THE FIX

Raise your hand, Tom Jones and Janis Joplin on YouTube

Paul comes over on Wednesdays and today is Wednesday and here comes Paul. He looks good. When he asks how I am, I tell him my predicament. I’ve been out of the hospital a couple of weeks after inhaling that pill into my lung, but I am not bouncing back. I do not want exhaustion to define me or the aging process, which up until now, I have enjoyed the hell out of. He is sympathetic. I tell him at least it gives me something new to write about because there must be something to be learned that I am not learning and then as if on automatic I start singing part of the Tom Petty song that has taken over my life, the first bars of The Waiting, and my daughter Sarah, who has been here all day, tries to remember who I went to that concert with and she thinks it was the Irishman and for the first time I hold up my little finger and mention his tiny little penis and the subject changes. I now remember a boy whose hard-on crept up his stomach inches above the belt of his jeans, which was so impressive that I don’t remember if we slept together or not, and then I recall Sarah saying about somebody’s pistachio sized penis, “I just can’t work with this.” and then Paul recalls seeing Willem Defoe naked in a theater where he worked, and he and Sarah start remembering all the old places they used to go and one of them mentions Max’s Kansas City where I had been and that somebody had told me Janis Joplin had waitressed there but was treated poorly because she was not a beauty and I begin to sing “Oh Lord, wont’tcha buy me a Mercedes Benz,” because I think I’m good at Janis, and Paul asks if I ever googled “Tom Jones Bulge” which I immediately do, and oh my fucking god, then he says watch Tom Jones and Janis do “Raise your Hand” and I go right to youtube and one look at how they are moving and the looks on their faces and suddenly I am no age at all, just a hot bundle of female and my essay has an ending but the replay button is right there and I may be old, but the night, the night is young.