Put On Your Big Boy Pants

Your Manhood Is Predicated on Knowing the Situation

This morning at the park, the twins and I strolled inside the partitioned park (Natalie and Julia in the wagon) when we saw a mother and 4-year-old daughter reading quietly under the slide. 

Natalie joined them, sat there, and I said hi to the mother, but she silently got up and walked outside. What a churlish individual, I thought, as I began to do 200 bar dips. 

Ten minutes later, the daughter assumed a sour face and left. The snooty child takes after her mother, I said to myself. Then I realized I was living in a fog: My daughter Natalie had pooed her pants and had an actual oil spill blow-out. I would have reacted the same had I been in their shoes. 

So there I was doing bar dips, scorning an innocent mother and her daughter, with my daughter covered in filth. 

After changing Natalie's diaper, I looked in the mirror and pimp-slapped myself . . . twice. 

Always know the situation. 

Sexy Chicken

 

 

I was in my late teens when I walked into the kitchen late one afternoon and on the counter was this yellow, slimy chicken. The plucked bird looked forlorn, a leper sulking on the cutting board. Mother was standing next to the chicken holding a cleaver.

“You need to learn to clean out this chicken,” she said puffing on a cigarette.

“I don’t want to touch it,” I said. “It’s disgusting.”

What Mother said next ruined my life. She said, “You better learn to clean a chicken. Otherwise, you’ll never be able to make love to a woman.”

Was there some Freudian nugget of genius insight in her analogy between one’s capacity for wallowing in blood and guts and one’s skillful navigation through difficult sexual techniques? Perhaps she sincerely believed that getting my fingers deep inside the labia-like folds of moist chicken flesh was a prerequisite for my transformation into a first-rate lover.  Or perhaps she was demonically sabotaging what little confidence I had in my hormone-soaked, vulnerable self-confidence. Perhaps when she shut herself up in her bedroom she was reading How to Irreversibly Destroy Your Child’s Psyche in 90 Days Or Your Money Back. Or perhaps I’m underestimating her. Perhaps she was writing that damn book.

My mother is a very complex human being, so I cannot honestly say I have a clear and single answer for any of the possible motives behind the Chicken Incident. My best guess is that several of those explanations I stated may be partially true and most likely none of them are completely true.

What I can say with certainty is that after she made her remark, I puffed my chest and exuding the same military aggression I learned from my father I said something like “That is utterly absurd, Mother,” before disappearing into my room. I turned on my radio full blast to the rock station, KYA-FM, and started working out with my weights.  Energized by the 1970s music of Kansas or King Crimson or Yes or Genesis, I would perform my bench presses and curls while visualizing myself being a world-famous bodybuilder living on a tropical island and drinking juices from halved coconuts while surrounded by hordes of women helplessly drawn to my masculine pulchritude. 

 

The Inextricable Link Between Cars and Male Potency

 

The inextricable link between the automobile and sexual reproduction,  is unforgiving. To see how this masculine delusion plays out in my own life, I must do a bit of self-psychoanalysis and explain how I came into this world. A car was involved. My father, in the army at the time, used a car, a white 1959 Morris Minor, to “steal” my future mother from another army suitor, John Shalikashvili, who would later become a United States General and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. My father and Shalikashvili were both stationed in Anchorage and both had met my mother in a tavern. My eighteen-year-old mother and her parents had recently “relocated” to Anchorage from Los Angeles when Senator Joe McCarthy went on the red-scare-inspired witch’s hunt, which included going after my grandfather whose politics were so left as to make Joan Baez look like a member of a William F. Buckley think tank. Deemed a threat to national security, my grandfather was fired from his high-ranking government-position with the USO, and, with the help of friends, got radio work in Anchorage. Laying low in Alaska until McCarthy was discredited as the ruthless political hack that he was, my mother, just out of high school, didn’t have a lot to do but flirt the with the local army personnel. That’s when she met Shalikashvili and my father who both wanted her as their very own. Their battle for her sole romantic affections took a Christmas hiatus when Shalikashvili returned to his home in Peoria, Illinois, and my father returned to see his family in Gainesville, Florida. Wanting to beat Shalikashvili to my mother, my father decided to secretly head back for Anchorage a couple of days early. The problem was that the Lukas fuel filter in the Morris Minor wasn’t working and the auto parts store still didn’t have a replacement. In a moment of ingenuity, my father, who would later become an engineer, used his only prophylactic and a paper clip as a temporary fuel filter replacement. While not a perfect repair job, the condom did serve as a spring to help keep the fuel pump from staying stuck in the “open” or “closed” position. Somehow he made it to Seattle, where he ferried to Alaska and reunited with my mother, beating Shalikashvili by forty-eight hours.

The problem was that my father used his one and only prophylactic and I was, as a result, born nine months later in Gainesville.  The condom that would have blocked my conception was instead adapted to make a car drivable. 

No doubt this lust-soaked effluvium that accompanied the origins of my birth made an indelible stamp of car lust that shows no signs of weakening. 

 

Possessed by the Carrot Demon

My wife Carrie and I had been married barely two years around June of 2004 as we drove from Los Angeles to visit my family in the San Francisco Bay Area. We’d been in the Volvo for about five hours or so and we were heading north on the 101, passing the pungent garlic fields of Gilroy on a hot afternoon when I asked Carrie to put the bag of carrots on the center arm rest. I had been gorging on carrots for the last several months, a piece of dietary advice I had read in Richard A. Watson’s The Philosopher’s Diet. Apparently, consuming huge buckets of carrots a day worked. I had lost over 40 pounds over the last several months and I felt I was regaining my manhood.

I ate the carrots ravenously, cramming more and more in my mouth before I had fully chewed up the ones I had already put in my mouth. Carrie was aware that I was stuffing my face and she told me to stop, but I ignored her.

Shortly after she admonished me for eating like a pig, I felt the insane tickle of a carrot piece in my nose. I sneezed and several pounds of carrots flecks and chunks sprayed all over the windshield, my clothes, Carrie’s clothes, the air vents, the radio controls. One sneeze wasn’t enough apparently. I sneezed several more times and each time it looked like orange carrot spray coming out of a lawn mower. It was disgusting.

But also funny because I found myself laughing in a way I had never laughed before—and never since. I can only describe my laughter as both protracted and demonic, a high-pitched shriek reminiscent of that diabolical Batman villain, the Joker.

I was no longer simply laughing at the jettisoned carrots; I was now laughing at how surprised I was at the sound of my own laughter.

As my high-pitched laughter grew louder and louder, my body was convulsing and I began to swerve on the road. Carrie started saying over and over, “You’re scaring me!”

Finally, she insisted that I pull the car over and wait until I regain my composure.  There was an exit sign for a place called Garlic World. We parked, walked inside, and, apparently energized by my sneezing spree, I began to buy just about everything in the store: garlic chips, garlic jelly, garlic relish, garlic salsa, garlic ice cream. Carrie watched in disbelief as I spent over $100 on garlic products. It was as if my frenzied garlic purchases were an extension of the carrot mania.

Ten years later, I’m on another weight loss mission. My weight is down to what it was in 2002, I’m eating carrots again, and we’re planning another trip up to the Bay Area—this time with our 27-month twin daughters.

Carrie has laid down a very strict rule for this trip: Absolutely no carrots will be allowed in the car. And if I had to guess, I’d say she won’t want me to be exposed to any stimulation that might prompt me to laugh like a deranged Batman villain. 

 

 

 

When a Man Is Too Strong for His Own Good

 

 

For the last 12 years I've subjected my forearms and hands to daily torture with the Captains of Crush grippers so that I won't be dwarfed by my manly watches.

 

Today, though, my strength got the best of me as I snapped a Captains of Crush gripper into two pieces. This brand, made of thick, tempered steel, is supposed to be the toughest made in the world and by God I broke it. A good day for Man Points but a bad day for Captains of Crush. 

 

 

Trying to Buy Back Your Friends Violates the Man Code

Have you ever been to a couple’s house with your wife, got an upset stomach from nerves or the gnawing sense that the meat they served you was undercooked or contaminated or both, had to suffer the great shame and anxiety of rushing to their bathroom several times, depleted their entire stock of Costco toilet paper, later learned you clogged their toilet, found out they had to call a plumber at some late-night hour on a Sunday and that this plumber charged them double the normal cost for snaking their pipes and they could barely pay the plumber and they and they ended up being two months late on their car and mortgage payments so that their credit rating plummeted and they weren’t able to get a low interest rate on a second car they had planned on buying? And then to put the icing on the cake, this couple—who used to be good friends with your wife and you—blamed you for all their financial troubles and they no longer want to be your friend?

Happens to me all the time. My friends list is dwindling. At this rate, losing about a friend a month, next October I’ll be completely friendless.

Three years without friends, my guess is that learned helplessness will sink in at which point I will become “unfriendable.”

Desperate to ward off this curse, I recently called the couple whose plumbing I had single-handedly ruined and begged for their forgiveness, even offering to co-sign on their car loan (I have an excellent FICO score) so they could get a cheaper rate, but they didn't return my call. After my initial offer with no response, I sent them $100 gift cards for Target, iTunes, Amazon, and Home Depot, but even after all that they still haven’t called me.

Unfriendable. I had better get used to the sound of it. 

 

 

My First Memory of Male Competition

Self-promotion starts early, long before adolescence. I learned this the hard way many years ago when at five years of age I had a tree house that was in competition with another nearby tree house, one that was lorded over by Rich Drakos. Our tree houses were about twenty yards apart from one another in separate walnut trees. We lured girls into our tree houses with dolls, stuffed animals, sweets, anything that would get their attention.

One afternoon, I tried to persuade Patty Wilson to climb up my tree by dangling a box of raisins, tied to a long string, in front of her face. I assured her the wood slats nailed to the tree trunk were secure enough for her to climb. She made her way up the trunk, tentatively grabbing each plank, her determined face grimacing, as I eagerly awaited her.

Always wanting to outdo me, Rich popped his head out of a leafy cluster and, holding a box of Captain Kangaroo Cookies, he told Patty to forget about my “sad little raisins” and to come join him for a real treat. His tree house was vastly superior to mine. Bigger, lusher, sturdier, it was more elaborately decorated with stuffed animals and lollipops, which hung from nearby limbs. It was quite obvious to me that Patty would not settle for my wrinkled little raisins when what she could be enjoying were delicious cookies, the very same sweets the ruddy-jowled Captain Kangaroo and his side-kick Mr. Green Jeans gorged on.

It was my first opportunity to see the power of TV-generated hype. Captain Kangaroo Cookies were promoted to the child demographic in a way raisins were not. So naturally Patty, upon hearing Rich’s scintillating offer, stopped half-way up my tree and greedily eyed Rich’s cookies as if they were gold bullion. She then gave a little snarl of contempt at my raisins before descending my tree, skipping to Rich’s tree house and climbing its little wood slats like a pro. Shortly after, she and Rich got cozy and feasted on their double-fudge, cream-centered cookie sandwiches. When they were done eating, they licked their lips and gloated at me, a lone loser, stuck with my pathetic little box of raisins.
 
As I watched them nestle together, I realized that Rich’s tree house was perched higher than mine and cast a dark shadow over me so that I felt chilled in the shade of my relatively small hovel. Inconsolable, I curled up in the fetal position and cried myself to sleep, only to be awakened hours later when my body was covered by red fire ants that, presumably attracted to the raisins, had swarmed my perch. My entire body felt like it had been lashed by stinging nettles and I ran to my apartment where my mother drowned the red ants, dozens still crawling over my body, by giving me a scalding bath.

As I nursed my welts, I looked at my pain as indicative of the anguish that comes from losing a girl to another male whose powers are vastly superior to mine.

Why God Gives Teenagers Pimples

I was six years old. My father and I were in our apartment living room in San Jose, California, watching Green Acres. More interested in space travel than I was in the clash between Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor’s personally differences, I asked my father how far planet Earth was from the sun. Without missing a beat, my father continued staring at the television and answered 93,000,000 miles. I was stunned by his knowledge. I then asked him how he knew this.

He answered, “Because I’m your father. And fathers know everything.”

I was in awe of my father’s power and felt compelled to ask him a question every time I felt perplexed by some puzzling situation. That puzzling situation occurred the next day when my father took me to the grand opening of a Taco Bell, which was considered exotic for featuring “Mexican” food. You have to remember this is when ketchup was the number one table condiment, long before it was taken over by salsa in the early 1990s (a factoid presented on NPR, which was later reiterated by George Costanza on Seinfeld).

The perplexing situation I faced was the teenagers behind the Taco Bell counter. They all had splotches on their oily faces, this being the era before antibiotics were prescribed by dermatologists and Oxy10 was readily available at drug stores.

I asked my father what those unsightly bumps were on the employees’ faces. He told me they were called pimples. I then asked my father why these young people behind the counter had to suffer this repelling condition. Without missing a beat, my father said, “Aristotle tells us that God gives teenagers pimples to teach them humility.”

This one sentence amazed me. Number one, my father was showing that he was well versed in Aristotle who I vaguely understood to be a famous philosopher that only smart people would know about. Number two, the idea that God had to teach teenagers humility suggested that the adolescent years were wrought with egregious personality defects that required some kind of divine corrective.

Overcome with anxiety, I looked up at my father and said, “Dad, someday will God give me pimples?”

He furrowed his brow pensively and said, “I don’t know, son. It all depends.”

I know what he meant by his portentous demeanor. If I became arrogant during adolescence, God would send a plague of pimples upon me. But if I was polite and humble, I might be spared.

In the mid 1970s during my sophomore year in high school, I broke out with a bad case of acne requiring antibiotics. At the time I was an oversized bodybuilder who had developed a case of chest-thumping braggadocio to conceal my insecurities.

Since that time, I’ve combed through the works of Aristotle and have never found reference to pimples and their connection to teenage arrogance. But I’m sure that Aristotle had to have said it because, after all, my father quoted him, and as my father said during an episode of Green Acres, fathers know everything.

Living in the Shadows of Paul McCartney

 

I used to know a Bakersfield man, a Paul McCartney look-alike, who was fated to live in the shadow of the great celebrity. He had the same nose, mouth, chin, ruddy jowls, sad-shaped eyes, and arched brows. He has the same hair, which he kept groomed the way McCartney did in the 1970s and 1980s, long in the back and feathered in the front.

However, Bakersfield McCartney was a tad shorter, stockier, and most noticeably had acne scars peppered on his cheeks. I first noticed him “trolling” himself at clubs, standing by himself in his black sport jacket, his “Beatles jacket,” and patiently waiting for an attractive woman to approach him and “break the ice” by commenting on how much he looked like Paul McCartney, as thousands of past successes had taught him. At clubs he would wear a stupid half-grin since his brain didn’t really have to be active in any sense as he simply used his resemblance as bait. The whole pick-up sequence must have been a rote, perfunctory affair.

Perhaps his biggest challenge was trying to show that his heart hadn’t become too calloused by this routine and that the woman fawning all over him was one of a few to make the brilliantly observant connection between him and the real Paul McCartney.

I later saw Bakersfield McCartney at my health club, where he had the same dumb half-grin on his face. His expression betrayed a certain expectancy, as if he knew it was only a matter of minutes before an attractive woman approached him and commented on his celebrity resemblance, a precursor to greater pleasures ahead.

Not surprisingly, I later found out that Bakersfield McCartney was a salesman—of cars and cell phones mostly—and that his resemblance worked to his advantage in the sales arena. All he had to do when people gawked over his resemblance to the great Beatles legend was act coy and “Ah-shucks,” and he could remain effective in the realm of sales—whether it be cars, cell phones, or, at the clubs, himself.

You could tell by looking over his life that he had no real challenges other than feigning good-natured surprise when the 99% of people he met commented on his striking resemblance to Paul McCartney. Otherwise, he was content to live in the shadows of the Liverpool crooner. Last I heard, he had never married, had never carried a long relationship, had never really put much effort in anything he did at all. He was a man content to live off a one-note gimmick and he had no shame for being so easily satisfied. Lacking any rigorous struggles to become a real person, he had become somewhat of a cipher, a hollow man with nothing to say about anything. His mind was simply full of the expectations of receiving “goodies”—accolades, sexual attention, strangers’ obsequiousness as they become elated in the presence of a mock celebrity.

His life lost its cheap glory in middle-age when his facial features distorted—bigger ears and nose, a reconfiguration of jowls and chin—so as to significantly obscure his face so that he no longer looked like the Beatles legend.  With no more celebrity connection, his posse of friends and lovers abandoned him and his sales dwindled. Sullen and bitter, he moved back with his mother, a widow, where he now resides. I imagine him now introverted and chubby from a sedentary lifestyle, his bedroom cluttered with Beatles souvenirs, as he languishes in his bedroom where he daydreams of his past glory.

Life Is What Happens While You're Waiting for the Grand Moments That Never Come

I didn’t become the Dog Man of Grant Avenue through conscious effort. It happened gradually without my noticing it. At first I walked one neighbor’s dog, a yellow lab, a six-month-old puppy named Simba; then another, a pit-bull terrier mix named Darcy; then another, a golden lab named Gordo; and another, a chocolate lab named Spivey. This does not include my own dog Gretchen, a Finnish Spitz, who can’t walk far distances because of her allergies. Exposure to grass and pollen sends her into a fit of sneezing and makes her eyes water. But counting Gretchen, I’m walking five dogs around the neighborhood.

Part of my motive is the need to keep my weight down. I am forty-seven years old, a lifetime practitioner of daily exercise but also a voracious eater and I’ve decided to help my neighbors out with their dog walking as a substitute for buying a cardio machine. I’m spending about 45-60 minutes a day walking various dogs, depending on whose needs are the greatest, and that’s about the amount of time I’d be exercising if I purchased a treadmill or a stationary exercise bike. So by walking the dogs, I don’t have to invest in an ugly cardio machine, have it take up valuable space in my modest 1,500 square-foot home, or worry about the machine’s maintenance. I’m getting comparable exercise from the dog walking and I’m doing a good deed, which connects me deeper to my immediate community.

But to tell you the truth, my motives go deeper than the burning of calories. I have a soft spot for dogs and when I see that my neighbors are gone for huge stretches, sometimes over ten hours, and I know their dogs, pack animals, are suffering the agony of loneliness evidenced by the cries in their backyards, I feel morally compelled to give them a walk. 

As I said before, the process of becoming the Dog Man did not happen overnight. It was incremental. I seemed to pick up a new dog, one at time. A neighbor dog owner would half joke watching me walk another neighbor’s dog, “After you’re done, my dog could sure use a walk.” I’d always tell myself I couldn’t add another dog to the list. But hearing the dog whining or whimpering next door compelled me to get out of the house and walk the dog around the block.

Becoming the Dog Man has become my life. But it’s not what I aspired to be. My formidable ego had grander designs. I wanted to be a writer of best-selling books that captured the zeitgeist of his generation, the kind of celebrity author who is sought out for his reliably scintillating radio interviews. Sometimes when I walk a dog, I’ll have an imaginary interview about the great success of my latest book with Larry Mantle, the talk show host from a the local radio NPR program KPCC. In this imaginary interview, Mr. Mantle says, “Did you ever imagine your book taking off the way it did?” And humbly, I say, “Not at all, Larry. You see, I’ve never really considered myself a book author. I’m a writer, yes, but a wind-sprinter, well suited for short bursts, the kind of explosive writings you might find on my blog, but I’m not built for the long drawn-out landscapes of book-length manuscripts.” At which time, Mantle says, “So you don’t plan on writing another book?” I answer that another book would have to be born from the necessity of catharsis, but that I will not simply write a book to appease my publisher. 

During these dog walks, I am not merely a best-selling author. I am also a celebrity DJ on another local NPR station, KCRW. I have a Sunday morning music show from 8-10. The show is called “This Morning Is Not Hectic” and it features my superior musical tastes in underground dream pop. The show becomes an unexpected hit and becomes the number-one rated show in its time slot. The KCRW music director Jason Bentley interviews me on his own weekday morning music show“Morning Becomes Eclectic” and at one point in the interview he asks me if I ever expected my show to become as successful has it is and I am genuinely humble, flummoxed, without any kind of explanation for my success. I shrug my shoulders and say, “I’m simply playing the music that I love and for whatever reason it resonates with the audience.”

The reality of course is that I am not a best-selling author doing radio interviews for KPCC. Nor am I a celebrity DJ shocking Los Angeles with my surprise blockbuster radio show for KCRW.  The blunt truth of it is I am the Dog Man of Grant Avenue and I spend a lot of my time picking up dog shit.

The huge chasm between the grand moments I dream about and the reality of who I am reminds me of somethingLester Freamon, a cop from the HBO show The Wire, says to his fellow cop Jimmy McNulty. He explains that McNulty is greatly mistaken if he thinks he can define his life by grand moments.  Freamon says these moments of exaltation that we spend our time dreaming about are not what life really is. What is real life then? Life is “the shit that happens while you're waiting for moments that never come.”

Those grand moments featuring myself on KPCC and KCRW are not forthcoming. But there is a dog crying in a nearby backyard and I am getting my leash, my baseball cap, my sunglasses, my portable radio, and some plastic bags.