Don't Stand Too Close to a Naked Man

by Tim Allen

  "Get away!"

  Women are always looking at themselves in the mirror. Men look once in a while. We get about five feet away, angle ourselves till we find a position that looks pretty cool, and that's it. Men as a rule think they're far better looking than they are. Women, as a rule, think they're far uglier than they really are. Men find a pose and freeze: "I look pretty goddamn good at that angle!" This is one reason bald guys can even walk out of the house. Angles.

  Women squint about a millimeter from the mirror and find stuff that dermatologists don't even want to look at. Squeezing, popping, fidgeting. They come out of the bathroom looking like you beat 'em up! They've got little blue marks all over their faces.

  "How do I look?"

  I want to say, "You look like hell." But you tell them that and it causes another zit, so it's "Yeah, you look great."

  Women don't believe you anyway. Not when they've got mirrors that make their nose hairs look like timbers.

  Women don't burp, either: "Hey Helen, blaaaaat!"

  Men are chronic burpers. My brother has turned it into an Olympic event. One Thanksgiving he did a blow burp across the table, just a "bluuuuuhhhh."

  "Oh, man. Was that you? Good one! I think you knocked Grandma in the soup with that one. Yup, she's down!"

  And women don't learn how to spit. Men have to get their hawking act together early. You can't graduate to manhood otherwise. I'd love to see my Gram and Aunt Rose burping and spitting.

  "My, my, that cheese ring was rich, wasn't it?"

  "Phhhttt."

  - -

  Sometimes a man can learn something important from a woman.

  I came in early one night from watching a Monday‑night football game at a friend's. The ladies were in the house gathered in front of a Discovery Channel special on breast cancer. I didn't know what they were doing. I just saw breasts being groped.

  "Yeah. You gals are a little hipper than I thought."

  You idiot!

  Pretty quickly I had to sit there and shut up and learn about breast cancer. They say that if women, starting at age thirty‑five, had a breast exam about once a year, breast cancer would be reduced by forty percent. I think one problem is that men don't realize how degrading the examination is for women. Have you ever seen a mammogram machine? It's like a drill press for tits.

  "Hey, hey, hey! Get it outta there!"

  I don't think a woman designed this machine. I'm glad they don't do penograms.

  Or do they?

  I don't want to know. The prostate exam is bad (and necessary) enough.

  - -

  The things that women will go through to make themselves beautiful for their boyfriends and husbands amazes me. Plucking their eyebrows. Bikini waxing. Ripping hair right off their crotches. This is something you will never see a man doing. That ball hair is staying right where it is. Even though we all gotta admit that ball hair is the ugliest spot on the planet Earth. There's not a woman alive who hasn't been scared to death of her husband naked bent over a bathtub. She wanders in and… "AAAAAAHHHH!. . Oh, it's you. I thought a wildebeest had wandered in here or something. Honey, I love you, I really do, but I don't ever want to see that again!"

  - -

  There's something I want to make perfectly clear-now that Richard Nixon is gone, that phrase is up for grabs, isn't it? Dibs!‑‑before I get into big trouble. It's a misnomer to call anybody "yours." Throughout this book, I'm always saying "My wife."

  Laura is not my wife. She's just nobody else's wife.

  "Hi, I'm Tim, and this is nobody else's wife, Laura."

  - -

  I don't want to be flippant about this. This is a philosophical problem that strikes to the heart of the matter. It epitomizes the differences between men and women, between ideological groups, even countries. One way or another this is at the heart of all arguments: Seat up or seat down?

  "Remember to put the seat down after you're done."

  "Why? Do you put the seat up after you're done?"

  "Just put it down."

  "Why?"

  Trust me, women will come up with a reason.

  "It looks better down. It's gotta be down."

  "Yeah? Then I've always got to lift it up, or I dribble on the seat. ."

  "Well, if you leave it down," says my wife, "then I've got to sit on it."

  Look, I can understand that in the middle of the night a woman doesn't like to accidentally fall into the can when the last thing she's thinking about is whether the seat is up or down.

  But why is it my responsibility to put it down anymore than it's hers to put it up? I sit down, too, now and then.

  Okay, okay. If seats were meant to be up, why would they make lids in the first place? All right? Is my macho withering before your eyes? The normal position is with the lid down. You don't leave car doors open so the next time you can just step right in.

  But seat up/seat down speaks to a larger issue: Who is right, and who is wrong?

  Speaking from a male perspective, it seems men are always wrong. Naturally wrong. Women will joke about it, like, "Yes, you are, ha‑ha‑ha," but women come from the position that they're right anyway and we're always wrong to begin with. They laugh it off, "Don't let it bother you. It's really just part of your charm."

  Of course, the point of this book has been to have fun with those differences; have fun and move on.

  the secrets men never tell women

  Do I look stupid? Why do you think they're called secrets?

  the family of man

  Have a kid and everything changes. This will not be news to most of you, but it was news to me. Big news. I had heard those words over and over, and still I couldn't have anticipated the consequences. No one could have accurately described them to me, even though lots of people tried.

  I'd like to share them.

  And since this is my book and not yours, you'll just have to put up with my going on about this for a while. Or else I'm taking my bottles and diapers and going home, to put myself down for a nap.

  See. Have a kid, and right away you start acting like one.

  - -

  We never tried to get pregnant. It just kind of happened. We knew we wanted kids, as a concept, but the lunatics inside both my wife and me were still scared, and maybe a bit selfish. It took us eight years even to get married. I thought, "What would I do with a kid? What would a kid do with me?"

  And then, one night, within a moment, my whole perspective changed. I was staying with an old friend from childhood, and her father was in town. We were sitting in her living room, laughing about something, and suddenly I noticed her father looking at her with what can only be described (though words cannot really describe the look) as a sparkling gaze of pride, love, and friendship. All at once he asked for a kiss and a hug. I said, "I'll hug you, but a kiss is out of the question." I learned later that he was speaking to her.

  This ineffable moment between parent and child made me rethink everything. We knew-superficially-that having a child would change our lives, change sex, change everything.

  Guess what? It's the best thing that ever happened to us. We wouldn't change a thing.

  My reaction to the news that Laura was pregnant was screaming. Loud, sustained screaming.

  My wife said, "Is something wrong?"

  "No, no. That's an excited scream." Nuances can be so subtle.

  In retrospect, the whole process was kind of fun. I've never had such manly feelings, both for her as well as about myself. Laura has never looked more radiant. There's something about how lovely pregnant women are that even makes you fall in love with pregnant strangers.

  Of course, we were scared to death. Laura said, "Now what do we do?" We worried: "Oh, God, what if the baby doesn't make it? What if it's sick or deformed?" The terror is nonstop, even after they're born. Mostly after they're born.

  When I got the news that we were expecting, I called my older brother and asked for his advice. He said, "I'd suggest going out to dinner."<
br />
  "That's all you can tell me about having a kid?"

  "I'm telling you: just pick a place right now and go out to dinner, because you will not be able to do this for a long, long time, and you don't realize how cool it is just to go out to dinner. Even if you have a baby‑sitter, it's almost unbearable the first time the kid stands at the door as you're trying to get into the car, crying wildly because he or she doesn't want you to go out. Try and enjoy your dinner then."

  How much being a parent would change my life didn't occur to me until I was heaving up my dinner the day my daughter was born. I'd had dinner at the hospital, then had to stop in the parking lot and throw up: once because of the baby, twice because of the food. When I finally got home, my first instinct was to pack a suitcase, leave a note-"I can't handle this"-and run away.

  - -

  Before my daughter was born, we learned that she had a potential genetic defect. It's a horror that a lot of people go through. I understand it. Our doctor was very concerned. A specialist said, "It's within normal values for this certain enzyme, but it's on the edge."

  Everything worked out okay.

  During the tests, our doctor had a picture of my daughter's chromosomes on the wall.

  "Well, there she is. You must be very proud."

  "God, she looks so. . small."

  "All those rods are what will determine her every detail."

  So I asked if there was a way we could give her bigger tits. The doctor took me seriously.

  "No!"

  "What about better eyesight?"

  She got really mad. "You can't go in there and start fiddling with your child's chromosomes, young man!" With that, my wife and I took our chromosomes and left. Later, Laura told me the doctor wanted to test me, as well. Before our appointment, Laura kept reminding me to wear clean underwear.

  "Are they clean?"

  "I don't know."

  "What do you mean you don't know? How can you not know?"

  "They were clean when they originally started, but I went to the gym today and I've been running around."

  Laura explained that the doctor was going to want to see my penis. That sounded like a reasonable request. Besides, I'd been wanting to show it to her. Not really. In fact, quite the opposite. I felt very uncomfortable. Every time the doctor would ask me a question, I got pissy.

  Finally, I said, "Enough with the questions. When do I get to show you my penis!" The doctor said nothing.

  Then Laura piped up. "Sorry, doctor. He's like this with everybody." Then they both started laughing.

  I discovered later that the two of them were in on this and just trying to get back at me for that crack about the chromosomes.

  I had to kill them both.

  My next book will be about single parenting.

  - -

  It was a natural birth. That is, there were no Satanists in the delivery room. We used the Lamaze method. Look at the word closely. With a little male ingenuity, a well‑positioned apostrophe, and French as a second language, Lamaze could be rewritten as L'Amaze. That's what birth is. Amazing.

  At the time, though, I kept thinking it was LaFromage, or LaDecoupage, or something like that.

  My wife didn't want her drugs until after our daughter was born. I told her, "This is not the Olympics or a gladiator movie. If it starts hurting, take the damn Demerol."

  That, and a stern look at the attending nurse, and I didn't have to say it twice.

  My wife was really good. We'd gone to childbirth classes together and she wanted me there. She could have cussed out the nurses when the pain got too intense, but it wouldn't have meant as much to her as cursing someone who would take it personally.

  It's a good thing I was around. Laura was breathing all wrong and the baby started coming out before it was ready. I had to remind her to hold on.

  "Honey. Honey. Hold your breath. We've got to wait until the doctor putts out on the eighteenth green."

  Before my kid was born, I used to think very differently about being in the delivery room. Like: There's absolutely no reason to be around. You're there for support, but you're really just a pain in the ass. You coo and whisper supportively, trying to help your wife concentrate on her breathing. It never works.

  If it was me having the kid, I'd want to hear a manly song I could sing along with: "In 1814, we took a little trip, along with Colonel Jackson, down the mighty Mississip. We took a little bacon and we took a little beans. ." I could breathe to the drum cadence.

  Men also say such stupid things in the delivery room. Men are such lamebrains. She's lying there, and we're going, "God, honey, that's gotta hurt," or "Will I be able to use that area again?"

  The woman is also angry, but she's drugged up, tied down, and what the hell is she going to do about it?

  You've got a take your licks when you can.

  "I don't like your cooking all that well, either. Honey. And you look like hell on Sunday morning."

  But that attitude changed the minute we got into the birthing room. I gained considerable insight and realized that birth has a deeper meaning for men than we suspect. Seeing the process firsthand just reinforced my belief that men are far more jealous about women's ability to bear a child than we'll admit. Men can build a skyscraper, but we can't hug it, feed it, change it, coach its Little League team, teach it about sex, or spring it from jail when it's caught joyriding in the family station wagon at three in the morning.

  I've read that men are like bees; they just hover around the uterus trying to reproduce themselves. I've also heard that men come out of women and spend the rest of their lives trying to get back in. I don't think it's very complex. The whole business of men and women is reproduction; there's nothing else to it. All the arguments, all the horseshit, all the rhetoric is, at bottom, about reproduction. We can't do what women can, so they have the ultimate power. We act like they don't. We treat them horribly because we can't have kids. We demean them-not because they'll accept it, but just to keep them in their place. If women understood the power they have, I don't know what we'd do.

  Maybe they do know. Nah, I can't even consider that. Too scary.

  I can't even fathom having a kid. I watched that child come out. The pride swelled up in me. Also the anger, and the competition. What I witnessed was something that hurt my woman and I couldn't stop it. And something that made her happy in a way that I've never been able to make her happy.

  This doesn't mean her screams didn't make me think, "Boy! I'm glad I'm a guy!"

  That's right. I'm not sorry I'm a man. True, men have all of the destructive tendencies. We're encouraged to be little destroyers from birth. These traits come in handy, though. Once we have a family, we'll destroy anything we have to that threatens it. Women like us for that. Sometimes men get so confused they actually destroy the family.

  Some men want to understand pregnancy so desperately (or just get their wives to shut up when their ankles swell to the size of holiday cheese logs) that they'll strap on one of those fake bellies and walk around for a while. This is going a little too far. If you're going to write about it so that we all understand it, okay. It's like Black Like Me. But if you just want to find out what it's like to weigh eighty pounds more, you can eat a lot of those cheese logs or make a movie like The Santa Clause.

  - -

  An odd thing about fatherhood is the change in camaraderie with other male parents, especially when your kids are still very small. You bond, but the adhesion principle is altogether different from the stereotypical macho posturing about one's fertility and already being able to pay for the kid's college education. That went out long ago, with the eighties. This bond is rife with genuine tenderness, vulnerability, and a little sadness. I don't know why. It just is maybe because having a kid finally connects a man to something he loves unconditionally that, unlike his car or power tools, can actually love him in return.

  One guy I know is afraid that someday somebody wearing a suit and carrying a gun is going to walk up to hi
m, out of a crowd, and simply say, "We know. We know you don't know what you're doing. We've been monitoring you." I know what he means. It's not really the "monitors," it's the reality police. It seems like my whole life has been by the seat of my pants. I'm making it up as I go along. I find it strangely funny that God allows me to make decisions; that life does just unfold, and lets me do the best I can. This particularly applies to fatherhood, in which you have ultimate responsibility for a totally dependent being. You can't go back and redo stuff you did, but you can't know if you're getting it right the first time, either.

  There are some rules, however.

  "Don't go near the pool. Don't hit me in the stomach. You've got to eat more." I just want to take care of my daughter. I don't want her sick. I'm worried about her falling.

  My wife is far better at this teaching stuff than I am. She thinks she's horrible at it, but she's wrong. That is why she can bask unashamedly in the delight of the school's calling to say, "Your child is doing extremely well in fire prevention. And the drop drill. Also, your daughter seems to know military rules quite well. She salutes. What are you doing with her at home?"

  Working so much, I feel oddly distant from the whole process. I do what I can. There's a lot of guilt involved. My wife says, "If you spent more time with her. ." I spend all the time I can with her. I'm getting better at it, though. Rather than read aloud from books on military tactics and supply requisitioning, we go to dinner and have a couple of kiddy cocktails and a marvelous time. This is usually when Mommy isn't around. My little girl and I relate better then. They're alone together so much. We're alone so rarely. When we're alone together, she and I somehow behave differently. We learn about each other. She learns that I'm her father. I learn that she's my daughter. It's a weird feeling, but any parent knows what I'm talking about when I say that I often look at my daughter and wonder just whose kid she is. Where'd she suddenly come from? And why on earth did she pick Laura and me for parents?

  When my daughter and I are alone she'll hug my leg and say, "I just love you so much, Daddy!" She's so used to my leaving that when I tell her she and I are going to hang out all night, she gets this great look on her face and says, "We've got so much to do, Dad!" There's nothing like it in the world.