Not Exactly What I Had in Mind (10 page)

Three hundred crack-shot boys and girls aged seven to fourteen, amid shushed adult spectators and under the hovering supervision of Jaycees and Daisy people, spent the weekend of the Fourth of July at the International BB Gun Championship matches, firing thousands, of just-right BBs from guns costing thirty dollars apiece. The guns, modified by coaches, were all but silent. The BBs floated softly, sometimes failing to go through the thin silver-dollar-sized cardboard targets. A quiet, flawless, slow-moving BB is a highly accurate BB.

The afternoons that weekend in Tennessee were devoted to what the sponsors called recreation. I thought BB-shooting itself was supposed to be recreation. “We want this to be a total experience,” said the Daisy man. “We care about the human being.” Maybe some group ought to run an International Total Experience Championship.

A lot of parents I know refuse to let their kids have any kind of toy guns. I think that’s repressive. The first time my son saw his older cousin Stuart’s BB gun, his eyes took on a glow. My daughter, who will try her hand at anything, could take Stuart’s BB gun or leave it alone, but she could shoot it straight. It turns out that in competition girls tend to be better BB shots than boys. They are said to relax easier. Maybe they don’t dwell upon the overtones involved.

If I had spent as much of my childhood studying French as I did shooting a BB gun, I would have been prepared to go directly from grammar school to Paris and open a shop. I wasn’t picky about my BBs; in fact I would dig them out of trees and shoot them again. I had a Red Ryder carbine, unmodified except for various dents and rust spots and the cocking mechanism’s tendency to jam. This malfunction probably developed from my fondness for pulling the trigger with the cocking lever open, causing the lever to whang shut violently. I don’t know why that gave me such satisfaction, but it did. When fired properly my gun went
punh
and sometimes shot true enough to puncture the chicken-pie tin or knock over the cylindrical cardboard BB container I was aiming at. I pretended I was a pioneer shooting at Indians. My politics, I realize now, were crude.

I even engaged in a couple of group BB-gun battles. These mostly entailed creeping around in the woods, but it was considered fair, if you were careful, to shoot another participant in the behind. This stung, and seemed wrong as we did it, and worked off forever my desire to shoot somebody like in the movies. My friend Francis Rowe once shot his BB gun at a blue jay and it actually fell from the tree and landed at our feet. We felt abruptly grave, and I think even briefly discussed religion. I had shot at squirrels and blue jays to scare them out of our fig tree, but had never actually
hit
one. The blue jay wasn’t dead yet. My friend tried to get me to end its misery — it was staring in our direction — but I couldn’t. Finally he did. I haven’t shot at a bird since, except some ducks near Waco, Texas, with a shotgun. To clean the freshly shot ducks, we cut them open from the tail end, gave them a fling while holding on to their necks, and then reached up into the body cavity to pull out the guts. It felt red-hot in there. I haven’t shot at anything living since then. Once I went goose-hunting, and had a good time, and fired when everyone else did, and got a kick out of firing, but I didn’t aim at anything — certainly not geese.

And if I ever saw my kids shooting other kids in the pants I would, of course, be horrified and move to stop them, as my parents would have done if they had seen me. So it is not in the interest of wild gunplay that I decry the International BB Gun Championship. I decry it because it seems like the kind of thing a kid would want to escape from, not into. A great many of the things that seemed tome most worth doing as a child were things of which an adult, had one been watching me do them, would have said, “What do you want to do
that
for?” and I wouldn’t have answered.

Throwing mud clods is actually more fun, and better exercise, than shooting BBs. Why not an International Mud Clod Throwing Championship? One reason is that nobody sells mud clods, but I don’t begrudge the Daisy people — who made my Red Ryder and whose name is nice — their promotional interest in this event.

I just don’t see what value there is in it for the shooters. I don’t see why a kid would want to go hang around with a bunch of Jaycees under carefully controlled conditions, for the sake of precisely quantified and certified target scores, when he could be out somewhere by himself or with friends shooting at a bird, actually hitting it, looking the bird in the eye with a wild surmise, regretting it all, and learning something. And not knowing what, exactly.

“As Men, What Do We Think We Need from Women, How Does What We Say We Need Coincide with or Differ from What We
Really
Need?”

I
HAVE LOOKED DEEPLY
into my heart on this one, and then looked quickly away. I hate looking deeply into my heart. It’s like looking deeply into my filing system. Or my garage. There are interesting things in my garage — just for starters, three chickens walking around loose — but you wouldn’t ever want to go in there and try to sort them all out.

But here is what I am inclined to believe. Just speaking for myself. I am inclined to believe that I don’t need the same things from all women. What I need from the woman I hand my dirty shirts to is not what I need from an ideal wife, say. What I need from the woman I hand my dirty shirts to is no starch and on hangers. I hate starch. But employees of laundering concerns tend to say to themselves, “Well, he probably doesn’t mean ‘no starch’ like, you know,
no
starch. He probably means ‘not a whole lot of starch.’ But I think he’ll look perkier with, oh, about a pound and a half of starch.”

On hangers I can usually get, but no starch is like pulling teeth. Incidentally, I had a woman dentist when I was a boy. How many of your so-called new males can make that claim? I liked the way her fingers tasted.

What I need from an ideal wife — well, I should mention that I have been pretty busy myself lately trying to remember what it was that I was trying to think of a couple of weeks ago, because I have the feeling I am about ready to think of it now if I could only remember what it was. Also, I have been tied up with all the consideration I’ve been devoting to the idea of doing something about my filing system.

What I need from an ideal wife is for her to go into my mind …

No, that is asking too much. Say you are an ideal husband. Can you imagine what it would be like to go into your actual wife’s mind? You’d be saying, “What is this pile of stuff over here?”

And she would be saying, “Oh, well, that’s just — never mind, I’ll go through that later.”

“You
say
you will, but … Okay, what is this cruddy old dingbat here? Let’s throw it out.”

“Cruddy! No! I want to keep that.”

“Why? What possible use could you have for it?”

“Well, I’m fond of it. It’s … you know.”

“I
don’t
know. What
is
it?”

“Well, it’s … my idea of you.”

“What!?”

What I need from an ideal wife is for her to go into my filing system … No, that is asking too much.

What I need from an ideal wife is for her to go into the garage (there!) and sort everything out. (She was the one who wanted chickens.) Let me put it this way: I am not holding my breath. Except when I get too close to the garage.

Which brings up something that men may reasonably expect from women: that they smell better than men. By that, I mean that they have a higher sense of smell. In a recent study at the University of Pennsylvania, women on the average outperformed men in odor identification tests at all ages. So why am I always the one who is finally driven to empty the Kitty Litter?

Of course if one’s wife’s olfaction were more ideal, then one’s own effluvium might have to be. I don’t know that any Ivy League school has done a study on this, but I think it is generally accepted that men tend to reek more than women do, on the average. Isn’t that just like nature? Making one sex smell worse and the other more acutely?

What does nature
want,
anyway?

Mind you, I’m not saying it’s women’s fault. In fact I’m …

Wait a minute.

Wait a minute; wait a minute.

Am I being sandbagged here? I thought it was sexist to suggest that men need anything in particular from women that they don’t need from men. I thought what a liberated woman was supposed to say when a man asked her to go upstairs and come down wearing nothing, but a pair of fluffy pink house shoes was, “Because I’m a woman, right? Get your friend Ed to do it.” I thought a person was a person now.

On second thought, however, I guess things have lately come around to the point where men don’t always have to be skittish about saying something that discriminates. If you ask me, a lot of the credit for that should go to President and Mrs. Reagan. I know I find it very hard to think of either one of them in terms of, you know, a person, as such.

So, what the heck. If I’m out of line here, tell me. (That last sentence is a good example of something men say to women that doesn’t coincide closely with what men think they really need.) But here’s what I think:

What men really need is for women to have more sense than men do.

Let me give you an illustration. A man is sitting home staring off into space, of an evening, and all of a sudden he springs up, slaps his head, and exclaims to his significant other (who is, I don’t know, knitting, whittling, restructuring a holding company):

“Hey! I’ve got it! Wouldn’t it be a neat idea if I invented this magnetic chemical so strong that a tiny drop of it in Cincinnati would attract a freight train all the way from Dayton? And then I could develop a piping system whereby we could pipe this chemical beneath all the streets of Moscow — see, the great thing is, the Russians have all their radar pointing
up
— so we could sit down at the negotiating table and kind of lean back in our chairs for a minute or two, smiling and listening to all their rantings, and then we could shift forward suddenly, with narrowed eyes, and snap: ‘Can it. Here’s the deal. You come to your senses and drop all this Communist malarkey right now, and give us Cuba back. Or else.’

“And the Russians sputter for a minute and then they get very still and say, ‘Or else what?’

“And we smile again. And lean back in our chairs again. And say, in this casual tone, ‘Ohhh, or else we will open the little pores in the pipes that at this moment are in place beneath all the streets of your capital city, thereby releasing this magnetic chemical that is so strong it will pull you, by the nails in your shoes,
down into the earth
up to about mid-calf level the minute you set foot out of the Kremlin.
Then
try to keep some kind of crazy godless economy afloat.’

“Wouldn’t that be neat?”

Okay.

What this man
thinks
he needs from this woman is for her to answer, “Yes, dear, I suppose so.”

No, I take that back. What he
thinks
he needs from her is for her eyes to sparkle as she answers, breathily, “Oooo,
yes!”

What he
says
he needs from her is for her to give him some thoughtful, objective feedback on this thing.

What he
really
needs is for her to say, “No.”

Why?

Not because a man (or a woman) needs the consolation of saying to himself/herself, “There is no telling how far I could go if it weren’t for Ms. [Mr.] Cold Light of Dawn over here.”

But rather because a man needs for a woman to help him understand the limitations of “Get them by the balls and their hearts and minds will follow.”

There may also be something along those lines that a woman needs from a man. But I haven’t sorted it out yet.

Come, my Arthur, finish up

With that saucer and that cup.

Now that I’m a realtor,

I’m not moody anymore.

Elbow-deep in suds you stand,

Art, my sweet dish-doing man.

Now that we have traded roles,

Let us haste to merge our souls.

You’re in housework, I’m in houses.

Ev’ry move you make arouses

Me to seize the fruits of love.

Come, peel off your rubber glove,

Then — no, no, forget the laundry.

Turn the lights down, play an Andre

Kostelanetz tape, and we’ll

Close our new domestic deal.

When from aerobic exercise you rise,

You are no fairer, Jane, nor am I fonder.

For what I love in you is not your thighs

But how your forehead wrinkles when you ponder.

Other women may have higher pectoral

Development and glutei more taut.

They lack your expertise on the electoral

College and the state of modern thought.

And when you raise a complex current issue,

You’re always penetrating, always apt.

The times I want most eagerly to kiss you

Are when in chess I find you’ve got me trapped.

The books that I can’t fathom, Jane, you memorize.

I never
get
the jokes
you
think are cheap.

You scoff at films that dazzle my poor dimmer eyes,

And now you’ve learned Italian in your sleep.

So though I’m glad you limber up your frame, dear,

The thing that makes me hurtle through the ozone

Like Santa Claus behind his merry reindeer

Is just to see your mind without its clothes on.

Bob, if I were twenty-four

Maybe I’d be charmed by your

Tendency to hint around.

But I doubt it. I have found,

In fullness of maturity,

That whatsoever’s said to me

Might just as well be said outright,

Right now — a modern woman’s quite

Prepared to hear what modern men

May have in mind. So try me; then