Navel Gazing

by Michael Ian Black

  Chapter Eight

  I do not know why my fantasy self so closely resembles a Hitler Youth leader

  People who know me probably assume I have always been sedentary because I wear my laziness like a pair of bespoke footy pajamas. But I am actually a person of above-average hand-eye coordination, fleet of foot, handy with a rack of Scrabble tiles. I am good at catching any manner of spheroid object thrown in my direction. When pressed, I can swing a softball bat with moderate aptitude. And while it is true that I possess the upper-body strength of an anemic tween, my calves are naturally toned, and I can still give my daughter regular piggyback rides with only minimal back pain. In short, I am woeful but not yet wretched.

  My body mass still hovers in the “normal” range, but I know better. That new glob of goop hugging my middle—the one that has, in recent years, occasionally caused me to utter those awful words “Can you let it out a little” to various costume designers working on various television shows—is a harbinger of fat to come, the first questionable resident in what used to be a decent neighborhood. I have a photograph of myself from when I was about twenty-three. My shirt is unbuttoned and, if I look closely, I can make out abs. Lots of them, stacked atop each other like croquet balls. But now those abs are hidden away, hibernating in a pillow fort constructed from pizza and buffalo wings.

  Even when I was twenty-three, though, I felt distraught over my physical appearance: unhappy that I was too thin but simultaneously terrified to gain any weight. It’s distressing to never feel good about how you look or to view your own appearance in graduated shades of “not bad.” Which is weird, because I know myself to be a not-unattractive person. In fact, aside from all of my hideous deformities, I believe myself to be a fine-looking young man.

  (Although I have already established that, from an actuarial standpoint, I am no longer young and am not even technically middle-aged, for the purposes of my already delicate self-image, it is important that I maintain the fiction of remaining a “young man.”)

  What’s odd, though, is that the person I believe myself to be does not resemble the actual me at all. I don’t just mean age. I mean, the person I see in my head when I think “me” doesn’t much look like the me I see when I glance at a mirror. Does everybody have some other person who resides in their brain, some fantasy avatar? Well, I do. He is six feet tall, rangy, and lantern-jawed. His hair is the color of sand after a rainstorm. Basically, he looks like a Winklevoss twin. But his last name cannot be Winklevoss because that sounds like the name of one of Tinker Bell’s friends. Besides, I am not so deranged that I would actually give my idealized vision of myself a name. But if I did, it would be Bruce Whitehall.

  I do not know why my fantasy self so closely resembles a Hitler Youth leader.

  Regardless, Bruce Whitehall has a swimmer’s body: long, lean, broad at the shoulders, narrow at the waist. It is the kind of body I could perhaps achieve through hundreds of hours spent swimming laps in a pool, a task complicated only by the fact that I hate swimming. Swimming is horrible. It’s the only activity I can think of that is exhausting, boring, and life-threatening all at the same time.

  There is an excellent reason our species evolved from the water, not toward it. The reason is that it sucks being in any body of water that is not ninety-five degrees, bubbling, and in a boutique spa. Water is meant to be drunk, splashed upon bikini models like my best friend Chrissy Teigen, and frolicked in for no more than seven minutes at a time. The thought of voluntarily dredging one’s body through endless laps in a chlorinated swimming pool is horrifying.

  When I was a child, Mom forced Eric and me to take lessons at the local YMCA. These lessons followed the standard Red Cross program, which ranks swimming ability according to a system of ever more deadly fish, from “guppy” all the way up to “laser shark.” Although I did eventually learn to survive in the water, I don’t think I ever progressed much beyond “anchovy.” My primary memories from those sessions are of cold water and cold changing rooms. All told, I probably got far more exercise from shivering than from swimming.

  My own children seem much more at ease in the water. We gave them swim lessons, too, when they were younger, applying the same logic that Mom assuredly applied to us: Teaching your children how to survive in water is the best way of ensuring that you don’t have to pay attention to them when they are near water. I know from firsthand experience how important this can be.

  One of the most terrifying moments of my life occurred at a neighbor’s pool party. There were probably fifty or sixty people there, most of them in the water or on the pool deck. Lots of kids. Too many kids to keep track of, really. Ruthie was about two at the time, playing at the edge of the pool by herself. I sat ten or fifteen yards away, my eyes sort of on her and sort of checking out how the local ladies looked in swimwear. As I dawdled on the pool deck sipping a beverage and ogling the neighbors, I happened to glance toward my daughter just as she toppled into the water. One moment she was watching the wake her pointer finger made as she dragged it through the water, the next she was fully underwater with barely a splash as evidence that she had ever been there at all. I sat far enough away to see that nobody else even noticed her go in. Thank goodness I have crippling social anxiety or I might have been talking to somebody instead of watching my daughter. I jumped in (shirt on because I feel bad about my chest) and hauled her, sobbing and choking, from the water. Total elapsed time: less than five seconds. Am I a hero? Sure, but that’s not the point. The point is that children are stupid and parents need to give them every opportunity to survive their own stupidity.

  So, off and on for about two years, we drove our kids to the local pool every Saturday morning for the same Red Cross lessons I endured as a child. I watched them progress from dunking their faces in the water, to jumping in without crying, to performing credible freestyle strokes, to glissading along the length of the pool. When the lessons ended, the kids were competent, happy laser sharks. My son, in particular, is a good swimmer, which I admire, although that admiration will turn quickly to seething resentment should he emerge from puberty with a Bruce Whitehall–esque build.

  I knew that if I wanted to get into shape, swimming was not the answer for me. All exercise books recommend that anybody looking to improve their physical fitness should find an exercise or sport they enjoy. Never answered is the question, “What if you don’t enjoy any exercise or sport?”

  In my case, I could think of no physical activity that I was excited about enough to perform on a regular basis, which makes sense, because if such an activity existed I would already be doing it. I do enjoy playing poker but no matter how hard I tried, I could not quite convince myself that sitting, unmoving, at a card table for untold hours at a time counted as a sport.

  Across the street from my house is a park boasting endless miles of mountain biking trails, apparently the best in the state. On weekends, scores of fit-looking dads unpack big-wheeled mountain bikes from the rumps of Subarus and disappear into those woods, emerging, hours later, mud-splattered and happy. With a little squinting, I could almost see myself pedaling through rushing streams, leaping atop fallen logs, surmounting boulders large and small, my helmet rakishly askew, perhaps an ascot poking from my yellow bicycling jersey, as I careen down sheer vertical slabs of granite.

  “Maybe that’s my sport,” I thought. For what are naturally toned calves good for if not to put on display in biking shorts? “Yes,” I thought. “Mountain biking is the sport for me.” Mountain biking appealed to me in an “adventurous but not too adventurous” kind of way. Only the barest smidgen of self-awareness prevented me from rushing out and spending every dollar I had on one of those artisanal asteroid bikes. No, I would be prudent. Before committing to an expensive purchase, best to wait until I’d fully mastered the sport in a week or so.

  Fortunately, my friend Matt had a mountain bike he wasn’t using. Matt agreed to let me borrow the bicycle on a long-term basis, and I hauled the thing from New York City to
Connecticut, got it tuned up at the local bike shop, bought myself a pair of padded bicycle shorts (which had the additional benefit of nicely flattering my cock), and pedaled for the woods. What I quickly realized upon encountering my first streams, fallen logs, and boulders, though, was that I had no idea what I was doing. The difference between riding a regular bicycle and riding this super-high-tech mountain bike amounted to the difference between flying a paper airplane and a jumbo jet, the main problem being that I had no idea what I was supposed to do with all the goddamned gears. There must have been a hundred of them. Maybe a thousand. Changing gears required manipulating a puzzling assortment of levers, and it seemed like every time I tried to go from a higher gear into a lower gear—or maybe it was vice versa—the goddamned chain would fall off the bike, necessitating a dismount to thread the goddamned thing back into the goddamned doohickey from which it fell. And when the chain wasn’t falling off the bike, I was.

  Then, while trying to leap over a giant (tiny) boulder (rock), I pitched myself forward over the handlebars and onto my ass. I am told this sort of thing happens all the time to mountain bikers. People fall down. They sprain joints. They break collarbones. What had I been thinking? Mountain biking was a dangerous and foolhardy sport, better left to guys named Austin or Sky or Cody, but Bruce Whitehall would not be mountain biking. I wheeled the bike into my garage, where it served as spiderweb scaffolding until Matt retrieved it a year later. Needless to say, I did not purchase my own mountain bike, although I do still sometimes wear my bike shorts around the house. They do not impress my wife.

  Ultimately, wasn’t impressing my wife and, by extension, the entire female population, the point of the endeavor? Yes, getting in shape provides health benefits and extends life span and blah dee blah dee blah. But if I’m being honest with myself, don’t I really just want women to find me attractive? And no, I obviously don’t mean all women. Just most. Say, seventy-five percent. After all, I am a married man.

  Aren’t my fears about growing old and getting fat and going bald and all the rest of it just symptoms of anxiety related to feeling unworthy of love? The reason Bruce Whitehall looks like Bruce Whitehall isn’t that I particularly want to look like a Hitler Youth leader but that, in my mind, that’s the kind of guy women find attractive (minus the Nazi part). And of course that’s nonsense, but I can’t shake the feeling that whatever my type happens to be is the wrong type. Moreover, why do I even care? I have a wife who loves me. Why do I need other (most) women to desire me? Only because I’m scared they don’t. The need for female companionship and affection has been at my center for as long as I can remember, my self-esteem rising and falling on tides of estrogen. And while I know it is neither necessary nor healthy to seek validation from others, I can’t help it. How much of our self-worth is tied up in the opinions of others? Yes, we all like to imagine ourselves as iconoclasts, hacking new trails across the tattered landscape of conventional thought. But that’s a lie. For as much as we like to think that we are freethinkers who care not a whit what others think of us, I’ve never met anybody for whom that is true. Maybe the guy who hiked to Alaska in that book Into the Wild, but he wound up starving to death.

  As for me, I cannot help but seek my own sustenance, at least in part, from Martha. I am at my happiest when I feel like she loves me, and my lowest when I feel she does not. It’s always been that way with me and girls. Maybe this comes from being raised in a lesbian household. Or maybe I’m just codependent. It’s not that I’m constantly seeking her approval in all things, but I do it often enough to recognize that I place nearly as much value on her opinions as I do on my own. When her favor does not come, I suffer from its absence. My desire to get into shape had as much to do with pleasing Martha as myself, even though Martha has once never told me she would prefer that I look a little bit more like a Hitler Youth leader. Then again, now that I think about it, it would have been odd if she had.

  Chapter Nine

  You down with ECT?

  As awkward as our “You know I love you, right? RIGHT?!?” Thanksgiving conversation was, Mom and I have had worse. The most cringe-inducing occurred during my early teen years, when Mom and Elaine summoned me to the living room for a chat. That alone should have set off alarm bells, since the living room was sacrosanct. Even though our crummy town house barely accommodated the six human beings who lived there, the living room remained off-limits, the invisible threshold between foyer and living room as inviolable as a crime scene. Even our neglected English springer spaniel Winston knew enough not to go in there and he was a genuine idiot. Mom and Elaine reserved the living room for “entertaining,” despite the fact they had few friends and almost never invited anybody over. The one exception I can remember was on the occasion of my mother’s fortieth birthday, which, confusingly for a lesbian couple, involved a birthday cake shaped and decorated like a penis. The cake was delicious but, to this day, I have mixed emotions about enjoying it as much as I did.

  On the rare occasions when I found myself the house’s sole occupant, I would sometimes sneak into the living room to liberate candies from a neglected box of After Eight dinner mints kept secreted in a side table, and to peruse the pages of a coffee table book of “artistic photography,” also kept hidden from prying adolescent eyes, which held more than a few (tastefully executed) shots of boobs. The forbidden living room, home to my every wanton desire. To be granted access to this sanctum foretold either very good tidings or very bad. Or, as it turned out, very weird.

  After asking me to take a seat on the floor (just receiving an invitation to the living room did not include a guarantee of a seat on the actual furniture), Mom and Elaine gently explained to me that being gay was perfectly natural and normal, and certainly nothing to be ashamed of. I nodded. Right, right. Natural and normal, sure. No problem. But their lecture confused me. Why was I receiving this talk now, years after they’d gotten together? Had I said or done something to make them think I disapproved of their relationship? It’s true that I did, but it had nothing to do with their homosexuality and everything to do with the fact that Elaine was a verbally abusive rage addict. Their homosexuality barely registered with me, no more noticeable to my eyes than their hairstyles. What insensitive remark had I made to merit this talking-to? I couldn’t think of any. And then I realized: They weren’t defending or justifying their sexuality. They were talking about mine. In other words, my gay family was outing me, despite the fact that I am not gay.

  Where did they get this idea? Did they see me enjoying the penis cake a little too much? It was excellent cake!

  Not only did I know myself to be not gay, but my heterosexuality was probably the only thing about myself in which I had any confidence at all. I’d known myself to be straight since the age of four, when I fell in love with a neighborhood girl my age named Sarah, who seduced me with the coquettish way she nibbled her carrot sticks. Although I could not have articulated at that age what I felt for Sarah, I remember it as a proto-sexual attraction, a thick emotional slurry warming my chest like hot cocoa. Young Sarah was only the first in a long string of girls I fell for throughout elementary school, middle school, and on into early high school, when Mom and Elaine informed me I was gay.

  What they did not know was that, at the time of our talk, I had recently begun fingering a mopey latchkey girl from the neighborhood named Cathy. I don’t even remember how it began between Cathy and me. Memories are, of course, unreliable, but I feel like one day she might have just said, “Hey, you want to come over and finger me?”

  To which I would have replied, “Okay.”

  Every once in a while, I would visit her after school and we would plod upstairs to her room, where I would touch her and watch her react to my artless ministrations in a vague, disinterested way, as if she were hearing about them from a friend. My finger-banging skills may have been lacking, but they were without a doubt the result of heterosexual urges.

  I wisely chose to withhold this information from Mom and Elai
ne during their living room intervention, which left me no credible defense against their accusation other than to get pissed off and sputter, “What are you talking about?”

  “I just want you to know I still love you,” Mom said.

  What. The. Fucking. Fuck.

  The most infuriating aspect about our heart-to-heart was their certainty. Fact: You are gay. As if I had no say in the matter. Some might point to this as evidence of the nefarious homosexual agenda that seeks to recruit children into their perverted lifestyle, but, in fact, the opposite was true: Their decision to confront me about my sexuality was partially in response to my mother’s fervent desire that I not be gay. By the time they sat me down, it was only after my mother had resigned herself to the fact that she had a gay son. Of the two of us, she was the homophobe.

  This took place during the height of the AIDS epidemic, an era before gay rights were a mainstream issue, before Madonna and Britney tongue-kissed on MTV. To be gay meant to risk being shunned, feared, and attacked. Our own home was the target of the occasional egging. Mom and Elaine kept their relationship as quiet as they could, absurdly masquerading as sisters, albeit sisters who looked about as much alike as Abbott and Costello. To have a gay son meant constant worry for his health and safety.

  Years later, when I call to ask her about her memories of this conversation, she says, “I felt terrible because I didn’t want you to be gay.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a hard life. I wouldn’t want it for any of my children. Plus I wanted grandchildren, goddamnit!”