Tony Parsons on Life, Death and Breakfast

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 (#ulink_bd8b1852-cbe8-5cea-b997-1c73585b36c1)

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.