Wry Martinis by Christopher Buckley

Author:Christopher Buckley
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307799876
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-08-10T05:00:00+00:00

Macho Is

as Macho Does

One night I had the words “fuck off” tattooed on the outside edge of my right hand. Some explanation is, obviously, in order.

I was eighteen and drunk, both on the six-pack of beer I’d been plied with to ease the pain of the far more elaborate (and tasteful) tattoo being applied to my biceps and with the thrill of being a young merchant marine on my first night of shore leave in Hong Kong.

But, you logically ask, why those particular two words? A joke on the ship’s officers. The offensive phrase was burned through my epidermis on the part of the hand most visible to the recipient of a salute. Get it? I didn’t either, on waking up to discover three regions of acute distress: my head, my biceps, and my hand. In a nice bit of karmic comeuppance, my assigned task that day was to swab clean the cargo winches: twelve hours of 100-degree heat, with my newly embroidered hand immersed the whole time in kerosene. Every letter sizzled memorably.

The second question begged by this act of juvenile idiocy is Why do men do these things? I don’t mean, Why do men have four-letter words tattooed on their hands? The only other instance that I know of is the Robert Mitchum character in the 1955 movie The Night of the Hunter. (How lovely to share this distinction with a famous psychopathic murderer. I must have a swastika tattooed on my forehead and achieve affinity with Charles Manson.) No, what I mean is, Why must some men play the tough guy?

One of the nice things about not being eighteen anymore is looking back on all those times when you practiced smoking in front of the mirror, impressed your date by revving the engine at the stoplight, tried on twenty pairs of sunglasses until you found the kind Paul Newman wore, talked fuel injectors and .357 Magnums while holding a long-necked beer bottle, and wore blue jeans so tight that you ended up with sore balls and a rash. Yes, one of the nice things about being forty-one and happily married is that you understand how ridiculous all that really was—and how ridiculous it still is.

Sometime between eighteen and forty-one I learned something: that the ones who are really tough never act tough. Unless—as with the saying about never drawing a gun unless you plan to use it—they intend to be tough, in which case it’s usually over very fast.

After the merchant marine, I went to Yale, where there was very little macho posturing going on. A lot of intellectual posturing, for sure, but no “Me Tarzan” stuff. This was the early 1970s—Nixon, antiwar demonstrations, women’s Hb, Alan Alda, homo sensitivus—and anyone who even tried to look tough would have been laughed at and told to go enroll in TM (transcendental meditation, for you Generation Xer’s).

It wasn’t until I started work in New York City as a magazine editor that I met my first genuinely fake tough guy. He was a writer.

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