Real Man Adventures (18 page)

The First 48
is undoubtedly a man show. Other man shows include anything about prisons, anything about serial killers, motorcycles, garages, anything about major traumas and treating them in ERs and/or on life-flight helicopters. I don’t know a woman who watches
The First 48
. My wife refuses, thinks I very well might have a defect because I can watch it. Because I can even watch the same episode more than once, sometimes three times. As though there’s going to be a different outcome to the generally two (but sometimes one) murder cases per show. All senseless, none by accident, ever.

I have always loved shows like these, but
The First 48
is among the best, if not the very best. I am fascinated by that CLICK over to murder, the mechanism it requires, if that’s the word for it. When men (and it is 99 percent men) decide to give in to the rage and let
it rain down upon another, regardless of consequence. A second in exchange for the rest of one’s life. Not to mention somebody else’s.

I am filled with so much anger at certain times, or maybe it’s more like frustration initially, and the anger is just attendant, but either way I don’t know what to do with it sometimes, and it is so unexpected and inexplicable and during this latter part of my “journey” in life there have been a few times when I could
almost
see killing somebody in one of these rages. I don’t want or need to go into much detail, but there is a very bad man out there who at one time threatened the safety and well-being of my wife (and children) before I was in their lives. Sometimes I have dreams in which this man has invaded our house while I am away, and when I come home, he is assaulting my wife in our bedroom. I go to the safe and pull out a .38 revolver and then walk back to the bedroom and put the barrel to the side of his head. I tell him to get off of her, and when he doesn’t, I calmly pull the trigger. I have no problem doing it in my dream, and I’m not sure I’d have a problem doing it in real life either. I think sometimes it would be worth it, that second in exchange for the rest of my life. It’s certainly worth his life, extinguishing him so he cannot menace any of the several women he has plagued, and no doubt will continue to plague, over the years. It almost makes me want to cross paths with him, just to see what it would feel like. What I would do.

On
The First 48
, these perpetrators likewise believe in what they are doing in the moment. I feel their chemistry telling them it’s the right thing to do, the only thing to do. Sure, I like the lead-up, the first few hours after one of these guys clicks over and a body is found, neighborhoods are canvased, families are notified then
interviewed. But my favorite part of the show is once the homicide detectives get suspects into interrogation rooms. It is one of the most compellingly intimate moments between humans that I can think of. Sometimes guys will just crumble, they will want to get it off their chests like the detectives are telling them they should.
Yes, you can have a lawyer, of course you can and should, but I think you might feel better if you tell me your side of the story first, man
. These guys who have just ruthlessly murdered another human being or a handful of human beings merely hours before will just fucking disintegrate wet-toilet-paper-like before your eyes, will cry and blubber and spell out exactly what they did, how they grabbed the AK, turned off the headlights, turned up the block, got out of the car, and for almost a full minute sprayed the outside of a house belonging to somebody they had beef with, not knowing there were other kids inside, and mothers, daughters—a
family
—and that bullets would travel through THREE SEPARATE ROOMS and lodge in the brain of a kid sleeping in bed way on the other side of the house. Would also kill an eighteen-year-old who just happened to be spending the night on the front couch. But would spare the intended target he was beefing with (who ends up with a bullet merely nicking his calf).

I would be one of these guys; I would crumble because it would feel better to tell my side of the story like they say, and I will say I didn’t mean it (now), and that I’m sorry (now), and I don’t need a lawyer (now), and you might as well just go ahead and book me.

But then there are these other kinds of guys, guys like the one who drove up to his friend on the street and pulled out a pistol and just shot his friend in the face. He would peel off and his shot friend would lie bleeding in the street, and his sister would come out of
their house, and then he’d be dying in his sister’s arms, and he’d say to her through a mouthful of blood, “Fat… Fat… Fat… Chris…. Fat…,” and he will be essentially delivering a death-bed identification of his assailant. He will say, “Help me,” too, over and over, but soon he will die. And still that guy, Fat Chris, who it turns out is not really fat at all, will a few days later sit in that tiny interrogation room in his big jeans and big white T-shirt with a bag of Doritos and three bottles of water on the table in front of him, and he will angrily—like he is really being put out by these detectives—he will sit there and say,
Honestly, I swear to you I promise I have no idea what you are talking about, I wasn’t even there
, even though there are five or six witnesses who saw him, saw his gold Chrysler LeBaron at the scene, with gun flash blazing out of the driver’s side window. And when he finally concedes he was there but didn’t pull the trigger, has no idea who pulled the trigger, it came from behind him, so how was he supposed to know which of the three guys in the backseat of the car it was. And then the detective will be like,
I respect you and what you’re saying, but what if I told you that your friend didn’t die right away, and he said you were the one who shot him?
And Not-That-Fat Chris will sit back, legs planted wide, cross his arms theatrically, and shake his head and continue to insist it was not him, because he is convinced it was not him, not the him now sitting in front of the officers at least, and he is in fact quite broken up about his friend dying, had no so-called beef with his friend, instead only has beef with the cops who come around and bust up his neighborhood and pick people up for no reason when he’s not doing anything wrong.

In
The First 48
there is always the question of
Why
. Of motive. There is rarely an answer, confession or not, conviction or not.
When I am at my angriest, when I feel I could do the most damage, it turns out I am disgusted not with whom- or whatever I’m taking it out on. Surprise! I’m disgusted with myself. And that is why the dwarfy kid in the painting and the murderers on
The First 48
comprise the only company I’m fit for, the only company I deserve, at three in the morning in the dark on the couch, when I should instead be in bed lying next to (and if I’m lucky, holding) the last person I should take anything out on, ever, the same one I was so effectively and inexplicably making cry just a few hours before.

T
HE FIRST RULE OF
Man Club is: you do not talk about Man Club.

The second rule of Man Club is: you DO NOT talk about Man Club.

The only requirement for entry into Man Club is: you have a penis. Or look like you have a penis. Because why the fuck wouldn’t you?

In Man Club, almost every sentence initially uttered by or to a stranger ends with “man” or “buddy” or “bro.” Or, often in large cities with youthful, hip populations, “dude.” Like when you’re paying for something at a register, the cashier, if a member of Man Club, will hand you your change and receipt while saying, “Thanks, man.” Or at the end of a long kayak paddle with a friend, as you’re pulling boats out of the water, and another man is there
doing the same while waiting for his buddies to return with the trailer, he will holler over, “You want a shot of whiskey to top off your ride, bro?”

In Man Club, if you raise your voice and express anger about something, other members of the club actually pay attention and often respond favorably, even helpfully (when not aggressively). Like, if you are telling a contractor to stop pilfering electricity from an outlet on the side of your house, that it’s been two months of it, the utility bill is two hundred dollars higher than it usually is, and you think you’ve been pretty fucking understanding and accommodating thus far, but when the
fuck
are you going to set up your own goddam power line so you can run your entire construction site off your own utility bill? After this tirade, another member of Man Club who is within earshot will, as you walk away demanding, “Fix it,” through a clenched jaw, scamper out of your path and ask, “Do you want me to move my car, man? Is it in your way?” even though his car is not in your way and has nothing to do with what you were yelling about in the first place.

In Man Club, you really do talk about sports with strangers when at a loss for conversation. Like if you are waiting for your wives forever outside the changing room at H&M, and the Yankees are playing, the man next to you will ask the score, like, of course you would know the score, but you don’t know the score or even that the Yankees are playing, because you don’t really care about the Yankees until the playoffs—and nominally at that, so you diddle around on your smart phone until you find the score so you can dutifully report it back and then discuss what an A-hole A-Rod is and whether he’s even worth it.

In Man Club you pretend your wife would be okay with your going to a place called the Mouse’s Ear, and as soon as you walk into a place like that—or maybe it’s called Panty Raid, or let’s be honest, it’s called the Cooter Ball—everybody there (everybody NOT a member of Man Club, that is), without fail, calls you “baby” and occasionally “cutie” (even if you’re a troll). Like if it’s slow and the middle of the afternoon and after one of her dances, the prettiest of the girls—Lisa, a dental insurance salesperson when she’s not doing this—will come over to your table, squeeze your shoulder, lean in close, and whisper, “Mind if I sit here? I don’t like to sit alone.” And you will be overly polite, half stand up, and pull out a chair for her, and you will order yourself a Coke and Lisa a Red Bull (no ice) when the cocktail waitress comes around and prompts you, because you hadn’t thought to do it yourself. And then the two of you will sit there in silence, only nominally watching one of the other girls who is presently dancing on the tiny stage in the middle of the mirrored room, where she is working twice as hard as Lisa was, as she is two times less attractive. And you and Lisa, plus the three other (much older) men in the joint, with various girls at their tables, will sit there in the dark and watch and listen and put a few dollars into garters or panties and pretend that it’s not completely fucked up that half a dozen girls are taking turns removing their clothes and spreading their legs to reveal their vaginas and assholes to complete strangers. As a privileged member of Man Club in good standing, this is all perfectly normal, merely a logical extension of a rigid hierarchy of which you inhabit the top tier, and if you feel otherwise, if you feel that there is in fact nothing even remotely
sexy
about it, in fact find it more
sad
than
sexy
, then another basic tenet of Man Club
states that you do not betray it. So you will keep sitting there beside Lisa, and you will not feel the need to say anything about yourself, although she will eventually, because there is just something about you, tell you how she got into the dental insurance industry, how she fell into stripping, then stopped stripping when she got married, how she started up again as soon as she got separated (“while I’m young and my body’s still good”). How she drives two hours to get here because if anybody at work found out she’d be fired, and she will, finally, right before she has to go up onstage again, tell you how she met her husband here at this very table seven years ago—and how one night a few months ago she came home one day after work at the dental insurance company and he and his things were just gone.

In Man Club, you talk about women in a way only members of Man Club talk about women. A handful of “down” straight women
¹
and a whole slew of butch lesbians out there think they talk about women with men the way men talk about women with other men, but trust me: men talk about women that way ONLY WITH OTHER MEN. Among these two types of women and members of Man Club there may be a momentary performance of, like, We’re so grooving on this funny, mutual understanding we have about women and their crazy peccadilloes. But that is
nothing
like how men actually talk about women with other men. It is something else entirely, it can’t quite be named really, because to be frank, it is that deeply embedded in the human condition. But it does have something to
do with a baseline, foundational understanding that you are simply a DIFFERENT SPECIES from women, and that alone brings you together no matter what other surface differences may be present, and every man knows exactly what I’m talking about, except maybe obviously and openly gay men, who don’t necessarily talk about women the way women are talked about by members of Man Club.

Like when I am doing hours of manual labor in 95-degree humid heat with a hillbilly fellow named Vinton who’s helping me build raised beds and stone walls for my wife to plant a garden in our backyard, and Vinton and I are sweeping back and forth across a five-acre, three-foot-high grass-covered field for hours, snakes coiled and ready to strike at any movement, maggots and ant colonies roiling under every rock we overturn, as we locate, excavate, and then haul something like three tons of Paleolithic-era stone chunks of varying sizes and shapes, and at some point the ancient owner of the property drives up in his giant Ford F-250 and agrees to let me pay $200 for all those tons, but first he says, “You might want to run a small load by the home front to make sure the missus is happy before you haul all that stone,” and the corner of his lip curls up a little as he sets down on the tailgate of my truck. He has a CHOOSE LIFE specialty license plate with a big smiling infant face affixed to his pickup, I mean, you really have to have some serious feelings about a lady’s right to have an abortion to go to the DMV and select the pro-life license plate and pay extra for it and then wait for it to arrive because they usually take a little longer, all those save-the-whatever specialty plates. And he knows from my plates I’m not from around here, and we likely have just about the most divergent political, social, and religious viewpoints two individuals can have,
and yet here we are, bonding implicitly over this one area, the biggest area there is in fact, the oldest one on record, so old it’s probably illustrated clearly on the walls of Chauvet Cave in France—the one that says we are on top, even though sometimes we pretend not to be on top, like when we run a couple different hues of stone by our wives before we haul it: the purpleish, or the rust-colored ones, dear?