Imagine He-Man in school uniform.
Lying on the bottom bunk, my mind flowed over with thoughts of heroism.
This new girl had come into our class, Flora. Flora like the flowers that glint after spring rain. Backpack discarded on the pavement, I was legging it over the zebra crossing, arms extended to a car no doubt stopping anyway, shouting stop in glass-shattering soprano. In slow-motion she would turn and we’d lock eyes, she would gasp with erotic smouldering.
Lying there going over the scene for hours as the moon moved outside the window in that spring of ‘89, I smiled. All I had to do was find the right zebra crossing.
Girls, man.
Would I wanna be one though.
‘… I’ll take ‘Sports’ for $200 please..’
*
We are lads. We have burgled houses and nicked car stereos, and we like girls and swear and take the piss.
Noel Gallagher
What could be better than being a dude.
No argument. We’re more chilled out, more easily pleased, we’re funnier, pets prefer us. We can shop for clothes in 20 minutes, we don’t queue for loos, our understanding of make-up is mascara. We hold doors open, walk on the outsides of pavements, double-tap taxis at the end of dates, we end wars.
Most of all we get to check out girls, save them from zebra crossing incidents aged 6.
That Budweiser ad was a phenomenon because it spoke to men and informed women. It unwrapped a kernel of truth hitherto ungleaned. Men like to chill hard with a cold one while affirming the fact they’re chilling hard with a cold one. That’s what evolution coughed up. The need to do nothing together.
Wazaaaaaaaaa.
The glorious reality of being a dude.
I like getting Tim Henmans, I like having Y-fronts, I like tinkering with my moustache. The only woman I ever saw pull off a moustache was selling apricots on the side of a road in Ukraine. I like getting tennis elbow from cracking the portafilter en route to a nectar-heavy ristretto. I like falling into three hour depressive episodes when we concede late on to Ipswich.
*
Women compliment each other out of contempt, men insult each other to show affection.
Women are weird.
Women tell you things they don’t mean, in order to make you do things they don’t want. They’ll initiate a game of hide and seek and won’t come to look for you. They’ll be all like I didn’t want you to call me, and then wait for two seconds and be like but why didn’t you call me.
Let’s be honest, no-one wants to line up a couple of cold ones and shoot the breeze with a girl. I might’ve have wanted to save Flora from a Ford Sierra slowing into 1st gear, but if we were going toe to toe on some obscure pale ale, eyebrows would raise.
Tim Hetherington the war photographer made an Oscar-winning doc called Restrepo where he spent a year in the Korengal valley in Afghanistan with a platoon of US military. The thing war taught him above any other, he said, is about men’s need to love one another. Not sexually, just a bloodbrother, lay down my life for you, if anyone touches you I will end them, I love you bro, type of thing.
Men as brothers.
While the bride worries for the stag’s life, what he fears more is her unleashing hell’s fire on account of a sprained wrist from too much group crocheting. Men are basic, unhinged, do dumber shit, grab life by the balls. Life isn’t walks on the heath on Sunday mornings with Rex, life is six idiots standing in a circle as Jordan Belfort goes full robot.
This is making me emotional.
*
I remember talking to a girl not long ago and being like, we’re not exactly an outstanding breed are we… it’s not like a girl is flowing-over with options. We’re a bunch of morons. Tell me about it, she said. The pickings are slim.
I thought about it. All the things I admired, I esteemed in my co-compadres, were a source of total humourless resignation in females. We farted in bed. We dressed badly. If we dressed too well it was suspect. We spent all day watching sport. We tried to fix everything, shelving units, their problems. We started wars.
Dylan thought women ruled the world.
I don’t know about the second part, but the first, I was down.
Women run shit.
Look I wouldn’t have got so deep in slander if I wasn’t going to bring it round. I’m not like curtain-twitchy obsessed. But what better thing in life is there than a late spring evening, to take a deep breath in, to look out across the fading light of the canal, and feel a little warm for the female form.
So you’ve gone from derision to objectification then.
No, this is veneration.
The amount of times I’ve almost lynched myself over my handlebars to catch a glimpse of someone moving away down the other side of the pavement. The male gaze, you groan. Maybe men revert back to caveman antics not to avoid women but because they’re scared stiff. I identified with the slave in front of the empress of antiquity, who would undress in front of him, because she did not consider him a man.
Nothing is more terrifying to a man than a woman.
This was Malena in the piazza.
Style is the difference, a way of doing
A way of being done
Six herons standing quietly in a pool of water
Or you walking out of the bathroom, naked
Without seeing me.
Bukowski
You guys rule the earth.
You carry life in you. You make humans. None of us would even exist without you, Earth Mother, the Divine Feminine. A longing to wander, wrote Hesse, tears my heart when I hear the trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, the longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life.
It leads home.
A memory of the mother.
We all carry that inside us. To men, women are a distant reflection, an echo, an amplification of that memory. Women put up with men, that’s their lot. We might have a strange way of going about it, but we worship you.
*
Sat there on the sofa, I hollered for some advice. What we basically want, said a friend over from Palma, is a five year old and a viking. In one packaged deal. Interesting, I said. So someone to mollycoddle and laugh at, and someone to dominate the whole fucking situation. Yea, who’s 8ft tall with a top knot and a shield, she went on.
I thought about it often. I had the five year old down. What about the viking. My triceps needed work. A driver’s license might help. Fuck, was I a feminine man, I thought, I cried in films at non-emotive moments. I liked Dove bright bouquet.
Maybe I was trans.
Telling my bro what I was writing about, he broke in. So basically it’s just a fucking advert.
Sue me.
Call it an audition. Look, I’ll walk on the outside of the pavement, I’ll double-tap the taxi, I’ll be chilled, I’ll get a top-knot. I’ll say the right things, even the wrong things when I know you just want to get upset. I’ll agree with nonsensical logic.
There is a reason that Chloe looked down at Kit, smothering him with her love, despite the other two, the love she had for that kid was too much, it was the first thing that came out of her tummy, her first experience of the circle of life. A mother’s love in plain sight.
How could we not venerate, fall down before you guys. We do nothing. We protect, we hunt, we bear our muscles, we ugg, we leave the seat up, we watch Super Sunday. You made us. We came from you.
I like being a dude, I like checking girls out in the street, I find first dates terrifying, I love my mother.
What I’m trying to say is.
Respect.
Sounds about right.
