Eighteen Again?

Eighteen Again?

Dance On    AI image, Nightcafe

“When I was eighteen, I wanted to be a millionaire.

Now that I am a millionaire, I want to be eighteen”

When I was eighteen, in the socialist India of the 1970s, I positively wanted to be a millionaire. I also wanted to play bridge like Omar Sharif, squash like the Khan family from Pakistan, and have a radio voice like Melville de Mellow. And, if I am not being too greedy, dear God, please, a girlfriend… I promise you, I’ll lose six inches around my tummy.

When I was eighteen, I also wrote the exams for my second year of economics at Delhi University, failed my mathematics paper, and barely made it to the bottom of the second division. 

When I was eighteen, I heard Neil Young’s Harvest for the first time. Unhurried bass drum ushering in a wavering harmonica, clear voice launching right into the meat of the song, “Think I’ll pack it in, buy a pick-up, take it down to L.A.”  I recorded the borrowed album on a tape recorder, and for weeks after, listened to the music over and over - a garden of pleasure unspooling in the heat of my terrace room. Neil Young shifted the shape of my relationship with music, from a social experience to a lifetime of deep, largely solitary delight.

Eighteen is discovery and mystery. Eighteen is choosing between familiar roads peopled with friends, and unknown alleys where alluring shadows play. Which roads did you take, to get to sixty six? How do you feel on this Saturday afternoon, when the sun is hazy but warm in Nehru Park, and you think the aging man you just passed was your school mate? He is, you call his name, and he enquires after your health. You see your neck in the folds below his chin, reminded that we are in the seventh decade of our lives.

“Aging gracefully”, theatre director Neelam Mansingh tweeted, “is a constant bit of advice given when people enter their 60s and 70s, I feel bewildered when I see my wrinkled face, sagging breast, flabby tummy, thighs that knock, and a wobbly neck. No, age is not just a number. It’s real, and it is lonely.”

Eighteen felt pretty lonely too, though crowded with parents and siblings, hormones and authority, and friends who tried, about as successfully as you, to paper over their insecurities. 

And grace? Grace is acceptance, not the taut skin of youth. Grace is the piano player from New York who looked on from her wheelchair as we brought 2023 in on the deck of a cruise ship. Her arms danced from the elbow when I greeted her, artist’s hands sculpting arabesques in the tropical night. For some seconds we were lost in our pas de deux, my hands following hers, then hers mine, till her face melted into joy, and I turned away to hide my tears.

To the young, the celebrity publisher Felix Dennis* wrote, “You are richer than anyone older than you, and far richer than those who are much older. What you choose to do with the time that stretches before you is initially a matter for you, but do not say you started the journey poor. If you are young, you are infinitely richer than I can ever be again. Money is never owned, it is only in your custody for a while. Time is always running on, and the young have more of it in their pocket than the richest man or woman alive. That is not sentimentality speaking. That is sober fact.”

Thing is, Felix Dennis was rarely sober.

"$100m on sex and drugs and rock'n'roll!" he told Sean O’Hagan** in 2013. "I literally pissed it away. Do you know how much hard work that is?" 

“Having survived his marathon crack-cocaine bender in the late 1990s”, the Guardian reported, “and the serious thyroid-based illness that followed it, he is now coming to terms with a recent diagnosis of throat cancer. He underwent surgery to remove a tumour in February 2012.” 

By 2014, Felix Dennis was gone, hopefully to a realm in which cocaine is not the most attractive diversion on offer. He was sixty six. 

By sixty six, things can go sadly wrong, and it may be tempting to trade your millions for youth. That trade is not on offer, but if it were, you’d have to hack your way to sixty six all over again. Will you be dancing then? Will your soul be dancing, whether your body moves like Jagger, or only from the elbows up?

If you find yourself at eighteen again, will you carry with you the lessons of a lifetime? I don’t think that’s part of the deal. You can’t carry a map of the future back into the past. In these five decades, I took more turns than most, explored many forest paths that ended in dense undergrowth. In rewind mode, I see how often I lurched along the edge of the abyss. 

But I survived, arrived here with song in my heart, and dance in my step, with time for the young, and a lingering lust for adventure. In Poles Apart, Pink Floyd meditate on the fickle promises of the future:

“Did you know...it was all going to go so wrong for you

And did you see it was all going to be so right for me

Why did we tell you then

You were always the golden boy then

And that you'd never lose that light in your eyes”

A golden youth is often just gilt, and it is in the living that we find out whether we are blessed or not. Providence has its own chart, and I wouldn't want to tempt it again. 

Of course, the millions help.

* Publisher of PC World, MacUser, and the men’s lifestyle magazine, Maxim, among others, quoted here by David Senra.

** https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/jun/02/nine-lives-of-felix-dennis