Self-Made Man (6 page)

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.”

Bob agreed. “Yeah, that's how I feel. I got nothin' bad to say about my wife either. Nothin'.”

It was an odd contradiction, but one that I came across fairly often among married men who talked to Ned about their sexuality. The way they told it, it sounded as if the male sex drive and marriage were incompatible. Something had to give, and usually what gave was honesty. These guys either lied to their wives about going to strip clubs, or at the very least they lied about the ubiquity of their sexual fantasies involving other women. On nights like these, among the boys, they could be honest, and there were no judgments.

The bowling part of the evening was clearly secondary to the beer and the downtime with the boys at the table, smoking and talking shit. They cared about their game and the team's standing—more than they let on—but as Jim jokingly put it to me as a way of making me feel better for being the worst bowler any of them had ever seen, the league was really just an excuse to get away from their wives for the evening. I learned later that this wasn't true. Actually, it was a money league, and every game we lost cost us twenty dollars. This made me all the more thankful and impressed that they'd taken my poor showing with such good humor.

Still, they warmed to me more and more as my bowling improved, and I got the sense that it wasn't just about the money. It was as if there was an unspoken credo among them that there was just something you couldn't quite trust about a guy who couldn't bowl. I didn't drink or smoke either, and, though they never said so, I could tell they thought this was just downright unnatural, probably the sign of someone who had it too good in life for his own good. Beer and cigarettes were their medicine, their primrose path to an early grave, which was about the best, aside from sex and a few good times with the guys, that they could hope for in life. The idea of telling one of these guys that smoking or drinking to excess was bad for his health was too ridiculously middle class to entertain. It bespoke a supreme ignorance of what their lives were really like—Hobbesian—not to put too fine a point on it. Nasty, brutish and short. The idea that you would try to prolong your grueling, dead-end life, and do it by taking away the few pleasures you had along the way, was just insulting.

The whole business of bowling, when we got down to it, was, as you might expect, tied in to masculinity in all the predictable ways—hierarchy, strength, competition—but it was much more subtly processed and enacted than I had suspected it would be, and I wasn't outside this tug-of-war by any means. I had my own issues, old issues that were bound up with being a tomboy and competing in sports with boys my whole life.

When I appeared at the bowling alley on that first night, I was late. Practice time was just ending, so I didn't get a chance to throw before we started. These guys had been bowling all their lives. They threw with spin and they hit with precision. They must have known me for the putz I was the minute I heaved the ball with both hands. There were fifty or sixty guys in that room, almost everybody smoking, almost everybody drinking. They had names like Adolph and Mac, and to a dyke scared to death of being gay-bashed, they were just downright mean looking, all seated at their respective tables with nothing else to do but watch you, the new pencil neck that nobody knew, walk up to the foul line and make an art of the gutter ball. They must have had some pretty hearty laughs at my expense.

That's how it felt anyway, and that's probably how it went down among the other teams when my back was turned. But when I'd traipse back to my table in fuchsia-faced shame with a zero or a foul blinking on the board, they never laid me low. I always got supportive advice. “You'll get there, man,” they'd say. “You should have seen me when I started.” Or more helpfully: “Just shake hands with the pins, man. That's all you got to do. Just shake hands with the pins.”

They were far more generous with me than they had any reason to be, and it was only after a couple of months when they got to know me a little better that they felt free enough to kid me now and then about how much I sucked. But even then it was always light and affectionate, a compliment really, a sign that they were letting me in.

“Hey, we all got strikes this round,” Bob would say, “except one. Who was that, I wonder?” Then he'd smile at me while leaning back in his chair, dragging deeply on his cigarette. I'd make a big show of giving him the finger, and we'd all laugh. Bob's flinty veneer was cracking.

 

As I tried to be one of the guys, I could feel myself saying and doing the very things that young men do as teens when they're trying to sort out their place in the ranks. Like them, I was trying to fit in, be inconspicuous, keep from being found out. And so I imitated the modeled behaviors that said “Accept me. I'm okay. I'm one of the guys.”

Half the time I was ashamed of myself for trying too hard, saying fuck or fuckin' one too many times in a sentence for effect, or swaggering just a little too wide and loose on my way to and from my turns, and probably looking as a result like I had a load in my pants.

But then I could see all of these learned behaviors in Bob and Jim and Allen, too, as well as the remnant insecurity they were meant to disguise. And that, I think, was where their generosity came from. They'd outgrown that adolescent need to challenge every comer as a way of deflecting their own misgivings. As always, Jim was the most forthcoming about his stupid flights of machismo and the Dumpsters they'd usually landed him in.

“I remember when I was in the army,” he'd say, “and I was drunk off my ass as usual. And there was this huge guy playin' pool in the bar I was in. And I don't know why, but I just flicked a beer coaster at him, and it hit him right in the back of the head. And he turned around really slowly and he looked down at me and he said in this really tired way ‘Do we really need to do this tonight?' And I said, ‘Nah, you're right. We don't. Sorry.' So he turned around, and fuck me if I didn't just throw another one and hit him again, right in the back of the head. I don't know why I did it. No fuckin' idea. And I knew when I did it that he was gonna kick my ass, so I turned around and tried to run, and I slipped in a puddle of beer and fell on my face, and he just picked me right up and bashed the shit out of me. And the funniest thing about it was that the whole time he was punching me, he kept apologizing to me for having to do it.”

This was a source of hilarity to everyone, the stupid crap you felt compelled to do as a guy finding your spot in the scheme of things, and the obligatory beatings you had to give or take to reestablish order after a breach. But only Jim really had enough perspective to admit the folly of his masculinity, and to fully appreciate the absurdity of brutish necessity in the male-on-male world. A guy whom you'd just provoked twice, and who'd warned you not to trespass, had no choice but to beat you if you crossed the line. That was just how it was among men, and Jim mocked it lovingly.

Bob was more guarded. He didn't quite have Jim's gift for self-deprecation. He didn't readily admit his mistakes or the missteps he'd made in the past. I got the sense that he couldn't afford to express regret or let on that he didn't know something. Instead, he held the world at arm's length, projecting a kind of terse authority from his barrel chest, just nodding or frowning at something you'd say, as if the answer was insufferably obvious, when, of course, at least half the time he probably didn't know the answer. The way he talked to his son Alex was essentially the way he talked to everyone. He was the guy who knew stuff, and what he didn't know wasn't worth knowing.

But when it came to something that Bob felt more confident about, he'd engage you. Not that Bob's engagements were ever long or involved, but they packed a rhetorical punch. I asked him once if his workplace was unionized, and his answer surprised me. I'd figured everyone in that room, being a bona fide member of the working class, was as staunchly pro union as the liberal intellectuals I knew in New York, but Bob didn't see it that way. Neither, apparently, did the members of one of the other teams, who had called themselves the Nonunions.

“No,” he said. “My shop isn't union.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Unions are for the lazy man.”

“Why's that?”

“Because they're all about seniority,” he said, pausing for effect. “I'll give you an example,” he went on. “One place I worked was union, and it was run on the seniority system. The guys who'd been there the longest had the most clout, which meant that when there were layoffs, they'd always have better standing. There was one guy like that there who'd been there forever, and he was a lazy fucker. He used to just hang out and read the newspaper. Never did a lick of work. Meanwhile, I worked my ass off all day long. But when it came time to let people go, I was let go and he wasn't. Now that's not fair, is it?”

“No,” I agreed. “It isn't.”

I tried to engage him further on the question, but as I came to understand, you'd always know when a conversation with Bob was over. He'd just revert to peering at you with condescending finality through a cloud of cigarette smoke.

A lot of the guys were like that. It would take you years to get to know them on anything more than grunting terms. They were walled-in tight.

Yet even so, under the surface there remained that distant male-on-male respect that I'd felt in the first handshakes and I continued to feel every time some guy from another team would say “Hey, man” to me when we met in the parking lot or passed on our way to or from the soda machine.

But there was one guy among the bowlers who established an odd intimacy with me early on. It was so immediate, and so physically affectionate, that I felt sure he could see through Ned. I never learned his name. I don't think he knew anything consciously. It wasn't that bald. But there was an unmistakable chemistry between us.

Obviously, I'd spent my life as a woman either flirting or butting heads or maneuvering somewhere on the sexual spectrum with nearly every man I'd ever met, and I knew how it felt when an older man took a shine to you as a woman. It was always the kind of guy who was far too decent to be creepy, the avuncular type who had turned his sexual response to you into a deep affection. He showed it by putting his arm around you cleanly, without innuendo, or patting you gently on the shoulder and smiling.