Self-Made Man

by Norah Vincent

  Bob agreed. “Yeah, that’s how I feel. I got nothin’ bad to say about my wife either. Nothin’.”

  It was an odd contradiction, but one that I came across fairly often among married men who talked to Ned about their sexuality. The way they told it, it sounded as if the male sex drive and marriage were incompatible. Something had to give, and usually what gave was honesty. These guys either lied to their wives about going to strip clubs, or at the very least they lied about the ubiquity of their sexual fantasies involving other women. On nights like these, among the boys, they could be honest, and there were no judgments.

  The bowling part of the evening was clearly secondary to the beer and the downtime with the boys at the table, smoking and talking shit. They cared about their game and the team’s standing—more than they let on—but as Jim jokingly put it to me as a way of making me feel better for being the worst bowler any of them had ever seen, the league was really just an excuse to get away from their wives for the evening. I learned later that this wasn’t true. Actually, it was a money league, and every game we lost cost us twenty dollars. This made me all the more thankful and impressed that they’d taken my poor showing with such good humor.

  Still, they warmed to me more and more as my bowling improved, and I got the sense that it wasn’t just about the money. It was as if there was an unspoken credo among them that there was just something you couldn’t quite trust about a guy who couldn’t bowl. I didn’t drink or smoke either, and, though they never said so, I could tell they thought this was just downright unnatural, probably the sign of someone who had it too good in life for his own good. Beer and cigarettes were their medicine, their primrose path to an early grave, which was about the best, aside from sex and a few good times with the guys, that they could hope for in life. The idea of telling one of these guys that smoking or drinking to excess was bad for his health was too ridiculously middle class to entertain. It bespoke a supreme ignorance of what their lives were really like—Hobbesian—not to put too fine a point on it. Nasty, brutish and short. The idea that you would try to prolong your grueling, dead-end life, and do it by taking away the few pleasures you had along the way, was just insulting.

  The whole business of bowling, when we got down to it, was, as you might expect, tied in to masculinity in all the predictable ways—hierarchy, strength, competition—but it was much more subtly processed and enacted than I had suspected it would be, and I wasn’t outside this tug-of-war by any means. I had my own issues, old issues that were bound up with being a tomboy and competing in sports with boys my whole life.

  When I appeared at the bowling alley on that first night, I was late. Practice time was just ending, so I didn’t get a chance to throw before we started. These guys had been bowling all their lives. They threw with spin and they hit with precision. They must have known me for the putz I was the minute I heaved the ball with both hands. There were fifty or sixty guys in that room, almost everybody smoking, almost everybody drinking. They had names like Adolph and Mac, and to a dyke scared to death of being gay-bashed, they were just downright mean looking, all seated at their respective tables with nothing else to do but watch you, the new pencil neck that nobody knew, walk up to the foul line and make an art of the gutter ball. They must have had some pretty hearty laughs at my expense.

  That’s how it felt anyway, and that’s probably how it went down among the other teams when my back was turned. But when I’d traipse back to my table in fuchsia-faced shame with a zero or a foul blinking on the board, they never laid me low. I always got supportive advice. “You’ll get there, man,” they’d say. “You should have seen me when I started.” Or more helpfully: “Just shake hands with the pins, man. That’s all you got to do. Just shake hands with the pins.”

  They were far more generous with me than they had any reason to be, and it was only after a couple of months when they got to know me a little better that they felt free enough to kid me now and then about how much I sucked. But even then it was always light and affectionate, a compliment really, a sign that they were letting me in.

  “Hey, we all got strikes this round,” Bob would say, “except one. Who was that, I wonder?” Then he’d smile at me while leaning back in his chair, dragging deeply on his cigarette. I’d make a big show of giving him the finger, and we’d all laugh. Bob’s flinty veneer was cracking.

  As I tried to be one of the guys, I could feel myself saying and doing the very things that young men do as teens when they’re trying to sort out their place in the ranks. Like them, I was trying to fit in, be inconspicuous, keep from being found out. And so I imitated the modeled behaviors that said “Accept me. I’m okay. I’m one of the guys.”

  Half the time I was ashamed of myself for trying too hard, saying fuck or fuckin’ one too many times in a sentence for effect, or swaggering just a little too wide and loose on my way to and from my turns, and probably looking as a result like I had a load in my pants.

  But then I could see all of these learned behaviors in Bob and Jim and Allen, too, as well as the remnant insecurity they were meant to disguise. And that, I think, was where their generosity came from. They’d outgrown that adolescent need to challenge every comer as a way of deflecting their own misgivings. As always, Jim was the most forthcoming about his stupid flights of machismo and the Dumpsters they’d usually landed him in.

  “I remember when I was in the army,” he’d say, “and I was drunk off my ass as usual. And there was this huge guy playin’ pool in the bar I was in. And I don’t know why, but I just flicked a beer coaster at him, and it hit him right in the back of the head. And he turned around really slowly and he looked down at me and he said in this really tired way ‘Do we really need to do this tonight?’ And I said, ‘Nah, you’re right. We don’t. Sorry.’ So he turned around, and fuck me if I didn’t just throw another one and hit him again, right in the back of the head. I don’t know why I did it. No fuckin’ idea. And I knew when I did it that he was gonna kick my ass, so I turned around and tried to run, and I slipped in a puddle of beer and fell on my face, and he just picked me right up and bashed the shit out of me. And the funniest thing about it was that the whole time he was punching me, he kept apologizing to me for having to do it.”

  This was a source of hilarity to everyone, the stupid crap you felt compelled to do as a guy finding your spot in the scheme of things, and the obligatory beatings you had to give or take to reestablish order after a breach. But only Jim really had enough perspective to admit the folly of his masculinity, and to fully appreciate the absurdity of brutish necessity in the male-on-male world. A guy whom you’d just provoked twice, and who’d warned you not to trespass, had no choice but to beat you if you crossed the line. That was just how it was among men, and Jim mocked it lovingly.

  Bob was more guarded. He didn’t quite have Jim’s gift for self-deprecation. He didn’t readily admit his mistakes or the missteps he’d made in the past. I got the sense that he couldn’t afford to express regret or let on that he didn’t know something. Instead, he held the world at arm’s length, projecting a kind of terse authority from his barrel chest, just nodding or frowning at something you’d say, as if the answer was insufferably obvious, when, of course, at least half the time he probably didn’t know the answer. The way he talked to his son Alex was essentially the way he talked to everyone. He was the guy who knew stuff, and what he didn’t know wasn’t worth knowing.

  But when it came to something that Bob felt more confident about, he’d engage you. Not that Bob’s engagements were ever long or involved, but they packed a rhetorical punch. I asked him once if his workplace was unionized, and his answer surprised me. I’d figured everyone in that room, being a bona fide member of the working class, was as staunchly pro union as the liberal intellectuals I knew in New York, but Bob didn’t see it that way. Neither, apparently, did the members of one of the other teams, who had called themselves the Nonunions.

  “No,” he said. “My shop isn’t union.”
r />   “Why not?” I asked.

  “Unions are for the lazy man.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because they’re all about seniority,” he said, pausing for effect. “I’ll give you an example,” he went on. “One place I worked was union, and it was run on the seniority system. The guys who’d been there the longest had the most clout, which meant that when there were layoffs, they’d always have better standing. There was one guy like that there who’d been there forever, and he was a lazy fucker. He used to just hang out and read the newspaper. Never did a lick of work. Meanwhile, I worked my ass off all day long. But when it came time to let people go, I was let go and he wasn’t. Now that’s not fair, is it?”

  “No,” I agreed. “It isn’t.”

  I tried to engage him further on the question, but as I came to understand, you’d always know when a conversation with Bob was over. He’d just revert to peering at you with condescending finality through a cloud of cigarette smoke.

  A lot of the guys were like that. It would take you years to get to know them on anything more than grunting terms. They were walled-in tight.

  Yet even so, under the surface there remained that distant male-on-male respect that I’d felt in the first handshakes and I continued to feel every time some guy from another team would say “Hey, man” to me when we met in the parking lot or passed on our way to or from the soda machine.

  But there was one guy among the bowlers who established an odd intimacy with me early on. It was so immediate, and so physically affectionate, that I felt sure he could see through Ned. I never learned his name. I don’t think he knew anything consciously. It wasn’t that bald. But there was an unmistakable chemistry between us.

  Obviously, I’d spent my life as a woman either flirting or butting heads or maneuvering somewhere on the sexual spectrum with nearly every man I’d ever met, and I knew how it felt when an older man took a shine to you as a woman. It was always the kind of guy who was far too decent to be creepy, the avuncular type who had turned his sexual response to you into a deep affection. He showed it by putting his arm around you cleanly, without innuendo, or patting you gently on the shoulder and smiling.

  This guy was like that, old enough to have gained some kind of relief from his urges, and now he was free to just like me for being a woman. Even if he didn’t quite know I was a woman, his brain seemed somehow to have sniffed me out and responded accordingly. The thing was, in this context, of all places, the way he treated me made me feel like a woman—a girl actually, very young and cared for—and I wondered how that could have been possible if some part of him hadn’t recognized me as such. It was unmistakable, and I never felt it with any other man I came into contact with as a man.

  I felt something entirely different coming from the other men who thought I was a young man. They took me under their wings. Another older bowler had done this. Taking me aside between rounds, he tried to teach me a few things to improve my game. This was male mentor stuff all the way. He treated me like a son, guiding me with firm encouragement and solid advice, an older man lending a younger man his expertise.

  This was commonplace. During the course of the bowling season, which lasted nine months, a lot of men from the other teams tried to give me tips on my game. My own teammates were constantly doing this, increasingly so as the season wore on. There was a tension in the air that grew up around me as I failed to excel, a tension that I felt keenly, but that seemed unrecognizable to the guys themselves. I had good frames, sometimes even good whole games, but I still had a lot of bad ones, too, and that frustrated us all.

  At about the five-month mark, Jim began giving me pained looks when I came back to the table after a bad turn.

  I’d say, “Okay, I’m sorry. I know I suck.”

  “Look, man,” he’d say, “I’ve told you what I think you’re doing wrong, and you don’t listen or you get pissed off.”

  “No, no,” I’d protest, “I’m really trying to do what you’re saying. It just isn’t coming out right. What can I do?”

  I threw like a girl and it bugged me as much as it bugged them. If I told them the truth at the end of the season I didn’t want them to have the satisfaction of saying, “Oh, that explains everything. You bowl like a girl because you are a girl.”

  But their motivation seemed comically atavistic, as if it was just painful to watch a fellow male fail repeatedly at something as adaptive as throwing a boulder. Time was, the tribe’s survival depended on it. This just seemed mandatory to them in some absurdly primal way.

  As men they felt compelled to fix my ineptitude rather than be secretly happy about it and try to abet it under the table, which is what a lot of female athletes of my acquaintance would have done. I remember this from playing sports with and against women all my life. No fellow female athlete ever tried to help me with my game or give me tips. It was every woman for herself. It wasn’t enough that you were successful. You wanted to see your sister fail.

  Girls can be a lot nastier than boys when it comes to someone who stands in the way of what they want. They know where to hit where it’ll hurt the most, and their aim is laser precise. One summer when I was a maladjusted teenager, I went to a tennis camp in New Jersey that catered largely to rich princesses and their male counterparts. Most of them couldn’t really play tennis on more than a country-club level. Their parents had sent them there to get rid of them. They just stood around most of the time posing for one another, showing off their tans. But I’d had a lot of private coaching in tennis by that time, and my strokes were fairly impressive for my age. I took the tennis pretty seriously.

  As for posing, I looked like I’d been raised by wolverines.

  The instructors used to videotape each of us playing, so that they could go over the tapes with us and evaluate our techniques. One day, my particular class of about twenty girls was standing around the television watching the tape, and the instructor was deconstructing my serve. He’d had a lot of negative things to say about most of the other girls’ serves, but when it came to mine, he raved unconditionally, playing my portion of the tape over and over again in slow motion.

  At this, one of the prettiest girls in the group, no doubt exasperated by the repetition, said, loudly enough for everyone to hear: “Well, I’d rather look the way I do and serve the way I do than serve the way she does and look the way she does.”

  Now that’s female competitiveness at its finest.

  But with these guys and with other male athletes I’ve known it was an entirely different conflict. Their coaching reminded me of my father’s, whose approach to fatherhood had always been about giving helpful, concrete advice. It was how he showed his affection for us. It was all bound up in a desire to see us do well.

  These guys’ attentions were like that: fatherly. And it really surprised me coming from members of opposing teams, since this was, after all, a money league. But they seemed to have a competitive stake in my doing well and in helping me to do well, as if beating a man who wasn’t at his best wasn’t satisfying. They wanted you to be good and then they wanted to beat you on their own merits. They didn’t want to win against a plodder or lose to him on a handicap.

  But my game never got consistently better. I’d have good frames now and then, but mostly I hovered around an average of 102 and learned to swallow it. So did the guys. They knew I was trying my best, and that was all that really mattered to them. As with everything else a little odd or off about me, they accepted my clumsiness with a shrug of the shoulders, as if to say: “That’s just how some guys are. What are you gonna do?”

  I guess that’s what I respected about those guys the most. I was a stranger, and a nerd, but they cut me all the slack in the world, and they did it for no other reason that I could discern than that I was a good-seeming guy who deserved a chance, something life and circumstance had denied most of them.

  I could never have predicted it, but part of me came to really enjoy those nights with the guys. Their company wa
s like an anchor at the beginning of the week, something I could look forward to, an oasis where nothing would really be expected of me. Almost every interaction would be entirely predictable, and the ones that weren’t were all the more precious for being rare.

  When somebody opened up to me suddenly, like when Jim confided how much he loved his wife and how much it hurt him when the doctor told him that the best he could hope for was to see her alive in a year, or when Bob smiled at me playfully after teasing me over a toss, it touched me more deeply than my female friends’ dime-a-dozen intimacies ever did. These were blooms in the desert, tender offerings made in the middle of all that guy talk.

  I’d never made friends with guys like that before. They had intimidated me too much, and the sexual tension that always subsists in some form or another between men and women had usually gotten in the way. But making friends with them as a man let me into their world as a free agent and taught me to see and appreciate the beauty of male friendships from the inside out.

  So much of what happens emotionally between men isn’t spoken aloud, and so the outsider, especially the female outsider who is used to emotional life being overt and spoken (often over-spoken), tends to assume that what isn’t said isn’t there. But it is there, and when you’re inside it, it’s as if you’re suddenly hearing sounds that only dogs can hear.

  I remember one night when I plugged into that subtext for the first time. A few lanes over, one of the guys was having a particularly hot game. I’d been oblivious to what was happening, mourning my own playing too much to watch anyone else. It was Jim’s turn, and I noticed that he wasn’t bowling. Instead he was sitting down in one of the laneside chairs, just waiting. Usually this happened when there was a problem with the lane: a stuck pin, or a mis-set rack. But the pins were fine. I kept watching him, wondering why he wasn’t stepping up to the line.