Too bad it never dawned on us that perhaps our objects of desire might have wanted what we wanted as well.
As I matured sexually and socially and began dating regularly, I made some important discoveries. For example, girls in the country were easier targets than girls in the city. Girls in the city had other stuff to do. They could go to a movie, they could go to the mall. Girls in the country didn’t have a whole lot to look forward to. So whenever I went on vacation or down to the farm, I immediately began looking for prospects.
I figured that out the summer between the ninth and tenth grades, when I went to Pawpaw’s farm in South Carolina. I met a girl who was the friend of a friend and we were all going to ride horses. She was cute, with blunt-cut blond hair. After a morning on horseback, she and I tied our mounts outside my uncle’s trailer. No one was home. We went inside to get something to drink, settled down into the sofa, and she shifted right toward me.
I liked to think I was just too charming. On the other hand maybe she figured that making out with me was better than cleaning up after the horses, or the usual country pastime of staring all afternoon at a tree. Like I said, there wasn’t much to do. Anyway, she pretty quickly let me put my hand inside her shirt. Not only did I feel it, I saw it. It was so cute. You know how you open up a blanket and you see a puppy for the first time? So innocent, and it’s looking right up at you. That’s all we did, but it was enough.
Later Uncle Bob and I milked the cows and talked. Uncle Bob said, “Hey, you guys were gone for quite a while,” he said, with a devious chuckle. My mind churned. Suddenly I had my first shot at actually getting a man’s approval.
“Oh, yeah. Yeah.” Remember, this is my uncle Bob. And we’re milking a cow.
“So, how was it?”
“Good. Good,” I lied. “Really good.”
“Did you…?”
“Oh, sure. Sure.”
“You dawg.”
His reaction taught me an important lesson: Lying works. I’m just glad Bob wasn’t so impressed that he wanted to demonstrate any advanced techniques on the cow.
We always hear how men like to swap tales of a graphic sexual nature in the locker room. This is completely true. However, we can be more subtle. Occasionally we simply like to brag about our hot moves.
Whining is always at the top of the list.
HE: Please, sugar dumpling, please.
SHE: No. Uh-uh. No way.
HE: But my girlfriend just don’t understand me like you do.
SHE: Then break up with her.
HE: Cain’t. She’s also my maw.
SHE: You’re sick!
HE: Me? Sick? You did it with your cousin!
SHE: I know. But he’s nice.
HE: But sweetie…
Even though this example is assumed to be true only in select regions of the country, guys everywhere are still pathetic. They prove it every year at spring break. My most vivid memory is of five guys crammed into a Camaro, going to Fort Lauderdale or Daytona Beach, saying, “We’re gonna get some. We’re gonna get some.” Then six days later, “Next year. Next year we’re gonna get some.”
Nobody ever got lucky. It took me two or three spring breaks to finally figure out what I’d been doing wrong. Like everyone else, I’d been too overeager. Hollering things at women didn’t work. And for most women projectile vomiting has never been a turn-on. Finally, I tried a different tactic. When we all went into some place selling quarter drinks, I let the guys roam the bar while I sat by myself at a table and acted uninterested. Within five minutes I had eight coeds saying, “Why are you just sitting here? What’s wrong with you?”
Anything that works.
Travis Tritt’s road manager showed me the all-time best way to pick up a woman. We did a show at the Omni for the Super Bowl when it was last in Atlanta. I noticed that he had on two different cowboy boots: one was red lizard, the other tan buckskin. I said, “Why do you have on two different boots?”
He said, “I’ve gotten more women doing this than I can handle. All I have to do is go out dressed like this to a bar. I don’t have to say a word. Women just come up to me and go, ‘Why do you have on two different boots?’ They start the conversation.”
Like I said, anything that works.
Men are hounds. We think nothing of dating someone who just broke up with our best friend. I once asked a friend if I could date his ex. He said, “Don’t you recall me telling you about her chasing me through the parking lot with a butcher knife?”
“Yeah,” I said, “but she’s really good-looking.”
DeWayne Twilley, another good friend of mine, once brought a girl to my house for me to meet. He said he just wanted to show her off because she was so damn pretty. He was right. But a sophisticate like Twilley should have known better. (In the land of guys with no shame, Twilley was the king.) The minute he went to pee I wrote down my phone number and told her to call me later. It was just one of those things. I knew she liked me and I liked her as soon as she walked in the door. After Twilley took her home, she called me and we talked from 1:00 in the morning until 5:15 in the morning. Then I went to meet her. I didn’t even care that she lived across the street from Twilley. (Sorry, DeWayne.)
Some of the best advice I got about dating and women came from a little guy named Morris, who worked in the Kroger deli. “There’s nothing free,” he’d always tell me. “Nothing free, buddy. Always got to pay the price. Nothing free.”
I always tried to remember Morris’ advice at the end of dates where I knew I wouldn’t be calling again. I had to because otherwise I’d give in to the devil himself and think that although I had no intention of asking the girl out a second time, well, hell, I’m here and I got nothing else to do, so I’ll make my play. Maybe I could get something for free. I had to force myself to remember that if I was successful, there’d be a price to pay. It might be tearful telephone calls or the girl showing up at work unexpectedly. Carrying my baby. With her dad. Who had a shotgun. I had to learn to let it go.
Although my testosterone level overflowed, I never wanted to be like all the other guys, who I figured were pawing their dates and not taking no for an answer. That it worked for them didn’t seem to matter to me. I somehow believed that after the heavy breathing was over and the girls were back in their frilly bedrooms clutching a battered Barbie and scribbling the evening’s events in their diaries, that they somehow resented these overly-aggressive boys who had once again overwhelmed them with whining persistence and taken advantage of their virtue.
Boy, was I full of it.
In fact, my desire to be sensitive just made me lose girls to the bad boys. I don’t know why I persisted in believing that by being the nice guy I’d win. I guess I thought that finally one day a grateful woman would lie on my bed and say, “You know, you’re such a nice guy, I should just take off my clothes and let you lay on top of me.” Unfortunately, no woman ever had that realization.
DeWayne Twilley had been there, and done that—the whole thing!—by the ninth grade. His first woman was a junior at Hapeville High. They did it on her couch. We were pretty awestruck, and we all wanted to date her, but she wouldn’t give us the time of day.
DeWayne was our idol. DeWayne was always bold. Once, in college, we were out at a club. I sat at the bar making nice small talk and trying to score with a pretty young woman. DeWayne said almost nothing. Suddenly he spoke up, but not to me. “You know what? I really don’t want to kill the whole evening. Would you like to screw?” She said, “Yeah,” and they got up and left. DeWayne got his face slapped a few times, but more often he left with a woman on his arm, and he didn’t come back.
I don’t know how DeWayne did it. No, that’s not true, I know how he did it, I just never understood what the women saw in him that made them go along. I mean no insult to DeWayne. He was one of my best friends. He wasn’t bad looking, but he was also nothing to write home about. I guess he just had the Big Jim touch, which very few guys are blessed with. It’s almost
a curse, because then you have to end up telling stories while the rest of your buddies go, “And then what’d she do?” DeWayne was in the middle of our circle for many years, and the rest of us were on the outside going, “And then what’d she do? Oh my God. Wait, back up, back up.”
Eventually I caught up. Patty West was the girl of my dreams. She’d dated a “bad boy” and it didn’t work out. So our Spanish teacher set us up. I can still remember what Patty wore on our first date: a pair of double-knit peach-colored pants, and a brown sweater with some tan deer on the front. She had just gotten her hair cut that day in a little blunt swoop. She looked like a million bucks and she smelled great.
We went to see Rocky at the Varsity, the world’s largest drive-in. We parked on the upper deck. Pretty soon we started kissing, and we were really, really kissing. I had misjudged how much Patty had wanted to kiss me, and thought, “This is easy city here.” So I put my left hand on her right breast and she instantly got upset. She yanked my hand away and said, “You’re an animal. I thought you weren’t that kind of guy, and here you are, first date, and you’re groping me.”
I said, “No, I’m not that kind of guy! You know I’m not that kind of guy. I don’t know what happened.”
Maybe the heater was on too high again.
She forgave me. Patty and I continued to date, and I swear I would not have touched her breast had you balanced a million dollars on it and said “Take the money.” I might just brush up against it accidentally, though.
We went out, on and off, for three years. Eventually, I got to touch her there. The Friday before homecoming we parked off the driveway to the community swimming pool in Hapeville. She took my hand and put it on her breast. (Why fix a method that’s not broken?) It was nice.
That Saturday we made out on my dad’s couch. I got bold and started to unbutton her pants. To my surprise, she lifted her rear end off the couch to help me slide off her jeans.
She had on another pair of jeans underneath.
Or she might as well have, because instead of focusing on what was about to happen, Larry Burns’s voice popped into my mind, explaining his theory that the moment a guy always remembers is not when he has sex with someone for the first time, but “when a woman lifts her rear end to help you take off her pants.” When Patty West raised her hips I knew I was going to do it. My brain overloaded. “I’m going to do it. I’m going to do it.” Then a couple of seconds later, “Oh damn, I just did it.”
Afterwards I knew it wouldn’t count if I didn’t tell someone. Naturally, I called Burns, even though it was three o’clock in the morning.
“Guess what? You’re not going to believe what went on tonight.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Damn right I did.”
“How long did you last?”
“Almost six seconds.”
I was like an antiaircraft flare. They don’t burn long, but boy, they are brighter than hell and it takes no time at all to reload.
Patty West was also the first girl to whom I’d ever said “I love you” and meant it. I may have said it to Carrie Ann Campbell, but that’s just because she let me put my hand between her sweaters. Otherwise, I’ve always tried to avoid trading terms of endearment for sexual favors. I never wanted to be known as a guy who would say anything just to get what he wanted. I wanted to get it without having to say anything at all. So I took that bullet out of the love gun, and that weapon out of the arsenal. I’ve always played fair. I have never been a game-law violator.
I like to hunt within the rules.
Hunting, Fishing Chewing, and Other Turn-Ons
All men delight in pursuits that disgust women. Hunting is near the top of the list.
No woman, not even my mother nor my wife, can understand the pleasures of rising before daylight, in subfreezing temperatures, to sit in a tree for four hours, waiting for the chance to shoot an unsuspecting deer. I can spend an entire vacation doing that. I have.
Hunting makes a man more male. If he kills a deer, a man will cover himself with as much blood as possible while gutting it. Then he’ll bring home the carcass and let it sit out in the open. Men know that blood and carcasses drive women crazy. After a week, a dead squirrel or possum on the coffee table is guaranteed to cause marital problems. A dead deer can be grounds for divorce.
Men who don’t hunt can also upset that special someone and be included in this virile brotherhood. Simply slice your finger on a beer can pop-top, and smear the blood everywhere. Then use the half-empty can for an ashtray, and let the carcass stand out overnight to allow the three odors to mix and create a sweet perfume that will render an entire room uninhabitable to women for at least forty-eight hours.
Men hunt deer from deer stands. For the uninitiated, “stand” means a platform in a tree, maybe fifteen feet above ground. You drive spikes into the tree trunk, climb up to your private perch, and then wait for a deer to wander by. The stand is a sacred place, the sportsman’s holy ground. No blasphemy intended, but I still have one question: How come it’s called a stand when all we do is sit?
A really good stand depends on its location. A really great stand has its own mailing address. Being close to those places deer frequent helps immensely. Also important is the platform’s condition. Wood rotted so badly that every time you sit on it you take your life into your hands rates high. It means the stand is productive.
Since we hunters spend so much time in trees, it’s fortunate that the stand is also a good place to think. Thinking for me usually means writing jokes. Another favorite place to write jokes is on a long car trip. It drives my wife crazy because I have to write longhand, which is pretty tough when you’re going seventy miles an hour and you’ve got a notebook on the steering wheel. I’m careful about doing this now because my wife will inevitably scream, “Just let me out of the car!” So I wait until we’re driving at night and she’s asleep.
There are very good reasons to be in the tree. First, you don’t have to employ camouflage, as you do when you’re waiting in a duck blind. Second, sitting up high reduces your chance of getting shot by other hunters who’ve mistaken your Day-Glo orange parka and red hat for a deer. Third, deer don’t often look up. Even deer can’t understand why somebody would spend his vacation sitting in a tree.
At its most basic, waiting in the deer stand is a rite of passage to manhood, very much like chewing tobacco and sex, though not as messy. We’d sit in our stands from about half an hour before daylight until ten or eleven in the morning. Then we’d climb down, go back to the house, and eat breakfast. We’d lollygag around the den for a bit, swap sightings and “almost” stories, and then head out for a couple of more hours. The rule was that you had to sit in the tree until it got too dark to see your hand in front of your face. This, in turn, led to another adventure: shooting at noises.
I first hunted with my dad. We’d set out in the pitch-black dark woods and I’d never admit to him how scared I was. At first we shared a deer stand. However, the only father-to-son knowledge that passed between us in those memorable and sentimental moments was when I’d say, “Dad, Dad…,” and he’d whisper hard, “Be quiet.” You had to learn to settle in and be still.
One day my dad let me sit in a stand on my own. He picked one near his and I felt safe just because he was close. As I got older, he’d park the truck and go, “All right, you go into the stand over there at the bottom of the creek, and I’m going to be over there on the one by the cornfield.” Then I’d have to take the flashlight and walk by myself through the woods. I’d always do something like step into the middle of a covey of quail, which would then explode. Only my laundry man knew for sure how scared I really was.
When men hunt together, the first thing they do is jockey for stand position. My dad had about thirty stands on his property. Some were in good shape. Some were comfortable but in a bad location. Some had no redeeming qualities except that they were actually up in a tree. Who got which stand was a seniority thing. It started with
my dad and his guests and worked its way down to the youngsters. Usually, I sat around drinking coffee in the dark, cursing while guys picked among the better stands.
“Tom, where do you want to go?”
“Ah, I think I’m gonna go down there to that stand right there behind the pond.”
ME: “Damn.”
“Bub, where do you wanna go?”
“I’m gonna go down there to the other end of the hayfield and take that stand right there on the fence.”
ME: “Jeez.”
Then, after everybody had chosen, my dad would turn to me and say, “Okay, you got the one in the backyard by the basketball goal.”
“But Dad, I’m not gonna kill a deer by the basketball goal! Deer don’t even like basketball.”
Even so, I’ve never wasted my time hunting. You see the woods wake up. You hear a noise, it stops and it starts. Maybe it’s a bobcat, or a hawk or a fox squirrel. An hour and a half later you suddenly see something flick, and you realize it’s a deer’s tail at the top of the hill. And then it’s gone.
Today some of my happiest memories are of hunting and fishing with my dad. I know now that I was a pain in the ass to take, and that I cut down his chances of being successful. Yet he cared enough to take me with him. Whenever I did something good, he was the first one I wanted to show. I’d always think, “I want to go find my dad.”
Some time during this age-old ritual, if you get very lucky, you see a deer. Actually shooting one is like winning the lottery. I didn’t get my first deer until I was a college freshman.
It happened on opening day of hunting season. I was in my stand, an hour or so after daylight, mulling over the big questions of life—like bacon and eggs, or more beer for breakfast. I looked down absentmindedly and saw a deer six feet away. I’d never even heard him coming. And he wasn’t moving.
No Shirt, No Shoes...No Problem! Page 6