Menopausal Musings & Other Stories

By Elias Sassoon

Menopausal Musings is a collection of small novellas. Each novella follows the inner world of one character’s contorted thoughts as they cope with the crisis of middle age. We observe these afflicted people as they exist at different times of day. All are urban characters who live alone in New York City. All are trapped within the walls of their apartments and trapped in their minds and unable to escape. We listen and observe as their minds twirl with hopes, dreams, bitterness, and anger. We cringe as we watch their souls cringe because of isolation from family, friends, and the rest of humanity. They’re humans set adrift in a unforgiving world with its billions of unmarked faces. Yet, their pain is our pain; their longing is our longing. And, that is the whole point.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Feb 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312049505

Elias Sassoon

Elias Sassoon is the author of approximately, roughly, terminally twenty-five works that include short story collections, novels, poetry collections and non-fiction, essay collections. While producing his writing by night, he has earned his daily wage in honest labor that ranges from professions like teacher/bathroom attendant to a door-to-door bible salesman/fish cleaner and everything in between. Elias continues to work hard, grinding out the words and turning them into literary gems, or if you prefer, literary pearls of wisdom. He lives with his wife, two children and a dog-named Brandon in a suburban area in the vicinity of the great Metropolis known as New York City. There he prepares barbecue dinners for neighbors and friends, roams the area for yard sales, watches flies and other moving insect life die in his backward where he also sits on a metal beach chair deciding on the future of the world as we know it.

Book preview

Menopausal Musings & Other Stories

Menopausal Musings & Other Stories

by

Elias Sassoon

Menopausal Musings & Other Stories

ISBN: 978-1-312-04950-5

Copyright © 2014 by Elias Sassoon

All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or, other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage  or retrieval systems, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of any of the characters to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

First Printing: April 2014

Dedication

To my wife Arlene who has stuck with me through thick and thin while others have long-ago left and, even longer-ago, forgotten that they left.

Table of Contents

MENOPAUSAL MUSINGS

SECTION, THE FIRST

SECTION, THE SECOND

DROPPING IN BY DROPPING DOWN & OUT

SECTION, THE FIRST

SECTION, THE SECOND

WOMANLY ALONE

SECTION, THE FIRST

SECTION, THE SECOND

WEEKEND EPISODES OF A MAN

SECTION, THE FIRST

Menopausal Musings

SECTION, THE FIRST

Bang It - Morning 1:

Moving about, a man walking to work and thinking. I am that man, an American prince from the town of New York, as in the City of New York, New York, the factory of dreams, the factory of liquid detergent that is distributed to the proverbial masses.

My name, Mark Mansur, my persona, ordinary yokel, perhaps a common Joe, or perhaps a man about town without a town. Really though, and really or reality is the word, I am just a jerk from the suburbs who makes his money in the big, long-lost city surrounded by Hudson’s waterway and the Atlantic Ocean of oceans.

Today, Monday, a dismal affair, wake at five from my Long Island suburban bed, wake in the middle of the night. God, it seems I just went to bed, I did, I did just go to bed, 2:00 A.M. in the morning. I always go to bed in the middle of the night and get up in the middle of the night. I’m mad.  Sunday night is the worst; never can get to bed on Sunday night; too afraid of the Monday morning. Fear drives me Sunday night, fear of the next day’s jobs, all jobs that I’ve had, jobs, I have feared them all.

Thoughts, Monday morning, get up you moron, get up Mark, up, bathroom, wash a little, just a little, take a leak, just a little one, a teeny one, and then force yourself to look out the window. Nothing to see, nothing outside. Ducks, squirrels that corrupt the suburban roads are still asleep. Why do I have to go in, to work that is? Why do I have to do anything? I’m going to die anyway, right, right, right, or wrong, right or wrong, die, no doubt about that, death, like a Woody Allen theme, like a theme in some book, die, die, and die.  However, it’s Monday morning. Time to stop thinking. Preparations underway. Throw water of your face. Feeling better. More water on the face, water, the elixir of life. What the hell am I talking about now? Babbling of course.

In underwear, the blue fruit of the looms, barefooted I go, in dirty shirt I always wear to bed, preparing, rushing, and going back and forth through the bedroom in preparation. The wife, a woman in her thirties, still sleeps; she sleeps always even when she’s awake. Her only real love is sleep, not sex, sleep, not love, emotion, feelings, sleep, but enough for now. Monday, today, Monday. I collect some pair of dark pants from the closet, pull out a white shirt from somewhere, and pull out a red tie from somewhere, anywhere. I pull my wife supplies. The wife, my wife, she washes everything, always washes, its good she washes, cleans, whitens, disinfects. I want to wash, but I never do. Why wash? Who cares about the clothes, the things on the body? Pants change them once a week; pull them over my ass, off my ass, on my ass, over and over again. Everything over and over again. Come home from work, pants off, work, pants on, Dirty socks off, cleans socks on. Pants, the externals to my world, never care for, never fold. I’m a pig and I appreciate that in myself. I fling possessions as if they were pretzel sticks being thrown to waiting pigeons, or something like that. Taking care, it leads to being meticulous, which leads to being anal, which leads to juvenile paralysis of mind over body. Don’t want that. Life is wrinkled isn’t it? Why deny the obvious.

This Monday morning, finally getting the outfit on the body including the shoes, five-year-old things with the holes in the sole to match the holes in my soul, shoes, falling apart, five years, leather ripping, disbanding. Don’t care, who cares! Tie next up. Wrap around, square knot, wrap somewhere, twist, turn and there, lopsided as usual and fading toward the eastern hemisphere. Me care. Who am I trying to impress. My father would say that too. My father never liked dressing. A factory worker, you know, always decked out in a greasy, ugly uniform. Not impressed with things of the world, most things. My father is another story.

Cereal, eat it, morning, coffee, drink it. Not much time left. The wife is stirring upstairs and the kids, young kids, two kids, a boy and girl, four and seven or seven and four. I’ll see them when they come down as I’m about to leave, to take the station-car, to set off to the train station, to take the train, to go to the city, to walk in the city, to talk in the city, to work in the city. Hurry, train schedules must be adhered too. MONDAY MORNING! Go. Go. Go. First, feed your twenty-five birds, parrots and various genera and water your five hundred plants. Hobbies, these are your iconoclastic hobbies, your escapes from the mundane about you, these are your drug of choice. Escapes. However, you pay the price, more work, toil and trouble. Monday, today, you and your hobbies, dashing about doing feeding and watering chores, hurry, hurry. The kids arrive. They demand, the wife demands. She tells me the news of the day and the things that must be done by her, by me, by all. I barely listen. I have to get out. The kids request surprises for tonight, of me, they request surprises, presents, surprises. I hate surprises.

Off in a car, the broken down Buick that is my car, rusting, dirty inside, like I am dirty, filthy, like I am filthy, I can be no other way. Birds, my birds, dirty birds like me a dirty bird, feather shedding, and dust producing birds. Dirty, my plants are dirty too. Plants, cactus and succulents, bromeliads, orchids, that occupy me with things, anything, more things, with dirt things, with messy things. Filling my life with dirt, filling it with the life of dirt. There’s no other way.

Monday morning, I wish I could get more sleep. I wish I could veer off in the car and go somewhere by myself. Where would I go? Where would I want to go?

Train, commuter train from Long Island in the state of New York, moving toward the city in the distance, Manhattan in the distance, the Empire State Building in the distance, Wall Street in the distance. Train conductor, worthless sap, approaches.  Show ticket. Close eyes. Take a few minutes to sleep. However, thoughts appear. Work, Monday morning, facing others, face demands, not being able to meet demands, horrible, terrible, fear. Monday morning is terrible.

Trash It - Morning 2:

Passing days, Tuesday, Monday having passed, and a blurry Monday never remembered again. Tuesday, I’m out of the house in the morning without one thought and am in and then out, one hop off the train. I am in the great city, Manhattan, New York, the place of Broadway plays and Wall Street manipulations. I’m heading to work, from 33rd Street to 45th Street, a walk I take back and forth every day, from the famous Pennsylvania Station to the equally famous Times Square, the place of New Year’s Eve and dropping balls and crowds of delirious fools trying to be original but being fools instead. I wonder as I walk today, wonder about the common fool who lives in Iowa and the walk he takes every day, that is, I wonder about the direction to which he walks to work. Say he’s in Des Moines. What roads does he travel to the slave mill? What road does the Every man or Every woman travel to work in Chicago or Boston or anywhere USA?  The every man, the every woman, what roads, which roads, why roads. Wondering.

I hate this; hate it, on this Tuesday, thinking as I trudge to the mill of work, hate thinking perverse thoughts. Why the hell do I have to go to work, why does anyone have to work? Where is it written? Where is the propaganda coming from, that’s what I, Mark Mansur of the Mansur’s of Syria-way would like to know, would like to freaking, scummy- rummy, money-bunny, fathom. Who says I have to earn my daily bread? What if I just want to wander in the orchards, pick the fruit, eat the fruit, and sleep in the glens or the objects of my mind? Maybe I want to do that. But I can’t. Propaganda rings in my ears, from birth it’s been ringing that I must earn a living, that I am not rich so I must find a trade, a profession, that I must earn and then earn some more, and earn some more until I retire when I am ready for death and the absence of life. Work, you must work.

Work, doing, doing what. Shuffling papers, modern work. Who says work? God says it. How do we know what God wants or what God thinks? It’s a conspiracy I tell you, absolute fraud. Are we all just jackasses, to be saddled and pulled? That’s what this earn a living bullshit is about. Be bums, bums in the pejorative sense. Why not? Why run around? Why? Are we doing it for the Puritans, the fools with the stupid hats who told us work was good for the soul? They didn’t even know how to dress. Who are we doing it for?

Great works, you work to perform great deeds, for whom, for humankind. You telling me that a bookkeeper is performing a great feat for humankind? You telling me a skydiver is performing a great feat? Are you telling me that with a straight face? Stop lying now. Professions. Doctoring, lawyering, engineering, who cares, its work, performing great feats, who cares, for whom are we performing our great feats, for humankind, for men and women and little children, for humans. Are humans worth the great performances, you have to ask yourself that. What are human’s worth anyway? In the scheme of things, we’re nothing, just a collection of globs of multiplying cells wandering about aimlessly, in an aimless universe. Humans, who cares. Religion says man is the centerpiece, the masterpiece, somehow that seems inconceivable, it does, truly does.

Walking up 7th Avenue towards Times Square, 7th Avenue, Fashion Avenue, it is sometimes called, and am now passing a big bank. I notice the bank because every morning I see a woman, homeless, in summer and winter, fall and spring, dressed in heavy winter jacket and wearing a knitted blue cap on top of her skull. She sits in front of the bank building with all her possessions in little suitcases and parcels tied to one of those metal valise carrying contraptions that all the woman executives wheel around the city carrying their business wares to and from high-level meetings with clients. Every morning I pass her, every morning, I look at her face, a nasty, wind-swept, wind assailed face, big puffy cheeks, big bulging brown eyes. The hair, frizzed out, grey, long and falling out in globs from the knitted hat. The bag lady is kneeling besides her baggage and a balloon of a belly bulges outward. Yes, every morning I pass her, stare briefly and move on and she doesn’t seem to notice.

Mr. Sir, Mr., gentleman, a gravelly voice assaults me as I pass the bank building on this Tuesday morning of my life.

I stop in my tracks and look about like the fool I really am.

Sir, Mr., Effendi, kind gentleman of the street.

It’s the bag lady.

Should I keep walking or stop. The dirty animal wants something and I’m in no mood to give her anything. I got to get to work.

Sir, effendi, great gentleman, please come here.

I halt. Against my better judgment, I approach. I reach into my pocket for some coins and extend them in her.

No, my master, no, it is not loot that I want, I just want to greet the man I see pass every day.

She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a business card. The card is blank except for the name ‘Betty Bobka’ written in red crayon across its face. Below it are the words Contortionist Extraordinaire.

I try to hand her back the card. She shakes her head violently. Betty will not accept gifts. Betty asks you to take it.

I try to pay her in coins again but she refuses. I proceed to leave, with her card in my pocket.  Crazy, life is crazy, this woman is crazy.

Squeeze Out The Water - Morning 3:

Wednesday morning, passing morning, getting up, same routine, routine of routine. Thinking this morning, my mind, playing games in thought. I don’t even remember eating my cereal, the bran-stuff and the milk and the coffee, I don’t remember getting dressed, driving to the train station; I don’t remember anything at all except this feeling of wanting sex, desiring sex. Not from my wife, rarely from my wife. With my wife, it is all a matter of time, scheduling sex, scheduling the penetration, scheduling coitus interruptus, scheduling foreplay and prior-play and prior-prior play, that’s the idea, scheduling, scheduling even the climax so that it doesn’t conflict with other climactic schedule of schedules like doing the wash or going to the local fast-food restaurant, or going to the supermarket, or talking on the phone, or reading the latest trash romance, or blending the bathroom detergents, or reorganizing the furniture to form a fortress against the elements of human warm..

Sex, a job like all the rest. Okay Mark, put it in me and move it around and around, and let it go, fine Mark, good Mark, a wife saying to a husband. Nothing more, cannot be more. Don’t love you anymore. Me. It’s a chore. I rather look at the woman next to me on the railroad, focusing in, shutting out the realities of life, trying to make a living in a butcher of a city like New York where nothing seems to matter except running around, accomplishing nothing really but running all the same. My life is all running, just running, running to accomplish something, but never understanding what is to be accomplished. I prefer to think of the female’s genitalia intersections, soft, pristine, deep, dark, mysterious, wet and hot  rather than dwell on the roughness of life and how nobody gives two bits of a horse’s ass. I rather think of tits than how my bank account will look if I get canned. Tits are so firm, so protruding. Nice. Good. Sex, bitches, copulating together with fornicating, thinking of that, comforting, intercourse, wenches, penetrating, lubrication, fluid exchanges, warmth, having a place to fit in, finding self amidst a darkened womb. Wonderful. This morning, my mind, it’s blank to everything except the female body.

The train, women in skirts, in dresses, legs, thighs, thick, thighs rising, to the black hole, the hole of hope where completeness can be gained, the hole, commonly called the vaginal organ, or the mound, or the hole, or the pussy, or the cunt. Thinking of it, purely driving through and parking between the twin pillars; fulfilling myself, gaining fulfillment by jerking the car’s engine. Diving into it, the female hot spot, finding a reason to live in it, in it, deep down inside the feminine form. What’s inside there, down deep in the blackness/ Hope for me, hope for all. Secrets for all, secrets for me. Funny thing is, the female who possesses it, probably doesn’t look at her own cunt that way, doesn’t categorize her black hole that way either except as to deem it as some other human organ. It means little to her. However, to me, the male, it means my life, my entire existence. What does a woman put her existence in? What makes her whole? Children, having and controlling and leading children. Leading and controlling the husband, the man? Leading and controlling every object of physical space around her?

There’s an older woman, big, fat, tits like goofy pumpkins, short black skirt, sitting across the aisle from me as the train proceeds towards a destination to nowhere. Still not thinking of work, not thinking of anything except the flabby bitch. The woman must be sixty, but she wears the black hose and her thighs are large. Her eyes are closed and her hips are raised slightly and her legs are up. My eyes strain to see the inside of her thighs. My being longs to clutch those thighs, grab the large ass, let my penis glide slowly up the sides, let my penis burst through her panty hose and then through her panties. I long to hear her pant. I long to be smothered in her hot juices. I wonder if she could ever imagine what I’m feeling, I wonder if any woman could imagine what I’m feeling, I wonder if any woman could imagine me wanting to drill into another human being and stay in there as long as I could. Staying in, joining, it’s unimaginable.

Guilt about my own desires now towards the flabby one. She, the one I needlessly am calling the bitch, she is so much older than myself. How could I think such terrible thoughts, breath such lustful desires, calculate such pornographic visions? But what am I doing wrong? Nothing, nothing. So I want to screw her, so I’m horny. I’m not acting on anything. Rape, thoughts of rape. I wouldn’t rape. I’m not that type of person. I’m a gentleman, a pure gentleman. Aren’t I? I am. But what really makes me different than the rapist. I could put my dick in any woman. I wouldn’t be choosy if I had the opportunity. It is the nature of this beast. I could screw anything, yes, and it is a depressing thought, a thought for this morning and a recurring thought. Women, I make no distinctions. If she is a woman, if she has an posterior body orifice defined as female, I could screw her, at any age, any color, any size, any shape, screw, bang, thrust, harpoon, inject. I know it. It’s sick, maybe terrible or at least disgusting to the prudes at heart. But maybe it’s human. Maybe I’m not a freak. Thoughts, a lot of thoughts about sex this morning.

The girl, up front, sitting facing me, long black hair, red skirt, white blouse, hose skin tones. Long legs, stretching legs, legs that taper perfectly from the top of the thigh to the lovely arched feet. The hose, it is so perfectly fitting on the flesh, the warm flesh. Wonder how that hose feels on her skin, I wonder how that hose makes her feel. Does it make her feel sexy? Are women stimulated by the feel of nylon on their legs? Does that make their juices flow? Internal juices that become external; ideas of, liquids of sex flowing like Niagara Falls. Thoughts, thinking, can’t help thinking, normal thoughts.

The city arrives and the walk up 7th Avenue begins anew. Eyes are fixed on women’s asses, their legs. Eyes strain for skirts, to see skirts. A mind strains not to think of anything else but flesh, the mind strains. Soon the bank building is reached and thoughts of Betty Bobka return. She’s not here this morning and the space she occupies looks weird, empty space where a destitute woman belongs. My mind returns to thoughts of women until I arrive at work. Now it’s time to turn off my mind.

Poking Holes With An Axe - Morning 4:

Now, this minute, now, Thursday morning, cannot get out of the house this morning. Cannot put on my pants straight. I’m even having trouble brushing my teeth. My sons up, my daughters up and they’re both at my feet begging me to bring presents when I get home from work. I occasionally do, cheap plastic things that soon fall apart in the night. Why do I do this? Good question. I guess I want them to look forward to my coming home with anticipation, I guess I want them to want me to come home, I guess I desperately want them to look forward to me coming home. Normally they don’t. Normally I come home, my wife is home, they are home with my wife, they are at the TV, they are at the homework, they are at the toys and I am the outsider, the thing, and the useless vehicle that is only good to bring home money and not even for that. They, them, the family, everybody already has eaten dinner and I eat alone, looking at the walls while noises flood around me, children screaming, a wife screaming, kids demanding. I eat, frozen dinners, I eat, alone and seeking only to escape the kitchen table into the den and the television set or the computer or the collection of house plants, go deep into something and sink away.

Gifts, bringing them home makes me a special man, a man in demand, at least for five minutes or so after which the kids turn away. Five minutes is still good. At lunch, I’ll go and buy a few cheap toys, spend a couple of dollars and not more, and then make myself a five-minute king tonight. What’s wrong with that? Something is wrong with that. Why do I need to bribe my own kids? I