I’ve been checking out old men lately.  Not really old, decrepit, elderly men, though I love them too, but those salt and pepper crusted, weathered faced men, who are well past “middle age” even if we don’t really acknowledge that death mostly happens to men in their sixties or seventies, and not the hundreds.  These men walk with a purpose, the ones I’ve been scoping. The lines in their faces signify their accumulated laughter and experience. They are comfortable in their suits; the timepieces peeking out from under their shirt-sleeves are for appointment keeping, golf games, early bird dinner dates with their wives.  They smell that old man smell - is it Old Spice?  Whatever it is, I love it.

  They wink at me when they talk and call me names like Sweetheart.  No guy my age ever called me Sweetheart and if he did, it didn’t sound comfortable in his mouth.  My dad used to call everyone Baby, myself included, because he said he couldn’t be bothered to remember anyone’s names.  The Baby coming out of his mouth to the waitress at the diner, the barmaid, his secretary, or my sister was as much part of his identity as the suit he wore back when he held a job or his signature on a page, the F a big scrawling letter, what followed unintelligible scribble, until the M in Miglino, which was the size of a quarter and the only thing you could make out of his name except for the big G.  

My brother used to practice his signature at our kitchen table in Lindenhurst, taking great pains to make it unreadable.  He would hold up his paper when he got it just right, the M’s all slanty and pointy, everything else a muddle of loops and lines, nothing resembling a letter.  My dad would nod his approval and tell him he now had everything it takes to become a doctor.  My brother's chest would puff out and even then, I could see him in his Superman pajamas taking stock of his old man.

He kept his eyes on the prize and though he didn’t become a doctor, he is now a sales manager with all the trappings of success.  He wears suits to work, drives a Lexus, and calls his administrative assistant Baby.    His suits look too big to me, even though he’s in his late thirties.  He’s a father, a husband, an uncle.  He’s the patriarch now, the eldest male in the family.  Yet his voice still cracks when someone disagrees with him.  

My dad’s voice never cracked, that I can remember.  When he encountered something that he knew to be just plain wrong, whether it be liberal politics, women drivers, or one of his daughter’s having a black boyfriend, his anger was sure.  It rang out with a threatening growl through clenched teeth and issued flat statements like, “You’re not welcome in this house.”

It wasn’t that wishy-washy whine schoolmates or former boyfriends have used.  It didn’t consider what therapists or Tony Robbins might have thought in this instance.  It was the voice of a man.  Guys my age don’t possess that quality.  The old men I know have gravel in their voices, and speak with an earned authority.  

Peter’s voice has that edge to it, that New York City-born toughness.  Now this old guy is the real deal.  In fact, that’s the title we gave his autobiography: The Real Deal - The Life and Times of a Mafia Soldier.  When my dad first introduced him to me, at that Easter dinner we ate in a hotel restaurant in 1998, I was immediately smitten.  My dad would adopt that Italian-born tough-guy act once every few months when The Godfather played on HBO, bringing home cannoli and tell me he hoped that my first child be a masculine child, but with Peter it wasn’t an act. And it didn’t wear off as the weeks went by, and life took on its suburban reality.  

It was funny to watch my father, as he watched Peter.  He showed him off like a prized horse, but I could tell that he was intimidated.  I never was.  Either because I was too young and naive to know better, or because I could always see through the shellac of his exterior to his heart, he never frightened me.  Peter and I connected that first night.  We excused ourselves from the family table, and “went for a walk.”  Within minutes he found out that I could write, and he hired me as the ghost writer for his book on the spot.  We sat down once a week for two years and wrote down his life story.  

That was over ten years ago, and since then he’s become like a Godfather to me (pun intended.)  He calls me his niece, though he’s no uncle to me, and we both get off a little bit with me being on his elbow: young maiden to his silver-haired wise-guy, incurring knowing looks and stares, though nothing indecent has ever happened between us.  Whenever he calls me, which he does now from time to time to check in, the first thing he says is, “Hey baby.  Anybody botherin’ you?”

This is meant to be an unveiled threat against anyone who crosses me, although Peter is now just an old guy, and carries no menace except in his memories that count among them stickball in the streets of the Bronx, run-ins with guys named Sinatra and Luchese, kinship with the Colombos, and prison with the animals.  He differentiates between good guys and bad guys by use of the terms “convict” or “inmate.”  Inmates inspire little respect, but a convict provokes a lifetime of loyalty to a degree I could never understand.

Maybe that’s the attraction.  I don’t really get it.  I can’t relate to any of the experiences they have.  My dad grew up in the projects in Woodside before he moved out here to Uniondale, considered the country back in the fifties.  He had to fight the Long Island kids to back up his New York City accent and reputation, never getting comfortable with things like reading and writing.  His father would hit him across the dinner table if he wise-cracked or interrupted the Yankee game, and he left his mother when he was eighteen years old to go fight in the Vietnam war, against his will or better judgment.

But my brother and sister and I had the safety net of a much easier life.  We lived in a house, my brother even had his own room.  We had color television and Atari video games, and the holes punched in the walls or occasionally directed toward us were never during dinner time.  And wars were fought in the newspaper or on television.  They didn’t touch our real lives.  

Maybe because I’m the baby of the family - the youngest of us three - I equate age with attraction, something I’ve always coveted.  Age meant a later bedtime, getting to ride the school bus, boyfriends and first kisses, high school, parties, after-school jobs,  drinking, tattoos, sex.  It was everything cool that I watched my older siblings experience and I couldn’t wait for my turn.  The youngest kid got no respect, at least not  in our house.  It meant being a baby, a third wheel, a hanger-on, and old news.  It meant the backseat, no portraits on the walls, and secrets of Santa Claus’s non-existence leaking before its time.  I learned to equate youth with immaturity and age with everything that was just out of reach and by the time it wasn’t, the novelty was long gone.

You won’t find any anti-aging face cream in my house.  I am anxious for the time when my skin loses some of its elasticity and softens; when I get to spout my opinions without fearing judgement.  I want to be that little old woman on Fire island, weeding out her plants, big straw hat keeping the sun out of her eyes.  Her house is filled with treasures from her travels and gifts from her grown children.  Books spill out from her bookshelves and litter the tabletops and the floor by her bed.  She enjoys art.  She knows what she knows and can rest on the fruits of her experience.  There’s no more to prove.  Now she enjoys her grandchildren, and she drinks her gin and tonics when they go home. 

Marc was thirty-four when we first met, so our courting skipped all of his teenage and twenty-something years.  I got him when he was already cooked, and this was undoubtedly one of the things that attracted me.  His graying temples were an aphrodisiac to my twenty-one year old self, and they blinded me to anyone my own age,  guys covered with tattoos, their still dark hair sculpted with gel they bought at their hair salon.

The tattoos of old men tell stories.  They were etched in the navy or in that stint on Rikers.  They showed that though beauty might be skin deep, hardship wasn’t.  They are badges of courage or tales of bordellos in foreign countries, women with funny accents who didn’t speak the language, and communicated in other ways.  There are no Chinese symbols of power or wisdom or whatever the tattoo artists decides will sell, but anchors and numbers, hearts and crosses.  And they are faded now, and blurry, like memory.  Stretched and battered, freckled and softened.  White hair grows through them, waving like grain o’er purple mountain majesties.

I look at these men and I wonder how they feel, if they question when their time will be up.  How much longer can they live, realistically?  Are they stricken with terror, or have they come to an understanding, a peace that my relative youth prevents me from comprehending?  Is that what all the winking is about?

And I resent them, one and all.  I resent every man who lives past sixty-two and I wonder why.  Why do they get to keep adding to their already padded experience while my father lies cold underground?  But this resentment doesn’t stop the attraction.  It only feeds it.  It makes me want to hold the hand of every old man that I see, to feel the warmth and the rough skin against my own, to wrap myself in his thinning arms, and inhale that old man smell.  Just one more time might be enough.  

So I can remember him.