Among Men

Today at work, as I was heading back to the sanding table from punching back in, I noticed two of the guys who work on the shop floor. In a flash, I just saw this moment of tenderness and warmth pass between them. I have no idea what the context was; they were probably sharing some joke or other.

Most of the jobs I've had in my adult life, in fact, most of the situations I've been in, have involved a preponderance of gay men and women. Those, at any rate, are the groups within larger heterogenous assemblies to which I gravitate. But not now. It's all guys. And they're all pretty much straight.

So I feel like an anthropologist, carefully observing this alien culture. Except I don't have detachment; I like it all too much for that.

Men are good. That must read as fatuous, but it sums it up well. Men are good. There's this shared spirit and understanding among men, something born of struggle. We carry the load. We work hard and we play hard. We avoid the hard questions. We know what it's like. We understand.

A friend of mine read and was deeply moved by a biography he read of an English transexual, who had 'the operation' back in, I believe, the 1950s. I forget the name of the book, and the name of the author, but I remember my friend describing how after she became a woman, she had the sense that she had been welcomed into a club of sorts. When among strangers, she was surprised to find that women could immediately begin speaking--with what passes for intimacy among the English--with one another.

I do not concur. I find this same intimacy among men. This fellow feeling, this kinship.

A day or two ago, Christmas was discussed during one of our breaks. One of the guys--the one who is always complaining--described some tool he wants for Christmas. It costs about a hundred dollars. When his wife asked him what he wanted this year, he named the tool, and she gave him attitude, asking why he wanted that, and pointing out that he had a lot of tools, and he didn't use them often. "Hell," he said, "she asked what I wanted and I told her."

He wants a tool.

There is this appreciation of tools that is new to me. Well, sort of knew. I can understand it in that it's the way I feel about the tools nearest and dearest to me: my whips and floggers. I don't give them names or personify them really, but I know them, and what they can do, and I have a history with each of them.

A tool represents potency, and also potential. "I can do that." Or, "I can fix that." Because I have a tool. There's lots of fetish here. The Fetish of the Tool. (I guess it doesn't take a towering intellect to figure out what Mr. Freud would say about that.) On Monster Garage, the Grand Prize for breaking your ass for five days straight is a set of tools. There's a great part in every episode where the guys are presented with the promise of the Grand Prize, and everybody gets quiet, beholding the tools in their shiny, metal red boxes.

And, perhaps by osmosis, that's where my ideas are turning. I want tools. I want a welding machine. I want an acetylene torch. I dream (often) of one day owning a plasma cutter. I want a table saw. I want a router.

One night, while I was making dinner, my father remarked on the variety of pots and pans I'd brought with me. "Where did all that come from? Why do you need a pot so big?"

"Because, Dad," I answered, "You need the right tools for any job."

Nuff said. He got it. He doesn't ask any more.

Men and tools.

And there's another aspect of tools. That would be skill. The joy of a new tool is in the mastery thereof. Making it sing. Feeling it become an extension of your body. It's not the plasma cutter that's slicing through a three-quarter inch steel plate, it's your finger. As you use a new tool and get familiar with it, slowly slowly it becomes a part of you.

At least, that's the way it is among men.

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