Meddling with Midlife- Chapter 1 (A man and his prostate)

“I don’t care where my prostate is, you bloody pervert. If you think you’re fiddling around up there, you can go to hell. You can take your prostate and shove it up my bloody arse!”

Rod found it a little difficult to appreciate the irony in the wording of his vehemently growled protest, blissfully unaware that his prostate was in fact up his own arse and that the doctor, pervert or not, would indeed be going in.

“Sir if you could please just stand still, this will only take a moment! It’s a painless procedure…” the unfortunate doctor rationalised, unable to avoid a whiny and slightly desperate pleading tone to filter through his voice. “The lubrication will mean that you’ll only feel a minor discomfort,” he continued, taking a step back from his patient who was balling his fists and barking like a little angry bull terrier despite the fact that his trousers were pooled clumsily around his ankles. Clearly this patient happened to be quite mad.

“No. No way. Not gonna happen.”

“Sir, I’m afraid that I must tell you something. If you do not permit me to proceed, I will be obliged to call your wife and request that she not only bring you but also that she supervise the procedure,” the doctor offered casually, fully aware that a wife’s wrath would most likely invoke far more fear than the procedure itself.

It had worked. Rod froze in terror like a deer caught in the glare of headlamps and realising that he’d been outsmarted, dropped hi y-fronts without a word and waddled to the table. “How d’ya want me doc?”

Some minutes later with his eyes firmly closed and his buttocks clenched in defiant anticipation, Rod dimly wondered how it’d come to this. He was already 52, his grey hair was falling out like huge wads of dandruff and he had such a wobbly beer belly that he had to take a hold of it whilst running up and down the stairs to prevent any injuries from occurring. To make matters worse, he was now bent over a table with his trousers round his ankles like a naughty toddler and his slightly hairy posterior thrust out into the face of another young man. Brilliant. Abso-fucking-lutely brilliant.

As he heard the unsettling thwack-thwack of latex gloves being secured onto his doctor’s hands, Rod had an epiphany. A brainwave of biblical proportions. He felt like Noah deciding to build the ark, realising that he needed to do something dramatic to take control to save his own life. He might not have had any animals with him but a few kids must count for something. Rod suddenly knew how to get his youth back. He knew that as soon as this doctor had finished prodding around his arse hole, he would have to go out and buy a shiny new car. What he didn’t know was whether to buy a Porsche or a Ferrari. Such a dilemma.

In the end, Rod settled on a rather muscular Lotus Elise for its sentimental resemblance to his wife. The lotus was a flower and Rosaline, his wife, was known as Rose, which also happened to be the name of a popular flower. Neither looked as pretty as a flower really. Both were a little to broad and not nearly delicate enough but then the Lotus came in banana yellow and Rosaline, well she was just pink really. He couldn’t very well be driving around in a pink car, could he? Not at his age, anyway.



The new yellow atrocity lurched aggressively along the tarmac, noisily prowling through the grey streets of Stevenage as Rod honked his horn relentlessly at all of the pretty ladies strolling past. The reaction, Rod was pleased to note, was always the same and consisted of giggling and pointing in his direction. Reassuring himself that this was in fact a reaction of admiration and most certainly not one of ridicule, he slipped his aviators over the bridge of his nose and allowed his mind to wander. Yes, he concluded inwardly. He was a real stud now. Rod would henceforth be known as ‘hotrod’ and not his old childhood and somewhat awkward name of ‘Rodders.’ His new name had a certain ring to it. ‘Rod the hotrod.’

“Isn’t it funny,” he mumbled aloud to himself as he pulled up outside his modest mid-terraced house, “how a car changes everything?” He stumbled out of the near-fluorescent door, closing it gently behind him and taking a step back to admire his new purchase as one might admire a set of newly self-assembled shelves. It certainly was a fine vehicle, crouching low and proud like some sleek predator ready to tear up the dreary length of Fawcett Road with its feline prowess at any given moment. He imagined that the yellow streak it must appear to be when pushing 80 miles per hour would be something akin to lightning. Hotrod and his lightning car. It made him sound like he was a comic book hero. Well he was a hero of sorts anyway, he supposed. Bringing up three kids and staying faithful to his wife of 25 years, the thorny rose, made him a hero in his own way really. Sometimes he’d wished that he’d chosen a life of fighting crime instead. With the threat of having to wear form-fitting lycra every day, there’s no way he’d have let himself go and let his beer belly grow. Poking at the extensive amounts of fat suspended around his middle, he sauntered proudly forwards towards his house.

Rod’s house wasn’t exactly much to look at. It was preceded by a miniature patio crammed full of garden ornaments and potted plants which were so depressed by Stevenage’s atmosphere, that their leaves remained in a permanent droopy state. “You’ve seen better days, haven’t you poor buggers?” Rod murmured, bending down to pat the sunny head of an overgrown sunflower. The house itself was small in stature and overrun with a damp mossy lichen oozing up the crumbling brickwork. In the middle of the dreary structure stood a flaking ‘rose-pink’ door in tribute to Rosaline herself, who was already stood there furiously ringing her hands.

“What’ve you done? What have you gone and done?”

“You don’t like it? Well I like it, and I’m keeping it,” Rod retorted indignantly, eyeing his wife’s hair coiled neatly into rollers. “Why’ve you got those plastic things in your head? And for goodness sake woman, let me into the house. We can’t very well stand outside here in the cold all day, can we? Especially not with you in that dressing gown.”

“You are not keeping it!” When Rosaline became angry she had an ability to scream in the most unbearable pitch, somewhat akin to a banshee. Dogs would bark and children would run for cover, protecting their ears w3ith their tiny little hands. This was one of the moments. “When I married you it was for life and now you’re wasting our money on buying frivolous indulgences so that you can trail around town and pick up little hussies. For God’s sake, you’re a married man! In his 50s no less!”

The truth was, Rod was more than happy to stand there and listen to Rose screech away about marriage until she’d worn herself out and agreed to make him a nice cup of hot tea but the wretched woman had to go and bring his age into it. Right there on the street. “Hush Rose, we have neighbours. I don’t think its appropriate to tell them all my age. You’re not exactly the young pretty little thing you used to be either!” And there it was. The pivotal moment where Rod knew he’d gone too far. Rose’s face had shrivelled up like some gigantic wrinkly raisin and before he knew it, he felt a sharp smack on the side of his face and warm blood trickling down from his ear. He touched it in disbelief and looked to the ground to see a decapitated garden gnome rolling away on the paving slabs. She’d actually thrown a gnome at him? And one with a tiny fishing rod no less. He’d never liked the damn thing anyway but that was besides the point. The point was, she was stood there in her dressing gown and hair rollers, maliciously throwing garden gnomes at him for buying the car that could change his life.

“You threw a bloody gnome at me! Now look at me, I’m bleeding!”

“Serves you right, Rod! I’d do it again ‘n all! What were you thinking? How could you do this to me?”

It turned out that Rod wasn’t thinking anything. He was a refined and sturdy man but he had an unquestionable fear of blood. As he glanced down at the red smear covering his hand, Rod felt the world around him dissolve and drift away, he felt his new shiny yellow car smiling lovingly at him and then he felt nothing. Absolutely nothing.

A few minutes later, his eyes sprung open to see a startling face only inches from his own. “Aaaaaaaargh!”

“Don’t worry dad,” came the gleeful reply to his obvious fear at having somebody in such close proximity to himself. “You fainted. Like a woman.”

“I did no such thing! Your damn mother threw a bloody gnome at me!”

“Whatever dad. You’re just one big pansy really aren’t you? A big pink pansy..” And with that, Rod’s antagoniser poked her tongue right out of her pretty little pink mouth and flounced off.

Taking a moment to consider his daughter Maira, Rod shook his head. She was the youngest of his three, aged only 17 and he was very glad that she lived at home. He had suspected that she had some kinds of terrible learning disorder when she insisted that the Harry Potter novels were of immense literary value, declaring them to be the ‘greatest books ever written.’ Rose had dismissed him when he informed her of his gut feeling about Maira, that there wasn’t something quite right about her, and she refused to have the girl tested. All the same, Rod still took it upon himself to occasionally slip Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy in her bag in the vain hope that her literary tastes might mature and become as sophisticated as his own. In return, Maira felt obliged to leave pamphlets lying around about contraception to remind him in her own torturous way that she was growing up. Each time he found one, he would be straight onto Rose, hassling her to remind their daughter that no method of contraception is safer than abstinence.

“What can’t you tell her yourself?” Rose would demand of him, clattering dishes around the kitchen to indicate that she was far too busy to talk to Maria.

“Well, I can’t very well talk to her about that.”

“About what, Rod?”

“You know very well what I mean by that!”

“Its sex, Rod. You’re such a snobbish old prude. Just say it. Sex sex sex. S-E-X. Sex!”

“Shhhh! What if the neighbours hear you?”

“I daresay the neighbours would much rather hear us talking about sex than actually having it.”

“Rosaline!!”

By now, Rod would have flushed a satisfactory shade of red and having wound him up enough, Rose would take pity on him. “Ok ok fine, I’ll do it. I’ll talk to her but if she’s got all of these leaflets, at least she’s probably doing it safely.”

And that’s how the conversation would go each time Rod decided that it was about time his daughter learned about the values of real time-tested literature. He doubted very much that rose was actually having the promised conversations with Maira as their daughter now seemed to be going out with unsuitable boys more and more and wearing less and less each time.

“You can’t just go out in your shoes and undergarments,” he made the mistake of saying once in disbelief as she paraded past him towards the front door in what appeared to be a very short satin slip.

“Don’t be stupid dad, I paid eighty quid for this dress! Don’t you like it?” IN fact, Rod didn’t like it very much at all but having lived with rose for twenty-five years, he knew better than to say that it was anything less than wonderful. More importantly, he didn’t particularly like the price either. It seemed awfully expensive for such a small quantity of material.

“Where did you get the eighty pounds from?”

“The credit card you gave me for emergencies. Oh and I bought these shoes too. Aren’t they cute?”

‘No, they’re not cute,’ Rod thought to himself , betting that the price wouldn’t be cute either. “How much were they?” he asked suspiciously.

“Oh, I don’t really remember… anyway, I have to go! Byeeee!” And with incredible flippancy, Maira hurriedly escaped out into the night, leaving Rod feeling not only a little baffled but also really quite concerned about his next credit card bill.

TO BE CONTINUED....