Manhood for Amateurs

Faking It

At one time there was a pair of hooks on the back of the bathroom door from which one could hang a couple of towels, but people used the towels as vines, webbing, and rope for games of Tarzan, Spider-Man, and Look! I’m a Dead Guy That Hung Themself, and now, to serve four children, there remained one wall-mounted towel rack with only two bars. This situation encouraged the general tendency among the children to leave their soggy bath towels in Noguchi-like arrangements on the floor. The parents allocated resources for a pilot program of nag-based maintenance, targeted yelling, and regular exercises in stumbling over damp bath towels in dark bedrooms, but when emotional funding at last ran out, it became apparent that someone would have to put up a second towel rack. Responsibility for this task logically fell to the person who knew, kind of, how to use an electric drill.

You should have seen me. I had my cordless Makita in its blue high-impact plastic case. I had a ratcheting screwdriver, a nice Sears Craftsman hammer, a mechanical pencil with a good eraser, and (that most beautifully named of all tools) a spirit level. I sat down on the tile floor of the bathroom with the new chrome towel rack from Restoration Hardware and its gnomic instruction sheet, and I ran the fingers of one hand across the designated stretch of beadboard while sagely stroking my whiskers with the fingers of the other. I strongly suspect that I may well have looked as if I knew what I was doing.

I managed to sustain the appearance of competence over nearly the entire course of the next three hours, except for the painful minute that followed my dropping one of the metal towel bars onto my right thumb, behind whose nail, like a ghost on an old television screen, a grayish-blue blotch immediately made manifest. But from the moment I began to trace with my pencil the prospective outline of one of the faceplates against the beadboard until the moment when, holding my breath, I insinuated two ominously heavy towels into the works of the now-mounted towel rack, I was expecting, at every instant, disaster: molly bolts sliding with a creak of splintering wood from their holes, nickel-plated towel bars clanging against the floor.

I knew how to use my tools, more or less. I understood the rudimentary physics of tension and load that were supposed to hold the rack together and keep it fixed to the wall. And yet on both the deepest and the most practical levels, I had no reason to believe, no evidence from prior experience of myself, physics, or life itself, that I knew how or would be able to pull off the job. In fact, I had encountered a certain amount of tragedy in my dealings with molly bolts over the years.

“You’re going to put that up?” my wife had asked me when I brought the rack home from the store. She didn’t sound dubious so much as surprised, as if I were also proposing to weave a new set of bath towels from cotton I had grown and harvested myself.

“Duh,” I said coolly. “No biggie.”

This is an essential element of the business of being a man: to flood everyone around you in a great radiant arc of bullshit, one whose source and object of greatest intensity is yourself. To behave as if you have everything firmly under control even when you have just sailed your boat over the falls. “To keep your head,” wrote Rudyard Kipling in his classic poem “If,” which articulated the code of high-Victorian masculinity in whose fragmentary shadow American men still come of age, “when all about you are losing theirs”; but in reality, the trick of being a man is to give the appearance of keeping your head when, deep inside, the truest part of you is crying out, Oh, shit!

Perhaps in the end there is little difference between keeping one’s head and appearing to do so; perhaps the effort required to feign unconcern and control over a situation itself imparts a measure of control. If so, then the essence of traditional male virtue lies in imposture, in an ongoing act of dissimulation — fronting — which hardly conforms to the classic Kipling model of square-dealing candor.

I have no doubt that the male impulse to downplay his own lack of fitness for a job, to refuse to acknowledge his inadequacy, insufficiency, or lack of preparation, has been and continues to be responsible for a large share of the world’s woes, in the form of the accidents, errors, and calamities that result from specific or overarching acts of faking it, a grim encyclopedia of which the G. W. Bush administration readily affords. There is also the more subtle damage that is done repeatedly to boys who grow up learning from their fathers and the men around them the tragic lesson that failure is not a human constant but a kind of aberration of gender, a flaw in a man, to be concealed.

Men’s refusal to stop and ask for directions, a foundational cliché of women’s criticism, analysis, and stand-up mockery of male behavior, is a perfect example of this tendency to put up a front, in that it views as aberrant a condition — being lost — that is ineluctable, a given of human existence. We are born lost and spend vast stretches of our lives on wrong turns and backtracking. In this respect, male fronting resembles a number of other behaviors typically ascribed to men and masculinity, in that it proceeds by denying essential human conditions or responses — say public displays of mutual affection, grief, or triumph — marking them as feminine, infantile, socially unacceptable.

I learned to pretend that I know what I am doing from my own father, an extremely intelligent and well-informed man whose intermittent bouts with mistakenness and inaccuracy visibly cost him bitter pain and embarrassment, and shocked the hell out of me when I was a child. By fiat and consensus, fathers are always right, so that when facts or events inevitably conspire to prove them wrong, they and their sons alike totter on the brink of an abyss. I have never forgotten the day — I can’t have been older than five — when I watched in silent horror as my father, imperturbable and confident and disdaining the instruction sheet, assembled an entire barbecue grill with its key pieces upside down and backward. I remember my mounting anxiety about whether I should point out his mistake to him, and most clearly of all I remember the sharp and mocking look my mother gave him when at last I betrayed him.

When I became a father, I made a promise to myself not to pretend to knowledge I did not possess, not to claim authority I plainly lacked, not to hide my doubts and uncertainties, my setbacks and regrets, from my children. And so I have tried to share them over the years as I have been fired from screenwriting jobs or proved wrong or led to look a fool. I have made a point (until the recent advent of GPS) to stop and ask for directions. But sometimes I waver in my resolve. My sense of myself as a father, my sense of fathers, is so deeply caught up with some kind of primal longing (which I think we all share) for inerrancy, for the word of God, for a rock and a redeemer, a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, for the needle that always always finds true north in a storm.

And maybe that longing in one’s wife and children runs beyond the understanding of even the most painfully self-conscious of fathers. One recent winter my family and I found ourselves stuck in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in the middle of a snowstorm. All flights out were canceled. There was a flight home from Idaho Falls, a drive of two hours through a high mountain pass, or three hours by an easier route that skirted the mountains. Either way, there would be snow, ice, unknown chances. If we wanted, we could wait for an airline-chartered bus that might eventually depart for Idaho Falls, getting us home to Oakland no one could say when. Or we could sit tight, wait it out, and hope to get home sometime tomorrow or the next day.

I didn’t give it a moment’s thought. We had rented a big strong four-by-four. It had the tires and the muscle for the roads up there. I liked the way I felt behind its wheel, competent and unperturbed by weather. The fact that I had not driven in a blizzard in twenty years barely entered the conscious register of my thoughts.

“Let’s drive,” I told my wife. “I’ll go the long way around.”

She looked at me with a strange expression, then said okay; later, after we had made it safely and without incident up and down through ice and rain and snowfall that was at times blinding, my wife told me that she initially thought I was dangerously insane when I proposed driving to Idaho Falls through a blizzard. But then she had heard something in my voice that reassured her; she’d seen something in my eyes. I looked as if I knew what I was doing. And though I gripped the wheel with bloodless hands and prayed wildly to the gods of the interstate trucker whom I carefully tailed all the way to Idaho, in the backseat the kids calmly watched their iPod videos, and my wife studied the map and gossiped with me, and none of them knew or suspected for a moment — for I never betrayed, by word or deed, my secret — that I was in way over my head. I was the father and the husband; they were safe with me. We made it to the airport right on time to catch the next flight home.

“I knew you could do it,” my wife said, and I thought about saying, “Well, that makes one of us.” But I held my tongue and nodded with a Kiplingesque modesty, because the truth was that in the absence of any evidence or experience or reason to think so, I had known that I could do it, too. I had no choice, do you see, but to know that.

By the way, the towels are still hanging from the rack in the bathroom. And I fully expect, at any moment, in the dead of night, to hear a telltale clatter on the tiles.

Art of Cake

My life as a cook began on the back panel of a Bisquick box, with Velvet Crumb Cake. This was shortly before my tenth birthday. By that time I’d been helping my mother in the kitchen for several years, as she had helped her own mother, Nettie Cohen. Through helping her — and I know just how patience-taxing and supremely unhelpful a young sous chef can be — I had learned the basic techniques and tools to use: how to level a cup of flour, chop an onion, work the Mixmaster, separate an egg. But I don’t remember preparing any particular dish until I undertook the recipe on the back of that bright yellow box.

Bisquick mix was an anonymous staple of my mother’s kitchen. Pancakes and biscuits were never made with anything else, and nothing else was ever made with it. I think that was the initial appeal of the idea of Velvet Crumb Cake. I was shocked to discover that Bisquick had other uses, other roles that it had been waiting to play, like a shy yet talented understudy. The realization was like finding out that I could make a working model of an X-15 rocket plane out of a rubber-band glider. The only Bisquick recipes I’d ever seen were the two printed on a floury and tattered square of cardboard that my mother had cut from the back of an old box years before and then abandoned to her special Bisquick canister — ordered by mail from Betty Crocker — to be buried and reburied in an endless drift of biscuit mix. For years I never saw a Bisquick box at all. The chance revelation of the possibility of Velvet Crumb Cake, with its extravagant name, seemed to hint at the existence of a world hidden within the world of our kitchen, and to hold out promise of a more fabulous one beyond.

It was coffee cake; I hope that statement implies no sense of disappointment. Eaten warm from the oven, moist and crumbly, a nice coffee cake is pretty hard to fault. Coffee cake! I had made a coffee cake! Mysteriously, I thought, it contained no coffee. The velvet crumb business turned out to revolve around an impasto of butter, brown sugar, chopped nuts, flaked coconut, and a little milk that you spread over the cake after it came out of the oven. Then you stuck it back in the oven for a minute or two. Something wonderful happened to those five ingredients when you blended them and briefly subjected them to intense heat. The result was both smooth and grainy, crisp and chewy. Cooking, it turned out, was a magical act, a feat of transformation, a way of turning the homely and the familiar into something finer, like carving a pumpkin into a lantern.

That year for my birthday my mother gave me a cookbook. It was called Betty Crocker’s New Boys and Girls Cook Book. Like the Bisquick box, its cover was bright yellow. It featured intensely colored photographs of the things you could make from it: huge, lustrous cakes, casseroles, and molds awesome as monuments in a depopulated landscape. The recipe for spaghetti called (in retrospect, somewhat nauseatingly) for you to boil the noodles in the tomato sauce. A lot of the other recipes given in Betty Crocker’s New Boys and Girls Cook Book, perhaps not surprisingly, suggested that they be prepared with Betty Crocker-brand ingredients, especially Bisquick. Many turned for their effects on bits of kitchen legerdemain, exploiting quirks of food chemistry. I was fascinated by and still recall affectionately a recipe for Fudge Upside-Down Cake (or something like that — my copy disappeared years ago) that went into the oven with the batter on the bottom of the cake pan, under a layer of boiling water, and emerged with a layer of cake on top, floating like the earth’s mantle on a glutinous brown magma.

My mother was into cookbooks, and as soon as she saw my interest, she gave me the run of her library and let me try to make pretty much whatever sounded good. It was a solid and typical American-cookbook shelf of the day: keystones like the Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book and Joy of Cooking; Julia Child and Craig Claiborne; an intimidating bunch of classical French compendia; and period novelties like 365 Ways to Cook Hamburger and a fondue cookbook. The Library of Babel that is ethnic cuisine was summarized in a footnote, Claiborne’s New York Times International Cookbook. My all-time favorite, from the moment of its publication in 1972, was James Beard’s American Cookery. It had a recipe for nearly everything an American kid could ever imagine eating, including squirrel. Almost in passing — rather, in the style of my mother — it taught the fundamentals of the kitchen: how to boil shrimp, poach an egg, prepare an artichoke. (It also offered excellent recipes for pancakes and for biscuits, including those of Beard’s own mother.) And in retelling the history of the United States from Indian pudding to cheeseburgers, through the history of our great cookbooks and cooks (most of them women), it also turned out to be a kind of autobiography in the form of recipes, written in prose that was magisterial and laconic. I used to lie around reading it for hours.

I had a lot of disasters in the kitchen, even during the long period when I was cooking under my mother’s supervision and with the benefit of her experience. I still fail all the time, in particular when I turn to baking. After hundreds of attempts, following dozens of different formulas, I don’t think I have ever made what I would consider to be a completely successful pie crust. Disaster is somehow part of the appeal of cooking for me. If that first Velvet Crumb Cake had turned out a flop, I don’t know if I would have pursued my interest in cooking. But cooking entails stubbornness and a tolerance — maybe even a taste — for last-minute collapse. You have to be able to enjoy the repeated and deliberate following of a more or less lengthy, more or less complicated series of steps whose product is very likely — after all that work, with no warning, right at the end — to curdle, sink, scorch, dry up, congeal, burn, or simply taste bad.

This may form part of the male aspect of cookery, a pursuit that combines three classic male modes of gratification: the mastering of an arcane lore bound up in accumulable tomes; mindless repetition (the thing that leads boys to take up card tricks, free-throw shooting, video games); and the staking of everything on a last throw of the dice. Cooking satisfies the part of me that enjoys struggling for days to transfer an out-of-print vinyl record by Klaatu to digital format, screwing with scratch filters and noise reducers, only to have the burn fail every time at the very same track. I’m not at all saying a woman cook doesn’t feel the identical mad urge to keep ruining the same dish over and over until she gets it right. I’m just saying that every woman I’ve ever known has mocked me for being that way.

A few years after Velvet Crumb Cake entered my life, I was obliged to consider an aspect of cooking that has traditionally been thought of as female: that of feeding my family. When I was fourteen, my mother, holding a brand-new law degree from the University of Baltimore, went to work at a federal agency in Washington, D.C., a job that obliged her to rise early and commute almost an hour each way. By the time she arrived home at night, she had neither the energy nor the imagination to make dinner for my brother and me. “If you want to eat a nice hot dinner every night,” she told me, proposing to raise my allowance to a then-hefty fifteen dollars a week, “you’re going to have to cook it yourself.”

So that was what I did — every night for the next four years, until I left for college. I learned to cook all of the homely dishes that my mother had made for us all my life: Swiss steak, spaghetti and meatballs, baked chicken, lasagna, stir-fry, matzo-ball soup, brisket and kasha, beef and macaroni, breaded flounder, beef stew, chicken-fried steak. A number of these recipes were my grandmother’s, and they reflected the nature and history of my mother’s family — Jewish, southern (she was born and raised in Virginia and Maryland), and midcentury assimilationist in the best sense of the word: absorbing other cultural traditions as much as it was itself absorbed. I cooked when I felt like it and when I did not, when there was no risk of ruining anything and very little of interest in the recipe once I had mastered it. I cooked for people who were not always hungry, not always appreciative or amazed, not always in the mood for the lamb chop on their plate.

When I married my wife, had children, and began to cook for them, after many footloose years of recondite kitchen experimentation with the gods of chic vegetarianism, of ethnic-cuisine purism, and of the pasta machine, with non-cow cheeses and sun-dried vegetables and edible flowers, I inevitably sought help, even a kind of instruction, in those recipes from the American Cookery of my mother’s kitchen. I incorporated more modern dishes and ingredients into my regular repertoire, and I acquired many, many new cookbooks, but when it was time to get serious about feeding my family, there was not much doubt about where to turn. A fair portion of the three-by-five cards in my recipe box are written in my mother’s hand, and the thing is bulging with folded-up sheets of her typed instructions for Sour Cream Nut Cake or Chicken Rose.

This turns out to be the enduring source of the pleasure I find in the kitchen. It’s the one that was there from the start, even before my chance encounter with the glories of a velvety crumble of caramelized bliss on the top of a biscuit-mix cake: the connection to my mother, who not only fed her children well but taught me how to feed my own just the way her mother had taught her. In his great work, James Beard somewhat radically positioned himself as the heir and celebrant of a long line of American woman cooks, from Miss Leslie to Fannie Farmer to his own mother, and there must have been something in this unexpected male affirmation of female inheritance that registered with me.

I grew up during a time of dissolving boundaries, shifting economies, loosened definitions of male and female, of parent and child. Without shame or stigma, a marriage could be allowed to come undone, a woman could become a lawyer and go out and earn a good living. And a boy could take to the kitchen, the center of every home, and find there a sense of history and connectedness to anchor him, something that would not disappear or blow away or change beyond recognition. The processes of the kitchen, the secret chemistry that underlies the magical Velvet Crumb transformation of sugar by heat, are unchanging. Even if we can’t always master them, they are constant and true. Incidentally, these are qualities shared by my mother. That tumultuous era, and the new conditions of family life it imposed, obliged me to try to be like her in some measure. I’m lucky that it also permitted me to feel it was all right to want to be, even though I was a boy.

On Canseco

Before I start arguing that it’s muddleheaded and misses the point to disparage the greatness of a baseball player for his want of goodness as a man — before I rise to the defense of Jose Canseco — let me begin by offering one example of my own muddleheadedness in this regard. A big part of what I have always admired about the late Roberto Clemente as a ballplayer is what a good, strong, thoughtful man he seems to have been; his stoic dignity in the face of ignorance and bigotry; how he died while trying to help the victims of a great disaster, etc. I choose to view Clemente’s grace on the field as reflecting and reflected by the graceful way in which he conducted his public life (when one has demonstrably nothing to do with the other) and both together as lasting proof of some private gracefulness as a man, when I have no way of ever knowing what form the true, secret conduct of his life may have taken. I have no idea what Clemente’s relationship was to drugs, or what his feelings would have been about performance enhancers like anabolic steroids, but I would like to think that he would have viewed them both with disfavor, and that he was faithful to his wife, temperate in his habits, and modest about his accomplishments. Yes, I would like to think that, because I’m just foolish and mistaken enough to think that great baseball players must also be good men.

There is no question that Jose Canseco was sometimes a great baseball player. If you have any doubt about that, you weren’t paying attention to Canseco on the days during the seasons when he paid attention to the game, and that’s hard to imagine since, like Clemente, the man arrested the eye of the spectator, held the attention like a shard of mirror dangling from a wire in the sunshine, even when he was just standing around waiting for something to happen. But I’m not going to get into that here. The question of Canseco’s greatness or lack thereof can be debated endlessly, with statistics and anecdotes to support both sides, and some of us will never understand why Ron Santo, Gil Hodges, and Dick Allen are not in the Baseball Hall of Fame while others, many of whom serve on the hall’s Veterans Committee, always seem to vote to keep them out. And God knows I have no intention of claiming that Jose Canseco qualifies as a good man, according to the conventions of my own garden-variety morality of consistent effort, altruism, and personal integrity defined as the keeping of one’s promises to other people. Canseco’s want of goodness on those terms is also arguable, I suppose, though not by me. But I will go out on a limb and venture that any list of the one hundred greatest baseball players who ever lived would conform to the pattern for our species, and therefore contain a sizable number of men who spent most of their lives fumbling with an inherent tendency to shirk, ignore the sufferings of others, tell lies, and evade responsibility. Playing baseball well does not make you a better person any more than writing well does. The illusion that lures us into the error of confounding Clemente’s goodness as a man with his greatness as a ballplayer is that when a man is playing baseball well, as when a man is writing well, he seems to himself in that moment to be a better person than he is. He puts it all together, he has all the tools, in a way that seems impossible outside the lines of the ball field or the margins of the page. He shines, and we catch the reflected glint of that and extend the shining one an overall credit for luminosity that almost nobody could merit. Clemente, I think, shone with the grace and integrity of his play even when he was not on the field.

In other words, Roberto Clemente was a hero, and Jose Canseco, by this definition, is not. By his own admission, Canseco has shirked responsibilities and hurt people and lied and broken a lot of promises, large and small. And used steroids. Therefore, many people seem to feel he is not to be admired, neither in the past, during his brief heyday — so that we must retroactively rescind our delight in his style and our amazement at his prowess, put an asterisk beside our memory of the pleasure of his company over the course of a few long summers — nor in the present, not even when he steps forward to tell the truth, a big, meaningful, dolorous truth that most of us, measured by our own standards of heroism, would have a hard time bringing ourselves to tell. Canseco can’t possibly be a hero to anyone — he laid down that burden many years and arrests and screwups ago — and furthermore (goes the rap), there is nothing remotely admirable about Canseco’s allegation of widespread inveterate use of steroids by himself and by ballplayers such as Mark McGwire, who have a readier claim on our admiration and shoulder more naturally its weight.

In breaking the code of silence on steroid use, we have been informed by sportswriters, by commentators, and by his former teammates, opponents, and coaches, Canseco was only out for money. If lying would have paid better than telling the truth, then Canseco would have lied (indeed, some have suggested that is what happened). Canseco is greedy, faithless, selfish, embittered, scornful, and everlastingly a showboat. He is a bad man, and that makes him retrospectively (except among those who claim to have felt this way always) a bad ballplayer. Not to mention a bad writer.

The question that concerns me in all this is not one of the obvious ones, like what to tell my children, or what to do about the problem of steroids, or how to think about the records that may have been broken by cheaters, or how to protect against perfidy, avarice, taint, and scandal the dear old national game. Like all obvious questions, none of these can be answered. All human endeavor is subject to cracking. It’s the hard Tex Avery truth of the universe: Put your finger over one leak, and another one pops up just beyond your reach. Violence, gambling and game fixing, pestilential racism, overexpansion, competitive imbalance, labor strife, mindboggling cupidity, and cheating of every variety and school: For most of its history, the game of baseball, like everything we build, has been riddled with holes, some cavernous, some of them irreparable. I don’t know what is to be done about the latest steroids debacle, and neither do you. No, what I want to know about Jose Canseco is: How come I still like the guy so much?

I’ll go even further: I admire him. Not in the way I admire Clemente — not even remotely, which says something about what an ambiguous thing admiration can be. Like all showboats, Canseco courts the simpler kind of admiration, starting in the mirror each morning. He is slick, he drives too fast, he is nine feet tall and four feet wide and walks with a roosterish swagger. But there has always been something about him, about his style of play, his sense of self-mocking humor, his way of looking at you looking at him, that goes beyond vanity, self-aggrandizement, or being a world-class jerk-off

Canseco has been described as a charmer and a clown, but in fact he is a rogue, a genuine one, and genuine rogues are rare, inside baseball and out. It’s not enough to flout the law, to be a rogue — break promises, shirk responsibilities, cheat — you must also, at least some of the time, and with the same abandon, do your best, play by the rules, keep faith with your creditors and dependents, obey orders, throw out the runner at home plate with a dead strike from deep right field. Above all, you must do these things, as you do their opposites, for no particular reason, because you feel like it or do not, because nothing matters, and everything’s a joke, and nobody knows anything, and most of all, as Rhett Butler once codified for rogues everywhere, because you do not give a damn. One day you make that breathtaking play at the plate from deep right. Another day you decide for no good reason to come into the game during the late innings of a laugher and pitch, retiring the side (despite allowing three earned runs on three walks and a pair of singles) — and forever ruining that cannon of an arm.

I’ve never seen a man who seems more comfortable than Jose Canseco with who he is — not with who we think he is, like George W. Bush, or with his best idea of himself, like Bush’s predecessor, but with himself, charmer and snake, clown and thoroughbred. He doesn’t care what you think of him; if anything, he derives a hair more pleasure from your scorn and contumely than he does from your useless admiration. By coming forward as he did to peel back the nasty bandage on baseball’s wound, it was not that Canseco had nothing to lose, as some of his critics claimed. A man like Canseco never has anything to lose or to gain but his life and the pleasure he takes from it.

That this also remains exactly true for each of us is a thought that makes no impression on me in my daily intercourse with all of the things I give a damn about, and it probably makes none on you. We aren’t wired to see things that way, and we can never be blockade runners, or Casablanca casino owners, or fatally gifted ballplayers who sometimes, as Canseco once did, permit a baseball to bounce off the top of our head before its departure from the ballpark. We have no style, you and I; only people who don’t give a damn have style.

There was a time, though, when men like Canseco, without taking anything from the luster of men like Roberto Clemente, could also be accounted as heroes. They were the ones, the Ulysseses and Sinbads and Raleighs, who sailed to places we couldn’t imagine, and then they returned, after a career of wonder, calamity, and chagrin, not one whit better than they were when they left. And surely no better than we — possibly worse. Yet in the end, they were the only ones fit to make the voyage, and when they came back, they carried a truth in their baggage that no one else would be clown enough, and rogue enough, and hero enough, to speak.

I Feel Good About My Murse

One of the fundamental axioms of masculine self-regard is that the tools and appurtenances of a man’s life must be containable within the pockets of his jacket and pants. Wallet, keys, gum, show or ball game tickets, Kleenex, condoms, cell phone, maybe a lighter and a pack of cigarettes: Just cram it all in there, motherfucker. When I was a smoker — a long time ago — I used to predicate every purchase of a shirt, tee, or button-down on whether or not it featured a front pocket to hold my pack of Winston Lights. Take away everything, cigarettes, phone, even keys, a man remains a man so long as he keeps his wallet pressed up against his body. A wallet is a man’s totem, his distillation. It pockets his soul as surely as he pockets it.

The necessary corollary to this inviolate principle is that no man, ever, ought to carry a purse. Purses are for women; a purse is basically a vagina with a strap. If you have diabetes, let’s say, it is permitted to carry your works and your insulin around in a leather zip, but as soon as you start shoving your keys, Altoids, and above all your wallet in there, too, it’s over. You are a man with a purse.

As firmly — as manfully — as I always adhered to this absolute prohibition, I suffered from its tyranny. I sat on my wallet (a behavior so harmful to the sciatic nerve that it can lead to a diagnosable syndrome called piriformis, or fat wallet syndrome), got raked repeatedly across the thigh by the mace of my keyring, bulged all over in unflattering ways like Wile E. Coyote after he swallows a live Roman candle. I was tormented by that household devil of every pocket, the Hole, an anarchic character whose satanic powers include the ability to cause you to forget its existence every time you put on the pants or the jacket it has chosen to haunt, right up to the moment that all ninety-six cents of your change go skittering and windchiming across the bus-station floor, or your Bic lighter slips down into the secret lining of your blazer.

Nevertheless, I adhered rigorously to the way of the pocket for the first few decades of my life as a would-be man. For years I wore a sport jacket wherever I went, no matter how unseasonable or inappropriate to the occasion, simply to take advantage of the additional pocket-space it afforded, a strategy whose reductio ad absurdum is the photojournalist vest, the kind they used to advertise in the old-school Banana Republic catalogs. There was a period during college and graduate school when I dragged around a knapsack, but even then I never relaxed my grip on manhood enough to carry anything other than books, pens, and maybe one of the elephantine Walkmans of that era, impossible to pocket — the only storage alternative was the dreaded belt clip, a kind of prosthetic penis, in its own inverse way as emasculating as a purse.

Saggy-bottomed and stained from sitting around in puddles of beer, the knapsack is — along with its sober older brother the briefcase — one of a limited number of stealth purse strategies by which men routinely attempt to circumvent, elude, or transcend the cruel code of the pocket. The advent of the laptop computer has led to a kind of renaissance in the category of luggage formerly occupied by the satchel, an all but forgotten item just a few years ago, now more commonly designated a messenger bag and hybridized in leather, nylon, and plastic, leading to all kinds of knapsack-cum-attachés and tote-cum-briefcases. And there are the gym bag, and the paratroop bag, and the flight bag, and those other hopeful attempts to provide a man with a rugged GI Joe kind of place to carry around his Walther PPK, his cyanide pills, his safe cracking tools, and his Kiehl’s lip balm. But check your pockets, or the pockets of the man standing next to you, the one with the commando kit — cum — road warrior carryall. I will bet you a cyanide pill that he’s still packing his wallet, keys, and spare change in his pants. Otherwise, that rugged satchel becomes, by definition, nothing but a purse.

It was the diaper bag that broke me. When my first child was born, the idea that a bag intended for the transport of bottles, ointment, nipples, and Huggies ought not to emasculate its male bearer was a proposition only slightly more devoid of sense than at the present time. Furthermore, it was not merely a feminine aesthetic that guided the design of available diaper bags, but the same bizarrely infantilizing principle that prevailed in maternity wear — bears and balloons and cheerily ersatz gingham — as if it were the baby herself and not her adult parents who would be schlepping the thing around. In the end I found a number in plain black nylon, disguised as a knapsack, with a zip-down changing pad. It still had the nipples and the ointment, but I hoped that in its blackness and angles, it might possess certain properties of stealth.

I carried that diaper bag until it became so saturated and coated with dairy and excretory residue that it needed to be disposed of by a hazmat team and a federal cleanup superfund. Three children followed the first, each with his or her diaper bag, and as fatigue, inattention, and habit took over, I stopped noticing if I was carrying the Esprit or the Kate Spade or the (forgive me) Petunia Pickle Bottom in embroidered lime-green Chinese silk. I had the diaper bag over one shoulder and a kid in the opposite arm, and I was pushing a stroller full of groceries, and some other small child was dragging along behind me hanging from the back pocket of my jeans, and at that instant as I left the store, I felt like it would be a lot easier just to drop my wallet into the diaper bag with my keys, and my cell phone, and my New York Review of Books than try to shove it down into my pants.

After that I got into the habit of carrying all my stuff around in the diaper bag. As my youngest kid got older and the need diminished for the full armamentarium — for the boxes of UHT milk, the Aquaphor, and the baby wipes — I broke down and bought a nice Jack Spade knapsack, black and slick, lined with sky blue. I tucked a couple of diapers and some wipes into it with my wallet and iPod and keys, and I set out.

But a knapsack is such a defeated thing, sitting there slumped and baggy-assed on the floor at one’s feet. One sheds it wearily, with a beaten-down shrug of his shoulder. What’s more, I was forty, and there was something at once preposterous and dismaying about returning after so many years to the accessory of my PBR and Nietzsche days. So I tried a satchel, a messenger bag, and a couple of those outsize hybrids thereof. But whatever themed adventure these bags attempted to suggest — soldier, spy, pierce-tongued tattooed bike messenger, laptop slacker — I felt like an impostor, a boy playing dress-up. I just wanted a bag that wasn’t too big or too small or too heavy, one that would carry the things I needed — and inevitably some of the things my kids needed — without making me look too much like one of those Germano-Scandinavian tourists you see walking around New York in the summer with their zipper packs and clogs. I needed a purse. A man purse. A murse.

One day I was telling all this to a female friend of mine, an adventuresome shopper with a taste for the fabulous in men’s clothing and a boyfriend who refused to wear anything but the most routine garb. She had already bestowed on me, because her man would not be caught dead in it, the gift of a silk multicolor-pinstriped Paul Smith muffler, and I could tell that the murse question piqued her interest; indeed, she seemed to take an almost philosophical interest in the problem.

“You don’t want too mursy of a murse,” she said. “You don’t want to look like one of those Swedish guys.”

“No.”

“Next thing you’ll be wearing clogs.”

“God forbid.”

“It has to be sort of masculine somehow, but not goofy. Not army surplus. Not Jamaican bike messenger.”

“You echo my thoughts exactly.”

“I mean, the thing is, it’s a purse. You are going to be carrying a purse. I don’t think you can really get around that or try to hide it. Nor should you.”

“Nor do I wish to hide it,” I said. “If people want to mock me or think less of me or just laugh their asses off when they see me walking around with a purse, I am prepared to face their scorn.”

“Kind of like the Jackie Robinson of purse-wearing men,” my friend said.

“Kind of just like that,” I said.

There is nothing brave or courageous or remotely Robinsonesque about my contemplating the carrying of a purse, any more than there is in my taste for pink shirts, though I was once informed by a mother of my acquaintance, half disapprovingly, that wearing a pink shirt was a brave thing for a man to do. It’s simply the case that as I get older, I seem every day to give a little bit less of a fuck what people think of or say about me. This is not the result of my undertaking to exercise a moral program or of increased wisdom or of any kind of willed act on my part. It just seems to be a process, a time-directed shedding, like the loss of hair or illusions. I am a husband, a father, and a son, whether or not I think, ponder, or worry about gender, sexuality, my life as a man; and maybe there’s a kind of pleasure to be taken in simple unconsciousness, an automatic way of moving and being and acting in the world. And maybe for an instant here and there, in the taking of that pleasure, I partake of a grace like the grace of Jackie Robinson.

A week after I talked to my friend, a purse came UPS. It’s a square of fawn-colored suede, about the size of an extra-small pizza box, trimmed in brown leather with white stitching. It has a strap of cotton webbing, dark brown with a tan stripe running down the center. It’s handsome, soft and rugged at the same time the way only suede can seem. And it’s definitely a purse. It holds my essential stuff, including a book — for true contentment, one must carry a book at all times, and great books so rarely fit, my friends, into one’s pocket — but no more, and so I can wear it, and my masculinity, and my contempt for those who might mock or misunderstand me, very lightly indeed.