Busybody Blues

I have a friend in his mid-seventies who still drinks two or more big drinks every night and I thought I would offer him an opportunity to dry out. I called him yesterday in the afternoon as the rain was steadily falling and when the conversation turned to drinking I saw my opening.

“Buzz,” I said, “I want to offer you to stay in my guest house for a couple weeks, you can set up your drums and keyboard and…”

“No,” he said, knocking down the idea without equivocation, like I knew he would.

“We could even have an intervention,” I said, “and…”

He interrupted me again and said, “Well, if there was a woman involved, if I were in a relationship with someone who I could really relate to, and she asked me to stop drinking I’d do it in a heartbeat.”

“At least I get points for offering,” I said. “Well, we’ve pretty much given up looking for a woman.”

“Hey, speak for yourself,” he said.

“What, you’re out there looking?” I said. “Not me, I have no prospects, hey we had a good run, right? So why do you drink?” (I had read recently that even two drinks a day could be difficult for someone in their seventies to process.)

“It helps me pass out,” he said. “Every day I think I want to quit.”

(Yeah, I wanna save my old buddy Buzz, I do have a hero complex, to which you might say, “Dude, just save yourself!” But for what, to leave a good looking corpse?)

So Buzz won’t make a move, a change, unless there’s a nice understanding woman involved and I can relate, if I had one interested, and supporting me in any kind of life endeavors, I’d probably look back and think how was I able to live before, like this?

“Well, you’d want someone younger, right?” I said.

“Not necessarily,” he said.

“I dunno,” I said, “Two old people together, you’d probably just end up taking care of each other with all your senior issues.” (Though technically I am also old I don’t include myself in that subset because of the “Peter Pan Syndrome,” ie, living in the woods too long.)

“That could be good,” he said.

Okay, he turned me down and I probably didn’t even get points for offering but it got me to thinking: what if I created a situation for Buzz in which there were women involved? I can certainly see the prejudice against men: this year I invited two Facebook “friends” to drop by and both of them, a seventy year old woman and an eighty year old man, refused for the same reason: I am a dude.

The geezer would just rather spend any spare time with women and the woman doesn’t want to jeopardize her relationship with her younger guy by having a random visit with the likes of me. (I ran into her this summer in the Chautauqua parking lot, we were having a conversation, but then her handsome guy came out of the store, said he was heading to the car, and she dashed off mid-sentence after him.)

So how would it work? How would I find a woman to tell Buzz that she loved him and ask him to stop drinking? Damn, this is starting to sound like an intervention—stay tuned.