MEN TALKING

Five years ago, a friend invited me on a guys trip to a Colorado mountain town. I didn’t answer right away. I’d never gone on a proper Guys Trip, and in fact had avoided doing so, just as I’d avoided poker nights, bachelor parties, and the like. I told myself I’d avoided these spaces because I didn’t want to do what I figured men did there—trade facts and tall tales, talk shit about women and to each other—and while this was true, it was also true that I was scared. Scared I wouldn’t measure up. Scared I’d be a boy among men. Scared that, given my introversion, my shyness, my tendency toward social claustrophobia, I’d be overwhelmed by four days in the company of five men.

I said yes.

We met up at the airport, then headed to a brewery. At that brewery, and later at our rental, the other guys, most of whom who were married with children, groused about being married with children. They talked about their crazy wives and crazy kids, and they reminisced about the simple days when they just partied and fucked bitches, and they talked shit about each other and me. They were kidding, they said, when they saw I wasn’t laughing. I felt like a miser for not laughing. For not making eye contact. For hiding in the kitchen, making tortillas, wondering what it’d cost to change my flight. 

Over the next few days, we hiked the foothills, and we tubed a frigid river, and we drank whiskey in a cavernous barn. Our conversations were often stimulating—one guy had written a book on social justice pedagogy, another practiced sustainable ranching, they all were well-read, well-spoken—and I particularly enjoyed our one-on-one conversations, during which we shared about relationships and mental health, told stories that wouldn’t get laughs from the group but were important all the same. Our group outings, though, weren’t so enjoyable. One night, we were out at dinner, and two of the guys flirted with our waitress and talked about her ass and tits when she was maybe not quite out of earshot, and I almost said something, but I felt too small, so I just sulked and hoped my sulking would inspire them to stop. Another night, everyone was smoking cigars, and I was abstaining because cigars make me sick, and the guys asked questions about my partner and her body and the things I did with it, and I murmured that I didn’t want to talk about her like that and then I took a walk and called my partner and told her how confused I was and she asked what I was going to do and I didn’t have an answer.

Not long after I got home, I went to therapy. I told my therapist about the trip, and I chastised myself for not intervening, pushing back, as a better man might have, and I lamented that it probably would’ve backfired anyway, because the other guys would’ve just made fun of me and then I would’ve put my thumb in my mouth and filled my diaper and cried until someone took care of me.  

When I’d wrapped up my monologue, my therapist sat back in her chair. She raised an eyebrow. Smiled. She clearly thought there was more I could say, and I wanted to be the kind of man who’d say it, so I kept talking, flailing about, searching for the words that would make her lean forward and nod and say bingo and maybe give me a gold star. But she just kept sitting there, smiling, reclining.

After I’d talked myself out, and after a long silence, my therapist cocked her head and asked, “What if you didn’t have to avoid guys trips to feel better?” 

I nodded, like I understood. I didn’t understand.

She leaned forward, smiled her warmest smile. She asked if maybe I was focusing too much on intervention. Had I ever considered, she asked, just being how I wanted to be on a guys trip? 

I nodded, like I understood. I didn’t understand.

For years, I didn’t understand.

Recently, though, I read an essay by a man who’d offered to throw a bachelor party for his best friend. He wanted to avoid the sexist, heteronormative tropes of most bachelor parties—hiring a stripper, mainly—so he talked with the men who’d be attending, asked what they thought a bachelor party—and more generally a gathering of straight men—was really about. The men all said it was about celebrating the groom-to-be, and also about connecting with each other, and being around sexy women made connection easier because it helped them talk about vulnerable things without quite being vulnerable. So this guy, on the night of the party, set out to coax the rest of the men toward being vulnerable, sans sexy women. A few beers in, he just came out and asked them, “What makes you feel sexy?” At first, the men balked, joked, deflected. But eventually, one of them answered. Then they all did. They kept talking about their pleasures and passions and fears late into the night.

It’s been five years since that guys trip. I haven’t yet been invited on another one. If I do get another invite, though, I hope I’ll say yes. I hope that, if a guy asks again about my partner and her body and my body, I’ll slow down, think about what his question could mean, what I’d like it to mean. I hope I’ll tell him how I feel about my partner’s body, and how her body makes my body feel, and how I make my own body feel. I hope I’ll find a way to stop sulking, start answering and asking.

“What makes you feel sexy?” I’ll ask.

“What makes you feel?” I’ll ask.

“What makes you?”

HAVE YOU EVER HEARD OF A GUY NAMED ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER

I published my writing for the first time when I was nine years old. It was an op-ed of sorts, in Kid News, the kids’ section of the Chicago Tribune, to which my parents had a subscription. 

The piece in question was a response to a letter written by a girl whose name I can’t remember. In her letter, she’d shared why she loved being a girl, and why she was tired of girls being treated as lesser than boys. Girls, she said, were smarter and stronger and more flexible. Girls were the best.

I think it was this last bit, about girls’ flexibility, that really got to me. I’m not sure why. Nor am I sure why my mother, who read every word of what I wrote, allowed me to put my writing in an envelope and then put a stamp on that envelope and then put that stamped envelope in a mailbox. I don’t remember my mother having any sort of teachable-moment conversation about my writing. I only remember the glee of opening up Kid News, a few weeks later, and seeing my name, my words, me.

Maybe I’m bad at research, maybe the Tribune mercy-killed my words. Whatever the case, I can’t find my letter online, and my folks didn’t save the hard copy. So I’m working from memory here. I don’t recall how I refuted her assertion that girls are smarter, but I do know that, in reply to the bit about strength, I asked if she’d ever heard of a guy named Arnold Schwarzenegger. And then I went on to say that, while girls probably were more flexible, that only mattered in gymnastics, so who cares? 

Thirty-two years later, what really bothers me—more than my misreading of strength and flexibility, more than my belief that being like Arnold Schwarzenegger was a good thing, more, even, than my folks’ decision to let me show my preteen ass to untold thousands of readers—what bothers me is that I wrote the letter in the first place. A nine-year-old boy, already learning to play the victim.