By MICHAEL J. VAUGHN
The three of us--Saduharu, Big D and I--were sitting around the Twin Creeks clubhouse in Sunnyvale after a game of softball, chewing on pizza and talking about women. Big D, two years removed from a nasty divorce, was complaining about his current girlfriend.
"You know I love Lucinda--she's about the best thing I've ever run into--but why now? She's really pushing for us to get more serious, and I can't blame her 'cause it's been a year now, but you know? I just got off that boat."
"More like you were thrown off," I said.
"Exactly," said D, laughing. "I don't know what to tell her."
We mulled over D's problem for a few more minutes, then proceeded into the usual detailed analysis of our softball team.
"Well, you know, one thing's for sure: Cool Papa has really taken hold at third."
"Cool Papa can do anything," I said, "once he puts his mind to it. And he's the only human being on Earth who can dive like that."
"Sometimes I think he's a hovercraft," said D.
Then Saduharu cut in, apropos of nothing. "What'm I gonna do about Sherry?" he asked, raising his palms in despair. "We've been together a year now, and she knows I'm nuts about her, but she just can't get over that pinhead who screwed her over a couple years ago. I really want to get more serious, but all she thinks about is job, job, job."
Picking up the last pepperoni from my plate, it struck me that not only were my friends on opposite sides of the same issue, but they were completely unaware of the fact, each so penned in by his own troubles that he couldn't notice that the other guy's girlfriend was in exactly the same position.
The overriding irony, of course, is that a trio of sweaty, pizza-chewing, softball-playing guys like us weren't supposed to be having this kind of conversation at all. Thanks in large part to the great sitcom hacks of Hollywood, much of the public sorts men into two neat categories: the bead-wearing, hippy-dippy New Age dude who is fond of phrases like "space" and "inner child," and the more Midwestern, meat-eating type who responds to the words "I love you" by hitching up his pants, grunting and switching the TV to ESPN.
In reality, what many of us do is sit around in garages, outside of cafes and in pizza parlors, trying to figure women out, using real words and trying to hold onto our male identities while avoiding the verbal equivalent of scratching ourselves in public.
Anal Man (so named for his annoying talent for organization) has shared a twice-monthly ritual with me for years. We meet at Coffee Society in Cupertino, get wired up on double cappuccinos and analyze the female gender in excruciating detail, including all the important parts: the psyche, the breasts, the personality, the carriage, the eyes, etc., etc.
A typical passage:
"Met this beautiful Korean girl at a poetry reading last night. A little intimidated by all the bohemians, but she seemed real nice, and you could tell the lights were on upstairs. Her friend tells me she's a little neurotic but fed up with the yuppie lifestyle, and I said, 'Hey, nobody comes to a poetry reading unless they're a little neurotic. I'm a little neurotic.'"
"And her body?"
"Sort of flat up top, but a great little ass. High-toned and kinda perky, you know?"
"O-o-oh, yeah."
That's us: connoisseurs to cavemen in the blink of an eye.
There's a particular nuance of these conversations that might provide a good summarizing image for this hybrid nature of ours. Coffee Society is a hangout for De Anza College students, and so, having long ago passed the age where we worry about being dirty old men (we are), we do a lot of window shopping. Anal Man may be discussing something as mature and high-minded as Susan Sarandon's talent for selecting provocative, challenging movie roles, but when his eyes drift off over my shoulder mid-conversation, I know to take a five-second count and casually pivot in my seat to see what barely post-adolescent dish he is perusing.
Hey, the truth ain't pretty, but it ain't necessarily ugly, either.
This article appeared in the Sunnyvale Sun, August 28, 1996.
©1996 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.