Miller's Crossing

"All right, let's do some tricks," he says to Rusty and Sandy, his half-grown kittens, and promptly begins barking out commands. "Roll over! Roll over! Roll over -- no, not sit up!"

After a moment of indecision and a couple of hapless meows, Rusty, an orange shorthair, performs a supple roll on the kitchen floor. Quarles rewards him with a spoonful of wet food. He takes the cats through an increasingly difficult repertoire, which includes sitting up, leaping to exact spots on their jungle gym and touching a ladybug magnet on the refrigerator.

He is a firm, if amused, taskmaster. He has taught his cats 14 tricks in all. Joy animates his raspy voice, even when it deepens to a growl to encourage obedience. He laughs frequently at this unlikely spectacle he has learned to orchestrate.

Brenda Linn, a petite redheaded ICU nurse, sashays into the small kitchen and comes up behind her boyfriend as he gets a glass of water at the sink. She hugs Quarles playfully, almost as though she were administering the Heimlich maneuver.

"You want some, too?" Quarles asks her.

"No. Orange juice," she says coyly. "You know me and my orange juice, my vitamin C."

They make a cute pair. He, the dashing older man who looks like a college professor with neatly parted gray hair and green corduroy jacket. She, a fit, chipper gal of 70. They cohabited a few years back, but clashed constantly. Linn now keeps her own home for those times when the two need a break.

"She has a strong will," Quarles says. "Feisty as hell."

Settling onto the arm of his beige wraparound couch in the living room, Quarles speaks about cloning and cryonics -- freezing dead bodies on the assumption they may be brought to life again. He uses the same matter-of-fact tone that other old-timers might use to discuss that morning's golf round or the latest developments with their bowels.

"Michael West has arranged to have me cryonically suspended," he says, adding with a chuckle, "He didn't want to lose me." (West denies that he is working on cryonics.)

"Oh, Miller, you wouldn't want to do cryonics, would you!" Linn exclaims.

Quarles explains that he would like to be frozen only if he could come back with his memory intact. If so, cryonics would be more appealing to him than having a clone, which would merely allow his DNA -- not him -- to live on.

"I'd rather come back with memories than have a clone," he says. "Of course, the ideal [would be to] take enough cells to clone me, and about 30 years before they bring me back, activate the clone. My clone will be 30 years old when I come back. My son could be my father and tell me what's going on in the world. It's sort of science fiction now but"

It's this kind of talk that leads Quarles's ex-wife to call him "peculiar."

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil. -- Psalm 23

In May 1999 Quarles was only looking for ways to improve his vitamin regimen when he wrote a letter asking the Life Extension Foundation in Florida to evaluate his intake and suggest changes.

Over the years, he has devised a formidable arsenal of vitamins and supplements to take each day. The list ranges from the exotic (bee pollen, green tea extract, ginkgo) to the prosaic (vitamin C, aspirin) to the coldly clinical (chromium picolinate).

He sent along blood samples as well.

Bill Faloon, the foundation's vice president, called Quarles back a few days later with disturbing news: Tests showed signs of prostate cancer.

Quarles took the news calmly. His doctors had fretted similarly in the past, but biopsies always came back negative. Still, he didn't want to take any chances and had another biopsy done.

This one came back showing three spots of cancer.

"It worried the hell out of me," Quarles says.

He was set to start undergoing radiation treatment at M.D. Anderson, when the doctor told him there was a 60 percent chance he would emerge from the process incontinent or impotent.

For a man who has done everything to maintain his youthful vigor, neither option was acceptable. He had bounced back from a minor stroke some 20 years ago. As for his libido, he says, it has never flagged. He wasn't about to let it go.

"A lot of times when men give up sex or they can't have sex anymore, they lose a lot of interest in life," he says. "If they can stay sexually active, I think, they're happy."

Quarles declined the radiation. Faloon told him about hormone drugs that could reduce and possibly cure the cancer. "I said, "Well, I'll try that,' " Quarles recalls.

Patricia Richardson says her father's quest for the fountain of youth is primarily motivated by a love of life and not a fear of death. She says the effort has become hopelessly entwined with his fiercely competitive spirit.

"If he dies, it will probably be like if he lost a Ping-Pong game. He'll say, "I could have done better! I could have made this happen!' " she says. "It will aggravate him to die. I really haven't ever detected fear [of death]. He really does just like life."

More than a year after the initial diagnosis, the cancer treatment appears to be working.

"I think that I'll be all right," Quarles says. "I still think that I'm going to live to be 200."