by Dawn Davies
Because the medial sides of his eyebrows tilted up and saluted each other with amusement when I vigorously described the color, consistency, and value of the copious collegiate diarrhea from which I was suffering. This diarrhea had dehydrated me so much that I fainted and shat my shorts, and still I sat there on that gurney at three A.M. trying to look pretty. And because his skin looked like biscuits and gravy in the fluorescent lights, but his shoulders rolled muscularly under his stained white coat. And because, although he admitted to sleeping only four hours every other day, he still had a bruise on his cheek from slam dancing at a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert. I know this because I am the kind of person to ask strangers personal questions such as, “What’s with the crutches?” or “How did you get that bruise on your face?” or “Do you date patients?”
DOUGLASS, FREDERICK
Because his upper lip was shaped like a crossbow, and because he was an abolitionist, and because suffrage. What a badass to be one of the first men to go for that when no one else was touching it with a ten-foot pole. I would have brushed his coats, blued his shirts, oiled his head, massaged his scalp, and rubbed the worried furrow in his brow away, and loved him till death did we part. And taken it out in trade.
FEYNMAN, RICHARD
I had a dream once that I was a reincarnation of his first wife, Arline. After I woke, I believed it for ten, fifteen minutes, preparing breakfast wearing nothing but my aura, imagining sending him coded letters, rubbing my pinkie in the curve of his philtrum, quieting the clammy, busy flutter of his hands. Thinking of him before I died of TB, stopping my bedside clock at 9:21 P.M., leaving him something to puzzle over. Waiting many years to reincarnate into the body of a tall, anxious overthinker with both an irrational fear of catching tuberculosis (See also Chekhov, Anton, and Holliday, Doc) and an unsung desire to build an emergency nuclear bunker in my backyard. I would have this man’s baby just so I could raise a child who would understand theoretical physics.
GILMOUR, DAVID
He owned me the first time I heard the second guitar solo from Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb.” Plus, I’m not scared of a little belly. It’s what happens when men who don’t work out get older and keep eating the carbs and don’t stay on top of their T. Also, men should not worry about going bald. If they do something very well—run a business, parent their children, make decisions, play the guitar, stage sieges against governments trying to take away their land, or perform cunnilingus—it is possible to be masterful with a crowning glory of forehead. See also Hackman, Gene, and Levin, Tony.
GOLDBLUM, JEFF
Both before and after The Fly, because I am equal opportunity nerdist and muscle slut, though I must share some concern about this one’s potential chat factor. Sometimes I don’t need them to talk. I just want them to sit there and look pretty. I think this one would be interesting, at least at first; the kind of interesting where you lose yourself for hours, philosophizing far into the night, the Bob Marley playlist on repeat, even though your eyes are watering from exhaustion and your stomach is empty and the birds are starting to sing in the trees and the sky is getting light, and you realize that, in order to shut him up, there is nothing to do but have another bit of how’s your father in hopes that he will fall asleep.
GOLDMAN, MR., PRIVATE ROOM, MED-SURG UNIT, MT. AUBURN HOSPITAL, CAMBRIDGE, MA
Because he was eighty-eight years old with muscles and had a well-kept thirty-eight-year-old wife who worshipped him, and because his eyes were ice blue and sparkled with humorous things unsaid and he was vital as all get-out. Don’t ever let a few wrinkles and a sixty-year age gap set back your opinion of someone. He had prostate cancer (See also Zappa, Frank), which he said was less likely to kill him than boredom, and he also had insomnia. Sometimes during night shifts, after my work was done, I would sneak into his room and pull up a chair and he would talk, mostly about crazy things he had done in his life, speaking without wistfulness or regret. He had been a wartime soldier, then a merchant marine. He had made and lost and remade three fortunes. Once in a while I would put a blanket down on the floor and he would do push-ups. He told me once, “If I were single, I would snap you up.” “But I’m half a foot taller than you,” I said, to which he replied, “I like a big girl.” See also Kravitz, Lenny.
HACKMAN, GENE
Old enough to be my father or grandfather in certain cultures. So what? This list defies chronology and exists as a fantasy where both the man and I would meet in the prospective primes of our lives. And because older guys are fine as long as they can still alpha. And because Gene Hackman, though technically a 4.2 out of 10 on the GHF scale, due to an imbalance of the facial features, is overall a 9.5, largely owing to his je ne sais sex quoi—that unnamable thing that makes a guy with an average face and zero provable gym hours still extremely f%*kable.
HAMM, JON
Because a primal part of my hindbrain can name the ways in which his day-old beard growth would make my cheeks sting, and sometimes, when I’m having a bad day, I scroll through pictures of him on the Internet and it’s like rolling up a nice, sticky, fat marijuana cigarette. I can almost smell him, though who am I kidding? I don’t smoke. If I did, I wouldn’t be calling it a “marijuana cigarette.”
HOLLIDAY, DOC
Micoplasmically risky. Dusty. Potentially epic, yet stifling experience, likely above a noisy saloon, or in the storage room of his dental office. Again, no lip kissing the lungers (See also Chekhov, Anton), but you aren’t required to kiss in order to knock the boots.
HOWARD, TIM
Because goalie. And because no other explanation is needed. Just watch the soccer.
HURT, WILLIAM
Because he wouldn’t need to use words to tell me what he wants. He could just use eyebrows (See also Doctor, First-Year Resident), and perhaps sign language, though when I watched Children of a Lesser God forty-two times in high school, I wasn’t watching it for the sign language. I was watching it for that scene where he takes off his shirt.
IRVING, JOHN
Because Irving has a humorous way of applying the exclamation mark! And because sometimes—though not often—writers interest me. Generally, writers don’t spend their days logging or boxing or hiking, but writing, for hours at a time, their asses spreading slowly over the years, like glacial goo, to envelop their desk chairs. Their bodies are often grublike, soft, and thick in the middle, and even the men are larger at the hips than at the shoulders. And we all know that reduced firing of the muscles reduces HGH, which can affect testosterone levels and potential alpha drive. And I am not a fan of soft keyboard hands on men. But John Irving works out to offset this! He lifts weights! Lifting weights gives you rough hands. So does pounding away on an old-fashioned typewriter, which I imagine he does. And he writes autobiographically in his earlier novels so I feel like I know him (See also Bateman, Jason). Examples: An easy Google search shows that he wrestled in college, like some of his characters (See also The Redhead in My Neighborhood), and that his borderline protagonist, Trumper, in The Water-Method Man was at a Midwestern college in Iowa (read: Iowa MFA program where Irving attended!), finishing an advanced degree in literature (read: MFA in Creative Writing, which Irving obtained!). Trumper has a fling with a dainty student named Lydia, who wears “Pretty Piece Underthings,” which I imagine I might have worn in a different life, at a different age, had I been short enough to have ever been a coquette (See also My Husband). John Irving also pays the kind of inner attention to detail that I do, so perhaps conversation, or lack thereof, would be ideal, with each of us spending hours in silence, a nearly constant desire of mine, and meeting up in the evening for a light meal and some nookie. Admittedly, I often fall prey to either the potentially false persona, or the lip shape, which, again, speaks to my basic, predictable nature.
JAMES, LEBRON
Yes, all day long, but must use constant condom, in case he even sneezed in my direction. Any potential children created would be too freakishly tall to survive, though I ima
gine his big hands would have a nice, strong grip. On my wrists. Or my ponytail. See also Cena, John.
JONES, TOMMY LEE
Because I like a man with acne scars on his face and because He. Doesn’t. Bargain. If I tell you the number of times I have watched that scene from The Fugitive, you would think something is wrong with me. He is also the kind of actor you think shows his true self in the roles he plays so it’s easy to imagine what it’s like to have coffee and bacon with him in the morning, or wait with him in an airport, or inspect with him a fence line on a ranch. See also Bateman, Jason.
KRAVITZ, LENNY
I’m not afraid of a short man. Horizontality: the great equalizer. See also Goldman, Mr.
KLEIN, FELIX
Because I, too, am interested in the interface between math and physics, but in an obtuse, borderline-average-IQ way. What he liked, I’d like, because beard. And because big thinkers make me want to have their babies. See also Feynman, Richard, and My Husband.
LEVIN, TONY
I once got six-degrees-of-separation close with Tony Levin, as my then-husband worked with someone who knew him. He sent me a card right before the birth of my first daughter, when I was filled up with another man’s baby and also married, and also not hot. The card said, “Have a nice baby. Tony Levin.” It wasn’t enough. If I were given a get-out-of-jail-free pass for one night I would use it on Tony Levin.
MY HUSBAND WHEN WE WERE YOUNG
Chronologically, it is possible that he could have been my high school math teacher. If he started teaching at twenty-two while I was a high school senior at seventeen, we could have broken the law in the Xerox room or the backseat of his car, or a dinky motel near the highway, even though he was married at the time. I would have been the kind of girl to fall madly for him, doodle his name in my notes, look up his phone number in the phone book, and call at night, hanging up when either he or his wife answered, then make myself sick crying about him when I went away to college. I would have been his Lydia Kindle (See also Irving, John!). Alas, we didn’t meet until years later, when I was a grown-a$$ woman and he was divorced and no longer teaching math.
ONE OF MY NAMELESS BOSSES
Because oddly hot. High intellectual prey drive, though. He was curious about everything and that was sexy. So were his eyes, which were small and both dark and bright at the same time, and his lips curled up on the sides as if he knew a secret about what you looked like naked. We fought all the time and I didn’t like him as a person because he was a tool. We once had a three-day argument about whether the comma should go inside the quotes or outside. His rationale (for everything) was that he went to Oxford for graduate school and that’s how they did it in England. I still would have pounded the duck with him, probably in his office, if we had both been certain kinds of people, which we weren’t. Don’t $h*t where you eat and all that.
PRIMA, LOUIS
Because he sang loose and funny and slid his notes and always hit them when you thought he wouldn’t, and because he had a good sense of syncopation, and you’d think, after the show is done, he would have a couple of drinks and then slay you speechless with him stripped down to his wifebeater, his lips still swollen from playing his trumpet, and you on your belly and grabbing the iron bedstead in his French Quarter rental. He’d talk, too, and ask you what you liked, or better, tell you what you liked. He died before I was born, and as such, deserves a special time travel category. See also Bull, Sitting; Douglass, Frederick; Holliday, Doc; Klein, Felix; Rorschach, Hermann; Tesla, Nikola; and X, Malcolm.
THE REDHEAD IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD
Because redhead. And because freckles all over. And because he was a gentleman. He was leaving for college when I was an incoming high school freshman, so the age difference would have been alarmingly illegal, but we had a nice, platonic summer of us listening to music in his bedroom and me taking long walks around the neighborhood hoping to catch him washing his car in his cutoffs. He had meaty forearms and thick hands and fingers, and a slightly lupine slope to his shoulders, likely because he was a wrestler, and I like wrestlers. See also Cena, John, and Irving, John.
REZNOR, TRENT
All day every day at any point in time.
RORSCHACH, HERMANN
Because every time I take a Rorschach test I see things so dirty I scare myself. I’m betting he did, too.
STUDENT, UNDERGRAD ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY CLASS, UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
Because he was extremely competitive and we were neck and neck for the highest grade in our class of several hundred, and if you think I would have gotten a 99.6 as my final grade on my own, you are nuts. I’m not the kind of person who needs a 99.6. A 94 or 95 is fine in most instances. I studied extra hard for this class because it gave us something to talk about, and because trying to beat his scores on tests and quizzes was what I did instead of f%*king him. Sometimes I beat him and sometimes he beat me, which is kind of a metaphor for how repeated rolls in the hay go. We developed an intimate semester-long camaraderie that confused me, as he was twenty years old and lived in a trailer park with his eighteen-year-old wife, who wasn’t even in college and who worked as a checker at a grocery store and read gossip magazines. The logical end to that life bomb is so clearly this: He should have been with me, his intellectual and athletic equal, and not her. Incidentally, this man had a nose so big you could hang a nightgown off it, but he had the body of a triathlete because he was a triathlete. When we sat together in lecture, sometimes his flexor digitorum profundus would brush my flexor carpi ulnaris and I would not be able to concentrate. There were no hairs on this arm. Just smooth sheets of skin covering his muscles, all of which I could name by heart.
TEBOW, TIM
I’m sorry but I can’t help it. I keep trying to delete him from this list out of respect for his purity, but my computer keeps putting him back on, as if by some sort of sexual autocorrect. See also Carson, Ben.
TESLA, NIKOLA
Because I would f%*k him in his laboratory with the power on. Fully dressed, him in a linen summer suit, and me in enough petticoats to choke a chicken, bent over a desk or a chair, metal hairpins scattered on the floor, my updo ruined to where anyone on the street would know what I had just been up to when I later walked outside. And because he is a mechanical engineer and I like watching guys work with tools and I am literally unable to apologize for it. See also My Husband.
VAN HALEN, ALEX
An extraordinary drummer and I am interested in extraordinary drummers. If this were an unabridged list it would contain perhaps fifteen or twenty drummers, even though a list that long, especially one full of drummers, would run the risk of making me look like a slut. Alas and alackaday, to Tina Fey’s earnest prayer for her daughter to be the drummer so she need not lie with drummers, I must reply the following: What can I say? Sometimes you just want to lie with the drummer.
VAN HALEN, EDDIE
I know. Brothers. Something wrong with this, but I am attracted to expertise, especially in the areas of the hard sciences, music, and athletics, and also to men who have oddly shaped lips. (See also Douglass, Frederick, and Van Halen, Alex.) I would be the kind of person to choose one brother over the other and not look back, because I am an extremely loyal person, if a little Walter Sex Mittyish in my mind, but yes to this brother, as well, though there is likely a significant size discrepancy. See also Cheadle, Don.
WHITE, JACK
Because he holds the neck of his guitar like a boss, and because I once drove an extra hour by accident—nearly to Homestead, Florida—instead of getting off at my exit in Miami because I was listening to Blunderbuss. I think part of why women like musicians is we pretend to believe that the unchecked passion they display in their lyrics or while playing onstage is a representation of how they would act in a relationship, even though we know this cannot actually be true. They forget to flush like everybody else, they get depressed, they lock themselves up in studios for hours, they spend weeks or months alone with other musicians, they go o
n tour and sleep with copious numbers of other women. We don’t fall in love with them, we fall in love with what they create. It’s a farcical crush train from which it is difficult to disembark while young. Still: Jack White six ways to Sunday.
WILDER, ALMANZO
There is suggestion of some sort of genetic defect here, perhaps MTHFR, because he and his wife, Laura Ingalls Wilder, my favorite childhood author, didn’t produce very strong children, and he developed an unknown illness that he never quite recovered from, but that never fazed me. (See also Chekhov, Anton, and Holliday, Doc.) The bottom line is that he worked hard and was extremely good-looking. And he married a writer. I’m a writer.
WILLIAMS, PHARRELL
Because lips in “Money Maker,” though things between us might go the way of poor Don Cheadle. See also Cheadle, Don.
WINTERS, DICK
Because war hero, though this is not necessarily why I like him. (See also Yeager, Chuck.) I like him because cheekbones, and because he did a “French wash” with ice water and a razor every day during that awful winter in Bastogne.
X, MALCOLM
I like a guy with glasses and an overbite. I would make him leave the glasses on.
YEAGER, CHUCK
Because flight suit. And war hero, and balls the size of coconuts for breaking the sound barrier as a test pilot, but mostly flight suit.
ZAPPA, FRANK
As with many of the men on this list, this one is much older than me (See also Hackman, Gene), but because ink-black mustache, and because he sweated on my forearm at a show once where I had front-row seats. I’m not the kind of creeper who refuses to wash after getting sweated on by a famous person. I don’t ask for autographs, and I don’t get starstruck. I just wiped the sweat away, but it was cool, because he looked at me like he noticed he had dropped some sweat on me, which shows both a kindness and a sense of humor. I don’t know how Frank Zappa and I would have gotten on, but I know that I would have made sure he ejaculated far more than the twenty-one times per month needed to reduce his prostate cancer risk by thirty-three percent.
