Self-Made Man (32 page)

And what was his Achilles' heel? Pussy, of course. “The fight,” he said, “is about pussy.” Protecting it. Possessing it. Needing it. That was his whole life right there.

This guy was angrier than any guy I met in those meetings. He just stewed wherever he sat, as if the demons were so strong in him that he was afraid to move.

The rage and the pain were consuming and they were colored by the imposition of a masculine role, a role whose blatant symbolism Paul had had us draw on paper and thereby expose as the crude crayon scrawling that it was.

That was the lesson in the exercise. Drawing your hero wasn't quite as dumb as it sounded. You weren't reinforcing an idiotic image of yourself as the man god. You were drawing your cartoon self and exposing it as such, then tearing it apart for good measure. You were learning to stop being a straitjacketed man, bouncing off other men's manhood, and trying instead to be a person who could respond to the world without scripts of conflict or defense already written in your head.

It was different for every guy, and that is what Paul had really meant that first night when he'd spoken so assertively about the ego. Each man's journey of self-discovery was his own. He had to do it himself, to know and to actualize himself from the inside out or be lost altogether. It was his alienation from himself, his capitulation to “masculinity,” that had led him into despair in the first place. Respecting his own and another man's ego wasn't about walking around puffed up and pugnacious, every man a king among kings. It was about treading lightly around the other man's singular vulnerability, being present and available for contact, but not intrusive. It meant that it might be possible to look another man in the eye without intending to fuck or kill him.

 

The spirit dance happened on Saturday night. It was the pinnacle of the weekend, or it was supposed to be. It was the time when you were meant to enact and thereby resolve or dispel all the buried conflicts you had unearthed over the previous day and a half.

This was where the weapons came in. This was where guys like the bereft businessman chopped up their wives, and where guys like Corey could playact the humiliations of their relationships and achieve at least a partial catharsis in the process. Over a Ping-Pong game late Saturday afternoon Corey had told me what he was planning for the dance.

“I think I'd like to have some of you guys pretend to be those other guys who are always hanging around my girlfriend. Maybe you could pretend to flirt with her and insult me and then I can work through this.”

I said I'd be glad to help.

I in turn told him what I was envisioning and asked him if he might help me. I asked Corey if he'd be willing to cut me.

Yes, you read it right. I asked him to cut me.

Even now just seeing those words on the page is hard. Explaining them is harder still.

Why, you may ask, after having spent the past few weeks worrying about whether these guys might attack me, would I then of all things turn around and invite one of them to cut me?

The answer is complicated.

By this point in the weekend, and in Ned's unraveling life, I was drowning in guilt and Paul was the focus of that guilt, partly because we had become closer, but mostly because he was the founder of the group. It was his baby, and in deceiving the group I felt that I was deceiving him the most. I suppose I would have asked him to cut me if part of me hadn't still been afraid that he might take me up on it. Corey was a safe substitute. Obviously there was a very skewed logic at work here, but I thought that if I paid some penalty, some physically painful penalty for lying to Paul and everyone else, then everything would be paid for, not just everything there in the group, but everything throughout the project.

The idea of undergoing pain at these men's hands had possessed me by then subconsciously, and it surfaced all at once in my conversation with Corey. Punishment was the thing I thought I needed to enact in the spirit dance. My ritual, my pseudohero's trial, was expiation. I suppose in a way it should come as no surprise that my envisioned penance took the form it did, since I had just spent three weeks in a monastery surrounded by icons of the tortured Christ. Like I said, once a Catholic always a Catholic.

The only history I had as a man was one of deceit, and with these guys it went deeper than anything before. Their safe space was carefully carved out, and I had found my way into it through a lie. I knew their secrets, albeit secrets that would remain anonymous in my telling of them and, with luck, bring perhaps some women and men closer to an understanding of one another's struggles. But, and this was something I had addressed directly with the monks since leaving the abbey, how do you reconcile genuine interpersonal connection and potentially valuable insights into human behavior with false pretenses?

At the time I couldn't reconcile them. Not without some grisly form of absolution, or so I thought.

Even as I was asking Corey to cut me I didn't realize how wacko this scenario had gotten in my mind, or how crazy it would sound coming out of my mouth.

“What?” Corey asked. “You want me to cut you for real?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I want you to take a knife and cut me slowly in stripes on my arms and legs until I tell you to stop.”

“Why would you want me to do that?”

“Because it's what I need to do. It's my conflict. I can't explain it any better than that. Isn't that what this thing is for?”

“Well, yeah,” he said, still incredulous, “but man, you don't wanna do that. I've felt a lot of physical pain in my life and believe me it doesn't do anything for you. It's just pain.”

“Where did all this pain come from?” I asked, trying then to steer the conversation away from the alarming request.

“Injuries, mostly from sports. I've had a lot of injuries. Man, pain is just pain, that's all. You don't need that.”

The two of us were like a travesty of man versus woman, standing there talking about pain in such opposing terms. He, a typically athletic guy whose relationship to the physical world had been smash-bang probably since junior high. Me, a typical female looking to turn abuse on herself.

Corey reminded me of guys I'd dated in college, football players especially, who had talked about the aggression and need for violent physical contact that the testosterone infusions of puberty had engendered in them. I thought, too, about the guys on MTV's reality program
Jackass,
or the teenage skateboarders you see on street corners, throwing themselves headlong into scrapes with concrete, testing the boundaries of physical space without fear.

Then I thought about self-mutilators—people who cut and burn themselves ritually—and how 70-some percent of them are women. Pain for them, and now apparently for me, was like a bath, a relief, a penalty paid and a release ensuing. I'd never cut myself before, or binged on cigarette burns, or anything like that. But now it seemed like the only way to free myself from the guilt. Talking about it this way with Corey, I guessed I was showing my colors. He thought I was really weird—as well he should have—a guy with a really odd relationship to pain.

I thought in this context about the guys who spoke about saving women, taking the pain so they wouldn't have to. Pain was something they took out of duty or in necessary conflict. Most often it was the by-product of something else entirely. But most women weren't expected to face pain to prove themselves. It was in us, part of our monthly cycle, our first fuck, our physical design to give birth, but it wasn't part of our outward cultural definition, never a mandatory rite of passage. Everybody has a relationship to pain. Too often women's is intimate and self-inflicted, and in extreme form, that is what mine became.

Though I didn't know it then, my time as Ned was ending prematurely. I had planned to go to the men's meetings for another few months, but what began as a fantastical notion of bloodletting in the woods became in the coming weeks a dangerous obsession with purgative torture. Asking Corey to cut me was just the start of that devolution.

I was losing it and Ned was coming with me.

But losing it, or at least going mildly ape was something guys had done before at retreats. That's part of what the retreats were for. Loss of control was something that Paul and the other retreat organizers had anticipated. They had taken steps to prevent serious injury. Giving sharp weapons to rage junkies was a disaster they knew enough to avoid.

Finding this out the way I did was rather funny in the end. The night of the spirit dance I painted my face black with charcoal from the fire. It was another form of cover and my own boyish jab at spooking it up for the dance, where all the ghosts and demons were meant to surface.

The men had cleared the dining room for the festivities and set up an array of African and other drums in the corners so that various members of the group could provide the soundtrack for the evening. The room was aglow. They had lit candles all around and turned out the overhead lights. It was then that I saw all the weapons and implements lying on the long dining table, which had been pushed up against the windows out of the way.

There are moments when the power of fantasy is brought up humiliatingly short by real life, and this was one of them. Big time. As I looked the table over I realized that all the spears and knives and other weapons I'd seen gleaming so beautifully menacing in my mind's eye were in fact made of plastic. Yes, plastic. They were toys. Toy Viking and conquistador helmets and breastplates and machine guns that went
rat-tat-tat
when you pulled their triggers. I couldn't believe it.

I had to laugh at myself. Here was the ultimate clash of consciousness, a bunch of boys playing war, and me wanting a butchering at their hands. I felt like a twisted babysitter. I had come to the retreat worried about what might happen to me, but with the possible exception of Paul and the wolverine guy, I was the most dangerous person there. The other guys were pussycats to a one.

As we assembled I saw that people were half dressed in various costumes. One of my group mates was wearing his commando pajamas, a kind of camouflage sweat suit he'd been wearing all weekend. Corey was wearing a short bathrobe, the top half of which he soon dribbled over the belt and let hang from his waist. He danced topless that way for much of the evening, as did many of the other guys. Gabriel had donned a tragic thespian mask and was scampering around the room in a crouch, cowering periodically behind chairs and other people like a dog trying to dodge a beating. One of the middle-aged guys was wearing nothing but off-white long-john bottoms. His cock and balls wiggled and dangled as he skipped around in circles to the sound of the drums, his pecs drooping and withered, a look of awkward concentration on his face.

My commando-pajamaed group mate picked up one of the plastic axes and spent a good ten minutes mock wanking with it between his legs, running an open fist furiously along the shaft, arching his back and falling to his knees in ecstasy at the climax.

He said later, “I wanted to get in touch with my balls and my orgasm—my cum.”

How original.

Corey eventually joined a small group of guys writhing together on the floor, half wrestling, grunting and groaning and throwing themselves around. Nobody dared throw anyone else around in this group. They were having a hard time letting go, and most of them would have been too scared of what such a gesture might unleash. At any given time five to ten different guys were off squatting in one of the corners, watching uncomfortably. Paul would go over periodically to shoo them out and they would move away reluctantly into the dance, only to peel off ashamedly into another corner to hide. The whole thing would have worked a lot better if we'd all gotten stoned beforehand or taken other hallucinogens, as native cultures often did and still do in such rituals. The whole idea was to get out of yourself and have a vision, but nobody here was going to do that sober, including me.

I sat cross-legged in one of the corners with a pair of bongos I'd picked up off the long table. As long as I was engaged in music making I figured I could remain outside the circle and watch. But before long it became clear that there would be no collective zenith in the dance, no fever pitch reached and passed. People grew tired and disappointed by revelation's failure to show.

Yet for me, revelation was showing even then. It already had at the Ping-Pong table with Corey, though I would understand it only later when I caught up with it. My conflict was happening to me without prompting and when I got home I would have it all out.

The spirit dance ended without fanfare. It wound down with a final group shout at the end, something we always did to cap off our biweekly meetings, gathering in a tight circle, joining hands, raising our hands and letting loose. At those times I could always hear my own voice higher than the rest, reedy and incongruent, beside but never quite joining the struck note.

The retreat finished the way the spirit dance had, uneventfully, with a quiet, mostly reflective breakfast on Sunday morning and a thankful parting of ways thereafter. I said nothing about myself to anyone.

 

I came back from the retreat with a host of accumulated feelings in tow. No one found me out and, of course, no one cut me. But the malaise inside me was still there and growing.