Recently, a famous American novelist came to stay at my place in London.
In her later Substack post she described me as “an older gentleman.” It’s an accurate description — I’m sixty-eight! — but why does it make me feel so uneasy?
Older is fine. And so too is gentleman. But put them together and the phrase “older gentleman” brings to mind — at least my mind — a Prufrock-like figure. A rotund old guy who wears a bright cravat and a brave smile and potters through his pointless days, softly whistling half-remembered showtunes from the Golden Age of Broadway. A life punctuated with sighs and resuscitated with cups of tea.
Reader, I’m not that man — yet.
No, I don’t have a problem with growing older; I have a problem with growing up. Let me make one thing clear. I’m not one of those older guys who likes to boast that they’re really just “a big kid inside,” who see in their immaturity something wonderfully innocent, something precious — a sense of spontaneity, wonder and openness to life that gets lost in the transition to adulthood.
No, I’m one of those guys who feels embarrassed and inadequate by their lack of maturity. Whenever I hear Jordan Peterson lecture young men about the need to grow up and get their act together, I inwardly cringe. Peterson would be appalled by a man like me — sixty-eight going on sixteen.
When it’s not Peterson haranguing me, it’s me arranging me to grow the fuck up! It happened again just yesterday. I got caught doing something no adult should ever be caught doing: I was in the kitchen playing air guitar along to Boston’s “More Than a Feeling”.
If you’re asking what’s wrong with that, then like me, you need help. The answer is obvious: I’m too old to be playing air guitar. And yes, I’m too old to be wearing tight jeans and a Ramones T-shirt — but I do. And so do lots of other older men; we are that sad creature we thought we’d never become: the senior adolescent.
There’s only one thing worse than being caught watching porn and that’s being caught playing air guitar. (Actually, air guitar is worse because porn is now so ubiquitous it’s considered normal. Air guitar is considered pathetic.) For the uninitiated, air guitar is pretending to play the guitar part of some favorite rock song by whaling on an invisible Stratocaster. It’s an act of fantasy and mimicry, conducted with careful attention to musical detail so as to look utterly realistic. It’s what men once did as teenagers, in front of the mirror behind locked bedroom doors. Now it’s practiced by older men who should know better.
Anyway, my Polish cleaner caught me playing “More Than a Feeling” complete with bouncing head, gyrating groin, dental overbite and puckered lips as my fingers flew furiously over my imaginary red-cherry, double-neck Gibson — yes, the Jimmy Page one.
“What are you doing?” she asked incredulously.
Realizing I was busted, there was no option other than to brave it out. “I’m rockin’ in the free world, baby!” I said and just carried on.
She looked puzzled. And then I realized she doesn’t know that Neil Young song, so I appeared double crazy.
She shook her head, muttered something in Polish — no doubt about me being a pathetic bastard — and left. I did what any self-respecting man would do: I cranked up the volume and let rip. But that burst of defiant joy soon gave way to a queasy feeling, that intuitive sense of wrongness, that follows post-porn gratification and air-guitar escapism.
But what does being a grown-up actually mean? It means being responsible, sensible, judicious, industrious and most of all serious about life. By contrast, immature men like me devote our time to the serious business of being funny at cocktail parties. Yes, we may be absurd, irresponsible goofballs, but we’re not — generally speaking — boring. There is no torture on earth like a dinner party full of grown-ups discussing their work, their kitchen renovations and their brilliant children.
For my condition I blame the Sixties, baby boomers, pop culture and, of course, my parents. In my mid-teens I was, for a time, the grown-up in the family. My pot-smoking, jazz-loving bohemian parents were like two big kids always having fun with no worries about the future. I tried to get them to act — and dress — like adults, but they rebelled against the rules of adulthood. No, it wasn’t easy bringing up two parents on my own.
And I was just on the brink of leaving adolescence behind and becoming a grown-up when, thanks to mom and dad, I got sucked into the whole counter-culture view of life. The baby boomers were the first generation to look at adulthood and say, “Hell no, we won’t go!” And now I’m left wondering if it’s too late to grow up at sixty-eight.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s August 2023 World edition.
