The Cut-Rate Sugar Daddy

THE CUT-RATE SUGAR DADDY

Being cheap is a way of life for me and my much younger paramour.  Partly out of necessity but largely because we compete with each other to see who can be smarter about not spending money or who can get something for less.  Our motto is:  " The trouble with money is, you can only spend it once."

For example, Whole Foods Supermarket.  Its a rip off - everyone knows that, especially in their prepared food section - where a hot plate meal can cost as much as dinner at the Four Seasons.  And you still won't have enough to eat.  So we figured out that if you stuff a lot of rice and curry in a large soup container it costs much less ( no weighing by the pound ) and you can have more than enough left overs for the next day.  That's a good example of being cheap/boarder line psychotic that we're talking about.  

We take buses everywhere - me buying the monthly unlimited senior pass for $20 of course.  And we would sooner choke each other to death rather than NOT purchase the advertised Subway Sandwich of the day - its always at least 50 cents cheaper.  We almost never eat out - unless its Norm's and we buy all our veggies at the 99 cent store - but never the frozen ones (they come from China). Our biggest thrill is use every last coupon we can clip, find on the street or at the supermarket.  Of course we bicycle a lot (to save on gas)  and sometime it gets kinda tiring going that extra 3 miles to the right supermarket to redeem those coupons.

Now this doesn't exactly fit the paradigm of big spender 'older man' with his oh so young, voluptuous girlfriend dressed in revealing lingerie and giving a Lolita lick on her lollipop.   And that's because that is not exactly our  situation.  I ended up dating my biking buddy - for a number of reasons - the chief being she's a pretty women and I found her irresistible; the other one is that she's very cheap.  Which means we always enjoy the same things together - like biking to the beach, walking along the sand and eating at little Formica  topped  joints in Koreatown where the menu only gives you half the story.  (Ya gotta read Johnathan Gold in the free LA Weekly to find out the rest.) 

Being cheap is not just a Sunday affair with us.  It extends into our sex life together as well.  Now while it is  true that sex is free, contraception is not.  Although condoms are sometimes free at health clinics, it always seems that they are never free when you really need them.  So we resolved not spend that money by resorting to certain, uh..... 'deviate' practices; which I'm certain my readers are already very familiar with so I need not belabor that point. 

We find that this a very satisfactory. if not satisfying, relationship that puts a much needed new spin on the 'older man' cliche that helps us escape the creepy dimensions of a May-December relationship.  No one ever accuses my friend of being in it 'just for the money' and conversely, the 'dirty old man' baggage doesn't quite fit on a bicycle.    We do attract quite a bit of attention when  she calls me 'Dad' and we have a lengthy colloquium on the joys on incest at parties or other public gatherings.  ( That's one taboo that still manages to raise an eyebrow.)   Mostly we just fun about things like why my girlfriend never needs to buy lottery tickets.  My life insurance policy, that names her as the beneficiary, is a much surer bet.

I Scoffed at Jackie Kennedy

In 1999, when John F. Kennedy Jr. died in a very tragic airplane crash in a plane he was piloting, my ex-wife told me that it was his mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, reaching out from the beyond because she was lonely for her son. JFK Jr. died so that he could be re-united with his mother.

 A fantastical story which quickly led me to be a little uncomfortable around that ex-wife. Little did I fully understand the bond between a departed Mom and her son back then. 

I never did wanna know much about any 'parallel universe'.  Always figured that the laws of nature and geometry would protect me from crashing into that barrier.   I realize now how easily it can happen.  What I'm about to tell you is the sort of story about a Mother-son bond that Rod Serling might have used for his weekly TV show.

I have the pathetic middle aged fat guy malay known as bad snoring or to be medically correct, sleep apnea. It's a potentially serious sleep disorder in which breathing repeatedly stops and starts - hey, it has been known to cause death.  Especially if you live alone and don't wake up in time to take that breath.  I sleep hard and sometime dream but always forget the dreams the next day.    But this one night two weeks ago; I didn't forget.

I'm swimming with my recently deceased 86 year old mother.  Mom appears to be swimming ahead of me in the ocean off Santa Monica Beach.  Its an over cast day but we're swimming parallel to the beach front together anyway.  Mom's ahead of me

in the water doing a side stroke.  (Not clear if we were both swimming naked or not; but that seems a  minor point in light of what happens next.)

So Mom starts yelling back at me to turn around and go back. I can make out her strong command over the calm ocean.  I ignore her (like I always did when she yelled at me for smoking, drinking or womanizing) but then I heard her serious voice and saw she was pointing at me to swim back - no, demanding that I swim back.

She repeatedly said in a very calm voice,    "Turn around now Bernie, you need to go back immediately.  Do not follow me."  I kept thinking how she was nutty as always but after three stiff warnings.  I reluctantly obeyed.

As soon as I turned about in the water I immediately  awoke from my sleep in a complete terror, unable to breathe. The dream ended, I sprang up on my feet, opened the door to the garden and started to breathe in the night air.  It was 4 am and I realized that I might not be breathing if I hadn't turned back.

Now when I related this dream to my older brother, he seemed most weirded out regarding the naked part of the dream - and I will say that necrophilia is perhaps a little more unusual than say, cross-dressing.  But, I can certainly let that part go in light of the 'supernatural' side of this whole story.  The whole issue of being rescued by your deceased Mother dredges up much larger fears in my mind; like a  'parallel universe' and lots of Twilight Zone music in the background every time I think about it.

So I don't scoff at my ex-wife's story about Jackie Kennedy anymore.  I think Moms continue to watch over you one way or the other for a very long time.  Someone said that God couldn't be everywhere so he invented Mothers.  That feels real true.   I'm just grateful that Mom hasn't abandon her post yet.