and my grandmother would call it "healthy color." I would sleep on the world's only comfortable cot, listening to the ocean through the window screen, and my head would sing: "Hey! Jumbo jumbo!"
My friends say the whole plan sounds neurotic. My family agrees, and also wants to know if I have a date yet for my sister's wedding. "This is what it is," I tell my friend Jill, who I met, of course, at work--where else do you meet people these days?--when I used to be a joke writer for David Letterman, and Jill was a segment producer. "I move down to Florida and test out retirement early. I get to relax in the only place I've ever actually been relaxed. And while I'm there, I get to see what retirement is like forty years before I get there. I get to see if working hard is worth it. Maybe I meet a bunch of wise elderly people who inspire me and I somehow figure out a way to write a book about it. I've read 'Tuesdays with Morrie.' I know how it goes." "You're kidding me," she says. "Everything is so accelerated lately," I say. "Maybe I've crammed a lifelong career into seven years." "Sweetie, you go insane when you're not working," she says. "You gotta go back to work." "I don't," I explain to her. Instead of actually doing work I can at least tell people at parties, when they ask me what I'm doing, that I'm "writing a book." Then they will say, "Oh, wow, a book, that's great." I could drag it out for years. Americans are surviving longer and longer these days. Between the Bronze Age and 1900--about 4,500 years--our life expectancy extended twenty-seven years. In the last hundred years, thanks to medical advancements and better home care, our life expectancy increased the same amount. Replacement body parts, the Human Genome Project. We're going to live a long time. I don't want to get ready for those final years the way I get ready for a dental cleaning, maniacally flossing for two days to make up for months of neglect, then acting surprised when the hygienist says my gums are infected. What's neurotic about being exceedingly prepared? My first step is to somehow find a way to live in a retirement community. My grandfather tells me that it is unlikely I'll find one that will allow me to move in. Most Florida retirement communities have strict fifty-five-years-and-up policies. I ask him if any of his elderly friends have empty Florida condos I can squat in. I have always thought that my grandfather's wellspring of unconditional love is bottomless, but this request manages to scrape rock. He is nice enough, though, to set me up on a meeting with a New Jersey neighbor of his who keeps a condo in Boynton Beach, Florida. Unfortunately, she tells me, with a Dominican nurse sitting imposingly behind her like a bodyguard, that she is selling the condo any day now; it won't be available. I join Roommate Finders of Florida for one hundred dollars. I tell them I want a roommate over the age of sixty-five. They don't seem troubled by the request. Perhaps that fact should have troubled me. A few days later, they call back and say they've found me a roommate in Boca Raton. Her name is Margaret. She is in her mid- to late sixties. She lives in Century Village, one of the largest, most famous retirement communities in the country. It caters mainly to lower-middle-class Jews from the Northeast. I've heard of it before. It's one of these fully loaded communities: swimming pools, tennis courts, a huge clubhouse full of meeting rooms and social events, and more than five thousand condominium units for retired people. "One question," they ask. "Do you have a problem with cats or birds?" "Not enough of one," I say. The night before I leave Los Angeles for Florida, I throw myself a going away party at a tiki bar. A handful of my closest friends in the city show up. After two years here in Los Angeles, I'm still amazed by how few people I actually know well. It's not like it used to be, when we were in our early twenties and everyone would stay out late all the time. We'd all buy each other shots and then vomit together in the streets. Really great times. These days it seems like everyone is staying in; small dinner parties or just crashing out on the couch watching "Six Feet Under." I wonder how much I'm really going to miss any of these people. For my last night, though, we rage for a few hours like the old days. People give me AmberVision glasses, adult diapers, "Sexy and Sixty" cuff links. We drink pina coladas. Naturally, there are many crude jokes made about me romancing old women. The next day on the plane, I'm glad I got drunk at my party and I'm glad I am hungover. It blunts the edge as my plane descends toward South Florida, as I wonder what the hell I am doing, looking out over the paisley landscape and beginning an early retirement.
EARLY MORNING IN CENTURY VILLAGE "Old people, they make young people scream.
I've been forcing myself to get up early, like real retirees do. I walk outside at six-fifteen in the morning, and it couldn't feel more absurd. The sky above the greater Boca Raton area is still more black than blue. Outside, Century Village is full of elderly people already out for their day. They are moving at full speed. They are jogging, walking, swimming laps in the swimming pool, ambling around the tennis courts. At six-thirty in the morning, I have seen several men waxing their cars. They are wide awake; they are not sleep-waxing. Melatonin shortage doesn't begin to explain it. I should have laid a little more groundwork before I came down here. I realize that now. Most people, when they retire, go someplace where they already know a lot of people. My grandparents, when they used to live here, settled near all their old friends from Queens. I remember when I used to come down and visit them here, they'd always go out of their way to make me feel comfortable and relaxed, and to introduce me to everyone. "You remember Harris," they'd say, "from two floors below us in Rego Park?" Some guy I'd never seen before, with white chest hair sprouting out of his shirt, would swat me on the head. Then we'd all go play bingo together, or go down to the pool, or go out to Denny's. Great vacation memories. This was years before I realized that Denny's is a terrible restaurant. But my grandparents don't live here anymore. Harris died. I underestimated how different it would be in South Florida without all those people. I think I half expected they'd still be here. I don't know any of the retirees anymore, and the only piece of small talk my groggy brain can come up with is: "Why are you waxing your car at six-fifteen in the damn morning?," which doesn't feel neighborly. By late morning I end up trying to call someone back home. A family member or a friend. I just want to talk to someone who knows me. With the phone pressed up against my sweaty ear, I pace around the parking lot in front of my condominium, the only place where I can get halfway-decent reception. If I manage to get someone on the phone, he sounds stressed and busy, which cheers me up. It is a useful reminder of why I wanted to come down here to begin with. "I can't talk," my friend Matt says, "I'm working." I hear his fingers clacking on a keyboard. Matt works two jobs at once; he is on the payroll at one place and runs his own business at the same time. "I think I made a terrible mistake," I say. "It's lonely here." "I don't have time for this," he says. "Just talk to people," he says. "They're old. They're lonely too." What was it in the fifties that caused retirees to begin moving, en masse, to Florida? It's been attributed to the advent of Social Security in 1935. Nothing like it had ever occurred before. Suddenly, elderly people had a guaranteed income. They were no longer forced to work until they couldn't, and then, if they were lucky, die in their children's house. They could choose how and where they wanted to grow old. I wonder if any of the elderly people questioned the motives behind Social Security. Did they feel taken care of? Or did they feel like they were being pushed out of the workplace too soon? It's not as if anyone prized their wisdom and experience anymore. Old-timers knew how to milk a cow, or foxtrot; that didn't help Colgate sell more toothpaste. Georges Minois, in "History of Old Age," writes that the elderly, "living in this world, felt they no longer belonged to it. The activities, attitudes and distractions of the young were forbidden to them." Never before in human history had senior citizens decided to get up and move far away from everyone else, their families and hometowns. But that's what happened. At the age of sixty-five, they decided to become pilgrims and start a new colony. They went to Florida, and claimed their Shuffleboard Zion. So I've been trying to approach the retired people here and start conversations with them. I force myself to walk up to them mid-wax. I just want to bite the bullet, and accelerate the process of adjusting to the retired life. It will pay off in forty years, when I'm far more ready for the transition than my friends and loved ones are. Walking up to strange people is a terrifying prospect, even if they have friendly, wizened old faces like the people down here in Florida do. But I learn after a few attempts that most people around here are open to me. This is mainly because they assume that I am someone else's grandson. "You look like Sybil. Are you Sybil's?" one says. "Which Sybil?" says another. "Fourth floor or ground floor?" "I'm not Sybil's," I say. "I'm here to try out retirement early." "That's a good idea," they say. "Whose grandson are you?" Once I convey that I'm nobody's grandson, the retirees tend to get cagey. "What are you selling, then?" they always ask, half joking and backing away. Young men who aren't anybody's grandson are probably scam artists trying to fleece the elderly out of their savings. I've seen the flyers around the community warning residents to "Report Salesmen and Unregistered Visitors to Security!!!!!!!" So I usually tell them that I'm a professional writer. I tell them that I used to write jokes for David Letterman, and that always seems to placate them for a few minutes and open them up for a little conversation. I seem more like a vacationing professional and less like an off-putting weirdo who is living in their community for no discernible reason. "So is retirement what you expected?" I ask them first. It's my icebreaker question. "It's hard when you first get here," a man admits to me, as he waxes his car. "Especially if you're alone like I was." "I know," I say, "that's what it's like for me down here too." "Yeah," he says, a bit confused. "Do you have any advice," I say, "about how to get through the early days? How to adjust faster?" "Well...it helps if you find some common interests with people. Do you have any interests?" Interests. Do I have any? Is "Tivo-ing" an interest? Probably not. At my old office, I once used rubber bands to construct a bouncing ball the size of a large mango. Does that count? "I don't really have any," I say. "Sure you do, kid, what kind of stuff do you like?" he says. "You collect something? Stamps?" "Really, I don't have any interests," I say. "Nobody I know has any interests." "Oh," he says. "That's too bad." At that, the man goes back to waxing his car at six forty-five in the morning. I head back inside and go to sleep until noon.
MY ROOMMATES Margaret's parrot has taught itself how to imitate my alarm clock. That becomes clear to me at five-thirty this morning, when three solid slaps delivered to my Sony Dream Machine fail to turn it off. The bird's alarm clock impression is impressive. A pitch-perfect crescendo of electronic beeps, rising in volume, piercing my sleep. BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! I get a kick out of it at first. I lie in bed and laugh. Then, after a while, it stops being funny. The parrot imitates my alarm clock every few minutes for two hours straight. "I get it," I am forced to say, out loud, to a bird. "You can imitate the clock. Good one. You can stop now." But parrots don't have snooze bars. If you try to bop it on the head, you will just break its little bird neck. When I moved in, I told my roommate, Margaret, I was okay with her cats and birds. Roommate Finders had told me I should be agreeable, so I lied and told her I was an animal enthusiast, and that I didn't mind if she moved the parrot onto the patio outside my bedroom. "Outside, Zulu can get more fresh air," she said, and I said, "Great! Parrots need fresh air!" What I probably should have said is: "Okay, but good luck finding fresh air if your cats keep taking dumps under my bed." I lie down and try hard to fall asleep. I drift off and am sitting by the ocean, with the sun on my body and a line of turquoise hotels stretching horizon to horizon behind me. It's just like I had imagined Florida would be before I got here. BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! My eyes snap open. "Shut up, bird!" I shout, way too loudly. There is a knock on my door, and it swings open before I say, "Come in." It is Margaret, her skinny body shrouded in a pale blue nightgown, coming back from her early-morning bathroom break. She glances over at the parrot to make sure I haven't killed it. "Please!" she says to me. She doesn't seem fazed by the fact that I am lying stark naked on top of the sheets. Margaret gives me a final reproachful glare and shuts the door. The parrot starts up again, BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! I hurl the throw pillow at the patio door. The bird keeps beeping. Having a roommate can be practical, especially when you've just moved to a new place. I'm not yet sure, though, whether it is practical for me to have a roommate who spends the greater part of each afternoon talking to her animals. Ah, the Cat-and-Bird Lady. Back in suburbia, we would have dared each other to ring her doorbell and run. Now I live with her. Although it's not as if Margaret and I ever interact. Sometimes it seems like she's a ghost roommate, and that my real roommates are the cats, Ranchipurr and Petna, or the parrots, or the large painting of Jesus Christ that Margaret keeps on my bedroom wall. Aren't Margaret and I a little too old to be platonic roommates? I haven't had a roommate in years. Once you get past a certain age, it's not considered appropriate. Which begs this additional question: Why would someone in her late sixties invite a twenty-eight-year-old man to live with her? Margaret never even asked me why I was down here in Florida. When I told her I was here to test out retirement early, she shrugged and went back to watching penguins on Animal Planet. Is it financial problems? I've read that it's common for senior citizens to have inadequate savings. Does she like my company? Perhaps. It's not as if she has any friends stopping by. Maybe she likes the security of having a man around the house. Or maybe there's some darker reason. Margaret has a jittery way about her that can put me on edge. Her hair is often stringy and wild, as if she's been out wandering in the middle of the night. It's weird because she never leaves the condo. Sometimes, when I open the refrigerator and see the weird, drippy meat on Margaret's shelf, I wonder what it is I'm looking at. God help me. Is it an old cat? A former twenty-eight-year-old roommate? Later, at night, I stare from my bed at the painting of Jesus. I half expect eyes to blink behind the canvas, revealing the secret passage Margaret will use when she leaps into my room, in her pale blue nightgown, her wrinkled arms wielding a murderously sharp can opener. In the living room, Margaret has a beautiful piano that she never plays. Mainly the piano serves as a perch for Margaret's cats. The only time that Margaret talks to me is when I ask her about her cats. "Ranchipurr is named after the Indian city Ranchipur," she tells me. "But I added an extra "r" because he's a cat, and cats purr." "Oh," I say. I decide not to ask about Petna. My friends in New York, Nick and Eva, have a pet cat. It's one of those things where the cat is an obvious surrogate for their future children, a bad omen considering that Nick tends to torment the cat with a laser pointer. Eva says that the reason Ranchipurr and Petna are always trying to run into my room is that it used to be their turf. She says that when someone new shows up in a cat's home, it's common for a turf war to break out. "Oh, yes," my roommate Margaret told me once, "you're sleeping in Ranchipurr's and Petna's old playroom!" That would explain why there are cat hairs all over the carpet. Maybe it even explains the painting of Jesus. Maybe the cats are Catholic. Ranchipurr is the more creepy-looking cat. He has a shock of gray-white hair sticking up from his forehead that makes him look like a deranged feline Don King. Petna is smaller and more cute; he's the "good cat" to Ranchipurr's "bad cat." Sometimes they'll both walk out onto the patio outside my bedroom, and there's nothing separating us but the glass sliding door. We've gotten into some lengthy staring contests like that on many afternoons. I always lose. I end up feeling vulnerable, and I go hide in the windowless bathroom for a while. "I should have seen it coming," I tell Eva, "the moment I walked into Margaret's condo and smelled all that cat in the air. I just should have turned around and found another place to live." "You're, like, obsessed with cats," she says. "I spent three hours on the Internet last night reading about them. Is that obsessed?" "Yes." "Fact: they transport ear mites, germs, diseased fleas. Fact: in 2002, cats helped spread scrub typhus, a fatal disease, all over the Maldive Islands. And that's not the worst I've read about. Listen to this. Fact: a cat's litter box is filled with--" "Rodney--" "'Toxoplasma gondii,'" a one-celled parasite that can do tremendous damage to an unborn baby. They recommend washing your hands after every single contact with a cat." After a few more minutes, Eva tells me that I sound busy and that she will "let me go," and she goes back to work. I'm still wound up. Aren't cats supposed to play with yarn? These cats don't. Aren't they supposed to attack birds? I mean, these cats live with birds, and they don't attack them. I would feel better if the cats were attacking the birds. At least then my enemies would be going after one another, and I would benefit. But the cats and birds seem to have signed some historic cat-bird treaty where they agree to go after me instead. The parrot begins squawking early every morning, and has a limited vocabulary. Sometimes it shouts "HELLOOOOOOO?!" imitating Margaret as she answers the phone. Other times, it repeats the only phrase that Margaret has taught it: "NOT TO WORRY! NOT TO WORRY! NOT TO WORRY! NOT TO WORRY! NOT TO WORRY! NOT TO WORRY!" When a filthy bird shouts at me not to worry, I start to worry a lot more. It's not like I can tell the bird to shut the hell up. To begin with, Jesus is in my bedroom. I'm not Christian, but it's not like I want to curse in front of the dude. What if it turns out he's real? That's what I need, for the bird to imitate me saying "SHUT THE HELL UP," then Jesus gets pissed, and then Margaret kicks me out of the condo.
THE OL' SWIMMING HOLE There are 108 condominium buildings in Century Village, clustered in groups around communal heated swimming pools. The swimming pool is the afternoon social center of our condominium cluster. Every day, after lunchtime, crowds of mainly female retirees gather there. From what I can tell, the mornings are full of activity for elderly retirees, and the afternoons are for sitting on your butt. Even though they're no longer working, they still seem to follow the same old rhythm of the workday, where nothing productive ever seems to happen between two and five. Very few of the women go swimming. "I can't," I overhear one say. "I just went to the beauty parlor yesterday." That strikes me as funny. What's a little chlorine? As if her coiffure isn't chock-full of a billion chemicals already. Instead of swimming, the women pull the lounge chairs into circles and talk, all at once, for several hours. My grandmother used to do the same thing at her pool in Miami Beach, before she died, but I was always allowed to sit in with them because of the family connection. That's not the case here in Century Village. I try to sit close enough to eavesdrop, to get a sense of the kinds of things I'll be talking about when I'm older. Mainly they gossip and talk about local restaurants or their failing health. Their conversations are like an avant-garde symphony of food and medical maladies; they often switch from one to the other and back again so fast I'm thoroughly confused. "Have you been to Sweet Tomatoes yet?" I'll hear one say. "They got a lotta breads. I went there after Dr. Zann's." "Dr. Zann, he's good," says another, resting her feet on a lounge chair. "Good man. I like the salads at Limburger's." "I like that too. They make you wait too long, though." "Yes, he's getting too popular. The other doctor at the clinic, he's not as good." "I might go there tonight." "Yeah?" "Eat some greens. Make my doctor happy, right?" When I get bored with eavesdropping on the women, I pretend to read a book until I fall asleep. I bought a copy of "The Old Man and the Sea" at a bookstore recently because it seemed both geographically and gerontologically appropriate. The book is something like twenty pages long and it's taken me almost a month to pretend to read it. It's getting to the point where I'm experiencing actual feelings of hate for the marlin on the book cover. As difficult as it is to approach retirees when they're alone, it's way harder to do it when they're all together. They become an intimidating bloc. Their chairs are pressed together; they leave no room for anyone to come and join them. If I were to walk up to the Pool Group and start talking, I'd have to stand there like a dolt on the periphery of the circle. All those gray heads would turn at once, and I fear I would just be overwhelmed by my otherness and make an ass of myself. From what I've gathered I'm not overreacting. "You don't barge in. People need to get used to you," a woman told me, speaking of her pool group, a few zones over. "It took me two years to get into the group." Sometimes, if the Pool Group's conversation gets heated enough, I wake up. The mood becomes electric one afternoon when an ambulance drives into the parking lot and some emergency medical technicians get out and go into the building. It's a strange sight in the bright afternoon sun. "Where are they going?" one of the women asks. They all begin to speculate on who has died or had a heart attack. We watch the elevator go up the building and stop on the third floor. The orderlies walk down the catwalk and stop at one of the condos. "It's 303," says one of the women, an unnaturally red-haired woman named Shirley. "Is that the one from Philly? The short one?" "No, she's in 308." "Do we know 303?" "Nope." So the women turn away and continue their salad conversation.
"Are you new?" I ask. "Yes, I am," she says. "I moved here last week." That's exciting to me. It's always easier to make friends with other new people, because you have at least one major thing in common. "You're someone's grandson?" she says. "Yes, I am," I say, which is really just a white lie. I am someone's grandson. They just happen to be over a thousand miles away right now. "Are you making a lot of friends down here?" I ask her. Maybe she could introduce me to people. "It's impossible to make friends here," she says. "Everyone is very cliquish." She motions to the group of women across from us, sitting in their circle of chairs. "Like them. That pow-wow there. They're a big clique." "Oh," I say. "I'm sure they're very friendly." I've done some quick thinking and decided that I can perhaps send this woman over to the Pool Group as a weather balloon and see how they respond to an outsider. "Them friendly?" she says. "I doubt it." After fifteen minutes, the woman next to me stands up and walks over to the big clique. I can't believe it. She's going in. "Excuse me," she says to the Pool Group. "I've been listening to your conversation about doctors who overcharge, and I just came over to say that all of you are wrong." Now, personally, this wouldn't have been my opening statement if I were the weather balloon. It sounds a little confrontational to me. My weather balloon continues, telling the assembled women that she used to work for a doctor, and that he never overcharged patients who were on Medicare. "Well, that's just one doctor up North," says Shirley, the fake redhead. "We're talking about a thousand doctors down here." "You're all wrong," my weather balloon repeats, jabbing her finger at them. "'You're' all wrong," Shirley repeats. "They charge more here. And it's against the law for them to do that. It's as against the law as if I were to punch you." "Punch me?" says the weather balloon. "I'm just using it as an example," says Shirley. The rest of the Pool Group begin to snicker. "What a thing to say," says the weather balloon. She walks back over to me, deflated. I feel a brief sympathy for her. Man, the next twenty years of her life are going to be rough. Then I realize that the Pool Group might associate her with me, and I quickly face my body away from her so we look like strangers. At four o'clock, like clockwork, everyone leaves to go get ready for dinner. Huge dark storm clouds are rolling in, like they do every late-summer afternoon in the Sunshine State. I go back to pretending to read my book. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the old guy can't fish anymore. I get it.
But then, after World War II, the perfection of bug spray and affordable home air-conditioning made Florida a far more bearable place to be. Real estate developers began to sell the state as a vacation paradise, targeting GIs who had trained down in Florida and had fond memories of the state. In the first years after the war, Florida saw an increase in tourism many times over. And mind you, this was years before your children could be traumatized by a man in a mouse costume in broad Orlando daylight. Soon, the real estate developers recognized that they were thinking too small. Why just sell Florida to vacationers? "People could live in Florida year-round!" The developers began one of the larger swamp-draining projects in the planet's history. They embarked on road shows up and down the East Coast, pitching their "retirement communities" as the perfect place to spend your golden years. They called these places Leisure City, Leisureville, Leisure Lakes, Leisure Village, and Serenity. Brochures promised year-round "resort living at its finest," a place "where living has no limits." The pitch worked. The developers tapped in to an enormous population of spurned, dissatisfied elderly people with expendable incomes. These people had already been to Florida on vacation. They liked the idea of a holiday that would never end. Beginning in the 1950s, hundreds of thousands of recent retirees ventured south to Florida. They arrived in Florida at a rate of over one thousand people per week for almost thirty years, finally totaling over three million. It became a social necessity as much as a personal choice: If a retiree wanted to be with his lifelong friends from Brooklyn, he'd better move to Boca Raton. Soon mega-communities like Century Village appeared, reasonably priced and geared toward "active seniors." Century Village could house over eight thousand people in over a hundred condominium buildings. Within a few years it was virtually sold out. Many of these communities prohibited any resident under the age of fifty-five. To me, that seems delightfully vengeful and vindictive. It's like an act of civil disobedience. Millions of senior citizens shouting, "You don't want us? We don't want you!" from the Florida peninsula, which suddenly resembled a giant downward-facing middle finger. It was a revolution, an octogenarian Boston Tea Party. The only difference was that these colonists would stick each tea bag in their purses for later use. Why let a perfectly good tea bag go to waste?
TERRY The pool group consists of about fifteen women and two men: Harvey and Al. Harvey and Al never say anything, though. They just sit there and let the women talk. The only time I hear them say anything is when they greet each other. "Hey fella!" they say. I love that. A lot of old men call one another "fella." It's what my grandfather calls me. I think it's an awesome term of endearment that deserves a comeback as soon as everyone gets tired of saying "dude" and "my nigga." Harvey is round and Al is very skinny. They're a funny pair; they look like Mister Rogers crossed with Ernie and Bert. They're both widowers, and wear extremely yellow cardigan sweaters. It never seems to bother them when they show up in the same outfit. In general, I enjoy looking around the pool at everyone's retirement outfits. Most senior citizen retirees here spend their day in leisurewear: soft, loose, easy-to-wash cottons with bright, colorful, somewhat loony patterns. Elderly women often wear matching sets of clothing. They wear "outfits." Who does that other than babies and elderly women? Shirley, the redhead from the Pool Group, explains it to me one day. "It's from back when we used to vacation," she tells me. "We used to dress up every day. Men would wear a shirt and tie every day. So our retirement clothes are different, they're crazy, they're wild! They let you know you're on permanent vacation!" One night, I see a ninety-year-old woman wearing a Hawaiian shirt, a white leather biker cap, and gigantic sunglasses. The men wear unmatched clothes. It appears to be an act of defiance. They are outfit outlaws. At breakfast one day, I see a man whose every article of clothing is a different shade of blue. Light blue slacks, dark blue cardigan sweater, royal blue base-ball hat, blue socks, and navy striped sneakers. He looks like Mister Rogers crossed with Cookie Monster. I doubt he spent more than a few seconds pulling those clothes together; no fretting in front of the mirror worrying about whether his light blue slacks went with his dark blue shoes. Elderly retirees class it up when they're going out for the night. The women wear blouses, sweater sets, brooches, and makeup. There is a weakness for enormous earrings. The men often wear blazers, especially if they're going dancing afterward. On the plane down to Florida, I sat next to a man wearing a blazer. He looked at my "Is that how you travel?" he asked. One afternoon, on a whim, I purchase a zip-up white terry cloth shirt in a local flea market. Back home, if I wore a terry cloth shirt, it would be tantamount to personally inviting people to kick my ass. I wear my shirt to the pool one afternoon. What fabric is better than terry cloth? It is extremely comfortable. I feel like I am wearing a koala bear. The late-afternoon sun is shining down on me. A breeze blows into the terry cloth and through my chest hair, cooling me off. I know I look good. Several hours pass, and the sun begins to dip low in the sky. My cell phone vibrates in the pocket of my cargo shorts, and rather than answer it, I just let it massage my lower thigh. After a long while, I open my eyes, and Harvey and Al are crossing past me in their matching yellow cardigans, lit from behind by a halo of warm orange. "How you doing?" I say. "Hey fella," says Al. All around, I have to admit that felt pretty good.
TWILIGHT At five most evenings I hop in my rental car and go out for dinner. It's comforting but weird to drive the same Florida roads that we used to drive in the rental convertible when I was a kid, visiting my grandparents. Back then the Lionel never stopped oozing from the radio. Will there even be convertibles when I retire again, later in life? Will there be Lionel? This retirement, I rented the cheapest car possible, a Spectra. It's a flimsy automobile with the acceleration of a sea monkey. I like that it forces me to drive with caution, like an older person might. Whenever I pull out into the street from Century Village, the other cars get backed up behind me, waiting for my car's pickup to kick in. They're young professionals who just finished work and can't bear to wait. They end up honking and speeding past me on the road's apron. I know it's old people that have the bad driving reputations, but I can tell you firsthand that it's thirty-five-year-olds who drive like assholes. I'm amazed by how many retirees eat all their meals out. Nobody cooks anymore. The only people I've met who claim they cook are a few widower men who dutifully try to follow their late wives' yellowed recipes. It's a way for old men to pick up old women, because the women, at least the women I've spoken to, do not cook. I'm learning that the whole "just like Grandma used to make" saying is bogus. "I cooked for forty years," a woman in the clubhouse said to me the other day. "Why would I want to cook now? Let somebody else cook for a change." Value is the big concern for people who are living and eating on fixed incomes. At local supermarkets, there is a senior citizen traffic jam at the free sample areas. I've never seen a person work harder than the man dispensing these samples--his bicep is thick from handling thousands of pita crisps an hour. "Go check out The Boys," one woman told me, recommending one of the local markets. "You can eat a whole meal there for free!" But for senior citizens, the quest for value doesn't end at scamming free meals at the supermarket. The seniors at Century Village also flock to the many local restaurants that offer complete meals for under ten dollars, as long as you show up to eat before 6 P.M. These are, of course, known as "early bird" or "twilight" specials. For a young man, it feels very unnatural to be eating dinner at a quarter to five. It's summertime, and the light outside is still bright. My body seems to be saying to me: "Are you for real, dude?" I have to force myself. I've been going to all the senior citizen standbys: Bagels by Star, the Bountiful Buffet, the Two Jay's Deli, and, of course, Nestor's, one of the most famous early bird restaurants in South Florida.
EARLY BIRD RODNEY ROTHMAN SIMON & SCHUSTER Names and identifying characteristics of some individuals and Copyright (c) 2005 by Rodney Rothman SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks For information regarding special discounts for bulk purchases, Designed by Davina Mock Manufactured in the United States of America 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data everyone says they would like to retire early, but Rodney Rothman actually did it--forty years early. Burnt out, he decides at the age of twenty-eight to get an early start on his golden years. He travels to Boca Raton, Florida, where he moves in with an elderly piano teacher at Century Village, a retirement community that is home to thousands of senior citizens. Early "Bird" is an irreverent, hilarious, and ultimately warmhearted account of Rodney's journey deep into the heart of retirement. Rodney struggles for acceptance from the senior citizens he shares a swimming pool with, and battles with cranky octogenarians who want him off their turf. The day-to-day dealings begin to wear on him. Before long he observes, "I don't think Tuesdays "with" Morrie would have been quite so uplifting if that guy had to spend more than one day a week with Morrie." Rodney throws himself into the spirit of retirement, fashioning a busy schedule of suntanning, shuffle-board, and gambling cruises. As the months pass, his neighbors seem to forgetthat he is fifty years younger than they are. He finds himself the potential romantic interest of an aging femme fatale. He joins a senior softball club and is disturbed to learn that he is the worst player on the team. For excitement he rides along with a volunteer police officer on patrol, hunting for crime. But even the criminals in his community seem to have retired. Early Bird is a funny, insightful, and moving look at (continued on bock flap) (continued "from" front "flap)" what happens to us when we retire, viewed from a remarkably premature perspective. Any reader who plans on becoming an old person will enjoy joining Rodney on his strange journey, as he reconsiders his notions of romance, family, friendship, and ultimately, whether he's ever going back to work. RODNEY ROTHMAN is now living in Los Angeles. He is a former head writer for the Late Show "with David" Letterman and was a writer and supervising producer for the television show Undeclared. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, The New Yorker, McSweeney's "Quarterly," and Men's Journal. Register online at www.simonsays.com for more JACKET DESIGN BY PAUL SAHRE
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Published by Simon & Schuster. Copyright © 2006 by Rodney Rothman.