Mick Jagger, My Father (Part Three)

I have seen photos of my family from the early seventies. One in particular I found odd: my brother is standing next to my father, who is holding me facing away from the camera. My mother is standing beside him and seems a little nervous. Why? I could never find anything in that photo to get a reasonable answer. I had to dig a little deeper and look at some of the later pictures. I am in the Caribbean with my mother and brother at the airport. I am sitting on my grandmother’s couch in her home. I am on the beach, running with my mother and trying to avoid the surf. This last photo was a vital clue to my links with the prince of rock and roll’s dark side.


I moved like Jagger. I had the lips and eyes of a satyr and a love of music that my parents would begin to question and fret over. I also noted how bad the Stones became after 1972. Could it be that the trauma of discovering that he was now the father of a soon-to-be big-headed first-generation born West Indian in the Golden Horseshoe led to a dropping off in the ability of Mr Jagger to compose with Keef? Was it something that he could only deal with unconsciously? This makes the most sense to me, because it does not seem logical that any group of musicians from England would show any interest in soup made from the head of a goat. There must have been some unconscious reason to explain this sudden interest in a West Indian staple (far better curried than in a soup, by the way).

In The Belly (Part Four)

Let’s go back to the idea of food as an issue not taken seriously. When my brother made his comment about why he ate so much, we laughed. It was the family and we were in the kitchen while my mother was preparing dinner. The comment was sharp, to the point, and too honest not to make us laugh.

I also heard this comment:

“You’re watching the Food Network: Porn for Fat People”

This was an announcement made before a sketch on the comedy program Mad TV. They were satirizing a television marathon devoted to egg recipes (quite nauseating and funny), and I wondered about that introduction. It seemed inaccurate. Porn is porn for fat people. I doubt that there are higher numbers of people with weight problems who watch that network than pornography (I would wager that there were heavier viewers for Fox or TNN), but I understood the joke.

Fatness has always been a staple of comedy. I believe that jokes are a way of telling a truth that we may not want to accept, even if we know it in our hearts. A fat man chases a thin man and falls down, trips on something, or is blocked in some sort of passageway by their own girth. How many films from the birth of Hollywood (from the early silent movies to today’s blockbusters) have used fatness as its own punch line? Laurel meets Hardy; Abbott had Costello; John Candy, John Belushi, and Artie Lange all played the part (the latter’s memoir is even called “Too Fat to Fish”).