Zero hour - the big 5-zero

STEVE BRAUNIAS

HE WAS once a great athlete. In his youth, he moved like a light breeze on the football grounds of the Bay of Plenty. No one could catch him. The ball was his student. His educated left foot taught it amazing lessons. The willow trees lining the fields of Greerton, Otumoetai and Tauranga crossed their branches, and applauded. His performances were legendary, especially in his back yard in Valley Rd, Mt Maunganui, where he played his most fabulous games, alone.

The past is another unreliable narrative. It's true that he was fit as any number of fiddles. In summer, while everyone else flocked to the beach in that seaside town, he practised his skills and ran solitary laps at a deserted park. Even now, years later, there is a faint reminder of his tuned physique as he walks the neighbourhood streets named after birds – Moa, Tui, Kiwi, Huia – to the nearby shops where he sits at his usual table in the arcade tearoom and orders a cup of coffee poured straight from the pot.

He walks at an unhurried pace, but is capable of an explosive burst of pace to skip ahead of dithering old dears in the tearoom queue. He is as slim-hipped as he was in his sporting pomp. He has all his hair. His feet remain delicate instruments.

But they are carrying him ever closer to a destination further away than the shops. They are taking him to a place of no return. They are about to step over a line in the sand. He is headed somewhere barren and cold. Everyone born in a year ending in a zero can keep easy track of their age. His birthday falls on a certain date in the winter of 2010; then and there, he will turn That Age.

That Age is unspeakable. He cannot bring himself to quote the exact number of That Age. Enough to say that it ends in a zero, and introduces a void. In a stroke, being That Age renders his entire youth – his childhood, obviously, as well as the teenage years of his athletic prime, but also his gormless 20s, and peroxided (what was he thinking?) 30s – as ancient history.

Well, he concedes, fair enough. You can't argue with numbers. The year he was born absolutely qualifies as ancient history. In New Zealand (pop. 2.4m), Keith Holyoake was re-elected as prime minister, and television began. So did the very first episode of Coronation Street. In Hamburg, the Indra Club gave a residency to an English music combo called The Beatles. Political news just to hand: JFK won the US presidential election.

Nothing much else happened. It was the year of the complete knob: famous people who were born then, and who will also turn That Age in 2010, include Bono, Prince Andrew, motivational blowhard Tony Robbins, martial arts bonehead Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Mick Hucknall from Simply Red.

Never mind. He has never been particularly aware of the world around him. He has never been particularly aware of anything. Life has passed by in a sometimes fairly pleasant fog. Dreamy at best, dozy at worst, he sets himself the lofty goal of low expectations, and constantly aspires to do things by halves.

A litmus test of New Zealand morality is to account for your whereabouts during the 1981 Springbok tour. He was lurking in an alleyway off Cuba St, Wellington, as an anti-apartheid protest march tromped down the street. He was having an affair with one of the marchers. They arranged she would take her place on the outside of the mob. He reached out and grabbed her hand as the protesters chanted, "Amandla!" He didn't know what the word meant; he thought they were chanting, "Amanda!", and wished they'd keep their voices down.

His flippant manner ought to help deflect the crisis of turning That Age. He doesn't mind too much the fact that it confirms he's old. He has an old man's tastes – Milk Arrowroot biscuits, Vanilla Wine biscuits, Super Wine biscuits. Nice with a cup of tea. He has an old man's iPod – his carefully selected playlists include swinging hits by mod stars such as Fleetwood Mac, Marc Bolan, 10cc, Rod Stewart, George Michael, Velvet Underground, John Denver. Nice with a cup of tea.

"When you're young," Martin Amis said in an interview, "almost the definition of youth is this idea that it's going to last forever, and you're not going to get old like everyone else. It's just a rumour." What an interesting comment, but he's not sure he felt like that. He was too shy and too vague for the full exuberance of youth. Also, he has been a lifelong misfit. He'll probably be too shy and too vague for the apparent wisdom of old age. Quote from another literary figure, Tom Stoppard: "Age is a high price to pay for maturity." He'll pay up on a certain day in the winter of 2010, but he doesn't expect his birthday presents will include the sudden onset of mature thinking.

He has met people much older than That Age who live by a dreary motto: "Growing old disgracefully." He doesn't want a bar of that. Their acts of boozed comedy seem so determined, so grim. It's true that now and then he hankers for a drink, by which he means a liquid lunch lasting at least eight hours. But his tremendous thirst is behind him. There were a few lost years, spent in a very pleasant fog, when he could be seen most nights of the week propping up the bar of an upstairs establishment called The Alhambra. He set a record for drinking its house cocktail, The Sigh of the Moor, and later broke it to tell the tale and barely live. He was there, a layabout launching his first book, on the night of 9/11: a sozzled witness to history.

By happy chance, the bar closed its doors a month before the birth of his daughter. A father, at last; you do your best living for the love of others. He is now a house cat, an old moggy, domestic and purring, in bed with a beautiful younger woman, sober in charge of a two-year-old. He asks her: "Am I old?" She says: "No. You're my daddy." Good girl. She turns three in February. There'll be balloons, cake, tears, fizz. He turns That Age in June. There'll be tears.

Unconcerned about being old, unbothered that his youth will soon be declared officially kaput, he is nevertheless deeply troubled at the prospect of turning That Age. Is it because the terrible statistic means he'll become, by society's standards, a dead weight, a dead loss, a dead end?

There is a sign above the doorway of That Age. It reads: ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER. Jim White wrote about this in the Daily Telegraph last year. He referred to That Age as "not simply a matter of adding another digit to the chronological scoreboard". Instead, it meant losing your place as "part of the 35-plus generation, still thrusting, still upwardly mobile, still someone of potential", and entering "an entirely new demographic... the one heading rapidly down a black run to a lonely grave".

Apart from Winston Peters, no one cares what old people think. White continued, "Research in the US has indicated that turning [That Age] can be one of life's darkest events. This is the age that can mark the very trough of life, the basement point in mental wellbeing, the moment most of us realise not only that we have achieved nothing, but now it's likely we will never achieve anything."

Yes, that's very cheering. So-called social science research has a habit of bottoming things out. But he doubts he'll mark That Age by squirming inside the very trough of life or crawling around the basement of his mental wellbeing. He's already been there, done that, a million times. Roll on a quote from another literary figure, Cyril Connolly: "I have always disliked myself at any given moment. The total of such moments is my life."

As for the likelihood of never achieving anything – well, all right, that's a shame. But he didn't expect to in the first place. Again with the flippant attitude. Self-effacement is such a tiresome pose. Someone in Paraparaumu once wrote a dismissive review of his first book, and described him thus: "A metropolitan layabout." How unfair. The truth is that he's always worked hard – in such metropolitan centres as Greymouth, Palmerston North, and Te Aroha – to achieve an average result.

He worked long hours even in those lost years at the Alhambra, although he set up a red couch in his office to sleep off the hangovers. Years earlier, while his contemporaries had saved enough money to whoop it up on a big OE, he worked Monday to Friday as a diligent storeman in a carpet warehouse, and took the train out to various destinations in the Hutt Valley on Saturdays to work as a pedantic sports writer. He wasted his youth on deathless prose: "Two national records fell to Nelson man Jack Callaghan in yesterday's Cook Strait weightlifting championships held at Naenae."

It paid off. At 30, he finally had enough money for a big OE. He returned to Wellington, penniless and dumped by his girlfriend, six weeks later. He signed on the dole and found a dismal one-bedroom flat. It was beneath an escort agency. The landlord rigged up the telephone lines to share his phone number. He would be woken up at 2am by men ringing to inquire about the price of Storm, Roxy, and Luna. Sex and money: it sent a message. He moved to Auckland.

Now, as he creeps towards That Age, still determinedly polishing his deathless prose, he is a seasoned professional in his trade, and may possibly qualify as an elder statesman. That's a bit grand. Another way of putting it is that he's fast becoming an irrelevance. Actually, he never felt relevant, but he was too young for it to count as an issue. That Age exposes him fair and square.

Already too old for Facebook, Twitter and other ridiculous toys, bored with blogs, personal websites and other blathering vanities, he's behind the times, out of step. He doesn't give a stuff about the tastes of a younger demographic. He's a creature of almost pathological habit – the daily hoof up to the shops along the birding streets of Moa, Tui, Kiwi, Huia. He's very content to be stuck in his ways. Small wonder That Age is a popular time in all occupations to be shown the door, given the shove, deleted.

But that's not what worries him about turning That Age. He's resilient; he'll survive, probably – someone has to write up the results of the Cook Strait weightlifting championships held at Naenae. That Age presents other, more pressing concerns. The first is that he views the figure as plain embarrassing. It's why he's so coy about naming it. Him, That Age! It's shameful, almost careless. It's like a kind of leprosy. He should be quarantined, kept away from the general public, at That Age. There goes the long liquid lunch, unless it's held at the RSA.

Yes, yes, he's read all the boring magazine articles – he wrote one, once – stating that no one acts their age any more, that 70 is the new 40 or whatever, but it really doesn't look like that. He gaped with astonishment at the elderly New Zealanders in the studio audience of TV1's execrable New Year's Eve special. They looked exactly like the elderly New Zealanders in the studio audiences of It's In The Bag – 30 years ago. That Age is the same old That Age.

One final quote from a literary figure. George Orwell: "At [That Age], everyone has the face he deserves." It's possible to avoid mirrors, but other people have to live with it. He feels for his fiance and his daughter, those captive innocents, as they look across at his crumbling fizzog, day in, day out.

His biggest concern about turning That Age is – naturally, inevitably – its intimation of mortality. Death and that. The final removal, the ultimate fate; off with the light that gleamed an instant, and then endless night. He doesn't much care what it means for himself, but others have to live with it. As head of the household, ruler of two vivacious females, his responsibility is to hang on in there as long as possible. He'll very likely give that perhaps not overly flippant consideration on a certain date in the winter of 2010.

This weekend in summer, though, I'll be at another landmark occasion: my brother Paul's 60th. The party will be held at the family home in Valley Rd, Mt Maunganui. It should be fun. I've always adored Paul. I remember his 50th. With our brother Mark, we stayed up drinking all night, and cleared away the hangovers with a brisk stumble to the beach in the morning. The light was clean and clear over the horizon.

- © Fairfax NZ News