Thomas Wictor

Sergeant Major Daniel Joseph “Dan” Daly, United States Marine Corps, is said to have shouted, “Come on, you sons of bitches! Do you want to live forever?” at his men during the Battle of Bealleau Wood (June 1 to 26, 1918). Well, this son of a bitch doesn’t. I can’t think of anything worse.

My poor father was terrified of aging and dying. He told me in all seriousness, “Until I was seventy-five, I honestly thought I’d live forever.”

I didn’t say, “You mean you thought you’d be in your house in La Puente for trillions and trillions and trillions of years, eating hunks of cheese the size of bricks and slaughtering innocent trees and bushes?”

People do amazing things to deny that they’re aging. They have their faces hacked up and then spend night after night drunk-tweeting IN ALL CAPS. Or maybe they dump their wife and and latch on to a twenty-three-year-old with eyes as hard as diamonds. Or they dye their hair and eyebrows charcoal black.

Now that I’m past fifty, I’m inundated with junk e-mails that assume a certain level of insecurity, compulsiveness, and physical decrepitude in me. All the sites at which I registered sold my info to spammers. That’s okay. I love these e-mails.

Well, I’ve never even had a cavity, so I don’t need dentures. I’m trying to figure out what isn’t fake on that blonde transsexual. Her shirt, I guess. Have you ever seen someone’s teeth reflect light like that? Wouldn’t that happen only if they were made of chrome or were covered with so much saliva that it would be pouring out of her mouth? Speaking of mouths, look at the second one from the left at the bottom of the ad.

What would you do if a woman playfully bit her finger at you like that and said, “Do you like my dentures?”

This ad is great because the “After” picture makes her look much older.

In the “Before” shot, she could be a rangy Australian cowgirl in her thirties. Glopping the bub-buh-cream on her kisser turned her into a middle-aged New York matron planning your destruction. Would you let someone like that into your house? She looks like the ultimate flim-flam artist. That horrible, practiced smile tells me she’s a sociopath.

My cardiologist said I have to lose weight, which I’m doing by eating nothing but cereal, veggies, poultry, and whole-wheat bread. Apparently Garcinia Cambogia makes more sense.

Yes, I want my fat burned while it’s still on me. My goal is to have crispy, golden skin that women can peel off and nibble on as I chat them up in bars. I also want to look like I’m having an orgasm all the time. It’s very attractive. And who doesn’t trust Dr. Oz? Those pleading hands and slanted eyebrows could sell me on anything.

Men my age are supposed to have trouble getting our little buddies to function. There’s help for that mortifying deficiency.

Christ, the guy’s smile! Is it possible for that to be a real image? Try and make your face like his. Even if you can, what they don’t tell you about all these “T-boosters” is that they enlarge your prostate. You won’t have that smile when you’re getting up twenty times a night to pee. The woman looks pained and deeply embarrassed to be seen in public. That grinning oaf has been pounding her like a jackhammer and then dribbling urine on her. She lives in hell.

Once aging men are full to the brim with new testosterone, specialized services will help us blow off, uh, steam.

That’s just wonderful! Life is short, so betray the person you’re supposed to love the most. Not only that, betray him or her with another married person, so we can double the betrayal. Well, you’re going to need a better model if you want to coax me into debasing myself. That woman’s lips are disgusting. She looks like she’s having an allergic reaction.

Actually, you could use that photo in an ad calling attention to domestic violence. Her expression is reproachful, as though she were knocked to the bed with a punch on the mouth. Her legs are twisted, and her right arm makes her seem to be dazedly emerging from unconsciousness. All in all a deeply unerotic image.

If I’m not interested in having affairs with beaten women, I could always go for young party animals whose videos have been banned.

I didn’t watch, but I do have a question about anatomy. You can see through her tank top that this cutie has absolutely massive areolae and flat nipples the diameter of half-dollar coins. How in the world could a baby feed from those? Wouldn’t the kid need a mouth like a sucker fish?

All these e-mails tell me to juice myself up and go nuts with deformed young women, and then they warn me of the dangers. I am a codger, after all.

So I take my testosterone boosters, fall down and can’t get up, press my panic button, and the paramedics arrive to find me lying on the floor with a giant erection. I think I’d rather just die.

And I will too. Someday. But I’m not afraid. Nor am I afraid of aging. The Cardinal Ghost sent me photos to use in Ghosts and Ballyhoo. I’ve got the unedited versions.

I’m sure her husband won’t mind me saying that I find her even hotter at fifty-two than she was when we were in our twenties.

And if he does mind, too bad. He can write a rebuttal for me to post.