Dave Barry's Complete Guide to Guys Read online

  “Steele,” she said, “you never notice when I change my hair, so this time I’m telling you ahead of time: I’m going to get a new hairstyle today. It’s going to look completely different.”

  So that evening, when Steele got home from work, he immediately started raving about how nice Bobette’s hair looked, how much better he liked it, etc. He was so excited about her new hairstyle that she had to interrupt him to say: “Steele, they canceled my appointment.”

  Even when guys do notice women’s hair, they can get in trouble. Here is part of a letter I got from a guy named John Maines, describing an incident involving a woman he was seeing named Shawn:

  Once I drove my car into Georgetown here in D.C. to pick her up after she had gotten a “perm.” I was all flustered because the traffic was very heavy and I had gotten lost on the way in and was late getting to the street corner where I was supposed to pick her up.

  Shawn got into the car, her long hair all kinked up. It looked good, but I was still concentrating on driving. After a minute, she said, “You don’t like it, do you?”

  “Not at all,” I replied, staring ahead, hands firmly gripped on the wheel. “I bet it will take a half an hour just to get three blocks.”

  Anyway, today Shawn and I are what she calls “best friends” (every guy knows what that means, sex-wise).

  Many guys also have a problem seeing details of their own personal selves. This is why there are guys walking around, convinced that they are the most irresistible stud muffins on the continent, while wearing shirts that stop about three inches above their belts, thus allowing maybe twenty-five pounds of hairy, pasty, belly-buttoned flab to thrust itself out, looking like a bloated mutant one-eyed albino walrus trying to escape from their pants. This is why some guys honestly believe they can comb their remaining hair in a realistic, even attractive manner over bald spots the size of American Samoa.

  A lot of guys can’t see dirt. This is why they’re so bad at cleaning chores around the house. Partly, of course, this is because they have learned that if they do a bad enough job, they will no longer be asked to do cleaning chores around the house, but mainly it’s because dirt is flat invisible to them. They are capable of “cleaning” a bathroom in such a way that, when they are done, it still contains active mildew colonies capable of capturing and eating a small dog.

  A variation of this is Floor Blindness. My son, Rob, has this. Ordinarily he has eyes like an eagle’s: He can read Stephen King books in total darkness, see brownies through a solid kitchen-cabinet door, and spot a Burger King sign seventeen miles away. But he cannot see things that are on the floor, particularly if they are his things. I’ll say to him, “Rob, I want you to pick up your room,” and he’ll say, in an annoyed voice, “I already did,” and I’ll go into his room to inspect the floor, and I can’t even see it. It is completely covered with layers and layers of Rob’s stuff. It is entirely possible that Jimmy Hoffa is buried under there somewhere. I could not swear, in a court of law, that he has a floor.

  But as much of a problem as Guy Vision is, it is not nearly as serious as a related guy medical condition, namely:

  Guy Memory Lapses

  The basic problem here is that guys, as I have noted, devote so much of their brains to remembering vital facts such as who was named MVP of the 1978 Super Bowl that they cannot always remember minor details, such as that they have left an infant on the roof of a car.

  You think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not. According to a 1992 Boston Globe article that was sent to me by various alert readers, a guy in Massachusetts did this on Mother’s Day. He had his two children with him, and he was loading them into his car, and he did—give him credit—remember to strap his twenty-month-old daughter into the car. But the amount of concentration required for a guy to remember this type of child-care detail can put a lot of strain on his mental equipment, so he went into acute Guy Memory Lapse and forgot that he had placed a car seat containing his three-month-old son on the roof of the car. As he accelerated onto Interstate 290, he sensed that something was wrong when, according to the Globe, “he heard a scraping sound on the roof of the car.”

  (This is classic guy behavior: He doesn’t notice that he has only 50 percent of his total children inside the car with him, but he does notice that his car is making a funny sound.)

  Anyway, the car was going about fifty miles per hour when the car seat containing the three-month-old boy sailed off the roof and landed on Interstate 290, where—this is strong evidence that God is a guy—the seat skidded safely to a stop, with the boy unhurt. So the story has a happy ending, except of course that this particular guy had to tell his wife what happened (Happy Mother’s Day!). I bet she rolled her eyeballs into the next state.

  Perhaps you are saying: “Dave, aren’t you being unfair? Aren’t you using purely anecdotal evidence to reinforce an unfortunate gender stereotype about men? Isn’t it entirely possible that a woman could leave her child on the car roof and drive off?”

  No.

  Nor do I think it is likely that anybody other than a guy could have been responsible for another Adventure in Motoring that was reported in 1992 by the Scripps-Howard News Service. This involved a Colorado guy who pulled his van out of a gas station near Washington, Pennsylvania, and drove through West Virginia and part of Ohio without noticing that his wife, the mother of two children, was still back at the gas station in Pennsylvania. The guy assumed she was sleeping in the back of their van. He made it almost to Columbus, Ohio, where he pulled over and—still not noticing anything unusual—decided to take a nap. Only after waking up an hour and a half later did he realize that his wife was not, technically, in the van with him. At this point he turned around and began driving frantically back east on Route 70, getting as far as Wheeling, West Virginia, where he hit a deer. The accident damaged his van, so he walked to a truck stop, where he was reunited with his wife, who had been transported westward by helpful police.

  Guess what day this happened on.

  That’s right: Mother’s Day. I am still not making this up.

  I’ll give you one more clinical case history of Guy Memory Lapse; this was reported in the police roundup section of The Mining Journal of Marquette, Michigan, and sent to me by alert readers Tina and Dan McFaddin. It concerns a couple who were driving in a rural area, devoid of rest stops, when nature called. The item begins as follows:

  NEGAUNEE—A Wisconsin woman suffered broken ribs when her husband accidentally backed over her in their pickup truck Monday night while she was urinating.

  Miraculously, this incident did not occur on Mother’s Day. And if this woman has any sense, when Mother’s Day does roll around, she will barricade herself in a bomb shelter until it’s over.

  We see from these examples that Guy Memory Lapse is mainly hazardous to other people. But there are certain uniquely guy medical situations that are hazardous only to the guy, the scariest of which involves:

  Threats to the Guy Privates

  I am not suggesting here that only guys have privates. I realize that women also have privates, and plenty of them. But their privates are a lot more private. They are tucked safely away in various vaults of the female body; whereas the guy privates—which contain not only half of the guy’s nerve endings, but also a good 83 percent of his motivation—are, because of an incredibly stupid design flaw, hanging right out in the open in an absurdly vulnerable manner,6 like Harold Lloyd dangling from the face of the giant clock, waiting for disaster to strike.

  Almost every guy has, at one time or another, been traumatically whacked in the personal region by a baseball or a bicycle bar or a knee or something, and this is the kind of thing a guy remembers for a long time. I can still vividly recall an incident in the fall of 1960, when a lot of us kids were let out of junior high school to see a big Republican campaign rally, featuring President Eisenhower, at the Westchester County (N.Y.) airport. There was a huge crowd, and my friend Emil Sommer and I were taking turns sitting on each other’s s
houlders in an effort to see better. Just as the presidential party was getting close, I slipped off my perch in such a way as to severely pound my personals7 on Emil’s elbow on the way down. I could probably have hurt myself worse, but only if I had used power tools.

  So I was doubled over in extreme discomfort amidst several thousand cheering Westchester County Republicans shouting “There he is! There he is!” And I looked up, and there, briefly, through the throng, and through the reddish haze of my pain, I could see the smiling moonlike face and spasmodically waving arms of: Dick Nixon.

  It was not, technically, his fault, but I was never able to look at him again without considerable discomfort.

  But that incident was nothing, compared with what happened to a guy in Singapore in August of 1993. I quote here from a news account in The Singapore Straits Times:

  A former national shotput and discus champion was bitten on his testicles yesterday by a python hiding in a toilet bowl he was sitting on.

  The Singapore Straits Times—which covered this story the way The New York Times covers tension in the Middle East—dutifully noted that pythons have a “particularly nasty” bite because they have “rows of inward-curving, needle-sharp teeth.” After the victim—whose name (I am still not making this up) is Fok Keng Choy—was stitched up8 at the hospital, The Singapore Straits Times asked him about the pain, and he said eloquently: “Words could not describe it.”

  It took four men to pull the python out of the toilet bowl. The Times noted that a woman had used the very same toilet just forty-five minutes before Mr. Fok did, “but nothing happened,” which just proves the point I am making here about the extreme guy vulnerability resulting from the Dangle Syndrome.

  Another incidence of a penis being chomped on by irate wildlife was reported in September 1992 by the British newspaper The Sun, which stated that a carpenter sat down on a portable toilet at a building site and a black widow spider “sunk its fangs into his manhood.” The article further elaborates that the man “spent four days in agony in hospital” and had not had what you would call an active love life since that time. Also, he had developed a deep-seated fear of portable toilets, although The Sun, getting both sides of the story, did quote a spokesman for the toilet suppliers: “Never before has this happened in the history of portable toilets.”

  I am not criticizing the spider, here. It was simply defending its home. Suppose you were Mrs. Black Widow Spider, in your web, feeling safe and secure, and you had just eaten a nice meal consisting of a fly, or possibly Mr. Black Widow Spider, and you’ve tucked the egg sac in for a nap and are getting ready to catch forty billion winks yourself, and suddenly the roof opens up and your web, your home, is assaulted by a sex organ that is, relative to you, the size of the Goodyear blimp. You are going to be upset. You are going to sink your fangs first and ask questions later. But that doesn’t make it any easier for the guy.

  It is not just wildlife that poses a threat to guy privates. Guys are not even safe from their own underwear. I have here an article published in 1991 by the South County Register of Waldport, Oregon, headlined:

  MAN WINS LAWSUIT AFTER

  PRIVATES ARE “LABELED”

  The article reported that this guy purchased some new underwear at a department store, wore them to bed, and awoke to discover that the underwear inspection label—this particular pair had been inspected by Number 12—was stuck to his personal organ. He could not get it off.

  So he had to take his organ to a medical clinic. I bet that was fun. I bet he really enjoyed explaining the situation to the receptionist, especially if the clinic was crowded that day and the receptionist was the kind of person who liked to make jokes. (“Look on the bright side, sir! At least it passed inspection!” Loud laughter from the other patients in the reception area.)

  The clinic was able, using solvents, to remove the label. But then, the article tells us, the guy developed “a severe rash,” and although the rash did respond to treatment, the guy was eventually left with “a permanent scar the size and shape of the inspection label.”

  There probably are some guys who might try to turn this kind of thing to their advantage, especially in singles bars (“Hi! Wanna see my label?”). But this guy, who was a lawyer,9 sued the department store, claiming that he had been “made a laughingstock” within his family (“So, Morton, you devil, when are you going to let us meet this Number 12?”). He wound up collecting three thousand dollars, which makes me wonder if I would still have a legal case against the Nixon estate.

  The ultimate example of an unfortunate guy medical emergency is of course the famous one involving John Bobbitt, whose wife, Lorena, cut off his penis with a knife, then drove off with it and threw it out the car window.10 Fortunately the police were able to track down the penis11 and take it to the hospital, where it was placed in a lineup with five other penises so Mr. Bobbitt could identify it.

  No, really, it was surgically reattached to Mr. Bobbitt, and this incident became a huge national news event. For weeks, every time you turned on the TV, there was a perky female news anchorperson smiling cheerfully and using the phrase “cut off his penis with a kitchen knife” at every possible opportunity. (“We have a cold front moving into Virginia, the very state where John Bobbitt’s wife cut off his penis with a kitchen knife.”) U.S. industrial output dropped sharply because so many guys were walking around with both hands over their privates.

  Today, of course, John Bobbitt’s penis is a major celebrity with its own agent and a successful show-business career.12 This particular penis is far better known than the U.S. vice president.13 Nevertheless this was a chilling incident for guys, and I for one think we are way overdue for a federal ban on the sale or possession of kitchen knives. I also think that, just in case, we should have mandatory registration of Salad Shooters.

  I am going to end this chapter on special guy medical concerns by presenting an:

  Idea for Getting Really Rich

  Start a Guy Medical Center. The center’s motto could be: Prostate? What prostate?

  The doctors would all be guys who had been specially trained to deal with guys’ unique medical needs. Guys would not be afraid to come to this center for treatment, because they’d know they’d get the kind of medical attention they want:

  DOCTOR: So, what seems to be the problem?

  PATIENT: Well, the main thing is, I keep coughing up blood. Plus I have these open sores all over my body. Also I have really severe chest pains and double vision, and from time to time these little worms burrow out of my skin.

  DOCTOR: It’s just a sprain.

  PATIENT: That’s what I thought.

  1 Duh.

  2 One of them, for example, has a toilet on it.

  3 The Rangers continue to engage in Mental Preparation well after the parade is over. “You can’t be too prepared” is one of their mottoes.

  4 The props for “Moon Over Miami” involved two coconuts and a banana.

  5 Do not try these maneuvers at home.

  6 Further evidence that Mother Nature is a woman.

  7 Or, as the Mexicans say, “crunched my cojones.”

  8 Guys: Do not even think about this.

  9 Not that this makes it any less tragic.

  10 Thereby simultaneously exposing herself to a charge of littering, and her husband to a charge of indecent exposure.

  11 Even though it was not labeled (rim shot).

  12 Why not? It’s more talented than anybody on Melrose Place.

  13 What’s-his-name.

  7

  Guys and Violence

  The Curse of the Noogie Gene

  I HAVE HERE an article1 that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, headlined:

  NAPA WRITER BLAMES MALENESS FOR CRIME

  The article concerns an author named June Stephenson, who wrote a book entitled—this is a real title—Men Are Not Cost Effective. Ms. Stephenson’s basic point, according to the article, is that crime is basically a male problem; that males do not b
ecome criminals because of environmental or societal influences, but simply because they are male.

  “I am not saying that all men are criminals,” she is quoted as saying. “But most criminals are, in fact, men.”

  The article says she believes that “such experiences as circumcision early in life may lead to violent behavior.”

  (Let me just note here parenthetically that if you want to see violent behavior in a guy, try to circumcise him late in life.)

  But here is the key point: According to the article, Stephenson proposes “that men—not women—should bear the cost of imprisonment, perhaps through a special tax.”

  So it has come to this: a tax on guys.

  I suppose it was inevitable that somebody would propose this, because guys do have a reputation for resorting to violence. But is this reputation warranted? Is it fair to say that violence is a guy problem, simply because women hardly ever do anything more violent than chop celery, whereas guys tend to sometimes lose their tempers; maybe throw a few thoughtless punches on occasion; maybe even fire a gun in anger or invade a neighboring country or go up in airplanes and drop thousands of powerful bombs on urban areas?

  Okay, so guys do seem to have a violence problem. Maybe June Stephenson is right: Maybe there should be a special tax on guys to pay for the prison system. But let’s be fair, here: If we’re going to tax guys for prisons, shouldn’t we also tax women for the extra costs that they impose upon society? For example, scientists estimate that, just since 1980, the American public has spent a combined total of 875,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 hours unsuccessfully trying to make a final decision regarding where to put furniture. It is not guys who are responsible for this. As I stated in the introduction to this book, if guys were in charge of positioning furniture, they’d leave it wherever it was. Most of the world’s furniture would still be back in ancient Greece.