He didn’t say any of that. He just wrote me several tickets and told me I was lucky because he could have taken me down to the station, and pointed out I’d be responsible for the other guy’s bodywork.
“I can’t even make my own body work,” I tried gamely, but the time for light humour and verbal byplay had passed.
I went home and when my partner heard a strange scratching sound at the front door she opened it to find me folded like a newspaper on the mat.
I looked up at her and said, “I’m getting old.”
And she looked down at me kindly.
“Honey,” she said. “It’ll be all right.”
“No, it won’t,” I said. “I’m going to die.”
“So am I,” she said.
“That doesn’t make me feel better.”
But she took me by the foot and dragged me inside, which was a bit painful coming over the doorframe, and she closed the door and lay down on the carpet beside me and held me until I did feel better again.
3
Youth
Middle age comes up fast for the usual reason things come fast: because we didn’t notice it coming slowly. There were warning shots, but when you heard them you jinked and you thought that’s why they missed, and when shots miss enough times, you think you can’t be hit.
THE TWENTIES
I don’t miss my twenties. God, my twenties were awful. I realise this isn’t a common view. Given the choice a lot of people might freeze their lives in some golden moment of twentysomethingness when a bra is only a style choice and men have so many erections they can afford to ignore some of them. But that’s madness. Unless you have one of those lifestyles that actually require you to be in your twenties – professional sperm donor, say, or Donald Trump’s next wife, or a poet in the First World War – your twenties are usually a waste of not being old.
I reckon I could take the twentysomething me in a fistfight. Not a real one, obviously – my cunning and enhanced willingness to cheat might give me an advantage now but that guy was very reckless with his personal safety, which goes a long way in a fist-fight. Also, that guy felt he had something to prove, and fanatics are dangerous. But in most other ways I have the edge. I worry less how my hair looks these days. My clothes fit better. I know how to talk to women now. For that matter, I now also know how to talk to men. (Top tip for talking to both men and women: it doesn’t make as much difference as I used to think whether it’s a man or a woman I’m talking to.)
There are only two ways I can think of that my twenties were better than my forties.
1. Hangovers
When I think of hangovers gone by, I start to worry if I’m even the same man. That fellow wasn’t human. He applied alcohol to himself like a man using a mallet on a coconut. When Muhammad Ali introduced the technique of the rope-a-dope to George Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle in Kinshasa in 1974, there were long sequences when he would sag on the ropes while Foreman whaled on him with fists like folded manhole-covers. You thought Ali would surely die. No man could take that and be the same afterwards. No, please, not his face! His pretty face! Then Foreman, tuckered and arm-weary, would cease his whaling to gasp for air and Ali would dance off the ropes, smiling like a child actor on a red carpet, and assay some nifty skip-steps while waving to the crowd with a glove like a rose. In this metaphor, you understand, Foreman was the alcohol and I the young Ali.
In the morning after a night of grievous orally applied self-abuse, I’d rise and cure myself with a Panado. A Panado! Sometimes two, if I’d really run away with myself. I can’t imagine a problem nowadays so small that it could be solved with paracetamol. Offering a Panado to one of today’s hangovers would be like throwing a peeled litchi at Vladimir Putin: if he even noticed, it would only antagonise him. It used to be that you would describe your hangovers to your pals and boast about their savagery, but now it’s like coming back from Vietnam or Uncle Trevor’s garden shed: things happened over there and you just can’t talk about them, not even to the ones closest to you.
The worst part of today’s hangovers is that they’re the undeniable voice of the truth. They’re like the slave standing at the ear of the conqueror as he takes his golden triumph through the streets of Rome, murmuring, “Memento mori.” (Which must have been a rough job. Bad enough being a slave without having to be the official buzzkill as well. Where’s the job satisfaction?)
I can normally convince myself that nothing has changed. My life is carefully arranged to hide any signs of flagging vitality: I politely avoid feats of strength and decline gruelling tests of endurance and I make sure I’ve limbered up properly before tying my shoelaces. It’s true that occasionally a combination of teacups, standing and breathing might give me trouble, but so far not often. For the most part I feel pretty good about things. Then I take a drink and feel even better. Well done, sir, I say to myself. The younger you wouldn’t have handled his drink this well – by now he’d have gone charging the bar like the Light Brigade. He’d be starting conversations by asking probing questions of complete strangers and directing sly single entendres at any lucky ladies nearby. But now look at you: you can pace yourself. You haven’t once tried to sing along to the music without first swallowing your wine. You may not be young, exactly, but you’re better than young! You’re young-plus!
Then in the morning you wake with the great iron wheels turning in your head, crushing unto bone meal and dust all your dreams and hopes, your self-regard, small woodland animals, everything. And there’s a banging on the door and when you answer it the hangover comes into your home like a Serbian ruffian and puts you in a chokehold and drags you to the mirror. Look! it says, in its coarse and unpleasant accent. Look, damn it! This is who you are now. Ecce homo!
2. Sex
Allowing me to use my penis in the 1990s was like sending a chimpanzee into a hostage situation with a semi-automatic weapon. No matter how carefully you’ve briefed him, sooner or later he’ll get over-excited and spray the room. Maybe he’ll hit some appropriate targets but he’ll also take down lots of innocent bystanders and probably shoot himself in the foot. And he never runs out of bullets.
I thought I was terribly cool and adult in my twenties but really I was like a pressurised fire hose that someone dropped and is snaking around the scene, soaking everyone. I was always trying to have sex before I actually wanted to have sex. I know twentysomething men are supposed to want to have sex all the time, and maybe I did, but sometimes I didn’t, if you know what I mean. Still, I felt obliged to try whenever I could, like some opportunistic shark of the tropic seas: if I don’t have sex when I can, if I wait until, say, next time to have sex, then maybe I won’t have sex at all. I hadn’t yet discovered that sometimes not having sex is a pretty good way to spend an evening.
My friend Dan says it’s not having sex in his twenties that he misses, it’s having sex with people in their twenties. I don’t even really miss that. Even when I was younger, I preferred older women. Partly that’s because older women have lower expectations of the sexual experience, which is a sensible precaution when bedding me, but also because women are only really interesting once they’re in their thirties. Women in their twenties are too outdoorsy, too summery, too thin-skinned, taut and energetic to be sexy. They lack the low, slow, languorous, paprika-like potential energy of a woman who has had enough time to be a woman and to decide what it feels like. And oh, the way a good perfume smells on a grown woman. Perfume on a woman in her twenties just smells like something sprayed on skin; a grown-up woman’s blood runs warm and thick like a Coleridge poem and heats the oils differently to release the sinuous rills and sunless seas and murmuring bassnotes of the body … I’m sorry, what was I saying?
Yes, older women. I used to sleep with older women whenever they’d let me. I’m not sure what was in it for them. Maybe they were going through a midlife crisis. Maybe they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe they saw me the way my friend Dan sees young women: he thinks they
’re attractive, but really they’re only young.
Whatever the unhappy path or blind alley that led them to my door, I definitely had the better end of the bargain. Most were kind and hid their disappointment well enough and sometimes even found encouraging words to say: “Next time will be better”; “I liked your enthusiasm”; “It’s nice to be with someone who tries so hard.”
One woman, let’s call her Lorraine, knew what she wanted, and what she wanted was for me to stand around more. What did she mean? Did she want me to tamp down my natural dynamism and be less of a go-getter? I thought I was already doing some sterling work in the goofing off and lazing around department. That is not what she meant.
“When young men take their clothes off, they’re too self-conscious,” she said. “They hunch over and scuttle towards the bed. Take your time. Be proud.”
Her implication was that older men drop their trousers and stand around like proud Greek statues. There is nothing that so smarts the eager young lover than the suggestion that older dudes do something better, so the next time I disrobed, I stepped clear from the puddle of jeans and struck a pose copied from the Super-man underpants I had when I was nine: hands on hips, chest thrust out, chin lifted to stare into a heroic middle-distance. A bit like an undressed Lenin, come to think of it.
I don’t have children so I haven’t had the experience of watching a child’s face as it opens a Christmas present to discover something that it wasn’t hoping for at all, but thanks to Lorraine, I have a pretty good idea of what I’m missing.
“Mmm,” she said, a little like the sound a mom makes when receiving “You’re the Fire” perfume for her birthday.
Thinking that perhaps it was all a little too static, I marched around a little. Let her get a gander of the majesty of me in motion.
She averted her eyes. “All right,” she said. “Thank you. Point taken.”
(Now that I’m older, I realise she must have been bluffing the whole time. No older man wastes valuable time touring the bedroom like a walking hat-rack. After a certain point an erection is like creative inspiration – you don’t know where it comes from or when it will come again, so while it’s here you’d better get something down while you can.)
But it’s true that my twenty-year-old self had some logistical and administrative advantages when it came to sex. I don’t like to be crude, so let’s just use an appropriate metaphor … um, let’s see … all right: let’s say that I could, uh, submit the paperwork more often and with less advance warning. Then again, I generally needed to do it more often in order to get it done properly: where I excelled in quantity of, uh, paperwork, I often let myself down in duration.
Oh, let’s be honest, I didn’t let myself down – I lasted just about exactly long enough for me. Save your sympathy for my partners. Sex with me was the essence of Hobbesian life: nasty, brutish and short. Never mind the paperwork metaphor, I was a grass-court player in what is, really, a clay-court sport – I’d play a few forceful forehands then rush the net, which is fine if you’re John McEnroe and have a subtle touch and some neat angles when you get there. I was more like Tim Henman or Wayne Ferreira: usually I’d fold under the pressure and have to feign an injury.
There are some techniques the over-enthusiastic can try out for purposes of extending the experience. Some patently don’t work: counting the seven-times table backwards just makes you stare at the wall with your lips moving silently, which is unsettling for whoever’s underneath you because you seem to be either praying for forgiveness or arguing with the voices in your head. Also, I would get stuck on seven times eight, and there’s something uniquely demoralising about failing at sex and arithmetic at the same time.
Then there’s the technique of picturing something green. I can’t vouch for the science of this, but allegedly the colour green delays orgasm. If you don’t have a potted fern nearby, the thing is to imagine something. I tried it out. The next time I was, uh, filling out an order form, I took a mental peregrination through the freshproduce shelves down at Pick ’n Pay: broccoli, limes, yes, those are nice limes, elastic-banded bunches of spinach, mmmm, heads of lettuce, firm avocado pears … I don’t know that it worked, precisely, but afterwards I certainly felt healthier.
On subsequent occasions I pictured the green glades of Amazon rainforests and the Zoo Lake bowling green and the sweet summery Newlands outfield. But a young man craves sexual variety. Seeking different hues of greenness, your mind wanders down ever more baroquely verdant pathways: Robin Hood, Yoda, the Incredible Hulk … there’s nothing necessarily wrong with any of this, but you do start to wonder: where will all this end?
I’ll tell you where it ended. It ended on the day my mind opened some horrendous green door to find that the secret it was keeping was … John Robbie in an Irish rugby jersey. He looked me in the eye and gave me a thumbs-up. Take it from me, John Robbie and his thumb are the last thing you want to see before you orgasm. No, hang on, I mean, he’s not the last thing you want to see before you orgasm … wait …
I almost feel that’s enough detail, but I suppose I should mention that there’s also a physical manoeuvre which involves reaching down at the moment critique, taking hold of the, um, the … no, it’s no use, I can’t think of an analogy with the world of paperwork, I’m just going to have to say testicles, and giving a firm tug in the opposite direction. This allegedly stalls the moment and buys you extra time.
There are certain drawbacks to this technique. One is the question of physical dexterity. Unless your arm is very long – if you’re an orang-utan or an octopus, this would be right up your alley – it isn’t so easy to give yourself a good backwards reacharound. Try it yourself right now, if you don’t believe me. Practice is key, because you don’t want to find yourself groping around back there for the stable door when the horse has already bolted, finished the race and is now getting a good rubdown and a nosebag of oats.
There’s the further danger that your bed-partner, being in a co-operative mood and unwilling to stand idly by while you blindly fumble around your nether regions, might helpfully try to lend a hand. This involves the very real probability, nay, the inevitability, of someone who doesn’t have testicles miscalibrating the vigour and power implied in the phrase “firm tug”, thus resulting in the following dialogue:
“Macaroni cheeeeese!”
“Sorry, too hard?”
“Hanyani shimangi!”
“Wait there, I’ll fetch some ice.”
“Ngggggggg.”
I suppose an even bigger danger is that the human’s brain is our most adaptable sexual organ, and if that happens enough times you might start to enjoy it.
THE THIRTIES
My thirties were great. They were definitely the best of it so far, although considering they’re only up against the teens and the twenties, that’s not saying much. To be worse than the teens and twenties, my thirties would have to involve a flesh-eating disease or an attack by giant spiders.
But before you can enjoy your sweet, giant-spider-free thirties, you first have to be twenty-nine, and that’s a jolt. One minute you’re chugging along, ejaculating everywhere and hangover-free, and the next … twenty-nine? That’s … that’s almost thirty. Jesus and Jim Morrison were dead by now. Thirty! This is the end! Thirty’s the finish line! It’s all over!
But no, wait – I’m a thinking man, I’m a rational ape; thirty’s not really that long, is it? Three decades just sounds like a long time because “decades” is one of those fancy words they use in history class. Let’s see, let’s just do some basic counting to get some perspective here … thirty years before I was born was … uh, let’s see, carry the one … no, wait, I must have counted that wrong. Thirty years before I was born was the Second World War. I can’t be almost as far from my birth day as my birth day was from Dunkirk! Either there’s a problem with my maths or history is lying.
Let’s not get carried away – there might be a third option. What if someone is doing something to the
very mechanics of time itself? Who’s to say some evil bald Bond billionaire in a hollowedout volcano hasn’t invented a giant gyro-whirligig to literally speed up time, so that a second and a minute and an hour each pass a little faster than they used to, and no one can tell because all the clocks are speeding up at precisely the same rate? So the only way we can tell something is happening is through our subjective experience of time going faster, which everyone agrees, but the scientists don’t listen to us because subjective experience isn’t something scientists listen to? What if this is happening right under our noses and I’m the only person who has rumbled this scheme?
“Or maybe it’s not a super-villain,” I said to Clarence urgently and adamantly one night, because it’s silly to still suspect super-villains when you’re nearly thirty years old. “What if it’s some kind of naturally occurring electromagnetic thing?”
It was quite late at night, which is the time of day when twenty-nine-year-olds get most urgent and adamant.
“What kind of thing?” asked Clarence.
“I don’t know. A singularity.”
“What’s a singularity?”
“It’s like a thing. But there’s only one of it.”
“Like a panda?”
“No, there’s more than one panda.”
(This was around the turn of the millennium, when people still worried about pandas. I don’t know what happened after that – it’s all rhinos and polar bears now. Pandas need new PR.)
Of course, there are other theories about why time seems to be going faster, other than Bond villains and electromagnetic singularities, but none of them are especially convincing.
1. “Time is relative”
One Midlife Crisis and a Speedo Page 4