Authors: Jill McCorkle
I’ve thought of publishing a book about it all, all the different types of the species. You know it would sort of be like Audubon’s bird book. I’d call it
Male Homo Sapiens: What You Need to Know to Identify Different Breeds
. Natural habitats, diet, mating rituals. I’d show everything from chic condos to jail cells; from raw bloody beef to couscous and sprouts; from a missionary position (showers following) to an oily tarp spread out behind a Dempsey Dumpster. I’d break it all down so even the inexperienced could gain something. Of course there are a few questions that I haven’t quite worked out yet. Like, why is it considered
tough
for a man (usually a big-city macho type) to grab himself and utter nasty things (such as an invitation to be fellated) to another man? Is there something hidden there, like in those seek and find pictures? And why don’t men have partitions between urinals? Is there a history of liking to watch or something? Does it all go back to the Greeks and Romans where a little homosexual activity was perfectly in order, like a good solid burp at the end of a
meal? I’m still working on a lot of topics, as you can see, but quite a bit of my research is already mapped out.
You know, you got your real
fun
guys that you love to date but you wouldn’t want to marry—they’d be addicted to something and out of work about the time you hatch the first kid. Then you got the kind who might do all right in a job and lead a relatively clean life, but they bore you to tears. (I’m talking the kind that gets into little closet organizers and everything zipped up in plastic.) And you’ve got the kind you ought to leave alone—period. (I’m talking worthless pigs and middle-aged crazed sleazos.) That’s where Lorraine screwed up (on both accounts) and I’ve told her so on many occasions. Her husband, Tim, likes to drink beer and scrunch the cans on the side of his head. He likes to chew tobacco while drinking beer and talk about what him and the boys
done and seen
while
hunting up some good fat quail and some Bambi
. He wears army fatigues and drinks some more beer and talks about needing to get some sex (actually, he uses all the slang terms for a woman’s anatomy). He drinks still more beer and talks about needing to take a leak.
“Well, just be sure you put it back,” I said not long ago, and Lorraine and her mother (my evil step-mother) gave me a long dirty look. My name is Lucinda, after my real mother’s mother (I go by Luci), but every now and then I refer to myself as Cinda and bare my size six-and-a-half foot just so they have to take a good look at themselves:
mean ugly step-mother and self-centered step-sister, both with big snowshoe-type feet.
“Take a leak. Put it back. That’s a good one now,” Tim said and shuffled through his magazines until he found one of his choosing for a little bathroom time,
Soldier of Fortune
or
American Killer
, something like that. Lorraine and Mama, Too—as she
used
to beg me to call her when Daddy was still alive—were still staring. They have accused me of turning my back on my family and our natural ways because I lived in Washington, D.C., for a year, where I worked as a secretary in some very dull and very official office where there were a lot of very dull and very official men. I was there when there were rumors that this senator who wanted to be president (there are LOADS of men who fit into this particular
Homo sapiens
profile) had a mistress. This fellow always wins the election with the help of people like my step-brother-in-law who believe that there should be a gun in every home and that school cafeterias should be eternally stocked with that delicious vegetable, the catsup. What I still don’t understand is who in the hell would go with that type? I’m an expert on these things and oftentimes am led by curiosity, but I have my standards. I mean, if you were the
wife
at least you’d live in a nice house in Georgetown or Alexandria, the fella wouldn’t utter a peep if you dropped a few thou. But just to
go
with him, good God. Lorraine’s friend, Ruth Sawyer, has dated a man for fifteen years with nothing to show for it. Stupid, I say.
I left D.C. (which was fine with me) when Daddy got so sick. I was allergic to those cherry trees the whole country raves about in the spring. Still though, if I ever even refer to the Smithsonian, Lorraine and Mama, Too roll their eyes and smirk at each other.
“You’d be lucky to get a man like Tim,” my step-mother had said.
“Like I don’t know,” I told her. “There are very few men in his category.”
“That’s right.” Lorraine nodded her head as she flipped through her husband’s pile of arsenal magazines to find one of her beauty ones. Tim’s breed happen to travel in camouflage clothes, but they like their women to sport loud and gaudy feathers and makeup. Of course she had enough sense to know that I was not being serious, so she turned quickly, eyes narrowing. “What do you mean, his category?”
“Not many men who read about the defense of the great white race while taking a leak,” I said.
“Har de har har,” Lorraine said. She has not changed a bit since they came into our lives not long after my mother died of liver disease. Mama, Too worked in the office of the funeral parlor, which was convenient. I called her a “widower watcher” then, and I still do. My daddy was not such a great man, but even he was too good for Mama, Too.
Before Lorraine met Tim, she dated the man who I file in the middle-aged crazed sleazo slot. You know the type, someone who is into
hair
(especially chest) any way he can
get it: rugs, Minoxidil, transplants. That poor grotesquerie would’ve had some grafted on his chest if he could’ve afforded the procedure. He’d have loved enough hair on his head to perm and chest hair long enough to preen. You know the type of man I mean, the type that hangs out in the Holiday Inn lounge like a vulture, sucking on some alcoholic drink, his old wrinkled eyes getting red and slitty as he watches young meat file through the doorway. He likes chains and medallions and doesn’t believe in shirt buttons.
“You’re some kind of bad off, aren’t you, Lorraine?” I asked one night after her MAN left, his body clad in enough polyester to start a fire that would rival that of a rubber tire company. “I bet he couldn’t get it up with a crane.” My daddy was dying of lung cancer even as I was speaking, though we hadn’t gotten him diagnosed yet, and he let out with a laugh that set off a series of coughs that could have brought the house down.
“Don’t you have any respect?” Mama, Too asked, and I turned on her. I said, “Look, I am over thirty years old and my step-sister there is pushing forty. It isn’t like he can send me to my room and keep me from going to the prom. Besides,” I added and pointed to him, “he wasn’t respecting me when he and Mama were out cutting up all over town, pickling their livers and getting emphysema while I was babysitting every night of the week to pay for my own week at Girl Scout camp, which I ended up hating with a passion anyway because it was run just like a military unit.”
What I didn’t tell her, though, (what I’ve never told anyone) is that going to Girl Scout camp gave me my first taste of self-sufficiency. It had
nothing
to do with the actual camp, but was in my getting ready for it. I found stability in my little toiletries case: my own little personal bottles of shampoo and lotion.
My
toothbrush and
my
toothpaste. These smallest personal items represent independence, a sensation you need forever. Otherwise, you’re sunk. I liked having everything in miniature, rationed and hidden in my bag. For that week (the only way I made it through their bells and schedules) I was able to pull myself inward, to turn and flip until I was as compact as one of those little plastic rain bonnets. It was the key to survival, and it had nothing to do with the woods (though I’ll admit the birds were nice) or building a fire (I had a lighter). It had nothing to do with what leaves you could eat (I had enough Slim Jims along to eat three a day). It was my spirit that I had found. Of course I lost it the very next week once I was back home and doing as I pleased when I pleased, but I couldn’t forget the freedom, the power my little sack of
essentials
had brought me.
“You could have benefitted from the military,” Mama, Too said after I’d run down my career in the Girl Scouts. She was ready to spout on about her late great husband Hoover Mills and his shining military career. I told her his name sounded like an underwear or vacuum cleaner company.
“I have said it before,” I told her, “and I’ll say it again. I would never have a man of the church, and I would never have a man of the military. I don’t want anybody telling me what to do or inspecting me.” I emphasized this and looked at Mama, Too.
“Who’s to say they’d have
you?”
Lorraine said.
“I could have that old piece of crap who just left here if I wanted him,” I told her, and my daddy erupted in another phlegm fair, coughing and spewing and laughing.
“We are in love,” Lorraine informed me, and to this day I remind her of saying that. I remind her when Tim is standing close by so I can watch her writhe in anger. I remind her whenever we ride by the Holiday Inn. I’ll say, “Here to my left is the Holiday Inn, natural habitat of Lorraine’s former lover, the middle-aged crazed sleazo of the Cootie phylum, complete with synthetic nest and transplanted feathers.” Now whenever I say anything about Tim, the Soldier of UNfortune, she responds that same way: “I love him.” I miss not having my daddy there to choke out some good belly laughs. Those attacks always bought me enough time for my comeback.
“It’s easy to fall in love,” I always say, “easy as rolling off a log, or if I were Mama, Too’s boyfriend (a new one, just that fast!), easy as rolling off a hog.”
“I know your soul is in the devil’s hand,” Lorraine says. “You wouldn’t know love if it bit you.”
“Oh, yes I would and, oh, yes it has,” I say. “It’s easy to
fall in love. What’s hard is
living
with it. And if you can’t live with it, you’re better off without it.” I wanted to add that Mama, Too had done a fine job killing off love but I let it ride.
I’ve never gotten into all that love/hate rigamarole like some women do. If I want lots of drama, I’ll turn on my TV set. Any time of day you can turn on the tube and hear women talking about things they need to keep to themselves. I hear it when I go to the spa. There we’ll be, bitching about cellulite and sweating it out in a sauna, and somebody will start. She’ll talk about how her eye has been wandering of late, how her husband bores her, how he just doesn’t turn her on, nothing, zippo. “What do you do for a wandering eye?”
“See the ophthalmologist?” I ask. “Go down to the livery stable and get yourself some blinders?”
“Oh, be serious, Luci,” they say. “You DO like men, don’t you?” It’s amazing how whenever a woman is asked this question, other women get real uncomfortable while waiting for the answer. They check to make sure that no private parts are exposed for the wandering eye of a lesbian, which I am not. Still, I let them sweat it.
“I like men the same way I like people in general,” I say. “Some I do and some I don’t.”
“You know what we mean,” they say, and they all lean forward, more skin than swimsuits showing in this hot cedar box.
It’s like a gigglefest in that sauna anytime you go. Something about the heat makes everybody start talking sex and fantasy. I tell them that they need some hobbies, get a needlepoint kit, bake a loaf of bread. The truth of it all is that I’m ahead of my time. I have already figured out what I need to live a happy healthy life and I’m no longer out there on the prowl. If my life takes a swing and I meet Mr. Right and settle into a life of prosperity then so be it, and if I don’t then so be it. I’m in lover’s purgatory. I’ve seen hell and I’m content to sit here in all my glorious neutrality.
One woman who was all spread out in a tight chartreuse suit said that she had a stranger fantasy. She said (in front of seven of us) that she thought about meeting a man in a dark alley and just going at it, not a word spoken. Well, after she told that not a word was spoken for several minutes, and then I got to feeling kind of mad about it all and I said that I just didn’t think she ought to go touching a penis without knowing where it had been. “For health reasons,” I added, but by then there were six near-naked women mopping up the floor with laughter and that seventh woman (Ms. Stranger in Chartreuse) shaking her head back and forth like I was stupid.
I was desperately seeking once upon a time. I was unhappily married to a man who wanted me to be somebody I wasn’t and was forever making suggestions, like that I
get my ears pinned, that I gain some weight, that I frost my hair, learn to speak Spanish, get a job that paid better, pluck off all my eyebrows, let the hair on my legs grow, and take up the piano so that I could play in the background while he read the paper. Now where was my little sack of security then? I was buying the jumbo sizes of Suave shampoo so I could afford the frostings and the Spanish tapes and the row machine. My essentials were too big to hide from the world. I once knew a girl who went to lunch from her secretarial job and never came back. I knew another girl who woke up on her wedding day with bad vibes and just hopped a jet and left her parents with a big church wedding mess. I admired them both tremendously. I once told Lorraine she should take lessons from such a woman, and she and Mama, Too did their usual eye rolling. It wouldn’t surprise me if one day their eyeballs just roll on out like I’ve heard those of a Pekingese will do if you slap it hard on the back of the head.
Before I was married, I was a rock singer. I named my band The Psychedelic Psyches, you know after the chick Cupid liked. I saw us as soulful musicians, acting out some of our better songs with interpretive dance numbers. My parents called us The Psychedelic Psychos, which I did not appreciate. There were four of us in the band: I sang and played the drums; Lynn West, a tall thin brooding poet type, played the uke; Grace Williams, who was known for her peppy personality, could rip an accordion to shreds;
my friend Margaret played the xylophone and had a collection of cowbells she could do wonderful things with. We were just warming up on a local level when some jealous nothing type of a girl (someone like Lorraine) started calling us The Psychedelic Sapphos and spreading rumors about what we did in my GM Pacer, which we called “the band wagon.”