I’ll get to him later, but first, some nasty talk.
In the realm of personal ads, one’s circumcision situation is right up there with hair color and shoe size. Cut means you are, uncut that you’re not. While both contain what usually turn out to be at least one exaggeration, statements like “7 inches cut w/low hangers” seem to have replaced “I like long walks on the beach.” For a while there were many men on the east side of Portland who were attempting to restore their foreskins with little weights and pulleys. They’d meet for coffee on Saturday mornings to compare stories and offer support. I have been with a couple of men who were uncut, something I thought was interesting though not particularly earth shattering. Since I’m sure anyone reading this is dying to know, I myself am cut, but the particulars are not something I ever got around to discussing with my mother or father, so I have no idea why. The complete absence of any curiosity on my part about the removal of my own foreskin puzzled me, and for a while it concerned me.
The first time I saw my youngest nephew, a nurse was changing his diaper as if she were teaching a class, offering little tid-bits of baby butt wisdom as she went. He began to pee, which messed up the blood-stained dressings between his legs. When she was finished, the nurse handed him to me and as I was holding him the words “I see the butcher was by” flew out of my mouth. I hadn’t intended to criticize or condemn, although seeing an infant who has yet to pass the 24-hour mark sporting battle scars is a bit much. The baby’s mother, who has a graduate degree in childhood development informed me, defensively, I thought, that circumcision is a proven way to combat infections. “Well, hopefully he won’t come down with an earache,” I said. Things were never quite the same between us.
My friend’s husband is in many ways a gift. For various reasons I’ve been railing on heterosexual white males for the past couple of years (it’s fun, for one thing, and for another they’re long overdue), and this guy is a green light for my worst inclinations. In a way that seems symptomatic of being a heterosexual white male of a certain age and mindset in Portland, this guy is “into” very specific pursuits. For a while it was camping. Then it was brewing his own beer. Last I heard it was scooters. The pursuits change, the habits do not: Everything this jackass is “into” requires lots and lots of expensive, hard-to-find equipment and gear and accessories and a supporting cast of lots of other heterosexual white males, who grunt their approval communally, as if part of a herd attempting to migrate. or breed or both. In the same way that discussions about my work projects are more often than not not about the projects but the computers, this guy and his buddies manage to take over every conversation I’ve witnessed with endless talk about what they’ve just bought, and where they found it, how great it is, and what it cost. Actually, they don’t talk: Since they’re heterosexual white males who have been awarded 50 out of 100 points for simply being born to those demographics, they assume that everyone is interested in what they have to say. So they shout. Shouting comes easily for our friend: He has a voice that seems to project itself nicely, which probably comes in handy when he’s at work, teaching third grade, God help us all, at a public school in Portland.
The last time I saw him was at a backyard barbecue. He said something that was, as usual, anti gay, but only vaguely so, not quite ignorant enough to justify me calling him a bigot in front of his wife and his buddies. In fact, his comment – as is often the case with him – was just the sort of thing that would have prompted one of my white, heterosexual male brothers to say, had he been there, “Man, his pussy sure was showing on that one.” So I said something equally vague, something along the lines of how sad it sometimes was to watch kind-of sort-of hot hets (I refuse to use the term “straight”) go to flab. Then he said, “Everything you say is gay.” Then I said, “Everything I do is gay, you dumb fuck.” I don’t know about you, but if someone called me a dumb fuck in my own back yard he’d be on his way shortly, but for this moron, who is raising two young boys and teaching third graders, that’s about an unremarkable as scratching your balls while talking to your mother-in-law. Manners, I suppose he thinks, are for chicks and fags. Later, I was out front on the sidewalk, having a smoke with two other homos, one of whom worked at the time with my friend. She came out and joined us. Then her husband came out and for some reason, after a bit of bantering that tends to occur when people smoke together, he felt compelled to say, as if he were marking and defending his territory “I’m an ass man.” If you couldn’t see it before that gem of a direct, word-for-word quote, I’m sure you can see now why I consider this idiot a gift.
I see my friend regularly. She’s a lovely woman, I think. She’s intelligent, she’s evolved, she pays attention. And yet, when it comes to her husband, she’s been presented with two choices: Either delete him or lower her standards. Even though she refuses to take his name, which is surprisingly rare in Oregon, I’ve found, she has chosen the latter. I don’t necessarily blame her for that. They have two sons, one who must be getting close to kindergarten age and another who was born last summer. Recently, my friend had to reschedule our get together because the youngest wasn’t sleeping, which had turned her schedule completely upside down. “And I’m getting tough with [HUSBAND’S NAME],” she told me. That piqued my curiosity, of course. Her husband presents himself as a progressive kind of guy, one of those left-of-liberal sorts who knows the real story on a deeper level than most – “Obama’s a pussy,” he shouted once. Followed by “Democrats are fucktards.” Proclaimed politics aside, when it comes to childcare, he considers that women’s work. So after weeks of sleep deprivation, she’d taken up residency in the guest room and informed her husband that it was his job to get up several times during the night to take care of the infant.
Naturally, I asked why the baby wasn’t sleeping. Well, she said, he was circumcised a few weeks ago. Why, I wondered out loud, recalling my nephew, was that not done shortly after his birth? “Because he has a crooked wiener,” my friend told me. “So we went back and forth on it, and finally I just told [HUSBAND’S NAME] that he needed to make the decision, and he decided that he wants [BABY’S NAME] to look like him.”
The most amazing part of this story is not what I said to that – even if you’ve only read this blog twice, there’s a 98 percent chance you could fill in the blanks correctly – but the fact that we’re still friends. In fact, we’re getting together for this week for lunch, which is always a lot fun.
