I think of Harold sometimes. And then I’ll fire off a tweet like this:
***
At dinner once I overheard an elderly couple bickering over their order. The restaurant was small, intimate, uncrowded and though seated on the far side of the room, the details of their discussion were evident. To everyone. The volume alone made ignoring them impossible. The elderly man was ordering pasta with prosciutto, white wine, butter sauce, when the elderly women, apparently his wife, cut him off, “BUT HAROLD, YOUR CHOLESTEROL…”
This happened in Rome. I mention it only to say that food in Rome is as exactly as good as you’ve heard. The best espresso I ever tasted was at a hole-in-the-wall cafe off a side street across from the Pantheon. The best pasta. Best Gelato. I could go on.
So when an elderly English-speaking couple, probably American, obviously retired, obviously on vacation, find themselves with the chance to enjoy an intimate diner together in Rome, fuck cholesterol. Nomesayin?
It wasn’t WHAT the old bird said that boiled my guts. Just four words: her husband’s name, a health reminder, probably well-intentioned. Loved her husband in her own way no doubt. Looking out for his health, his poor arteries, hoping to extend his life, miserable as it seemed to me, to give them more time together. (Heh)
It wasn’t even HOW she said it. The whiney sing-songy way of doubling the syllable count of a simple two-syllable name. HA-RO-OL-LD. It wasn’t even that she said it loud enough for everyone in the restaurant to hear. (Maybe it was that, partially. The indiscretion. Reminding him and me and all patrons throughout the restaurant of a medical condition of which he was obviously well aware.) Their waiter, dressed in black apron, shared my pity, I could tell, by his raised Roman eyebrows.
The thing about this interaction, brief as it was, the thing that murdered my heart and seared the scene into my brain, the thing that haunts me all these years later is this: In a moment of celebration, on a romantic vacation, perhaps the last he would share with his aging wife, Harold had decided, for just a brief moment, to throw caution to the wind, to LIVE, to eat creamy pasta with prosciutto and in this golden moment of unmuzzled joy…
…don’t make me say it, Fam.
What dog ever loved a leash? What does a kite sing except for songs about the snapping of strings? All creatures long to run free. Even those of you not born in Sagittarius.
Yet Harold bowed; he bent the knee. The old man’s heart, his spirit, his eternal soul had, over the years, been choked out, suffocated, subverted, degraded, corroded, retarded to the extent that whatever shred of it remained, whatever withered raisin was lingering still inside the chest of the man seated across the room from me at this Roman restaurant, folded and retreated like the menu in his wife’s hands.
“My husband will have the poached white fish with steamed vegetable medley. No salt please.”
***
That night in Rome, that dinner with Old Harold and his Mrs. is a dozen years behind me now. Considering their ages (and the urgent medical condition which to his wife seemed cause for eternal vigilance), I doubt the couple are alive still. But Harold had already ceased to live long before his formal rendezvous with The Reaper.
Harold the man may be gone, but he remains with me always as a symbol. A phenomenon I call the “puggification of the wolf-soul of man.”
Harold has led the life of a wageslave, a number cruncher, not a closer but a bean counter, he is a calculator, a salaryman, a zero, a midget, a widget a billable unit for Boss Man. What guts what nuts what sack what balls what back what bone what sand what stone whatever small blossom of his masculine soul has yet been snipped and clipped and pruned to the nub by his job, has been fed back to him in irradiated fast food in pesticides and micro plastics. He is Harold of the micro-penis, Harold of the low-test, Harold of the glass jaw, Harod of the BMI, Harold of the gynomastia man boobs.
Harold the taxable unit who lives in a box and drives a box and works in a box and eats from a box and comes home and stares at a box at the bread and circus at simulated soy boi colosseum war games at corporate sponsored millionaire gladiators on professional sports teams which he roots for like just another busty cheerleader. God made Harold for war but Harold never made it onto the battlefield, never made it past the tailgate party.
What passion, what hopes, whatever dignity or dreams remain are dispelled, dispatched, hung up, wrung out at the domesticating hands of his wife. Day by day, the life force recedes, inch by inch out of sight, drop by drop until Rome, until…
BUT HAROLD. I told you not to use my fancy table settings for your barbecue.
BUT HAROLD. You forgot to add fabric softener to the last load and now my slips are ruined.
BUT HAROLD. Don’t talk politics at dinner tonight with my family.
BUT HAROLD. It’s not even 5pm yet, are you drinking already?
BUT HAROLD. Don’t touch me that way, it tickles.
The image below says it all. Don’t make me spell it out. Writing the words would hurt too much, every bit as it would pain you to read them.
Take a moment then to look at this image and summarize in a thousand words if you can exactly what they’ve taken from you.
20 September 1519, five ships carrying 270 men are set to depart the Spanish port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda. The Captain of this voyage, a Portuguese-born adventurer kisses his wife on the docks, “I shall be the first man to circumnavigate the globe, dear. “But Ferdinand,” his wife replies, “Your Cholesterol!”
12 April 1961, just before 6:07 am UTC, the Vostok 1 spacecraft is preparing for launch from Baikonur Cosmodrome. The Commander aboard suddenly radios his wife, “моя возлюбленная (My Sweetheart) if I return in one piece from this mission, I shall be the first man in the history of our species, in the history of sentient life on this planet, to travel into that blackness called space and from there to orbit the planet..” BUT YURI,” his good wife protests, “Your cholesterol!”
But Genghis, Hernan, Noah, Leonidas, Alexander, Hannibal, Achilles, Vlad, Richard the Lionhearted, Vasco, Marco, Ibn, but William Wallace, and Edmund Hillary, YOUR CHOLESTEROL!
Now consider another image.
“Do not go gentle into that good night. Old age,” as Dylan Thomas well noted, “should burn and rave at close of day, not nibble on steamed unsalted veggie mix. Rage, rage, Dear Harold, against the dying of the light. Heed the words of Uncle Walt, “Be not a bit tamed. Be untranslatable. Sound your barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”
Fuck your cholesterol.