The Manly Arts

Listen," my mother has said to me, "you know why men are useful? It's that little inside pocket in their jackets. They can carry a passport. Maybe a pack of Chesterfields for you. It's very convenient."

"Is that all?"

"Mmmm. A man has a razor you could borrow for your legs. You can wipe your glasses on his tie. Also, a man is good for screwing—"

"Uh, Mother, my therapist told me I shouldn't talk with you about that kind of—"

"And unscrewing. Especially light bulbs way up on the ceiling. And faucet handles so they won't drip. And wringing wet laundry out. And jars. I married three times just so I could get jars open. A happy male-female relationship should contain lots of tightening and opening. Otherwise, you need a man as much as you need a spastic colon."

This sort of talk has never jeopardized my self-esteem. See, I know that Mother doesn't consider me a man, she considers me a son—which is something different, possibly genderless. But don't get the wrong slant on her: Mother isn't spermicidal. She appreciates male companionship and will treat all men with the same unfailing, patient grace that she would accord to any slow hotel porter.

Me, I'm not so pessimistic. I think the Manly Arts still exist—each a mysterious and intrinsic act that men alone can bring off, either because women can't, or won't stoop so far, or are afraid their nail polish might flake off while they're doing it. From these our culture, ever since Cro-Magnon man first took mastodon garbage out or bought his mate some cheap wrist corsage, has knit a receiving blanket of obligation and trust that won't change much even though Ms. Ride reached escape velocity last year. After all, there should be something that will distinguish male and female—aside from yeast infections or a handle-bar lip fern.

Here, then, is the Manly Art (M.A.) accordion file—rites and talents that, in my opinion, would seem so innate as to be gene determined. I don't claim proficiency for myself. I'm a son, remember. I have, however, seen other men perform well. Upon these M.A.s, I suggest, the enduring bond and the native civility that persist between man and woman are grounded. (By all this acoustical cologne I mean: Thank God she still needs you to fit that damn thready, flimsy little hook and eye together at the back of her dress.)

Life in the Exact-Change Lane

Women can't manipulate anything more complex than a Pez dispenser. They get along with mechanical equipment about as well as roaches get along with boric acid. You'll think I made this up, but it is down-pure true. See, I'm at a self-serve pump and Ms. Goodwrench has just bought one quart of motor oil. "Know where to put it?" I ask. Complete snub and heavy, basic indignation. Then memsahib, she yoicks her hood up and, my God—gloppo!—she is now shaking oil all over her entire engine block, the way you'd sprinkle vinegar on escarole. Women drive off jacks they can't pump down and throw away your birthday-present butane lighter when it has run out of gas. Also, a camera will completely f-stop them, which is why, I guess, so many appear nude in magazines: Someone has to snap the shutter. Men and machinery, by contrast, have a fine understanding, like that between young children and dirt. Motors and drive shafts and clock escapements have to be dealt with firmly: You catch rattlesnakes so, hard, behind the head. Trouble is, women think of metal as male; they try to seduce it. But even if she's so sexy she'd make your nose hard, a flooded carburetor won't respond.

Carve Me One Wing and Three Legs, Please

My father, now, he could slice a full bladder. He could cut the Pope's nose from T-bone steak. Man, he was George Washington Carver. Keep your knife sharp as cheap schnapps, he'd tell me, cut along the grain and don't get emotionally involved with dinner. That was my problem: I could anthropomorphize a chicken. I'd feel sorry and end up with all dark meat. Women won't carve, possibly because they don't like to reveal their aggressive nature. And they won't eat, either: Women are forever dieting or scared to unsimonize their lip gloss. Perhaps the least understood and most important M.A. is plain old eating. Men have to smack their chops and ask for a third helping and get gas so that our whole social fabric won't unravel. Heartiness is male. There's no such thing as a hearty woman, is there? You wonder we men throw up fat-thrombosed clots and infarct all over by the time we're 39?

You've Never Met a Female Shoe Fetishist, Huh, Have You?

No. Because few women get real beef satisfaction from good leather. To them, shoes are just dumb ornament—a kind of coiffure for walking in. Men, even hobos, understand that broken footwear is absolute social death. Women let their toe gear derez almost at once; it'll look like the Elephant Man's palm by next week. Avoid this foot fault. Work good oil around, ply and squeeze. Insert one finger, then massage gently, with an Eine Kleine Nachtmusik beat. Educe natural juices. Don't forget the tongue: Get in deep with it and stroke to your own peculiar coxswain's call. Shoe care of this kind may be the quintessential Manly Art.

C'mon, Baby, Light Mah Charcoal Grill

Ever see women trying to start a wood fire? They'll bend down and look for the pilot light every time. That subtle step up from kindling point (tight newspaper) to higher kindling point (twig and bark) to highest kindling point (major wood with good draw beneath) is less comprehensible than a unified field theory. Their brain waves go flat when they consider fire. Women, moreover, are more impressed by sheer flame than by smooth, even burning, because they're always cold. I've never known a warm woman. That's why women prefer the missionary position: You're not their lover, you're their flesh bedspread, Irvin. Also why they have to put solid-kapok underwear on right after sex. ("But I'm cold, dear, and you've seen it once already.")

Generous, Full-Bodied and Wet

It is an M.A., utterly thankless, to select that special wine. Women, I think, have just 12 scanning lines on the tongue, somewhat fewer than your cheesiest computer screen. Robust, earthy Bordeaux will taste like raw potted plant to them. Better it should smell like a premature dessert. And be white, endlessly, blindingly white. At Lutece, she'll say, "A glass of white wine, please," as I'd say, "A glass of liquor, please," at my neighborhood bar. California still means cheap donk to women, so buy French anything—mis en bouteille sous la Place Pigalle—since French is now cheaper than Californian. Hopeless: She'll never admit to enjoying it. If she did, you'd pour more and then she'd vomit out your no draft on the trip home or, worse, make love spontaneously.

Screw That Cork

My method may be tacky as painting on black velvet, but it's efficient. Work your corkscrew in, then—while you hold it at center with chin or nose—turn the bottle. Aha! A Polish sommelier. Easier, though, to twist that big, solid bottle straight than to turn that jiggery cork screw straight. And there is no more testosterone-inhibitive second—I'm impotent for one full week after—than when you catch dry cork and make the gourmet equivalent of foot-sole parings on her kitchen counter. As for champagne, of course, the trick is not to pop it and waste carbonation. Women, of course, love loud sound. Champagne is a big thrill for them—like, oh, taking NyQuil in the afternoon. Practice tock! noise against your palate. And let gas out slowly, the way you would a dark fart at 10 Downing Street.

Just So I Can't Tell There's Any Liquor in It

Women don't tend bar well; their martinis taste worse than ear grease on some old pay-phone receiver. Women want the ideal cocktail to (A) look pretty (ever try swallowing your lava lamp?) and (B) taste like a Barricini holiday assortment. My wife has been seen ordering Kahlúa mixed with Baileys Original Irish Cream—known among New York bar people as The Final Yoo-Hoo. It is masculine and artful to pour Galliano (over your knife edge) atop a Harvey Wall-banger—so it'll remind her of Creamsicles. Even then, she'll nurse it longer than the Fabulous Invalid. Here we may as well discuss a yet more essential M.A.—pure drinking. How else—tell me—are you gonna stay in that nice piano bar? She's got her one half-rotted Wallbanger and Mr. Officious Waiter is wiping the table with your hand still on it. Me, I have to order bourbon after bourbon until I belong in a Frozen Embryo Repository. Then, later at home, with my prowess on backward, she'll say, "You sure overdid it tonight, didn't you?"

The Fact That You're High on Grass Doesn't Qualify You for Handicapped Parking

Women don't know one loose gram about scoring drugs. So you, Percivale, will have to meet Bacciagalupe, with his face like a gangland-style execution, in some dark playground sandbox. One hundred years for possession, life for dealing—you're just fortunate they run consecutively. Even if your French Connection is Aunt Mimi in De Gaulle, New Jersey, try to suggest great personal risk. Come back talking black jive, such as "That half-steppin' ho-daddy splib, cat try and walk on it with Polly-dent, off him, off him, he not wrapped too tight, ditty bop an' thuh Motown soun'." This ethnic badinage will thrill her—more than the junk, which is probably half fly ash and half old pocketbook dirt. Either way, no sweat, no threat, because even when women get good stuff, when they're out prone on tiptoe, they say, "I just don't feel (continued on page 82)Manly Arts(continued from page 72) it at all, do you? It has no effect on me." Sure, Mildred, but you just ate a dime and now you're dialing my left nostril. But we do need women. Only they can roll a decent tight joint. Mine come out as fat as monarch-butterfly cocoons and burn faster than the Coconut Grove fire.

Baksheesh, or, Face It, Guy, Women Are Cheap

Hell, they wear perfume and flash inner thigh and retain water in attractive places; why should they tip, too? If your wife is buying, leave an extra fin behind. Otherwise, the waiter will sprinkle amoebiasis in your doggy bag. Women actually think they should tip for good service—a concept that threatens Western civilization as we know it. Doing a smooth palm lube is supermanly. Fold your bill tight, denomination up, and try to look Middle Eastern when the disco bouncer passes by. Also, recognize your mark. I once slipped a bus boy $20 for preferential seating. (Now, wait—he was better dressed than I; it's sometimes hard to tell.) We were put conveniently near a live dumb-waiter, but he did run one of those little crumb carpet sweepers over my suit all night. Massaging the human silk gland may be your most critical M.A. If men didn't take women out, cabbies, waiters and mechanics would have little not to report on their collective 1040. Think of it. The underground economy would get starch blocked and almost nothing would trickle up.

If It's Bigger Than an Ant and Doesn't Answer to Fido, Scream

Women who are cool with the surprise Pampers and unflung formula become shrieking Roquefort when any after-dinner-mint-size creature moves. A palmetto bug'll make your wife pop her cervical cap. And then she becomes instant Caligula, right? "Kill it, kill it!" she'll yell as you take a Luna moth back outside. Manliness requires you to bait her hook with the worm, then remove whatever she might have caught. In between, though, she's fishing. And remember Rover? He'd lift his leg on your attaché case every A.M. before work and sniff right there with that cold nose just when you were coming. Yeah; but now that a transit-mix truck hit him, Rover is your pet. I've conducted more dog obsequies than any K9 Corps chaplain. And what about mice? I think women fear mice for the same reason an elephant is supposed to. Only their trunks are shorter.

Her Work is Never Done, Probably Because She Lost It

Extensive aptitude testing has shown that men are twice as lobed to cope with shape and organization as women. Father could pack our car perfectly (primeval M.A., that) while Mother was still trying to get channel four on her Dial-a-Lash. The female pocketbook is one neighborhood that'll never be gentrified. And as for that predictable kitchen "thing" drawer, it must come with her trousseau—old batteries fizzy from acid, string, blank thumbtack cards, chance books for some 1974 Roman Catholic automobile, one moving part, one Iran Air stand-by reservation, one cuff link, one ankle weight, one ben-wa ball—this drawer is on a secret list at the Center for Disease Control. No wonder they don't find women in organized crime. It is an important M.A. to keep separate emergency duffel hidden somewhere: second flashlight, second can opener, second car key, second diaphragm, second tube of Ortho-Gynol, second petroleum-jelly jar, second thought about your relationship.

Girls Throw Like, Ah, Girls

Women face every sport chest on, as if they were all—tennis, softball, Frisbee—a pub dart game. They don't comprehend torque, angle or leverage; they could get fouled in the act of taking a foul shot. Moreover, they presume that just one body part is requisite: arm for throwing—yike! forgot to open the hand and, yow! why did my right foot step on my left toe? Watch her bowl. Exotic approach copied from Laverne on TV. Then—eerrrk!—a dead, shoe-burning stop (which negates the approach completely). Release gutter ball. Stand with hands on hips, body English sent under separate cover. Curse a torn cuticle. Then—¡olé!—follow-through. Female movement is serial: She will dive, swing, serve the way committees take up an agenda. It is manly to keep your woman from being killed by her own farblonjet biofeedback. I know, I know, there are great female athletes. I also hear that some Russian has taught an elephant to speak.

The Electronic Revolution, or, Does Ms. Pac-Man Have Bulimia?

Anything with one plug and three knobs will give a woman an occluded head. She can't even tune her color TV right—O. J. Simpson is green and Kermit is high yellow. A vague sense of propriety there, I guess: It isn't nice to adjust someone else's base make-up. Stereo: Well, the left speaker is for treble and the right is for her wandering Jew, which could use sunlight, so turn the whole component toward a window. A woman does not, ba-ba-dahdum, rock on down to Electric Avenue. She is piss awful at Donkey Kong and Pitfall! and Berzerk, maybe because the Atari joy stick reminds her of a hand job she once knew. But don't explain, do: Software for a woman is a silk chemise. If you point at her tone control, she'll watch your finger tip. Women are extremely observant; they just observe the wrong thing. Women have poor sequential logic. Read the service manual, tune or focus or install and offer her warranties of your continual presence.

Do I Have to Draw You a Map, Ethel? Ha, So You Wanna Confuse Me, George?

It's left over from the Fallopian time—this female inability to read a road map. Women won't concentrate: They figure, from their egg P.O.V., if they wait long enough, asphalt will move underneath and a destination will come to them. Men, by comparison, have sperm instinct and hustle. Hang that left at North Utero or you die, Drip off the Old Block. Thank Saint Stercoraceous for this Manly Art. Without it, civilization would still be calling the A.A.A. from a phone booth on some dark, membranous highway.

If You're a Man, Call the Man

Electrician, plumber, landlord, bureaucrat—they all deal with your woman as though her brain had been redistricted by CREEP. If you're home when Mr. Man calls, however, he probably won't put an expensive damper pedal on her sewing machine or convert your furnace for Texaco Hi-Test Anti-Knock. We do treat women the way corrupt surrogate judges treat minor children. And women think, with too much justification, that a male phone voice or presence will pull down more respect. If she rear-ends the squad car, you and Officer Macho can conspire. "Go easy, huh? She's careful driving, but you know how women are-reflexes of a hydrangea." She'll get warned, where male you or I would end up trying to survive freshman week at Attica. We are their mouthpieces, agents, managers. Men don't become involved with women; they're sort of retained by them.

Plug into Your Outlet, Then Plug into Your Outlet

Most sex-aid stores are patronized and run by a kind of human venereal wart. "Pick 'em out," Jabba the Hutt will say, "pick 'em out, this ain't no liberry," while braiding his latest mucoid discharge between thumb and forefinger. One look is (concluded on page 174)Manly Arts(continued from page 82) enough to send a respectable woman into instant Mittelschmerz. No way she can price real simulated Spanish fly or hot Ream Cream. It is manful, then, to get her ring size and fetch plastic gratification home: cheese-grater condoms and Dancing Dingers and purple crank dongs so large you could start a Model T with one. Mechanical adroitness will again be prerequisite—D battery, adjustable screw clamp, rubber gasket—men who are all thumbs can never please their women. On any sexual drive-through jungle tour, moreover, man must be guide and handy man and head fantast. After all, most women approach sex as if they were auditing an elective course: no roll taken, no class participation. A man should mix some warm, some cold, some French, some Greek, some B and D, some Water Pik and some winsome narrative about Goldilocks and the three chicanos. It can be your best M.A., but practice, intuition and gentle guile are needed. You don't learn this secret by playing a few cuts of the White Album backward.

That Fourth Arm

There you are, after a night of love that really rotated your tires. You snuggle close for sleep, spoon tight against her fertile crescent and—and find that God made men and women with one arm too many. Yours. Yours is the fourth arm. No matter where you hang it—over a headboard, in your crotch, beneath her back—at least one major vein will squinch off and become necrotic. But the night was splendid, so who cares if you look like Kaiser Wilhelm II next morning: You're a man.

In an Emergency, Croon

Men—well, certain men at least—have sufficient presence to firebreak panic and pour foam on psychological runways before the crash. Sure, women can kiss and make better, which might be OK local anesthesia—but not so effective when the Titanic is heading for very uneminent domain. Strong men crowd-control because, by implication, they are themselves at risk. I remember the time my father cut in on two knife-out drunken men at a bar. Their women were screaming. My father simply said, "That'll be enough." And it was—after he had presented his chest as an interloper between. There is sleight of voice and body here (why d' you think there are so few female magicians?). Men, of course, have this power partly because they can talk real low. A Cronkite sound has about the effect that straight Romilar and airplane glue would have: Human diaphragms are fork tuned to it. Hysteria is a high, thin locust sound, Menudo-fan noise. You couldn't imagine Henry Kissinger shrieking, could you? A man can say, "Women and children first" and make it stick—except with the Supreme Court, where that would be ruled either discriminatory or male-chauvinist pork.

Then, As I End the Refrain, Thrust Home

My father was a powerful man: He could swim across the Hudson River and back or arm wrestle two firemen down at once. In his time, I suppose, he must've buried three dozen cats with high small honor. He could fix just about anything; what he couldn't fix he built again. He constructed sumptuous fires, got reception where a sound wave had only been under slight surveillance before. Nothing daunted him, neither man nor rattlesnake nor, at last, the carcinoma. He was, I think, somewhat in awe of women and rather glad about that. He and my mother were well wed for more than three decades. And in his so-convenient inside jacket pocket, he carried a heart as big as general delivery.

Manliness, after all, transcends instruction or art. It has to do with a genial, unnuanced availability. Great males can anticipate, as great athletes can, the hairspring grab of human need. Around them there will be space without condition—and safety that doesn't impede. They defray a general expense of spirit. Womanhood, to them, is neither dangerous antithesis nor client estate: It is an extension and a rounding off. As the branch spread of a tree above soil must equal the root spread below, they are well grounded—grace comes most often from being easy in oneself. And, yes, they screw open a jar now and then. There is becoming chivalry enough in that.

"We are their mouthpieces. Men don't become involved with women; they're retained by them."

"On any sexual drive-through jungle tour, moreover, man must be guide and handyman and head fantast."