E5. Lou Reed's Nephew on Aging

“There is an age past which the world doesn’t care about you anymore,” Lou Reed’s Nephew confided.

“There is an age past which the world doesn’t care about you anymore,” Lou Reed’s Nephew confided.

I found this confession touching.

“And what age is that?”

“I don’t know. But I am past it.”

“You seem young for a midlife crisis.” I considered myself young for a midlife crisis, and I was almost twenty years older.

“I sometimes catch myself thinking I have circled back and outsmarted it,” he continued. “But I know there comes a time when you can no longer be the next interesting thing.”

“…”

“Lists of interesting things never include old people, like you,” he continued, not sparing my feelings. “Lists are created by young people, who never believe in them more than when they are impatiently waiting to inhabit them. I see them on the subway, these youngsters, wearing pinned pants and porkpie hats—waiting for photographers to arrive. The women wear perfect little trench coats and those boots like stormtroopers’.”

“How old are you, exactly?” He seemed indistinguishable from the people he described.

“I arrived too old, maybe,” he said, wistfully.

“I am concerned about you.”

“Yesterday I went to look at an apartment,” he said. “It was being rented by a curvy young woman with calves like bowling pins. Inverted, I mean. They were lusty. She worked for a fashion website and was dressed like a secretary from December 1963—that crucial month between the Kennedy assassination and the Beatles’ arrival, when our popular culture hung in the balance. Pencil skirt. Sweater. Flats with little Tory Burch swastikas on them. I asked why it hadn’t been rented already and she said the people who’d looked at it so far had been younger. ‘My age,’ she said.’”

“I am so sorry,” I consoled him.

“But I did know,” Lou Reed’s Nephew continued. “More clearly than she could have understood. She was dwelling in the belief that she still might become somebody. That beacon lay before her, a lighthouse up ahead. And I know (but could not tell her, obviously, while she considered my application) that she will never be able to pinpoint the exact moment when she passed the lighthouse. She will only one day realize that she has.”

“You’re killing me.”

“Which is not to say that new beacons don’t occasionally materialize. They do, and they tantalize. But never do they convince as completely as that first great beacon.”

“Did you at least get the apartment?”

“No,” he said. “She gave it to a really old couple. People your age.”