Like—three weeks.
Then we will meet another girl who wants to have sex with us and the whole process starts all over again. I know—it enrages you that you could be killed in a car crash or hit by a bus or contract some fatal disease and less than a month after you are placed in the cold, cold ground—the love of your life is bonking a bottle blonde. We all know women who have buried their husbands or lovers and never managed to muster up that same amount of love for another man—sometimes spending decades on their own—a picture of her handsome husband sitting above the fireplace. I know a woman who has had a searing, endless crush on a single guy she works with for over five years now—not only does he have no interest in sleeping with her, he’s actually moved in with another woman, who he is now engaged to. The chick I know? Still hoping, still waiting. Doesn’t work that way for men.
You have a mega crush on a girl and you make the move and she tells you to take a hike? You move on. More than likely to a girl who kinda looks the same. We don’t get picky—we just get busy.
There are countless public examples. Paul McCartney—worth about five hundred zillion dollars. The love of his life Linda dies a long, diabolical death while fighting breast cancer and less than three months later he is banging a one-legged lunatic half his age. Why? Because she offered it. He was horny and hungry and she must have given great head and grilled cheese. Plus, he’s a big pothead so he probably figured the fake leg would come in handy for smuggling marijuana on international private jet-set flights.
Why would ex-Beatle Paul pick a gimpy bitch when he could more than likely have had a swarm of two-legged girls to romance and take to bed without having to worry about whether they needed a bedpan or a crutch or maybe even a walker in order to take a piss in the middle of the night? Two reasons: Heather fucked him first and Heather fucked him first.
That’s it.
You have to understand the word “smitten.” If a guy becomes smitten by you and your body—it’s over for him. His money his mind his cock his car—he will give it all up if a girl makes him happy. Her interests become his interests—and I mean pronto.
I live on a farm full of horses. I grew up in the city and the closest I’d ever come to horses were in old western movies and—if I had ever bothered to look close enough—on the ingredient section of some dog food cans. I viewed horses as ten-thousand-dollar lawnmowers. Then I met my wife. She grew up riding and loving and dreaming about horses. So, now I have horses—who I not only love and also dream about—but am learning to ride. If my wife had been into bumblebees, I would stand—as you read this—out in a field full of insects and flowers with a bee-keeper’s hat and gloves on shouting “Annie—big motherfucking bee at three o’clock!” I’d have honey stains in my underwear and sting salve sitting on my sink and love every goddam black-and-yellow minute of it.
I met my wife literally across a crowded room twenty-five years ago. When she stepped into the doorway and I first saw her, it wasn’t so much that my knees buckled—it was more of total soul collapse. All the blood in my body went into my shoes and then shot straight back up into my brain—twice. Now that was probably a purely visceral response—my penis knew that looks-wise, she was right in my wheelhouse. SO in my wheelhouse that if she was even remotely smart and funny—I was a dead man.
Which I was.
Right after she started talking and making me laugh.
Twenty-five years and two kids and a lot of ups and downs and arguments about everything from how much pepper I put on my potatoes to why I don’t bother to put my clothes from today into the laundry hamper tonight (answer? Because I’m planning on wearing them again tomorrow morning) in sickness and in health, in good times and the bad, for better or worse and four marriage counselors later (one was an asshole, one was an idiot and the third one I’m pretty sure was a Yankees fan)—I still wake up and wonder how I got so lucky.
By the way, guys—here’s a few quick and easy steps to follow before you enter the first session with your wife and the marriage counselor. I found these to be very, very helpful:
1. It’s all your fault.
2. Really. The fault is yours.
3. Still your fault.
Write those down on some five-by-eight-inch index cards and flash-memorize them. Better yet—stick ’em in the glove compartment for safekeeping.
A lot of women I know not only need to be in therapy, they prefer to talk to a male therapist. Why?
Because he’s a guy whose JOB it is to listen.
To listen and learn.
About them.
Listen as they register all of their complaints, anxieties, worries, frets, marital woes and relationship friction. Listen INTENTLY as they ramble on and on about their husbands, their mothers, their fathers, their step-dads, their sisters, their bosses—it all gets laid out and the man in the room has to keep two very wide-open ears.
The Man Shrink. The perfect partner.
He nods and squints and murmurs in agreement and when he asks her a question to probe further it’s almost always offered up as “How did that make you feel?” or “How did you feel about that?” or “Did that make you feel such and such a way blah blah sympathy blah?”
The Man Shrink takes mental notes and pays rapt attention and is absolutely guaranteed to agree with her. For forty-five minutes. Then—it’s time to go.
Man Shrinks are the female version of hookers.
You pay him to provide a necessary service that has a strict time limit and though it involves what seems to be an incredibly intimate exchange—you don’t see or talk to him again until the next time you pay him.
Plus, this kind of prostitution is not only legal—it can make your marriage or relationship better. And let’s face it—you want her to be happy.
The girl in your life will always be better than a life without your girl. She will make you a finer, more upstanding citizen in our society—and not just in a psychological sense.
Every guy I know has had the experience of seeing another guy he knows amble into a room sporting a fresh new frou-frou haircut, six-hundred-dollar designer jeans and something akin to clown shoes. No one wonders if he joined the circus. No one asks him why his eyebrows no longer meet. They all know he got dressed and groomed by the new girl in his life. Hey—it happens to the best of us. They take your cash and use it to rebuild you.
Which brings up another difference between the sexes. Paul was sixty-something years old, a multibillionaire and incredibly famous when he and Heather hooked up. She was thirty-three and had eight cents in her plastic foot. And claimed she was “in love.” Uh-huh. Why is it young chicks—bipeds or single-wheeled—never fall “in love” with sixty-four-year-old janitors. Or hobos?
Would Donald Trump have had such a parade of young pussy pass through Trump Tower over the last five decades if he didn’t OWN the fucking thing? Are women at least half his age really that attracted to fourteen strands of dyed blond hair that are teased and tickled and duct-taped into submission until they somehow form a semi-circle of bangs that swoop down like a hair hawk across his forehead before ending up in a nest just above his coat collar?
And the answer is? No. It’s the buildings, stupid.
Name the last man in his early thirties or late twenties that you know of who married a rich woman at least twice his age?
Need more time? Go ahead.
Here it is—Donald Trump’s first wife, Ivana—listed at sixty years old but you can add a good four or five years to that—and her thirty-six hairgellin’-megaMetro-sexual-year-old über-Euro-trash-boyfriend Rossano Rubicondi. You make up your own jokes about this union, his name and his motivations and please feel free to insert them right here.
Because guys can’t do it. Unless they’re gay and there’s no sex involved. Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore is the closest we can come. She was forty-two and he was twenty-seven when they fell in love. That’s a difference of only fifteen years. And they may both be fine with it three years later, even as
I write this.
But two decades from now—when the kabbalah bracelets and the Botox both stop working their magic, she needs new tits again AND a hip replacement and he’s about to hit fifty with a bald spot or two—let’s see how much resistance he has when Jessica Alba’s daughter is hitting on him during the shooting of Dude, Where’s My Car Part Seven.
Straight men don’t dance, remember birthdays or marry chicks with hearing aids.
We also don’t date women who are on death row, which is another compartment in The Female Brain. If you are a guy and you kill your parents or a stranger or your ex-wife or just snap like a twig and take out thirteen of your co-workers—and society decides not to turn you into a human sloppy joe strapped to an electric chair—women will flock to visit you. It happens time and time again. A guy gets life behind bars and the fan mail flounders in. Pretty soon some buxom chick from Biloxi or a local cookbook author from Columbus is getting hitched to a guy she will only be able to have sex with in a five-foot-wide metal trailer once a month for fifteen minutes. Why? I guess because they know where you are. And you love them. They can tell by all the wonderful sweet nothings you write in your letters, which you are only writing because you don’t have access to porn (and she sent you a Polaroid of her tits). And she knows you won’t cheat on her—unless it’s with Mack the Truck from Cellblock B—whose tits might be bigger but have a shitload of hair on them.
This plan would never work for guys. If Brad Pitt had met Angelina Jolie through an exchange of letters while she was assigned to a Federal Penitentiary for her next nine lives—he may have gone to see her in the trailer twice. MAYBE three times.
After that—just too long of a drive.
Two and a half hours there, five minutes of sex, ten minutes of whining about how much the system sucks and how the guards are all talking about her behind her back and how her mother won’t stop telling her how she threw her life away and blah blubbedy I’m thinking of getting your face tattooed on my ass but first I have to have Billy Bob’s name erased and do you think the fact that I could fit both his first names on my ass means my ass is too big and blub I wanna adopt my Nigerian cellmate blib and then the bell goes off ending the session and Brad still has a two-and-a-half-hour drive back home.
Not really worth the trip.
These are the facts. There is no way around them.
The big chunk of The Female Brain that’s called The Past?
That’s a gene men don’t really carry. When it comes to things that happened five or ten or even eighteen years ago—we have no recollection. Unless we’re talking about sports or The Godfather Part One and Two or the Vanessa Williams issue of Playboy magazine. Your old boyfriends? You could have had thirty-seven of them—the only one we care about is the one who came right before us.
But every guy has had the experience of getting into an argument with his chick and she falls off the deep end, spiraling forth from whatever it was you just did wrong to spouting out general admonitions like You Never Listen and You Always Pull This Same Old Shit and the next thing you know she says this:
Remember that time at Stephanie’s birthday party four years ago when we were talking in the kitchen to her and you got a beer and went out into the living room and I was talking to Stephanie in the kitchen for like another half an hour and I came out to make sure you were okay and you were talking to that tall blonde with the big tits in the tight white sweater and I gave you a look and went back in the kitchen and Stephanie even noticed it and later when Stephanie was opening her presents and they brought out the cake when we were singing happy birthday to her I saw you say something under your breath to Big Tits and she laughed so I KNOW you were flirting with her and then Big Tits gave me a look like I just made your boyfriend pay attention to me and you denied it all the way home and then we didn’t talk for like two days? Do you remember that?
And our response is almost always the same:
Who the fuck is Stephanie?
It ain’t personal. It’s just the way we are. I think we’d get a lot more done in this country if we finally could put to bed the idea that men need to be a lot more like women and vice versa. It goes against all science, math and common sense about the sexes.
Men claim women are always miserable—stay-at-home moms bitch about having to stay home, working moms bitch about having to work AND raise children, when they are not bitching about not getting paid as much as men.
Listen, let me make this as clear as the clear glass bottom of a just-Windexed—and thus as clear as clear can get—glass-bottomed boat: I’m not talking about single moms who have to work to feed their kids or moms who work as well as the dads because between the two of them they barely manage to feed and clothe and shelter the kids or moms who work a part-time job to help out with the bills that both her and her partner of choice are doing their best to keep from piling up.
My sister-in-law Judy worked as did my brother Johnny as did my sisters Ann Marie and Betsy and both of their husbands and they did so because they needed both incomes and you know who the full-time nannies were? My mom and Judi’s sister Janie and any and all available nearby aunts.
I’m not talking about necessity.
I’m talking about the moms—and we all know them—who begrudge the baby and the time they should be spending with it because it’s beneath or beyond them.
The moms who are not “fulfilled” by being a mom.
The moms for whom toting a kid is fine—if the kid’s outfit matches their own or carrying a kid for twenty minutes or so lends them a worthy amount of caring cachet from the shallow set that follow what’s in fashion. If kids are suddenly and ever-so-briefly back in style—then so are they.
Moms who find sitting and talking with other moms while their kids play together so boring that they would rather have a Nicaraguan nanny with no vested interest in the baby other than as a means to stockpile dollar bills change and coddle and burp it while mom is out power-lunching her way to a bigger office with bigger lunches and sleeker desks and seven more assistants they can assault with assorted lists and demands.
If Helicopter Moms are overinvolved and almost ever present—flying into schools and playdates and Little League games and soccer fields to primp and feed and urge and cheer and many times just check to make sure the kid is okay, then the women I’m talking about should be referred to as Jet Pack Moms.
Helicopter Moms fly in.
Jet Pack Moms fly OUT.
As soon as little Ashley shits her pants or toddling Todd erupts with vomit—Jet Pack Mom powers up and disappears. You want her to watch you climb up onto the couch? Sorry. Jet Pack Mom’s out shopping. For shoes. For herself. You want her to teach you how to multiply two times two? Sorry. She’s busy dividing up dumplings at a Best Friends Who Brunch At Barney’s brunch. How about commiserating at the playground while you run and jump and skip and hop? Nope. She’s hopped up on low-dose antidepressants to keep her fear of growing slightly older at bay. But when you might need a little extra oomph from the sidelines during your dance recital? If there are other moms attending whom talking to would help shorten or enhance her long walk up the society ladder, Jet Pack Mom will fly in and mingle with fury.
Helicopter Mom found breastfeeding to be a wonderful bonding experience.
Jet Pack Mom briefly loved her larger chest and contemplated augmentation and new dental bonding while the baby was bottle-fed formula.
Helicopter Moms fly in with hugs and extra pencils.
Jet Pack Moms pencil their kids and kid hugs in.
Helicopter Moms fret and worry about bullies and bad grades.
Jet Pack Moms worry about frown lines and labia reduction surgery.
Helicopter Moms dream long baby dreams and wake up thinking baby baby baby all day long.
Jet Pack Moms dream of appletinis and kid-free Caribbean vacations and ponder beachweather workouts all afternoon.
You know that dad you see doting over his daughter down by the plastic slide i
n the park every day?
He’s not a Helicopter Dad.
He’s just married to a Jet Pack Mom.
Here’s the real deal: men are built for work, kids almost always want their mommies, if you decide to not have kids and just chase your career—hey, not getting promoted happens to almost everybody.
It used to drive me nuts when I was working in comedy clubs and some female comic would say something to the effect of “it’s so hard to do this when you’re a girl.”
Oh really.
And standing up in front of drunken, combative assholes who paid twenty bucks each to get in and just ordered a round of tequila shots and beer that’ll cost them another sixty-five bucks—which they think gives them the right to talk out loud while the person onstage tries to talk funny into an electric stick—which only makes THEM talk even louder—yeah, that’s oh so easy for the rest of us.
It’s a room full of morons who are shitfaced—it sucks for everyone.
It cracks me up when actresses have meltdowns leading to an increase in their medication because some edgy orange frock a wine-and-Klonopinswilling French designer convinced them to take a chance on led to getting named Worst Dressed Woman At The 14th Annual San Antonio Film Festival. Hey, I got picked as one of People magazine’s Sexiest Men a few years back—which is a sign that either the apocalypse will shortly be upon us or Willem Dafoe absolutely refused to do the photo shoot—and within a few months the same magazine named me Worst Dressed Man At The Umpteenth Emmy Award Extravaganza. I guess a black shirt and red tie on the red carpet is grounds for getting slammed by Joan Rivers and the five gay men who help to hold her head up. Did I call my shrink? No—my brother saw it in the mag, called me up, we had a good laugh and I was happy they spelled my name right. Who gives a shit?
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