Man Enough Just Ain't Enough, Man

More military and martial arts fighting, more steroids, testosterone, more phallic rockets to heaven, or at least to Mars

Long before everyday life became the obscene cartoon it is, I did my part to help clear the path for it happen. This week, I was reminded of what I used to believe as a teenager and young adult by an event celebrating the beginning of our national 250th independence celebration…

Real Men

The big question in my youth, whether about me or our country, was, “How manly was manly enough?” I didn’t hold many other deep thoughts, other than whether I would get enough to eat on pizza night or the Buffalo Bills O.J. Simpson would rush for 2,000 yards in a season.

I obsessed over this central question in my youth because, true to the playground ethos, sooner or later another man or country was going to come along who was bigger and stronger than you. This is why it was so important to be a real man—to be a nation of real men—not a weak version who could be easily overrun.

As the son of a father who was shot to death while trying to kill his mistress and her date, as well as the stepson of a traumatized two-tour Vietnam War veteran, I soon developed some stellar ideas about how to become a real man. Just like they did, and likely their fathers did, too.

I thought it would be healthier choice in the long run to avoid the parts about getting killed and killing others, at least until I left home as a teenager. That way, like a dog loyal to its food sources, I wouldn’t upset my mother and sweet old granny, who provided me thousands of calories per day and the sturdiest 1970s J.C. Penney threads available.

Besides eating and drinking, I sometimes thought about books, too. I’d been told by the men in my family that the arts were for sissies, but I made an exception for books thanks to sweet old granny, who’d read all of Charles Dickens.

The road was a real-man kind of place, one where you were tested with all kinds of the so-called rites of passage. I weathered as many as I could: Sleeping outdoors, working construction, hitchhiking, shooting guns, drinking, drugging, playing the drifter, womanizing, or at least trying to within the boundaries of my body odor, and, of course, getting arrested. I was feral and fully locked on the path to becoming a real man.

But the closer I neared my goal, the more it seemed to shift away from me. I wanted the solid ground of certainty. It turned out that there wasn’t just one step to becoming a real man, but many. How could I know which ones to choose first, or how many of them I would have to keep repeatedly climbing?

If I had shown greater care about whether I lived or died, I might have hit fewer random checkpoints to manhood and avoided things like driving with my eyes closed and striking a telephone poll, drinking until overdose, running into the middle of traffic and charging cars, engaging in a staring contest with a murderer in a jail cell, playing chicken with a semi truck, cliff diving into a lake without knowing how to swim and other spur-of-the-moment choices I believed were challenges I had to overcome on my journey. But why think when you can just react?

Actions could get me where I needed to go quicker than thinking, and I wanted to become a real man as quickly as possible. Without money or means, I could only try to prove my toughness at every opportunity, no matter the risk. It would all be worth it once I achieved my goal. I would do it on my own, without any guidance from my father and stepfather—but who knows, maybe I’d even do them proud in the process.

Every time I passed a test to becoming a real man, however, another test popped up, and then another, and another, until it seemed there would never be an end to them. How could you grade out as a real man if you were always taking the test?

What I couldn’t grasp back then was that there were a lot of other young males just like me looking to pass this test. Maybe we glimpsed each other on the road, drank at the same bars, slept next to each other in youth hostels—not in the same bed, mind you, not gay stuff—ate at the same soup kitchens, haggled with the same dealers, slammed against each other in mosh pits. But we weren’t aware that we had a shared experience. Each of us was alone in his journey.

After completing what I felt were many of these real-man challenges, I eventually gave up, feeling I’d done everything I could. I found a job, cut back on the drinking and drugging, which definitely helped prevent most of the wild risk-taking, and left the cutting-edge, real-man world to join polite society.

But a new generation began its journey. They found alternatives to the tough-guy action model by shaping the role of the internet to fit their own desires. They could manipulate complete strangers. This gave them real-man control without getting their hands dirty. No one was alone anymore, or so it seemed at first. Vast groups of young males could connect as they shared their journeys to become real men.

The tough-guy model made its presence online, too, but without the physical risks. Talk was money, money was talk. Religious folk started clamoring about how being a real man was not only virtuous, but God’s destiny for the nation’s males. Even really rich guys—not traditionally the most obvious candidates— began proposing that money and the power it bought made you a real man. They sold it as a new kind of exploration and, high on their stink, built rockets to take over space, even Mars.

Recently, the government also stepped into the ring—literally. They staged mixed martial arts fights right on the White House lawn! Air Force fighter jets blazed the skies above the fighting cage. Lasers lit the grounds. The United States Marine Corps Band played music to accompany the entrances of each fighter descending from various sections of the White House, like gladiators entering the Colosseum arena but without the man skirts.

Male celebrities showed up, but so did people of all walks of life. Short guys were allowed to broadcast the event but no one cared. They were tough, too. Yet it wasn’t some man-on-man-only, gay kind of affair. The right type of women attended, too, ones who wouldn’t get in a tizzy over the violence of the fights. After their matches, fighters even made jokes about how some women were men.

Sponsoring the country’s 250th birthday, the event swelled with the blood of the nation. Youths jumped up and down, gorged with pride over this celebration of real men, whether or not we knew exactly that meant. In fact, those questions no longer seemed necessary. The answer had always been what felt the simplest: harder, not softer; more, not less; tougher, not gentler; man death, not sissy survival.

Everyone appeared deeply stirred by the festivities. You could see by the excitement flushing their faces that they didn’t think things could get much more manly.

There had been other birthdays, but this was how we were going to rock 250. For one moment, as the tension of the event rose in a feverish pitch, it felt like every red-blooded male was lifted up as a real man, almost as if we’d all risen atop the national phallus for its ultimate blast off—but without any of the gay stuff.