Enjoying early retirement — at 28

"This is what it is," I tell my friend Jill, who I met, of course, at work — where else do you meet people these days? — when I used to be a joke writer for David Letterman, and Jill was a segment producer. "I move down to Florida and test out retirement early. I get to relax in the only place I've ever actually been relaxed. And while I'm there, I get to see what retirement is like forty years before I get there. I get to see if working hard is worth it. Maybe I meet a bunch of wise elderly people who inspire me and I somehow figure out a way to write a book about it. I've read ‘Tuesdays with Morrie.’ I know how it goes."

"You're kidding me," she says.

"Everything is so accelerated lately," I say. "Maybe I've crammed a lifelong career into seven years."

"Sweetie, you go insane when you're not working," she says. "You gotta go back to work."

"I don't," I explain to her. Instead of actually doing work I can at least tell people at parties, when they ask me what I'm doing, that I'm "writing a book." Then they will say, "Oh, wow, a book, that's great." I could drag it out for years.

Americans are surviving longer and longer these days. Between the Bronze Age and 1900 — about 4,500 years — our life expectancy extended twenty-seven years. In the last hundred years, thanks to medical advancements and better home care, our life expectancy increased the same amount. Replacement body parts, the Human Genome Project. We're going to live a long time. I don't want to get ready for those final years the way I get ready for a dental cleaning, maniacally flossing for two days to make up for months of neglect, then acting surprised when the hygienist says my gums are infected. What's neurotic about being exceedingly prepared?

My first step is to somehow find a way to live in a retirement community. My grandfather tells me that it is unlikely I'll find one that will allow me to move in. Most Florida retirement communities have strict fifty-five-years-and-up policies. I ask him if any of his elderly friends have empty Florida condos I can squat in. I have always thought that my grandfather's wellspring of unconditional love is bottomless, but this request manages to scrape rock. He is nice enough, though, to set me up on a meeting with a New Jersey neighbor of his who keeps a condo in Boynton Beach, Florida. Unfortunately, she tells me, with a Dominican nurse sitting imposingly behind her like a bodyguard, she is selling the condo any day now; it won't be available.

I join Roommate Finders of Florida for one hundred dollars. I tell them I want a roommate over the age of sixty-five. They don't seem troubled by the request. Perhaps that fact should have troubled me. A few days later, they call back and say they've found me a roommate in Boca Raton. Her name is Margaret. She is in her mid- to late sixties. She lives in Century Village, one of the largest, most famous retirement communities in the country. It caters mainly to lower-middle-class Jews from the Northeast. I've heard of it before. It's one of these fully loaded communities: swimming pools, tennis courts, a huge clubhouse full of meeting rooms and social events, and more than five thousand condominium units for retired people.

"One question," they ask. "Do you have a problem with cats or birds?"

"Not enough of one," I say.

The night before I leave Los Angeles for Florida, I throw myself a going away party at a tiki bar. A handful of my closest friends in the city show up. After two years here in Los Angeles, I'm still amazed by how few people I actually know well. It's not like it used to be, when we were in our early twenties and everyone would stay out late all the time. We'd all buy each other shots and then vomit together in the streets. Really great times. These days it seems like everyone is staying in; small dinner parties or just crashing out on the couch watching "Six Feet Under." I wonder how much I'm really going to miss any of these people.

For my last night, though, we rage for a few hours like the old days. People give me AmberVision glasses, adult diapers, "Sexy and Sixty" cuff links. We drink pina coladas. Naturally, there are many crude jokes made about me romancing old women. The next day on the plane, I'm glad I got drunk at my party and I'm glad I am hungover. It blunts the edge as my plane descends toward South Florida, as I wonder what the hell I am doing, looking out over the paisley landscape and beginning an early retirement.

From "Early Bird: A Memoir of Premature Retirement," by Rodney Rothman. Copyright © 2005 by Rodney Rothman. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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