Real Man Adventures (3 page)

“K
ICK ME
”
IS A
game I used to play with my brother (seven years my senior).

Object: to land a kick anywhere on your opponent’s body (including crotch, face, etc.).

Rules: none.

Play: Kickee repeats, “Kick me, kick me, kick me,” over and over, enticing and taunting kicker. Kicker becomes kickee as soon as a kick is landed, play swapping back and forth.

Game ends: In tears (on part of younger sibling), or when mother has screamed, “STOP IT!”

My brother always initiated, placing a hand on my forehead to keep me at arm’s length, and then repeating, “Kick me” however many times were required before I could resist no more, and with
all my strength and determination would try to kick him, usually in one of the shins. I cannot recall an occasion on which I was actually able to land a solid kick. Thus, the only time I would be allowed to be the kickee would be when my brother tricked me into a game by “letting” me go first.

His being appreciably older, significantly stronger, bigger, and not a little meaner, I stood small chance of being a formidable opponent. My arms were of course not long enough, nor was I tall enough to palm his forehead and keep him away in that manner, so my method of staying outside the range of his half-hearted kicks would involve darting back and forth like Barry Sanders (I fancied), bobbing and weaving, hiding under things, throwing people in front of me to block my brother’s foot, whatever it took to stay alive and stave off becoming the kicker for as long as possible. But inevitably he would catch me, and even though he’d pull his kicks, it would still hurt like shit when one would land. But I’d hold it together, take my turn, and like Charlie Brown and that goddam football, I’d fool myself: this time I’ll connect.

I don’t have a lot of extremely vivid memories of my childhood, but I do have a distinct one of a particular game of Kick Me. It was the first big family trip my parents saved up for and took us on, to Europe, when I was about six, my brother thirteen or fourteen. I loved traveling, thrilled at seeing novel places and people and things, but my brother, not so much: he was a zitty, pissy pubert with little power in the world but to torture me. My mother claims her most persistent memories of that trip involve her two children traversing the Champs Elysées, Saint Mark’s Square, and Westminster Abbey, with him tormenting, “Kick me, kick me, kick me.” Him walking
backwards, teasing, taunting, laughing at my repeated failure, and me trailing with a face damp and red, pigeons scattering.

We were somewhere in the French countryside, alongside the Seine, when I took a giant swing at him and missed, losing my balance and quickly finding myself on my ass, my hands ground into the gravel on the curb beneath me. We must’ve been on a small traffic island, because I looked up and there were cars whizzing by on either side. My mother grabbed my upper arm and dragged me to my feet across the street, where I finally got a look at the pebbles deeply embedded in both palms, purple with blood just starting to ooze out.

I will always remember the magic—no other word for it—of seeing the Eiffel Tower for the first time, and Notre Dame, Buckingham Palace, the
Mona Lisa.
Of floating on a Venice canal. But I will also likely never forget the dysphoria of rage, feeling so tiny and insignificant. Both in the realm of my family and in the larger world I was seeing for the first time. Inconsequential, weak. So easily taken, forced into a position. Despising my brother’s ability to play me, to enrage to the point of tears. Hating him so much, when maybe I just wanted to see what it would be like to be him.

I
N MY
“
JOURNEY
,”
THERE
have been some new truths, even if they are also stereotypes:

1.
 
I don’t cry as much as I used to. Or: It takes way more to make me cry.

2.
 
I am angry more frequently. Or: It takes way less to make me blazing mad.

3.
 
I don’t get as bummed out by things as I used to. Or: my mood is generally positive.

4.
 
I have less patience.

5.
 
I am not as adept at communicating.

6.
 
I want to have relations with my wife, all of the time, regardless of context.

7.
 
People defer to me more.
¹

8.
 
I am stronger, my muscle mass larger.

9.
 
I have more stamina on the treadmill.

10.
 
I say less to strangers.

_______________________________

1
. This may seem far-fetched and like I’m trying to seem like a good feminist or some bullshit, but ask my wife: she’ll gladly confirm it happens all the time when we are out in public or meeting new people. (And she is no shrinking violet.)

ESQUIRE:
W
HAT’S THE GREATEST
example you know, or have witnessed, of someone stepping up as man?

TC: The first example that comes to mind is pretty much anything Johnny Weir does. Outside of that, honesty always leaves a big impression. Across the board, across gender, the bravery required to be completely honest with both oneself and others is something that is as rare as it is great. So to me “stepping up and being a man” is twofold: it means trying to be as honorable as possible, and in cases where you fail to be as honorable as possible, then it is to be completely honest about that shortcoming—without being mean or punitive. It’s more about being an adult than being a man.

ESQ: What about manhood do you know now that you wish you’d known at eighteen?

TC: 1) That men aren’t right all the time, or even most of the time. 2) That men don’t have to act like they’re right when they know they’re wrong. 3) That you can still be a man, even if you don’t have a manhood.
¹

ESQ: What’s your favorite thing about being a man?

TC: Just “being a man” is something I can’t take for granted, since I was not born a man. But you know what? It turns out nobody else is born a man either. Sure, roughly half of us humans are born male—but only a fraction of that fraction grow into men.

So I’d have to say my number-one favorite thing about being a man is being a man. Because it wasn’t something that just happened to me. I had to work for it—going against what the world was telling me I was ever since I was pushed out of my mother and into it.

Other favorite things about being a man include (in no particular order): sideburns, sex drive, not feeling paralyzed with worry about everyone else’s feelings all the time, and the unconditional acceptance from and love of the best woman in the world, which has probably made me more of a man than any of the other shit out there—including testosterone.

_______________________________

1
. While I know these three things in theory, that doesn’t mean I am very good at them or necessarily remember them all of the time in practice.

F
EAR
¹

She has me stripped and flayed and is swinging at will from the inside of my rib cage as if on one of those geodesic playground apparatuses. Primary paint colors and rust flakes in her hands, she’s free-climbing all limbs and laughs and smiles, and we are both eight and eighty years young, and we are also unicorns riding clouds and cotton candy kittens, and every puppy who ever fell in love with a wiry tomboy’s skinned knees. And the air is perfect up here, even if the walls are rattling and cells are dividing and then (somewhat hauntingly) regenerating, only with her DNA in them.

And sometimes—in fact most times if I’m honest—when she leaves whatever room I’m in, I am instantaneously seized with the distinct notion that she might never come back. Not ever. And not quite seized, rather more like doubled over in the driver’s seat in long-term parking row 14A, the minutes just about to click over into another day’s rate, mouth carved into a grotesque howl, the sort where no sound comes out but the hiss of compressed air. And to be further honest, it’s not only when she leaves the room, but generally anytime her eyes leave mine (to drive, to walk, to read, to see something else).

There it is, the signpost up ahead: not the man she and the world need you to be.

_______________________________

1
. Written about a few months after meeting my wife.

P
ARTIAL TRANSCRIPT OF A
telephone conversation I had with a representative of the U.S. Department of State
¹
[after having my passport renewal application rejected and returned in the mail]:

ME: I don’t understand what the problem is. You have my fee, you have my correctly filled-out application, and you have a letter from a surgeon saying that I had sexual reassignment surgery and have lived as a man for several years.

DEPARTMENT OF STATE: It doesn’t say you had complete sexual reassignment surgery.

ME: I see. Well, what does complete sexual reassignment surgery entail?

DOS: Um. [
Ruffles papers
]. It requires, um. It requires full, complete surgery.

ME: What is full, complete surgery?

DOS: What you are calling “bottom” surgery.

ME: So essentially, in order to have a passport that I can safely travel with, I need to disclose what is in my pants.

DOS: I suppose you could put it that way.

ME: So I could have a penis and giant boobs but you’d still let me have the M?

DOS: I didn’t make up the rule, sir; I’m just telling you what it says.

ME: Did you have to tell the government what is in your pants in order to get your passport?

DOS: Uh, sir, I did not have to, no.