I SING THE BODY ELECTRIC!

ROCK ’N’ roll and baby-making are often regarded as incompatible pursuits. The kids are alright so long as you don’t have to rear ’em. You’re either a breeder or a bleeder. On the skin of it, then, The Birth Experience should have about as much in common with rock ‘n’ roll as the oral Irish does with Irish oral. Well, pilgrims, I’m here to tell you it ain’t necessarily so.

Sure, Gillian Anderson may have admitted that Circle Jerks and Suicidal Tendencies never quite sounded the same after she dropped a sprog. And fair enough, domesticity probably did Lennon, Dylan and Springsteen’s songwriting more harm than good. And me? For years I had a Dali-like phobia of inseminating anybody, fearing that the siring of runts constituted the very antithesis of rock ‘n’ roll.

But lately, looking at it from the other end of the horrorscope, I’ve come around to thinking that rock ‘n’ roll belongs to men and women as much as to skinny white boys.

Certainly, the pain of and longing for motherhood has enriched the work of Patti, PJ and Madonna no end. The cruelty that Ma Nature showed Neil Young, giving him two cerebral palsy kids by different mothers, left him with a rage that makes most pretenders half his age sound like Up With People. And I wonder if Tom Waits could’ve imagined the fabulous ‘I Don’t Wanna Grow Up’ if he hadn’t been infested with rug-rats?

By extension, then, childbirth is closer to the art of kicking out the jams than most jam-kicker-outers would like to admit. Rather than being an excerpt from a particularly teary episode of Little House On The Prairie, it is instead a carn(al)ival of blood, sweat, tears, cussing, cat-scratching, skin, hair and teeth flying, the whole she-bang often climaxing with the labouring woman squeezing her partner’s scrotum in her fist, just so he can get some inkling of the pain involved.

Scenes from the labour ward are more snuff than sniff movie, intense enough to make your average rock ’n’ roll show-offs look like a bunch of limp dicks in comparison. Your average rock ‘n’ roll show-off that is. I first experienced Iggy Pop live in August 1996 in the Mean Fiddler in Dublin. Three days later, my second daughter was born. In my brain, the two events have morphed into one. Just as well I’m not a gynaecologist.

The big day began at about one in the morning, roughly two weeks earlier than anticipated. Good job too – The Bump had swelled to such a size that it seemed to take over not only every waking moment but most of the sleeping ones as well. My wife was groaning with baby-bulk and hadn’t had a good night’s rest in months. She wanted this job done, and now. I empathised, but as Robin Williams testifies, a man can’t possibly “share the birth experience” unless he has the misfortune to pass a bowling ball. It’s bizarre, really, the idea of growing another human in your belly. It’s even more bizarre that this human should exit the way it went in.

There had been a series of break-ins on our road that summer, so when my wife roused me from my slumbers on that balmy night, I thought we were being burgled. In a way, we were. Our domicile was about to be turned over by a little intruder who would leave our routine in ruin, our nerves in ribbons, and our clothes smelling positively thermonuclear.

“It’s time to go,” she said, shaking me.

“Wha?”

“It’s time to go. I think the contractions have started.”

“What contraptions?”

“The contractions.”

“Oh. Shit. Are you sure?”

“No, I’m not sure. But it feels like it.”

“Okay. I’ll be right down. Put the kettle on. I’m just going to nap for a minute.”

“Get up. Please.”

“Alright, alright, I’m coming. Jesus.”

I got dressed while my wife called her mother to come take care of our firstborn, who of course, wanted to come to the hospital with us. But while I’m as earth-friendly as the next tree-hugger, I draw the line at traumatising our offspring in the name of new-age parenting. So it was just the two of us, riding into the aptly-named Rotunda Hospital with a disconcertingly cheery cab driver. Like Lou said, it was the beginning of a great adventure.

Folk still have an odd attitude to pregnancy. Throughout the gestation, people displayed a mind-boggling lack of diplomacy and cop-on when discussing the imminent arrival of spawn number two. The men, when learning of my imminent trip down the parental rollercoaster, seemed to take devilish glee in pronouncing my life as good as over, seemingly forgetting that I already had a five-year old madonna in the house.

“Oh, ye better have yer fun while ye can,” they’d chuckle, in the know-all, don’t-envy-you tones usually adopted by schoolboys when informing a classmate that his presence is required in the Principal’s office. “In a few months it’ll be all over. Ho ho ho.”

Merry Christmas to you too, sir.

Perhaps all males have some innate Oedipal phobia leading them to believe that the production of progeny must, by order of cosmic and natural law, be balanced by the blood sacrifice of the father, or at the very least, the renunciation of all adult pleasures (maybe that’s what Jacques Brel meant when he crooned, “My death waits between your thighs”). Indeed, the way some parents seem to regard child-rearing as one life-long Lent, you’d wonder why they continue to reproduce at all. As Keanu Reeves’ character pointed out in Parenthood: “You need a licence to drive or to buy a gun. But any asshole can become a father.”

Mind you, the women were as bad, appraising the bump in the supermarket queue as if it were a particularly lucrative unit of livestock. In the time it takes to get your groceries tallied, the bulge in question would’ve been subjected to so much scrutiny you’d think it was an alien incubus, not a human-in-progress. If total strangers were to talk about my gut in that way in a public place, I’d punch their lights out.

Then there was the gender question. “Ah, I’d say himself would love a boy,” mother hens would wink at my wife, who’d grit her teeth and smile back politely.

“Why would you say that?” I’d demand, irked.

“Well, y’know . . . ,” they’d respond.

“No, I don’t know,” I’d bristle. “Do you think I’m so insecure that I only want a boy-child in order to prolong my own vain sense of immortality on this earth?”

At which point my wife would give up trying to elbow me into silence and seek refuge in the magazine stand. Such stroppiness soon ensured that my name became dirt among the local victualers and check-out community.

INSANE IN THE MEMBRANE

Pregnant women are nuts. That’s not a very PC thing to say, I know, but it’s true. The clichés are legion. The throwing up. The mood swings. The aversion to anything icky on the TV – Trainspotting, Millennium or anything with Christopher Walken in it. For long chunks of the nine months, I was forbidden to watch BBC 2, Channel 4, or ingest any item of art or literature that portrayed this world as being anything other than one big, marshmallowy bouncy castle. The house resounded with the strains of ‘Smiley Happy People’ and old Magic Roundabout re-runs (this was pre-Teletubbies). It’s understandable, I guess. If you’re carrying new life in your undercarriage, you’d like to believe that the planet is at least halfway habitable.

And then of course, there’s the famous cravings. Somewhere along the line, my wife suddenly became this stark raving gastric pervert. Okay, so she didn’t exactly start gnawing at the door-jamb, but her desires, while being subtle, were certainly strange: jars of pickles so green and weirdly formed they looked like foetal attractions in a rural Chinese freakshow, Chutney and Branston Pickle sandwich spreads, Weight-Watcher’s Chicken Curries, tomato, mayonnaise and salt sandwiches, tuna melts - her palate developed a rather deranged mind of its own. Occasionally, I’d even catch her eyeing the coal bucket lustily. And yet, I once had to spend the night in the car for using the word “pasta” at the wrong time. The planet of women can be a very strange and alien place.

“When you get out of the hospital/Let me back into your life” – Jonathan Richman

Once at the Rotunda, we checked in at reception, and I watched my wife swallowed up by the white behemoth of the hospital, spirited away to fill out forms and answer questions about her bodily workings. (There’s another faultline in the gender war. Women know so much more about themselves than men do. Not having seen a doctor in several decades, all I can tell for certain about my body is which hole the food goes into and which one it comes out of.)

I was shown to an empty waiting room and left to think about what I’d done. And, to paraphrase the oft-apt words of David Byrne, “I asked myself/How did I get here?” One minute I was in short trousers, happily playing GI Joe in the backyard in Co. Wexford, blissfully unaware that my pecker served any purpose other than turning white snow yellow. The next I was interned in a Dublin hospital, watching God’s Gift To Women early on a morning so hot all the windows had to be left open, waiting for God-O (Another name for Bump. Indeed, wife and I spent so long in anticipation of its arrival, we considered rechristening ourselves Vladimir and Oestrogen).

Eventually, I was called into a room half full of women in varying states of labour. My wife was assigned a bed by the window. The expressions on her roommates’ faces varied from mild discomfort to hotwired agony. Some were alone, some had their partners with them; hassled-looking, whey-faced men secretly longing for the clock be turned back to the ’70s, when they could’ve sat out in the hall contemplating a fine cigar, or better still, nipped across the road to The Groggy Few for a pint or ten to steady the nerves. We were a fine body of men alright, offering feeble reassurance, pacing, fretting, and generally acting like the spare pricks in a labour ward that we were.

Soon, my wife was hooked up to a kind of space age TV which monitored the baby’s heartbeat. We passed a couple of long hours of hushed panic, gauging the strength and regularity of God-O’s cardiac rhythm. Like its old man, Junior seemed to have inherited a rather idiosyncratic sense of timekeeping. Every time there was so much as a blip astray, we’d holler, “Nurse!” only to be reassured that, yes, it was alright, the little creature was just playing merry havoc with our nerves.

After several hours of this I was craving a Bewley’s breakfast, a stogie, a shot of morphine and a big bouncy bed. Doodle was offered tea and toast. I scoffed the lot, heartlessly.

Meanwhile, a quarter of a century and half the planet away . . .

. . . three men and a big baby are undergoing their own birth pangs. Sequestered in a room under the bloody red sun of phantasmagoric LA, with an engineer for a midwife, these four pelvic musclemen grind off each other, expanding and contracting, straining to expel the unstoppable mutagen from their collective body. As they play, the engineer turns to the tape-op, and, presaging John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing by 12 years, hisses, “I don’t know what it is, but it’s weird and pissed-off.” The music thrashes and whips against itself like the coils of some swamp-formed hydra-headed thing. The bass is pumping like a heart, the sheets of amplified feedback sound like blood rushing in the ears, Iggy’s bawling baby head is yowling out the indignant rage and protest at having been expelled from the warm, watery womb, into a world cold and hostile and senseless and quite mad.

LOVE HURTS

Most of us menfolk think we know about Pain. We’ve been in a scrap or two, sustained a puck in the snot that made our eyes water, cut ourselves with the bread-knife, bashed our thumbs with the hammer. But in reality, we have it soft. We are only on nodding terms with Pain, we deal with him once or twice a year, kinda like the parish priest or the taxman.

Women, on the other hand, are given a gynaecological examination by the fucker for one week out of every month. They know him, in the Biblical sense. He squats on the perimeter of their lives, everpresent, gibbering, pulling faces and making guerilla raids down the birth canal with brazen regularity. He is their tormentor, their confidante, their companion.

(“I’ve been HURT . . . and I don’t care.”)

My wife was wrestling the dirty rounder at that very moment. She’d dealt with him before, but you can never quite get the sonofabitch’s measure. He always has some new trick, some thumb-twisting technique he’s just learned in order to put the hurt on you. There’s nothing for it but to carry this maggot until he’s sucked you dry. You’re like Padre Pio wrestling The Man In Black, except he leaves you with stretchmarks instead of stigmata.

(“I’ve been DIRT. And I don’t care. ’Cos I’m . . . learnin’. Inside.”)

It’s been held that there’s a conspiracy of silence among mothers. Many first timers complain that the sisterhood are a little economical with the truth of just how painful childbirth can be. In fairness, I think that this is less out of disingenuousness than the peculiarly widespread phenomenon we’ll call “Birth Amnesia”.

See, in order to ensure the continued survival of our species, Mother Nature pulls a particularly rotten stroke – she wipes the mothers’ memory banks clean almost before the newborn’s arse has been slapped. One look at Junior and it’s like being hypnotised: somehow, the new mother forgets the supernatural suffering she’s endured, leaving only euphoric relief. Until post-natal depression sets in, anyway. But that’s another horror story.

Back at the labour ward, the contractions had accelerated and intensified. The pain was coming in great twenty-foot waves. All we could do was walk around the corridors as the gaps between painful convulsions grew shorter and shorter, and my wife moaned, “It’s not fair,” over and over, hanging onto me and the wall at the same time.

(“Do you feel it when you cut me? There’s a fire . . . there’s a fire . . . buuuuurnin’ . . . inside.”)

Each time she was racked with agony, I shuddered. I kept thinking about those gynaecological instruments for mutant women in Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers. It was as though her muscles were being winched apart by some barbaric medieval device. The portal to the new life was slowly opening. It was weird and compelling, like the movie Spielberg never made.

Midway through The Stooges’ ‘1970’, Steve Mackay’s saxophone comes wailing in, like the first veloceraptor-waulings of something primal and peeved. It never fails to make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Too close to the pelvic bone, that sound.

He hits the stage running, homo-erectus, his whole body one livid, angry hard-on, as the band lash out the opening chords of ‘I Wanna be Your Dog’. Most performers are lucky to get to such a level of intensity by the end of the show, but Iggy seems to achieve meltdown this early by simply willing himself to power, his body whipping back and forth like the lascivious tongue of some bellying beast. An iguana perhaps.

He’s shirtless, and the ripped, pocked torso is slimy under the lights, the faded jeans riding down around his hips like the bump ’n’ grind of some grotesque Mexican stripper. The ancient, magnificent face is not so much lined as gouged, the lips are contorted in a snarl, the eyes perpetually startled and utterly beautiful, boring into the crowd, searching, challenging, probing. The F-word made flesh.

WEIRD SCENES INSIDE THE FUN HOUSE

Eventually the pain grows so severe all you can do is walk, walk, walk the crazy paving, the fallopian-tubed maze of the labour ward. But the axes keep shifting, the tiles run under your feet like those escalator walkways at airports.

You try to call home between warp-spasms. There’s a queue for the payphone. Doubled-up women, all in the same boat. That bloody saxophone is still wailing in your ear. This is madness. And it hurts. At last, the phone’s free. You catch your reflection in a window, as cracked and mad as a hall of mirrors. Lights flash behind your eyes. A flame touches your nerve-endings.

You put the change in . . .

“Hold me tight, I’m calling from the fun house!”

“I want to be checked,” my wife whimpered between agonising spasms. “I can’t take this much longer.” And then, the last moment of clarity: “I’m never going through this again.” She climbed up onto the hospital bed, writhed around like a bitch in pup and put her head on my shoulder. “I want an epidural,” she sobbed into my ear.

“I’m sure it’s too early for that,” I soothed her.

“Please, please, please, please, please can I have an epidural,” she moaned.

“I’d give you one in a second, but I’m not the anaesthetist.”

“It’s not fair.”

Eventually, miraculously, it was time to go into the surprisingly sparse and friendly-looking delivery room. I was all ready to be suited up with mask and gloves, expecting banks of space-age gizmos, teams of surgeons, specialists, experts, assistants, assistants’ assistants, all crying, “Scalpel, nurse!” So much for the ER horseshit. The staff were as professional as you like, but unphased. They may be in the business of miracles, but it happens every hour.

My wife was now leaving the realm of reality shared by the rest of us and entering the seventh circle of the fun house, the bugged-outer limits, beyond the threshold of pain. At this stage, I had formulated a mental picture of Mother Nature, and she looked exactly like Pinhead from Hellraiser. My wife finally had her wish for an epidural granted, and while she was waiting for the anaesthetist, the midwife introduced her to the joys of the gas and air cylinders. When the next bout of contractions hit, my wife jammed the oxygen mask against her face and gulped down great lungfuls, eyes rolling, sweat slicking her brow. My dear wife had become Frank Booth out of Blue Velvet.

The anaesthetist arrived. As she was administering the wonder drug, inserting a tube into the lower back, I heard my wife say, high as a coot, “I feel like Krusty The Clown.” The anaesthetist suppressed a snort.

Before the drug had time to kick in, my wife abruptly grasped the sides of the table and croaked, “Oh my God! I have to push!” “Hold on,” instructed the midwife. Then, to a nurse, “ I think we need to check her.” They did. My wife had gone from five to ten centimetres of separation in a matter of minutes. I was kinda proud. She was like the Michael Schumacher of the delivery ward.

The pushing began. “I hope I don’t poo on the table,” my wife said, crunching my knuckles in her hand. I hoped I didn’t poo on the table too.

At least she had an excuse. This was all happening too fast. There was no time now for the epidural to take effect. It was only ten o’ clock, barely six hours after we’d been admitted. Some labours last as long as twenty-four. Or forty-eight. Some, I believe, never actually end, they just stretch on into eternity like some purgatorial yellow brick road.

“Remember your Lamaze exercises,” urged the midwife, illustrating her point by inhaling deeply, and then rapidly blowing out short breaths. I seized upon this as my chance to make up for skiving off from all those pre-natal classes. “Breathe,” I encouraged my wife, forgetting, in the heat of the moment, that she’d been doing it all her life. I began frantically respiring. my wife looked at me like I’d lost my mind and reached for the oxygen mask.

“I have to push!” she panted again. I kept on with the breathing lark ’til I almost hyperventilated and had to take a break. At last the midwife allowed my wife to push and then took a peek inside. She could see the head. More pushing. More breathing. My brain, in that gloriously inappropriate habit it has, began pumping vintage Dylan into my inner ear: “Something is happening, but you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones?” How much longer could she keep this up?

The band slams into ‘Lust For Life’, and Iggy throws himself at it like a man trying to dislocate his mind as well as his body, a beast breaking out of human bondage. After forty days in the smoke pit, he’s seen a vision, he’s leaving the tribe to go out into those primordial woods and cut a deal with the hissing devils crowded beyond the perimeter.

He hoots. He whoops. He gibbers. He stretches his arms above his head and preens. King monkey. Kaiser stooge. I hate myself and I want to live. Every rib, joint, vessel, vein, knuckle and bone are throbbing: “I stuck it deep inside, ’cos I’m LOOSE!”

It’s unbearably hot. His flanks are wet, his eyes are rolling, he’s caught up in some frenzied ghost dance. The spirits come channeling through him, cursing and wailing, and he convulses, again, again, again.

The midwife caught my attention. I looked down between my wife’s legs and saw a tiny skull, crowned with a clump of thick black hair. “The head’s out!” I trumpeted. My wife muttered something in reply. I leaned in closer to hear. “Imagine if I stood on my hands and went walking around the room now,” she croaked feverishly, “It’d look like I had this tiny little head.” More pushing. At last, the creature slithered out, covered in amniotic gunk.

People differ on the subject of newborns. Some say they’re the most beautiful humans on earth. Others say they’re downright ugly little critters. They’re all wrong. Newborns are, in fact, purpley-blue aliens from the bottom of the sea. They don’t actually become human for several minutes.

The nurse held the baby up, checking the respiration and sex. A girl, bawling lustily. It was all over bar the afterbirth.

“Elvis has left the building,” my wife moaned, then strained to see.

Iggy proudly surveys the calm after the carnage, as the mortared walls of ‘Wild Thing’ collapse in on themselves. The total white noise subsides and he looks the crowd in the whites of their eyes one last time before leaving the stage, spent, catharsised, renewed, his old self left behind him, crumpled on the stage like shed snakeskin.

Tomorrow, it’ll happen all over again.