Dave Barry's Complete Guide to Guys

by Dave Barry

This is the part you hate. It’s always bad when they want to show you something.

  “Take a look at this,” Steve says, pointing to a random house part. “You see this?”

  You look at it and frown. You have no idea what particular part Steve is pointing at. It could be a “rafter.” It could be a “drywall.” It could be a “joist.” It could be a “gable.” It could be the steering wheel from the Titanic.

  “Huh,” you say, looking at it.

  “Yup,” says Steve. “You got a problem.”

  “What kind of problem?” you say, and Steve gives you a little sideways look, which tells you that, in his view, you are the stupidest homeowner he has ever met who was still able to walk erect. He can’t wait to tell the gang all about you tonight when he goes to the Competent Guys’ Tavern. Because this problem is spectacularly obvious to a guy like Steve. A guy like Steve can diagnose this kind of problem while under anesthesia. So there is a distinct tone of condescension in his voice, similar to the tone you used in explaining the security-door concept to your wife, when Steve explains to you exactly what the problem is, as simply and as clearly as he can.

  “You got calcification in your pullet-beam header grommets,” he says.

  “I was afraid of that,” you say.

  “Yup,” says Steve.

  “Can it be fixed?” you ask.

  “Well, sure it can be fixed,” says Steve, who cannot believe what an idiot he is hooked up with here. “All you got to do is jack up your laminate bolts and winch in a three-sixteenths catheter truncheon.”

  When Steve says “you,” of course, he does not mean “you.” The only tool you own is a set of toe-nail clippers.3 Whereas Steve has a wide assortment of both jacks and winches. Steve’s children play with jacks and winches. Steve has every kind of tool he’ll ever need for anything, right in his truck. If the world economy ever collapses, and mankind regresses to a primitive state, guys like Steve will be living in sturdy, safe shelters that they built with their own hands, eating food that they grew or caught. Whereas guys like you will be passing through the digestive systems of wolves.

  So Steve, sweating the sweat of honest labor, starts jacking and winching your house, and you go off to begin your work day, during which the most challenging physical task you will be called upon to perform is chewing.

  Eventually Steve fixes your house, and you write him a large check, and he heads off to his next job. But you notice that he continues to be a topic of interest among the members of your family.

  “I saw Steve today,” your wife will say. “He was lifting Audrey Pootermaker’s car out of a ditch.”

  “With a winch?” you ask.

  “No,” says your wife, and you definitely detect a certain dreaminess in her voice. “He was just lifting it.”

  “Wow!” says your son, who then resumes playing with the miniature submarine—powered by a tiny but fully functional nuclear reactor—that Steve made for him out of empty Sprite cans.

  Naturally this bothers you. You wonder, What’s the big deal? Sure, Steve can do a lot of stuff, but could he do some of the things you know how to do? Could he analyze a financial spreadsheet, for example? Could he make a four-way conference call? Hah! You’d like to see Steve try that.

  But you know you’re only fooling yourself. You really wish you had some mechanical competence. Finally you decide that you are by gosh going to do something about it. You go to the Sears tool department to equip yourself:

  SALESPERSON: May I help you?

  YOU: Yes. I’d like to buy a tool.

  SALESPERSON: What kind?

  YOU: Not too heavy.

  You come home with a fifty-three-piece socket-wrench set in a neat little carrying case. Sometimes, when nobody else is around, you open it up, take out one of the little socket things and click it onto the end of the long handle thing. Then you prowl around the house, squinting knowledgeably at mechanical objects and looking alert, in case you happen across something that needs to be wrenched. You feel you are ready. All you need is a break.

  And then, one Saturday morning, you get your big chance….

  “Dear,” your wife says, “I think there’s a problem with the water heater.”

  “What kind of problem?” you ask in what is, for you, a pretty deep voice.

  “The kind of problem where we need to call Steve,” says your wife.

  “No need for that,” you say, in the same fairly deep voice. And then with a smooth, practiced motion, you grab the handle of your socket-wrench-kit case. And then, with an easy physical grace that you would not have thought yourself capable of, you crouch down on the floor to pick up the fifty-three pieces, which have fallen out because you forgot to latch the case.

  With a look of grim determination, you march into the garage. There, after spending several minutes sizing up the situation and carefully analyzing the physical evidence, you are able to put your finger on the problem: The water heater is located in the basement.

  So you march down there, and sure enough, something is wrong with the water heater, which is dribbling water onto the floor and making a loud groaning noise. You instantly recognize these as classic mechanical symptoms, which can only mean one thing. That’s right: The water heater is pregnant! It’s about to have a baby water heater! You’ll need hot water, and plenty of it!

  No, you think; get a grip on yourself. You open your socket-wrench case, carefully select a socket thing at random, and place it on the handle thing. Your wife has come downstairs to watch you. You approach the water heater carefully, on the balls of your feet, looking for an opening, hoping that it will let its guard down for a second so you can get in there and fix it. You notice a little box on the side of the heater, with wires coming out; this looks like a vulnerable area. You probe it with your wrench. Nothing happens. You probe it a little harder. Nothing happens. You realize that this is probably the type of box that is designed to be struck with great force, so you whack it with the wrench handle. The cover comes off. Your wife, making a noise not unlike the one the water heater is making, goes back upstairs.

  Inside the box, just as you suspected, you find: parts. Now you’re getting somewhere! Using the wrench handle, you probe around among the parts, looking for some sign of trouble, such as a part holding up a small hand-lettered sign that says HELP ME. Suddenly you see a spark, and you hear a pop, and one of the parts falls onto the floor. At that same moment, the water heater stops groaning. Hurrah!

  On the other hand, all the lights have gone off. Also you can smell smoke. But there’s an old do-it-yourselfer saying: “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs and cutting off the electrical power and possibly setting fire to your home.”

  You are not worried, however. You figure all you have to do now, to finish the job, is to find the fallen part—which was obviously the root of the problem—and go get a new one at the hardware store. So you root around on your hands and knees in the darkness and dampness until you find the part. At least you think it’s the part. It could also be something hard that was regurgitated long ago by the dog. Whatever it is, it will have to do, because you are not particularly comfortable in the darkened basement environment. You have seen spiders down here the size of bus tires. Next time you will carry a larger socket wrench.

  And so, clutching the part, you go upstairs, noting—here is an amazing coincidence—that the power is off up here, too. Also it seems a little smoky. You’ll have to look into this, once you’ve straightened out the water-heater thing.

  “I’m going to the hardware store,” you tell your wife, who is sitting at the kitchen table, head down, whimpering. That’s the thing about women: They get emotional over a little thing like a broken water heater, and that’s why they can’t be relied upon to take action and deal with a situation.

  And thus we come back to our opening scene: You, a lone guy, arrive at the hardware store, holding a broken part that you don’t know the name of. You wander through the store aisles, looking for a par
t that might be the same as the one you have. Around you, this Saturday morning, are perhaps a dozen other guys. Each one of them, like you, is in the middle of some kind of home-repair project that has gone past the Point of No Return—the guy has taken something apart and removed some critical part, and even if the part wasn’t broken before, it certainly is now, and unless the guy can find one like it, he is in serious homeowner trouble.

  So you guys are wandering the aisles, frowning intently at the hardware store’s thousands of items, comparing them with the parts in your hands, looking for a match. And of course all of you will fail. The hardware store never has the part you’re looking for. This is the fundamental law of guy do-it-yourselfing. Not only does the hardware store not have your part; nobody has your part. It’s the only part of its kind in the entire world. When it was made, the original manufacturer destroyed all the plans and executed the workers involved, so as to ensure that this part could never be reproduced.

  But for a while you continue your fruitless search. You go from hardware store to home center, still carrying your part. You become good friends with other guys who are also on parts quests. Sometimes you all exchange parts, just so everybody will have something new to look for. Eventually some of the guys wander off to look for their parts in other states, maybe other countries. Some of them apply for positions in NASA, in hopes of someday searching for their parts in other galaxies.

  But you’re more of a realist, and eventually you realize that you’re going to have to return to your dark, smoky house, to confront your failure, and apologize to your wife, and see how your children are doing, and—above all—get some clean underwear. And so one day you swallow your pride and go home. And there, sitting in your driveway, a massive, throbbing presence, is: Steve’s truck.

  And the pain you feel at that moment is something that no woman could ever understand.

  The Public Rest Room Problem

  This is a problem that guys face when they go into a public rest room. When women go into a rest room, they have the privacy of stalls, but guys have to do it while standing pretty much out in the open, sometimes with many other guys standing around.

  This can be tricky, because peeing is very much associated, in guys’ minds, with masculinity. Consider the behavior of guy dogs, who spend their lives in a ceaseless quest to establish their masculine dominance by peeing on everything in the entire world. Scientists believe that the reason dogs howl at the moon is because they (the dogs) (also some of the scientists) are upset that they can’t get up there and pee on it.

  As noted, I own two dogs: a large main dog named Earnest, and a small emergency backup dog named Zippy. Earnest, a large female, pees only when she has to pee. Zippy, a tiny fluffy male, basically never stops peeing. He is like a small walking wad of cotton with urine constantly dribbling out of it. Sometimes he encounters the next-door neighbors’ dog, Prince, and the two of them engage in a pee-fest. They’ll sniff each other for a moment, rush off in a purposeful manner to squirt various bushes, then rush back together to sniff each other some more, then rush to the bushes again, back and forth, a pair of leaking, low-IQ testosterone tornadoes, each one firmly convinced that he is the biggest, baddest stud on the planet.

  My point is that peeing has significance for guys that goes way beyond the mere elimination of bodily fluids. It is an important territorial statement. This is why, every time a guy enters a public rest room, he must confront a critical guy problem; namely: Which urinal should he use? His goal is to avoid, at all costs, peeing right next to another guy, because they would be infringing on each other’s territories.

  So in the ideal guy rest room, the urinals would be located a minimum of fifty feet apart. Unfortunately, in the real world, they’re right next to each other, which means the guy often must make split-second strategic urinal decisions. To illustrate this process, let’s imagine a public rest room in an airport. Let’s assume the rest room has a row of five urinals, which are represented as rectangles in the following scientific diagram:

  Let’s further assume that nobody is in the room when Guy Awalks in. He is almost always going to choose one of the end urinals—either no. 1 or no. 5—because he knows this will put him as far as possible from the next guy who comes along. Let’s say Guy A chooses urinal no. 5, which means our situation is now this:

  When Guy B walks in, he will always take no. 1. He would never, ever, in a billion years, take no. 4. To do such a thing would cause Guy A to become alarmed to the point where he might zip up his fly so fast that he risks wetting his pants and possibly even injuring his manhood, rather than remain there. But Guy B will always take the far urinal; he may be a decent, secure, open-minded, nonjudgmental person with absolutely no prejudice whatsoever toward gay people, but he nevertheless would rather poke both of his eyeballs out than have Guy A think that he is one. So he will go to the other end. If the line of urinals were a mile long, Guy B might very well choose to hike the entire distance, even if this meant he would miss his plane.

  So now the situation is this:

  When Guy C comes in, he will clearly choose urinal no. 3. He is not crazy about it, but he still has a one-urinal buffer on each side:

  But now in comes Guy D, and he has a real guy problem, because whatever urinal he picks, he’ll be right next to two other guys. This is very upsetting. Some guys in this situation will choose to pee in an enclosed stall, or wait until there’s a buffered urinal available, or go way off to the side and pee against the wall, as follows:

  If Guy D does go to one of the available urinals—say no. 2—he and guys B and C will all stand rigid, staring intently straight ahead, as though the wall tiles were inscribed with a secret formula for turning Grape Nuts into platinum. DEATH BEFORE EYE CONTACT, that is the motto of a guy at a public urinal.

  I realize that you women out there think I’m making all this up. But ask the guy in your life to read this section, and I bet he’ll nod in recognition. He’s been there, and he knows the behavior I’m describing. But he has never felt comfortable about discussing this subject with you, because this is an extremely sensitive area for him. Also he knows it’s stupid. Although it doesn’t hold a candle in that department to an even bigger kind of guy problem—possibly the biggest guy problem of all:

  Sports Anguish

  Guys are very vulnerable to this. Because guys care about sports teams. I’m not talking about simply rooting; I’m talking about a relationship that guys develop, a commitment to a sports team that guys take way more seriously than, for example, wedding vows.

  When a guy gets married, he might say that it’s for richer or poorer, until death do them part, etc., but he knows, somewhere in the deep4 recesses of his mind, that something could come up to make him change his mind, possibly even during the reception. Whereas the bond he forms with a sports team is permanent.

  You may feel that there is something twisted about the values of a guy who can be more committed to a bunch of transient athletes—none of whom he really knows, and none of whom care about him—than he is to his own wife. But you have to consider the larger picture, from the guy’s point of view: His wife may be a warm, loving, and loyal person, but there is no way she will ever make the play-offs. Not even if she really works out and bulks up during the off-season. Whereas there is always a chance that, if the guy remains faithful, his team eventually will not only make the play-offs, but also even win the championship.5

  But—every guy secretly believes this—the team can succeed only if he really cares about it, really devotes himself exclusively to it night and day, even if this means he must neglect his family and his career and the threat of global warming. If he does this, he can make a difference; he can be a part of the winning effort; he can contribute to the victory in every way that the athletes themselves do, except in those ways that involve actually doing something athletic.

  I have experienced this firsthand. Back when I lived in Philadelphia, I shared season tickets to the Philadelphia 76ers pr
ofessional basketball team with a friend of mine named Buzz Burger. These were great seats, right behind the visitors’ bench. We could listen to everything the opposing coach said, and offer helpful suggestions and words of encouragement. Sometimes we were so encouraging that the opposing coach would yell helpful suggestions rhyming with “duck shoe” back at us, causing the dedicated fans around us to give us high-five congratulatory handshakes.

  But our main function, and we took it very seriously, was to ensure that the 76ers won. We did this by being deeply concerned about them, to the point of derangement. If you were to go back and carefully analyze videotapes of certain critical parts of certain critical games, you would see faint but definitely visible Concern Rays shooting out of Buzz’s and my heads onto the basketball court, affecting the course of the game.

  The ultimate instance of this occurred in a game during the 1985–86 season, when the 76ers were playing the Boston Celtics. This game remains one of the high points of my life. It was a game that, as a human achievement, ranks right up there with penicillin.

  You should understand that, as a longtime 76ers fan, I hated the Celtics. Not in the way I hate, for example, Hitler, but more often.

  In this game, the 76ers did not have their center, Moses Malone, who was a major world rebounding power and a large enough individual that he, personally, should have been represented by at least three members of Congress. Without him in there, the 76ers were struggling, and Boston led most of the way. It looked like the Celtics would win easily, which was bad enough; what made it worse was that there were three Boston fans sitting right behind us, and of course they were typical Boston fans, by which I mean they accounted for two thirds of the known world supply of smug. They weren’t so much rooting as they were smirking loudly, right in our ears, the whole game, saying it was a joke, no contest, and that Julius Erving, the 76ers’ captain, was over the hill. Which he was, but these people had no right to say so. Because Julius Erving was, and still is, a fine individual, and if the voters would have the common sense to elect him president, instead of the goobers we keep putting in there, this nation would be a lot better off than it is now.