You're Only as Old as People Think You Are

Autograph-requesters and first responders in restaurants and other public places very often ask me, “John, at an age by which most men have devoted themselves to worrying about their prostates, you are, as well as a prolific composer and implacable fitness enthusiast, an essayist and author, and America’s best loved expatriate heterosexual humourist. Why do you do it?”

I do it to give voice to the mute, strength to the feeble, and hope to the despairing. I do it, very simply, because I must, and all this while looking decades younger than my actual age. But don’t believe me as regards my preternatural youthfulness. Believe the countless dozens of perfect strangers, deeply flawed strangers, and passers-by whose impressions my insecurity has compelled me to solicit since my recent birthday.

Only yesterday, on a crowded Piccadilly Line train I’d boarded in Finsbury Park, a woman I didn’t know from Eve affirmed my youthfulness as we sped, glacially, toward Hammersmith. Smiling like the sun emerging from behind rainclouds, I asked how she was doing. She, of course, looked at me with a combination of incredulity and censure, for it is an unwritten law that no one speaks to anyone else on The Tube, unless previously acquainted. Londoners like to be left alone with their own thoughts and standoffishness. But I have only a small portion of one life left to live, and have no intention of living it in the abject loneliness toward which I am by nature propelled, and invariably greet my fellow passengers with great cordiality. On at least a few occasions I have even attempted, with varying degrees of succeess to get carriagefuls of commuters to join me in a cappella versions of If You’re Happy and You Know It, Itsy Bitsy Spider, and REM’s Losing My Religion. 

“Just fine,” she finally said, and then immediately returned, in a way that made clear she wished to be harassed no more, to her free copy of The Evening Standard. 

“Glad to hear it!” I exulted. “Would you mind my asking how old you’d guess me to be?”

She looked for help to our fellow passengers, all of whom, of course, pretended they didn’t know what was going on, as it was None of Their Business. 

“I wouldn’t, actually,” she aid, smiling hatefully, and returned to her Evening Standard. 

“I’ll give you a hint,” I said. “Almost everyone gets my age wrong by up to a couple of decades.”

“How lovely for you,” she said, eyes glued to that horrid celebrity gossip page without which the ES believes its readers would be inconsolable. 

“I attribute it to good genes,” I said, “weight-lifting, and a good diet.”

By now she was feigning deafness, but she certainly heard me — gals are so vain! — when I told her I’d guess her own age at between 31 and 33. (She was in fact probably pretty close to 50.) For a moment, her face lit up. “Well, a few years older than that, actually,” she said, managing to banish the delight from her face.

“Now it’s your turn,” I persisted as the train pulled into Caledonian Road station, which I remembered from the time in around 2003 that Dame Zelda and I alighted there en route to the London Fetish Fair. 

She glared at me. It didn’t work. I kept grinning. She sighed. “For fuck’s sake,” she said under her breath, and then, more loudly, “Sixty, maybe? Fifty-eight?”

“Most people guess a lot lower than that,” I said. “Some people guess as low as 45.”

Apparently intending to alight at Kings Cross/ St. Pancreas, probably the only railway station in the world named after an endocrine gland. she rose, gathered up her possessions, and left her Evening Standard on her seat. “Have it your way, mate,” she said. “Forty-five it is.”

Didn’t I tell you?