Self-Made Man Read online

  He was a natural comedian and raconteur, easy to listen to and talk to; the most open of the bunch by far, and charming as hell. He told stories of the worst beatings he’d taken in his life—and it sounded like there were quite a few—as if they were parties he’d been privileged to attend. He had a robust sense of his own absurdity and a charming willingness to both assign and ridicule his own role in whatever fate he’d been privy to. Even the most rotten things he’d been handed in life, things that were in no way his fault, things like his wife’s ongoing ill health—first cancer, then hepatitis, then cancer again—he took with a surprising lack of bitterness. He never fumed about anything, at least not in front of us. That, it seemed, was a private indulgence, and his only apparent public indulgences were of the physical variety—cigarettes, a few beers out of the case he always brought for the team and junk food.

  We all usually ate junk food on those Monday nights, all of us except Bob, who stuck to beer, but let us send his twelve-year-old son Alex, who always tagged along on league night, next door to the 7-Eleven to buy hot dogs, candy, soda, whatever. We always tipped the kid a little for his services, a dollar here and there, or the change from our purchases.

  Alex was clearly there to spend some quality time with his dad, but Bob mostly kept him at bay. If we weren’t sending him next door to fetch snacks, Bob was usually fobbing him off in some other way with a few extra dollars. He’d encourage him to go and bowl a few practice frames in one of the empty lanes at the end of the alley, or play one of the video games against the back wall. Alex was immature for his age, a chatty kid, and a bit of a nudge, always full of trivia questions or rambling anecdotes about some historical fact he’d learned in school. Typical kids’ stuff, but I couldn’t really blame Bob for wanting to keep him occupied elsewhere. If you let Alex hang on your arm, he would, and he’d make you wish you hadn’t. Besides, this was men’s night out, and most of what we talked about wasn’t for kids’ ears.

  I noticed, though, that no one ever tempered his speech when Alex was around. We swore like stevedores, and nobody seemed bothered, including me, that a twelve-year-old was within earshot. I can’t say that the kid ever aroused any maternal instinct in me. I went along with the make-him-a-man attitude that seemed to prevail at the table. In that sense, Alex and I were on a par in our tutorial on manhood, just doing what was expected of us. I was never mean to him, but I participated heartily when the guys teased him. When he’d been going on for too long about Amerigo Vespucci or something else he’d picked up in social studies, either Jim or Allen would say, “Are you still talking?” and we’d all laugh. Alex always took it well, and usually just went right on talking.

  I got the impression that part of Bob’s way of teaching his son how to relate to other men was to throw him in with the wolves and let him find his way by trial and error. He’d learn his place in the pack by seeing what worked and what didn’t. If he took harsh insults or beatings in the process, so much the better. It would toughen him up.

  On this subject, Allen asked me if I’d ever heard the Johnny Cash song “A Boy Named Sue.” I hadn’t—a lapse that, thinking back on it now, probably should have been a tip-off that I wasn’t a guy, since the joke in my circle of friends has always been that every guy in the world is a Johnny Cash fan on some level, “Ring of Fire” being the universal guy guy’s anthem of troubled love.

  Allen told me the story of the song about a boy whose renegade father had named him Sue. Naturally, the kid gets the shit beaten out of him throughout his childhood on account of his name. At the end of the song the kid, all grown up, meets his father in a bar and beats the shit out of him in turn for giving him a girl’s name. Once beaten, the father stands up proudly and says:

  Son, this world is rough

  And if a man’s gonna make it, he’s gotta be tough

  And I know I wouldn’t be there to help you along.

  So I give you that name and I said “Good-bye.”

  I knew you’d have to get tough or die.

  And it’s that name that helped to make you strong.

  …Now you have just fought one helluva fight,

  And I know you hate me, and you’ve got the right

  To kill me now and I wouldn’t blame you if you do.

  But you ought to thank me before I die

  For the gravel in your guts and the spit in your eye

  Because I’m the———that named you Sue.

  It was amazing how close Allen had come to my secret without knowing it. I’d have to remind the guys of times like this if I ever decided to tell them the truth about me. I wondered if they’d get a kick out of seeing all the signposts in retrospect, the ones I was always noticing along the way.

  Being Ned, I had to get used to a different mode. The discord between my girlish ways and the male cues I had to learn, like Alex, on the fly, was often considerable in my mind. For example, our evenings together always started out slowly with a few grunted hellos that among women would have been interpreted as rude. This made my female antennae twitch a little. Were they pissed off at me about something?

  “A Boy Named Sue,” words and music by Shel Silverstein. © Copyright 1969 (renewed) Evil Eye Music, Inc., Madison, Wisconsin. Use by permission.

  But among these guys no interpretation was necessary. Everything was out and aboveboard, never more, never less than what was on anyone’s mind. If they were pissed at you, you’d know it. These gruff greetings were indicative of nothing so much as fatigue and appropriate male distance. They were glad enough to see me, but not glad enough to miss me if I didn’t show.

  Besides, they were coming from long, wearying workdays, usually filled with hard physical labor and the slow, soul-deadening deprecation that comes of being told what to do all day by someone you’d like to strangle. They didn’t have the energy for pretense. Allen was a construction worker, Bob a plumber. Jim was working in the repair department of an appliance company. For extra cash to buy Christmas presents and maybe take a weeklong ski trip to Vermont on the dirt cheap, he also picked up odd jobs in construction or whatever came up, and he worked part-time in a party store.

  None of them got much satisfaction from their jobs, nor did they expect any. Work was just something they did for their families and for the few spare moments it afforded them in front of the football game on Sundays, or at the bowling alley on Mondays. Jim lived in a trailer park and Allen had lived in one for much of his life, though now it was unclear where he was living. Bob never said where he lived. As always, Jim cracked jokes about his class. With his usual flip wit, he called trailer parks “galvanized ghettos,” and Allen chimed in about living in a shithole full of “wiggers,” or “white niggers,” themselves being foremost among them.

  In my presence, none of them ever used the word “nigger” in any other context, and never spoke disrespectfully of black people. In fact, contrary to popular belief, white trash males being the one minority it is still socially acceptable to vilify, none of these guys was truly racist as far as I could tell, or certainly no more than anyone else.

  As usual, Jim told a funny story about this. He said that he’d been coming out of a bar late one night, and a black guy had approached him asking for money. He’d emerged from a wooded area behind the bar that was well known as one of nature’s crack dens in the area. The guy said to Jim, “Hey man. Don’t be afraid of me ’cause I’m black, okay. I just wondered if you had some money to spare.”

  “I’m not afraid of you because you’re black,” Jim shot back. “I’m afraid of you because you came out of the woods.”

  They took people at face value. If you did your job or held up your end, and treated them with the passing respect they accorded you, you were all right. If you came out of the woods, you were shady no matter what your color.

  They were big football fans, so on one particular Monday I introduced a hot topic of the week to see if I could feel out their positions on race and affirmative action in professional sports. That
week Rush Limbaugh had made his now infamous remark while commentating on a Philadelphia Eagles game for ESPN, suggesting that Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb, one of a handful of black quarterbacks in the NFL, “got a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he didn’t deserve.”

  I asked the guys right out: “Do you think McNabb deserves to be where he is?”

  I thought they would meet this with a flurry of impassioned responses, but the conversation ended with a single comment from each. Yeah, he was doing a great job. Yeah, he was as good as or better than the average quarterback in the league. They were happy with his performance, on some nights very happy, and that was all that mattered. The policy debate over skin color wasn’t interesting to them, or relevant. They were rock bottom utilitarians. Either a guy was good and did what he was hired to do, or he wasn’t, and that alone was the basis on which you judged his worth.

  The only time I heard the term “reverse discrimination” mentioned, Jim was telling a story, as he did from time to time, about his stint in the army. He’d been promoted to the position of gunner, apparently, and had occupied the post proficiently for some time, when a new superior officer, a black man, was installed in his unit. Jim found himself demoted to KP and a whole host of other shit jobs soon thereafter.

  “The guy had taken everyone out of their posts and put all his black friends in them instead,” Jim said. “It was blatant discrimination. So I went to the sergeant in charge, who was a black guy and very fair, and told him all about it. He consulted the evidence and told me I was right, and put me back in my position.”

  Everyone nodded around the table and that was that.

  Exposing my own prejudices, I had expected these guys to be filled with virulent hatred for anyone who wasn’t like them, taking their turn to kick the next guy down. But the only consistent dislike I ever saw in them was for comparatively wealthy clients for whom they’d done construction, plumbing or carpentry work and the like. But even here they mostly laughed at the indignities inflicted on them, and marveled, more than balked, at the odd habits and hang-ups of the upper middle class, saying only “rich people are just like that.”

  Bob told a funny story about a buddy of his getting a wicked case of the shits on a job and being summarily denied the use of the “old lady’s toilet.” There was nothing for it, so as Bob described it, the guy took a newspaper and a bucket into the back of their van and camped out. After a while the old lady, wanting to know why there’d been an unauthorized work stoppage, burst into the van, only to happen upon a very unsavory scene that sent her shrieking from the premises, denouncing the men as barbarians.

  There were the occasional gay or sexist jokes, but they, too, were never mean-spirited. Ironically enough, the guys told me that I, being the worst bowler in the league by far—my average was a mere 100—was lucky I hadn’t bowled with them in a previous season when anyone who averaged less than 120 incurred the label “fag,” and anyone who averaged less than 100 was, by default, a girl. At the end of the season, whoever had won the booby prize had had to bowl an entire ten frames in women’s panties.

  They each had the usual stories about being propositioned by a gay man, or happening on a gay bar unawares, but they told them with the same disarming bemusement and self-abasement as they told the stories about the habitually mysterious ways of rich people. Gay people and their affairs didn’t much interest them, and if gays were the butt of a joke now and then, so was everyone else, including, and most often, themselves.

  Nothing was beyond humor, especially for Jim, but he was a sharp guy, and when he made a joke he always knew, and let you know that he knew, what he was doing with a quip. He introduced the most outrageous joke he ever told in my presence with an appropriate caveat. “Okay, this is a really sick joke,” he said. “I mean really sick, but it’s funny as shit. You wanna hear it?” Everyone nodded. “Okay. A child molester and a little girl are walking into the woods—” He stopped here to add, “I told you it was really sick.” Then he went on. “Anyway, so the little girl says to the child molester, ‘Mister, it’s getting really dark out here. I’m scared,’ and the child molester says, ‘Yeah, well how do you think I feel? I’ve got to walk back alone.’”

  Jim was at his funniest when it came to women and relations between the sexes. As always, his observations were startlingly astute and his anecdotal way of framing them drew you in and made you come away rolling. Apropos of nothing, he introduced the topic of women one night with this interjection:

  “You know, if guys could just learn to go without the pussy for a while, they’d get so much shit done. I mean, that’s what boxers do when they’re training, and it keeps ’em focused for the fight. Go without the pussy and you get strong, man. I mean, I haven’t been laid in two months, and I’m about ready to lift up the corner of the house.”

  This was the kind of thing that just came out of his mouth out of nowhere and it used to make me wonder what he might have done with himself if he’d gone to college instead of joining the army at seventeen. His humor was the ticket to his brain, and you could tell it was whirring at a higher speed than most of the brains around him.

  He often told stories about his days at school as a kid, stories that confirmed my suspicion that he had a lot going on inside his head that had been beaten out of him on the playground, and that he now knew enough not to share in the wrong company. Here again, though, he was impossibly funny.

  “I was one of those quiet, psycho kids,” he’d say. “I never spoke. I just sat there in the corner. You couldn’t provoke me to fight. You could be pokin’ me with a stick and I wouldn’t move. I’d just be sittin’ there drawing pictures of killing your family.”

  Every now and then Jim would come out with a word that somebody—either Bob or Alex—would call him on, a word like “enable,” which Alex wanted to know the meaning of, and “cordial,” which Jim used to describe his behavior toward someone or another, and which Bob clearly thought was a little too big for britches.

  In Jim’s defense I said that the word was only “too, too” if you were talking cocktails, which, of course, only made it worse, because it made me sound like an asshole, and blew for good whatever class cover or remote coolness I might have gained.

  Jim salvaged me, though, with a courtesy laugh.

  Then he went on with his riff about men and women: “I mean, take work, for example. I can work with an ugly chick. There’s an ugly chick works in my office with me every day, and I’m fine. I do my thing. I can concentrate fine. But every now and then there’s this hot, hot woman who comes into the office, and for the whole time she’s there I’m completely fucked. Everything’s out the window. I don’t get shit done. All I can do is stare at her like this—”

  Here he made a dumbfounded expression, mimicking himself in the office ogling the hot chick.

  But all joking aside, these guys took their sexuality for what it was. They felt there was no getting around it, so they found ways to work within it, ways that sometimes entailed lying to their wives about going to the odd strip club.

  One night Jim was talking about his plans for a ski trip. He wanted to find a location that had good skiing, but he also wanted some lively nightlife. “I’d like to find a place that has a good titty bar,” he said.

  Bob chimed in, “Yeah. Count me in on that. I’m definitely up for that.”

  This sparked a short discussion of titty bars and how the married man negotiated them. The ski trip would offer one of the few opportunities for the boys to be boys, since their wives weren’t coming along. This had to be taken advantage of, since it was clear that at least Bob’s and Jim’s wives had expressly forbidden them to go to strip clubs. Besides, they agreed, no vacation would be quite as relaxing without a little skin in it. For these guys, it seemed, there were just some things a married man learned not to be honest about with his wife, his abiding love of and even need for porn and sex shows being prime examples.

  As Allen told me once when I
asked about the secret to marriage: “You tell women what you want them to know and let them assume the rest.”

  None of this talk surprised me. We were, by virtue of our name, the recognized dirty team in the league. The rest of the teams had names like Jeb’s Lawn Care or Da Buds, but ours was The Tea Baggers. When I heard this the first night I nearly blew my cover, blurting like an art house idiot, “Oh, do you guys like John Waters movies?” Waters’s movie Pecker had featured the practice of tea bagging.

  “Who’s he?” they all asked.

  “Oh,” I mumbled, “I thought that’s where you got the name from.”

  “Nah,” said Jim. “It’s something I saw in a porno mag. Some guy was squatting over a girl, dangling his balls in her mouth, and the caption said ‘Tea Bagging.’ I thought that was fucking hilarious.”

  The oddest thing about all this dirty talk and hiding strip club visits from their wives was the absolute reverence with which they spoke about their wives and their marriages. To them it seemed it was necessary to lie about certain things, but in their minds this didn’t threaten or damage the integrity of their partnerships. They were happy and they cherished their wives.

  When Jim’s wife’s second cancer diagnosis came through he talked about it with us a bit, but only in clipped phrases. He’d spent the previous week drinking himself into a stupor and blowing up abandoned cars on the back lot of a friend’s junkyard. You could tell that the news was devouring him, and the only way he could deal with it was to tear himself up and anything else inanimate that was handy.

  “You know, man,” he said to me, “she puts up with a hell of a lot with me, and I can’t say I’ve ever been unhappy with her. How many guys can say that? I’ve got a good woman. She’s never given me a minute’s trouble.”