The Book of Guys

by Garrison Keillor

  “Bernie was wearing a red-plaid flannel shirt, an orange down vest, rubber boots, overalls, and long johns, and he had a Vicks eucalyptus cough drop in his mouth and Old Spice aftershave on his face. I can still smell him and I’ll always remember how much he looked forward to being with us. He was one of us, a hard worker, not a loafer, a northerner, a trucker, a faithful husband, a good buddy, and here is to him.”

  We drank a solemn toast.

  “She got the house, the concrete business, everything, all that he’d worked so hard to build up, and you know? she didn’t share much of it with those daughters either. She sold the company for six million dollars to some jerks who then ran it into the ground and she built herself a big house on Barbados and bought an apartment in New York where she entertains liberals and artists and feminists by the truckload. That’s what happened to the life and hard work of Bernie, boys. It went to feminism and he never got to go fishing.”

  We all leaned forward and spat on the ground.

  “He was a loser, boys, and the world loves winners. People used to love their losing teams, but no more. The owners are in it for the money and the fans are in it for the victories. If you lose, you’re shit. Well, boys, we are all losers like Bernie—you, me, we’re drunk, confused, sad, and we smell like dead trout—but I loved him and I love all of you.

  “Here’s to that trip he never took and the fun he never had. He wanted to get out of line for a few days, hoist a few, tell some jokes, be with the boys. So let’s do it. Here’s to Bernie. Let ’er rip.”

  And we drank a long toast and gave six long whoops, Eeeeeeee-ha!

  By four a.m. there was little left to say and nobody in condition to say it. So about six, I went home. (APPLAUSE)

  * * *

  It is hard to put your finger on, but guys are in trouble. Guys are gloomy. We try to cheer ourselves up, we go down to the Lost Hombre Saloon and hoist a margarita with some sad guys from the Sanitation Dept. and we tell them, “Hey, tomorrow’s a new day.” So we put on our pants in the morning and think A Hum babe c’mon babe hum babe, attaboy, let’s go, babe, play from within yourself babe, good as ya wannabe babe, let’s go, babe, hum babe, a hum it in there babe, focus babe, center yourself babe, c’mon babe, hum babe, hum babe, feel good about yourself babe. Or we say the prayer of St. Geoff: “Breathe deeply, relax, let go of all stress and anger, and be here within yourself in the universe where you are truly welcome—really.” Or we go to a steam room and cook, or we go to a ballgame, or we go to a Unitarian monastery in New Hampshire. The rule there is complete silence but if you think of something really good you can go ahead and say it. So one day, eating our silent lo-cal lunch, we turn to the abbot, a former psychiatrist, and say, “I keep racing and racing, I live life fifteen minutes at a time, I’m stretched thin, and inside I am empty.” And then we see the hollowness in his eyes, poor man. In America, you don’t have to know what you’re doing in order to do what you’re doing. You become a holy man by learning to act holy. The furrowed brow, the shambling gait, the vacuous modesty, the blissful dumbness, the maundering, the weird verbless speech, and Abbot Bob has mastered the act beautifully, but one look in his eyes tells you that nobody is home, he is a vacant shrine.

  Years ago, manhood was an opportunity for achievement, and now it is a problem to be overcome. Plato, St. Francis, Michelangelo, Mozart, Leonardo da Vinci, Vince Lombardi, Van Gogh—you don’t find guys of that caliber today, and if there are any, they are not painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or composing Don Giovanni. They are trying to be Mr. O.K. All-Rite, the man who can bake a cherry pie, go play basketball, come home, make melon balls and whip up a great soufflé, converse easily about intimate matters, participate in recreational weeping, laugh, hug, be vulnerable, be passionate in a skillful way, and the next day go off and lift them bales into that barge and tote it. A guy who women consider Acceptable.

  Being all-rite is a dismal way to spend your life, and guys are not equipped for it anyway. We are lovers and artists and adventurers, meant to be noble, free-ranging, and foolish, like dogs, not competing for a stamp of approval, Friend of Womanhood.

  Back when our gender was running on all eight cylinders, women died for the love of us (e.g. Carmen stabbed to death, Butterfly self-stabbed, Tosca self-hurled from parapet, Brunnhilde self-burned, Aïda self-buried, Ophelia swam after mealtime)—those days are over. Now women watch us and monitor our conversation for signs of bad attitude, they grade us daily, and, boys, we are in the wrong class. Men can never be feminists. Millions have tried and nobody did better than C+.

  Here’s what they won’t tell you in class—

  • Girls had it better from the beginning, don’t kid yourself. They were allowed to play in the house, where the books were and the adults, and boys were sent outdoors like livestock. Boys were noisy and rough, and girls were nice, so they got to stay and we had to go. Boys ran around in the yard with toy guns going kksshh-kksshh, fighting wars for made-up reasons and arguing about who was dead, while girls stayed inside and played with dolls, creating complex family groups and learning to solve problems through negotiation and role-playing. Which gender is better equipped, on the whole, to live an adult life, would you guess? (APPLAUSE, SHOUTS) IS there any doubt about this? Is it even close?

  • Adolescence hits boys harder than it does girls. Girls bleed a little and their breasts pop out, big deal, but adolescence lands on a guy with both feet, a bad hormone experience. You are crazed with madness. Your body is engulfed by chemicals of rage and despair, you pound, you shriek, you batter your head against the trees. You come away wounded, feeling that life is unknowable, can never be understood, only endured and sometimes cheated.

  • Women know about life and social life and how to get along with others, and they are sensitive to beauty, and at the same time they can yell louder. They know all about guys, having been exposed to guy life and guy b.s. since forever, and guys know nothing about girls except that they want one desperately. Which gender is better equipped to manipulate the other?

  The father of a daughter, for example, is nothing but a high-class hostage. A father turns a stony face to his sons, berates them, shakes his antlers, paws the ground, snorts, runs them off into the underbrush, but when his daughter puts her arm over his shoulder and says, “Daddy, I need to ask you something,” he is a pat of butter in a hot frying pan. The butter thinks to itself, “This time I really am going to remain rectangular,” and then it feels very relaxed, and then it smells smoke.

  • Men adore women. Our mothers taught us to. Women do not adore men; women are amused by men, we are a source of chuckles. That’s because women are the makers of life, and we aren’t. We will never be able to carry life within our bodies, never breast-feed. We get more than our share of loot and we are, for some reason, incredibly brave and funny and inventive, and yet our role in procreation basically is to get crazy and howl and spray our seed in all directions.

  • So we carry adolescence around in our bodies all our lives. We get through the Car Crash Age alive and cruise through our early twenties as cool dudes, wily, dashing, winsome, wearing white socks and black loafers, saying incredibly witty things, shooting baskets, the breeze, the moon, and then we try to become caring men, good husbands, great fathers, good citizens, despite the fact that guys are fundamentally unfaithful. (AUDIENCE REACTION) A monogamous man is like a bear riding a bicycle: he can be trained to do it but he would rather be in the woods, doing what bears do. Nevertheless, we learn to ride that bicycle for the sake of women, and we ride it darned well, considering, and we live a pleasant, if sometimes cloying, life shopping at the Food Shoppe and Wine ’N Stuff and taking the kids to the Wienery-Beanery, attending planning meetings, writing thoughtful letters to the editor, eating bran flakes, supporting the right things, and we accept restrictions and limits, no smoking, jackets required, No Left Turn 4–6, and then, with no warning, we wake up one morning stricken with middle age, full of loneliness, dumb, in pain. Our wo
rk is useless, our vocation is lost, and nobody cares about us at all. This is not bearable. In despair, we go do something spectacularly dumb, like run away with Amber the cocktail waitress, and suddenly all the women in our life look at us with unmitigated disgust.

  Spectacular dumbness is a guy type of gift. (APPLAUSE) We are good at great schemes and failed brilliance, and some eras seem to encourage this. The seventies was a time when people could do dumb things and nobody gave them a hard time about it. You’d go to see improvisational theater and the actors were climbing naked through piles of tires waving flashlights and reciting numbers at random, and afterward you thought, “Well, life is like that sometimes, I guess,” and then a few years later there were strict new rules: everything had to Add Up, as if life were a term paper. People kept turning around and explaining themselves, even people for whom there was no explanation—everyone was seeking plausibility.

  I once was interviewed on a daytime radio show whose host wore a tiny pink bathing suit, although she was in fact a normal-sized woman. We sat together in a studio the size of a walk-in closet, and I avoided mentioning her bikini on the air, but she didn’t leave out anything when it came to me.

  “You seem like a nice guy with a lot of dirty underwear,” she said. “Let’s talk about it. I’ve heard it said that you drifted into manhood with the charm of a claims adjuster and a withering sense of guilt due to a good upbringing. That in high school you tried to escape your unworthiness by affecting a sort of wispy bohemianism, writing your name in lower-case letters and composing dippy poems with titles like ‘Soliloquies for Stringless Guitars,’ and eventually you ran away from home when you were twenty-four. People who know you well have described you as moody and inarticulate, a guy with cold green eyes and a ratlike smile who suffers good fortune with ill humor, which has left you virtually friendless, isolated, adrift, out of touch, and that you have lost approximately thirty-two points of IQ in the past twenty years and were only average to start with. But that’s not my question. My question to you is: does loss of brain function justify persistence in the face of, shall we say, a certain pointlessness to one’s life? A lot of people are asking this question about you. What do you think, Gar?”

  I will be honest—through most of her rather long question I was concentrating on her breasts, which were prominently displayed, particularly the left one, which was nearer to me. (AUDIENCE REACTION)

  “I don’t think that’s true about my IQ,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve dropped that far.” I smiled.

  She said, “And yet my question remains: is reduced mental capacity the clue to your career or should we look for other explanations?”

  I had to admit that I have made some boners in my day. I wasn’t about to confess them all but I did tell a few stories on myself, about situations involving cars, in which I had attempted to solve problems through brute force. She seemed genuinely amused by these anecdotes.

  “Thank you,” she said. “That’s all the time we have.” And the show was over. “I hope you don’t feel I was too hard on you,” she said. She put on a brown wool skirt and white blouse and a green blazer, picked up her briefcase, and left.

  Her honesty drove me to take a closer look at myself and I made a list of my abilities and inabilities.

  A. Useful Things I Can Do

  Fix decent meals and serve them.

  Be nice.

  Make a bed.

  Dig a hole.

  Write books.

  Sing alto or bass.

  Read a map.

  Drive a car.

  Talk on the radio.

  Wash and iron clothing.

  Clean.

  B. Useful Things I Can’t Do

  Chop down big trees and cut them into lumber or firewood.

  Plant a field of corn or any other crop.

  Handle a horse, train a dog, or tend a herd of animals.

  Handle a boat without panicking the others.

  Build a frame structure larger than a birdhouse.

  Do simple algebra or mathematical computations of any kind.

  Fix an internal combustion engine. Or an external one.

  Remember the laws of physics.

  Make an intelligent bet on a horse.

  Invest money wisely.

  Teach electricity, grammar, the Reformation.

  Play guitar.

  Throw a fastball, curve, or slider.

  Load, shoot, and clean a gun. Or bow and arrow. Or use either of them, or a spear, net, snare, boomerang, or blowgun, to obtain meat.

  Defend myself with my bare hands.

  Keep my mouth shut.

  Maybe it’s an okay report card for a person but I don’t know any persons, don’t know what they can do and can’t do. For a guy, it’s not good. A woman would go down the second list and say, “What does it matter if a guy can handle a boat? Throw a curveball? Bag a deer? Throw a left hook? This is 1993.” But that’s a womanly view of manhood. (LAUGHTER)

  Miss Woofenberg, our second-grade teacher, worked hard to instill a womanly view of manhood in us boys. She taught us that it was manly to be quiet and be nice, to be neat, to share and yet give a slight advantage to girls, to be studious and listen and do as she said. These traits, which she believed that girls innately possess, Miss Woofenberg urged us boys to learn, and she made us repress our urge to push ahead, to grab, to fight, to struggle, to press forward in man’s relentless quest for superiority and world domination.

  A man achieves world domination every time he does something awfully well. A guy who has a good fastball, or knows physics like his own backyard, or can pick up a .22 and pick off a pine cone at a hundred yards knows this.

  Guys need this feeling if they’re going to survive. Guys know that we are going to lose some, maybe lose a whole long string, maybe get our butts kicked for years, but we have to be No. 1—sometime, somewhere, if only for ten minutes—or else we sag inside and become sad and careful, a guy who when he stands up you hear the tinkle of broken dreams.

  Miss Woofenberg created a problem for us when she catechized us in the theology of submergence in the group.

  “We want what is best for everybody,” she said, which sounds good until you strive for it for a while and realize that, like the horizon, the common good recedes as one draws near. The only way to approach it is to live in a deep canyon.

  A fastball travels ninety miles an hour or so, and if it isn’t thrown by guys, it isn’t going to be thrown, babes.

  We go around with a sense that our gender peaked in the eighteenth century. The King, the Court, the Church, Knighthood, Guilds—all of that worked for guys: in paintings by the Old Masters, guys looked good, whether boy or burgher, hearty and flush, good-humored, bold, prosperous, Guys at Their Best. After that, guys vanished from art, except for troubled self-portraits. Now our gender supplies all the major criminals and all the major candidates for high office; the female gender supplies the goddesses of light and mercy. What went wrong?

  I haven’t seen the S.O.B.s since that campfire and I don’t expect to, and if I did see them, I don’t know what we would say. Because guys don’t talk to each other. We paw up dirt, we bang antlers, sometimes we graze side by side, but we seldom talk.

  You can fly off to the rain forests of Rawalpindi and attend the Tribal Gathering of World Men and dance around pounding your tom-toms, chanting ancient guy chants, grunting guy grunts, painting your body with guy markings, squatting around the fire and telling ancient guy myths, but the biggest myth of all is that men can open up to each other and share their secrets. Oya.

  You go to the Guy Pride lunch and hear a talk about All for Oneness and afterward you confide in a fellow guy that you are going through a hard stretch right now, and he says, “I can sure sympathize, Jim. Listen, let’s get together soon and do some bonding. Really.” And he checks his watch, glances around for someone else to talk to, he can’t get away from you fast enough. He goes off and talks to other people and he says, “Look out for Jim. He st
rikes me as unstable. A liability to the team. How can we ease him out of here?” Men are capable of this. You should hesitate to tell a guy you feel bad. It may embarrass him and he won’t talk to you for months. Or it may excite him and he will think of ways to get your house or at least some of your savings.

  Men need women to talk to and tell the truth to. This is a main feature of sexual life, where guys are concerned.

  Guys know that we should free ourselves from women, stake out our own turf, and stop trying to be so wonderful to them. Let women deal with their own lives and solve their own problems. Stop feeling guilty, as if we could make it up to them. (AUDIENCE REACTION)

  Guys know that we ought to get together with other guys and drink whiskey with our arms draped around each other and sing “Old Paint,” and tell our ripe rich jokes.

  But we keep coming back to women.

  They can’t take over the world fast enough for me. (APPLAUSE) I mean that. Let them run everything. (APPLAUSE) They should take over business and government and manage society and finance and let guys be artists and hoboes.

  We are delicate as roses in winter and need to be wrapped in warmth or else we die. (LAUGHTER) I don’t know why I said that, except that it’s written down here and also it’s true. (LAUGHTER)

  Women can rule the world, fine, but we need them to love us again, or else it’s no good.

  “Why is it so important to you to be as wonderful as you are?” a woman asked me one night as I lay sobbing into a pillow, having made a cherry pie that tasted like some old sparrows had been baked into it. “Why can’t you just be yourself?”