Manhood for Amateurs

by Michael Chabon

  This may form part of the male aspect of cookery, a pursuit that combines three classic male modes of gratification: the mastering of an arcane lore bound up in accumulable tomes; mindless repetition (the thing that leads boys to take up card tricks, free-throw shooting, video games); and the staking of everything on a last throw of the dice. Cooking satisfies the part of me that enjoys struggling for days to transfer an out-of-print vinyl record by Klaatu to digital format, screwing with scratch filters and noise reducers, only to have the burn fail every time at the very same track. I’m not at all saying a woman cook doesn’t feel the identical mad urge to keep ruining the same dish over and over until she gets it right. I’m just saying that every woman I’ve ever known has mocked me for being that way.

  A few years after Velvet Crumb Cake entered my life, I was obliged to consider an aspect of cooking that has traditionally been thought of as female: that of feeding my family. When I was fourteen, my mother, holding a brand-new law degree from the University of Baltimore, went to work at a federal agency in Washington, D.C., a job that obliged her to rise early and commute almost an hour each way. By the time she arrived home at night, she had neither the energy nor the imagination to make dinner for my brother and me. “If you want to eat a nice hot dinner every night,” she told me, proposing to raise my allowance to a then-hefty fifteen dollars a week, “you’re going to have to cook it yourself.”

  So that was what I did—every night for the next four years, until I left for college. I learned to cook all of the homely dishes that my mother had made for us all my life: Swiss steak, spaghetti and meatballs, baked chicken, lasagna, stir-fry, matzo-ball soup, brisket and kasha, beef and macaroni, breaded flounder, beef stew, chicken-fried steak. A number of these recipes were my grandmother’s, and they reflected the nature and history of my mother’s family—Jewish, southern (she was born and raised in Virginia and Maryland), and midcentury assimilationist in the best sense of the word: absorbing other cultural traditions as much as it was itself absorbed. I cooked when I felt like it and when I did not, when there was no risk of ruining anything and very little of interest in the recipe once I had mastered it. I cooked for people who were not always hungry, not always appreciative or amazed, not always in the mood for the lamb chop on their plate.

  When I married my wife, had children, and began to cook for them, after many footloose years of recondite kitchen experimentation with the gods of chic vegetarianism, of ethnic-cuisine purism, and of the pasta machine, with non-cow cheeses and sun-dried vegetables and edible flowers, I inevitably sought help, even a kind of instruction, in those recipes from the American Cookery of my mother’s kitchen. I incorporated more modern dishes and ingredients into my regular repertoire, and I acquired many, many new cookbooks, but when it was time to get serious about feeding my family, there was not much doubt about where to turn. A fair portion of the three-by-five cards in my recipe box are written in my mother’s hand, and the thing is bulging with folded-up sheets of her typed instructions for Sour Cream Nut Cake or Chicken Rose.

  This turns out to be the enduring source of the pleasure I find in the kitchen. It’s the one that was there from the start, even before my chance encounter with the glories of a velvety crumble of caramelized bliss on the top of a biscuit-mix cake: the connection to my mother, who not only fed her children well but taught me how to feed my own just the way her mother had taught her. In his great work, James Beard somewhat radically positioned himself as the heir and celebrant of a long line of American woman cooks, from Miss Leslie to Fannie Farmer to his own mother, and there must have been something in this unexpected male affirmation of female inheritance that registered with me.

  I grew up during a time of dissolving boundaries, shifting economies, loosened definitions of male and female, of parent and child. Without shame or stigma, a marriage could be allowed to come undone, a woman could become a lawyer and go out and earn a good living. And a boy could take to the kitchen, the center of every home, and find there a sense of history and connectedness to anchor him, something that would not disappear or blow away or change beyond recognition. The processes of the kitchen, the secret chemistry that underlies the magical Velvet Crumb transformation of sugar by heat, are unchanging. Even if we can’t always master them, they are constant and true. Incidentally, these are qualities shared by my mother. That tumultuous era, and the new conditions of family life it imposed, obliged me to try to be like her in some measure. I’m lucky that it also permitted me to feel it was all right to want to be, even though I was a boy.

  Before I start arguing that it’s muddleheaded and misses the point to disparage the greatness of a baseball player for his want of goodness as a man—before I rise to the defense of Jose Canseco—let me begin by offering one example of my own muddleheadedness in this regard. A big part of what I have always admired about the late Roberto Clemente as a ballplayer is what a good, strong, thoughtful man he seems to have been; his stoic dignity in the face of ignorance and bigotry; how he died while trying to help the victims of a great disaster, etc. I choose to view Clemente’s grace on the field as reflecting and reflected by the graceful way in which he conducted his public life (when one has demonstrably nothing to do with the other) and both together as lasting proof of some private gracefulness as a man, when I have no way of ever knowing what form the true, secret conduct of his life may have taken. I have no idea what Clemente’s relationship was to drugs, or what his feelings would have been about performance enhancers like anabolic steroids, but I would like to think that he would have viewed them both with disfavor, and that he was faithful to his wife, temperate in his habits, and modest about his accomplishments. Yes, I would like to think that, because I’m just foolish and mistaken enough to think that great baseball players must also be good men.

  There is no question that Jose Canseco was sometimes a great baseball player. If you have any doubt about that, you weren’t paying attention to Canseco on the days during the seasons when he paid attention to the game, and that’s hard to imagine since, like Clemente, the man arrested the eye of the spectator, held the attention like a shard of mirror dangling from a wire in the sunshine, even when he was just standing around waiting for something to happen. But I’m not going to get into that here. The question of Canseco’s greatness or lack thereof can be debated endlessly, with statistics and anecdotes to support both sides, and some of us will never understand why Ron Santo, Gil Hodges, and Dick Allen are not in the Baseball Hall of Fame while others, many of whom serve on the hall’s Veterans Committee, always seem to vote to keep them out. And God knows I have no intention of claiming that Jose Canseco qualifies as a good man, according to the conventions of my own garden-variety morality of consistent effort, altruism, and personal integrity defined as the keeping of one’s promises to other people. Canseco’s want of goodness on those terms is also arguable, I suppose, though not by me. But I will go out on a limb and venture that any list of the one hundred greatest baseball players who ever lived would conform to the pattern for our species, and therefore contain a sizable number of men who spent most of their lives fumbling with an inherent tendency to shirk, ignore the sufferings of others, tell lies, and evade responsibility. Playing baseball well does not make you a better person any more than writing well does. The illusion that lures us into the error of confounding Clemente’s goodness as a man with his greatness as a ballplayer is that when a man is playing baseball well, as when a man is writing well, he seems to himself in that moment to be a better person than he is. He puts it all together, he has all the tools, in a way that seems impossible outside the lines of the ball field or the margins of the page. He shines, and we catch the reflected glint of that and extend the shining one an overall credit for luminosity that almost nobody could merit. Clemente, I think, shone with the grace and integrity of his play even when he was not on the field.

  In other words, Roberto Clemente was a hero, and Jose Canseco, by this definition, is not. By his own admission, C
anseco has shirked responsibilities and hurt people and lied and broken a lot of promises, large and small. And used steroids. Therefore, many people seem to feel he is not to be admired, neither in the past, during his brief heyday—so that we must retroactively rescind our delight in his style and our amazement at his prowess, put an asterisk beside our memory of the pleasure of his company over the course of a few long summers—nor in the present, not even when he steps forward to tell the truth, a big, meaningful, dolorous truth that most of us, measured by our own standards of heroism, would have a hard time bringing ourselves to tell. Canseco can’t possibly be a hero to anyone—he laid down that burden many years and arrests and screwups ago—and furthermore (goes the rap), there is nothing remotely admirable about Canseco’s allegation of widespread inveterate use of steroids by himself and by ballplayers such as Mark McGwire, who have a readier claim on our admiration and shoulder more naturally its weight.

  In breaking the code of silence on steroid use, we have been informed by sportswriters, by commentators, and by his former teammates, opponents, and coaches, Canseco was only out for money. If lying would have paid better than telling the truth, then Canseco would have lied (indeed, some have suggested that is what happened). Canseco is greedy, faithless, selfish, embittered, scornful, and everlastingly a showboat. He is a bad man, and that makes him retrospectively (except among those who claim to have felt this way always) a bad ballplayer. Not to mention a bad writer.

  The question that concerns me in all this is not one of the obvious ones, like what to tell my children, or what to do about the problem of steroids, or how to think about the records that may have been broken by cheaters, or how to protect against perfidy, avarice, taint, and scandal the dear old national game. Like all obvious questions, none of these can be answered. All human endeavor is subject to cracking. It’s the hard Tex Avery truth of the universe: Put your finger over one leak, and another one pops up just beyond your reach. Violence, gambling and game fixing, pestilential racism, overexpansion, competitive imbalance, labor strife, mindboggling cupidity, and cheating of every variety and school: For most of its history, the game of baseball, like everything we build, has been riddled with holes, some cavernous, some of them irreparable. I don’t know what is to be done about the latest steroids debacle, and neither do you. No, what I want to know about Jose Canseco is: How come I still like the guy so much?

  I’ll go even further: I admire him. Not in the way I admire Clemente—not even remotely, which says something about what an ambiguous thing admiration can be. Like all showboats, Canseco courts the simpler kind of admiration, starting in the mirror each morning. He is slick, he drives too fast, he is nine feet tall and four feet wide and walks with a roosterish swagger. But there has always been something about him, about his style of play, his sense of self-mocking humor, his way of looking at you looking at him, that goes beyond vanity, self-aggrandizement, or being a world-class jerk-off

  Canseco has been described as a charmer and a clown, but in fact he is a rogue, a genuine one, and genuine rogues are rare, inside baseball and out. It’s not enough to flout the law, to be a rogue—break promises, shirk responsibilities, cheat—you must also, at least some of the time, and with the same abandon, do your best, play by the rules, keep faith with your creditors and dependents, obey orders, throw out the runner at home plate with a dead strike from deep right field. Above all, you must do these things, as you do their opposites, for no particular reason, because you feel like it or do not, because nothing matters, and everything’s a joke, and nobody knows anything, and most of all, as Rhett Butler once codified for rogues everywhere, because you do not give a damn. One day you make that breathtaking play at the plate from deep right. Another day you decide for no good reason to come into the game during the late innings of a laugher and pitch, retiring the side (despite allowing three earned runs on three walks and a pair of singles)—and forever ruining that cannon of an arm.

  I’ve never seen a man who seems more comfortable than Jose Canseco with who he is—not with who we think he is, like George W. Bush, or with his best idea of himself, like Bush’s predecessor, but with himself, charmer and snake, clown and thoroughbred. He doesn’t care what you think of him; if anything, he derives a hair more pleasure from your scorn and contumely than he does from your useless admiration. By coming forward as he did to peel back the nasty bandage on baseball’s wound, it was not that Canseco had nothing to lose, as some of his critics claimed. A man like Canseco never has anything to lose or to gain but his life and the pleasure he takes from it.

  That this also remains exactly true for each of us is a thought that makes no impression on me in my daily intercourse with all of the things I give a damn about, and it probably makes none on you. We aren’t wired to see things that way, and we can never be blockade runners, or Casablanca casino owners, or fatally gifted ballplayers who sometimes, as Canseco once did, permit a baseball to bounce off the top of our head before its departure from the ballpark. We have no style, you and I; only people who don’t give a damn have style.

  There was a time, though, when men like Canseco, without taking anything from the luster of men like Roberto Clemente, could also be accounted as heroes. They were the ones, the Ulysseses and Sinbads and Raleighs, who sailed to places we couldn’t imagine, and then they returned, after a career of wonder, calamity, and chagrin, not one whit better than they were when they left. And surely no better than we—possibly worse. Yet in the end, they were the only ones fit to make the voyage, and when they came back, they carried a truth in their baggage that no one else would be clown enough, and rogue enough, and hero enough, to speak.

  One of the fundamental axioms of masculine self-regard is that the tools and appurtenances of a man’s life must be containable within the pockets of his jacket and pants. Wallet, keys, gum, show or ball game tickets, Kleenex, condoms, cell phone, maybe a lighter and a pack of cigarettes: Just cram it all in there, motherfucker. When I was a smoker—a long time ago—I used to predicate every purchase of a shirt, tee, or button-down on whether or not it featured a front pocket to hold my pack of Winston Lights. Take away everything, cigarettes, phone, even keys, a man remains a man so long as he keeps his wallet pressed up against his body. A wallet is a man’s totem, his distillation. It pockets his soul as surely as he pockets it.

  The necessary corollary to this inviolate principle is that no man, ever, ought to carry a purse. Purses are for women; a purse is basically a vagina with a strap. If you have diabetes, let’s say, it is permitted to carry your works and your insulin around in a leather zip, but as soon as you start shoving your keys, Altoids, and above all your wallet in there, too, it’s over. You are a man with a purse.

  As firmly—as manfully—as I always adhered to this absolute prohibition, I suffered from its tyranny. I sat on my wallet (a behavior so harmful to the sciatic nerve that it can lead to a diagnosable syndrome called piriformis, or fat wallet syndrome), got raked repeatedly across the thigh by the mace of my keyring, bulged all over in unflattering ways like Wile E. Coyote after he swallows a live Roman candle. I was tormented by that household devil of every pocket, the Hole, an anarchic character whose satanic powers include the ability to cause you to forget its existence every time you put on the pants or the jacket it has chosen to haunt, right up to the moment that all ninety-six cents of your change go skittering and windchiming across the bus-station floor, or your Bic lighter slips down into the secret lining of your blazer.

  Nevertheless, I adhered rigorously to the way of the pocket for the first few decades of my life as a would-be man. For years I wore a sport jacket wherever I went, no matter how unseasonable or inappropriate to the occasion, simply to take advantage of the additional pocket-space it afforded, a strategy whose reductio ad absurdum is the photojournalist vest, the kind they used to advertise in the old-school Banana Republic catalogs. There was a period during college and graduate school when I dragged around a knapsack, but even then I never relaxe
d my grip on manhood enough to carry anything other than books, pens, and maybe one of the elephantine Walkmans of that era, impossible to pocket—the only storage alternative was the dreaded belt clip, a kind of prosthetic penis, in its own inverse way as emasculating as a purse.

  Saggy-bottomed and stained from sitting around in puddles of beer, the knapsack is—along with its sober older brother the briefcase—one of a limited number of stealth purse strategies by which men routinely attempt to circumvent, elude, or transcend the cruel code of the pocket. The advent of the laptop computer has led to a kind of renaissance in the category of luggage formerly occupied by the satchel, an all but forgotten item just a few years ago, now more commonly designated a messenger bag and hybridized in leather, nylon, and plastic, leading to all kinds of knapsack-cum-attachés and tote-cum-briefcases. And there are the gym bag, and the paratroop bag, and the flight bag, and those other hopeful attempts to provide a man with a rugged GI Joe kind of place to carry around his Walther PPK, his cyanide pills, his safe cracking tools, and his Kiehl’s lip balm. But check your pockets, or the pockets of the man standing next to you, the one with the commando kit–cum–road warrior carryall. I will bet you a cyanide pill that he’s still packing his wallet, keys, and spare change in his pants. Otherwise, that rugged satchel becomes, by definition, nothing but a purse.