Big Mike: My Guy-ness Suffers A Blow

Even though I’ve spent most of my life avoiding guy-hood, I still find myself occasionally trying to be a guy.

Yeah, I know it sounds funny for this hairy, lumpy, scratchy, gassy human being to deny his basic man-ness. I’ve howled in these precincts before about how I’m not at all interested in being a guy, since most of the members of that species are, well, dicks. I still subscribe to that mid-1970s, Alan Alda-ish, men-can-be-feminists-too philosophy that has been so roundly pooh-poohed by the money-grubbing, gun-toting, god-fearing, let’s-bomb-everybody-just-for-the-hell-of-it gang that has held sway since the age of Saint Ronald.

I’ve had a lot more women friends than men friends throughout my life, mainly because I find women more interesting. I can count the number of good male friends I’ve had as an adult on the fingers of one hand. And not a one of them is really, unabashedly, undeniably guy.

There’s Benny Jay, of course. Yet he becomes as helpless as a newborn in the face of technology, tools and cars. My pal Danny, whom I now love with all my heart, became my friend only when he married my oldest and dearest friend Sophia. Tim seems to fit all the prerequisites for guy-ness – up to and including his almost insatiable libido – but his preferred bed mates are burly men. Gary, Indiana’s Greatest Writer, Milo, drinks, plays cards, has fired a rifle and brags about his prowess with the opposite sex. Guy, right? Well, lemme tell you a little secret – Milo’s lovely bride would knock his nose to the other side of his head were he to cross her well-defined boundaries.

I can’t stand the women that American guys salivate over. If you took the sex symbols of the last 15 or 20 years and marched them into my bedroom, all of them clad in string bikinis, I’d merely flip the page of the book I was reading. No lie. Go back to Carmen Electra, and Pamela Anderson, then consider today’s hotties like the purposeless Heidi Montag and the cerebrum-less Megan Fox. Not a one makes me twitch.

But today, I found myself deflated in the guy world. The Loved One and I are trying to sell our Louisville home so we can move back in together near Bloomington, Indiana, where she has scored a fabulous new job. As always, when you try to sell your home you start to believe that every little problem or flaw in it reduces its price by another ten or twenty thou. So, you spare no expense to get it fixed. For instance, whenever we turn on the hot water in the basement sink the pipes start making a racket that would make a space shuttle liftoff sound like a lullaby.

I couldn’t figure out what the problem was so The Loved One leaned on me to call the plumber. I finally got him out here this morning. He checked out the sink and the pipes, making clucking sounds and sighing with concern as though he were an oncologist examining a chain-smoker. The calculator in my head started smoking by the time he uttered his tenth cluck. I imagined him ripping out the pipes all the way out to the water main under Murray Hill Pike.

Finally he said he had to go out to his truck to get his tools. I buried myself in my laptop, trying to pretend that The Loved One and I weren’t about to be driven to debtor’s prison.

Fewer than ten minutes later, he came up carrying his bill. “All done,” he announced.

“What? Are you kidding me?”

“Nope. C’mon. I’ll show you what was wrong.”

I followed him back downstairs and he flipped on the hot water. It gushed out without making any banging or cracking noises in the pipes at all.

“Great,” I said. “What was it?”

He leaned over and fished around in the garbage can next to the sink. He brought out a tiny, frayed rubber ring, no bigger around than the width of his thumb. “Y’had a bad washer.”

“Huh? A washer?”

“Yup.”

“You mean I could have done this myself for less than a dollar? Fifty cents maybe?”

“Yeah. That’s if you knew what was wrong.”

He shoved the bill toward me. A hundred and twenty-nine bucks. “Sorry,” he said. “That’s the minimun I can charge you.”

Grrrr. I felt like a blonde being raked over the coals by an unscrupulous auto mechanic. A real guy, I figured, could have figured this out. Suddenly, I wished I were a real guy.

Of course, maybe I’m being too hard on myself. I need to remind myself that I’ve never wanted to be a guy. Yeah, that’s right. Phew. I feel better now.

I think I’ll enjoy this sense of relief for a little while. I’ll wait a few hours to tell The Loved One about the $129 bill. I’m afraid she’s gonna knock my nose to the other side of my head.