by Dave Barry
That is why I am asking you women to please try to be more understanding. When you look at the guy in your life, lying on the sofa and burping sporadically in the direction of a football game even though you have asked him fourteen times to please take out the garbage, do not think critical and contemptuous thoughts. Instead, think of two words that will remind you of the deep-rooted problems that he is struggling, deep inside, to overcome; two words that will help you, in some small way, to feel his pain. Those words are of course “intestinal parasite.”
Women, with your help and understanding, we guys can do better. And we will do better. We will, inch by painful inch, overcome our natural handicaps, and we will rise to meet your standards for personal behavior. It will not happen tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that, or even necessarily before the Earth crashes back into the sun. But it will happen, because we guys are sick and tired of not living up to your expectations, and we are by gosh really going to start trying to change.
But not until after the play-offs.
1 This month’s featured spread: “The Girls of the Paleolithic Era.”
2 This marked the invention of sarcasm.
3 “You’ve Tried the Rest; Now Try the Best.”
4 Motto: “The City That Is Probably Spelled Wrong.”
5 Another one is: “Guys always hog the blanket.”
9
Guys in Action
OVER THE YEARS, guys have taken a lot of vicious abuse.1 Guys have been blamed for just about every terrible thing that has ever happened, including war, genocide, and bass-fishing tournaments.
Granted, we deserve it. But there is another side to the guy coin. It happens that there are also countless guys who have really Made a Difference; guys who have performed feats of unsung heroism; guys who—when Old Man Trouble reared his head and somebody needed to take action; when it was the bottom of the ninth with two out and men on first and second and the home team trailing by two, and somebody had to step up to the plate and stroke the long ball; when it was fourth and eight with two minutes to go and there was no tomorrow for either team and it was a question of who really had the Desire and the Will to Win; when push had come to shove and it was time to separate the sheep from the goats by either cutting bait or getting off the pot; when there were no atheists in the foxhole and a penny saved was a penny earned and you had to walk eight miles to school barefoot in the snow and a loaf of bread cost a nickel, but nobody had a nickel and the most you could expect in your Christmas stocking was some used chewing gum, but you didn’t complain, no sir, because there was a Depression going on and times were tough for everybody, not like today, when kids have Nintendo games and trust funds and they walk around in their $157 sneakers with their baseball caps on backward, which makes about as much sense as (they probably do this, too, and I don’t want to know about it) wearing a jockstrap backward, and don’t get me started on all this body-piercing going on among young people today, some of them putting rings in their noses, for God’s sake, which does not seem sanitary at all, which is why, although I ordinarily do not favor government intervention into the lives of individual citizens, I feel there ought to be a federal law stating that before you get your nose pierced, you should have to take an IQ test, which would consist of one question (“Do you want to get your nose pierced?”), and if you gave the wrong answer (“Yes”), you would be legally prohibited from getting your nose pierced, and before I get a letter from some liberal Communist bleeding-heart vegetarian American Civil Liberties Union lawyer claiming that such a law would violate people’s constitutional rights, let me point out that the U.S. Constitution, in Article Six, Section Four, Verse Two, specifically states “By the way, nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to mean that people have the right to wear jewelry in their noses,” and to ignore the clear intent of these words by our Founding Fathers would be an insult to this nation and to its many law-abiding citizens, especially the countless unsung guys who, when Old Man Trouble reared his head—
WARNING WARNING WARNING
WE ARE NOW APPROACHING
THE END OF THIS SENTENCE
took action.
* * *
I want to talk about some of those unsung guys. I want to start with the absolutely true story of a guy I happen to know personally, and how he came through in the clutch during what could have been a serious natural disaster. I’m going to call this guy “Wally” and his wife “Lynne.” I am giving them aliases because this story involves the use of marijuana.2
Let me stress for the benefit of any impressionable young readers out there that marijuana is very, very bad. Medical research has shown that people who use marijuana are more than eight times as likely as nonusers to eat raw cookie dough. And the figures are even more frightening for pepperoni.
But there was a time, not so long ago, when many people were unaware of these dangerous side effects, and it was during this time that Wally and Lynne used some marijuana in their home in Miami. Then they decided to spend the evening lying in bed, watching the Mel Brooks movie The Producers on TV.
This happened to be powerful marijuana, and Wally and Lynne were extremely wasted. I am certain that you, like myself and Bill Clinton, have never been in this condition, but we know from reading medical journals that a person under the influence of powerful marijuana is comparable—in terms of alertness, reaction time, problem-solving skills, and overall central-nervous-system functionality—to linoleum. A person in this condition is not capable of quick thinking and effective decision-making. People in this condition can take upwards of two hours to open a can of soda (“Do you realize that this pop tab—Just this pop tab!—is actually billions and billions of MOLECULES??” “My God, you’re RIGHT!”)
That is the condition that Wally and Lynne were in, watching The Producers, when suddenly the show was interrupted in midscene by an alarmed-looking announcer with an Urgent News Bulletin: A major hurricane was heading directly toward Miami.
A moment or two passed while this information worked its way into what was passing for Lynne’s and Wally’s consciousness.
Then:
“Oh my God,” said Lynne.
“Oh my God,” agreed Wally.
“Wally,” said Lynne,3 “what are we gonna do?”
So there it was. Wally was in the ultimate guy pressure situation: There was trouble on the way, big trouble, and his woman was looking to him to make a decision. Wally knew, even in his severely impaired state, that he had to act. The hurricane shutters needed to be closed. The yard needed to be cleared of loose objects that could, propelled by hurricane winds, become deadly missiles. Emergency supplies needed to be gathered. It might even be necessary to evacuate, as Wally and Lynne lived in a low-lying area, near the water.
And there wasn’t much time: The TV was now showing satellite photographs of the monster hurricane, moving closer, closer. Wally looked at the screen, then at Lynne, who was watching him anxiously, waiting for him to say something, depending on him to come through. Fighting to clear the dense fog from his brain, Wally considered the situation, and, finally, he made a decision.
“Lynne,” he said, “we’re gonna die.”
It seemed like a solid decision. There was no way, in their condition, that they could evacuate. There was reason to doubt that they could, without assistance, remember how to open the bedroom door.
On the screen, the TV news people were sounding more and more urgent. In the bedroom, Wally and Lynne were becoming more and more distraught. They wanted, desperately, to act, but they were hopelessly nonfunctional; all they could do was wander back and forth in front of the TV, Lynne in tears, Wally tugging helplessly at his hair, both of them watching the increasingly grim newspersons deliver the increasingly bad news.
“We’re gonna die,” Wally repeated, so as to keep them focused on the issue at hand.
Nobody—especially not Wally and Lynne—knows how long they spent in this agony. But then, suddenly—and this is why I am darned pr
oud to be a guy—Wally had the glimmer of an idea. Call it an inner reserve of guy strength; call it instinct; call it the Will to Live. Whatever it was, something deep inside told Wally that things could not end this way. Somehow he knew there was an answer, and if he could just concentrate hard enough, he would be able to dredge it up from the deep recesses of his brain … If he could just remember what it was … Wait a minute … YES! That’s IT!
He turned and faced Lynne. She looked at him, tears streaming down her face. But something in his look told her that maybe—just maybe—they had a chance.
“Lynne,” he said, “we’re watching a tape.”
He was right. They had forgotten that they were watching a borrowed videotape of The Producers. Unbeknownst to them, it had been recorded as Hurricane David approached South Florida; since this event had occurred several years earlier, the danger now posed by Hurricane David to Wally and Lynne was, mathematically, quite small.
“My God, you’re right,” said Lynne, and in her eyes there was love, and—yes—worship.
And why not? They were going to live.
Her guy had come through.
And that is only one true story of a guy saving the day by quick thinking. Another example, which I found out about via news articles sent in by a number of alert readers, involves an incident that occurred in Turkey on September 8, 1992. The guy in this case was a U.S. Air Force pilot who was flying an F-16C fighter jet to the northwestern corner of Iraq to patrol the “no-fly” zone there. It was supposed to be a routine mission. But when you are flying a high-performance fighter aircraft toward potentially hostile territory, nothing is ever, really, “routine.”
At first there were no signs of trouble. But gradually the pilot began to sense that something was wrong. When you have flown enough missions, you develop a “gut feeling” for this type of thing, and pretty soon he knew, deep down inside, that he really had to pee.
This presented a problem. Your modern jet fighter plane does not contain bathrooms; these were discontinued several years ago as part of the military downsizing, which also eliminated beverage-cart service. And of course the pilot, traveling at hundreds of miles per hour, could not simply pee out the window; some pee could have landed on the Kurds, who were the very people his mission was intended to protect.
Fortunately, he had what the Air Force calls a “piddle-pack,” which is a device consisting of a sponge inside a plastic container, designed to enable pilots to relieve themselves in flight. The problem was, when he unfastened his safety belt and adjusted his seat upward, the belt buckle became wedged between the seat and the control stick, causing the plane to make a sharp right turn. It began to dive, plunging from thirty-three thousand feet in a wild and deadly spin. The pilot fought to regain control, but it was hopeless; when he reached two thousand feet, with virtually no time left, he made the decision to eject, getting out just in time.
Thanks to this quick thinking, he was able to avert what could have been a real disaster. The only downside is that an eighteen-million-dollar airplane was instantly converted into landfill. But the important thing is: He did not pee in his pants. At least the article doesn’t say he did. It also doesn’t say what happened to the piddle-pack. I hope our side retrieved it. You wouldn’t want a device of such great military value falling into enemy hands.
For our next example of Guys in Action, we go to Grant’s Pass, Oregon; where some guys had what newspaper accounts described as a “rafting and outdoor group” called Mountain Men Anonymous. In May of 1993, this group was holding an initiation ritual for a potential member. Perhaps you would like to guess what the ritual consisted of. If you guessed that it was a sensitive and meaningful ceremony, wherein the guys hugged each other and played drums and shared their deepest masculine feelings, you have not been paying close attention to this book.
No, the ritual consisted of having a few beers, putting a beer can on the potential member’s head, then shooting it off with an arrow. This is a real guy ritual. None of that wussy New Age crap for Mountain Men Anonymous. No, they have a ritual that means something, a ritual that will really stick in the potential member’s mind, which is also what happened to the arrow in this case. It entered the potential member’s head through his right eye, passed through his brain,4 and lodged in the back of his skull.
This did not kill him. You cannot kill a real guy merely by shooting an arrow through his brain. He did lose the one eye, but after the doctors got the arrow out, they were amazed to discover that he had suffered no brain damage. He even held a press conference at the hospital.
“I feel really stupid,” he told the press.
I think he was way too hard on himself. What he did took great courage. Too many of us, in this day and age, are content to sit back and let “the other guy” put a beer can on his head and let his friends try to shoot it off with an arrow after they have been drinking. I applaud this guy, and I applaud Mountain Men Anonymous for thinking up this ritual. If we required people to go through this type of initiation before they were allowed to participate in, for example, the New Hampshire primary, this would be a much better nation in which to live.
* * *
Speaking of guys and doctors, our next example of Guys in Action concerns two guy doctors—a surgeon and an anesthesiologist—who responded courageously to a medical situation that, without their bold and decisive action, could easily have turned out to be routine.
This occurred at the Medical Center of Central Massachusetts. According to The Boston Globe, an elderly woman was on the operating table, sedated, in need of emergency gallbladder surgery. The surgeon was all ready to go. In fact, he had been all ready to go for an hour and a half when the anesthesiologist arrived, so he was none too happy when the anesthesiologist began boldly and decisively making coffee.
At this point, the surgeon had several options. He could:
Proceed with the operation as soon as possible, then hash out his disagreement with the anesthesiologist later.
Proceed with the operation as soon as possible, then bring the matter to the attention of the hospital authorities.
Proceed with the operation as soon as possible, and try to put the incident out of his mind.
The surgeon, after weighing these options, elected to:
Throw a medical sponge at the anesthesiologist.
This is SGP, Standard Guy Procedure, for handling anger. We know that if we bottle our petty hostilities up inside, there is a very real danger that we will, over time, forget them. So we prefer to get our anger right out into the open, where it can do some damage.
When the anesthesiologist got hit by the sponge, he realized immediately that it would be idiotic to escalate this petty incident by responding to such a childish act, so he ignored it.
Ha ha! That was of course a joke.
The anesthesiologist, as a guy, had no choice but to retaliate. There is an old saying among guys that goes: “A guy who gets hit by a sponge and does not strike back is the kind of weenie who probably also would refuse to jeopardize his life and the lives of innocent people in a confrontation over a parking space.”
And so the anesthesiologist and the surgeon, in the words of The Boston Globe, “began punching each other and fell to the floor.” Right there in the operating room. With the patient (Remember the patient?) still on the operating table.
Of course it could have been worse. The two doctors could—anything is possible, with guys defending their manhoods—have gotten into a fight while the operation was actually going on. This would have been really serious, because a guy in the heat of battle will strike out with whatever is at hand, and you could get a newspaper story with a headline like:
SURGEON HELD IN ORGAN ASSAULT
BLUDGEONS ANESTHESIOLOGIST
WITH ELDERLY WOMAN’S GALL BLADDER
Fortunately, this did not happen. All that happened was that both guys were admonished and fined by the state medical board, as well as being placed on five years probation by the
hospital. In other words, these guys permanently marred their professional reputations and seriously jeopardized medical careers that they had undoubtedly spent years building. But so what? The important thing is: They did not back down.
Our next example of Guys in Action also involves decisive response in an acute medical situation. This occurred in 1992 at the Willow-brook Golf Course in Winter Haven, Florida. According to the Associated Press account, some guys were playing a round of golf, when suddenly one of them—in the kind of shocking occurrence that we can never really be prepared for—was struck by a falling piddle pack.
No, seriously, he suffered a heart attack and, unfortunately, died, right on the sixteenth green. As you can imagine, this created a serious problem for the golfers—described by the Associated Press as the deceased’s “friends and neighbors”—who were playing on the course behind him. Here, in the midst of what was to be an afternoon of sport and camaraderie, they had suddenly and tragically lost one of their own. What should they do? What is the appropriate mode of behavior when a guy is confronted with such a profoundly sad and upsetting situation?
The answer is—and I hope this will silence those who claim that guys are insensitive—the golfers skipped the sixteenth hole. That’s right: For two hours, as the deceased’s body lay on the green and police tried to locate his widow, the golfers went directly from the fifteenth hole to the seventeenth hole, making the extreme sacrifice of missing out on a full one-eighteenth of a golf game, so as to avoid getting into a situation wherein they would be forced to do something that could be perceived as disrespectful to their friend and neighbor, such as hitting a ball off of his body.5