Why We Suck

by DR. DENIS LEARY

  That’s what the female terrorist said to her husband minutes before they left home—probably late—to launch a double suicide attack.

  Every husband or boyfriend has heard some version of that question—just switch out the word “bomb” and replace it with dress.

  Or skirt.

  Or blouse.

  Or shirt, hat, car, house, sofa, pen, bed, city, country, hemisphere—you get the point.

  Every man who lives with a woman has had to sit in that hot seat—in the bedroom, in the hallway, in a hotel suite, almost anywhere—and offer up glowing accounts of an endless stream of outfits that—each after each—apparently “make” her ass look fat. It’s never her actual ass that is too big, it’s the way the ass looks in some Nightmare Pair Of Designer Jeans or a One Of A Kind Evening Gown or These Goddam Stupid Imported Capri Pants or even Those Old Jeans From Four Years Ago when the ass WAS tiny and looked so incredibly edible you felt like slapping it and throwing her onto the bed right then and there.

  Joseph did it with Mary.

  Hitler did it with Eva Braun.

  Randy Gerber is doing it with Cindy Crawford as you read this sentence.

  Trying to divine the best way to—evenly and with a strong, calm voice—discuss her derriere.

  Yet—no matter what man you may be—you cannot utter even a sliver, of one tiny teeny slice, shaved off just a corner—of one kernel—of the truth.

  It looks fine, honey.

  It looks great, sweetheart.

  Babe—I love the way your butt looks in that.

  Those three alone’ll get you into enough trouble.

  And even when The Ass Under Consideration does, in fact, measure up to the finest of all Ass Ethics and is, indeed, still sexy and juicy and oh so delectable—she will not hear anything positive that flows out of your mouth no matter how it is offered up. She needs to primp and pose and gape and prowl and turn and frown and gaze over one shoulder and then do the same over the other shoulder and then flip her hair back and start the whole goddam process right from Outfit Number One again.

  And you have no choice but to sit and wait and watch and wait and bite your hungry lip.

  I’m convinced the burka was not invented by some crazed Arab hell-bent on following religious conventions—it was just a hungry husband who wanted to make his dinner reservation on time. If she’s forced to wear only one thing—how hard could it be? (I know I know—even as we speak, Muslim wives around the globe are trying on brown burka after brown burka—wishing that somehow just one of them would make their sacred asses disappear.)

  I have spent over twenty-five years going through this exercise two or three or sometimes five evenings a week with the exact same woman—my wife Ann. So at some point a while back I decided to give in and stop swimming upstream and you know what?

  Something wonderful happened.

  By letting all the anger go, by allowing the distemper and the exasperation to just slip away, by forcing my ire and chagrin and my miff and my tiff and my huff and my puff and my pique and my dander and the speeding express train of torrential goddam curse words about to explode out of my mouth to—instead—evaporate (and by staving off my hunger with a wad of roast beef wrapped in Swiss cheese)—I had a revelation:

  Relax, man. Just relax.

  It’s not your wife.

  It’s this really hot chick trying on different outfits.

  Which means—at its basic, most raw and bottomest best:

  You get to see a sexy girl nekked.

  And once you embrace that theory—man, have you ever hit the jackpot. ’Cause if you love your wife and she’s still got it going on—wow.

  Sit back and swoon, brother.

  My wife looks better than ever and I gotta tell ya—it’s like you’re at your own private fashion show.

  Wait—it’s better than that.

  It’s like you’re simultaneously watching a fashion show AND you get to be backstage at the exact same time.

  She tries on an outfit—then she saunters around in her bra and panties looking for another outfit.

  She takes that outfit off—and her bra—so now she is topless! Holy shit.

  Then she puts on heels and tries on a cocktail dress.

  THEN—she decides she has a VPL—Visible Panty Line (ya gotta get the lingo down pronto)—so she slips her panties off and—if you’re lucky—decides the dress makes her hips look too full so she takes that dress off and goes in search of another—MEANWHILE you now have her naked and in stiletto heels wandering back and forth right there in front of you—God, what a gift from above.

  When I was a teenager, a hot chick strutting her stuff in your bedroom was considered an impossible event and here it is happening multiple times a week for free? I’m telling you, fellas—once you use my system and take what we used to think of as a task and reimagine it as a fun-filled hobby—it just doesn’t get any better than this.

  What I do now is run downstairs and stuff some beef in my mouth, get changed real quick and then sit on the edge of the bed in the master bedroom and let the games begin:

  I don’t think that’s the right dress, honey.

  VPL alert, honey—VPL alert. Let’s get those panties off.

  I think we’re gonna need a bigger set of heels, honey.

  I like that top but try it without a bra.

  It turns being late for dinner into an entirely different animal. Look—we get ready to go out by grabbing one of our two dinner jackets—check to make sure there are no holes anywhere or at the very least only one or two small pinhead-sized holes and maybe a couple of minor coffee stains that really don’t jump out at you because the jacket is brown to begin with PLUS the barely there dollop of mustard that sits in a splotch on the shirt you just grabbed off the floor of the closet is a bigger concern because throwing the thing through a ten-minute cycle of Dewrinkle in the dryer ain’t gonna make the yellow disappear from a white shirt but that’s why you wear a yellow tie and tie it extra long and voilà—two palm-prints of Aqua Velva ’n you are more than ready to rock ’n’ roll.

  Her? She likes to linger.

  And look.

  And linger.

  And—here comes the good stuff—primp and preen and reach and flounce and stride and ankle and stretch and parade and—maybe my personal favorite—sashay.

  I love it when my wife sashays.

  You should feel the same way when your girl does it.

  Happy wife, happy life. Not to mention lots of giant boners.

  Let’s take this theory and run with it.

  CHAPTER 15

  TESTICLE-COLORED TOWELS

  Actually, the proper name for the color is Testicalé.

  Testicalé being a fake Spanish word I just made up. It means “ball.” As in “my balls hurt.” (Hey—I made up the word, I get to make up the definition.)

  And a towel that is colored Testicalé is a towel that is pink with a slightly brownish tint and a little bit of peachy peach fuzz along the edges.

  And the reason I bring this up is because there is no such thing as a pink towel anymore. Or a brown towel. Nope. Some gay man somewhere—and I’m personally blaming Calvin Klein, married though he may be—decided that women were way more likely to buy way more towels if said towels were in fact saddled with fancy-sounding color names. Thus—instead of pink towels—we now have Salmon. Or Fuchsia. Or Blush.

  See? That’s why I chose Testicalé. Because the real Spanish word for ball is testiculo. Which just sounds too much like testicle, which reminds you of a scrotum and does not make you wanna buy a bunch of towels.

  Whereas Testicalé sounds like some kind of smooth, fancy-tasting tequila, which you could sip over ice as you lounged in a soothing hot bath with Cooling Cucumber Bubbles and a Hydrating Skin Mask of Yoga Tea Leaves nestled atop your face.

  I bet I could get a shitload of ladies to buy Testicalé towels.

  Guys? Not so much.

  We couldn’t care less what color a towel is.


  We don’t even care if it’s clean.

  As long as it wipes the water off our back, head and ass and sops up all the nooks and crannies in between and we can slap on our slacks and get something to eat—we’re happy.

  But even if pressed into having to pick, the Guy Pie Color Chart For Towels would consist of maybe three—blue, white and red.

  Maybe black.

  That’s it.

  I would’ve thrown gray in there too but for most guys gray would just be another kind of blue.

  When did white and blue and black and red become too little too late for most women?

  When they got a whiff of Acorn and Heather and Persimmon and Pearl.

  I don’t even know what colors those are supposed to be—I just saw them listed in a bed-and-bath store catalog I stole out of my wife’s office.

  Get a load of these:

  Moss.

  Forest.

  Celery.

  Guess what color? Green, goddammit. Green. Moss? What the hell. I don’t even know a GUY named Moss. Why not go with Mold? Or Yeast? Is yeast green? I dunno. All I know about yeast is that women get infections that are named after it AND I think they might use it to make beer.

  More catalog colors:

  Mushroom.

  Ecru.

  Taupe.

  Khaki.

  Got a guess? Tan. Fucking tan. Which is really light brown but let’s not get into that—let’s just accept that light brown is tan. Then—years ago—they came up with beige and burnt sienna.

  I remember because I was a kid and they added beige and burnt sienna to the Crayola crayons box, so let’s accept that tan is tan and beige is lighter tan and burnt sienna is probably some kind of tan that the Indians came up with but is that enough to base a towel selection on? I guess the fuck not because now we have four more bullshit choices, which we will now unbullshit our way through:

  Mushroom. Mushrooms are for cheeseburgers, pasta sauces, soup and getting high enough to think that the Grateful Dead were actually a good band when in fact they were just a bunch of spaced-out, balding junkies with two songs they managed to spread out over four hours as a scam to sell tie-dyed T-shirts.

  Ecru? Sounds like a cough. (Don’t forget—I’m a doctor.)

  Khaki? Pants. That’s it. Just pants. I don’t want a towel named after a pair of pants I wouldn’t buy or wear anyways. Christ. Let’s make all pant names into colors. How about Cargo. Are those off-white pants, Penis Man? Nope—they’re Ski. Hey Lefty—are those pants black or navy blue? The proper name for the color is Tuxedo, asshole.

  And Taupe? I looked up “taupe” in a dictionary and here’s what it says: “A moderate to dark brownish gray slightly tinged with purple, yellow or green.” Jesus Christ. Could there be a less decisive color? Is Taupe running for President Of All Towels?

  Orange becomes Tangerine or Pumpkin, red becomes Burgundy, white becomes Alabaster, purple morphs into Plum, Lilac, Aubergine and Mauve.

  I knew a pissed-off lesbian from Dublin who was named Mauve and a French-Canadian hockey goon whose last name was Aubergine—neither one brings the color purple to mind. (Although Mauve did give me a purple nurple because she thought I was hitting on her girlfriend when I was—in fact—just asking for a light. Her girlfriend looked like Aubergine, by the way—only he had better teeth.)

  The point is—why.

  Why do we need these colors why is someone getting paid to create them why are women buying towels and curtains and linens and bedspreads named with them and bringing them home or even worse showing us the choices in the catalog BEFORE they buy them and asking us which one we like better—the Pewter or the Periwinkle? The Topaz or the Azule?

  The Milk or the Butter the Cream or the Honey the Egg or the—I don’t know if I’m still picking out bed and bath wear or ordering fucking breakfast.

  Speaking of which, it’s the same thing that’s happened with food. My wife and I recently went out to eat on a gorgeous late-winter Saturday evening and after watching her perform an extended version of The Lace Panties And Bare Skin Display and driving twenty-five miles inside an enclosed space as the scent of her perfume arrayed itself around my lips, I had two thoughts in mind: sex sex and more sex.

  Actually—that was all one continuous thought, so as we arrived at the restaurant I just wanted to chow down and speed home before tearing her clothes off and manhandling her.

  Then—the ponytailed, three-earrings-in-one-earlobe, not black but I’m sure Midnight suit-sporting waiter sauntered up to the table, placed a menu gingerly into each of our hands and—I shit you not—began to recite the following special additions:

  (I remember because as soon as he was done and excused himself—no doubt to re-buff his nails—I borrowed a pen from my wife and wrote all of this down.)

  An Heirloom Tomato Tower Featuring Goat Cheese And A Plum Salsa Dressing.

  French Tenderloin Filet With Crab Galette And Israeli Couscous Flecked By Casino Butter.

  Pistachio-Encrusted Swordfish With Corn Whipped Potatoes Drizzled With An Asian Fennel Sauce.

  For Dessert—Italian Apple Sorbet Sitting Above A Vanilla Wedge And Topped By Belgian Chocolate Glaze.

  First things first. A tower of tomatoes is okay by me ’cause it sounds like a tomato sandwich and that seems like it would just be faster to eat, but

  FEATURING goat cheese? What is this, a rock concert? And what the fuck exactly is plum salsa—an excuse not to have more tomatoes on the plate? But I digress. Because the tomato tower is normal stuff compared with the French Tenderloin Filet With Crab Galette. You know what the galette was? A crab cake.

  It’s just a chunk of steak with a crab cake on top, and I’ve been to Israel—I worked there for a summer once—and I never heard the words “Israeli couscous” in English OR Hebrew and what the fuck is Casino Butter—pads of butter with paper on either side that you stole from the Caesars Palace All You Can Eat Buffet? And let me ask you this—Corn Whipped Potatoes—did you actually whip the potatoes WITH a cob of corn or did you just save me the trouble of having to mix the corn into the potatoes right here on my own plate? I appreciate your deshelling the pistachios for me in advance, by the way, but I don’t want them encrusted around my goddam fish. I don’t like anything encrusted. Reminds me of that stuff you have in your eyes after you wake up from a deep sleep. Especially when you have the flu. Flu-Encrusted Cod anybody? And drizzled? Let’s cut to the goddam chase on that one—poured. Okay? You poured some shit over some other shit. Drizzle means it’s raining outside but it’s not really raining. And I’m Irish so I’m kind of an expert on this one—anything “drizzled” or poured or splattered or plopped on top of potatoes is gravy—I don’t give a good goddam if it’s from Asia or the South Bronx—it’s G-R-A-V-Y—and you better have a shitload of it. And as far as dessert goes—you ain’t fooling me. It’s an apple on top of a cookie with hot fudge. Fuck Belgium AND the Italians.

  My wife loved it. I closed the menu and let her order for me. It all gets so confusing and long and descriptive and—basically—uses way too much time and far too many words. Here’s what the menu at the ultimate restaurant built by, for and WITH men in mind would say:

  BEEF

  CHICKEN

  FISH

  SPAGHETTI

  BOOZE

  CAKE

  PIE

  That’s it. Make them all the same price and you have a done deal—guys will flock there in record numbers.

  I bring all of this up to let women all over the world know—once and for all—we don’t really care about Amber towels and Auburn washcloths and Claret curtains and Salsified Sea Bass and Crystallized Cocoa Flake Splashed With A Dandelion Brandy Sauce. We’ll shower up and rinse our hands clean and sit down and eat the stuff but for one reason and one reason only—we wanna have sex with you. That’s it.

  That’s why I’m extending the argument put forward in the previous chapter, guys—don’t go off the deep end about the linen and the menu additions
like I just did—sit back and let it all go.

  So you have to let some ponce in a ponytail point out food that simply by the length of its title is gonna have a price tag far beyond its actual nutritional value—so what?

  So instead of grabbing a red towel and raking it across your ass and your ballsack—you gently dab at your dabbables and remark: “Honey—this towel is so big and fluffy and just so—is it Magenta? It is? It’s such a perfect balance with the smaller towels—the hand ones? Lemme guess—are those Puce or Terra Cotta? Oh—Vermillion. I love it!”

  That and a slow, gentle slide of your hand—palm down—across the surface of the new Crimson sheets and a quick remark about how much you love the Russet pillowcases will do wonders down unders.