by Ira Wood
Table of Contents
Praise
Also By Ira Wood
Title Page
THE SMALL PENIS RULE
A MAJOR WORK OF FICTION
THE GIFT THAT KEEPS ON GIVING
SATYRICON
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
IF YOU WANT ME TO BE HONEST
MR. NAPPY, THE ARTIST
A WORK IN F**KING PROGRESS
1.
2.
3.
4.
THE SYLLOGISM
THE ONE WHO DIES WITH THE MOST SEX WINS
HAMMER AND FLAY
HEARTSONG OF THE WARRIOR, INC.
THE MACARTHUR FOUNDATION OF VEGETABLES
Because I do my best thinking in the garden.
Because it’s better than a rowing machine.
Because the garden is one of the few places in modern society where you can do ...
Because the garden makes you a philanthropist.
Because gardening equals sex.
YOU ARE WHAT YOU OWE
THE SECOND MARSHMALLOW: AN EPILOGUE
THE AUTHOR
Copyright Page
More Praise for You’re Married to HER?
“You’re Married to HER? is a hilariously brazen memoir. Ira Wood lets his delirious inner Portnoy off its leash, no holds barred, and what a romp! It’s really fun, laugh-out-loud, and I couldn’t put it down. It’s f**king delightful.”
—John Nichols, Author of The Milagro Beanfield War
“This is not just a funny book: it’s a darkly funny, wildly confessional, beautifully constructed description of an ordinary guy written as if it were a collaboration between Jean Jacques Rousseau, Robin Williams, and Woody Allen.”
—Mary Mackey, Author of The Widow’s War
“Ira Wood is the funniest essayist I’ve read since Woody Allen. This is more than wit; this is hard-earned wisdom, a memoir of rare intelligence, honesty and integrity. “
—Martín Espada, author of The Trouble Ball and The Republic of Poetry
“Damned funny stories.’”
—Pagan Kennedy, Author of The First Man-made Man and Black Livingstone
Also By Ira Wood
The Kitchen Man
Going Public
Storm Tide
(with Marge Piercy)
So You Want To Write:
How to Master the Craft of Writing Fiction and Memoir
(with Marge Piercy)
“I am a monopolar depressive descended from monopolar depressives. That’s how come I write so good.”
—Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake
THE SMALL PENIS RULE
One summer morning when I was seven years old, sitting next to my father in the front seat of his Ford Fairlane, I was presented with a question that would remain with me for fifty years. My father was a headstrong and self-destructive man. He held grudges so long he often forgot what had made him angry in the first place. He ate with gluttonous disregard for his appearance and his health, was disdainful of exercise, chain-smoked after each of his three heart attacks and died in his sleep at 62 years old as a result of the fourth.
In contrast to his reckless personal habits, he was the most cautious driver I have ever known and insisted on a literal interpretation of the term “speed limit.” That is, unlike most drivers who regard the posted speed as a rough suggestion, my father saw it as the absolute extremity of rational conduct—like jumping from the window of a tall building at the first whiff of smoke—to be used only in the event of emergency.
My father drove so slowly it was hard to tell if the window was open. It was a common occurrence for him to lead a three-mile entourage of enraged commuters, his speedometer needle hovering at twenty in a forty-five mile per hour zone. Hardly oblivious to the furious parade behind him, the middle fingers jabbing out windows, the flashing high beams, the exasperated drivers bug-eyed with road rage spitting curses and pounding their horns, my father would initiate conversations with them in the rear view mirror. “Got an important meeting, Mr. Big Man?” he’d taunt them, or “Your time is s-o-o-o much more important than mine?” reproaching their audacious need to make the train on time or get to the hospital before the baby was born, always with the assumption that they thought themselves superior. As soon as we reached a broken yellow line and could be legally passed I would squeeze my eyes shut and hold my palms over my ears in an effort to block out the gestures and epithets from the drivers speeding by, because I knew we deserved them.
On this particular day, however, one car did not barrel past but came abreast of us on the left and slowed to my father’s speed. Through his open window the driver looked hard at my father and roared, not a curse, but a question. “How’d you get that way, you little putz? That’s what I want to know.”
A putz, in Yiddish, is a fool, an idiot, but literally, a penis. Having been raised with my father’s stories of growing up in grinding poverty (false, according to my uncle: their father was a licensed plumber and had work all through the Great Depression) and being sent to school without shoes (preposterous, according to his sister), I had a child’s notion that my father was a strange and self-pitying man but not what it had to do with a penis.
Five decades later the answer found expression in a completely unrelated phrase, a naughty maxim from First Amendment law. Now the publisher of a small literary press, I was researching defamation of character in conjunction with a memoir we were publishing when I came upon “the small penis rule,” a droll but practical safeguard against charges of libel.
According to the New York Times, Libel lawyers have what is known as “the small penis rule.” “One way authors can protect themselves from libel suits is to say that a character has a small penis,” Attorney Leon Friedman said. “Now no male is going to come forward and say, ‘That character with a very small penis, that’s me!’”
My father had nothing to do with law or libel but at the focal point of his mental picture of himself he was a naked man in a crowd of strangers, an object of ridicule and a failure. Painfully ambitious and hard working, a patternmaker by trade, a partner in a procession of hapless dress manufacturing firms in Manhattan’s Garment District, popular with other men and, in spite of a serious case of acne in his adolescence that marked his face all through his life, considered ruggedly handsome, he was nonetheless handicapped by a loathsome self image and given to viewing himself through a distorted mirror, one in which he saw all his flaws and none of his strengths. Whenever his behavior reflected this distorted image of himself he did indeed act like a fool, a putz—and long after his death I admit, so have I. In fact, writing a book of stories mined however loosely from memory has caused me to wince on almost every page, to admit, That character with a very small penis, that is me. For the record, and those readers oblivious to metaphor, I would have avoided the subject entirely if my wife did not assure me I was of average size, an opinion as comforting as it is troublesome because I know how much research she’s done first hand.
My wife is a prolific writer, hardly famous—fame being far too ephemeral an assertion for any serious writer who does not spend an enormous amount of energy in its cultivation—but admired by many for speaking truth to power. Considered too political, too feminist, and admittedly too unsentimental and class-conscious in her sensibilities to stay on any best seller list for long, she is, as even her critics would have to admit, an iconic American novelist and poet whose work appears widely in text books, rituals, anthologies, lit mags, newsletters, testimonials, dedications, and (almost the instant her poems appear in print, it seems) on the internet. For many years after we started living together we were someth
ing of a curiosity. There was not only a disparity in reputation (I had none) but in age, almost fourteen years (as it turns out, it is a habit of women in her family to marry younger men). There were many more reversals (maturity, education, sexual experience, success at earning a living) that, while commonplace between a man and a much younger woman, unsettled enough people for them to ask me to my face,
You’re married to her? (Why you?)
You’re married to her? (The writer?)
You’re married to her? (Why would she want to do that?)
The answer has been yes for over thirty years now, but for the first fifteen of them, I admit, it was a question I sometimes asked myself. Why in the world would a woman writer at the peak of her career put up with behavior that was rational only to an albeit sweet-enough guy who was unsophisticated and self-defeating? This book roughly covers that time. Readers seeking insight into the creativity of a prolific American artist had best look at my wife’s own memoir, for these are my stories, those of the very lucky young man she chose not merely to put up with but to love, and for slim rewards except being fiercely loved in return. They’re the stories of a guy without a goal who took every half-assed, oddball, shortcut to get there; a guy whose guiding principle was the small penis rule, which we all follow at times, men and women, when our behavior sinks to the level of our self-esteem.
A MAJOR WORK OF FICTION
When I was sixteen years old I fell in love with a mysterious yellow-haired girl from a prominent and affluent family. Knowing she was a year older than me and there was nothing that would remotely excite her to return my feelings, I told her that my parents were dead.
It was never easy for me to be alone with girls and with a girl like Allison it was impossible. We didn’t use words like “aloof” in high school or “patronizing” to describe a girl who never laughed at boys who made farting sounds in their armpits but observed them with the detached curiosity due insect specimens, as if wondering how long it might take them to suffocate in a vacuum jar.
None of my friends liked Allison. The girls were jealous of her clothes. The boys said her ass was too big. In fact she did have more of a woman’s body than a girl’s. I loved the slow easy sway of her buttocks when she walked and the extra little twitch she gave when she knew some idiot was watching. I loved the way she crossed her legs at the knee in history and dangled a shoe from one toe, just biding time, as if all of high school was a stoplight you had to endure until it turned green. People repeated all kinds of rumors about Allison. That she did it with older guys. That her mother drank. But since no one had ever hung out with Allison or had even been inside her house I imagined I recognized something of myself in this strangely grown up girl: a weariness of things adolescent, a desire to stay beneath the radar of the residing morons, and above all a longing to pass through to the other side—to college.
At the end of junior year we both had roles in The Music Man. She was a Pick-A-Little Lady, a small singing part. I was the oafish Mayor Shinn, the second male lead. Because I had accidentally split the seam of my pants on the night of dress rehearsal I received an unexpected round of applause. When the curtain fell Allison absently squeezed my shoulder. “You were so funny!” she said, and from that one spontaneous gesture I had all the encouragement I needed. Summoning the power of positive thinking from a technique I had read about in Readers Digest called Sylva Mind Control, I offered to walk her home along the beach. Caught without an excuse, she accepted.
But I blew it as usual. I started to babble. “You like theater? I love theater.” I launched long mindless riffs in a compulsive attempt to keep her amused. “But theater makes me sneeze. You know why?” She didn’t bother to answer. Nor did she seem to care. “Because I only saw Broadway shows with my grandmother and her theater lady friends who wore beaver coats and feather hats and heavy perfume and as soon as I got in the car with them I started to sneeze. You ever see a Broadway show?”
She sighed as if having calculated she had another half mile to walk in the company of this simpleton. “My father’s office is next door to the Shubert Theater.”
“That’s where I saw A Chorus Line! You ever see A Chorus Line?”
She removed a tortoise shell beret, shook out her shoulder-length hair and twisted it into a ponytail with an elastic band. “My father is the director’s lawyer.”
Allison lived in the only house in town with a swimming pool. She wore A-line skirts and cashmere sweater sets in winter, culottes when the weather warmed, and had a miniature Lhasa Apso named Cimba. (“It’s Tibetan,” she explained. “For ‘small.’”) She was an only child of parents who traveled everywhere, the kind of kid whose term paper described her spring vacation in the Fiji Islands. My family had recently moved to a four-and-a-half room apartment across the street from the boardwalk. When the windows were open it smelled of boiled franks. I slept on a convertible couch in the living room.
“You must be very proud of your father,” I said.
“Of course. Aren’t you proud of yours?”
A bland and predictable “well, sure” would have sufficed, but just that morning my dad and I had gone at each other again outside the apartment’s one bathroom, the family sanctum sanctorum, the only place anybody could be alone. My mother sat on the toilet seat and cried; my brother locked the door to spread out his collection of Civil War memorabilia. The baby was left on the potty chair for hours with a bowl of cheerios and milk. My father went to the bathroom with a newspaper under his arm, a pack of cigarettes and a transistor radio, like someone leaving for a day at the beach. This morning I thought I might explode if I didn’t get in there in time. “Please, Dad!” I rapped on the door. “There’s only one bathroom in this place.” I was doing jumping jacks when the toilet flushed and the door flew open. I had no idea what to expect. Since his last business had gone under and we’d had to sell the house, he was unpredictable. He might pass me by without a word. He might talk about me in the third person, have a conversation with himself as if I wasn’t in the room. He rarely raised his voice. His preference was to try to extract confessions that enabled him to feel even worse about himself.
“You’re trying to remind me it’s my fault we lost the house.”
“I’m trying to go to the bathroom.”
“The one bathroom.”
“Can I please get in?”
“Can you tell me something? Do all your friends think your father is a loser?”
“Of course not.” I closed the door.
“Which ones do then?” he called through it.
“I don’t have a father,” I said in frustration. Allison stopped in her tracks. She had round hazel eyes with long lashes the color of white gold and she held my gaze demanding information.
“He’s dead,” I said, and for a moment I even shocked myself. Who even thinks a thing like that?
Allison touched her hand to my chest. It felt as if she held my beating heart in her palm. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. Her eyes shone silver in the moonlight. “But,” she swallowed. She could barely bring herself to ask, “Your mom?”
Oh, what the fuck. In for a penny, in for a pound. I bowed my head. I didn’t actually say she was dead but the implication was clear enough.
We were holding each other now as the surf pounded. “You poor baby.” Her lips touched my ear. I felt a shiver in my groin and my legs were weak. This was an intimacy I had never known with a girl, never felt with anyone in my life. I had no desire to do harm to my mother and father. Their deaths were a kind of drama I was constructing as Allison allowed me to kiss the tears from her cheeks. Bits of movies I had seen, books I had read, comics, newspaper stories provided the details of what was becoming my first major work of fiction.
A sudden snowstorm. The week before Christmas. Just after midnight. The roads slick with black ice. They were driving home from their wedding anniversary party when their car was side swiped by a truck on the Long Island Expressway. The driver had been drinking. My bro
thers and I were awakened by a plainclothes detective in a heavy tweed overcoat. His breath smelled of peppermint. He gave us each a stick of gum. We were separated for months, sent to different homes, eventually taken in by my grandparents. But they were old. It was a hardship for them to raise three boys. We were finally adopted by a poor but well-meaning couple who lived in a small apartment across the street from the boardwalk and weren’t able to have children of their own.
“You never got to say good-bye to your real parents.”
“They died instantaneously.”
“It must be so hard for you.”
What was hard was establishing a double life. Because I could never bring Allison to my home—How could I be sure she wouldn’t call them my step parents?—I contrived to spend all our time together at hers. Nor could I ever allow her parents to cross paths with mine or even speak to them on the phone. Because my father considered himself a failure he assumed I felt the same way about him and was resigned to losing a son, while her parents were delighted to gain one.
My presence seemed a positive relief, proof that their moody, big-boned daughter was not only interested in boys but attractive to them. Although her father had a Manhattan law practice that catered to famous names in show business, he was more than generous to a lower middle class boy like me, especially an orphan boy. He liked to give me his old dress shirts and cashmere sweaters and teach me how to line up a putt. A tall pear-shaped man, he wore tortoiseshell half-eye readers on the bridge of a long proud aquiline nose over which he appeared to view the world with an imperious bemusement. He was fond of squeezing my funny bone when he thought I was down, bellowing “Nil Il-legitimus Carborundum, my boy!” and ticking off the names of famous orphans who’d become successful. It was like Allison hadn’t brought home a boyfriend but the United Way.