Self-Made Man (7 page)

This guy was like that, old enough to have gained some kind of relief from his urges, and now he was free to just like me for being a woman. Even if he didn't quite know I was a woman, his brain seemed somehow to have sniffed me out and responded accordingly. The thing was, in this context, of all places, the way he treated me made me
feel
like a woman—a girl actually, very young and cared for—and I wondered how that could have been possible if some part of him hadn't recognized me as such. It was unmistakable, and I never felt it with any other man I came into contact with as a man.

I felt something entirely different coming from the other men who thought I was a young man. They took me under their wings. Another older bowler had done this. Taking me aside between rounds, he tried to teach me a few things to improve my game. This was male mentor stuff all the way. He treated me like a son, guiding me with firm encouragement and solid advice, an older man lending a younger man his expertise.

This was commonplace. During the course of the bowling season, which lasted nine months, a lot of men from the other teams tried to give me tips on my game. My own teammates were constantly doing this, increasingly so as the season wore on. There was a tension in the air that grew up around me as I failed to excel, a tension that I felt keenly, but that seemed unrecognizable to the guys themselves. I had good frames, sometimes even good whole games, but I still had a lot of bad ones, too, and that frustrated us all.

At about the five-month mark, Jim began giving me pained looks when I came back to the table after a bad turn.

I'd say, “Okay, I'm sorry. I know I suck.”

“Look, man,” he'd say, “I've told you what I think you're doing wrong, and you don't listen or you get pissed off.”

“No, no,” I'd protest, “I'm really trying to do what you're saying. It just isn't coming out right. What can I do?”

I threw like a girl and it bugged me as much as it bugged them. If I told them the truth at the end of the season I didn't want them to have the satisfaction of saying, “Oh, that explains everything. You bowl like a girl because you
are
a girl.”

But their motivation seemed comically atavistic, as if it was just painful to watch a fellow male fail repeatedly at something as adaptive as throwing a boulder. Time was, the tribe's survival depended on it. This just seemed mandatory to them in some absurdly primal way.

As men they felt compelled to fix my ineptitude rather than be secretly happy about it and try to abet it under the table, which is what a lot of female athletes of my acquaintance would have done. I remember this from playing sports with and against women all my life. No fellow female athlete ever tried to help me with my game or give me tips. It was every woman for herself. It wasn't enough that you were successful. You wanted to see your sister fail.

Girls can be a lot nastier than boys when it comes to someone who stands in the way of what they want. They know where to hit where it'll hurt the most, and their aim is laser precise. One summer when I was a maladjusted teenager, I went to a tennis camp in New Jersey that catered largely to rich princesses and their male counterparts. Most of them couldn't really play tennis on more than a country-club level. Their parents had sent them there to get rid of them. They just stood around most of the time posing for one another, showing off their tans. But I'd had a lot of private coaching in tennis by that time, and my strokes were fairly impressive for my age. I took the tennis pretty seriously.

As for posing, I looked like I'd been raised by wolverines.

The instructors used to videotape each of us playing, so that they could go over the tapes with us and evaluate our techniques. One day, my particular class of about twenty girls was standing around the television watching the tape, and the instructor was deconstructing my serve. He'd had a lot of negative things to say about most of the other girls' serves, but when it came to mine, he raved unconditionally, playing my portion of the tape over and over again in slow motion.

At this, one of the prettiest girls in the group, no doubt exasperated by the repetition, said, loudly enough for everyone to hear: “Well, I'd rather look the way I do and serve the way I do than serve the way she does and look the way she does.”

Now that's female competitiveness at its finest.

But with these guys and with other male athletes I've known it was an entirely different conflict. Their coaching reminded me of my father's, whose approach to fatherhood had always been about giving helpful, concrete advice. It was how he showed his affection for us. It was all bound up in a desire to see us do well.

These guys' attentions were like that: fatherly. And it really surprised me coming from members of opposing teams, since this was, after all, a money league. But they seemed to have a competitive stake in my doing well and in helping me to do well, as if beating a man who wasn't at his best wasn't satisfying. They wanted you to be good
and then
they wanted to beat you on their own merits. They didn't want to win against a plodder or lose to him on a handicap.

But my game never got consistently better. I'd have good frames now and then, but mostly I hovered around an average of 102 and learned to swallow it. So did the guys. They knew I was trying my best, and that was all that really mattered to them. As with everything else a little odd or off about me, they accepted my clumsiness with a shrug of the shoulders, as if to say: “That's just how some guys are. What are you gonna do?”

I guess that's what I respected about those guys the most. I was a stranger, and a nerd, but they cut me all the slack in the world, and they did it for no other reason that I could discern than that I was a good-seeming guy who deserved a chance, something life and circumstance had denied most of them.

 

I could never have predicted it, but part of me came to really enjoy those nights with the guys. Their company was like an anchor at the beginning of the week, something I could look forward to, an oasis where nothing would really be expected of me. Almost every interaction would be entirely predictable, and the ones that weren't were all the more precious for being rare.

When somebody opened up to me suddenly, like when Jim confided how much he loved his wife and how much it hurt him when the doctor told him that the best he could hope for was to see her alive in a year, or when Bob smiled at me playfully after teasing me over a toss, it touched me more deeply than my female friends' dime-a-dozen intimacies ever did. These were blooms in the desert, tender offerings made in the middle of all that guy talk.

I'd never made friends with guys like that before. They had intimidated me too much, and the sexual tension that always subsists in some form or another between men and women had usually gotten in the way. But making friends with them as a man let me into their world as a free agent and taught me to see and appreciate the beauty of male friendships from the inside out.

So much of what happens emotionally between men isn't spoken aloud, and so the outsider, especially the female outsider who is used to emotional life being overt and spoken (often over-spoken), tends to assume that what isn't said isn't there. But it is there, and when you're inside it, it's as if you're suddenly hearing sounds that only dogs can hear.

I remember one night when I plugged into that subtext for the first time. A few lanes over, one of the guys was having a particularly hot game. I'd been oblivious to what was happening, mourning my own playing too much to watch anyone else. It was Jim's turn, and I noticed that he wasn't bowling. Instead he was sitting down in one of the laneside chairs, just waiting. Usually this happened when there was a problem with the lane: a stuck pin, or a mis-set rack. But the pins were fine. I kept watching him, wondering why he wasn't stepping up to the line.

Then I noticed that all the other bowlers had sat down as well. Nobody was taking his turn. It was as if somebody had blown a whistle, only nobody had. Nobody had said anything. Everyone had just stopped and stepped back, like in a barracks when an officer enters the room.

Then I realized that there was one guy stepping up to the lane. It was the guy who was having the great game. I looked up at the board and saw that he'd had strikes in every frame, and now he was on the tenth and final frame, in which you get three throws if you strike or spare in the first two. He'd have to throw three strikes in a row on this one to earn a perfect score, and somehow everyone in that hall had felt the moment of grace descend and had bowed out accordingly. Everyone, of course, except me.

It was a beautiful moment, totally still and reverent, a bunch of guys instinctively paying their respects to the superior athleticism of another guy.

That guy stepped up to the line and threw his three strikes, one after the other, each one met by mounting applause, then silence and stillness again, then on the final strike, an eruption, and every single guy in that room, including me, surrounded that player and moved in to shake his hand or pat him on the back. It was almost mystical, that telepathic intimacy and the communal joy that succeeded it, crystalline in its perfection. The moment said everything all at once about how tacitly attuned men are to each other, and how much of this women miss when they look from the outside in.

After it was over, and all the congratulations had died down, Jim and Bob and Allen and I all looked at each other and said things like “Man, that was incredible,” or “Wow, that was something.” We couldn't express it in words, but we knew what we'd just shared.

 

I'd been playing a part with these guys for months, being Ned, the walk-on. Of course, he had it easy in a way, because everything was on the surface. Nobody knew him and he didn't really know anybody else. He was mostly quiet—listening, recording, trying not to say the wrong thing, trying not to give himself away—and that put a barrier between him and his environment. Despite the masculine intimacy that enveloped the evening, the guys and I were really only amenable strangers warming our hands together for a while over the few things we had to say to each other: the odd fag joke or tall tale of glory days, the passing home improvement reference, and of course the ritual dissection of
Sunday Night Football
and the ongoing hockey season. Nothing mysterious really. The usual stuff that guys find convenient to say when nobody's giving anything away.

So, after having bowled with these guys every Monday night for six months, I gave something away. I just decided one night that it was time to tell them.

But how to do it? I didn't know. I was wary, uncertain about how to come clean. I couldn't anticipate how they'd react. I had visions of myself running down the middle of the town's main street with my shirt ripped off at the shoulder and a lynch mob chasing me with brickbats and bowling balls in hand.

Fortunately, that night, Jim presented me with the perfect opportunity. He asked me what I was doing after we finished, something he'd never done before, so I took a chance and asked him to have a drink with me. He was the most accessible of the bunch, and I figured getting him alone and telling him first would give me a sense of how to proceed, if at all.

We went to his favorite haunt, a biker bar not far from the trailer park where he lived. When we sat down at the bar I told him he should order a shot of whatever would relax him the most, because he was going to need it.

“I think I'm about to blow your mind,” I said.

“I doubt it,” he said. “Just about the only thing you could say that would blow my mind is if you told me that your girfriend was really a man and you were really a woman.”

“Well,” I said, stunned by his exactitude, “you're half right.”

“Okay,” he said slowly, peering at me skeptically. “In that case, I'll have a blackberry brandy, with a beer back.”

“Actually,” I said, “you might want two. I'm buying.”

He downed the first and ordered another. I wasn't sure if he was spooked or just taking advantage of the freebies. Knowing him, probably the latter, not that I was the big spender or anything. At that bar you could get good and ripped for ten dollars.

When he'd wiped the vestiges of the second shot off his lips, I started in.

“Jim,” I said, “you were right. I'm not a guy. I'm a woman.”

“Shut up, asshole,” he said. “C'mon, really. What did you want to tell me?”

“No. That's really it. I'm a woman. Look,” I said, “I'll show you my driver's license if you don't believe me.”

I pulled it out of my wallet and put it into his hand. He looked at it for a second, then said, “That doesn't even look like you.”

He shoved it back into my hand. “Besides, you can fake those easy.”

“I swear, Jim, it's not a fake. That's me. My name is Norah, not Ned.”

“Shut up,” he said again. “Why are you doing this to me? I mean, I gotta hand it to you, if this is a joke, it's a good one. You got me, but a joke's a joke.”

“It's not a joke, Jim.”

He shook his head and took a big gulp of his beer.

“Okay, look,” I said. “I'll show you every card in my wallet, including my social security card. They all have the same name on them.”