Brylcreem becomes a poor weapon in a battle for self-confidence in advance of a public outing, writes MICHAEL HARDING
I WAS IN the Pajero just beyond the toll plaza, when I saw a girl hitching.
“Where are you going?” she asked. “Dublin,” I said. She hopped in, which delighted me since the jeep was full of old tissues, and empty coke bottles. There was even an old vest on the passenger seat, which I managed to fling into the back before she noticed.
Her perfume was gorgeous and her silence made the drive almost intimate. She had earbuds, which delivered shuddering rhythms into her skull, and she hummed to herself most of the way. “I’m giving a workshop to young writers this afternoon,” I said. I thought that would impress her.
She said nothing, and didn’t remove the earplugs until we reached the quays. “Drop me at Capel Street,” she announced.
It’s not that I wanted a relationship with her, but I thought she might have made an effort to acknowledge that I was a human being.
I was walking up Abbey Street, after parking in the Irish Life Centre, and feeling almost invisible, when, out of habit, I looked in a shop window to check my appearance, and suddenly I wished I was invisible.
My hair was standing up in a bushy heap. Clearly nobody would take me seriously at a workshop, if I arrived with a head looking like a tuft of rushes.
So I went to a chemist and bought Brylcreem, and then went into the men’s toilet in the Gresham Hotel and massaged my head with the white cream, in the hope of improving the overall image. I felt like Marilyn French, the great feminist, who once had an epiphany in a rest room, as she made up her face to be presentable to men.
A man came into the toilet and stared at me with some pity, as I worked frantically at the mirror. He grinned, and said, “Whoever she is, son, she’s not worth it!”
I said, “Actually, it’s not a woman; it’s just that I’m meeting a lot of people in a few minutes and I want to look my best. And quite honestly, to look your best, you have to feel your best, and after listening to Marian Finucane all morning I don’t feel very good at all; so I need the Brylcreem. Does that make sense?”
He relieved himself, as real men do, with the force of a camel whose bladder has not been emptied for weeks, and then he left the room without even giving his forefingers a ritual rinse under the tap. I put the Brylcreem in my briefcase and headed off for the workshop.
Performance anxiety stems from the desire to do one’s duty, no matter how painful it might be, simply in order to be liked; a condition I suffer from quite regularly.
I remember when I started studying Buddhism for the first time, and going to weekend retreats, I got instruction on how to meditate: I should sit on my knees, with my back straight, and hold my eyes open and focus on a spot just beyond the tip of the nose.
The instruction wasn’t rocket science; simply focus on a spot on the floor, in line with the tip of the nose. But I misunderstood, and thought I was being directed to examine a point on the end of my nose.
By the end of the weekend my eyes were watering with pain and I was completely cross-eyed. I had become far too anxious about performing the meditation correctly.
On Saturday evening I had a pint with the General. I told him the story about the Brylcreem and how I had been suffering from performance anxiety all day.
“By gosh,” he declared, “it takes more than Brylcreem to relieve my performance anxiety.” Then he told me that he had been expecting an old girlfriend from South Africa, for the weekend.
“I wanted Viagra,” he whispered, “but the doctor prescribed something else, which works for a much longer period; and since there was a chance that my friend might arrive suffering from jet lag, the stronger tablet seemed like the bee’s knees.” I asked him did it work.
“By Jove it did,” he said, “The problem was that my friend didn’t arrive, so I was staggering around the house all night like an invalid. I could barely walk as far as the fridge this morning; so don’t talk to me about performance anxiety.”
“Have you ever read Marilyn French?” I wondered.
He confessed that he had not.