Back around 1992 I did a tour with the singer Kate MacKenzie and the pianist Richard Dworsky, an evening of duets and stories, and also a monologue that succeeded in eliciting cheerful booing and hissing from a lot of women in the audiences wherever we went. It was a knowing sort of booing and hissing, ironic booing, and it put them in a cheery mood. They knew they were supposed to boo and they did it with relish, but very stylishly. My marriage to a staunch Danish feminist had broken up, ending a five-year period when I tried hard to be a Dane and a social democrat—and it was a relief to stop trying and to resume life as a Midwestern American guy. And a pleasure to do shows in America again and to see the Great Plains and the Rockies and the Gulf and the California coastline.
One of the stories I told was about one January night when I drove my truck deep into the woods north of Anoka to attend the annual Sons of Bernie bonfire in a grove of birches, twenty below zero, five feet of snow, and there, under the Milky Way and a nearly full moon, we ate chili out of cans and drank bourbon and sang mournful songs like “Long Black Veil” and “Old Man River” and “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” about thirty of us, not exactly my crowd, guys unluckier than I who had suffered cruel fathers, treacherous lovers, abject poverty, dust storms, prison, tuberculosis, car wrecks, the boll weevil, and poor career choices, not to mention bad skin, halitosis, bleeding cuticles, and lusterless hair. They looked so much older and sadder than you want people your own age to look. I was by far the soberest and handsomest one in the bunch. I decided to stay for a while and write about them so that they would not be completely forgotten, but as the night wore on, I came to see that we were truly brothers. It was an epiphany. It changed my life.
We stood close to this fire, smoke in our eyes, hot coals landing in our hair, left arm over the shoulder of the man to our left, right arm free to pass the bottle, and we sang “Hard Times Come Again No More,” “Abilene,” “Love in Vain,” “Streets of Laredo,” “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” and recited poems, such as “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes I all alone beweep my outcast state,” and then someone recited, “There was an old sailor named Tex who avoided premarital sex by thinking of Jesus and terrible diseases and beating his meat belowdecks.”
It was not a tasteful or reverent occasion, not something you’d want your wife or daughters to see. A man can down a quart of whiskey in subzero temperatures and still keep his feet, and when you are that drunk, you will say things that you wouldn’t care to see in print, but nevertheless I would hate to come to the end of my life and think, “I never ever once got drunk in the woods on a winter night with a bunch of guys who all knew the words to ‘Dead Flowers.’” And now I won’t.
We sang about Old Paint and Frankie and Johnny and somebody recited the famous poem:
Whenever Richard Cory went downtown,
The women on the streetcar looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean shaven, his aftershave Royal Platinum.
And he looked terrific in a suit.
And he was always pleasant when he talked;
He certainly made the heads turn en route
To his office as he walked.
And he was rich, a man of style and grace,
And married to a beautiful woman named June.
And yet none of us wished that we were in his place.
We knew June and she was a Gorgon.
And one calm summer night, under the summer moon,
Richard Cory put a bullet in his noggin.
No big surprise, not if you knew June.
We got to feeling awfully close, hooked together, the fire blazing away, the whiskey doing its work. After the poem, a guy said, “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way but I’m glad there aren’t any damn women here to look at us with disgust.” (LAUGHTER) Another guy stepped forward and said: “I have worshipped women all my life and avoided objectifying them and when in conversation with a woman have maintained steady eye contact and not eyeballed their you-know-whats and then the other day, a woman I know told me that she felt empowered when men stared at her breasts, and I said Oh really but maintained eye contact—‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘I have a fantasy that one day a man will reach down there and scoop them up like two Bosc pears and nibble on them’—Interesting, I remarked—‘A man who doesn’t enjoy looking at my bazongas is missing a circuit in the brain,’ she said—and so I glanced down at her and she whacked me in the chops and she said, ‘I knew you’d do that,’ which makes me think that maybe women have gotten more mileage out of feminism than they should’ve and maybe we could stop bowing whenever one comes in the room.”
A ripple of excitement passed through the circle: Guys were Speaking Out! Us! Saying things we wouldn’t dare say in polite society (i.e., women).
A guy with snow-white hair stepped into the circle. “Listen, you pineapples. I am no misogynist but I got to say, women are getting impossible to please these days. I’ve been busting my butt for years trying to keep women happy, and they’re madder at me now than before I started trying so hard. I quit playing poker and hockey and going deer hunting and took up painting watercolors, still lifes mostly, and tossing salads, and learned how to discuss feelings and concerns and not make jokes about them, and they’re still angry at me. A guy can’t win. Boys, let me tell you: most women down deep believe that everything that is wrong with the world is men’s fault and nothing you can do will ever change that. So don’t worry about it. Live your life.”
“Oya!” we all yelled.
A great big bearded guy stepped into the circle. “I sort of miss communism. When the Soviet Union fell apart it seemed like everything went slack and we gave up on manhood. Guys lost interest in guns and quit messing with cars. My son never gets under a hood. Instead he tries to understand his girlfriend and keep a close relationship. We’re selling out our manhood, bit by bit, one ball at a time, trying to buy peace and quiet, and you know something? It won’t work. Self-betrayal never works! I say nuts to sensitivity. Go ahead and fart. Go ahead.”
So we did. All at once. The fire flamed up blazing bright. It felt good. And right.
I realized right then, standing in that circle, that for thirty years I have been nudging women and pointing out dopey men to them so that women would know that I am no bozo or redneck. And here I was arm in arm with the very sort of guys I had always made fun of. I felt shame.
And then the head man of the S.O.B., the Big Burner himself, stepped into the circle, to talk about Bernie. He had been Bernie’s best friend and accountant.
“Bernie was a good guy who married a great girl, Jackie, who read Betty Friedan on their honeymoon and became a militant feminist, but that was okay by Bernie, he supported her in all that she did. They had four daughters, Susan B., Elizabeth Cady, Willa, and Betty. Bernie was a good dad and good husband, and the rest of the time he was a cement contractor. He had fourteen trucks pouring concrete. One winter when the concrete business slacked off, Bernie thought he’d maybe go ice fishing for a week with the old gang, play poker and tell some stories, have some laughs—though Jackie thought it was dumb beyond belief and gave him a hard time about it, so Bernie canceled the fishing trip—and then, on the day he had planned to leave, he ran into me on the street and told me how wonderful it would be to see the old gang again. ‘I haven’t gone fishing in fifteen years, but someday I hope I can get Jackie to let me go,’ he said. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I gotta cash a check before the bank closes.’ And he turned and five seconds later he was rubbed off the face of the earth by a gravel truck making a sudden left turn.
“Bernie was looking forward to being with us someday and someday we will join him in the clubhouse in the sky. He was a hard worker, a good husband and daddy, and he was a great pal, and in his memory we meet and toast him—may he rest.”
We raised our glasses.
“She got the house, the concrete business, everything, all that he’d worked so hard to build up, and you know? She didn’t share much of it with those daughters either. She sold the company for six million dollars to some jerks who ran it into the ground and she bought herself a penthouse in Manhattan where she holds fund-raisers for snooty big-ass liberals. That’s what happened to the life and hard work of Bernie, boys. His money went to people he couldn’t stand to be around and he never got to go fishing.”
We all leaned forward and spat on the ground.
“Well, here we are, boys, we are all losers, we’re drunk, confused, sad, and we smell like dead trout—but I loved him and I love all of you. Here’s to Bernie. Let ’er rip.”
And we drank a long toast and gave six long whoops, Eeeeeeee-ha!
By four a.m. there was little left to say and nobody in any condition to say it. So I went home. And ever since that night, I’ve tried to be more understanding of my fellow men. They are in a bind. Manhood used to be an opportunity and now it’s a liability to be overcome. Plato, St. Francis, Michelangelo, Mozart, Leonardo da Vinci, Vince Lombardi, Van Gogh—you don’t find guys of that caliber today, and if there are any, they are not painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or composing Don Giovanni. They are trying to be Mr. O.K. All-Rite, the man who can bake a cherry pie, go coach girls’ basketball, come home, make melon balls and whip up a great soufflé, converse easily about intimate matters, participate in recreational weeping, laugh, hug, be vulnerable, then go upstairs and be passionate in a skillful way, and the next day go off and lift them bales into that barge and tote it. A hard life, all of it closely monitored by women.
Men adore women. Our mothers taught us to. Women do not adore men; women are amused by men, we are a source of chuckles. That’s because women are the makers of life, and we are merely an appliance. We will never carry life within our bodies, never breast-feed. Our role in procreation is to get crazy and howl and spray our seed and then go away and not frighten the children. I have to go now. The S.O.B. meet on the night of the first full moon of the year. See you then.