I’m pretty sure being in your 50’s is the Kansas of middle-age.
Hear me out. There’s still shit worth seeing, and there’s some sense of urgency or need to get on. There are mountains in the western distance, looming but never approaching. Common sense dictates that distance is finite but the mountains never seem to get any closer.
You have aches and pains, but you’ve had those since your 30’s (which is like crossing the Mississippi River between Illinois and Missouri in a jon boat with a questionable motor and no experience at rowing). There’s an indignity to having to stretch before getting out of bed. The hip you didn’t get replaced complains more about the cold and you start to feel like an old dog and you argue with the TV meteorologists because your aches give you an accurate forecast. The landscape is flat and full of either fallow fields or unharvested crops, neither of which has anything to do with you. Kansas feels like it lasts forever. There’s a few populated areas, but mostly you’re driving with who you started out with in Kentucky, or who you picked up hitchhiking along Route 66, or who picked you up while you were hitch hiking. If you were the one who got picked up, you’ve been there long enough that you take a shift driving.
The mountains loom. You think you can make out the snow trails on the peaks, but then you hit some traffic and have to take a piss and suddenly remember you left the boombox on back in 1982, somewhere around Vermont.
The knock on the screen door was so light Gypsi, our 12-year-old blue heeler that barks at leaves blowing down the sidewalk across the street and was lying on the mat in front of the door, didn’t react. I might not have even heard it, except I was looking for my coffee cup or something. We have three dogs, all of whom react to noises with varying degrees. Nala, the 8-year-old FOMO husky mix, pretty much barks whenever Gypsi barks, except for when she spies one of the neighborhood cats when she’s outside. She mostly stairs out the window the way I remember my grandma watching soap operas in the afternoon on television. Barley, the 12-year-old aussie shepherd mix, only barks at Something. He’s always had the knack of knowing when something ought to be barked at, though I’ve noticed him slipping a bit in the last year. He’s a good old son, though, and I give him the grace earned by a working dog in semi-retirement.
But when Barley didn’t bark, I took notice.
Our doorbell doesn’t work and as far as Amanda knows, has never worked. I’ve thought off and on about fixing it… or at least seeing if it’s the button or some wiring issue I don’t feel like digging out. But we have the dogs. And doorbells are generally more intrusive than they are useful.
Amanda was sitting on the toilet with the bathroom door open, talking to me about something. I think I was about to ask her if she remembered where I set my coffee cup or whatever it was I was looking for. The knock at the door was so light she didn’t hear it, either.
“There was a knock at the door,” I said, looking through the peephole. A standard issue dude bro, dressed in white down to his air-cushioned kicks with the prerequisite baseball cap turned backward, was standing on my porch. He was intentionally standing within view of the eyehole. A salesman, I thought. I briefly debated ignoring him. I couldn’t be sure he didn’t register my voice through the door or take note of my shadow through the spy lens. These new generation dude bros… what my 5-year-old granddaughter calls brahs might have heightened senses, especially the salesman models.
“What?”
“There was a knock on the door,” I repeated. I moved to open the door. In our small house, the bathroom is in eyeline of the front door. I ask my wife if she could please close the bathroom door so I could open the front door, and she obliges. I opened the door to find a blond, chisel-chinned dude brahstanding there with a tablet. I almost miss when they carried clipboards, I thought. A soundworm of Ronald Reagan on The Tonight Show echoed in my ear. They show up carrying a clipboard and say ‘Hi I’m with the government and I’m here to help.’ Thundering laughter and applause at the joke we were all supposed to get. The name of a home security company was emblazoned on the dude brah’s fitted polo. There was an accompanying company ID hanging from a careless lanyard around his neck. I opened, stepped through, closed the front door behind me and opened the screen door.
His approach was flawless and his dedication to the script was admirable. He reached out his hand, which I didn’t take, and told me his name, which I don’t remember. “I’m just out here upgrading our customers out here,” he said, nodding to the street, “and I thought I’d stop by and see if you were interested in protecting your home.”
Not bad. I wondered if he practiced. He asked me my name, and I didn’t tell him. He went on to tell me that he was offering to set me up with a camera doorbell… “That’s why I PUNKED you,” he added, “because I noticed your doorbell didn’t work.” Genius. I wondered if he registered my eyeroll. He went on to try and sell me a free month of service, during which his company would be watching 24 hours a day.
“Now I know,” he tried to hide a slight lip twitch, the kind people make when they step near fresh dog shit, “I know this is a safe neighborhood. In fact, your friends and neighbors tell me the biggest issue here is porch poachers.”
Friends and neighbors, I thought. Does he mean the guy next door who lives with his parents and sells drugs or the meth heads a few houses down that burn plastic in the giant firepit out back?
I tell him I’m not interested and move to go back inside. He says he understands, then asks me my name again. Again, I don’t tell him. Undeterred, he points to the tablet, explaining that because his company will be watching 24 hours a day, if some dreaded porch poacher tries to take an Amazon package off my porch that the I-spy-little eye doorbell camera will say “Hey,” which naturally, will scare off any potential poachers.
Porch Poachers. Sure, we’ve had some packages taken. Is it inconvenient to reorder? Mildly. It doesn’t happen that often and we don’t order any high ticket items like that. Does it piss me off when it happens? Yes. I thought about telling the dude brah about taking all the smart lights and speakers out of our house. The Faceless Woman, as Amanda took to calling it, would listen at odd times and was starting not to listen at all when it was supposed to. The smart device experiment had been my idea. It was also my idea to rip it all out. I didn’t say that to the dude brah. I also didn’t tell him what I thought of the new police program to use residential cameras for random surveillance.
Again, with a little more edge in my voice, I tell the dude brah that I’m not interested. Then he smiles — bleach white teeth that have never met a cup of coffee or a cigarette, with vaguely sharp incisors — and asks, trying to hide that slight lip curl, am I really not interested in protecting my home.
“I have three dogs and a shotgun,” I said, being sure to look him straight in his dead eyes like he’s a paper target.
“Hell yeah!” he proclaimed.
I nod. “I don’t have problems like that.”
I must have stumbled on the correct turn of phrase or tone that turned the if/then command in the dude brah’s brainbox. He stuck a hand out again and asked me my name. This time I shook it, still looking him dead in the eyes.
“Ozymandias,” I told him. He repeated it, curiously and without comment, then walked away.
I was standing in the shade of the historic marker on the wharf listing writers and presidents who have visited there. I like smoking with the names wondering if Charles Dickens knew he would be immortalized on the backside of a plaque describing the Steamboat Era. A woman walking by stopped, asked me if the wharf was safe to walk. Her skin perma-tanned like leather.
“No one’s walking,” she said looking past me through pitch black designer sunglasses. “I don’t see people…”
Do not belabor the obvious. No everyone is an alligator in the heat.
I tell her it’s safe. More lights. More cameras. The cops even drive through sometimes.
After the cruise, I’m driving home in the dark. Gaggles of co-eds and zombies run loose in Old Louisville. A sedan with Florida plates cut me off and tried to break check me. I swerved and missed them.
