The Sacred Elders

A Short Story
By Hilding Lindquist
Copyright © 2004 by Hilding Lindquist

Asexual orientation had appeared in the news that week, but it wasn’t the first topic of conversation for Fred Strom and me, Jack Celsius, as we sat down at a table at Nick’s Gourmet Deli on the southeast corner of 7th Avenue and West 49th Street in Times Square, Saturday afternoon, October 16, 2004.

We were two old farts—I would be 66 on Halloween and he was 73—continuing to catch up on life’s details after a couple years separation. I had moved east to New Jersey in September, 2002, and Fred had stayed in Alaska. He was visiting me for the first time, also his first time to the Big Apple, New York City.

We had started jabbering away at each other as soon as I met him at the Alaska Airlines baggage carousel at the Newark Airport on Thursday. It seemed we hadn’t skipped a beat since I fled Fairbanks after a bout with acute kidney failure which had settled into pre-dialysis chronic kidney disease. I didn’t want to get stuck in an Interior Alaska winter contemplating having to make a trip to a dialysis center three times a week.

Fred was still as healthy as an ox. We had lost a good friend, Gene Richards, to lung cancer in the spring of 2000.

Fred spoke first as we settled into our chairs, two cups of hot black coffee steaming in front of us. “So how do you think George W. will explain the flu vaccine shortage?,” he asked.

“He’ll say Clinton didn’t do anything either,” I replied.

“Or his father, or Reagan, or Carter, or …,” he left his sentence hanging unfinished.

“Did you read that article in the Times Magazine I showed you?”

The New York Times Magazine for the next day had been delivered with the Sunday supplement sections that morning. In it was Ron Suskind’s article about Bush, Without a Doubt.

“Uh huh,” Fred responded. “You called it on him. Bush is a damn True Believer." There was brief pause and then he continued, "But aren’t you worried about not getting a flu shot in your condition?”

“Yah, but I really got depressed when I missed my Lupron shot last week. I totally forgot the appointment. Old age is creeping up on me, or I was just too excited about your coming to visit and I forgot everything else.”

“That stuff working?”

“Uh huh, my last PSA the week before was normal, so they’re thinking pretty positive about my prostate cancer.”

“Shit, is there anything you don’t have?”

“You know I went into the emergency room last month because I was worried about some soreness just under my sternum, and I was feeling kind of light-headed. Thought something might be happening to my heart. It got my attention.”

“No, I didn’t know that.”

“I thought I was going to have to tell you not to come, but the doctors think I can weather whatever is wrong with me. They put me in the hospital for a couple of days, gave me some pills, and told me to come back for some follow-up, next Friday actually.”

“Did they say what was wrong?”

“Nah, but they said they would have gone in and looked for it except my kidneys probably couldn’t stand the action.”

“Really?”

“Uh huh.”

We sat there sipping our coffee for a few minutes, watching the pedestrian and vehicular traffic flow past the corner outside. I broke the silence.

“Did you read the stuff on asexual orientation in the news this week?”

“No, what did it say?”

“That a small percentage of the population has no sexual activity whatsoever and don’t miss it.”

“Really?”

“Uh huh, and guess what?”

“What?”

“I’m in that group since I got out of the hospital in 2002.”

“Really?”

“Uh huh, I think it’s the Lupron.”

“What do your doctors say?”

“I don’t tell them.”

“What?!”

“Like I told you, I’m in the asexual group that doesn’t miss sexual activity. I like it this way.”

“You have got to be kidding me! You?!”

“Me.”

“What’s going on here?”

“Well, as near as I can tell, if I don’t feel the urge, I don’t feel any frustration and I don’t miss it. In a way its like in, ‘out of sight, out of mind’. For me its ‘no testosterone, no thoughts’.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s my final answer, at this point.”

“That’s kind of scary.”

“That’s what I used to think if this would ever happen. But things pretty much slowed down after I reached my mid-fifties, and I wasn’t too worried about it then. Now it’s totally gone and I’m loving it.”

“Really? You can’t mean that.”

“I do, I do mean it. I used to think the same way you do, no longer. I can now fully understand the wisdom of the sacred elders in sexual matters. It isn’t getting wiser. It’s simply getting older.”