The Bachelor's Home Companion

This is addressed to the true bachelor, an adult male and a gentleman, who has never married and never intends to.

We are a select group, without personal obligation, social encumbrance or any socks that match. We breathe the cold, pure air of solitude--of Olympus, of Parnassus and of the basement where all the pipes are frozen because nobody turned up the thermostat.

Sherlock Holmes was portrayed as a bachelor. So was Raffles, the gentleman cracksmith. Sir Isaac Newton and Giovanni Casanova were bachelors, also Saint Paul, President Buchanan, Nietzsche, Oliver Goldsmith, George "Chinese" Gordon, Voltaire and almost all the popes. King Henry VIII kept trying to be one.

We are our own men, aloof and independent, unchocked wheels in a world of cogs and gears. We do as we damn well please. And we don't belong to any immune-deficiency high-risk groups, either.

We also don't exist.

What's become of the bachelors of yore? The old salts? The Oxford dons? The misanthropic billionaires wedded solely to greed? Well, some of us turned out to belong to that immune-deficiency high-risk group after all (Saint Paul, for one, I'll bet). Some of us broke down and got married and are paying a fortune in child support. The rest of us turned into singles.

We are attempting to cut down on saturated fats. We live in co-op apartment complexes with heather-tone wall-to-wall carpeting. We try to meet girls at aerobics classes. And we're in transactional analysis, dealing with our conflicted feelings about making mature commitments.

Therefore, this is really addressed to assistant sales managers, Dekes and Phi Delts in off-campus housing, divorced guys, young men who've been told to get the hell out of the house by their parents and fellows whose girlfriend won't marry them because her first husband was such a bummer. That is, to every male in a house without pot holders.

Basic House Cleaning

Cleaning, like seduction, should be done from the top down--starting with the ceiling, which is ridiculous. Gravity takes care of that. If there were any dirt on the ceiling, it would fall off and land on the floor. The same goes for the walls. Dirt falls right off them and lands on the floor. And you shouldn't fool around with the dirt on the floor, because it will get all over the walls and the ceiling.

How often does a house need to be cleaned, anyway? As a general rule, once every girlfriend. After that, she can get to know the real you.

Don't try to kid women by being neat. Most bachelors are fairly neat. When the dirty clothes are stuffed into a dresser drawer, we think everything is under control, even if the floor is sticky. But women can tell tidy from clean, especially after they've leaned against a window sill in a pair of white-linen slacks.

But don't be tempted to make house cleaning fun. Don't try to dust with the dog. It may seem like a hoot to get naked and slither around on the sopping-wet floor with a mophead in either hand. The results will be disappointing. The house will look worse in the morning. And so will you.

And don't get too involved. There's a part of the psyche that's never satisfied with chunks of an archduke at Sarajevo and has to have a World War One. If you really start to think about cleaning house, you'll wind up on a stepladder polishing light sockets with 000 steel wool. Repent of thoroughness. Eschew the systematic.

Concentrate instead on preventive maintenance. Discard anything that's harder to wash than you are (Remington Model 1100 automatic shotguns and Mercedes alloy wheels excepted). Any item of clothes or bedding that has to be dry-cleaned more often than you commit a cardinal sin in it should be thrown away. Anything that has accumulated enough dust to write your name in has to go. You aren't using it enough. It's hard to apply this advice to woodwork, but worth it.

Tricking Mothers, Lovers and Female Friends into Cleaning up for You

Some bachelors spend years in psychoanalysis claiming to have a dependency problem with their mothers just so the old lady will come over and clean every now and then. It's hard to pull this on modern women, many of whom are in psychoanalysis themselves.

You can try being pathetically incompetent in your cleaning operation. Let your date see you wet-mopping the windows or vacuuming the dirty dishes and she may feel compelled to step in. Or she may feel compelled to step out, permanently. Knowing today's women, what your date may do is dictate a memo on the proper use of house-cleaning equipment and have her secretary Express Mail it to you.

Maybe you can offer to trade a woman one service for another. Tell her that if she cleans your bathroom, you'll do her taxes. By the time the IRS catches up with her, you will probably have broken up.

Romance is another strategy. For some mysterious Darwinian reason, women feel compelled to straighten up bedrooms before and after sex. Try making love in every other room of the house. Suggest taking a shower together. If the woman loves you enough, she'll rush right in there with a pail and a scrub brush. The only problem is, she doesn't love you enough.

Nobody loves anybody that much. The last person to feel this strongly about someone else was Bess Truman, and she felt that way about only Harry, and they're both dead now and don't have any bathrooms to clean.

Entertaining

One of the best things about bachelorhood is that no one expects hospitality from us. We're obviously selfish people or we'd be married and holding up our end of the car pool. Furthermore, we are a scarce commodity. Every hostess in America is racking her addressbook for unattached dinner guests.

As long as our looks don't actually gag a cat, we have more invitations than Charles and Diana on coronation day. Ours is the life of the happy drone. The whole hive of civilization is busy feeding us and keeping us amused.

Nevertheless, there are moments when bachelors are expected to act the host. Sometimes lovers or parents corner us, sometimes we give in to misplaced whims of congeniality and sometimes 20 old SDS buddies show up, drugged and armed.

There are three types of entertainment a bachelor is traditionally called on to provide: (1) love trysts; (2) dinner parties; (3) enormous drunken blowouts.

The Love Tryst

The proper love tryst has three elements: (1) drinks; (2) cozy meal; (3) interesting excuse.

The interesting excuse is not actually interesting. It just gives your date an excuse for not saying goodbye when she ought to. Usually, it's a video tape of something high-brow, such as a Truffaut remake of Francis in the Navy. With any luck, you won't see the end of it.

The important thing in a love tryst is to make your home tug at your date's heartstrings. Women like to think every bachelor is one of the Lost Boys who wandered away from Never-Never Land while Peter and Wendy weren't looking.

Turn your place into a female's idea of a mess which is to say clean it. Women know we can't take care of ourselves, and they think this is adorable. But that doesn't keep them from blanching at the sight of soap scum. Now muss your home with boyish clutter. Hang neckties from cute places, such as the refrigerator-door handle. Stick your hat on top of a lamp shade. Leave a half-empty wineglass on a table next to a burned-down candle and sheets of stationery covered with crossed-out lines of poetry. (Steal them from Rupert Brooke.) Toss your tuxedo onto the floor. And use a wastepaper basket for (continued on page 178)Bachelor's Home Companion(continued from page 129) an ice bucket. This is what women mean when they say, "His place was a fright." If your place is really a fright, they won't stay long enough to describe it.

Be sure all towels and sheets are clean. And make your bed, no matter how strange this seems. Women make their beds each morning, and they assume everyone--a criminal on the lam, an animal in its burrow--does the same.

Now wreck dinner. There are two forms of the intentional muff. Using the first method, have all the ingredients for a good dinner ready, but don't start cooking until your date arrives. If you're really incompetent, your date will feel obliged to take over. This, however, is a mean thing to do to a woman, and believe me, she'll know it.

The second method is better. Have the dinner under way before your date arrives, and make sure it's terrifying. Fix baloney soup and pickled-beet salad with ouzo and sheep-cheese dressing. And make sure all of it, including the salad, catches fire during drinks. Then, just when the gruesome slop is supposed to be served, have a pizza delivery boy show up at the front door.

The Perfect Little Dinner Party

Why spoil it by showing up? Let people ring your doorbell for a while and go away puzzled but probably relieved. Or be a bully. When you invite your guests, they'll say, "Is there anything I can bring?" Tell them, "Yes, a salad, a vegetable dish, dessert and an eight-pound standing roast--medium rare." Voilà! Dinner is served.

If this doesn't work, distract like mad. Serve unshucked oysters as hors d'oeuvres. Dress your dog as a butler. Make guests cook their own live lobsters on wienie forks in the fireplace. If you keep people busy and confused, they're likely to think they're having fun.

The Enormous Drunken Blowout

Here's an event where bachelor expertise pays off. A good bachelor is a living, breathing party all by himself. At least, that's what my girlfriend said when she found the gin bottles under the couch. I believe her exact words were "You're a disgusting, drunken mess." And that's a good description of a party, if it's done right.

Every society needs to blow off steam. Classical Greece had its Dionysia. Ancient Rome had its bacchanals. But modern America seems to have gotten off the track. We are the only culture ever to develop a type of festivity where you get cornered by a pipe-smoking psych prof who's a bug on nuclear winter.

To turn a dumb soiree into a dangerous bash, the first consideration is time. Don't choose an ordinary time such as Saturday night. Have your party at 11 on a weekday morning. The purpose of parties is fun. And anything is fun when you're supposed to be working. Other good times for a party are during college exams, jury deliberations and any point in a marriage.

Whatever the occasion, do not neglect alcohol. No other refreshment will do. Yes, alcohol kills brain cells, but it's very selective. It kills only the brain cells that control good sense, shame, embarrassment and restraint. Wield a heavy hand at the bar. Spike the white wine. You don't want your guests to get half drunk. They may suddenly remember the baby sitter, try to drive home and kill themselves. If a guest is able to make it to the end of your driveway, you've unleashed a dangerous maniac on America's highways.

Lots of noise and lots of people are musts for a good party. Make sure some of these people hate one another. Otherwise, there will be no chemistry. What would the universe be like if there were only positively charged protons and no negatively charged electrons? The most basic molecules couldn't exist. The world wouldn't have hydrogen, let alone cute blonde girls in shorts. Chaos takes organization.

Bachelor Cooking

The only secret to bachelor cooking is not caring how it tastes. If you achieve this, everything will be fine. The rest is damage control--most of which is done with steak sauce or common antacids.

Besides, if you were a cook, you'd know it already. You'd have one of those hats.

The Five Essential Bachelor Meals

Standard-issue breakfast: Orange juice, coffee, scrambled eggs, toast and bacon--it's a meal suitable for any time of day, even morning.

You can squeeze your own orange juice by putting oranges in a big plastic garbage bag and stepping on it. Or just buy it. Fresh coffee can be brewed by tying up the grounds in a clean white athletic sock and boiling. This is only a little worse than instant coffee. Lay bread or muffin slices right on the stove burners. Bacon is hard to wreck if you put it in the oven (use a pan or the lid off something) and set the heat at 350 or 400 degrees. Throw some frozen Tater Tots in with the bacon--delicious, and it lets you perform messy-grease cleanup with your own stomach.

Real hamburgers: The secret to getting that compelling/disgusting burger flavor that only roadside bars and all-night diners seem able to achieve is (1) cheap ground beef that's at least 30 percent fat and 20 percent filler; (2) a dirty skillet (available in most bachelor households).

Moosh the burger patty down flat, put a book end or a doorstop on top of it and turn the flame up high so that everything gets splattered. Use heaps of salt and pepper and only the gooiest untoasted burger buns. Garnish according to how wide you can open your mouth. Serve with beer, chips, another hamburger, more beer.

Peanut-butter-and-jelly-sandwich classic: Proportion is everything. There has to be just enough jelly to squirt out between the bread slices and just enough peanut butter to keep it from doing so. Use the freshest commercial white bread. Wonder bread is OK, but Sunbeam and Silvercup are better. Cheap jelly is also essential. And use a brand of peanut butter that has at least a $5,000,000 annual TV-ad budget. Skippy, Jif and Peter Pan are recommended. Health-food-store peanut butter is good only for cabinet repairs.

Steak: Every bachelor believes that there's one dish he knows how to cook. For 98 percent of us, this is steak. And we're right. Even we can cook a steak, especially if we don't get silly with the broiler or the charcoal grill and just fry it in a pan.

Buy the most expensive steak you can find, about as thick as the heel of a Bass Weejun. Put half a shot glass of any kind of oil but motor or olive in a skillet. Heat it up until the oil smokes like hell. Now take the batteries out of your smoke detector and put the steak in the pan. As soon as you think the steak should cook just a little longer, stop cooking it.

Spaghetti divorce style: Boil spaghetti until it sticks to the wall when you throw it across the room. Drain through a window screen or an ex-girlfriend's fish-net stockings. While this is going on, heat up a jar of Ragu' spaghetti sauce and put things in it. Spaghetti is rarely fixed sober, and it may seem like a good idea to put everything in the house in the spaghetti sauce. This is not true.

Three Culinary Experiments for the Adventurous

Doggy melt: Boil or heat a hot dog or leave it out to get warm. Put it on a piece of toast or bread with a slice of Velveeta cheese on top and put the whole thing in the oven. Doggy melts make a great plea for help. Fix these to make women feel sorry for you.

Girlfriend chicken: Put a raw chicken breast in a pot with a lid and pour the contents of a can of condensed cream-of-mushroom soup in there. Put the pot in the oven and cook at 350 degrees until you can bite into the chicken without gagging.

This dish is customarily fixed by girl bachelors--your girlfriend, for instance. But you may not have a girlfriend, and if you live according to the precepts of this article, you may not get one. So you can fix it for yourself. Seasoning may help. Or it may not. You may be able to put a potato in the mushroom soup. Maybe you should even boil it first. I have no idea.

Tuna what's-it: This is really horrible. The only reason you'd fix this is to show your ex-wife or your parole officer that you're trying to live like a human.

Mix a whole bunch of canned tuna with the now-familiar condensed mushroom soup and a can of peas. It should achieve the consistency of Play-Doh. Put the result in something that won't explode in the oven--empty Chinese-food containers work well--and crumble potato chips over the top. Cook for as long as it takes to watch a ball game on TV.

Emergency Helps

Cooking without utensils:

• Fix breakfast by balancing unbroken raw eggs between the pipes of a steam radiator before you go to bed.

• Warm canned goods by putting them inside the air cleaner on your car engine and driving around at 100 miles an hour.

• Bacon can be made to cook itself if you light it with a Zippo.

• Turn TV dinners directly into cold leftovers by allowing them to thaw.

• Take a hint from steak tartare and use your imagination to turn raw hamburger into food.

Cooking without food:

Emergency tomato soup: Made with hot water and catsup. (Cold water and catsup makes emergency bloody-mary mix.)

Library-paste guacamole dip: Made with flour and water. (It tasted great in first grade, didn't it?)

Spice slumgullion: Seasoning is what gives food flavor, so if you pour all those little jars of cloves and curry and ginger and garlic salt into boiling water, you should get something delicious.

Sewing on Buttons

Don't. You should always be missing some buttons. Its part of your boyish bachelor charm. Many a woman has sat down on the living-room couch to sew on a button and has wound up doing something more interesting on another piece of furniture. If, however, you're involved with one of those very modern young women who pride themselves on being useless around the house, use a stapler.

Pest Control

Cockroaches: Cockroaches have been given a bad rap. They don't bite, smell or get into your booze. Would that all house guests were as well behaved. Don't do anything about cockroaches. There's nothing you can do, anyway.

Mice: Don't put cheese in a mousetrap. Mice are more attracted to fat, suet, peanut butter and bookbindings. And if you examine this list, you'll see that if they got it, you probably don't want it, anyway.

Rats: Rats are another matter. You have to do something about rats. But don't poison them, because they'll die in the walls. And a dead rat in the wall is the one thing on earth that can, I guarantee, make your bachelor home more disgusting than it is.

Laundry and Dry-cleaning Tips:

You can dry-clean your clothes at home by dipping them in gasoline. (Clothes will be permanently free of all dirt if you do this near an open flame.) • The gasoline smell can be removed from clothes by sending them to the dry cleaner. • Press wrinkled trousers by putting them between the mattress and the box spring before going to bed drunk. • An alternative to wearing your clothes in the bathtub is bathing in the washing machine.

Miscellaneous Bachelor Tips

Home finance: You can't put your VISA bill on your American Express card.

Bachelor safety tip: Never throw food on a grease fire.

Bachelor health tip: Remember, your body needs six to eight glasses of fluid daily--straight up or on the rocks.

Bachelor diet tip: Eating doesn't make you fat. Marriage does. Compare waistlines of married and single friends for proof. But yogurt does make good shaving cream.

Tools and their Use

Screwdriver: For opening beer cans when the pop top has broken off, stirring paint, getting quarters out of cracks in the floor. The handle may be used as a hammer or for tapping stuck jar lids.

Phillips screwdriver: For punching holes in cans of oil.

Adjustable wrench: For pounding nails.

Pliers: For opening greasy tubes of sun block.

Claw hammer: For making delicate adjustments to thermostats, storm windows and loose plumbing fixtures.

Crosscut saw: For swatting the cat, propping open screen doors.

Tin snips: For emergency haircuts and detaching drumsticks from roast chicken.

Scotch tape: For making all actual repairs.

Household Cleaning Products

Many men are confused by household cleaning products. For instance, will Sani-Flush flush the dirt out of extra-filthy clothes if you put it in the washing machine? Below is a brief summary of the proper uses of cleaning products.

Pledge: Speeds up car waxing and is satisfactory on downhill skis.

Windex: You can use Windex the way you use those little towelettes on airplanes and give yourself an instant shower.

Soft Scrub: Makes lousy tooth paste.

Toilet-bowl cleaners: Use in toilet bowls, in sinks and bathtubs. They are the only thing that works on soap scum when your cleaning intervals are six months apart. (Do not use on self or pets.)

Ammonia: A whiff of this will clear a stuffed nose.

Floor wax: Excellent for emergency shoe-shines.

Laundry bleach: Too much eats holes in LaCoste shirts; less won't do anything. Bleach is good, though, for cleaning and whitening your animal-skull collection.

Saddle soap: Can be substituted for baby oil in the bedroom.

Aerosol room freshener: Pressurized can is helpful for filling party balloons.

Warning: Be careful when using any of the house-cleaning products listed above. Have you ever read the labels? These things contain more dangerous chemicals than Bhopal, India. Hold a lighted match to the nozzle of a can of spray cleaner sometime.

Genuine Texas six-gun double-toilet chili: The recipe is exactly the same as the recipe for spaghetti sauce, except take out the spaghetti and add everything in the no column above.