Self-Made Man

by Norah Vincent

  After this initial outpouring to the group, the speaker would step down and the group would split up into smaller discussion circles of threes or fours. These smaller discussion groups, which lasted nearly an hour, functioned like cocounseling workshops. These were usually the dark heart of the meetings, the intimate times when breakthroughs could be made. For me, they were usually just times to learn more about the core issues, the specifically gender-related problems these guys shared in common and hashed out together. I often sat aloof taking mental notes.

  It was in one of these small discussion groups that I had my first conversation with Paul. It happened several months after I’d started going to the meetings. I’d met him very briefly once before, early on, but he intimidated me, and so I kept the contact to a brief hello, terrified that he would see through Ned immediately. I had heard about him from the other members, about his problems with rage, but also about his perceptiveness and intelligence. I thought I should be very careful around him. I said to myself, if anyone will sniff you out, he will, and it won’t be pretty when he does.

  I was afraid of him. He was a powerful-looking man, probably in his late fifties. No taller than five feet nine, but heavy, with solid arms, large hands and a sizable paunch, which he wore like a sumo, as if it would be an asset in a fight, not a liability. He probably couldn’t move very fast, but he looked as if he could crush you with a single blow. He had the bloated, toughened face of an Irish boxer or a corrupt old-world cop, and his whole head, woolly with his russet graying hair, looked like a wad of scar tissue.

  Even though he scared me a little, as the godfather of the group and the leader of its biannual retreats, Paul was fascinating to me, too. As much as I wanted to avoid him for fear of being found out, I also wanted to know his story, to pick him apart. I saw him as a self-styled neopagan guru with a ragtag pack of foundlings whimpering at his heels. I couldn’t help thinking of it that way at first, and disliking Paul for the petty tyranny he seemed to exercise over these men. It wasn’t hard to dominate this group. These were mostly broken people, and as much as Paul may indeed have been out to help his fellow men, his brothers, as they called each other, he was, I thought, probably also in it for the bimonthly adulation. Plus, one weekend a year he got to go into the woods with drums and hatchets and play Colonel Kurtz, spouting his aphoristic horrors to his followers and roasting offal on the fire, or some such. I didn’t know what they did on those weekends, but I was going to find out.

  To me, he seemed dangerous on some level. Volatile, at least. And what I was doing was invasive to his pet project, or could be. The rage it could provoke in him might be considerable. It would press all his buttons. As he told it, one of the defining conflicts of his psyche was his hatred for his mother, whom he said had been psychotic (she was dead now) and had tried to kill him. He said he had the scars to prove physical abuse at her hands.

  I imagined that Paul had transformed his abiding hatred for this woman into a pervasive and virulent misogyny. His response to me, if he found me out, especially if he found me out in the woods with all of (what I supposed to be) his sharpened instruments at hand, could, I thought, easily turn nasty. I could see it happening, all the matriphobic ire finding its focal point in me, the treacherous female, nosing her way in where she didn’t belong, listening to their secrets and invading their sacred space.

  Of course, none of this was fair. I didn’t even know the man yet.

  But Paul was emblematic for me from the start. This was the end of Ned’s journey and Paul was his last trial, the last person to deceive and perhaps confront. I wanted to make it easy for myself to dislike him, because it was going to make me feel a lot less guilty about spying on him. Posting him out there somewhere as my nemesis in effigy made him neatly detestable in my mind. Besides, the way he presented himself on a first or second meeting didn’t help his cause. He seemed gruff and egocentric, even a little belligerent when he spoke, spitting his words like a preemptive strike.

  The first time I heard him address the group he speechified with self-important authority. He condescended, almost angrily, as if he were a principal lecturing truants.

  He said, “Someone said about me recently, ‘Paul thinks he’s the center of the universe,’ and I say if you’re not the center of the universe there’s something wrong. You are the center of your universe, because if you’re not, who is?”

  He went on to talk about the need for each man to respect other men’s egos. This made the feminist in me bristle at first. Haven’t we had enough of men’s egos, I thought? But then I remembered my first night out in drag in the East Village and my perception that respecting one another’s egos was exactly what men were often doing with their eyes and body language, slipping past one another’s protected zones with minimal engagement. It wasn’t about pride so much as protection.

  As if reading my thoughts, Paul said, “When you look another man in the eye it means one of two things. What?”

  He waited for a reply. I was ready with the answer.

  “I want to fuck you or I want to kill you,” I said.

  Everyone turned to look at me.

  “Exactly,” said Paul. “I want to fuck you or I want to kill you.”

  This much I knew and understood. I’d experienced it myself. But in Paul’s rendering, there was more to it. He was making a larger point, a point that was central to the purpose and methodology of the men’s movement, but I didn’t find that out until much later, until I’d heard more of these men’s stories and learned what they were trying to accomplish at these meetings. At the time it just made me think that Paul was a petty tough guy, showing his homemade troops how to piss in all four corners of the room.

  But then Paul and I met again in one of the small discussion groups. We were sitting two feet from each other, face-to-face, and he wasn’t an abstraction anymore. Nor, I soon discovered, was he the bully I’d taken him for.

  I sat quietly for the first half hour, just as I usually did, listening to what the other guys were saying. He was listening, too. And as I listened and watched the way he listened, I began to see that there was much more to him than the illusion of certainty he’d presented at the front of the room. He wasn’t just a windbag who loved the sound of his own voice. Actually, he was the only man in the group who really listened. He listened intently, instead of just waiting for his turn to speak.

  Most of the other guys tended to talk at and past each other, rarely to or with each other. They listened, it seemed, mostly for things that reinforced their own experience or point of view about themselves. They’d nod when something resonated, but then, as soon as the speaker finished, they’d often just launch into their own story, relevant or not. This ships-passing-in-the-night approach didn’t seem to bother most of the guys. Probably because they were so unused to talking this frankly about their feelings, a mere airing was good enough. They weren’t practiced at the art of give and take.

  But Paul was. He actually responded to what you said. He’d ask a follow-up question, probe you a bit to make you examine your thoughts. He’d interact. This, coupled with his intelligence and depth, stood out markedly in this company. It almost made me want to participate.

  And that’s what happened that night. Paul drew me in and drew me out.

  He turned his chair around, as he often did in meetings, and he folded his arms on the chair’s backrest, propping his chin on one fist. He looked me right in the eye and wouldn’t look away. I’d been silent all evening, but there was no denying that look.

  It said, “So what’s your story?”

  “I’m in a very bad mood,” I said. “I don’t think I’m going to say anything helpful.”

  “Anger isn’t helpful?” he prompted, fixing me more intently.

  A good point. This came up often in the group—the idea that anger was not an unproductive emotion if followed to its source. The way these guys told it, anger was the one emotion they had in abundance, the one emotion that the world had allowed
them to have in abundance, so by implication it contained everything else—sorrow, pain, need, shame. You name it. It was a feeling they knew well, and it was the place where most of their other feelings hid. Nobody here was going to judge you for letting it speak.

  This was refreshing, actually, and, I thought, particularly masculine. I, and most of the women I knew, had been sublimating anger for as long as we could remember. It was the one emotion we weren’t quite allowed, or didn’t allow ourselves. Eschewing it was part of being nice and attractive. You didn’t want to be thought of as a bitch, so you put it all underground or turned it on yourself.

  With these guys, I liked taking it in the face for a change, hearing anger spoken out loud in no uncertain terms.

  I heard people venting spleen without apology in harsh and cutting words. They’d say things like, “I hate my sister,” or they’d tell you in detail about how they’d fantasized about ripping their wife into tiny pieces. At one of the yearly retreats, for example, one guy had found it very therapeutic to pretend that he was chopping up his wife with an ax—this after he’d come home from a business trip to find that she’d left him and taken the kids with her. Paul said he got a wedding invitation from this guy a few years later. On it the guy had scrawled a personal note saying that his second marriage would have been unthinkable without the healing he’d experienced on that retreat.

  Many of the guys in the group were not afraid to admit that they had murderous rage inside them. Some people said it outright. “I’m homicidal.” Some said they knew there was a potential rapist in them—not that any of these fantasized crimes ever came to pass or would. They were just talking, saying the worst things, letting out the worst thoughts, not always violent, but ugly, un-charitable thoughts, the kind of thoughts that, if most of us were honest, we’d admit we’ve had, too, in some form or another. I respected their frankness.

  Of course, if you heard all of these wife-mangling stories out of context you’d misunderstand what was really going on. It would sound like motivational misogyny, or some sick rallying cry for the thwarted. But it was more complicated than that. The anger came from legitimate feelings, and the more time I spent with these guys, the more the underlying causes for these feelings took shape and actually vetted things I’d undergone or perceived as Ned. Many of them seemed linked to common male experience.

  Sometimes, as with Paul, the anger and hostility these guys felt toward the women in their lives sprang from an unsurprising Freudian source. Their wives and girlfriends were often versions of their mothers. They remembered their mothers as being suffocating, omnipresent influences on whom they had felt humiliatingly dependent, and from whom they were still desperately trying to get free. One guy in the group talked openly about this, and in his comments about his wife you can hear the humor and pathos of his struggle.

  “If I put on her underwear, I would drown. I couldn’t live in her underwear. She’s pretty big. And she really shouldn’t try to live in mine. She doesn’t have the balls. She’s a woman. She doesn’t have balls. I try to detach, but the truth is that when I think I’m going to die, my wife’s life flashes in front of my eyes instead of my own. There’s still a little kid in me that still needs mommy very badly. I admit that. I even referred to her a few weeks ago as my mother instead of my wife.”

  This push and pull with mommy, and hence with women in general, became even more tangled and ferocious when you factored in dads. Aside from having had, and sometimes still having, difficulties with their mothers, a lot of these guys had terribly strained and loaded relationships with their fathers. True to form, as I had also discovered in the monastery, the breakdown between father and son had happened largely as a result of the two men’s culturally conditioned inabilities to communicate with each other. It was a curse that fathers had been handing down to sons for generations: emotional remove, hypercritical expectation, silent judgment, abandonment. This had left populations of sons without role models, teachers or guides to lead them through the tangled, confusing and often painful process of becoming a man.

  In groups with other men, these guys were trying to find the love that their fathers had been unable to give them, or possibly the love that the entire culture had conspired to keep men from giving each other. Again, like the monks, they had a profound need for other men’s love. Love alone wasn’t enough. They needed a man’s affection and respect, a man’s approval, and a man’s shared perspective on their feelings. Having a mother’s or a woman’s love just wasn’t and could never be the same. It couldn’t fill the hole.

  As Bly wrote in Iron John, “Only men can initiate men, as only women can initiate women. Women can change the embryo to a boy, but only men can change the boy to a man. Initiators say that boys need a second birth, this time a birth from men.”

  This was the crucial and remarkable difference between the way these guys felt about their mothers and fathers. They placed blame on both parties, but they actively mourned their fathers. They were seeking to reclaim and make peace with them. As for their mothers, it was mostly good riddance.

  In the context of this longing for male love, sometimes female love was all the more repugnant and enraging to them, only serving to emphasize what was missing.

  “What does it want?” Paul asked me.

  “What, you mean the anger?” I said.

  “Yeah. Anger is always a deprivation. So what does it want?”

  “To be free. Free of the expectations.”

  “Whose expectations?”

  This would be an answer they could relate to, and a true one.

  “My father’s,” I said.

  The two other guys in my small circle nodded vigorously. They knew the tribulations of living up to a father’s expectations. They had all shared similar feelings in heartbreaking language, though their burden was far heavier than mine—mostly, as Bly has argued, because they were men. Their fathers were their models for themselves in a way that mine wasn’t and never could be.

  On a previous night, one of the guys in my circle had shocked me when he’d said, “If only my father hadn’t hated me so much, maybe we could have related.”

  Another had talked of killing his father, taking revenge on “the bastard” for his childhood.

  A third, Josh, had told the story of his father’s recent death, his need to make peace with the man’s legacy, and his inability to step into his father’s vacant shoes. A few months after his father’s death, Josh’s mother had telephoned him and asked him to come to the family home and clean out his father’s workshop. His father had been something of a master craftsman, and he had left behind a lot of tools, but Josh wasn’t the type to work with his hands. You could tell that this must have been a sore point between his father and him, and probably part of what had kept them apart.

  Josh did go home to his father’s workshop, just as his mother had asked him to.

  “I touched the handle of his hammer,” he said in a shaking voice. “I went into the basement where there were rows and rows of his little drawers, full of screws and bolts and stuff, all carefully labeled. I couldn’t face it. I couldn’t take these things to my home and do what he had done with them. But then I thought maybe I could just take them out of their drawers and mix them all up together in a pile.”

  Everyone laughed at this. We knew what he meant, an anarchistic act, a rebellious last no to measuring up to Dad.

  Like Josh’s, my story was pretty vanilla—my father and I had never hated each other—but it seemed relevant, so I shared it with Paul when he asked.

  “Here’s the thing about my relationship with my dad when I was growing up,” I said. “He was a real stickler about intellectual pursuits, especially about grammar. He couldn’t abide bad grammar. He still can’t. He yells at the television to this day. But I wasn’t particularly intellectual. I was a tree climber who couldn’t sit still long enough to read a paragraph. I lived by intuition, and I wanted him to respond to me emotionally. That was my world. But he didn’
t really understand it. There was a disconnect between us for that reason and we didn’t communicate very well.

  “If, for example, I had gone into his bedroom in the middle of the night and woken him up and said, ‘Dad, it’s me. The house is on fire,’ he would have said: ‘It is I. The verb “to be” takes the nominative case.’ Then he would have rolled over and gone back to sleep.”

  “You really need to come to the retreat,” said Paul, laughing.

  I was coming whether I needed to or not, though I was doing so without the slightest idea what to expect or how I was going to maintain my disguise.

  As I packed for the retreat I grew increasingly anxious about making the trip. What if they found me out? What would they do? Was this a crazy idea? I was going up into the woods alone with a bunch of guys who thought I was a man and who had serious rage issues about women. They’d even talked about tearing women to pieces or chopping them up with axes. These were psychodramatic exaggerations, yes, but so what? Anything could happen in the woods, right? Look what happened to Teena Brandon. She passed as a guy in rural Nebraska, and then when her so-called friends found out she was a woman two of them raped and murdered her. And what about Matthew Shepard? For the crime of being gay and being in the wrong bar at the wrong time, he was beaten senseless and left for dead hanging like a scarecrow from a fence in a Wyoming pasture. Whether I had reason to or not, I was starting to get scared.