Happy Birthday to Death!

One year closer or even one moment nearer.

The face that launched 1000 fists.

The Young Ones were great. A comedy series out of the UK, it debuted in 1982 and told the story of four roommates in a dilapidated state of student housing working through the vicissitudes of life in Thatcher’s England. Metal-tinged punk rockers, woke new wavers, hippies and post-non-graduate hang-arounds skewered their various tribes to wild comedic effect.

One stuck with me though. Rik, the woke new waver, is leaping into frame at odd moments announcing to all and sundry that it is his birthday. The response, to put it mildly, is…underwhelming, his roommates dismissing him with “yeah yeahs” or grunting, barely acknowledging the day.

Frustrated Rik finally demands a response whereby Vyvyan, the metal-tinged punk rocker delivers the kill shot: “well you already knew it was your birthday…and we don’t care.” Subsequent to this Rik threatens to kill himself by consuming what he expects will be a lethal dose of something or other imagining that their house will now become a shrine for hippies, punks and rastas who will arrive to mourn “the people’s poet.”

Neil, the erstwhile hippie then asks Vyvyan if it is actually possible to overdose on laxatives. Vyvyan is unsure but states that he is going to stick around to see. We’d guess that would be the inevitably shitty outcome.

“Well, LA is like this,” he explained. “Everyone lies here so if I say 40, he’ll think I’m really 50, so I say 40 because if I say 50, I don’t want people to think I’m 60…”

Flash forward 35 years and I’m in the common kitchen area at Hell Co., also known as OZY. An ebullient junior staffer, one who I really like, is trilling that it’s his birthday and without missing a bit I hit him with the shot, “well you already knew that and we don’t care.” Instead of generalized merriment though the color drained from his face and I could see that I had visibly wounded him. Which in turn made me feel terrible.

I apologized profusely, blaming it on just having been to jiu jitsu where the pirate ship politics that embrace the sport and the gym might have affected my judgment. He accepts the apology and waves it off but I really did stand corrected. It, in general, is a total good to be excited about your birthday and I’d not choose to be the kind of joykiller that would suggest otherwise.

Especially since I, myself, have traditionally enjoyed the fuck out of my birthday.

Like in 1971 when the presents I got were hidden scavenger hunt style, all over the house. Or 1994 when my girlfriend at the time dressed up like a streetwalker and took me to a tony San Francisco hotel for streetwalker style celebrations. Even the one in 1987 that almost got a roomful of people shot when another girlfriend had filled the garage I lived in with a bunch of people who leaped out of the darkness for a surprise party.

They were all great and personally memorable.

Then Facebook hit. With its automatic notification when your birthday was your birthday, it had become a day when people who occasionally perused the corkboard of celebration of your meals, complaints, or thirst trap shots of your various body parts, could click on something and leave a half-hearted recognition of the day your mother suffered to bring you to fruition.

It still was a notification, of sorts, but as it grew wider, it started to feel a whole hell of a lot less deep. Besides which as a person in a band it started to feel, and call this a certain kind of paranoia, like a gestured instruction that maybe it was time to stop being the Fat Elvis and maybe do something more seemly than bare-assing it on stage.

So now, it was much less of a celebration of the afternoon during which I showed up at seven pounds and 10 ounces, and much more a time marker to the scant seconds left to me.

“Your birthday? How OLD are you anyway?”

Oh. I see. Trying to punk me, eh?

“Younger than Nick Cave…”

“Yeah, but…”

“Younger than Henry Rollins…”

“Yeah, I mean….”

“Younger than Nicholas Cage!”

“Actually…wasn’t Cage born in 1964?”

“OK. Scratch that. Younger than Ian MacKaye!”

And so it would go. I, a vain man, was much more than willing to throw anyone within arm’s, and age’s, reach…right under the senior center bus. Even if the option is so completely dire, like world leaders riding horseback shirtless or swimming to project some sort of virility, I wanted to make something much more than clear.

What?

What Bukowski’s gravestone suggested when it said as it does, “Don’t Try.” Except in my case I was fleshing it out a little: don’t try it.

Where “it” is any number of possible negative outcomes connected to this idea that like Max Cady said in the Robert DeNiro remake of Cape Fear, “I can out-learn you. I can out-read you. I can out-think you. And I can out-philosophize you,” DeNiro as Cady said after beating back an attack. “And I'm gonna outlast you.”

I’ve come to add I can out-fuck and out-fight you but that’s probably less true now at 61 than ever before, besides which, you already got the idea.

“Yeah, I turn 40 next year.” I was in Los Angeles and a friend of mine was telling what I knew to be a baldfaced lie. I later quizzed him on it. I mean I had outed myself age-wise, and we were the same age, so now I am the sap?

“Well, LA is like this,” he explained. “Everyone lies here so if I say 40, he’ll think I’m really 50, so I say 40 because if I say 50, I don’t want people to think I’m 60. The same reason I lease a new car every year.”

“What? Wait…what does this have to do with cars?”

“You get the car of the year you hit it big,” he laughed. At my ignorance. “If you are driving a 2002 Mercedes it’s clearly not because you have some sort of penchant for that year but that you haven’t had shit going on since then.”

I whistled. Not in admiration. Much more morbid fascination. Walking to my 1965 Chevy Chevelle I was now laughing. Good thing I didn’t live in LA.

When the driver is older than the car. (Photo by Sean Culligan)

But I needed to get over this…sensitivity. At an underground fight club I was fighting with a trash talker. He told me that I hit like a girl. This didn’t bother because my daughters are all fighters and they punched like trucks. He told me I was a pussy. Not many of these have I met that I haven’t liked, so…no emotional response.

Finally, he hit the button: “come on…old man.”

And unbeknownst to what a button it was, I flipped, and I’m not gilding the lily here to say, right the fuck out of my head. A frenzy of punches, kicks, knees and mounted over him, hammer fists to the face before he tapped out, led me to believe I needed to get this age thing, and my perceptions of it, under control.

Something that didn’t really happen until a conversation with Diamanda Galas.

“If you’re going to ask, and you shouldn’t,” she told me, “how old I am you need to know you can just look it up on Wikipedia. If you must know.”

Though I don’t rank enough to have my own Wiki page, as soon as I do I will make sure to note that I was born in 1972.

Making me? Younger than Jay-Z. And Brad Pitt. And Denzel Washington.

And…a liar.

Which is neither here nor there. Happy birthday to me and all of the other Virgo’s out there. We “deserve” it.

Now…GET OFFA MY LAWN!

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If you’ve already pre-ordered the memoir A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight Into Murderer's Row, from Amazon? Or the Bookshop.Org dealie: Here?

You will now not get the book until OCTOBER 12, 2023.

Feral House is STILL planning on special, SEXY giveaways to accompany the book. Which you should STILL do the right thing and pre-order right now if you haven’t already done so.

Hint regarding the special giveaways? Willy Wonka style in signing 400 some-odd books, in three of them I have left, special notes that will entitle the owner to all kinds of…filth. Of the good kind. Three out of 400. I mean…what are your chances?