Self-Made Man

by Norah Vincent

  I filled out the rest of the story for them between frames. They already knew that I was a writer, and at some point during the season I had told them I was writing a book. Now I told them that I was writing the book about them and me, and that the drag was part of the project. They seemed to like the idea and they wanted to know what their names were going to be in the book. Jim cracked that he wanted Colin Farrell to play him in the movie.

  After I’d finished, they all went on to bowl one of their shittiest games of the season. I think Bob and Allen were in shock. Maybe Jim was nervous about a pending riot. But I had one of my best games. I felt free, loose for the first time, and I was knocking them down like never before. Still, I had a bad headache all of a sudden. The tension of the buildup had taken its toll.

  “Hey,” I said, “does one of you guys have an Advil or something? I’ve got a killer headache.”

  “No,” Bob said without a moment’s hesitation, “but I think I might have a Midol.”

  They all laughed, and that broke the tension. Then right away they started a round of chick jokes, the usual stuff about female intuition and being on the rag and so on. They seemed relieved to know that I could take a joke. Even the lesbian thing didn’t throw them.

  “By the way,” I said, “you know I’m a dyke, right?”

  “Yeah,” Bob said. “I gathered that.”

  Again everybody laughed. He was on what for Bob was a roll.

  As they had with Jim, things changed completely after that with the guys. Everybody loosened up and opened up. Everybody liked Norah much more than Ned, even knowing that I was a dyke dressed as a man. Once I’d outed myself to them I could be a full and rounded person again, much more animated and genuine than Ned had ever been. I’d spent most of my time with them as Ned trying not to stand out or say the wrong thing. I’d done it poorly, the way desperate adolescents do, and with the same miserable results. They were glad at last to have a real person in their midst, whatever her flaws and quirks.

  My supposedly subversive lifestyle just didn’t matter to them, or at least it didn’t appear to, and this was the part I hadn’t expected at all, or given them credit for in the beginning. I’d pegged them unfairly as potential thugs, and now they were showing me up as the judgmental one.

  None of that politicized stuff made a difference to them. I just kept bowling out the season with them, dressed as Ned but revealed as Norah. We didn’t tell anyone else in the league, and they never found out as far as I knew. The guys went right on calling me Ned and he, just as Jim had, but they knew I was a woman in exactly the way that Jim did.

  For me the label couldn’t have mattered less. We were finally getting to know each other and it was the easiest time we spent together all season.

  Allen got drunk one Monday night a week or two after I’d told them. He spent the whole night leaning over and babbling in my ear, mostly about mundane stuff that hardly made sense. The other guys knew what he was like when he was blasted, so they just laughed and let him go on and on as I sat there in polite misery.

  At one point in his rant he leaned a little closer to me and said: “You know, none of this matters to me. It doesn’t affect me. You’re cool. I don’t care what you are. I really like bowling with you, man. Shit, you’re cooler than Bob.”

  This wasn’t exactly the coolest thing to say in front of Bob, since Allen was Bob’s in-law, and the two had been close friends for years. Still, I knew Allen meant it as a great compliment, and I took it as one. But I also knew it was something he would never have said to Ned, not just because he didn’t like Ned as much as Norah, but because he couldn’t talk to a guy the way he could talk to a woman.

  These guys were old pals, but I got the sense that they didn’t speak intimately with each other the way my women friends and I did, or the way Jim had done with me once he’d known that I was a woman. The contrast was striking to Jim, too, which was why, when I told him about my true identity that night at the bar he said, “That’s why you listen so good.” When Jim talked to Bob about his wife’s illness, for example, a life-changing, hugely traumatic event, he spoke almost without affect, tersely, using the only available language, the facts of the catastrophe, to imply but not convey his pain. Bob listened in the same way, nodding respectfully and with clear concern, but with a little distance and discomfort, too. He was a good friend, but he seemed as trapped as Jim by his reserve. Watching them made me tense and sad, as if their exchange was happening in a sealed jar where the air was close and stifling.

  Maybe that was part of the insult in Allen’s comment, too. Maybe he hadn’t just meant to say that I was cool, but also that he felt closer to me in some way than he did to Bob. Their friendship had sure boundaries of touch, affection and expression, and as a woman I could break through those blocks as quickly and effortlessly as I had changed my sex. Those were the rules, it seemed. As a guy you didn’t make yourself vulnerable, and you didn’t burden yourself or your buds with your doubt and fear. They didn’t want to hear about it, and you didn’t want to reveal it. But with a woman it was easier immediately. You could speak freely and get away with it, or at least as freely as your customary reticence would allow.

  It seemed that getting drunk was one of the only ways Allen could express his feelings, even to a woman. They came out a little ragged and impolitic in the process, but they were touching anyway.

  He may not have said much the night of my disclosure, but he’d clearly been thinking about it since. He told me that he’d been talking with his thirteen-year-old daughter that week and she’d said to him, the way teenagers do, “Oh, that’s so gay,” referring to some activity or article of clothing that wasn’t in fashion.

  “You know,” Allen said, “she’s always sayin’ that, but this time I stopped her, and I said: ‘You oughta be careful how you use that word.’”

  Jim had told me a similar story about a confrontation he’d had a few days before with a coworker who’d been talking about gay characters on network TV shows like Will and Grace. She’d said: “Well, I don’t have a problem with gays, but why do they have to keep shoving it in my face?”

  And Jim said, “Oh, okay, so you’re fine with gay people so long as they stay in caves and back alleys. Is that what you’re saying?”

  He said he’d really pinned her to the wall for it, saying finally, “Either you have a problem with gay people or you don’t. There’s no ‘but.’”

  These guys were starting to sound like a progressive party meeting and all I’d done was laugh along with them when they’d said things like, “If you’re really a chick, then how the hell do you have such big feet?” But I was grateful for their support however they showed it, and I felt more than a little ashamed of how I’d underestimated them.

  They had taken me in, and I had deceived them. They took it astonishingly well nonetheless. I had condescended to them all along, even in my gracious surprise that they were somehow human. They had made that leap on my behalf without the benefit of suppressed snobbery. I have condescended to them still in these pages throughout, congratulating myself for stooping to receive their affections and dispense my own, for presuming to understand them. Class is inescapable in tone, and even a pseudointellectual will always sound like she thinks she’s earning points in liberal heaven for shaking hands with the caveman or, worse, the noble savage. The most I can say is that they were far better men than I in that, and undoubtedly far worse or just as bad in ways that I would never and could never know. They made me welcome in their midst, and by so doing, they made me feel like a bit of a shithead, like an arrogant prick know-it-all. In a sense, they made me the subject of my own report. They bowled with irony after all.

  They made me look ridiculous to myself and they made me laugh about it. And for that I will always be grateful to them, because anybody who does that for you is a true and great friend.

  3

  Sex

  “The four Fs. That’s all you need to know about women. Find ’em. Feel
’em. Fuck ’em and Forget ’em.”

  Phil, a thirty-three-year-old professional with a wife and two daughters, was telling me about the first and only man-to-man chat he ever had with his father. He was twelve years old at the time, and that was the only advice he ever got from anyone about how to treat a lady. I had met him as Ned for the first time at another bar a few nights before, struck up a conversation with him and asked if he could show me where the good strip clubs were in the area.

  He’d agreed. So here we were at the Lizard Lounge sitting at the back of a dark room at one of those square brown Formica tables that you see in truck-stop coffee shops, the kind with the rickety bases that always have a matchbook shoved under one of their feet and a filthy plastic ashtray sliding back and forth across their tops in a rash of salt. The room was filled with tables like this, set up café style, all with their metal-frame chairs turned in the same direction, and the men in them staring rapt at the naked women dancing for them on the stage. Other naked women were wandering between the tables, working the crowd for dollar bills, a wad of which they each had strapped around one ankle.

  Phil had ordered a bottle of water, as had I. They didn’t serve alcohol at the Lizard Lounge, which is common in places where the girls get totally naked on stage and give the more explicit private lap dances. In the places where alcohol is served, the dancers don’t usually disrobe entirely, and if lap dances are offered they’re usually of the tamer variety where touching isn’t allowed and nothing more than frottage happens. That is, unless you find a place that’s breaking the rules, which a lot of places do to some extent or another, depending on what an individual dancer is willing to do offstage.

  Phil poured his water into a glass, then dumped two packets of sugar into the water and stirred it with a straw. He gulped it as he spoke.

  “My dad and I have come to places like this together,” he said. “We have a lot of fun with it. He came to my bachelor party here and got a couple of lap dances.”

  This appalled me at first, the idea of a father and a son hanging out in strip clubs together, as if it was a rite of passage. It appalled me even more that a father would advise his son to treat women like hostile organisms who were to be made necessary and expedient use of and then discarded as soon as possible. But the more I observed about the painful compulsions of male sexuality while in the company of men as a man, and the more I understood about the deep insecurity that goes along with being a man in the company of women, the more I understood what a ham-handed charade men were often putting on in front of each other, all of it in a desperate effort to hide that insecurity and pain. My bowling pals had been as full of the same off-color jokes as Phil and his dad, full of the same know-it-all insouciance that betrayed exactly how much, not how little, women and the esteem of women actually meant to them.

  We’d only been at the club for a few minutes, just long enough for Phil to spin his family anecdote, when one of the naked crowd pleasers approached me. I looked at the floor as if to decline her offer, but it wasn’t an offer. This was my first time in a strip club, and I didn’t know the etiquette yet. I didn’t know that giving dollars to the dancers wasn’t really elective. You were pretty much expected to give on demand, which is why the doorman had given me eight singles in change for my twenty.

  The dancer turned her back to Phil’s gummy grin as she slipped between our chairs to face me. She took my right knee between her legs, and sidled her pelvis closer to my face. I looked up, past eye level, trying not to see the hard veined hands that were already roughly parting and fingering her shaved pussy. I looked past the length of her stretched belly and her small, angry breasts, to her downturned face, which I thought would be the least offensive part of her. But I was wrong. Her face was where the squalor showed the most. She looked old for this work, but she was probably younger than she looked. She peered down at me with a weathered grimace of contempt and resignation, like a prostitute posing for a mug shot.

  And who could blame her?

  We were the scum in her world, and a dollar didn’t merit effort. She was giving us what we wanted and she was giving it dirty. She wasn’t pretending that she liked us, or wanted us, or cared what we thought. She knew what we thought.

  Her face didn’t matter. Probably only a woman would even bother with her face. None of the other guys I saw her approach ever looked her in the eye, and I only did it out of shame and disgust. I had thought I would find something endurable in that face, but it was a mask. Her eyes were intentionally repulsive, and I looked away.

  What had I expected? She knew that no matter how raunchy things got, the men would want more of it. They would look at the gash in front of them with the mild interest of entitlement, which the men around me did. They turned their eyes sideways from the stage to look at her impassively, as if she were a commercial break or a side of fries. I shoved my dollar at her just to get rid of her, but she wouldn’t take it.

  “Not yet,” she said.

  She could tell I was a cherry and she was going to amuse herself with my discomfort. She leaned over and took my head between her hands. She pulled me into her chest, sagging one meager breast on each cheek, then bobbling them back and forth with her shoulders. Maybe she was genuinely smiling now. Finally she pulled her ankle up into my lap, digging the point of her heel into my knee, and bending open the wad of bills so that I could reach in and deposit my due.

  “Now,” she said.

  This was my introduction to a substratum of the male sexual psyche that most women either don’t know about, don’t want to know about, or both. How could they? Their boyfriends and husbands weren’t likely to tell them, not even about things they did when they were bachelors. There is too much shame in it. Or, more truthfully, there is too much incrimination. If a man has been to a place like this and admits it, he’s already blemished in the eyes of many prospective mates, and if he admits to having enjoyed it or indulged his baser instincts in the corners of the room, he’s even more tainted, which is why the men I met were never honest with the women in their lives about strip joints like these or the sexual drives they are designed to satisfy.

  Phil knew these dives and their offerings intimately, and he liked playing the guide and tutor. He knew I’d never been to a place like this before, and when I asked him probing questions about it, he was full of expert bluster about what it all meant, as if, just by virtue of being who he was—a prototypical guy—he had a lock on the male mind:

  “What are most guys looking for in a woman? We’re not looking for a nice person. We’re not looking for someone to rear our children. We’re not looking for someone who’s going to pitch in and be a good worker and contribute to the household. A guy is looking for a woman to fuck him. We want someone we can stick our dicks into all the time. That’s ninety-five percent of looking for a woman. And there’s no explaining that to anyone.”

  Of course, I’d spoken to enough men to know that this wasn’t the whole truth by any means, and Phil knew it, too, but it was a truth of sorts. Plenty of men—most, really—want wives and families for all the right and good reasons, for love, companionship, dedication. Domesticity is not inimical to them. The very idea is absurd and disproved a thousand times a day. But to hear them tell it, a lot of men do seem to struggle with their sexuality underneath, as well as all the religious, political, matrimonial—literally mothering—forces that tell them to repress it.

  Men get married, but their sexuality doesn’t then magically disappear amid the bliss of family life. Hence the preponderance of married men loping off in shame and secret to the strip club.

  Sometimes even respectable men with respectable lives have primal ugly stuff bracketed somewhere in their minds, kept in its place apart from the purported love that goes with the responsibilities of fatherhood and husbanding. How could it be otherwise? Much as they might have liked them to, these drives and desires didn’t somehow cease to exist in respectable company. It was only society’s prevailing myth, or perhaps femal
e wish fulfillment, that had pretended otherwise. As a result, individual men and women were left to sort out the sordid reality on their own, hurting and getting hurt because sometimes it was too hard to successfully resolve the conflict between baseline male sexuality and the civilized role of a man.

  These clubs and the thoughts and feelings that produce them are the squalid subbasement of male sexuality in which a lot of men have at least one foot or toe firmly planted. No matter how high they ascend in the civilized world, no matter how tall, how dapper, how educated or savvy they stand in the stratosphere of age and accomplishment, a lot of average guys still have a nudie film loop flickering in the back of their minds. And the more educated, politicized, refined they become, the more ashamed of their base proclivities they often feel.

  Even the mildest, most conscientious men I spoke to about their sexualities often spoke of the satyr inside them that led them, especially when they were young and crazed by the primal drive to fuck, to do things they were ashamed of.

  “In college, I remember waking up in bed with women I didn’t know, and worse, didn’t want to know,” said Ron, an Ivy-educated, literary family man who makes his living in the world of letters, “and feeling so appalled by what my body had led me into doing. Most of these women I just dropped without ceremony, and to this day I feel quite bad about that. I treated them terribly, but I just felt insanely compelled by the urge to find some relief.”

  Despite not wanting to know the truth about what goes on at strip clubs, most women think they know nonetheless. Popular films show women half-clad shaking it suggestively on stage, which some of them do in the tamer clubs. But the women in these first few clubs I visited were naked and there was nothing artful about their striptease. There was no tease, just cunt, bald and raw. The women on stage were usually naked within the first minute, and they didn’t hint at some dreamed-of consummation, they just auctioned their merchandise at close range.