Before I tried giving up the manly arts, I was familiar enough with the catalog, broadly signified. I watched sports, built fires, committed to memory various trivia regarding movies, war, sex, architecture, oceanography, baseball, football, golf. I learned to grill a good steak. I developed an excellent sense of direction, made myself a good driver at all speeds. I tried to understand the way things work. I coveted cars, chased tail, craved a better office. I hungered for a threesome. I grew a beard. I liked it.
I hated my feet, my belly, my weak throwing arm, my runt of a penis. I took any work I could get: I hung Sheetrock, cleaned dumpsters, tended bar, waited tables, sprayed kudzu, carried buckets of hot pitch, mowed lawns, and worked as a janitor. From the very start, I sensed that the world was a reflection of my own state of being. When the Yankees lost my life was sunk. When the Redskins won, I knew something good was in the offing. I stood when women arrived at the table, held doors for them, tried my best to let their wishes take precedence. I learned to like beer, then gin, then whiskey I knew well enough how to fish, play cards, and perform at the batting cage, without being particularly great at any of it. I rationalized, insisted, argued. I deferred, I lied, I cheated - then worked to back down on all that. This somehow made me more certain, so that when something irked me, steroids, religion, parking-lot attendants - I argued as if I were the sole cipher to the existence of the thing. Through all this, I outdrank, outworked, outfucked anyone against whom I could benchmark myself. I tried, anyway. Over time, I learned to forget the need to urinate, sometimes for eight hours at a time. I could always catch a ball, even when I had to dive for it. I could lift a man and carry him over my back. I still can do all that.
I am a man. And in this way I was made man. I did it. My father did it. My mother did it. Just a man. Not the man Not the best man, certainly, Man. It was in men I when I was born. Or it welled up. I stumbled on some of it. I measured it in what I did and the way I did it. I liked that and rarely stepped off.
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