Dave Barry's Complete Guide to Guys Read online

  Also the early Olympic events were extremely grueling, especially the marathon. The first marathon runner ever was a messenger, who was sent from the scene of a great Greek military victory to carry the news to the city of Athens, twenty-six miles away. He ran and ran and ran, and when he finally got to Athens he ran up to the king, gasped out his message,8 collapsed to the ground, and died.

  For a moment the stunned crowd looked down silently at the body of this courageous man. And then one guy, way in the back of the crowd, deeply moved by what he had seen, could no longer remain silent.

  “Boo,” he said.9

  And a couple of other guys, hearing this, thought it sounded pretty good, so they joined in.

  “Yeah,” they said. “Boo.”

  This was indeed a historic moment, because these guys were history’s first sports fans. They had made the breakthrough discovery that you could be involved in sports without having to actually do anything. Even if you were a totally nonathletic tub of ancient Greek lard who sat around all day eating ancient Greek junk food and couldn’t run twenty-six feet without falling over and setting off shock waves powerful enough to create several new ancient Greek ruins, you could still pretend that you had something to do with a sporting event by shouting uselessly and often unintelligibly at genuine competitors.

  In addition to “Boo,” ancient Greek guys developed a number of phrases for fans to yell, expressing both criticism (“You suck!”) and encouragement (“You suck!”). Within a few centuries, ancient Roman guys were developing advanced fan phraseology that could be used at a wide range of sporting events. (“Hey LION! You call THAT mauling a Christian? My GRANDMOTHER could maul a Christian better than that!”)

  Guys in the Middle Ages

  The Middle Ages saw the breakdown of civilization in Western Europe—a severe decline in cultural values and standards; a rapid descent into chaos and near-barbarism. So it was a pretty good time for guys. They could spit pretty much whenever they wanted, and for entertainment, they could go to jousting tournaments and cheer for their favorite knights. (“Hey LANCELOT! You SUCK!”)

  Still, it wasn’t perfect. Most of the available jobs were in agriculture, which was hard work. People would be out in the fields from dawn to dusk, working the dirt with crude farming implements, sweating and toiling day after day, year after year, yet obtaining only meager results.

  “Maybe we should plant some seeds or something,” they would sometimes remark.

  Medieval guys did not care for agriculture. They were always looking for some new lifestyle option, and finally, one day, one of them had a brilliant idea.

  “That’s it!” he said, smacking himself in the forehead. Unfortunately he was holding a crude farming implement at the time, so he fell to the ground, unconscious. But when he woke up, he explained his plan to the other guys, who loved it, and they immediately put it into effect. That night, at dinner, they turned to their wives, and, with anguish in their voices, said: “You know what? The Turks got the Holy Land!”

  “No!” said the wives, who, in fact, had no idea what the Holy Land was. But the husbands seemed deeply concerned about it, and the early wives didn’t want to appear unsympathetic.

  “Yes,” said the husbands. “I guess this means I’ll have to go on a Crusade.”

  “A what?” asked the wives.

  “Don’t wait up for me,” said the husbands.

  And thus was born one of the greatest guy inventions of all time: business travel. Soon thousands of guys were going on Crusades. After several years they’d return home, and they’d hang around a while, listening to their wives complain about the fact that the soil needed tilling and the roof needed thatching and the kids were coming down with the darned plague again. After a couple of weeks, the guys would announce, looking really upset about it, that those lousy Turks still had the Holy Land, and off they’d go again.

  Meanwhile, guys in Turkey were leaving their homes, telling their wives that they had to go get the Western Europeans out of Norway. These groups of opposing crusaders generally spent most of their time hanging out in Italy, where, fortunately for them, the Italian restaurant had just been invented. This in turn led to the development of the expense report, which was the forerunner to modern literary fiction.

  Renaissance Guys

  The Renaissance saw the rebirth of interest in philosophy, science, and the arts, and above all the rise of humanism—a philosophy centered on the distinctive needs, interests, and ideals of … not deities, but people. Guys were in favor of this because it resulted in statues of naked women.

  There was also a resurgence in theater, with the appearance of such playwrights as the immortal William Shakespeare, whose brilliant comedies and tragedies were extremely popular with guys. (“Hey HAMLET! You SUCK!”)

  The Role of Guys in the Protestant Reformation and the Subsequent Political Realignment of Europe

  Guys were fishing when this happened.

  Guys and the Age of Exploration

  The Age of Exploration began in the fifteenth century when an Italian guy, who historians believe was named Nick, had a couple of glasses of wine, rented a gondola, and attempted to take his wife on a tour of the canals of Venice. He paddled around for a couple of hours, until his wife, noticing that they were in an unfamiliar neighborhood and suspecting that Nick was lost, suggested that he ask somebody for directions. Naturally he would not do this. It is a well-documented fact that guys will not ask for directions. This is a biological thing. This is why it takes several million guy sperm cells, each one wriggling in its own direction, totally confident it knows where it is going, to locate a female egg, despite the fact that the egg is, relative to them, the size of Wisconsin.

  So anyway, Nick was paddling and paddling, and night was falling, and his wife was becoming more and more insistent that they should ask somebody where they were, and he was becoming more and more snappish when he told her he knew exactly where they were, and finally they both got so angry that they stopped talking altogether, her sitting with her arms folded, him paddling, until they arrived at the North American continent.

  “Oh sure,” said Nick’s wife, because when she was really angry she spoke English. “You know exactly where we are.”

  “I do,” said Nick. “This is a shortcut.”

  On the way back he almost smashed head-on into Christopher Columbus, going the other way.

  Colonial Guys

  It was some colonial guys who came up with the idea of dressing up as Indians and throwing a whole lot of tea into Boston Harbor to express the public outrage over the high-handed antidemocratic actions of the British government. Also they had always wanted to try it.

  This courageous effort led to the Revolutionary War, during which these same guys engaged in numerous other paramilitary actions, including: dressing up as cowboys and throwing chairs into Boston Harbor, dressing up as French milkmaids and throwing a cow into Boston Harbor, and dressing up as a bunch of ale-consuming guys and throwing up into Boston Harbor. General George Washington showed his awareness of the efforts of these guys when he personally issued a decree stating that they would not be allowed to be in the army “even if everybody else is dead.”

  Guys in the Industrial Revolution

  The Industrial Revolution saw the world’s economic landscape radically transformed by technological breakthroughs in mechanization, steam power, and mass production, thereby permitting the emergence of capitalistic free markets, the creation of vast wealth, and the rise of the middle class as the dominant social element in an urban-industrial society. During this era guys invented the office betting pool.

  GUY SCIENCE MILESTONE

  On October 8, 1857—decades before Thomas Edison began experimenting with various designs for an incandescent electric light—Alfred A. “Gus” Loogerhalter, working in a small makeshift laboratory in his home, connected the leads from a crude lead-acid battery to the ends of a filament that he had inserted into a sealed glass globe from which he
had pumped out all the oxygen. Nothing happened, so he invented the whoopee cushion.

  Guys in the Modern Era

  As humanity entered the modern era, guys continued to make contributions. Here is just a partial list of the modern benefits that society would probably not enjoy today if it weren’t for guys:

  Mooning

  Pez

  It may seem as though there is nothing more that guys could possibly accomplish, but they continue to make amazing strides forward right up to the present day. I have here a newspaper article from the La Crosse, Wisconsin, Tribune, sent in by an alert reader named Sherryl Gingrich10 concerning three guys—Trygve Thompson, Richard Stakston, and Dan Ellefson—from the town of Westby, Wisconsin. These guys, all in their forties, had a few beers one winter’s night and decided it would be a good idea to hurl themselves off a thirty-meter ski jump.

  In a canoe.

  I am not making this up. According to the article, written by Jeff Brown, the guys had talked about canoe-jumping for several years, and this particular night they just decided to do it. So they hauled a sixteen-foot canoe up to the top, got in—the article says that Ellefson, sitting in the back, had an oar11 —and pushed off. The canoe flew down the jump, rocketed off into space, and—you guessed it—smashed head-on into Christopher Columbus.

  No, seriously, the canoe landed at the bottom traveling at approximately fourteen thousand miles per hour and flipped over. Miraculously, the three occupants suffered only cuts and bruises.

  The article describes them as “three grown men with jobs and families.” This may be. But when they got into that canoe—and I mean this as the highest compliment—they were guys.

  1 Also “Tater Silo.”

  2 10 clans = one tribe.

  3 Sometimes they would also use a false beard.

  4 Such as the stone Weed Whacker.

  5 Source: Phyllis Schlafly.

  6 “Four” had not been invented yet.

  7 Ironically, they showered with their clothes on.

  8 His message was “” (Literally, “My feet are killing me.”)

  9 Pronounced “Boo.”

  10 Sherryl will receive, as a token of my appreciation, this handsome footnote mention.

  11 “He was going to steer,” Stakston is quoted as saying.

  2

  The Biological Nature of Guys

  Important Scientific Reasons

  Why They Act Like Jerks

  TO UNDERSTAND GUYS, it is essential to remember that, deep down inside, they are biological creatures, like jellyfish or trees, only less likely to clean the bathroom. When you see a guy in the modern urban environment, sitting at the wheel of his automobile, waiting for the traffic light to change, what you see on the surface is an intelligent, rational, technologically advanced being picking his nose. But if you were to probe beneath that sophisticated veneer, you would find all kinds of powerful instincts and glands and hormones and semidigested Chinese food, all of which combine to exert tremendous influence over the guy’s behavior. Nowhere is this clearer than in the area of:

  Sex.

  Although humans tend to view sex as mainly a fun recreational activity sometimes resulting in death, in nature it is a far more serious matter. Because sex is vital to the continuation of life. Granted, there are some species that have developed ways of surviving without having sex. The West Asian Wincing Lizard, for example, propagates itself entirely by adoption.

  But most species must have sex to survive. And that is why, in most of nature, sex is a very grim business indeed. Take dragonflies. Next time you see two dragonflies having sex in midair, take a good look at their faces. Do they appear to be enjoying themselves? Are they smiling? Of course not. To the best of our knowledge, dragonflies don’t even have mouths. No, they are deadly serious, because they know that if they fail to perform the sex act correctly, all the other insects will laugh at them. That’s the disadvantage of doing it right out in midair.

  “Dammit, Arthur,” the female would say, if she had a mouth. “Why can’t we just go to a motel?”

  Another reason why the dragonflies are so serious about the sex act is that if they don’t do it right, the female won’t be able to produce any eggs, and come springtime there won’t be any baby dragonflies emerging from the cocoon1 and standing up on their cute little wobbly legs and sleepily blinking their 4,968,938,109,944 eyes and stretching their gossamer wings and edging tentatively to the edge of the tree branch and stepping off into space and SNORK getting swallowed by Mr. Wren, who has been waiting for this moment all winter.

  Thus we see how important it is for dragonflies to produce a very large number of offspring, which means they have to have a lot of sex. This is true of most species, and usually it is up to the male to initiate the sex act.2

  Males take this responsibility seriously. In many species, the males develop bright coloration and attend special schools where they learn complex mating rituals designed to attract females. Consider the behavior of the rare Brown-Spotted Contractor Ferret. When the male of this species spots a female, he will race around, making a noise that sounds like “Wheep! Wheep!” and gathering up small sticks, which he will painstakingly assemble, using dirt mixed with saliva as a sort of mortar, into a small structure shaped not unlike a Barca-Lounger. This task often takes him as long as four hours, after which the female will approach, make a noise that sounds like “Pfah,” then scamper off into the forest, because the last thing she needs is ugly furniture made with spit. That is why this particular ferret is so rare.

  But the point is that the male is trying. He believes that having sex is the central biological reason for his existence. All guys do. We guys get accused of just wanting to get laid a lot, but the truth is that we have been entrusted with an extremely important responsibility—the very survival of the species—and by gosh we’re going to try to carry out this responsibility, even if it means we have to try to have a lot of sex.

  Don’t thank us; we’re just doing our job.

  Guys in some species take this responsibility so seriously that they’ll try to have sex with anything. I am looking at a page in a biology textbook with a photo caption that states: “Indiscriminate sexual behavior is common among males.” Above this caption are two photographs. The first shows a guy toad trying to have sex with a human finger. I am not making this up. The caption states: “A male toad (left) clasps a finger as if it were a female of his species.” And sure enough, the toad is really wrapped around the finger, looking very passionate, for a toad. He is so determined to have sex that he has not even noticed that his partner (a) is not, technically, a toad, and (b) is attached to an organism roughly two thousand times his size. He doesn’t care! He’s getting laid!

  And he is probably already thinking about making a pass at the thumb.

  But if you think that is an atypical example of indiscriminate sexual behavior, consider the other photograph in this biology textbook. The caption states: “An Australian buprestid beetle (right) attempts to copulate with a beer bottle.”

  Sure enough, there’s the guy beetle, humping away on the side of a beer bottle that does not even remotely resemble a female beetle. It clearly resembles a beer bottle; in fact, it resembles an ugly beer bottle. But this guy beetle appears to be bonking it with great enthusiasm, and what is more, he will probably brag about this to the other guy beetles.

  “So,” is the message he will communicate, by waving his antennae in a certain boastful pattern, “guess who scored today?” And then he will nod his head3 in a significant manner toward the beer bottle.

  “Damn!” the guy beetles will indicate, waving their antennae in an envious manner. “I’ve been trying to get her for months!”

  There are plenty of examples of the lengths that guys in other species will go to to have sex. I once read about a species of fish wherein the male is much smaller than the female, and when he mates with her, he becomes permanently stuck to her, and then she sort of absorbs him until he is actually part
of her body, just an appendage of the female, kind of like whoever is currently married to Elizabeth Taylor. You talk about a guy giving up a lot for sex. The guy fish’s days of hanging out with the other guys on the reef are over.

  And let’s not forget banana slugs. Actually, you’re going to want to forget banana slugs, once you find out what they sometimes do to separate from each other after having sex, according to a fascinating book called The Banana Slug, which was written by Alice Bryant Harper and sent to me by alert reader John W. Glendening. This book states that banana slugs have very large sexual organs (for slugs, I mean), and sometimes, after the sex act, they remain stuck together, and in order to get themselves apart, they

  WARNING WARNING WARNING

  The U.S. Surgeon General has determined that the remainder of this sentence should not be read by guys of the male gender.

  take turns gnawing off the penis.

  So the conclusions that we can draw from this detailed survey of the wildlife kingdom is that guys in the wild, because of this great and sacred responsibility they feel to keep the species going, will:

  Have sex with just about anything.

  Do just about anything to have sex.

  Of course human beings, as a species, are no longer subject to the kinds of threats that face animals in the wild. Thanks to modern medical advances such as anesthesia, antibiotics, and organ transplants, few human beings born in the latter half of the twentieth century have been eaten by wrens. But the basic underlying guy reproductive instincts are still there, as powerful as ever.