Dave Barry's Complete Guide to Guys Read online

  We should also consider the fact that certain genders consume way more of certain precious resources than certain other genders. To name just one area: If everybody were a guy, the human race could easily be able to get by on less than one-twentieth the current number of shoes.

  And let’s talk about phone-line usage. Let’s consider how much of our nation’s precious telephone resources are tied up at any given moment by women trying to make joint decisions on issues such as how to celebrate a close friend’s fortieth birthday. A lot of phone resources, that’s how much. Because two women making this kind of decision will want to discuss every aspect of the situation, including how the friend feels about getting older, and how they both feel about getting older, and how everybody they know feels about getting older, and whether the friend might want a smaller gathering, and if so who should be invited, and who should not be invited, and how these people will feel about not being invited, and how they would feel if they were not invited, and so maybe it should be a slightly larger gathering, and how their friend might feel about a slightly larger gathering, and how they might feel about a slightly larger gathering, and what kind of food they should have, and whether they should try for mainly low-fat hors d’oeuvres, or whether their friend would assume that they were having low-fat hors d’oeuvres because she was gaining weight, so maybe they should have high-fat hors d’oeuvres, to suggest that they hadn’t noticed that she was gaining weight, although this might seem insensitive, so perhaps the best thing would be to have a combination of low-and high-fat hors d’oeuvres, or maybe even to go with exclusively medium-fat hors d’oeuvres, but cut them into smallish pieces, although this might make their friend think they were just being cheap, so maybe they should blah blah blah blah blah blah on into telephone eternity. Two women could waste dozens of potentially productive hours on this effort, and that total could easily rise into the hundreds if the issue of centerpieces comes up.

  In contrast, two guys, in the identical situation, would waste virtually no time on this problem, because they would handle it via the logical, efficient, and cost-effective guy technique of never having the faintest clue when anybody’s birthday is. They wouldn’t realize that their close friend had turned forty until well after he had turned forty-five.

  Thus we see that there are major economic costs associated with women,2 so it’s only fair that if we’re going to tax guys to pay a special tax for the prisons, then we should also tax women to pay for the costs they impose on society when they engage in wasteful behavior. For starters, we could tax June Stephenson a flat seventy-five thousand dollars for each copy of Men Are Not Cost Effective.

  But I am drifting away from the main point of this chapter, which is Guys and Violence. Guys are violent, yes. No question about it. If you don’t believe that, all you have to do is go to a football game, and you’ll see guys slamming into each other, beating on each other, knocking each other to the ground with tremendous force. And that’s just the guy fans. The guy players are brutal.

  What makes guys so violent? To answer this question, we must consider the genetic makeup of the human guy. As you are no doubt aware, each of your body cells contain a tiny molecule (or “atom”) called “DNA,” which stands for “DinohydroNuclearsomethingsofAmerica.” These DNA molecules in turn contain strings of small electrons called “genes” that provide, in secret code,3 all the information required to make you an individual person, such as hair color, shoe size, and social security number.

  The key is that certain genes are specific to men or women. For example, all women have a gene that makes them want to have a special bar of soap in the guest bathroom that everybody is afraid to use. Likewise, all men have a gene that scientists believe is directly related to violence.

  To help you get a clearer picture of what I am talking about, consider the following scientific diagram of a guy DNA molecule:

  Fig. 1: Guy DNA Molecule (shown actual size)

  If you study this molecule closely using sensitive scientific instruments such as your eyeballs, you will see, cleverly encoded in it, the root cause of guy violence: the Noogie Gene. This gene—which is virtually never found in women4 —gets its name from the fact that, among other things, it causes a guy to be seized from time to time with the overpowering urge to grab another guy’s head and rub his knuckles into it. Yes, this is a savage and brutal instinct, but for millions of years it has been vital to the survival of the species.5 You see the same behavior all the time in nature, where, for example, guy wolves will constantly try to give each other noogies as the wolf pack establishes its pecking order.6 (Certain types of guy marsupials will also snap towels.)

  Unfortunately, the Noogie Gene has no place in modern, civilized society, where it can create serious problems such as violent crime and genocide and radio car-dealership commercials. Also, we now know that many commercial-airline disasters that were officially blamed on “wind shear” were in fact caused by the copilot—in flagrant defiance of FAA regulations7 —giving a noogie to the pilot during takeoff. And the world will not soon forget the tragic events that ensued in 1991 when Iraq decided to give a giant international noogie to Kuwait.

  What can be done about this unfortunate facet of the guy biological makeup? One obvious solution, of course, is to surgically remove all the Noogie Genes from every single one of the billions of cells in the guy’s body, using tweezers. Phil Donahue had this operation. But it would be impractical to perform it on the guy population at large.

  No, the answer is not to try to remove the Noogie Gene: The answer is to provide a safe outlet for the resultant behavior, to channel the noogie energy into some activity that is relatively harmless, such as bowling or national defense. Any activity that involves knocking things down, blowing things up, setting things on fire, or making loud noises is ideal for noogie transference.

  When I lived in Pennsylvania, my auto mechanic was a guy named Ed, a bearded guy with an intense gaze and a serious temper. I believe that Ed would have been a major threat to society, except for the fact that he was deeply into fireworks. He bought them in huge quantities. He dissected them and studied them intently in his auto shop. He was able to make time for this activity by hardly ever working on cars. I regularly visited Ed’s shop to see if he had made any progress on my Camaro. I had a 1975 Camaro that I kept at Ed’s shop on basically a full-time basis for the better part of a year, in case Ed ever had a spare moment or two to fix the transmission.

  On one memorable visit to Ed’s, I arrived to find a sign on the door that said CLOSED. This didn’t faze me; this sign was mounted permanently on the door,8 as part of Ed’s ongoing customer-avoidance program.

  I opened the door and went inside the shop. The air was thick with fireworks smoke. You couldn’t see across the room.

  “Ed?” I shouted, into the cloud. “It’s me! Dave! I was wondering if maybe you had a chance to …”

  Then I heard a popping sound, and I looked down, and a little cardboard tank was scuttling toward me through the blue smoke haze, emitting a shower of sparks and sporadically shooting its little cannon. And back in the gloom I could just make out the shape of Ed, watching the tank critically.

  “I just got these from Ohio,” he said. “I don’t think they’re as good as the tanks I got from Tennessee, do you? Not as loud.” Ed really likes loud.

  “Ed,” I said, “any word on the Camaro transmission?”

  “If you want to hear loud,” Ed answered, “Listen to this.”

  And he lit what appeared to be a stick of dynamite and tossed it onto the floor, and

  BLAM

  (This explosion is still ringing in my ears, despite the fact that it occurred in 1983.)

  “How about that,” Ed said.

  “That was great, Ed,” I said. “Listen, do you think there’s any chance that the Camaro …”

  “I got something to show you,” Ed said. “I got a … wait a minute.”

  He went over and peered out the window suspiciously. Someb
ody had just driven up to the shop. Ed hated it when strangers came around, because they were always trying to get him to fix their cars. But whoever it was saw the CLOSED sign and drove away.

  Turning back to me, Ed said, “I got a hot-glue gun.”

  “Is that something you need to fix the Camaro?” I asked.

  Ed laughed pretty hard at that. That was a good one, all right. Fix the Camaro. Har! No wonder I was a professional humorist!

  It turned out that the function of the hot-glue gun was to enable Ed to manufacture his own fireworks. Fireworks that were much bigger, much louder than the ones he was getting from these weenies in Tennessee and Ohio. I saw Ed test-fire one of those babies once, and I can tell you that if those radical Muslim fundamentalist terrorists had had Ed on their team in 1992, the World Trade Center would now be referred to as the World Trade Pit.

  But my point is that fireworks were good for Ed, and society in general, because they gave him a relatively harmless outlet for his Noogie-Gene tendencies, which were exacerbated by the tension that constantly built inside him from the strain and hassle of being in the demanding business of not fixing cars.

  I believe that without such a release, guys can become dangerous. You know what the neighbors always say about the guy who suddenly goes berserk and massacres everybody in a Burger King with a machine gun just because he’s sick and tired of trying to open those stupid little packets of ketchup with his teeth.9 The neighbors always say: “He was such a quiet person!” And they might very well add: “He never set off fireworks!”

  So when we see guys engaging in what appear to be stupid, pointless, wasteful, destructive, and juvenile activities such as deliberately driving a car into a lake, or carrying a piano all the way to the top of a six-story building so they can find out what happens when they push it off the roof, or shooting marine flares into pumpkins, we should not condemn them. We should congratulate them for finding legal and socially acceptable and usually nonfatal ways to release their violent impulses.

  This is why I believe that the Nobel-Peace-Prize-Handing-Out Committee should consider giving a large cash award to the guys who belong to the Chicagoland Corvair Enthusiasts club, for their pioneering efforts in the area of making vacuum cleaners explode. I am not making up these efforts; I have personally viewed them on a wonderful videotape that was sent to me by Larry Claypool and Kirk Parro, who are members of the Chicagoland Corvair Enthusiasts.

  (Perhaps you are thinking that people who are enthusiastic, in an organized way, about Corvairs are perhaps—to use a psychological term—several drawers shy of a file cabinet. Let me assure you that you are correct.)

  Here’s the background: One day Claypool and Parro were reading a publication called CORSA Communiqué, which is the official magazine of the Corvair Society of America, and they came across an article headlined:

  VACUUM CLEANERS AND SIPHONS DON’T MIX

  The article was written by a person named Chess Earman,10 who recounted what happened once when he was trying to siphon the gasoline out of one of his four Corvairs.11 He didn’t want to get gasoline in his mouth, so he decided to get the suction going by holding the end of the siphon hose up against a vacuum-cleaner hose. What this meant, of course, is that he was sucking gas fumes directly into an electric motor, which as you know operates by having sparks fly around inside it. So the next thing Chess Earman knew, there was an explosion inside the vacuum cleaner, and fire was coming out of the back of it “like a jet engine.”

  Fortunately Earman was able to unplug the vacuum cleaner before anything really bad happened. But this was indeed a chilling cautionary story about the extreme danger of messing around with gasoline and vacuum cleaners, and when Larry Claypool and Kirk Parro read it, their natural reaction, as guys, was: Hey, cool.

  “Such a challenge must not go unmet,” is how they put it, in a letter to me.

  And thus it came to pass that, for a number of years during the 1980s, the big attraction at the annual Fourth of July picnic of the Chicagoland Corvair Enthusiasts was the Flaming Vacuum Cleaner competition. I wish you could see the videotape, because it is difficult for me, using mere words, to convey the full flavor of this event. But I will try.

  Each year, contestants brought vacuum cleaners, which were grouped into teams under signs denoting their brands (TEAM HOOVER, TEAM ELECTROLUX, etc.). One by one, these vacuum cleaners were brought out into the competition arena, where they were introduced by the announcer over the public-address system.12 The vacuum-cleaner nozzle would be placed in a shallow pan of gasoline. Then everybody would retreat to a safe distance, and the vacuum cleaner would be plugged in to a 240-volt power source, causing the motor to start, so that gasoline was being sucked in through the nozzle.

  Usually nothing happened for a few seconds; then there’d usually be a BANG and the vacuum cleaner would jump a few inches into the air. This always got a cheer from the crowd. Various things would happen next, depending on the vacuum cleaner. Some models would emit a cloud of black smoke and stop running, causing the crowd to boo. But other models would send a jet of flame shooting several feet out the back for several seconds. A few hardy models kept running for several minutes; the longer they’d run, the more the crowd would cheer, encouraged by the announcer. Sometimes the flames would stop, and inevitably you’d hear somebody—it always sounds like the same guy, a guy who has been drinking a lot of beer—shout “MORE GAS!” Certain canister models—these were the most popular with the crowd, getting wild cheers of approval—would explode violently apart, with the tops flying up and out of the camera’s range of view.

  “The canister tops often exceeded altitudes of thirty feet,” report Claypool and Parro.

  After each contestant was finished, it would be dragged off and dumped onto a growing, smoking mound of charred and mangled machinery, and the announcer would say something nice about it, such as, “Not bad, Electrolux Number Two!” Or: “Let’s hear it for the Eureka!”

  On the tape, between contestants, you occasionally see women walk past in front of the camera, on their way to get more potato salad or something; they sometimes look at the guys, who are working industriously away the way guys do when they’re on a Mission, getting another vacuum cleaner ready for action, and the women shake their heads in such a way as to clearly indicate that, yes, they knew guys could be idiots, but they had never before realized that guys could be idiots of this magnitude.

  Again, these women did not understand that the Flaming Vacuum Cleaner competition was, in fact, a relatively positive activity for guys to engage in—that if the guys didn’t have this outlet, they could easily become involved in something with far more serious consequences. I am sure that none of us ever wants to pick up our morning newspaper and read a headline that says CHICAGO FEARED VAPORIZED IN MISHAP INVOLVING EXPERIMENTAL NUCLEAR-POWERED CORVAIR.

  No, the Flaming Vacuum Cleaner competition was probably a good thing. I want to stress, however, that it was also a very dangerous thing, not to be attempted by amateurs. Remember that the guys who did it were not ordinary untrained civilians: They were Corvair enthusiasts. And they took certain critical safety precautions, such as rigging up a public-address system. You must remember that gasoline and vacuum cleaners do not mix, and under no circumstances should you attempt to do anything like this yourself. And if you do, please let me know where and when.

  1 This article was written by Ron Sonenshine and sent in by alert reader Thomas William McGarry, who will receive, as a token of my gratitude, the Hope Diamond.

  2 Notice that I have the class not to mention toilet paper.

  3 To prevent others species, such as raccoons, from stealing it.

  4 With Roseanne being a big (har!) exception.

  5 Don’t ask me why.

  6 These happen to be rare Arctic pecking wolves.

  7 Which clearly state, in volume IX, article 7, section 3.2.4: “No noogies below 15,000 feet.”

  8 I am not making this up.

  9 Not that
I entirely disagree with him.

  10 This is a real name.

  11 Yes: four.

  12 Of course they had a public-address system.

  8

  The Domestic Side of

  Guys (With a Side

  Discussion on Orgasms)

  or: The Secret Truth About Why

  Guys Are Better at Math

  or: Where Standards Came From

  or: Perfectly Legitimate

  Reasons Why a Person Might

  Elect to Blow His Nose on

  His Laundry

  or: Let’s Not Be So Darned

  Critical of Tapeworms

  PROBABLY THE fastest-growing sector of the U.S. economy is the sector that conducts surveys asking women what is wrong with men. About every two days you read yet another newspaper article stating that 92.7 percent of American women find men to be pathetically inadequate in some way, with the two major areas of male deficiency being:

  Housework

  Orgasms

  When I say “orgasms,” I of course am not suggesting that guys don’t have orgasms. Guys have plenty of orgasms. Most guys have more orgasms in a single day (and here I am thinking of a day that probably occurred during the summer between ninth and tenth grades) than some women (and here I am thinking of Margaret Thatcher) have in their entire lifetimes.

  No, the big complaint that women have is that guys often fail to induce orgasms. This is because the guy biological makeup, as I explained in chapter 2, is designed to ensure the survival of the human race by giving guys the ability to achieve orgasms virtually instantaneously with virtually any kind of stimulus (although here I am not thinking of Margaret Thatcher).