By Jim Hagarty
2014
I sing and play guitar and sometimes I get asked why I don’t perform in public more often. The short answer is that the offers have dried up since Ed Sullivan and Johnny Carson died. But there is a longer answer and if you can stand to sit through it, here it is.
When I agree to play somewhere other than the elaborate stage I have set up in my bedroom where the acoustics are awesome and the imaginary audience is all-adoring, the body that would need to accompany me on such a gig raises a major objection.
“You drag me out to that concert, Jim, and I will SEE YOU IN HELL.”
Rare has been the occasion when Body did not make good on its promise. And the sequence of steps by which my general and alarming decline is made manifest are predictable and awful. To begin with, though I left my teenage years behind a full 44 years ago, Body is still somehow able to work up a good pimple just in time for a show. As it did this week in the days leading up to a few songs I played at an event on Saturday. At the beginning of the week, I started to feel a pain on the side of my nose and I thought to myself, “No way. It couldn’t be.” But it could be and was. When I looked in the mirror on Saturday morning, there it was in all its glory. Blossomed and white like a beautiful puffball mushroom on the edge of a forest on a nice summer’s day. My first “whitehead” since last time I played.
When you’re 63 and still able to work up a pimple that would cause a baby to fill its Pampers if he saw it, you are probably owed some sort of rebate from God, but there it was. So you heat up a sewing pin and lance it and hope it doesn’t ooze too badly all day. (I am an expert at this, having lanced dozens of them before first dates in high school and beyond.) My cat has a pimple behind his ear. Why couldn’t I just have one there for once?
Then comes the shaving. I can shave my face a thousand times and draw nary a drop of blood but on the day of a public performance, Marie Antoinette and I have a lot in common, though I don’t manage to lose my head over it. Saturday morning, fully aware of what was almost certain to happen, I took out my “safety” razor and started scraping away. Soon, one gusher appeared and then another beside it. Two nice and lovely slices on my cheek that at least, with the blood they emitted, distracted somewhat from the pimple on my nose, about two inches away.
Finally, at the concert, shaking like a popcorn maker, and about an hour before I was to appear, guitar in hand, came another phase in this fun-filled adventure. My bowels, which, strangely, had not been heard from much all week, decided that now would be a perfect time to cripple with pain the expanse of muscle and skin enclosing them. I rushed to the, thankfully unoccupied, stall in the washroom. Emerging from there, feeling better, my bladder soon announced that from then until the end of the show, it would be filling up and in need of emptying faster than a farmer’s bathtub on Saturday night.
Minutes before showtime, my hands began to sweat. The palms of a person’s hands are not supposed to sweat, but here they were, moistening up like a mama’s eyes at her firstborn child’s piano recital.
“And now we would like to welcome to the stage, Jim Hagarty.”
Guitar in slippery hand, feet shuffling to stool on stage, vibrating butt on seat. Fingers begin to shake faster than Elvis’s hips. Audience seated, big smiles on faces. If these people were teenage girls, they’d be screaming their heads off about now. And then, saving its best for last, Body sends out Brain to finish me off. Three seconds before I open my mouth, Brain completely erases the memory from my hard drive. Song is gone. Lyrics gone. Tune gone. Trembling hands unable to form chords on guitar as the memory of all that is gone too.
And yet, somehow, a few minutes later, I hear applause.
Maybe I imagined it. My imagination rarely stops working.
During my performance on Saturday, I said between songs, I haven’t done this in 30 years but I believe that every 30 years a fella should get up and sing a song. And I do believe that.
Catch my next show when I do my encore at 93. Should be fun to see what Body has in store for me by then.
