Cape Town - A friend recently posted on Facebook that he has booked tickets to see The Cure live in New York next June.
A slew of pithy comments ensued, many referencing the word “live” and the fact that my friend shouldn’t have booked so far in advance, considering lead singer Robert Smith’s age.
He might be dead by June, some said, or be using a Zimmer frame and wearing adult nappies and a cardigan with leather patches on the elbows.
I rooted around the internet and found a recent picture of Robert Smith and posted it on my friend’s page. There were no leather patches or walking aids. Instead, there was a bloated face, old cat hair, smeared red lips, sweaty eyeliner and jowls that could smuggle half a ton of red velvet cheesecake. It was cruel – not just to my friend, but to all of us who had grown up in the 1980s with egg white in our hair. It confirmed we were no longer young.
When I was a teenager, I thought it quaint that my father would bang on about the Beatles as though they were still making girls faint. “Oh, dad,” I would say, patting him on the head. “That’s so cute.” And then I would mooch off to my bedroom to cut up curtains to wear as dresses, crank up my tape deck and practise dancing meaningfully to The Cure, Gary Numan, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and The Pixies.
I was never a convincing Goth. I was blonde, competitive in athletics and lived on a chicken farm. No Goth worth her Doc Martens lived on a chicken farm.
But the music spoke to me. It was a constant narration to those years of acne, angst, terrible guitar playing and experiments with Spiced Gold. I fell in love for the first time to The Cure’s Standing on the Beach – and then fell promptly out of love when the winkle picker-wearing boy in question kissed me, kissed me, kissed me and his breath tasted like the smell of chickens dying in summer.
Most Friday nights, my dad would drive my brother and me 30km into town to an under-18s club, where grown-up Goths would take pills and smuggle in whisky. We would dance all night in our curtains, making shapes with our hands.
When it was time to be picked up, we would make our dad park his Passat around the corner so the cool kids wouldn’t see him in his pyjamas. He was probably the age I am now. He probably listened to the Beatles while he waited.
Last week, in the bathroom at work, I discovered a nest of unfamiliar hairs on my head. They’re all the same length – about 10cm – and they’re wiry and coarse and punk face-white. It’s as though four months ago my body radioed through a message to my scalp to start releasing old age.
I’ve become obsessed with the hairs, plucking them out in the car on my way to the office, pulling them out in front of the mirror at work. I hold them up to the light and feel them with my fingers. Then I drop them in disgust. The footwell in my car is starting to resemble a goat-shearing shed.
Since finding that picture of Robert Smith, I’ve found other current photographs of my teenage idols. Gary Numan looks like Riaan Cruywagen, but with more make-up, Siouxsie Sioux wouldn’t look out of place at a Country Road sale and Black Francis from the Pixies looks like Kobus Wiese.
I even googled Richard Dean Anderson, aka MacGyver. If you’re in your 40s and nostalgic about seeing him escape from a car boot using only a toothpick and a pair of washing-up gloves, don’t go there. It looks as though he’s spent the last 30 years eating his way out of a box of Twinkies.
However, between the hair plucking and the wailing about my burgeoning turkey neck, I have come to realise that ageing is inevitable – and there is no cure. It will happen to you and you and you and you (yes, even you with your sleek hair and Adele obsession). I’ve realised that, like my father and the Beatles, it’s okay to be attached to the things that formed us.
Look at Robert Smith! And Siouxsie Sioux! And Gary! They’re all in their 50s and 60s and are still doing world tours; still singing in their old cat hair and bleeding lipstick on stages from New York to Sydney.
I hope my friend isn’t disappointed when he sees The Cure in New York. I hope he still remembers the lyrics and sings along to Lullaby and makes Goth hand-shapes to Love Cats, wailing and howling and feeling so wonderfully, wonderfully, wonderfully, wonderfully pretty. Because we might be quietly alarmed by the sagging and the shrivelling and the whitening and the disappearing, but we’re not gone yet.
All it is, is a slow Disintegration.
Cape Argus