Tobacco Avenue

The clock has just struck 4:30 p.m. at The Green Royals retirement home in Richmond’s far West End, and the line for supper - it’s country-style steak night - is already snaking around the corner.

Some 30 or so senior-citizens away from the warmed dinner plates, Harold Jennings Jr. holds his orange food tray tightly, his head peering over the shoulders of those in front of him, the fully-suited thin man anxiously waiting for the point when the group begins moving through the cafeteria line.

For Jennings, a former tax worker and widowed grandfather of five, the food is one of the many highlights of his 9-hour day. But he doesn’t call The Green Royals home for the assisted living or medical-care services.  Nope, the Navy veteran says, he is strictly here for the women - and the occasional unadulterated romp in an adjustable safety bed with disposable underpadding.

“The tail at this place is like none you could ever imagine,” Jennings said in a recent interview. “Take her,” he says, pointing to 92-year-old Emma Jean Graham, at the time preoccupied with making sure her green Jell-O is leveled securely on her dinner tray. “Legs and arms like just-salted slugs. Breasts like a pair of wet socks hanging on a clothesline. Dimes like Emma Jean are everywhere you turn.”

For Jennings, it is the swarming groups of tempting elderly women that give him a reason for living - and a reason for living here, the 87-year-old says.

“A lot of times when the [grand]kids come to see me, they’ll chuckle at the raised toilet seats in the bathroom,” he said. “Then I’ll typically look over at Emma Jean and give her a little wink, because we both know what those contraptions are really used for.”

“That is, if she is having one of the good days when she can remember that far back, or who I am,” he added.

Like that raised toilet seat, Jennings has found that much of the equipment and objects found in a typical retirement community can be used to his advantage in what he calls his “mission for being” at Green Royals.

He recalls a day in July 2006 when he’d overheard that resident Corrine Gillespie was given a motorized wheelchair for her 82nd birthday. Enticed by the possibilities of automatic and unknown movement in whatever way their writhing, wrinkling bodies hit the directional joystick, Jennings quickly sought out the woman, living in the East Wing at the time.

“In that situation, particularly, her being relegated to a seat wasn’t all that bad,” Jennings explains. “To tell you the truth, for the reasons I’m living here, she was in the right position to start with.”

Added Jennings: “God rest her foxy soul.”

Back at the dinner line, the man who flew 18 missions over Germany in 1943 scouts the dessert items and the woman he’ll try to pick up to “have social hour with” later this evening, just before bed at 8:15 p.m.

Before that, he plans to get in some “QT with the cuties” on the center’s Nintendo Wii later tonight to improve his coordination skills. This routine will continue over the course of several months for Jennings, unless his recurring incontinence problems interrupt his best-laid getting-laid plans.

“And if I don’t find a lady here, I joined a Bridge group last week that’s just me, Phil [Mooney] and the girls. I’ll bring the booze,” Jennings says, “and I’ll let you draw your own conclusions on where that night will go.”