Tasteful Nudes: ...and Other Misguided Attempts at Personal Growth and Validation (10 page)

At that she stopped dancing and cackling and looked me right in the eye.

“Your pussy stinks,” she told me, three words a man almost never expects to hear about himself.

“Excuse me?” I replied while cleaning the wax from my ears and trying to think what else she could have possibly just said to me.

“Your pussy stinks,” the woman repeated before resuming her dancing and cackling.

As I tried to make sense of it all, that’s when it hit me. It’s fine if a lot of people think I’m a woman. But apparently all of a sudden I was a woman with some sort of condition I needed to address. And as much as I’d like to think that lady with the orange traffic cone had no idea what she was saying, and as much as the fact that I am recognized by the American Medical Association as male should be reason enough to dismiss her words entirely, the more I roll them around in my head, it’s hard not to start to thinking that maybe she had a point. Maybe my lady parts do stink a little bit. And to be honest, I’m not sure how to even begin dealing with that. The mind boggles. And presumably my lady parts continue to stink.

As a result of my bizzare Chinatown encounter, things have even started to seem kind of messed up at home lately, which is especially strange since I live alone. And sometimes I can’t help but wonder how that whole scenario might have worked out differently. But I guess the real question here is does any of it really matter when it comes to the true measure of a man? This may be convenient thinking on my part, but I tend to think what makes a man a man more than anything else—far more than an interest in sports, an affinity for stuff that runs on gasoline, or even a complete lack of female genitalia, regardless of how good or bad it smells—is his ability to have someone else’s back in a tough situation, what in simpler times was known as “manning up.” And, truth be told, this doesn’t even have to involve a knife fight necessarily (though, once again, knifeplay is preferable).

Manning up can be as simple as walking on the outside of the sidewalk to protect your companion from being trampled by wayward horses or splattered with the contents of chamber pots being emptied from overhead.
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Manning up can also mean doing your damnedest to return a lost wallet to its rightful owner even though the easier thing would be to just stuff it in your pocket like it was your own. And, of course, manning up can also mean letting your friends know that the ornery-looking guy who just walked into the bar in search of cheap booze, loose women, and trouble has a knife fastened to the tip of his right cowboy boot just before you totally kick his and all his friends’ asses, not unlike Patrick Swayze in
Roadhouse
, a film that continues to both shape and define us as a people to this day.

It turns out that manning up is also something you can do as you ride on a crowded subway headed for Brooklyn during evening rush hour, minding your own business and totally not expecting to have to man up at all at any point during the journey. Let me break it down for you:

It was a rainy night, which only added to the foul mood of commuters forced to press up against one another in the name of getting from one place to another. I did my best to block it all out by reading a book held eye-strainingly close to my face, something by one of the more butch Brontës I think.

As the train swelled with more people at one of the stops, a couple of feisty male cross-dressers pushed and shoved their way onto the train, sending several passengers flying across the car, one of whom was an attractive young lady who just so happened to slam right into my chest. Naturally, my sturdy frame stopped her in her tracks. The poor gal must have felt like she’d just hit an especially sexy brick wall or something.

“Sorry,” the winsome superfox offered while casting a disapproving yet sexy glance at the Feisty Cross-dressers.

“It’s okay,” I said to her in the way that a man who has absolutely no problem with having a pretty young thing slam right into his chest might.

As the attractive woman composed herself, a damp, middle-aged man began to chastise the Feisty Cross-dressers for so rudely shoving their way onto the train. He was swearing and everything and, as is often the case with Feisty Cross-dressers, they were not having it.

“That’s just plain rude,” the man said. “You should be ashamed of yourselves.”

“No you di-in’t,” one of the Feisty Cross-dressers snapped predictably in return.

“Actually, yes, I did.”

“No, you di-in’t!”

Things were heating up pretty quickly as the Feisty Cross-dressers continued to insist that everything the man had just said or done had not actually happened at all despite the fact that—by all accounts—it clearly had. Were it not for the four or five passengers pressed between them, it seemed as if the middle-aged man and the Feisty Cross-dressers might have come to blows. The war of words continued for a couple more stops as everyone near them looked around uncomfortably, as if they thought a bomb might go off at any minute unless Hollywood’s Wesley Snipes
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were able to come to the rescue and quickly diffuse it.

Eventually, the train pulled into the station closest to wherever the Feisty Cross-dressers were headed and they pushed and shoved their way off the train, sending all in their path stumbling around the subway car and struggling for both balance and decency once again. Once the Feisty Cross-dressers were off the train, everyone on board heaved a sigh of relief. Everyone except for me, that is. As the train sat in the station with its doors still wide open, I intuitively sensed that the trouble had only just begun.

“This ain’t over,” I thought. “This ain’t
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anywhere
near
over!”

Now I was getting worked up. But, like any seasoned crime-fighter would, I pretended to be oblivious to my surroundings and continued reading my book. Meanwhile, the man who had been arguing with the Feisty Cross-dressers stood in the doorway with his back to the platform while the pretty lady remained next to me, still marveling at my rock-hard yet welcoming frame while I subtly stood guard on the opposite side of the doorway.

Of course my intuition was spot-on. And as the train idled in the station just long enough to incite groans of frustration from its passengers, the Feisty Cross-dressers appeared once again, this time wielding a large closed umbrella. Then, as one hung back a few feet, the other swung the umbrella in the direction of the middle-aged man’s head. It is at this point that the attractive woman stopped contemplating my chest and, presumably, our potential future together and gasped along with everyone else near the doorway at the sight of what would undoubtedly lead to bloodshed (and ultimately the cover of the
New York Post
) in a matter of milliseconds. As for me, well, I continued pretending to read my book while taking in the entire scene in my peripheral vision.

As you might expect, this whole scenario was all happening in slow motion for me. So, for dramatic effect, I waited until the umbrella was just about to connect with the oblivious middle-aged man’s head before I slowly lowered my book and deftly reached out with a single hand to catch the umbrella just before it ripped the man’s skull wide open. The sound of the umbrella hitting my hand was like a thunderclap, echoing throughout the station and probably some other stations like an alarm of justice.

Since the middle-aged man had his back to his would-be assailants, he was totally oblivious to what had just taken place. For all he knew, I had just mysteriously thrust my hand directly behind his head like some sort of crazy person. And, perhaps exhausted from arguing with the Feisty Cross-dressers earlier, he didn’t even bother to question it. I imagine I could have explained to him how I had just saved his life, but, of course, that sort of thing goes against the hero code.

As for the Feisty Cross-dressers, one might expect them to have become enraged at me for foiling their attack, and reasonably so. But as I caught their umbrella in my hand, the look on both their faces instead seemed to say, “Wow, we were really hoping to split that damp, middle-aged guy’s skull wide fucking open, but we gotta admit, what you did just now, well, that was pretty awesome! And while, sure, your delicate features and wavy locks do suggest the kind of femininity we strive to attain on a daily basis, we can honestly say, on behalf of all men who go to great lengths to give the outward appearance that they are, in fact, fully functioning women with lady parts and everything, that you, sir, are one of the manliest men we’ve seen in our entire gender-bending lives.” And with that, they slowly backed away, presumably to reconsider the true meaning of the word
fierce
.

“But, Dave, what about the hot young superfox who couldn’t stop thinking about your chest and probably other parts of your scorching-hot bod?”

And to that I say, calm down. I was just about to get to that.

As the subway doors finally closed and the train lurched out of the station with order restored, the hot young superfox slowly looked up at me with her big doe eyes and half-whispered, “Wow, you’re good.”

“Yeah, I know.” I smiled back at her thoughtfully yet sexily.

Then I went back to reading my book, only this time for real. Then, as fate would have it, the seriously attractive young woman and I both got off at the next station.

“I wonder if she’ll ask me to come directly back to her apartment to ravage me or if she’ll want to stop off for dinner and sexy drinks first,” I thought as she headed for the station exit just a few feet ahead of me, the clicking of her high heels echoing throughout the station like a goddamn mating call.

I waited what felt like an eternity for the seriously attractive young woman to finally turn around and say something, anything to me, but instead she just kept on walking out of that station and into the rainy yet sultry night.

I know, I can’t believe it, either. I also never saw her again.

Sometimes I wonder if maybe I was the one who was supposed to say something before she disappeared into the night like that. Or maybe she took one look at my scar and decided being friends was just about all she could handle. It’s hard to say, really. One thing I know for sure, though, is that it’s not always easy being a real man. But guys like me—we don’t have much of a choice now, do we?

The Lord’s Work

There’s a phrase my friends in the the UK often use that I just can’t get enough of—“could do,” a seemingly innocuous pair of words that British people say to let someone down gently after they’ve suggested doing something that’s pretty much guaranteed to suck. For example, if your friend Marty asks if you want take a bus across town with him to visit his incontinent great-uncle and help him finish up some expired cold cuts before taking turns wrestling him shirtless in his basement, you just say “could do” and you’re usually off the hook. Sure, it sounds like the suggestion of possibility is there, almost like you’re seriously considering it, but what you’re really saying is something more along the lines of “Look, Marty, I recognize that what you’ve just asked me is indeed physically possible, but there’s no way in hell I’ll have any part of it—not today, not tomorrow, not ever. Seriously. No. F-ing. Way. Mention it again and I’ll stab you.… Hey, we’re still friends, right, Marty?”

“Could do”—it really packs a wallop.

One reason I like the phrase so much is because I’ve never quite gotten the hang of saying “no.” As a result, I’ve found myself in countless situations I wouldn’t wish on a Nazi or any other jerk, either, everything from having to sit through a community theater production of
Nunsense
in the middle of Long Island to catching last call with a friend of a friend of a friend at a bar called the Fat Cock in the East Village that, as it turned out, wasn’t nearly as chicken-themed as I was originally led to believe. Couple my inability to say the word “no” with my mother’s inability to hear that same word and the results could be tragic.

This is the story of one of those many, many tragedies.

Shortly after my thirtieth birthday, at a time when most adults are out having lives and stuff, I had a date with my mother—one of our regular mother-son outings—another night of ice-skating at the local rink, all-you-can-drink instant hot chocolate, an organ player, and no one under sixty on the ice except for me. After a couple of hours of this, my mother was driving me back to my sister Miriam’s house, where I had been living for the past few months while “plotting my next move.” As we pulled into Miriam’s driveway, I gathered my skates up from the floor of the car. Then my mother cut off the engine and slowly started to smile.

“There’s going to be a benefit for retired nuns and priests at the new hotel downtown in a couple of weeks,” she said. “I thought you might like to go.”

“That doesn’t sound like my kind of thing,” I told her.

“Really?” she said. “There’s going to be a nice buffet and there will be actual retired nuns and priests at the event.”

She said that last part as if we had just won the lottery or a crime-solving monkey or something.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“But, Davey, you haven’t heard the best part yet,” my mom said with a glimmer in her eye.

“It gets better?”

“A lot better. There’s going to be a concert after lunch featuring none other than Maureen … McGovern,” my mom said wide-eyed, the “F” word
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in between “Maureen” and “McGovern” implied.

“Who’s that?”

“‘Who’s that?’ You’re kidding, right? I thought you were into music.”

It turned out Maureen McGovern is the fiery chanteuse perhaps best known for singing the theme from
The Poseidon Adventure
and whatever other show tunes she could get her jazzy hands on. My mom was convinced Maureen McGovern was right up there with the Stones.

“I think I’m busy then,” I lied.

“Okay. I guess you’ll just let me know.”

“I really don’t think so, Mom.”

“Well, you need to let me know soon because I need to make sure there’ll be tickets left.”