12

Juice

“You’re not afraid of needles, are you?”

I doubt there has ever been a transaction starting with those words that ended happily. Especially not when the person doing the asking is a woman with a severe blonde ponytail and icy blue eyes and arms like giant nutcrackers. She could have put a coconut in the crook of her elbow and turned it to suntan lotion with a simple flex. This woman was my drug dealer.

“I’m not crazy about needles,” I said cautiously.

She shrugged. “Here,” she said. “You can have this one.”

I felt nervous. When embarking on a new course of action, the prudent man considers the trends of history; historically speaking, not much good has ever come of civilians being handed syringes in clandestine meetings in downtown coffee shops.

I suppose I must have been complaining too often and too loudly about the ravages of age and the body, because one night at a dinner party the boyfriend of one of my friends sidled up to me.

“What you need is GH,” he said. “Your GH has been declining since you turned forty.”

“Oh, GH, yes, tch,” I murmured in a grave voice.

But he knew where I could get some GH, he told me. He has a very good GH source. GH, he said, would change my life.

Well, who doesn’t want to change their life?

GH, as everyone knows who goes straight home from a dinner party and looks it up on the internet, is growth hormone, a production of the pituitary gland responsible for cell growth and regeneration. A scientifically rigorous website with the header “Everything you need to know about GH” informed me that GH injected into the folds of my belly flesh will “turn back your body’s internal clock, helping you rapidly build muscle, slash fat and increase libido, all while sending energy levels through the roof”.

Well, that didn’t sound too bad. Energy levels through the roof are pretty much what you want when swimming from one continent to another. It went on to assure me that despite the fact that GH is a controlled substance almost everywhere in the world, and that its use in sports is strictly banned, it’s pretty much safeish.

It cited no less an expert than “Eric Braverman, M.D., who specializes in anti-aging at Path Medical Center in New York City”, who assured me that “complications are very minimal”, and that “only a few people ever come in with big feet or big livers from mega-doses, and those aren’t my patients”. I was certainly reassured. This is the glory of the internet: at a finger-click we have access to all the objective scientific knowledge and reliable information that modern medicine has to offer. At the bottom of the page was a link to another section of the site where I could buy my own GH with free shipping.

But the message here is that GH makes you younger. It makes your bones more dense and your skin more elastic; it gives you deeper sleep and glossier hair and a wetter nose. It’s the solution to middle age in a single syringe, regularly applied. Well, why not? It would be research for the book. How can I write about middle age without at least trying the cure? And if along the way I should become younger, sleeker and more like the way I would have been when I was younger if I’d worked out back then, then where’s the harm? After all, as Sylvester Stallone said when he was charged with importing forty-eight vials into Australia in 2007: “In ten years’ time, GH will be legal.”

And that’s what happens, I suddenly realise, sitting in the coffee shop with my nutcracker-forearmed pusher-lady as she slides me a packet with a month’s supply of GH and accepts R2500 back. That’s what happens when you’re middle-aged and you don’t know how to grow old with dignity: you forget the things you know and you start taking life advice from Sylvester Stallone.

Because the thing I’ve nearly forgotten I know is that there isn’t a solution. There’s no elixir to make this right, because there’s nothing fundamentally wrong. Growing older isn’t the problem; growing older just happens. The problem with middle age isn’t that we’re changing, it’s that we don’t know how to do it. We panic and flail like drowning swimmers who can’t shout for help. I don’t need to go on some fool’s errand to turn back the clock, I need a way to make peace with the clock moving forward. Because the clock, no matter what you do, always moves forward. If I need this stuff to get across the Dardanelles, I may as well just take a boat.

There are risks to GH: people develop joint problems and mood swings and it seems that some poor sods get oversized feet. If normal cells start dividing faster, so do the cancer cells you might not even know you have. But the biggest danger is the same danger as the boner potions and Viagra prescriptions: it’s the danger of trying to look backwards while your vehicle’s still moving forwards. It’s the foolishness of responding to autumn by trying to live like it’s still summer. It’s the sheer dumbheaded indignity, the tacky, childish, tasteless embarrassment, the simple, sad unwisdom of not knowing how to grow with your life, not knowing how to act your age.

I gave her back the parcel and didn’t ask for my money. Sometimes, especially when you’re forty-three and you’ve become as stupid again as sixteen, a lesson needs to hurt before you learn it.