“Okay, I’ll put the nose down now so we’ll gain some speed … add the afterburners.” I felt a surge forward as the F-16 accelerated to .85 Mach, or 550 knots.
“Okay, Chris, are you ready?”
“Uh hunf.” I was already tensed to the consistency of granite.
“Okay, here we gooooo …” We were sideways to the ground now. Dan pulled back hard on the stick and we went into a tight turn.
The G suit inflated to the maximum. My hands pressed down onto my crotch. A crushingly heavy weight pushed down on my body. My helmet was nailed to the headrest. I was aware of a slight shuddering. The video shows the wings shaking. Somewhere a voice I did not recognize said, “Bingo, bingo!” Dan later explained that this was a fuel-warning device he had preset. At cruising speed, the F-16 carries enough fuel to stay aloft for two hours and ten minutes. With the afterburners on, it will use up all its fuel in fifteen minutes, which pretty much limits the number of nine-G turns you can do while dogfighting over enemy territory. In one hour and ten minutes of flying, we used two and a half tons of fuel.
But now I was aware of Dan’s voice again …
“… Seven … eight … there it is, nine!”
“We did it?”
“You sure did!” I appreciated the “you,” even if all I had done was to strain through the bowel movement from hell. But there it is on the video of the heads-up display, the pilot’s TelePrompTer-like screen that displays all his instruments, a little digital “9.1” at the lower left-hand corner.
The entire turn had lasted five seconds. I had not blacked out, or even lost any peripheral vision, my solitary, pathetic moment of triumph that morning. I don’t think I could have lasted another two seconds without blacking out. During their aerial shows, the Thunderbirds execute a seven-G turn lasting eighteen seconds, at a hundred and fifty feet above the ground. No margin of error for blacking out there. That is why Thunderbirds tend to be in their early thirties and possessed of great physical strength.
The audio portion of the video records a high-pitched whine as we came out of the turn. I think that was me. The camera shows me looking pale, but giving two wan thumbs-up. Then I turned it off, not wanting my memento of the day to show the gastrointestinal aftereffects of nine Gs.
We did a victory lap over Hoover Dam. Just before landing, Dan did two tight three-G turns to shed airspeed, but by now they hardly amounted to shucks, and then we were on the ground. The canopy was lifting, fresh, desert air filling the cockpit. I came down the ladder slowly, stood wobbily beside Dan for a photo while he pinned a Nine G button on my flight suit. Then I crawled to the Life Support Room where I availed myself of a trash basket in the corner. We did the debriefing, watching the video, Dan sitting beside me hungrily eating an aromatic nitrite-red weiner with chili.
The nine-G turn doesn’t look like much on the video. All you see is a shifting of sunlight and a dark-visored figure crushed inert in his seat. The only sound is the loud, three-second exhalations, the strange “Bingo, bingo,” and a high-pitched whine that might have been the last of my air being crowbarred out of my lungs. I had to make a conscious effort to stay awake in the debriefing room, even though I was watching a video of myself in the cockpit of a fighter plane. But there was an insight in this fatigue. This is how they will feel, a lifetime of dinner guests glancing frantically at each other: Oh God, here it comes, his Thunderbirds video. Tell him we have a baby-sitter and have to get home.
—Forbes FYI, 1996
Macho Is
as Macho Does
One night I had the words “fuck off” tattooed on the outside edge of my right hand. Some explanation is, obviously, in order.
I was eighteen and drunk, both on the six-pack of beer I’d been plied with to ease the pain of the far more elaborate (and tasteful) tattoo being applied to my biceps and with the thrill of being a young merchant marine on my first night of shore leave in Hong Kong.
But, you logically ask, why those particular two words? A joke on the ship’s officers. The offensive phrase was burned through my epidermis on the part of the hand most visible to the recipient of a salute. Get it? I didn’t either, on waking up to discover three regions of acute distress: my head, my biceps, and my hand. In a nice bit of karmic comeuppance, my assigned task that day was to swab clean the cargo winches: twelve hours of 100-degree heat, with my newly embroidered hand immersed the whole time in kerosene. Every letter sizzled memorably.
The second question begged by this act of juvenile idiocy is Why do men do these things? I don’t mean, Why do men have four-letter words tattooed on their hands? The only other instance that I know of is the Robert Mitchum character in the 1955 movie The Night of the Hunter. (How lovely to share this distinction with a famous psychopathic murderer. I must have a swastika tattooed on my forehead and achieve affinity with Charles Manson.) No, what I mean is, Why must some men play the tough guy?
One of the nice things about not being eighteen anymore is looking back on all those times when you practiced smoking in front of the mirror, impressed your date by revving the engine at the stoplight, tried on twenty pairs of sunglasses until you found the kind Paul Newman wore, talked fuel injectors and .357 Magnums while holding a long-necked beer bottle, and wore blue jeans so tight that you ended up with sore balls and a rash. Yes, one of the nice things about being forty-one and happily married is that you understand how ridiculous all that really was—and how ridiculous it still is.
Sometime between eighteen and forty-one I learned something: that the ones who are really tough never act tough. Unless—as with the saying about never drawing a gun unless you plan to use it—they intend to be tough, in which case it’s usually over very fast.
After the merchant marine, I went to Yale, where there was very little macho posturing going on. A lot of intellectual posturing, for sure, but no “Me Tarzan” stuff. This was the early 1970s—Nixon, antiwar demonstrations, women’s Hb, Alan Alda, homo sensitivus—and anyone who even tried to look tough would have been laughed at and told to go enroll in TM (transcendental meditation, for you Generation Xer’s).
It wasn’t until I started work in New York City as a magazine editor that I met my first genuinely fake tough guy. He was a writer. (Surprise!) He wore mirrored sunglasses—the kind that look exactly like mirrors, that is—and he would come to the office wearing a Porsche racing jacket crammed with stripes and patches. It was made of this silvery material—faux flame-retardant?—so shiny it looked as if it had been made with cast-off astronaut-suit material. At first I was mightily impressed. After four years of Shakespeare, Blake, and Joyce, here was a real-world writer. He smoked Camels; drank “Stoli, up”; made a show of annoying our boss, the editor; and told lurid stories of hanging out with extremely brutal South Bronx street gangs to research the big piece he was doing for us.
But after a time I started to wonder. (The best thing about a good education is it equips you with a good shit detector.) His teeth were unappetizingly brown from nicotine. He coughed a lot and wheezed after climbing a flight of stairs. The editor whom he cast as Walter Burns to his Hildy Johnson confided to me with wry amusement that he had been escorted every inch of the way by New York police during his research on the South Bronx gangs. As for the jacket, it became pellucidly clear that he had never set foot in a Porsche or any other racing car.
The mirrored shades were, I suspect, to cover up the aftereffects of too many Stolis, up, at Elaine’s, or, more subtly, perhaps they were just the perfect sunglasses for the Me Decade because they let the beholder see himself in the reflection, invariably improving his opinion of their wearer.
He died ten years later, in his early fifties, of a heart attack, on the tennis court. Not a terribly macho end.
It was partly my memory of that jacket that led me years later to lock horns publicly with one of my heroes, Garry Trudeau. I’d been working at the White House, writing speeches for then vice president Bush. At the time, Trudeau was going after Bush mercilessly for w
hat he perceived as Bush’s slavish loyalty to Reagan, raking him over the coals in strip after strip for sacrificing his “manhood.” When the next Banana Republic clothing catalog arrived, I saw in it an effusive endorsement by Trudeau for a leather navy pilot’s jacket. Bush had gone off at age eighteen to fly torpedo bombers in the South Pacific against the Japanese; Trudeau had not. I pointed out this irony in a repercussive letter to The Washington Post.
Ever since, I’ve been averse to military fashions on civilians. Flight jackets ought to be earned. Imagine standing in an elevator wearing one with a 388th Fighter Wing insignia and the door opening and someone who’d actually been with the 388th getting on.
I’m averse, too, to civilians who talk military, saying things like “Lock and load” when they’re merely going into a meeting, or shouting, “Incoming!” when the boss sends down a sharp memo. One of my closest friends served with the Special Forces in Vietnam, and I have never, ever, heard him say, “Lock and load” or “Incoming!” because something wasn’t going well that day at the office.
The White House, as anyone who’s worked there will confirm, is a veritable platform for macho posturing. I was there during the early Reagan years, and while it’s true that the place did not lack for cowboy boots, the smell of testosterone roasting around the campfire was by no means peculiar to the Reagan era. Nixon’s chief of staff wore a crew cut, and JFK’s people liked to one-up one another with the question “Is your wife pregnant? Mine is.” White House toys are too tempting for many men (and women): flashing lights, motorcades, Air Force One, phone consoles with lots and lots of important-looking buttons, Uzi-toting Secret Service agents, and, most coveted of all, a White House pass on the end of a chain around your neck. I saw people wear those chains around their necks at dinner parties, pretending they’d forgotten they still had them on. Whoops. So then I said to the president …
The most conspicuous practitioners of macho on any White House staff are the advance men, the ones who arrange presidential movements and events. They wield a kind of plenipotentiary power. Who’s going to tell them no? They work for the president of the United States. I’ve seen twentysomethings reduce governors of consequential states to fuming impotence—and relish every second of it. I watched one tell a government official of a significant foreign power, after viewing the spectacular nineteenth-century palace where the bilateral event would take place, “The facilities will be adequate.” The documentary The War Room, about the Clinton campaign staff, shows the swagger that develops when young men get a taste of power. The advantage of the American system of government over, say, the Rwandan system is that in ours the tools of power consist of pagers and passes, theirs of guns and machetes. It is harder to laugh off the macho pretensions of a sixteen-year-old Hutu pointing an AK-47 at you.
Guns are certainly more attention-getting than even the coolest sunglasses or the flashiest Porsche jacket. Posturing with guns became literal in the 1980s with Miami Vice, when Crockett and Tubbs held their biiig pistols with both hands, in the combat stance. Up until then, TV cops had been content to hold their weapons in just one hand. (The cooler combat stance was the result of Vice producer Michael Mann’s having previously directed and produced the film that is recognized by both security and military types as the only one to portray the world of killers with technical realism—Thief, starring James Caan.) Dirty Harry managed to empty his .44 Magnum—“the most powerful handgun in the world”—with only one steady hand, but by the 1980s guns were too serious to handle with just one.
I’ve noticed, too, that guns have become icons of masculinity. Street gangs today initiate members by having them kill whichever passing motorist signals to them that their headlights are off. The last issue of Spy magazine carried a piece in which well-known rap musicians talked with fondness about their guns. Clearly we’ve arrived at a weirdly evolved stage of gun macho. A few weeks ago I was on a jury that convicted a man of it. He had drunk “about twenty-four” beers one day—this according to his own defense witness—and then, when no girls would dance with him at a party, stuck a loaded .22 revolver in the temple of a man who’d got on the elevator at the wrong moment. The police call this type of posturing “ADW (Gun),” assault with a dangerous weapon. It can get you about ten years, but I have little doubt that he’ll be back among us soon, probably in need of an even more urgent expression of his compromised manhood.
He was just a small-time punk loser, seeking to impose his own loser status on the other guy. The tough-guy act I find most repellent is the one affected by some Wall Streeters. Michael Lewis got their number in his book Liar’s Poker when he wrote about show-off million-dollar bets and swaggering traders with their cigars, scatologies, and crude misogynies. Most of the really sick jokes—of the Challenger disaster or the Michael Jackson variety—I’m told, originate on Wall Street.
Tom Wolfe found the perfect name for this breed of puffed-up bantam cock in The Bonfire of the Vanities: Masters of the Universe. In the ridiculous movie version, poor Tom Hanks did what he could with Sherman McCoy, given the deplorable script, and managed a few nice moments of swagger, as when he shrugs over losing half a billion dollars of a client’s money and grins and says to a fellow MOTU, “We’re not going to get upset about $600 million, are we?” Michael Douglas did a fine job of showing the effect of too much money on the prostate with his portrayal of Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, shouting “Lock and load!” to his assistant as he launches another hostile takeover.
Give me the posturing of the businessmen of yesteryear any day. At least this one: Sally Bedell Smith, in her biography of William Paley, founder of CBS, recounts a gem of an instance. Paley was visiting his Long Island neighbor John Hay Whitney, owner of the Herald Tribune. “To Paley,” Smith wrote, “Jock Whitney embodied the ultimate in American masculine style.… A gentle rivalry flecked their friendship as a result. Once while watching television with Whitney at Greentree, Paley wanted to change the channel. ‘Where’s your clicker?’ Paley asked, figuring Jock would have a remote-control switch at his fingertips. Jock calmly pressed a buzzer, and his butler walked up to the TV set to make the switch.”
Whitney had grown up in the era of Teddy Roosevelt’s “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” (And clicker.) Lately, U.S. foreign policy seems to be all talk and no dick. Here was Clinton on the campaign trail: “The Serbian aggression against Bosnia-Herzegovina … must end. It is time for America, acting in concert with its allies, to exert strong leadership.” This is not to suggest that America ought to send in the cavalry in an attempt to eradicate religious and ethnic hatreds that go back half a millennium: only that talking tough without follow-through looks as ridiculous on nations as it does on eighteen-year-olds, but with far worse potential for trouble. Bush’s words after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, “This will not stand,” would now sound pretty hollow if Saddam were still receiving his mail in Kuwait City. General Colin Powell was not putting on the macho when he announced his war plan with a matter-of-factness startling to our government-pronouncement-jaded ears, “First we are going to cut [the Iraqi army] off,” he said. “Then we are going to kill it.” Powell was the most plainspoken military man since Sherman.
People made fun of Reagan for playing the tough guy, just an old ham actor turned president, but in the end there was somehow something convincing about his toughness. Certainly, the Evil Empire was convinced; after the fall of the Soviet Union, it was learned that in the early 1980s the Kremlin thought Reagan was planning to go to war against them if they pursued their policy of foreign aggression. This said more for their paranoia than it did for Reagan’s bellicosity, but they blinked first, and the Iron Curtain came down within a year of Reagan’s leaving office, so the historians may decide it was more than just acting. He certainly demonstrated toughness of the personal kind when he took Hinckley’s bullet in the chest. It’s a test I fervently hope I never have to take, but in the event I do, I hope I’ll have the scrappiness, as he did, to ask the doct
ors as I go under if they’re all Republicans.
The tattoo? The one on my biceps is still there, a little faded but clear enough to alarm small children on the beach. The one on my hand is no longer there.
About ten years after that night in Hong Kong, I was in the Zarzuela palace interviewing the king of Spain—a muy macho fellow and very admirable—and about halfway through our hour I noticed his eyes being drawn to my hand, which I then assiduously tried to hide, not wanting to have to translate “fuck off” into Castilian for His Majesty Juan Carlos de Borbón y Borbón, king of Spain. When I got back to New York, I went to a dermatologist. It was prelaser back then, so it took an old-fashioned glistening steel scalpel to cut it out—thank God I hadn’t asked for “Don’t Tread on Me”—and fifteen stitches to close it. It hurt, and this time there was no six-pack to ease the pain. Now, I look at the scar and think, What was I thinking?
—Allure, 1994
Hardly
Roughing It
Would You Belize!
There are drawbacks to group travel, it occurred to me as I sat trapped in the back of the van listening to a woman I had only met an hour before acquaint me in immodest detail with the vicissitudes of her husband’s lower colon. I was more interested in Belize, the small, coastal Central American country that I had always wanted, for some reason, to see, and where now I finally was. I nodded as politely as I could throughout her unbrief discourse on the virtues of Manchurian ginseng, as she eye-droppered some onto the tongue of her docile husband. I managed to keep an impassive face as she lectured me urgently that “you can’t just dump everything into your liver—you’ve got to clean out the lymphs,” but when she said brightly, “That’s why Bill and I are into colonics,” I averted my eyes in the direction of a jungle-covered Mayan hillock and thought, It’s going to be a long ten days.
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