Taking early retirement to extremes

For people who grow up in the Northeast, life can feel like it’s been planned out by a Florida real estate marketer. You go to work straight out of school, get married and wear yourself out trying to provide for your family, buy a nice house you can’t afford near good schools for the kids and then after 45 years or so you cash it all in and head south. Boca Raton, maybe. Fort Lauderdale. Someplace warm, where in January you don’t need the ice scraper for the car or salt for the sidewalk.

You know: paradise, and the siren call of retirement.

Rodney Rothman decided to jump the line. Rothman was accustomed to spending as many as 80 hours a week working first for MTV, then as a writer for “The Late Show With David Letterman” before he moved to Los Angeles five years ago to write television sitcoms. When Fox canceled “Undeclared” after its single 2001-02 season, Rothman, then 28, decided it was time to check out retirement, if only temporarily.

“I was curious,” Rothman, 31, said recently over a grilled-cheese sandwich and fries at a Beachwood Canyon diner near his apartment. “When I work, I get consumed by my job.... I just genuinely was curious about going to see what was at the end of all that work. That was the question I posed to myself -- where does all this work take me?”

It took him to Century Village in Boca Raton, a condominium community of mostly working-class and middle-class retirees from New York, where Rothman spent six months testing the waters of idleness for his recently published book, “Early Bird.” He also worked up a television pilot based on his experiences for NBC -- it was filmed at Leisure World in Orange County’s Laguna Woods -- but the show didn’t make the fall schedule. Rothman and his partners are still hoping to land the project somewhere.

The concept has comic overtones -- the character Kramer retired to Florida briefly during the 1997-98 “Seinfeld” season -- but Rothman was driven more by curiosity than comedy. He was rewarded with small epiphanies about the elderly and how people get there, the persistence of personality and the fallacy that wisdom comes with age. Structured as a series of vignettes in loose chronological order, the book is a personal tour of the future, not quite a farce but not a sociological tract either. It’s more an exercise in immersion journalism.

“I see myself as somebody writing first-person accounts of real experiences,” Rothman said. “I compare myself more to a documentarian than a journalist, in that I’m documenting real things and often I’m part of the story the same way a documentary crew is part of the story.”

In a sense, the book is a bounce-back project for Rothman, who achieved a small level of notoriety when it was discovered he had made up some details in his “My Fake Job” first-person article for the New Yorker’s Nov. 27, 2000, issue. Rothman showed up at a dot-com firm in New York’s Silicon Alley, describing himself as a “junior project manager” from the “Chicago satellite office” and spent 17 days pretending to work.

He wrote of having wide access -- including getting a massage -- without being challenged or found out. Problem was, his mother had worked for the firm, which gave him more of an “in” than he let on. And the massage didn’t happen -- Rothman put his name on the list but made himself scarce when his turn came.

“I was nervous about taking things from this company that hadn’t hired me,” Rothman said. “When I was writing, I kind of said to myself, well, I signed up for the massage, and they were looking for me, I could have gotten the massage, so what’s the harm in it? It was stupid.... I was naive about it.”

The sin didn’t rise to Jayson Blair levels, but the backlash was severe as the New Yorker repudiated the article and Rothman was pilloried as a fraud.

“It was certainly no fun,” Rothman said. “I made stupid choices. I think it got way overblown, by the way, but I also see how my own actions created the problem. I learned from it and moved on.”

Rothman insists that everything in the new book happened, and with a television writer’s optimism sees the silver lining in the cloud that still shadows him.

“I did everything I could to go into this with a clear conscience. That said, I derive a certain amount of pleasure that, given all the stuff that had happened, I kind of have come back a few years later with something 20 times as long.”

Rothman went into the project expecting to spend two or three months in a retirement community, reprising his youthful visits to his retired grandparents. “It was the last time in my life I’ve been relaxed, when I was down in Florida visiting my grandparents,” Rothman said. “I think there was, you know, that component of me wanting to go write some gonzo journalism in some place relaxing.”

Rothman’s style isn’t gonzo, though, as created by the late Hunter S. Thompson, whose acid tongue was seemingly powered by booze and amphetamines. Rothman’s writing voice is detached wryness, a half-step short of mockery. He tries to laugh with his subjects, not at them.

And he spices the approach with moments of self-deprecation over his lack of athletic ability, his spotty romantic successes and, in a high school flashback, his fumbling efforts to join the “cool” group gathering poolside at the retirement center (he was finally accepted).

“I had more in common with people that age than I expected,” Rothman said.

He found that the first three months in Florida were largely pump priming. After weeks of daily contact he began to learn the more important details of people’s lives, and found himself thinking less about his apartment and old friends back in Los Angeles and more about his new life in Florida.

“You do three months of small talk and all of a sudden they’ll tell you, ‘Oh, my husband drank himself to death,’ ” Rothman said. “I was starting to download their lives a little bit, starting to be affected by what they were telling me. At that point, the idea of going back to Los Angeles and going back to my apartment and seeing what my TiVo had taped and meeting my buddies ... the idea of going back to Los Angeles and picking up that old life seemed less appealing.”

Mostly, Rothman writes about himself as he writes about others, detailing his surprise at the raunchy humor of a 93-year-old woman who used to do stand-up comedy, the irrepressible sexiness of another woman in her 70s, and the preoccupation with sex among many of the men he befriended. For many, Rothman said, the death of a wife after 50 years was like hitting an emotional rewind button, as though they reverted to who they were before they had married.

“It’s like he became frozen at 19 and all the tedious 19-year-old misconceptions he had unfreeze and he just becomes a [butt]-grabbing moron again,” Rothman said. “But I met older people who were in the same boat as me,” distracted by concerns over what to do with their lives.

Rothman became golfing buddies with one man in his 60s, identified as Artie, who spent 30 years living overseas as a heroin junkie and low-level dealer before moving to Florida when his lover became ill. Artie and the woman were drug-free when Rothman was there, and he and Artie spent hours discussing their futures.

“We were legitimate buddies who would fool around in the golf cart and give each other guidance counseling,” Rothman said. “I’d be like, ‘Hey, man, maybe you should cook for a living.’ And he’d be like, ‘You’d probably like advertising.’ That I definitely didn’t expect.”

Rothman fears that in some ways the lifestyle he chronicled may be threatened as baby boomers decide they’d rather retire to more isolated suburban settings than those offered by traditional retirement communities, which Rothman sees as transplanted urban neighborhoods -- people living in close quarters who evolve complicated social networks based on proximity, interests and outlook.

“This was the generation that grew up in the outer boroughs of New York; they’re used to living with people on top of them,” said Rothman, who grew up in Scarsdale, a wealthy suburb in New York’s Westchester County. “It reminded me of college. Everything that I’ve missed since college I got back when I lived in the retirement community. You walk out your door, you see 50 people you know, they all ask you about your life, you ask them about their life. You have company.”

And he found that retirement was more than shuffleboard, early bird specials and spoiling grandchildren from afar.

“Retirement is supposed to be stagnant and people imagine it’s depressing,” Rothman said. “For me, it was actually incredibly vibrant and exciting. I was surprised by something every day.”