 | |  | |  | |  | |  | |  | |  | |  | |  | |  | |  | | |
Understanding the Showdown between the two sides of an American Man's Personality
by
Mark Leyner, freelance writer, family man
Origiinally published in O Magazine, June 2005
even know who that person is lying beside her in bed
or sitting across from her at some restaurant.
There’s a terribly misleading myth in our culture that
men – as psychological entities – are solid,
unyielding, and immutable, and that, conversely,
women are more fluid and amenable to change.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Just look at old
yearbook photos. There’s Jane – student council
president, literary magazine editor, varsity swim team,
beaming with ebullient optimism and self-confidence.
And now here’s a photo of Jane in the business
section of today’s newspaper. Why, look, she’s the
CEO of some obscenely successful company. She
hasn’t changed at all. She’s the same old Jane –
beaming with ebullient optimism and self-confidence.
Let’s peruse the yearbook again. There’s Dick,
president of the Chess Club, founder of the Origami
Society, lettered in lacrosse… Now look at that
newspaper. Isn’t that Dick’s photo, accompanying the
article “Deranged Psycho Goes on Shooting Spree in
Upstate Mall”? Dick’s changed.
Just this morning in The New York Times there was
an article about Richard J. Roach, a blustery, hot-
tempered Republican district attorney and vaunted
antidrug zealot who would brag about the draconian
sentences he’d wring from juries down there in
Roberts County, Texas. And what became of this real-
life Dick? He ended up dosing himself with Levitra
and injecting methamphetamine in the presence of
his office secretary (who was wearing a wire).
Government officials had also been investigating him
for pornography and weapons possesion. Roach’s
explanation? “I just sort of… went nuts.”
Men are going nuts all the time. Men are in a
perpetual state of repentance, rehabilitation, and
recidivism. And I really don’t think most women
understand that.
There are such wildly contradictory impulses and
exigencies tearing at American males that they are
rent asunder and fragmented from boyhood on.
self-reliance that reaches its peak in Sergio Leone’s
spaghetti Westerns, in which the evasion of
heterosexual entanglements and indulgences imbues
the rootless loner with mystical heroism. No love
given, none sought. This is presented to the American
boy as the exemplary American man.
But as we get older, we realize that we need other
people. We need abiding relationships. And we crave
them with gnawing desperation. And men, whose
whole raison d’etre as Paleolithic punks had been
fierce and fecund and unattached, start unraveling.
The forces at work are too polar, too magnetically
repellant. The center won’t hold. So we lurch. This is
why the same guy could be lovingly paring the crust
from his 11 year-old daughter’s French toast at 8:30
am and shooting up methamphetamine and Levitra
with his secretary at 9:30. He’s both these men. And
neither. Rock stars solve their aversion to all this
midlife melodrama by self-immolating before the age
of 30. And when they don’t, it can get ugly. Just look at
poor Paul McCartney’s performance at the Super Bowl
halftime show. Suddenly in the middle of the majestic
“Live and Let Die,” McCartney unadvisedly decides to
get up off his piano stool and rock out, attempting
some arthritic pirouette that makes everyone wince.
Old Delta bluesmen know better than this. They just
sit down and play, their dignified power and heavy
sexual vibe undiminished by their canny recumbence.
But for that moment, Sir Paul had no idea who or
where he was.
This happens to men all the time. Each and every
morning when I wake up and look in the mirror, I see
the eyes of this boy who’s enveloped in the body of his
kidnapper, a boy who’s been forced to joyride with
some lunatic and then dumped onto the side of
road… who looks around, befuddled, wondering How
the hell did I get here?
For men, there’s not even the semblance of a unified,
fully integrated, coherent self until dotage or near
death. It’s like that final scene in horror movies, where
the expiring monster’s face morphs into the good,
innocent, original face of the afflicted protagonist.
Until then, the man you strive to understand is an
unhinged, dissociative, amorphous, inchoate, radically
unstable composite whose molecules are so far apart
that you can put your hand right through him, as if
impaling some preening nebula.
