Dave Barry Talks Back

by Dave Barry

  STRESS FOR SUCCESS

  It’s 8:30 A.M., and I’m in a small, brightly lit room with a tube in my arm, and a woman I have never met before named Bette is scrubbing my chest with what feels like sandpaper.

  “Some people really scream when I do this,” Bette is saying.

  I’d scream, too, but I’m too busy pretending that there’s no tube in my arm.

  “There’s no tube in my arm,” is what I am telling myself in a soothing voice. “There’s no tube in my arm. There’s a TUBE in my arm. There’s a tube IN MY ARM. OMIGOD THERE’S A TUBE STUCK RIGHT INTO MY ARM AND I’M GOING TO …”

  “I need to lie down,” I say.

  “You are lying down,” Bette points out.

  I suppose it goes without saying that this is happening in a hospital. Specifically, it’s in the Stress Department. That’s the real name. When Bette gets on the phone, she says, “This is Bette, in Stress.”

  I’m here to get what is called a Thallium Stress Test on my heart. The reason for this, according to my doctor, is that there is probably nothing wrong with my heart. That’s what doctors always say: “There’s probably nothing wrong … but just in case we’re going to run a few tests.”

  “Probably nothing wrong” is the leading cause of health care in America today.

  The Stress Test, like most medical procedures, was originally developed by the ex-Nazi researchers at the Institute of Punitive Medicine as a means of maintaining hospital discipline. If you’re a hospital patient, and you start to become irritated because the food tastes like Purina Rat Chow and they charge you $2,316.17 every time you flush the toilet, and you are foolish enough to complain about this, they’ll say, “Sounds like we need to run some tests on you.” And if you have the common sense that God gave gravel you will never open your mouth again. Because the way these tests work is, whatever part of your body they claim they want to look at, they insist upon entering you via some OTHER part. If you have, for example, an ankle problem, they’ll say, “What we’re going to do is insert this one-inch-diameter exploratory garden hose into your eye socket and run it the length of your body, so you might experience some discomfort.”

  I won’t even TELL you where they insert the hose if you have an eye problem.

  So anyway, my doctor—his actual name is Dr. Hamburg, but to avoid a costly lawsuit I will refer to him here as “Dr. Frankfurt”—made the alarming discovery that there was probably nothing wrong with my heart, which is why Bette stuck a tube in my arm and sandpapered my chest and attached wires all over my skin and strapped a large electronic box to me so that I looked like a man being attacked by a crazed mutant home appliance.

  I was close to passing out from the stress of all this, but I was thinking to myself, “Well, at least it’s almost over, because there’s nowhere else on my body for them to attach anything,” when in walked Dr. Frankfurt, who ordered me to run on a treadmill. With a TUBE in my arm. I bet no medical person has ever even considered doing such a bizarre thing himself.

  But Dr. Frankfurt made me do it. While I was running, a small man who had been lurking in the shadows rushed in without warning and put thallium into my arm tube. This made me feel VERY stressful because thallium is basically atomic radiation, and I distinctly remember a horror movie from the 1950s when a man—it might have been James Arness—became radioactive and started glowing like a gambling casino and acting antisocial to the point where he had to be subdued by several branches of the Armed Forces.

  The next thing I knew I was in a wheelchair being rushed through the hospital halls with a terrified look on my face and a tube in my arm and radiation in my body, and I was thinking how only an hour earlier I felt fine, and now, thanks to Modern Medicine, people were looking at me in the same pitying way that they’d look at a recently run-over cat. And then I was wheeled into a department called “Nuclear Medicine,” which are two words that do NOT go together at all, and they put me on a slab, and all the humans sprinted from the room, probably because of the radiation. Then a medical robot swooped down and examined my body very closely. It did not have a good bedside manner. It would peer at one spot for a while, and then go: “Whir.”

  “Is that BAD?” I would ask it.

  “Whir,” it would say.

  It turned out that there was nothing wrong with my heart. Just as we had suspected all along. But I’m actually glad that I went through the Thallium Stress Test. For one thing, I know I’m OK. For another thing, I no longer need a bedside lamp. I just read by the glow from my body.

  SPORTS NUTS

  Today, in our continuing series on How Guys Think, we explore the question: How come guys care so much about sports?

  This is a tough one, because caring about sports is, let’s face it, silly. I mean, suppose you have a friend who, for no apparent reason, suddenly becomes obsessed with the Amtrak Corporation. He babbles about Amtrak constantly, citing obscure railroad statistics from 1978; he puts Amtrak bumper stickers on his car; and when something bad happens to Amtrak, such as a train crashes and investigators find that the engineer was drinking and wearing a bunny suit, your friend becomes depressed for weeks. You’d think he was crazy, right? “Bob,” you’d say to him, as a loving and caring friend, “you’re a moron. The Amtrak Corporation has nothing to do with you.”

  But if Bob is behaving exactly the same deranged way about, say, the Pittsburgh Penguins, it’s considered normal guy behavior. He could name his child “Pittsburgh Penguin Johnson” and be considered only mildly eccentrie. There is something wrong with this. And before you accuse me of being some kind of sherry-sipping ascot-wearing ballet-attending MacNeil-Lehrer Report-watching wussy, please note that I am a sports guy myself, having had a legendary athletic career consisting of nearly a third of the 1965 season on the track team at Pleasantville High School (“Where The Leaders Of Tomorrow Are Leaving Wads Of Gum On The Auditorium Seats Of Today”). I competed in the long jump, because it seemed to be the only event where afterward you didn’t fall down and throw up. I probably would have become an Olympic-caliber long-jumper except that, through one of those “bad breaks” so common in sports, I turned out to have the raw leaping ability of a convenience store. I’d race down the runway and attempt to soar into the air, but instead of going up I’d be seized by powerful gravity rays and yanked downward and wind up with just my head sticking out of the dirt, serving as a convenient marker for the other jumpers to take off from.

  So, OK, I was not Jim Thorpe, but I care as much about sports as the next guy. If you were to put me in the middle of a room, and in one corner was Albert Einstein, in another corner was Abraham Lincoln, in another corner was Plato, in another corner was William Shakespeare, and in another corner (this room is a pentagon) was a TV set showing a football game between teams that have no connection whatsoever with my life, such as the Green Bay Packers and the Indianapolis Colts, I would ignore the greatest minds in Western thought, gravitate toward the TV, and become far more concerned about the game than I am about my child’s education. And so would the other guys. I guarantee it. Within minutes Plato would be pounding Lincoln on the shoulder and shouting in ancient Greek that the receiver did not have both feet in bounds.

  Obviously, sports connect with something deeply rooted in the male psyche, dating back to prehistoric times, when guys survived by hunting and fighting, and they needed many of the skills exhibited by modern athletes—running, throwing, spitting, renegotiating their contracts, adjusting their private parts on nationwide television, etc. So that would explain how come guys like to participate in sports. But how come they care so much about games played by other guys? Does this also date back to prehistoric times? When the hunters were out hurling spears into mastodons, were there also prehistoric guys watching from the hills, drinking prehistoric beer, eating really bad prehistoric hot dogs, and shouting “We’re No. 1!” but not understanding what it meant because this was before the development of mathematics?

  There must have been, because there is
no other explanation for such bizarre phenomena as:

  Sports-talk radio, where guys who have never sent get-well cards to their own mothers will express heartfelt, near-suicidal anguish over the hamstring problems of strangers.

  My editor, Gene, who can remember the complete starting lineups for the New York Yankee teams from 1960 through 1964, but who routinely makes telephone calls wherein, after he dials the phone, he forgets who he’s calling, so when somebody answers, Gene has to ask (a) who it is, and (b) does this person happen to know the purpose of the call.

  Another guy in my office, John, who appears to be a normal middle-aged husband and father until you realize that he spends most of his waking hours managing a pretend baseball team. This is true. He and some other guys have formed a league where they pay actual money to “draft” major-league players, and then they have their pretend teams play a whole pretend season, complete with trades, legalistic memorandums, and heated disputes over the rules. This is crazy, right? If these guys said they were managing herds of pretend caribou, the authorities would be squirting lithium down their throats with turkey basters, right? And yet we all act like it’s perfectly normal. In fact, eavesdropping from my office, I find myself getting involved in John’s discussions. That’s how pathetic I am: I’m capable of caring about a pretend sports team that’s not even my own pretend sports team.

  So I don’t know about the rest of you guys, but I’m thinking it’s time I got some perspective in my life. First thing after the Super Bowl, I’m going to start paying more attention to the things that should matter to me, like my work, my friends, and above all my family, especially my little boy, Philadelphia Phillies Barry.

  THE MALE ANIMAL

  Speaking on behalf of all the guys in the world except possibly Phil Donahue, I want to say that I am really ticked off about the results of this recent poll of women. You probably read about it. The Roper Organization asked 3,000 women the following question:

  “Do you agree that the average man today is a lazy selfish opinionated egotistical sex-crazed tub of crud who never thinks about anybody but himself and refuses to help with child-rearing or housework and wants to go to bed with practically every woman he meets who is not legally his grandmother and tends to have the same annual output of natural gas as Montana?”

  Eighty-seven percent of the women agreed with this. The other 13 percent noted that men also pick their noses at stoplights.

  By scientifically analyzing these results, we can conclude that women do not appear to have a high opinion of men. This is unfair. Oh, sure, men in the past have displayed certain unfortunate behavior patterns that tended to produce unhappy relationships, world wars, etc. But today’s man is different. Today’s man knows that he’s supposed to be a sensitive and caring relationship partner, and he’s making radical life-style changes such as sometimes remembering to remove the used tissue wads from his pockets before depositing his pants on the floor to be picked up by the Laundry Fairy.

  As so here we men are, making this kind of extreme sacrifice, and WHAM, the Roper Organization hits us with the fact that women still think we’re jerks. This really burns my briefs. I mean, I’d like you women to stop and think for a moment about what this world would be like without men. Think of the vast array of cultural and scientific achievements you’d have to do without, including:

  Football.

  Professional football.

  Ear hair.

  Betting on football.

  The list just goes on and on. And let’s talk about men’s alleged obsession with sex. Do you women think that men are just animals? Do you really think that all they want to do is get you into bed? Wrong! A lot of guys, especially in bars, would be happy to get you into a phone booth! Or right there on the bar! (“Nobody will notice us,” the guy will say, being suave. “They’re watching ‘Wheel of Fortune.’”)

  But that doesn’t mean ALL guys are like that. There are countless examples of guys who think about things beside sex. The guys on the U.S. Supreme Court, for example, think about important constitutional issues, as is shown by this transcript from recent court deliberations.

  CHIEF JUSTICE WILLIAM H. REHNQUIST: Whoa! Get a load of the torts on THAT plaintiff!

  ASSOCIATE JUSTICE BYRON R. WHITE: (Dies.)

  And I am particularly outraged by the charge that guys never help out around the house. I happen to be a guy, and often, when my wife goes away, I assume Total Responsibility for the household, and my wife has such confidence in me that she will often wait for an entire half-hour before she calls:

  MY WIFE: IS everything OK?

  ME: Fine!

  MY WIFE: IS Robert OK?

  ME: Robert?

  MY WIFE: Our child.

  ME: Robert is here?

  My wife likes to give me these helpful reminders from time to time because once she went away for several days, and when she got home, she determined that all Robert had eaten the entire time was chocolate Easter bunny heads. But other than that I am very strong in the homemaking department, the kind of guy who, if he gets Cheez Whiz on the sofa, will squirt some Windex on it without even having to be told.

  So come on, women. Stop being so harsh on us guys, and start seeing past our macho hairy exteriors, into the sensitive, thoughtful, and—yes—vulnerable individuals that we are deep down inside. And while you’re at it, fix us a sandwich.

  MALE FIXATIONS

  Most guys believe that they’re supposed to know how to fix things. This is a responsibility that guys have historically taken upon themselves to compensate for the fact that they never clean the bathroom. A guy can walk into a bathroom containing a colony of commode fungus so advanced that it is registered to vote, but the guy would never dream of cleaning it, because he has to keep himself rested in case a Mechanical Emergency breaks out.

  For example, let’s say that one day his wife informs him that the commode has started making a loud groaning noise, like it’s about to have a baby commode. This is when the guy swings into action. He strides in, removes the tank cover, peers down into the area that contains the mystery commode parts, and then, drawing on tens of thousands of years of guy mechanical understanding, announces that there is nothing wrong with the commode.

  At least that’s how I handle these things. I never actually fix anything. I blame this on tonsillitis. I had tonsillitis in the ninth grade, and I missed some school, and apparently on one of the days I missed, they herded the guys into the auditorium and explained to them about things like carburetors, valves, splines, gaskets, ratchets, grommets, “dado joints,” etc. Because some guys actually seem to understand this stuff. One time in college my roommate, Rob, went into his room all alone with a Volvo transmission, opened his toolbox, disassembled the transmission to the point where he appeared to be working on individual transmission molecules, then put it all back together, and it worked. Whereas I would still be fumbling with the latch on the toolbox.

  So I’m intimidated by mechanical guys. When we got our boat trailer, the salesman told me, one guy to another, that I should “re-pack” the “bearings” every so many miles. He said this as though all guys come out of the womb with this instinctive ability to re-pack a bearing. So I nodded my head knowingly, as if to suggest that, sure, I generally re-pack a couple dozen bearings every morning before breakfast just to keep my testosterone level from raging completely out of control. The truth is that I’ve never been 100 percent sure what a bearing is. But I wasn’t about to admit this, for fear that the salesman would laugh at me and give me a noogie.

  The main technique I use for disguising my mechanical tonsillitis is to deny that there’s ever anything wrong with anything. We’ll be driving somewhere, and my wife, Beth, who does not feel that mechanical problems represent a threat to her manhood, will say, “Do you hear that grinding sound in the engine?” I’ll cock my head for a second and make a sincere-looking frowny face, then say no, I don’t hear any grinding sound. I’ll say this even if I have to shout so Beth can
hear me over the grinding sound; even if a hole has appeared in the hood and a large, important-looking engine part is sticking out and waving a sign that says HELP.

  “That’s the grommet bearing,” I’ll say. “It’s supposed to do that.”

  Or, at home, Beth will say, “I think there’s something wrong with the hall light switch.” So I’ll stride manfully into the hall, where volley-ball sized sparks are caroming off the bodies of recently electrocuted houseguests, and I’ll say, “It seems to be working fine now!”

  Actually, I think this goes beyond mechanics. I think guys have a natural tendency to act as though they’re in control of the situation even when they’re not. I bet that, seconds before the Titanic slipped beneath the waves, there was some guy still in his cabin, patiently explaining to his wife that it was perfectly normal for all the furniture to be sliding up the walls. And I bet there was a guy on the Hindenburg telling his wife that, oh, sure, you’re going to get a certain amount of flames in a dirigible. Our federal leadership is basically a group of guys telling us, hey, no problem with this budget deficit thing, because what’s happening is the fixed-based long-term sliding-scale differential appropriation forecast has this projected revenue growth equalization sprocket, see, which is connected via this Gramm-Rudman grommet oscillation module to …

  THE WEB BADGE OF COURAGE

  On my 41st birthday, a Sunday in July, I went out to face the spider. It had to happen. There comes a time in a man’s life, when a man reaches a certain age (41), and he hears a voice—often this happens when he is lying on the couch reading about Norway in the Travel Section—and this voice says: “Happy Birthday. Do you think you could do something about the spider?” And a man knows, just as surely as he knows the importance of batting left-handed against a right-handed pitcher, that he must heed this voice, because it belongs to his wife, Beth, who, although she is a liberated and independent and tough Woman of Our Times, is deeply respectful of the natural division of responsibilities that has guided the human race for nearly 4 million years, under which it is always the woman who notices when you are running low on toilet paper, and it is always the man who faces the spider.