Tony Parsons on Life, Death and Breakfast

tony parsons

on life, death and breakfast

For Dylan Jones From the Roxy to eternity

Introduction

One The Mid-Life Myth

Two When Yobs Swear

Three Dying Parents

Four Angry Old Man

Five Fear of Fake Breasts

Six Humiliation

Seven Tough Guys Get Facials

Eight You Only Wed Twice

Nine Getting Tested

Ten A Complicated Young God

Eleven The Gunfire Next Door

Twelve Performance Anxiety

Thirteen Love Handles, Actually

Fourteen Man and Boy Racer

Fifteen Junk Sex

Sixteen Tough Girls

Seventeen A Bigger Cock Than That

Eighteen Faulty Modern Men

Nineteen Get Fit with Fred

Twenty Gentlemen, Please

Twenty-One How to Be Happy

Twenty-Two New Man, Old Lad

Twenty-Three Fever Bitch

Twenty-Four Double Standards Now

Twenty-Five Fake Breasts Don’t Bounce Back

Twenty-Six The Secret of My Failure

Twenty-Seven Why Men Stray, Why Men Stay

Twenty-Eight The Formerly Young

Twenty-Nine Big World, Small Society

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

When I was a washed-up music journalist, wondering what to do with the rest of my twenties, not to mention my life, the telephone rang.

It was a friend on a women’s magazine. She wanted to know if I would write something for them. One thousand words on ‘Commitment’. The man’s view. Sure, I said, before she had a chance to change her mind. I was desperate for work, and the red bills were piling up.

And that phone call saved my life.

Because when I sat down to write about commitment for my mate on the women’s magazine, I discovered my subject.

Sex. Romance. Fathers. Sons. Men and women-especially that-how we struggle to find love, and what we do with it when we find it.

The great game that never ends.

My subject had been music, but that had gone by the time I was twenty-five. The musicians I had known, and loved, and written about, had all moved on. Some of them were trying to crack America. Some of them were dead. Some of them were trying to hold on to their sanity. But nobody was where they had been any more.

I had joined the NME at twenty-two and it was what I did instead of university or National Service. I went in as a boy and I emerged as a man. Or, if not exactly a man, then at least a boy who had taken lots of drugs and met Debbie Harry. But it was never meant to last forever, and it didn’t. By twenty-five I was out of a job, and penniless, and a father. By twenty-nine I was out of a job, and out of a marriage, and penniless, and a single dad.

So whatever way you looked at it, things were definitely going downhill.

I had dropped out of school at sixteen with wild, impractical dreams of being a writer. After years of low-paid jobs that ended with the night shift at Gordon’s gin distillery, I landed that job on the NME. They hired me because I had published a novel called The Kids-exactly the kind of callow, feverish rubbish that usually remains mercifully locked in some teenager’s bottom drawer-and, far more importantly, I looked quite good in a cheap leather jacket.

I was a writer at last. But in the music press, the only vocational training I ever received focused on teaching me about taking drugs with rock stars. How to pass a joint to Bob Marley. The correct etiquette at a Keith Richards’ heroin bust. How to offer Johnny Rotten some of your amphetamine sulphate without making some dreadful faux-pas. When I was on the NME, the creative writing thing was far less important than being able to hang out with Iggy Pop all night. I really wanted to write-it was the only thing I had ever found that I was halfway good at-but after leaving the NME, I found I had lost my subject without even really serving my apprenticeship.

Until I got that phone call.

So I wrote my little piece on commitment. And then I started to get other phone calls. The same sort of thing. And I realised that I loved it. Writing about the great game. Men. Women. Family. Fathers and sons. Husbands and wives. Sex and romance and what happens when you can’t tell the difference. And the happy days when there really is no difference. How we feel when it all comes apart, and how we never stop hoping that we will get just one more chance to get it right. Becoming a parent and watching your own parents age and die. Finding love and then misplacing it somewhere, or having it snatched away from you.

The money wasn’t terrific, but it was a living, just about-and I hadn’t been making a living for a long time.

Money had not been important when I was at the NME. After a night of rock and roll decadence, me and Julie Burchill-then my girlfriend, later my wife, and a bit later still my ex – wife – would often take R. Whites lemonade bottles back to the local shop, collect our tube fare, and go to work, giggling like a pair of happy urchins who were exactly where they wanted to be. We didn’t need money. Apart from the deposits we claimed on lemonade bottles to pay our tube fares.

But then I became a grown-up–with a wife, and a baby, and a divorce, and a broken heart, and a broken boiler, and bills that I could not pay. And money would matter from now on because I could never again pay my way in the world by taking back a few R. Whites lemonade bottles.

Don’t you hate it when that happens?

I could have made the music thing last a few more years. I was still young. I still had my leather jacket. Ian Dury wanted me to go on the road in America, and Madness seemed like nice boys-but what would have been the point? I would have been faking it. The bands that I had really loved were else where–on Top of the Pops or fighting heroin addiction or recording their difficult second albums in New York. Staying up for three days and nights in a row loses its appeal after a while. And I had a little son. And going to America with a band could never have been the same again.

What I remember most about my days on the NME was going to the Speakeasy with an unknown, unsigned young band called The Clash … and being turned away because we were not sufficiently cool. Not them. Not me. Not even the whole job lot could scrape together the cool quotient required to get us into the Speakeasy. Somehow I cherished that memory above the others. But those days were gone. And with them went my career.

That phone call from my friend on the women’s magazine gave me back my career. It was the mid-eighties, and a great time for magazines, and for newspapers. Looking back, they seem like the last of the boom years. With the Internet still some years away, there was suddenly all this space to fill. And although my early gigs were all on women’s magazines, or on the women’s pages of national newspapers, soon there were all these magazines for men that were not simply about fishing, or football, or the new Ford Mondeo.

After the storming success of The Face, my old NME editor Nick Logan started Arena, the first British magazine for men, and that opened the gates for Esquire, Loaded, FHM, Nuts and British GQ –where many of the articles included here come from.

It gave me more than a living. It gave me confidence. When my mother was dying of cancer, and my little son was not quite so little any more, I felt totally poised between the generation that came before me and the generation that came after me in a way that I never had before-or since.

I sort of got it-the cycle of life thing. The way that, in the end, you lose everyone-your parents get old and die, your children grow up and leave you-and although it breaks your heart, it is the most natural thing in the world.

I knew I wanted to write something about all of this ordinary yet momentous stuff, something longer that maybe a few people would like-and even if nobody liked it except me, then I still had to write it. And that became the novel, Man and Boy.

I like writing about these things. About the way we break each other’s hearts, sometimes without meaning to. It is endlessly fascinating. It is the most important part of our lives. It helps me make sense of the world, and my part of it.

My timing has always been a bit out. I was a young husband and father, and then I was a single dad for most of my thirties, and then I met Yuriko and got married at thirty-eight, became a dad again in my forties. It has been wonderful research, and I think that a writer can ask no more of his life.

As a reader, too, I always bought books that had something to say about the great game-even if I couldn’t always finish them.

I think that there are a lot of people like me. We want to understand the great game, we want to make sense of our lives-what could be more human than that?-and yet we know there is no magic handbook that explains everything. We muddle on. We make it up as we go along. With husbands and wives, lovers and partners, parents and children, the woman next door and the man at the gym.

So this book is for the people like me, the searching souls who bought Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus-but only read the first fifty pages.

And the title? This morning I sat on the steps of a Caribbean hotel room with my seven-year-old daughter, watching a mongoose chase a lizard around the trunk of a palm tree.

It went on for what seemed like ages but was probably only a minute or two-the mongoose inches from the tail of the lizard, the lizard running for its life. You could not look away. It was like being David Attenborough.

And my daughter, being seven and gentle of heart, is very sensitive to anything that smacks of unkindness to animals. She is always telling me that fast-food outlets should only use chickens and cows that have died of old age.

‘That’s so cruel,’ she said, shaking her head as the mongoose and the lizard bombed around the palm tree.

‘No,’ I said. ‘The mongoose has to hunt to survive. It’s really not cruel-it’s life and death.’

She looked at me, unconvinced, and I saw that it was a lousy answer. Because I had described the enormity of the moment-and the mongoose was getting ever closer to the lizard-but not how natural it was, how this kind of stuff happens every day, and has no choice-it has to happen every day.

The mongoose caught the lizard. It was over in a moment. We watched the mongoose sitting alone, at the bottom of the palm tree, smacking its lips.

‘And he has to eat,’ I said. ‘The mongoose can’t order from room service.’

My daughter nodded.

‘Life, death and breakfast,’ she said, and she seemed slightly happier with that.

Tony Parsons, 2010

One The Mid-Life Myth

I was asked to go on one of those radio shows – you know, the kind where a bunch of middle-class, middle – aged pussies sit around whining about how hard it is for the modern male when his life approaches half-time.

The mid-life crisis – that hoary old chestnut. That complete fallacy. That shagged-out old cliché.

And I almost went. Because I felt like standing on the roof of Broadcasting House and screaming, What is wrong with you guys? Don’t you know by now? Is it not as clear as the laughter lines on your face?

A man’s life gets infinitely and immeasurably easier as he gets older.

Mid-life crisis? What mid-life crisis?

The mid-life crisis is a myth. More than this, the mid-life crisis is a lie. Life only gets better for men-better and better as the years roll by. Mid-life is not a crisis. Mid-life is when you are getting warmed up. When you have money in your pants. When you are doing a job you love. When you are an adorable combination of youth and experience. When you know how to find a clitoris without Google Earth.

So some thirty-nine-year-old man runs off with his secretary, or his neighbour’s wife, or a Latvian lap dancer. So what? So some forty-four-year-old executive goes off on a business trip and ends up sampling more than the Toblerone in his mini-bar. So what? So a fifty-year-old guy decides he wants to trade in his Ford Fiasco for a Harley-Davidson. So what?

Every fifty-year-old man I know owns a Harley-Davidson. And they are all very happy. That’s not a mid-life crisis. That’s Me time. That’s known as, for once in your life, doing exactly what you feel like doing.

What we call a mid-life crisis-it’s tame stuff, isn’t it? Changing your woman, changing your means of transport, changing your trousers …

This is not to suggest that these things can always be done without pain and tears. That Latvian lap dancer might leave you, or you might wrap your motorbike around a lamppost, or your Diesel Viker straight-leg jeans may be a sartorial disaster-mine were-but, compared to the poisoned chalice of youth, this is all just a pint of mild and bitter.

Unless a man has led an extraordinarily sheltered life, the so-called crisis of his middle years-whatever form it takes-will be nothing much compared to the crisis he faced down in young manhood.

I look back at my youth and I see … turmoil.

Drugs. Women. Fights. Drink. Ice cubes made from the tears of the broken-hearted. Often all in one lunch break.

And I remember friends dying. Not from the cancer and treacherous tickers that stalk us later in the unrelenting cycle of life but in all the raw violence of youth.

Dead in car crashes. Dead from drugs. My friend Johnny Thunders died in a New Orleans hotel at the age of thirty-eight-just when he should have been preparing for one of those mid-life clichés. If Johnny had lived, would he really have experienced a mid-life crisis? Would he have fretted about needing a size bigger in leather trousers, or why heroin didn’t taste as good as it used to?

Whatever the middle years had in store for Johnny Thunders, it would have seemed pretty tame compared to the screaming insanity of what came before.

And hardly a crisis at all.

So it is for all of us. Youth is never a stroll in the park. It is almost always harder than what waits down the line. It is sad-tragic even-when a marriage breaks up, or when your hairline is receding faster than your career, or when love grows cold and beyond recall. But look on the bright side: is it really tougher than what you endured in your teens and twenties? Wanting a new car, or a new woman, or a new way of living- is it really such a crisis?

I would suggest not.

Where does it come from-this idea that a man reaches a certain point in his life when all is peaceful and calm? When there are no more irrational passions and unfulfilled yearnings, and no desire to-one last time-spill his seed on the passenger seat of some inappropriate ride?

‘Stop dreaming of the quiet life, ‘cos it’s the one we’ll never know,’ sang the Jam when I was young, and I have always cherished the wisdom of those words.

A man never gets to a point when trouble of some shade or another is completely out of the picture. The mid-life crisis is born of the illusion that nothing exciting should happen to you once you are in the far-flung corners of youth.

And it is just not true.

What has gone wrong since I became a grown-up? Oh, the usual. Divorce. Bereavement. Money troubles. Promiscuity. Coveting my neighbour’s wife. Coveting my neighbour’s car. Coveting my neighbour’s lawn mower. A bit more bereavement. A few more money troubles. Did I mention the coveting?

But none of these domestic nightmares-which began in my late twenties and went on for ten years or more-could be considered a mid-life crisis. It was all just … the stuff that happens in a lifetime. And what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger-unless it’s a baseball bat or something.

In many ways, the middle bit of life is where we start getting it right. You get divorced-but then you meet someone lovelier, and you get married to her. Your parents die, but the years go by and you realise how lucky you were to have that woman as your mother and that man as your father.

You see that this is not a mid-life crisis at all. It is merely Mother Nature doing what she is obliged to do: kick you firmly in the testicles.

As time goes by, inevitably you have a lot more money than you had when you were seventeen or twenty-one. Yet that does not stop the money troubles of your middle years from being as real as a tumour. So you grit your teeth, you do good work and-eventually-good things start to happen. The best things.

Life is infinitely better now than when I wore DMs every day of my life. At twenty-two I lived in a bedsit in Crouch End where you had to sleep on the right side of the mattress when it rained because water came through the ceiling. Even if it all falls apart tomorrow, even if I forget my name and have fragments of jam sponge cake on my unshaven chin, I am never going to live anywhere as rotten as that again.

Youth is hard for most of us. It is different for girls, but boys are often lonely because the girls their age want older boys-boys with money, boys with cars, boys who know how to talk to them.

Youth is frustrating. You are rarely doing the job you want and, in your late teens and early twenties, life can seem as though it is slipping away far more desperately than it ever does in your thirties and forties.

Mid-life crisis? You mean doing the job you love? You mean a ceiling that doesn’t leak and a woman who loves you? You mean having a couple of quid in your pocket? You mean swapping the bus for a BMW X5-and then swapping that for a Harley? Sounds pretty good to me, this mid-life crisis caper.

The trouble is that society confuses being a middle-aged man with being a freshly made corpse. A lot of what gets put down to a mid-life crisis is actually just a man revealing the first signs of life that he has shown in years.

I would never suggest that a man should give his heart to the first girl he meets who is young enough to be his daughter. And it is not a good idea to start riding motorbikes without having considered the possibility that you might fall off. But if you do, then don’t beat yourself up. This is not a mid-life crisis-this is you, still breathing.

My father was a middle-aged man at twenty. He had killed many men and he had seen many men die. The top half of his body was a starburst of scar tissue. For the next forty years, until he died at the age of sixty-two, he had hard, black, jagged bits of shrapnel from a German grenade worming their way out of his legs. Still a young man, he wanted nothing more than to work, raise a family and tend his garden.

But even my dad-who often gave me the impression that he had had his fill of the outside world-discovered a new passion in his middle years.

He took up sailing. Every year he went down to Cowes, where he impressed the posh boys with his nautical skills. Was that a mid-life crisis? No, it was just my father rediscovering his passion for the open sea, and messing about in boats, and sailing. It was just my father remembering that he was alive, but he would not be forever. And of course it was a lot less trouble than having him elope with a Latvian lap dancer.

This is not to make the case that age is inherently better than youth. There are many slings and arrows in your middle years-the closer proximity of death, the way hangovers last for days, the desire of GPs to give you a prostate examination every time you bend over to tie your Asics trainers.

But where did it come from, this idea that there’s a point in life when a man should stop seeking fulfilment, stop looking for meaning and stop having fun?

And when did we get it into our heads that at a certain stage in life troubles melt away, relationships stop falling apart and our hearts are no longer capable of ecstasy, or of breaking? That only happens on the day we die and until then life is full of varying measures of joy and pain, and it doesn’t matter a damn whether you happen to be sporting a six-pack or a family pack.

The mid-life crisis is a myth designed to keep men tame, neutered and in their place. It doesn’t exist. Fight against it. Buy a motorbike. Learn to play bass. Trek the Himalayas. Buy a Porsche 911. Learn Mandarin. Fall in love. Give up your job. Actually, better not give up your job-the passions that come later in life are only made possible because you are no longer on the tight budget of youth.

And there are plenty of middle-aged women who fancy a change of direction-or the bloke who lives down the street. There are plenty of women who get sick of their jobs, or their shagged-out old husbands, or who want to dance the Tango in Buenos Aires before they die. And why not? Let there be fire in your eyes and flashing limbs. Dump the husband. Fly to Argentina. Enjoy every sandwich. You’re a long time cremated.

But somehow it is only a mid-life crisis when a man does it-when he decides that, now he comes to think of it, he doesn’t want to be a chartered accountant. He wants to kiss the face of God.

We should all be allowed to kiss the face of God, whether it comes in the form of a bigger bike or a younger lover or the rolling sea. How else to respond to our mortality?

There is no cure for death, no age limit for dreams, and no escape from who we are and always will be-mortal, fallible creatures, full of love and longing.

And if the young lover breaks your heart, or if you fall off your Harley, or if Buenos Aires is a disappointment-if you make a fool of yourself-well, that is what we do, and what we have always done.

That is not a mid-life crisis.

It’s just the latest in a long line of cock-ups.

Two When Yobs Swear

Sooner or later you will find yourself in a situation. It may not happen for ten years. It could be tonight. But it is coming-be sure of that – and when it arrives you will have the choice between the only two buttons that really matter on your biological dashboard.

Fight or flight?

You might be in a bar. You might be in a restaurant. It could be at the end of your road or it could be on a tropical island. You might be standing outside your home. The location doesn’t matter. This is how it will be: you will be confronted by in-appropriate behaviour that intrudes upon those you love. Effing and blinding and talk of a graphically sexual nature. You know the kind of thing. And, in an instant, you will have to decide – Do I say something?

Or do I say nothing?

This is the terrible thing. This is the heart of the matter. You will not be alone. You will be in company – with your girlfriend or wife, or with your children, even if they have yet to be born-people who look to you to protect them from the worst of this world.

And there will be a cackling mob of pimply cavemen, every other gormless word an expletive, talking about bitches and blow-jobs and easy birds. They will bring their world into your world and you will have to decide, in a terrifying instant, what to do.

Even if what you do is nothing.

You can get killed for saying something. Even a mild rebuke can get you the death sentence, effective immediately. Men die for speaking up.